aluminiumtrioxid

Volo speaks wisdom. Also, ex-boyfriend has proven himself to be a person who has no qualms about posting personal conversations for All Teh Internetz to see, engaging in tasteless ****-shaming, and basically attempting to wreck the professional career of multiple people. Not the kind of person anyone should treat as a reliable source of information.

That leaves the Orlans and Aumauans with very few options just so players won't have to go on the internet and get the extra portraits. In the IE games importing your own portraits was very easy; I don't see why the new races should get such a raw deal. I'm all for ditching dwarves and elves (even better, give everyone either long beards or ear-obscuring hair, so every portrait can function for multiple races), but cutting corners on portraits depicting people of color sends a very wrong message.

Druids, too can enjoy the fruits of civilization like shiny plate armor and cool swords, y'know Doesn't matter. In all realms and worlds of all reality; you alone get a druid vibe from her. Only you. YAY I'M SPECIAL

Druids, too can enjoy the fruits of civilization like shiny plate armor and cool swords, y'know

Yes. You are the only one who gets that vibe; in the entire world. She has a shiny sword, druids can make their swords shiny, therefore she's a druid. QED

FEEL THE MIGHT OF MY LASER SWORD! Am I the only one who gets more of a "druid using Wild Strike" vibe from that portrait instead of "yup, paladin"?

It doesn't matter that this is only the beta because that makes it seem like non-white characters are an afterthought. And PoC representation is way more important to me than fuzzy-faced hobbit representation. You're, of course, completely right on both accounts. I apologize.

Zoe Quinn, developer of the indie game Depression Quest had sex with a games journalist, according to a butthurt ex-boyfriend. This led to accusations of nepotism and unprofessional behavior (also ****-shaming). That's about the whole story, really.

No problem. It's a reasonable position, but having lots of white portraits and basically zero representation for people of color is just begging for accusations of racism.

"Many" meaning "exactly two" in this case. Five I think... I think the first one is a guy in the beginning. I'm know the human female portraits are a character from the beginning. Also there were three versions of the female Meadow Human, and one of the male meadow humans I'm pretty sure I saw in the beginning as well. Except the description of the guy in the beginning (red hair, thick mustache) has nothing to do with his portrait, leading us to the conclusion that it's not his portrait, but a placeholder. The female portraits are irrelevant, given the fact that I was talking about male portraits exclusively. That leaves us with the two portraits who are BBWizard with slight alterations.

"Many" meaning "exactly two" in this case.

One portrait per sub-race/gender?... I guess that's doable. Though a terrible waste. Oh please. There are what, 6-8 different portraits for meadow folk human males or so? Now that's a waste (assuming there are still subrace-gender combinations with no corresponding portraits).

It's my understanding that enemies can "roll save" repeatedly while being affected by status effects, therefore the theoretical duration rarely maps to how long it actually ends up lasting.

Good news everyone! My experience with the beta has led me to the conclusion that the game does award xp for every major-ish milestone of a quest, but the bugs tend to eat it. It's still not encounter xp, but it's definitely better than "you only get xp when you complete the quest".

With the exception of the fire godlike option, every single character portrait is lily-white. It's really immersion-breaking to spend half an hour customizing the ingame appearance of an ocean folk human just to find out that there is no character portrait option that's even remotely similar. Isn't really a priority for the beta, but I sincerely hope there will be bigger diversity in the final game.

I've had a similarly positive experience with them. Setting the game to auto-pause whenever a character is injured drastically increases their efficiency.

That's personal bias. If the game gives out the same amout of xp for the violent solution in small chunks of kill xp as it does for the nonviolent ones, the violent solution isn't systemically held up as superior. I agree that if violent and nonviolent solutions net the same amount of XP, and it's blatantly obvious that this is the case, then power balance is OK and incentive balance is OK. I have never seen this be the case that I'm aware of where kill XP is present. Alpha Protocol has kill xp. It also has avoidance xp, and they're equal. (Also, it lists hospital bills and orphans created, because it's an awesome game.) Deus Ex HR also gives xp both for killing and nonlethally neutralizing opponents, where the lethal option is not only messier (you have to hold down the button, instead of just tapping it, and they make more noise), but also worth far less xp. (Which is arguably bad design, but you need to unlock a lot less augmentations to be viable as a combat monster than an infiltrator needs to be good at what he does.) I'm somewhat iffy on the idea of categorizing "screwing around in an imaginary world" as useful and relevant, whether one has a pre-set goal or just does it for kicks. I mean, it's a game, which you're playing to have fun, therefore achieving fun is the only metric by which it can be useful and relevant. I don't think there's a need to punish people whose idea of fun is different from yours.

I'd personally rank it above both Pathfinder and Numenera (Monte Cook's horrible caster-fetishism has a strong negative impact on class balance, which is a pet peeve of mine), even though the latter's core system is way more elegant. As for Fate, apples and oranges, really.

No, I don't actually kill everything in sight, but having the abstract incentive there does make me consider the violent solution "superior" to other solutions. That's personal bias. If the game gives out the same amout of xp for the violent solution in small chunks of kill xp as it does for the nonviolent ones, the violent solution isn't systemically held up as superior. But... doing not story-related sidequests for quest xp isn't related to the story either. The current system doesn't encourage you to participate in the story more than the one in the IE games.

This ain't no Icewind Dale, son. Based on the extent of horrible stuff you can not only do, but are actively rewarded for in Planescape: Torment, KotOR 2, Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas, I think evil bastards won't lack in options geared specifically for them.

Get them pitchforks! No, really, where can we complain?

Yeah. And let's not forget the monstercyclopedia updates, which is a really good feature, by the way - not only does it make you more efficient at fighting, it achieves that by broadening your tactical horizon instead of just giving a flat damage bonus (unlike the "[creature type] hunter"-style perks in Alpha Protocol and FNV, which also kicked in after killing lots of a certain creature type), feeds nicely into the skill system, and achieves verisimilitude by making you more efficient at fighting only against opponents you actually have experience at fighting.

I agree, that was my biggest question in how they plan to scale difficulty some time ago. Picking dialog options can't really be made harder. Yeah, the unavoidable conflict between noncombat resolution having a static difficulty* while combat is heavily dependent on character level is one of the reasons why I think it's more fair to give the same xp for the completion of objectives, regardless of the route taken. *I mean, picking the right dialog can be made really frikkin' hard (think of Alpha Protocol's endgame), but assuming two players have the same stat allocation, said difficulty is solely dependent on their player skill.

Dunno, based on that logic, you shouldn't get xp for opening locks or persuading people (assuming the game displays you have enough ranks in whatever attribute is necessary for that) either.