Infinitron

Could be that Tutu broke something. I've always been faithful to vanilla BG1 and morale failure was very common in fights against "trash mobs" there.

really? I recall that you could use fear or confusion which made creatures to lose control and wander around, but I don't recall a morale system in bg\bg2 and neither in PoE for that matter :/ Edit: maybe you mean "morality" i.e. the alignment system? When some enemy forces started to crumble and became outnumbered, some would break, turn their selection ring yellow, and try to flee. I thought it was a nice touch. Yup.

Actually, Baldur's Gate did have morale. What version were you playing

I don't know what "designing an experience" means. I can tell you that Josh Sawyer appears to subscribe to a "gamist" philosophy of design, which basically means that he doesn't put mechanics in a game unless they're well-balanced to offer meaningful choices to players. He doesn't just throw stuff in, even if it might make sense in terms of making the game world more realistic. I don't know if that's what you'd call an "experience", but it certainly sounds different from an Elder Scrolls game.

Uh, this sounds a lot more like "designing the game to be an experience" - and a lot more like what Todd Howard does - than what Josh Sawyer intends to do in this game. OP seems to be a fan of ill-defined terms.

Wishful thinking.

I thought you would be able to access your "equipment" (what it's officially called, if I'm not mistaken), which is not only what you're wearing and wielding, but also what you have readied for quick-use (a pretty limited portion of that character's inventory, all-in-all). You won't be able to rummage through your backpack, no, but if you've got a potion on your thigh, or another sword on your back, you can access it in battle. With such items, I don't see how it matters what you're doing with it, if you can take the time to access it. That's what I said. Belts.

Yeah, this is a little remarked upon feature of the IE games. Since you won't be able to access your inventory during combat in PoE, I assume you won't be able to do this, unless they add some sort of special interface for swapping items between two characters' "belts" (unlikely)

It looks a lot like the Age of Decadence UI.

Period of calm == time until melee enemies close into attack range.

Eh? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/415136

Why do players savescum when one of their characters gets hit with a petrification-like status effect? There are three reasons: 1) They don't have any way to easily restore the character after the battle. 2) They do have a consumable that can restore the character, but they don't want to use it. Hoarding instinct. 3) They really need the character for the current battle, and can't easily restore him during it. Pillars of Eternity already offers a solution for the first two reasons. The game's healing system has been abstracted into an health reservoir that automatically replenishes your stamina after each battle, removing the need for healing consumables. That health reservoir could also be used to cure status effects. Is your character petrified after a battle? He loses a big chunk of health to unpetrify. If he doesn't have enough health to unpetrify, he just dies. This solution doesn't address the third reason though, which is that you lose the character for the entirety of the current battle. Placing a time limit on the petrification effect is the most straightforward way of solving this. You could combine the two solutions, so that when the character unpetrifies after the time limit is up, he also loses a chunk of health. (If you want to get really funky, you could let a character choose to "shake off" the petrification effect earlier at the cost of losing even more health.) However, I'd understand if the designers feel that petrification is enough of a punishment as it is, without also adding a resource penalty on top of it. By that logic, it's already bad enough that your character was petrified - why force him to suffer a loss of health on top of that?

I think what you're hearing there is "Jeremy Soule inspiration". He did Icewind Dale too.

Yet we were promised very few trash mobs. Still much more even without trash mobs. What, you think you're going to fight through dungeons with six people in them?

Isn't that obvious? The AI's advantage is that there are a lot more of them than there are of you.

http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Arkemyr%27s_Capricious_Hex http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Dimensional_Shift http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Overwhelming_Wave http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Mind_Wave Also, there a bunch more if the "Terrified" status effect is similar to "Fear" in D&D. See also here: http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Affliction#Affliction

If we "kill" an enemy character who's part of a party, but not the rest of his party, and then we run away from the fight, does he get back up with restored stamina? That's the same rule that the player's party follows, after all.

If you're small enough that you can work at home instead of renting an office, and you don't have salaried employees, then your financial calculus is completely different. In extreme cases, that can lead to indie teams with tens of thousands of dollars outperforming a low budget (a few hundred thousand dollars) "AAA" Kickstarter However, the Kickstarters with budgets in the millions of dollars are a different story. With the exception of Double Fine, it looks like they've all been very shrewd with their budgeting. Wasteland 2 is probably going to be out sooner than you think.

Very true. I'd also add that this is true for BG2's "mage duels" as well. Some people say that they liked the metagaming/hard counter aspect of them, but I believe that what 90% of them really liked is the fact wizard vs wizard combat was so well-developed in the first place - hard counters or no hard counters.

Since all stat allocations are viable in Pillars of Eternity, there's no reason not to add this, and it should be fairly trivial to implement. So why not?

What I think everybody is missing about the concept of the unlimited stash is that it allows the designers to ~balance~ the game around the assumption that players will pick up everything. In the Infinity Engine games, different types of players had wildly different "looting strategies", and it was hard to anticipate how much cash a player would have at any given point in the game.

I've always thought the people who said "Torment should have been an adventure game" were absolutely dead wrong. You know what you usually can't do in an adventure game? Explore an entire town. Talk to everybody you see, from commoners to important people. Kill anybody you want. In the 90s, adventure games were about puzzles. RPGs, even RPGs with bad combat mechanics, gave you freedom. By daring to be an RPG, and not merely an adventure game or a visual novel, Torment became a much more ambitious and satisfying product than it would have been otherwise. If it wasn't an RPG, it would just have been another Sanitarium or I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream - another weird adventure game from the 90s that barely anybody remembers.

Serious, well-balanced strategy and tactical games usually don't have the sucker punch/hard counter type stuff commonly seen in old RPGs. You might find strategy games boring of course, but I doubt it's for that reason. In many ways Pillars of Eternity can be seen as an attempt to implement a serious squad-level real time-tactics fantasy combat game within the framework of a broader RPG.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera/posts/797498

Pausing all the time like that isn't actually fun. And it's not going to turn a whole bunch of actions occuring simultaneously into actions occuring one after the other in sequence (ie, turn-based). I expect the slow down option to be pretty popular.