Sensuki

No it was put in to give units (most principally the AI) an easy way of stopping people running past the front line to get to the backline characters. This is not as much of a problem for players because you can use positioning and movement combined with knowledge of what breaks AI clauses to stop this (in the IE games anyway), player characters can bumrush AI backline characters, force ranged characters to switch to melee weapons so they deal less damage, get right up in the face of the squishy Wizard etc. I don't think this is a problem, and rushing to the backline is not always the ideal thing to do depending on what game you're playing/what encounter it is. Smart encounter design and AI Spellcasting/Ability use should alleviate most of these issues, tbh.

The party has gained 400 XP.

v278 was released on a Thursday PST, v301 was released on a Wednesday PST. Since we haven't heard anything about it yet, I would expect either Thursday or Friday ... or possibly next week

I have not played Multiplayer ME3, why would I want to do that? Played the game twice, once when it came out and I think I played it again last year to try out one of the mods that kind of fixes the ending. It does not have great gameplay. It is terrible gameplay for a shooter. The game has no Z-axis, and it uses the Unreal 3 engine which has huge issues with input lag by design due to bad coding (there's some quotes in this thread, where one of the ESReality users tested the engines with a 1000 FPS camera: http://www.esreality.com/post/2640619/input-lag-tests-ql-csgo-q3a/) and most of the movement is 'snap-to' designed for consoles. For the record, I played competitive Call of Duty (1, 2, 4 and Black Ops) on the PC for 10 years and was in the best Australian team in 2010, my teams came 1st or 2nd in every tournament we played in for 2 years straight (http://au.cybergamer.com/profile/529/Sensuki/extended/). I did enjoy slower paced shooters such as Rogue Spear, Ghost Recon, The Sum of All Fears and Swat 4 - but that would have been the last tactical shooter (other than Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, which was a 3PS) that was any good. You might enjoy ME3's gameplay, but saying that it's the best 3PS is a very controversial statement.

The current action is actually shown on the Combat HUD. Personally when animations and combat feedback is improved I will be disabling Combat HUDs, but if any changes are made to the UI to make the combat HUD a part of the action bar then hopefully that can be toggled off as well.

You're comparing a character system against games with no character system (technically). The reason JK2, Rune, the JK games and Max Payne 2 are better is because they used better engines, had way better movement and required skill to win. Max Payne 2 and Bloodrayne are different stories considering they are SP games, but the feel of those games is way better than ME3. All you do in ME3 is this: Run behind obstacle, such as a wall and go into the auto-crouch mode, lean out and fire off a few shots, lean back in, wait for your shields/health to regen - rinse and repeat. That is abysmal gameplay. At least ME1 encouraged a bit more freeform movement, and you could actually do some pretty cool stuff like Call of Duty style unscopes with the Sniper Rifle, although they fully consolized the inputs/movement with ME:2 *thumbsdown*

Who cares what D&D says, or what happens in a turn-based game. This is a RTwP game.

What you have described is how Engagement should work as per the the Melee Engagement Update 44 post, and Josh Sawyer's posts on how it should work. Currently it does not work how it is described in the Update or in Josh's posts, there are issues with the logic and there are multiple bugs with it. However I still do not think that is good enough, as it will still make combat into a stand still and attack fest, and no tactical re-positioning will occur.

I bought Starcraft 2:WoD but it's not as good as Brood War, and they ruined it with the first expansion, most of the pro players in the scene around that time quit the game.

Tile streaming.

You're kidding right? It's a popamole shooter that takes no skill. Older games such as Max Payne 2 eclipse it by infinite amounts. So do the Jedi Knight series (in Lightsaber mode), Rune, Bloodrayne ... etc Mass Effect 1 had the best 3rd person shooting mechanics of the ME series. They went down the drain with ME:2 though, but I didn't really care too much because I wasn't playing the games for the (boring) combat. All of the ME games also have really bad mouse lag / mouse smoothing on as well, have to apply a few tweaks just to get the mouse to respond properly. I am boycotting them though. I am not buying another BioWare or Blizzard game, both of them will never again make a title I will enjoy.

It wasn't an amazing game, it had high production values and lots of voice acting - that's about it really. I did enjoy the first two games and ME2 was probably the best 'cinematic RPG', but there was a lot of design decisions I really didn't like and the only reason I played it is because I wanted to see if any of the decisions you made over the course of the game meant anything, turns out they didn't. Not a single thing. That was the promise of the series, and they blew it. Since I'd already given up on the rest of their product lines (such as the DA and Star Wars lines), I see no further reason to buy their products - I am not part of their target audience, I do not give a damn about their girly romances.

Odd that sking was bumping threads from the 19th of Aug, a lot of those bugs have already been fixed. do not understand the method they use to reply to backer bug posts, it seems random

Definitely not, pretty sure they're aiming for 2GB RAM or something.

Good. I like it when developers speak their mind and don't hide behind some PR speak (even though GZiets himself is very good at PRspeak lol). I like RTwP, but since I know that the inXile devs and GZiets prefer TB combat they'd probably be more at home designing for that. Josh Sawyer also prefers turn-based combat

If you want sticky engagement you may as well just use MMO style aggro mechanics. Guess what? The majority of backers don't want that (me included). That is the reason why the "Melee Engagement" system was designed. However in practice I think it's going to be almost as bad as the Neverwinter Nights games. I am going to give the new patch a thorough whirl and then report my conclusions after that, but currently I'm thinking the feature should be cut.

So the leaked system requirements from a few months ago were correct (although I think some might have said 20GB rather than 25GB)

I'll wait until the next patch and probably collaboratively test it with Cubiq and others, otherwise it'll be featuring in a Sensuki's Suggestion We'll see whether we can make a good case, as I fear it might be an unpopular opinion.

I think the first PC games I played were Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, Jazz Jack Rabbit and the Aladdin Sidescroller game on my next door neighbor's PC.

I like new ideas when they are clearly beneficial. I don't think the Melee Engagement system is a good one though, but as I said previously, before I start campaigning against it, I'm going to give them a bit of a chance to fix it. It has a lot of problems besides the actual mechanics - how to display it as a UI without being obtuse, how it should work (not currently defined 100%) and currently the actual feedback for it is terrible because it lacks an animation. I do like the idea of other changed systems - Health system, Attack Resolution, Objective-based XP ... etc, I'm only singling this one out because I don't think it is beneficial to the gameplay.

How does a lack of an engagement system promote more movement than the IE games? There is no difference between how you set up for encounters in PE and in the IE games except that in PE you can see enemies in the fog of war and thus can 'abuse' the line of sight. Units in PE have more active abilities, so you use more active abilities. The current patch requires no tactical planning whatsoever if you're using firearms and arbalests. Select Rogue with Arbalest, toggle Reckless Assault, select Crippling Strike - attack enemy *boom* 200 damage, dead in one hit. The IE games had much less useless dogpiling

Actually one of Josh's goals was that he wanted more active combat - increased micromanagement from players. Nothing about Melee Engagement involves planning. In the current patch, melee combat is pretty much this Enemies and Player units rush at eachother at lightning speed, and stand there. If you try and reposition in the middle of combat against big groups of spiders, or if the AI bug does it for you, that character dies. Enemies have simple targeting clauses, they do not move around in combat, they just stand there. All of the IE games had more advanced AI than PE currently has, and when the AI gets more advanced, it will be very easy to 'abuse' the engagement mechanics with multiple melee characters. The problem with your Iron Golem anecdote is that the Iron Golem is a HUGE unit and you can abuse the navmesh so that he can't hit you through a door, or a tight corridor or something where he gets stuck - most common place to do that is in the Planar Sphere. That's a level design issue - not a system design one.

Not at all. No XP for combat works fine and it fixes various problems that the IE games had with their always being a 'best' option - that which gave the most XP. Melee Engagement is a creation to solve a problem which I think is overblown, and can actually be solved in other ways other than creating a turn-based inspired system for dealing with it. I gave the system the benefit of the doubt and actually didn't complain about it at all until giving it a good thrash. You'll find posts from 2 months ago on the RPGCodex where I defend the system, but after playtesting it thoroughly I have come to think that it stinks.

What? You don't run around like a chicken with your head cut off in the IE games. You micro characters back when injured, just like you do in other RTS games. Engagement does add a cost to moving away, but most of the time it's a pretty bad decision to move away from enemies that are attacking you, particularly against multiple enemies. This is a spiritual successor to the Infinity Engine games, not Dragon Age Origins, not Neverwinter Nights 2 - both games which I think had terrible combat. DA:O had MMO aggro mechanics to keep units in place, NWN2 had AoOs which were retarded anyway. I will wait a few more patches before pushing for it, but if it's still a bug-ridden feature come end of November or whatever, it's probably worth just removing.

I don't think it makes it more tactical, I think it makes it less tactical. It forces combat to be this stand still fest, which is not like the IE games at all. Feels more like Crapon Age Origins.