aluminiumtrioxid

Or 3) they could give out xp for exploring areas, or 4) let exploration in itself lead to quests without forcing you to engage with quest giver NPCs?

Well, if the game clearly communicates that this is a gamble, I see nothing wrong with that. But it didn't. ... But how could it not be a gamble? Energy weapons would be the most expensive guns in the game ~excepting miniguns, and that makes them rare by default, no? True enough, but based on the info the game hands out to you ("It is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Anything might be out there"), basically every skill except melee weapons (you get one at the start, doesn't require ammo which might or might not be rare outside the vault), outdoorsman (it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland, knowing how to survive there will surely come in handy) and perhaps stealth (wide utility, universally usable on all enemy types) is a gamble. (Worst of all, even these skills are somewhat underpowered.)

Or simply make the protagonist an Inquisitor, with the party being his Dark Heresy team, it would be quite interesting to examine and use his psychic abilities, the temptations of the Warp, the presence of the Astronomicon and whatnot. I prefer vanilla DH. Just my wits, crappy stats (50% chance at my specialty!), and a flashlight lasgun against the forces of Chaos. It's basically Call of Cthulhu in SPEHSS. With even bigger balls of steel.

Well, if the game clearly communicates that this is a gamble, I see nothing wrong with that. But it didn't.

That's not a really good example. BG2 specifically mentioned that these things are rare and you won't find them lying around every corner in the skill description. Fallout, on the other hand, doesn't communicate what's useful (and even goes counter to post-apocalyptic genre tropes sometimes, so common sense isn't as useful as it could be).

Or design the game to be not-broken to begin with, or clearly separate the flavorful-but-secondary skills from the must-have ones *shrug*. Any of these approaches could work. The problem with Fallout wasn't really the fact that certain skills were less useful, but the fact that it wasn't really intuitive what these skills were. I mean, having an "outdoorsman" skill be fairly useless in a game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland doesn't strike me as completely predictable. Also, if I remember correctly, there was a separate "repair" and "science" skill, one of which was mostly useless - and it wasn't the one that lets you, say, repair the cool stuff that was left behind by the technologically-advanced past. So, you can shoot yourself in the foot even if you go in with genre-appropriate expectations. And that is bad design.

(Bolded for emphasis.) That actually is a very cool thing. On the other hand, balancing the game in a way that the cost of these skills would be directly proportional to the benefit they offer (whether through a discount to less-useful skills, or making all skills equally useful) sounds like the prudent thing to do.

So, I've managed to get my hands on it. Does anybody have any questions?

I'd totally play that game.

I'd be perfectly content with pulp fantasy. More Moor**** and Howard, less Tolkien. Alas, DA doesn't even do that. A man can dream, though. Edit: ninja'd by Monte.

The Seven Dooms of Elysion, a nice collection of apocalyptic entities. One would think that it's hard to improve upon PST's rat-hivemind, but I have to admit, a giant kaiju corpse-golem-thing operated by a rat-hivemind is even cooler.

...Must... control... jealousy...

So, apparently there was a playtest leak. Did anybody take a peek?

And I think it would have been better if you could hear them out, go "wait a minute... this actually kinda makes sense", then shrug and let them do whatever they were planning to do

True enuff, some of them were. A pity that they were designated antagonists

Reducing female NPCs to collectible cards with boob pictures could be called many things, but "mature" and "tasteful" are not amongst them, methinks.

As long as the game doesn't feature armless, mouthless ghost monks cursed with burning desire they can't ever satisfy due to the aforementioned armless-mouthless business going on*, it's gonna be fine. Alas, trying to be cool and dark and mature has led many a soul astray. *that's totally a thing in a certain tabletop RPG which isn't FATAL (and prides itself on its handling of mature subject matter maturely, because mature mature mature). Also, bonus points for said monks begging for onlookers to **** them, which I don't really know how they do having no mouth and being incapable of using sign language (again, no hands either).

A succint summary of why I don't buy Bioware games anymore.

I just don't get why is it assumed in the cutscene that the player was originally hacking away at the gryphon with the steel sword. I mean, really, based on its efficiency vs. monsters in the previous two games, it just makes Geralt look like an idiot.

Yet still better than 80% of the dialogue spewed by "sarcastic" Hawke. Let that sink in a bit.

Slavery is bad!

Dunno about that, but certain people are making a noise about the Trail of Cthulhu ruleset being vastly superior to CoC. Never looked into it (I can do pretty much whatever I want from CoC in W40K), but maybe you should give it a try?

Aside from generally making good points as far as I'm aware, you, sir, are also obviously a man of (wealth and) taste. I approve heartily.

As the saying goes, "the best weapon against an enemy is another enemy" But yeah, I'd prefer if this type of stuff would mainly remain in the territory of conversations. Dominate as a spell is so cheap, and always makes me wonder why I can't use it out of combat.

Truer words have never been spoken.