Tamerlane

But there is no requirement that you be a "best friend" of someone to be a companion/ally. You can be a hireling. You can be following someone else because their agenda aligns with your own. You can be following someone else out of a feeling of debt. Myriad reasons. But none of them have anything to do with how many people are already around. None of those things would require me getting rid of any one character just to bring in any other character. That is purely a matter of balance and manageability.

The further away from being a human (or dwarf or aumau or whatever) it is, the more you should see unique abilities. A giant troll swinging wildly with its club can work as a unique ability because the troll is using its size and strength to do an attack that would be ineffective if done by a human. A goblin wounding someone with a spear is a bad unique ability because there's nothing unique about it; anyone with a spear could do it. This was one of the many bizarre changes from DAO to DA2. I will never understand what was up with the NPC/PC spell divide in that game...

In general, giving space between simple pass:fail on skill checks is a Good Thing. Introducing ways for companions to add their skills in is also a Good Thing, albeit not what Josh was talking about. The risk with scaling resource costs based on the difference between skill level and difficulty level is that this cost can easily become irrelevant if lockpicks (or whatever the consumable resource is) are too easy to obtain. But... damn, guys. This is a Good Thing. If you're a master thief, you won't destroy your tools.

The thing is, the six-man-limit is entirely arbitrary from an in-character perspective. It's there for balance and to make party management not-godawful. As far as the Bhaalspawn or The Nameless One or whoever the hell is concerned, there's really no reason for being limited to five followers at a time. Trying to build harsh plot-consequences around something that doesn't really make sense from plot-perspective is... generally not a good thing,

It... it looks like Meta Knight from Kirby got stuck in a comically giant suit of armour.

Daggerfall's climbing. Can't make me HALT when I'm running across the rooftops, stupid guards! Doesn't have much application to PE, though.

Regarding spell learning, I would like to fail learning spells. Frustrating, love/hate type of thing F5+F9, man.

If every addition is a new hire and every removal is a firing... well, that's a huge ****ing pain in the ass. Maybe I just want Viconia to chill the **** out while I go and do Valygar's questline before I bring her along again?

The fight with Gorudo (the leader of the Matilda Knights) is the best non-killing-Luca-Blight part of the game. Best. Friends. Forever, god dammit.

Is this one of those "the only way to win the game is to not play it in the first place" things?

Clever ways to seduce people? You mean "putting points into 'seduce'"? And unless you modded the game, your blood meter never went down independently. It was really just a fancy mana bar that you could replenish in some neat ways.

On the other hand, PST had a very slow drip of information, and revealing The Transcendent One earlier on could have ****ed with the flow of things. The Transcendent One was the final antagonist, but not necessarily the biggest villain. And that's totally fine.

Sorry then, I didn't recognize the song quote, nor have I read/heard that Josh has said this. No need to get worked up about it, I didn't think my post should have come across as more than a casual comment, not a heartfelt angry rant. EDIT: I searched for the song with this lyrics, and got: City of New Orleans, written by Steve Goodman. I played the song on my Wimp (Think Spotify), and have never heard it before, then again, I don't really like most country music. Eh, it was less directed at you and more... well, there's a lot of people complaining about that "Good Morning America" for some reason. City of New Orleans is a well-know, oft-covered song folk song. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Arlo Guthrie... some really good versions of it, though I prefer the original Steve Goodman. Guess that's just the one I grew up hearing.

It was a song quote. Josh Sawyer has specifically stated that he knows that PE's fan-base is approximately half European. Mother****, people.

Will this game work without hassle on modern computers? I won't buy it if it doesn't max out at 800x600 and I don't have to turn off hardware acceleration to stop my characters from moonwalking everywhere.

Cool. When I was a kid, I could see Saskatchewan from my house. Neat. Did you grow up in Flin Flon or Lloydminster or just a farm by the border or something?

I demand the ability to shinespark my way past boss fights!

Saskatchewan, Canada. And for those curious, Josh Sawyer has said that about half of the money raised came from Europe.

That's about all I can ask. Cool thangs, Ropey.

It's not even that X-Com is hard. X-Com's easy mode is easy. I mean, I can understand being challenged by it for a while if you're new to the franchise and playing on Ironman - and it reads to me like he's playing some unintentionally self-inflicted, self-enforced form of Ironman - is definitely gonna cause some problems.

Flitting from villain to villain (and outside the genre)... BG's Sarevok: Interesting motivation, but he gets so little attention that I really couldn't care about him. Mass Effect's Saren: Often brought up as a Good Villain, but I just couldn't take him seriously with his ****ing hoverboard thing. Not exactly a great way to maintain dignitas and gravitas. Dragon Age's Loghain: Almost really good, but a big part of his motivation got cut. Don't know if it was for time or because they just didn't want that bit in the game or what. The Return to Ostagar DLC played with it a bit, but fell a bit short. Mass Effect's Reapers: Loved the cuttlefish aesthetic, and the sound! The BRRRRM! Awesome. The infamously bad ending wounded them a lot, of course. The proposed alternate ending with the rapidly decaying stars and all that would have helped, but it still had flaws. The reapers claimed that their motives were ineffable, and yeah it's a cop-out, but if the choices are between that and something silly, I'm gonna go with "unknowable". To roughly paraphrase Stephen King: "When the hero opens the door and sees the meter-tall spider, the reader thinks, 'Whew! I was worried it would be a ten meter tall spider!' And if that spider was ten meters tall? The reader would think, 'Whew! I was worried it would be a hundred meter tall spider!'" Suikoden 2's Luca Blight: Man, what is it about Luca Blight? He's the most one-dimensional mother****er ever, and everyone loves him. Even me. Is it because he just doesn't give a **** about anything but wanton slaughter? Is it because he's so god damn hard to bring down? I just don't know. Half-Life 2's Dr. Breen: His speeches, man. "You have destroyed so much. What is it, exactly, that you have created? Can you name even one thing?" I believed that he believed that he was the hero. Starcraft Brood War's Kerrigan: Blizzard's writing has always been mixed, and I think they kind of lucked their way into a good villian with the Queen of Blades. Half the damn point of Brood War is making the player think, "So, Kerrigan is... good now? Right? Awesome. No, wait, she's amoral. But still kinda good? No, wait, she's bad. But she can be redee- nope. No redemption. She's evil. Hot damn is she evil. And she's not even the worst thing around." And it was a great ride, but then Starcraft 2 came and forgot that 95% of Brood War ever happened. NieR's Shades: Not just the boss. The Shades in general were awesome adversaries. I mean, they're just generic shadow monsters for most of the game but then you reach the end and (massive spoilers for a legitimately pretty good game ahead) Neverwinter Nights 2's King of Shadows: Despite the generic as hell name, his backstory was actually... good? Yeah, his backstory was good. I thought the "btw u want join me?" bit felt pretty tacked on at the end, though the scene where your companions chose sides was kinda cool.

That quote has nothing to do with retroactively wiping characters from saves. That's just basic "if you keep going, you can't revive him". Exactly like in the original game. Or in Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics or a gibbed character in Baldur's Gate. You're talking god damn nonsense. Either your game is bugged as ****, you accidentally hit the Ironman toggle (you can play on easy and still use Ironman), or you're doing something catastrophically wrong. I have played the game. I have reloaded old saves. On ****ing impossible difficulty. If someone died after the last save, I can reload it and they will be alive again in the past save. I can go and do that right now if I want. I know the words that you are using; I know the meaning of the words that you are using, and I know how to combine them into combinations that can create logical and reasonable sentences. And yet I have no idea what the hell it is that you are saying.

You... you bastard...

The game was, like... five bucks on Steam a week ago.

Yeah, either you're playing on Ironman without knowing it or your game is ****ed up or you're doing something terribly wrong or... I have no ****ing idea. You should be able to load an earlier save no problem if you didn't check the Ironman box. That's the way the game is designed. EDIT: Are you just... like, loading the wrong autosave? Every single time? EDIT2: And seriously... Enemy Unknown is hard on easy? Daaaaaaamn, bro.