Lohi

I was wondering this too. Do we get badge before the game comes out, or... Just surprised to see the Obsidian Order titles showing up now despite being new making me suspicious that I did something wrong or they forgot about the VIP titles.

Is it really going to have classes? I was hoping we'd get rid of them.

I liked the BG2 style strongholds, however they lacked a lot too. They seemed to just be a big adventure rather than a base of operations. If you were the right class you got some extra things to do, but when the adventure was over it wasn't really "yours" and not your base of operations really. They should have been the places where you go to find NPCs who left to rejoin your party, places to store your stuff. Compare to having houses in Fallout 3 and Fallout:NV. A quick return if you want, chests for your stuff, places to stick trophies, vendors nearby. Very handy, and a stronghold should be a bit more than than too. Say a fighter's or paladin's stronghold should have a hireling to take along with you, a wizard's tower should have lab equipment for making magical items or learning new spells, a thief's stronghold should have access to the only really reliable fence , and so on. We don't really need one per class either.

This is not D&D though. No tieflings (that sort of silliness wasn't even in the versions I played anyway). I wouldn't even mind it being all human. If there are races they should be subtly different. Elder Scrolls did it alright I think, all the types of elves were basically just tiny variants of each other, all the types of humans were just ethnic groups (except when they threw that out the door with cat and lizard people). If there are non human races then they should be non-human in all ways - ie, if you have lizardmen then the males should not have deeper voices and the female must not have mammaries, you should be totally unable to tell the difference between a male and female cat person. Dwarves should not just be small humans, and elves should not just be poetry loving humans who live longer.

Actually when I first did D&D the rule was XP came when the adventure was over. There were rules based on how much treasure you looted and the like, but most GMs just gave a flat amount I think. It was very much about telling a story and having an adventure and cooperating, rather than trying to get a high score.

Reasons are likely that wizards are scholars and in some cultures scholars wear robes (ie, cap and gown), as well as judges, officials, etc. That's why old pictures of alchemists all seem to have a certain style. Generally no one ever wears armor unless they're a soldier or guard and even then not all the time. It's inconvenient to walk around the home in armor, to wear armor to the market, etc. You put on the armor when you expect to be in combat. If you're traveling you don't even wear your most heavy armor either (I was also never a fan of the walking-steel-can guy).

I never really liked levels anyway. Too artificial. Some people seem to just want to see numbers I guess.

1) I was never a fan of "set difficulty at the start and never change it again" style. This works for ironman mode. But for other modes it always makes me pause. I want to set difficulty up but I don't want to find out it's no fun later on and I have to restart. Ie, like everything is smooth and easy until the final BG2 fight. So it would be nice if we could increase/decrease combat difficulty later on. 2) Two types of difficulty sliders: one for combat and one for gameplay. This way you can be in expert mode but also turn down difficulty of fights. Or be in ironman perma-death mode but with easy fights. Or very difficult combat with easy inventory management and infinitely stackable arrows.

I was talking about stats more than skills. With some systems only a few types of builds are really good. The tradeoff is between "viable" and "has difficulty". But if each combination of skills was viable you'd have more choices. Yes there are tradeoffs. If I drop strength to make charisma better that is a tradeoff. However by doing that I had better still end up with a viable character. Most games have you discover only later that charisma is only used in a couple places and that you're stuck with a gimped character unless you reroll. Of course on second or third replay players know this stuff but for the first time player you're really unsure what matters. I'd like a system where you can not completely gimp yourself out of ignorance because you mistakenly thought you were making some valid tradeoffs.

Of course the action could also cause no consequences if no one knows about it. Too many games give everyone in the world the ability to instantly know all your actions. If you killed the guy in a basement and no one saw it, then the townspeople shouldn't be instantly angry at you when you leave the house. Maybe in a day or two after the body is found and you were the only stranger who passed through, then you could lose some reputation. Also I really disliked systems that treated evil like a stereotype. It makes sense the the pure and holy priest is angry at me for stealing and leave sthe party. But it is ridiculous when a thief wants to leave the party because I wasn't evil enough.

Mature themes are anything beyond "kill things and take their stuff and then go party". It could be politics. It could be deep discussions about whether orc babies are inately evil and should be killed or not. It could be trying to figure out what can change the nature of a man. Themes that aren't immature in other words.

That's one time per instal though! What if you want to install it again 10 years later? Or the company is out of business?

Most Steam games that have DRM and were written for Steam also require DRM even if you install from DVD. It's pretty bad. Older games converted to Steam don't do this. Trust the players, don't treat them like potentional criminals. Allow Steam as an option for those who like digital downloads but never a requirement for everyone. I liked Fallout 3 as it had almost no copy protection (you didn't even need DVD in the drive!), whereas Fallout: New Vegas (from Oblivion instead) did require Steam. And I was extremely disappointed in that decision. Need to stand up to Valve and tell them flat out that the physical version will not have DRM! Guess what, we can still play Baldur's Gate even though Black Isle and Interplay no longer exist. Anyone who likes playing old games should be opposed to DRM and the idea that you only play a game that you own if the owners permit you to play.

Definitely not instant quaffing of heal potions while still in combat. Everything should take some time to work. Wounds should not magically close because of a potion. I also never liked the idea that you could just sleep overnight and be all better. Sure you get most of your fatique restored and can swing a sword again, but wounds should not vanish this way. On the other hand healing options should not be so limited that you feel you have to rest for days before going out again. A magical remedy could heal a minor wound in a few hours, heal a broken leg (after being set) overnight, not long enough to put you out of commision. More serious wounds would require more serious magic.

It would be very intersting to see some sort of ritual magic. It takes time, components, procedures. Not something you do in combat but something useful to do at other times. For instance the bigger healing spells might require this, or the creation of enchantments. That's what the original D&D hinted at, but you just told the DM "I spend 2 hours memorizing my spells" and got it over with, and soon most DMs forgot all about components. Obtaining the right components could even be a goal of the party. I'd like to see one specialty of magic, of course we also have a flashy magic user specialty as well. Ie, subtle means debuffing your enemy so that they miss more, don't hit as hard, get confused. Reducing the damage taken is better than healing the damage afterwords. If you charm an enemy to fight for you it could involve the spell caster remaining immobile for the duration, and not just a cast-and-forget. Think more like "these are not the droids you're looking for" and less like "pew pew". Also magic users probably should not be stereotypical robe wearers with daggers. There's no logical reason that they can't hold a sword and put on armor. It's a dangerous world out there! Maybe they don't know how to use a sword of course and they'd be clumsy in heavy chain mail, but it shouldn't be a hard restriction. Unless there's some sort of world based restriction that's clearly explained.

Not at all a fan of "memorized spells" ala D&D. And spell points solves this but have their own problems. Sure points can regen, and you could have spells consume activity points. But how about a system where instead you get diminishing returns? The more you've used a type of spell recently the less effective it becomes. Give it a rest and you're back to full effectiveness. That way you always have something to use in an emergency. With higher ability you would be able to use less potent spells very often without much diminishment, but the more powerful spells diminish greatly after even one usage. A really powerful spell would require a bit of time to prepare and some time to cast and then some bit of rest. I could even imagine the magic user trying to blast through a barrier and the rest of the party has to protect him for the duration. The system could apply to all major abilities, not just spells. Ie, when picking a lot you could repeat the pick,pick,pick,pick rapidly but get nowhere, but slow down and take your time to study the lock and it is then easy to open. Or wind up for a very big axe blow and then get tired, or else lots of tinier weaker axe blows instead.

Romances may be ok, but they're so often somewhat out of place. Too often though these seem to be the only in depth interaction wtih some characters. Make it more like Planescape where the other party members are very interesting without it being romantic. Now that I'm remembering more, Planescape did it very well, almost all the NPCs were very well fleshed out with lots of conversational options. Ie, how about Bromance! Maybe I want the girl I grew up with to be my best friend but without any entanglements. Maybe some of the party members are married already and have kids too, or some members have romance with each other but not the main character. How about the party member that subtly wants to get you to go along with him on some illegal venture, and instead of just saying "help me rob a bank" is instead feeling you out and it takes a few camp fire conversations before the plan is revealed.

Personally I'd like to just dump levels. Go with pure points/skill based system. Game systems often get nervous just dumping them because players want some sort of skill. Ie, Elder Scrolls where the levels themselves really did nothing much important except for health. Then you've got a cap for points/skills instead. If I reach the cap early then that's fine for me, the rest of the game is about doing the quests and exploring. Even at cap you get more powerful as you find better stuff. I think the D&D games the level caps were important because everyone wanted to know what sorts of powers you'd get over time, and so saying that 10 was the cap tells many players exactly what to expect even before they played the game. But there's no need to do that in a system no one knows. I also never liked when you got to the point of being superman in a game. Ie, Fallout once you got a reasonable chance of a critical rifle shot and lots of action points there was never any challenge left at all (except to keep Dogmeat alive of course). I'd like that there was always a slim chance for failure, and a bigger chance if you were stupid, but without scaled enemies ala Oblivion.

These guys should have lives. It shouldn't be up to me the main character to control them, with them hanging out twiddling thumbs when I'm not around. That is, if they leave the party we should not necessarily find them exactly where we left them. Maybe we've completely forgotten about one but then there he is in another town doing his own thing, or locked up in prison asking us to free him, etc. As for them getting XP it depends on the game system. I'd prefer one that's not about grinding XP or getting tons of levels/points with most of the game being about getting more and more powerful. If someone is not powerful enough they should still be able to join in ("Can you hold a gun, kid? Great, then cover this corridor for us.").

Variable party size is nice, especially if we pick them up along the way. As opposed to the style where you create them all at the start. Too many characters and it gets confusing to keep track of them all and their side quest lines. They should all feel like individuals and not just a big faceless party like Icewind Dale had. I think 6 is too many. I voted 4 but overall I think we could have 3 to 5. Some may just be temporary though. I do not want to see the case however where you're about to help someone out with some problem they have but they say "sorry, your group looks full"! Anyone should be able to join the party and hang out if you let them. Interesting if they could leave and come back over the course of a story instead of just being your pack mule that sticks it out with you all the time. Even more interesting if they could be more normal NPCs at times who travel along with you; ie, the shop vendor who you have been dealing with wants to travel along to the next city, the jail guard you took hostage while escaping, or even the completely inept peasant you rescued on the road. Of course that can get a bit complicated.

Just a follow up. It would be interesting to have a bit of class system in the game but without a class system. Ie, if you join guilds you get access to abilities that others would not have. Fighters guild, wizards guild, etc. You could get a certain level of a skill without guild but would need affiliation with it to get the skill higher level. Guild is a bit cliched in some games, but could include things like just joining the city guard or having been in the army in the past. Another way to add a bit of class system is to allow some starting templates for characters. Since it will be party based, the class system is not totally out of place. You will have others who will take up the slack where you're weak. In Baldur's Gate you wanted a mix of character classes; but in Fallout you could do just fine if everyone was using small arms. (On the other hand even though I say I like the skill based systems, I do know that 4 out of 5 times I play Fallout it ends up being essentially the same type of character at the end... )

I like SPECIAL in some ways because I don't like pure class based systems. Though I liked GURPS better than SPECIAL. Definitely a points based system over class based. Skill based ala Elder Scrolls: has problems for me because it gives you little chance to improve skills you rarely use. It rewards "practicing" by reusing a skill over and over for no good reason. Whereas a point based system like Fallout I could put points into energy weapons before I ever found one, and plenty of books out there to learn some basic engineering from. D&D: ok for the 70s though. The ruleset got too weird over time I think. Too hard to create the character you want in their class system, and early D&D tried to solve with too many custom classes in Dragon magazine. Alignment I always felt was the stupidest thing ever, however I did like how Planescape: Torment handled it. I also liked how Planescape handled classes, when the nameless one changes classes there it's like remembering some of your past and forgetting others. So Planescape felt like the only place where the silly parts of D&D made sense. D&D did keep number of stats to a reasonable level though, but the later merging of skills and feats felt really cumbersome and confusing. Multi-classing seemed like an attempt to break away from classes but didn't go all the way to dumping them; plus multi-classing was used to often for minimaxing builds. Fallout & SPECIAL: was ok mostly. However it felt often like you could create bad characters too easily. Ie, the game handled stupid character and could be funny, but you could severely gimp yourself this way. Some stats were dump stats and not much penalty for ignoring them. The perks systems seemed too powerful at times and were crucial to some builds. I also felt that Luck was out of place here; there were one or two stats too many. Overall I'd like to see something really balanced. Ie, accepting the default stats, ie, all 5s, should allow you to have a character just as heroic and viable as a specialist who focuses only one a couple of stats. Dump stats shouldn't exist, you should always feel like you're giving up something in order to get that extra point. And going back to fallout 1, a system that allows the non-combat player to succeed is nice. I was never really fond of the times in Fallout where you needed certain stats to see parts of the game. Ie, high charisma to get more quests, high luck for the random encounters, etc. Then again I don't just want to see SPECIAL redone yet again. It should feel like its own system and not get in the way of the game or game play.