Tamerlane

+1 The BG1/2 portraits were okay too, but not nearly as cool as the IWD1/2 ones. I get that, but wouldn't it be possible to partially mitigate that by creating multiple variations of the same portrait with different weapons and other small differences? The artists will work digitally anyways, so if they use different layers etc. then shouldn't this be possible with minimal overhead? I've never seen this done in a game before, but I imagine it could be an effective way to increase the "coverage" of the shipped portraits (i.e. make them cover as many different character builds as possible), without making them less expressive. Interestingly, I've never seen anybody mentioning portrait matching problems until Josh brought it up. It's definitely A Thing for me. "Hey, that one's perfect! It's even got- no, wait, is that a MACE? Ew."

We all still have no idea, unfortunately. I'd love to have the site up - or to have some mention of the site in the updates - but honestly, the fact that we have neither of those things barely merits a complaint from me. It's something that would be super cool to have right now, but until we actually need it, its absence registers somewhere between "my butter is too hard to spread on my toast" and "I have the 'Mulatto Butts' song from Archer stuck in my head" on my list of annoyances.

As much as D&D ever explained why you can use EXP from fighting to become a better talker, yes.

As far as I know, the least involvement you can get is "owned but neglected". They've said that the player house will be a basic stronghold component, though.

Celebrating one year of our awful financial decisions!

That is... incredibly defeatist.

Official thang.

If you enjoy combat, you don't need increasing numbers to validate your experience.

This is not something I was disputing. What I dispute is the need to segregate stats into categories of "take this if you want to be a magic dude" and "take this if you want to be a fighting man dude".

Well... Probably not. Unless they implement the Calculator class from Final Fantasy Tactics, or copy the "my powers are language-based and all my enemies are francophones" bit from Preacher, or something along those lines. But the point is that unless you have a stat that says, "This is for magic power only and absolutely nothing else," it will in some way affect your dude in a manner that may not fit your core character concept. A smarmy, obnoxious, yet undeniably talented bard, for example.

To the extent that I'd love to make a wizard who deals massive damage with spells and is exceptionally accurate with them but can't speak eight languages and is bad at math, yes. Simple.

Creatures may respawn in certain areas, but it will be scripted and not procedural/across the board.

I've always liked it when you had things that were simultaneously good and bad against a thing. Like, say, an ice elemental does double damage to a fire elemental, but also takes double damage. Or you hit the robot with a lightning spell and it hits way harder than normal, but it also doubles its speed or charges the enemy with electrical attacks or whatever. I think that was an enemy in Breath of Fire 3. I dunno. Though I suspect Gromnir is talking about how rock-paper-scissors implies "hard counters" over "soft counters". If you're a Starcraft fan, consider the differences between a marauder VS stalker fight in SC2 (a total walkover for the marauders; the only thing the stalkers can possibly hope to do is maybe retreat) and a goliath VS carrier fight in Brood War (you make goliaths to fight carriers, yet large goliath numbers don't guarantee safety from aerial attacks). I don't think that's a particular thing we have to worry too much about in PE, as Sawyer seemed pretty opposed to binary success/failure mechanics.

Yes. Yes you can. Because it's magic. It's dependent only on what the person who made said magic wants it to depend on. Because it is an entirely made-up thing that can be keyed to anything. If the person making the setting wants the power of said bit of fire to rely on how well its summoner can recite the Gylfaginning, then that's what does it. Because it is literally a made-up thing.

Magic, being a made-up thing that does not exist, can be affected by whatever the hell the person making it up wants it to be affected by. Moon phases, Scandinavian poetry, dancing prowess, soul-power, diet, how many episodes of Archer you've watched, species... even dirty peasant-muscles.

Fighters will be inherently biased towards passive and modal abilities but will have powers (or talents or whatever the hell they're calling them) that can make them more ability-spamming. Wizards will be inherently biased towards ability spam but you can take powers that make them more passive. Barbarians are based largely around fighting large groups in melee but can get more single-target-focused abilities. An active-ability-based fighter will always be a bit more passive than a wizard built around active abilities, or so is my understanding. But... look. You ever play Pathfinder? Alright. Take a wizard. Wizards are ****ing amazing. We'll say this wizard is level 11. Pathfinder's meant for mid-levels. Give him strength identical to his int. Just like that. And ****, take martial weapon proficiency for free. If you drop him into a room with a barbarian of the same level, are they melee equivalents? Well... no. I mean, he's still got the 1.5x strength mod to damage if he's using a two-handed weapon. He's still got the same encumbrance. He can still take a falchion. But he also has half the base HP. He has +5 BAB instead of +11/+6/+1. He doesn't have the Beast Totems or anything in the Superstition tree or DR, not to mention +6 str and +6 con from rage. He's not using Furious or Courageous weapons. His power attack is weaker even if he's using a two-hander. So even if the barbarian isn't doing anything more interesting than "I full attack" or "I charge and full attack" (with the odd "I spell sunder" or "I rage cycle"), he's still a much better at melee specifically than that wizard. Now, the wizard is a much better character because it's Pathfinder and he's a wizard and therefore ****ing amazing, but that's not the point of this terrible analogy. The point is that there are a ****load of ways that melee effectiveness can vary even with the same stats and not-very-many active abilities. EDIT: And of course, I made no mention of melee-buffing wizard spells. See, I did that because

I think that just comes down to how much stats alone matter. A high-strength muscle-wizard that doesn't have access to fighter powers may hit decently hard, but he's probably going to be missing out on a lot of the stuff that makes being in melee actually worthwhile.

Making stats useful for dramatically different classes is A Good Thing for me. Dump stats have always bugged the hell out of me. And there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of magical damage being tied to physical strength. If you're plunging your hands into the unknowable void, ripping from it a piece of raw, chaotic energy, forging it into a mighty spear of fire, and hurling it at your enemy, why can't strength be the core of that? This is no more innately problematic than "sorcerer with high charisma gets more spells than sorcerer with low charisma".

Well... they do quite regular updates. They did one on strongholds just a few days back. If you're specifically wanting an update on when the "early access beta" mentioned on the Kickstarter page could possibly begin? Well... Wasteland 2 is supposed to go into beta in October (the original projected release date). Now, Wasteland 2 started six months before Project Eternity and will be entering beta fairly soon. If Project Eternity is going to stick to its original release date (April 2014), then I'd take an ass-pull estimate of 4-5 months to beta. Of course, schedules are slippery things, so if the game gets delayed, then you can start tacking months on to my admittedly ignorant estimate.

Um. Why, exactly? I mean, I get nothing for not playing Pazaak in Knights of the Old Republic. Or for not doing the arena in Oblivion. Or for skipping the Modron Cube in PST, cool as Nordom is. I pass on those things because I don't enjoy them, and for me, the reward was "Didn't do **** I don't enjoy." Why should the stronghold be different?

That's nice, but it's not what the OP was talking about.

And in the end, while history and reality are important and necessary guides, they do not trump funhaving. The inclusion of certain enemies and situations that make ranged weapons less effective can be conducive to funhaving, so long as it's not of NWN2-crit-immune-enemies proportions. Putting ranged weapons (or magic or melee or anything else, really) on some weird inverse curve is anti-funhaving.

And it took... one hour and three minutes for someone to ask about torture. I'm glad I didn't make a bet on that; I'd have said five hours at the very least.

I think so, honestly. Damn shame; this one looks pretty legitimately cool.

Not dull: long. Like all rodents, beavers' teeth grow indefinitely. If they don't keep gnawing, they grow too large.