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I'm not even going to bother with the rest of your useless post since this statement illustrates your incapable frame of mind so completely. Whose game? Whose game? Oh, Obsidian's game? Oh, no, you mean that person's game, that guy who lives over five thousand kilometers from you? Hey, he seems to be enjoying himself, even with the saves and reloads. Ouch, he just reloaded again, but is that a grin? Looks like he's not ruining his game fun, wow! It's amazing! Players of a single-player game might actually enjoy playing in different ways! Imagine that. People like you who are so small-minded just flabbergast me. I'm sure you're so proud to give gamers and the gaming industry a bad name for being antisocial or sociopathic basement nerds. I'm glad that Obsidian isn't catering to such boneheads with the default setting.

FFS, which is exactly why MP cannot be added to PE. The devs have said this. The main references are in my sig, which summed up all say: Adding decent MP requires concessions in SP content, is complex to debug and costs more money for an extremely small audience. Those are from interviews and dev posts.

Don't get my hopes up!

You might want to actually read the devs' reasons for not considering this. Scattered across the forums and interviews and in my sig and all over this thread and related ones. You people just refuse to read and even accept the actual reasons (including the devs' reasons). The funniest interview quote would be from Sawyer (who's actually in the game industry, by the way, and can see numbers none of us can) was being perplexed that people ask for a co-operative experience and then the feature is so rarely ever used when the game ships. Basically: You guys are a pretty small minority for a complex mechanism that requires more cost and debug work for no content gain.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60594-how-should-the-ui-look/

You can go to the root of the Obsidian forums and see which mods are active and send a PM for them to move it. I agree that both DPI and resolution are critical for future-proofing...

I would imagine lot of the standard dialogue options will be fairly intelligent sounding anyway, so there's probably not much need for them to go to the trouble to make special options, as is the case with low intelligence. Unless of course you wish to roleplay a pretentious character who deliberately uses as many big words as possible in a sentence to seem intelligent. PS:T really shined in this. Low-med-high INT/CHA (I think WIS was xp, not sure) had varying degrees of dialogic content. The difference was not necessarily wording, which is what Obs seems to be going with the low INT option in PE, but rather the actual number of dialogue options shown. However, PS:T's implementation did run into that "these stats are always best for a full run no matter what class" problem, so keeping the dialogic content available by default would be fairest. (Alas )

I truly believe those people are a very small minority asking for this nonsense.

Out of curiosity, who did the first Sagani pic--Kieran Yanner, who did the group pic? Personally, I'd love to see two complete NPC portrait sets just during the development period since we have a bunch for the KS anyway---Polina concepts (missing Sagani and whoever else), and whoever did the first Sagani painted pic, which happens to be my favorite piece of all the KS art so far. I'm neutral about the switch mechanism since I'm sure PE will have portrait flexibility like the IE games...

I don't know how many people are normally involved in a private beta for a game of this scale, but the sheer number of those who will have donor keys--we're talking over 5300 from KS tiers without counting any add-ons. Seems hard to manage for a proper NDA, but I'm just skeptical...

Of the week---you have a short edit window for every post, I hope you realize that. I doubt a mod can change the contents of a "locked-in" post, if it's a software setting. Edit: Hm, maybe a mod can change the contents of a post; I think I've seen some in-post editing for offensive content before, but not sure where.

Maybe if it falls short of $3.5 they can give us a mega-village instead of a big city.

Walk/run toggle is a big plus. That's one of those funny mechanisms that PS:T had but none of the other IE games had. Weird.

Remember, for their time period, the IE games were a huge step up from the old Gold Box games. Concepts in usability design also evolve. I missed your "smaller displays" up there. I'm not even sure if software usability was standardized yet in csci/hud/design/techcomm/etc. back then... Usability evolves with the technology in terms of the interface displays, true, but are generally independent of underlying hardware power. I think the only thing PE has to worry about going forward is increased screen resolution and sizes (besides compatibility with Windows 17); however, I also believe there must be a cap somewhere. You could have a 50" LCD in the future, but that would probably cause a lot of neck strain and stuff would be illegible in the corners. I just don't see it happening.

This serves no purpose. There's no true reason for such a mechanic. None of the "arguments" put forth as to why it's a good idea to limit saving are convincing. And really, there's a vast difference between "encouragement" and "punishment." You really think your debuff idea is an encouragement? Wow. Ultimately, your stance is meaningless. There's Trial of Iron for ya, probably other difficulty options to tweak saving too. It's a single-player game, so someone else doing the save-reload dance 30 times against Firkraag shouldn't bother you one whit (and if it does, well.... pathetic). /facepalm

Oh, there's definitely room for improvement--for one, that base screen resolutions are much higher should help with that too. I just started a new game of IWD2 but have decided to shelve it for both work and school, but the UI, hm... I don't like it compared to BG, even despite the fact that people get attached to what they got used to first. I haven't played BG in a long time, so I don't think it's muscle memory getting in the way--the IWD2 interface doesn't seem very smooth, a bit cluttered and stuffed at the bottom of the screen. I rather liked the 3-bar wraparound UI of BG because different elements could be disabled. Yeah, darn those decade old interfaces that were written for much slower machines with smaller displays. Why aren't they as good as the modern games? Processing power has very little if nothing to do with usability design.

I've been playing IE games since day one (dating oneself ftw), and I gotta say, I think there's room for improvement in the interface. It's absolutely the style that should be used for PE, agreed, but where we left off in IWD2 it's still not...hrm...ergonomic? I can't quite put my finger on it. I gotta say, though that your in-game journal thing was what I was getting at from the start. If they could put something like that in, and have it get updated as my character collects letters/makes charcoal rubbings/etc, I would be thrilled. Oh, there's definitely room for improvement--for one, that base screen resolutions are much higher should help with that too. I just started a new game of IWD2 but have decided to shelve it for both work and school, but the UI, hm... I don't like it compared to BG, even despite the fact that people get attached to what they got used to first. I haven't played BG in a long time, so I don't think it's muscle memory getting in the way--the IWD2 interface doesn't seem very smooth, a bit cluttered and stuffed at the bottom of the screen. I rather liked the 3-bar wraparound UI of BG because different elements could be disabled. For an in-game chronicle of discovered lore attached to the journal, I'm in favor of something that matches the style of the setting... The problem besides UI in the DA:O codex was that you had no option to simply read in-game information before storing it in the codex for later study--the UI pop was automatic. A combination of access in BG (e.g. reading a book in someone's library) with an in-game option to record the information (maybe a little quill icon) into the notes section of your stylish journal would be better, I think... Well, yes. And I am looking forward to it like you cannot imagine. But the saving grace there is that it'll be a pdf. Otherwise, you'd end up with something that, while still seventeen kinds of awesome, would have been finalised and printed before the final rewrites went into the game. See also: your average strategy guide. I haven't used a strategy guide, so I don't know--I had to read this twice before understanding it. Alright, fair point.

It uses some variant of Android. Hardware may not be good enough either (1GB RAM). It's not merely the HUD that creates a barrier to porting.

Nah, lore is great. In-game lore is great. But I much prefer it to be kept in-game, not metagamed into a standoffish UI heavy on the "this is a computer game interface" factor like the DA:O codex. It could've been made far more visually pleasing, more like an old-school notebook with index and attached to the journal or something. PE fans much prefer the old school, old/worn stone kinda solid UI design than something slick and modern for this setting. Barring a truly good, usable in-game lore journal kind of thing, I'd rather leave the tidbits scattered in item descriptions and books a la BG. All or nothing... Besides, almanac.

I hated the DA:O codex with such a burning passion. Half the time stuff would pop up in there during combat or something and then the worst part was a UI with a bunch of nondescript icons for "new" data, so bugger if you had unread items before that and had to actually fish for it. If there's an in-game lore library tied to the journal, it should be far more usable with organization visuals. Besides, with the almanac, it's basically moot--the BG style was to have lore scattered in books around the lands, and it wasn't saved anywhere specific but your brain. I'd rather have that... And the DA:O codex was what people used to say it had more word count than PS:T, the true heresy. PS:T's word count was in dialogue, which is far more important content, not hidden in some lore study.

Having one stealth character in my party was absolutely critical in IE games for me--I scout everything whenever possible. Then I sneak back and tromp the party towards any danger and stay stealthed for that initial surrpise attack. Scouting isn't a gimmick either; it's a critical aspect of intelligence-gathering... A trick for designers is to ensure that it's not OP in that respect, too.

Indeed, actual autographs were part of the tier rewards... But I'm not expecting stuff to be shipped until 2014, so there's plenty of time to do it, if they preprint a sheet or something. I dunno.

I did that too. Someone mentioned elsewhere that being able to have all party member inventories open at the same time would be helpful too, especially if we've stuffed different things in different places (the multiple multiple scroll boxes were useful but also so easy to lose things within).

There are a number of ways to minimize certain types of save-scumming, for instance, if you have people who play the game with the absolute minimum investment in skills and just save/reload until they succeed, you can "fix" this by making skill successes a flat numerical pass/fail instead of a random roll. Ultimately, however, I think the effort to try and eliminate EVERYTHING that SOMEBODY thinks is an "exploit" is futile. If you're the type of person to have hysterics over how other people like to play games, well, all I can say is getting over it will be good practice for learning to get over things like where your roommate puts the dirty dishes and the neighbor's dog pooping in your lawn. Seriously, how much more pointless strife and heartbreak does the world need. Though to be fair, the better analogies would be where your sister's husband puts his dishes in their house or someone's dog pooping in another neighbor's yard. But basically, someone else's save habits not only don't affect you, you can't even see them. I still don't get the point of this thread besides "the number 3 is the best number, everyone must use the number 3."

No... Too many points against it for so little gain (travel mechanic is foot + compressed map shortcuts like BG). ROI is nonexistent for mounts in an iso game like PE. So "E" for me. For people who want a significant, complex implementation of mounted travel and combat, go play LotRO with the Riders of Rohan expansion coming Monday, where it actually makes sense in that setting. (Of course, you can't get access to mounted combat until level 75, so.... heh.)