Waywocket

It's so obviously not supposed to be 'Drow tombs' Anyway, was this done manually or using some map-making tool? Looks pretty good in a spartan kind of way.

To an extent, this is what a vancian [i've never heard it called that before, but that seems to be the term all the cool kids are using] magic system is there to prevent - your mage can cast invisibility if he has it prepared, but you thief can be stealthy at will. The mage has great power and versatility, tempered by moderation - if you prepare that transformation, that's one less fireball. If you cast it now, you can't cast it later today. You have great power at your disposal, but you need to be careful where/when/how you use it. That's why I like that kind of system, and I'm sad that it seems to be fairly unpopular even here, because going to something like a mana-based system means that either mages need to be nerfed to the point that they're far less fun to play, or they're so overpowered compared to the other classes that it's silly to pick anything else. I don't think I've ever played a game where the mage worked as well as in BG2 (not BG1 because you spend too much of the game so pathetic that you're almost useless, nor ToB where the mage really started to outstrip the other classes too much).

I despise lockpicking minigames with a burning intensity that cannot be described. I think that was one of the things I hated most about Fallout 3, a game which I consider to be only marginally more entertaining than a squashed turd.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by 'feels old'? To me this is one of those areas where 'old' means 'good' - I'm not a die-hard nostalgia fanatic, and I definitely think there are improvements to be made, but I've not played an RPG with an interface I prefer. Change can be good, but not when it's made for its own sake, so are there any particular aspects you dislike, which have since been done better?

Edit: I shouldn't respond to obnoxiousness in kind.

Wow, I can't believe people are saying no. I loved those! PS:T had probably the best spell effects of any game I've ever played. The first time I cast meteor storm bombardment... I think that's the most epic thing I've ever seen. All of PS:T's spell effects were great though, not just the ones with cutscenes. I liked blacksphere, axe of torment, fire and ice, etc...

That quote lumps console and tablet versions together, which doesn't make much sense. The UI necessary for a tablet is almost the same as that for a PC unless your game is keyboard-heavy, and doesn't really require designing the game around the interface limitations, whereas the UI necessary for a console necessarily means designing your game for that interface, and basically gimping it on a real computer. Really, I think a tablet should be considered another form of PC (in the broad sense along with Mac/Linux); witness the number of games being remade for touchscreens with only minor changes, where a console port in infeasible or at least severely limiting. (Obviously processing power is not going to be a limitation; a decent but relatively affordable tablet today is more powerful than the machines many people are still using for desktops. To think that this game will require anything remotely as powerful as an i5 is beyond ludicrous. [Edit: A quick troll around the Steam store for big-budget performance-heavy games shows a Core 2 duo as the highest CPU requirement I can find])

That makes a nice desktop wallpaper but not a particularly playable experience, with everything scaled down to a fraction of its original size. Try it out; it's very playable - more so even.

IWD already does this - probably the majority of XP comes from progressing through the story (and there are places where you don't want to miss out on talking to somebody, even though it's not necessary to progress, because there could be 20,000XP in it for you). Despite being more-or-less a straight dungeon crawl, it also encourages you to explore dialogue options and not just attack on sight - for example, when you find the cultists impersonating followers of a peaceful god, you get a substantial bonus for talking them into revealing themselves versus just attacking or breaking into their inner sanctum.

http://womenfighters.tumblr.com/ More to your liking?

Very much this. I have literally never completed the prologue to IWD without at least a dozen reloads - if a single goblin or orc rolls higher than maybe 13 then that will one shot a wizard or thief, or a cleric if the enemy gets a good damage roll. A single critical hit will one-shot any level one character. There's nothing you can do tactically to prevent that, short of composing your party entirely of fighters and having each one run away after the first time they get hit (and hope you don't get critted). Baldur's Gate is about the same, except you don't get such large groups of enemies from the beginning so you only need to get lucky on a few rolls. This is not fun. Actually, I don't really like any mechanics where the difficulty is all luck-based. By the time you get to about level 3 then the difficulty level is about right - you need to use tactics in fights, but you're not dependent upon outrageous runs of good luck. In general, I think games should start out easier so you at least have a chance to learn the mechanics before you've died repeatedly, but then gradually get harder as they progress - in both the BG and IWD series the games got progressively easier as you progressed, which isn't ideal, though it does lead to the feeling of becoming more and more epic as you get through the game. (Torment was actually pretty much ideal, because if you played your cards right you could get a long way without any forced fights; getting out of the mortuary relied more on cunning than on being able to get good dice rolls. Alternatively you could always start a scrap if you really wanted to.)

Well I'm hoping for something that looks like this: Seriously, I think Icewind Dale is actually the best looking game I've ever played. It doesn't really look photorealistic exactly, but it's headed in that direction. I would love to see more games following this kind of artistic style.

I expect it's more likely that UK sellers more commonly factor in the postal cost while deciding how much to charge, whereas US sellers have a large enough domestic market that they can assume the majority of their customers are in the same country.