PsychoBlonde

I see potions and other consumables as a way for me to moderately screw something up without having to load the game, as in this scenario: Me: ooh enemies! *charge* Rogue: There's a tr-- Trap: BOOM! Enemies: HA-HA! Me: *frantically chugging potions* They exist to help me get through the first run on the game when I have no clue what's around the corner. On subsequent playthroughs I tend to sell them.

This depends a lot on how they design the game. If they put in doors that you have to open by killing everything in the room, then yes, stealth is not much of an option. If you have to take your entire party with you everywhere, then yes, stealth is not much of an option. However, if you can sneak in the back door, kill the guardian monster, and then have your one rogue sneak their way up the well and gank that one item you need, stealth IS an option even with a full party. Since they've already talked about not giving XP just for killing things, I think they'll be heading more towards this sort of design philoosophy.

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.

What I don't get, is why killing some dude should cause the game to be "un-winnable". He's the only one who knows where the Ultimate Artifiact of Salvation is? The game's limited in scope. I can find it eventually. And if he knows where it is, HOW did he find out?!? Surely I should be able to read the same musty old tome myself. I mean, seriously, you can kill thousands of people but you need some crusty scholar to open a door? PLEASE. That's not to say I think that there's something wrong with games that don't let you randomly attack people. I just think they should pick a conceit and go with it. Either make ALL the "civilians" immortal and untouchable, or let people murder everybody if they REALLY want to. Don't just throw it around randomly.

So, your idea of fun is to have the game hurt you whenever you deviate from the script? I play to enjoy myself, not to get slapped around by a computer program. If the purpose of any design element is "hurt the player", that is a bad design element. The focus should always be on what the player CAN do not what they're "not allowed" to do.

Back in my day, we had to make our own map using graph paper. AND IT WAS AWESOME. I kid, I kid. Not about the graph paper, though. That really happened. A lot. Granted, in an isometric game there's really no reason to have a mini-map because it'd just show what you can ALREADY SEE. A non-mini map, yes. As for quest markers . . . I don't need em in this type of game, and they look cheesy.

Not necessarily. As long as the companions prioritize what they need and reserve room for it, it woldn't be a problem. wouldn't be that hard to implement either. Let's say 5 healing (or mana) potions and 2 stacks of arrows are a minimum stock a party member might mantain. I was worried more about the hassle of forcing them to buy 10 stacks of arrows because you're planning a long hike and you don't want to have to stop every other fight to get more. In Baldur's Gate 2 stacks of ammo was nothing I'd usually fill almost all inventory slots when I was in town to restock. If they couple a character who has to stock ammo with an AI mode that requires you to persuade them to stock up, that character is going to wind up getting ditched at the first opportunity.

I could see this being incredibly annoying if you have a situation where you want to swap stuff around and some items can't be used by some characters. It'd be like playing musical chairs or the towers of hanoi with equipment. Granted, that could be a way for them to include that damn ubiquitous towers of hanoi puzzle without it being obvious. :D

I hope there will be plenty of tactical options of this and other varieties for fighters, rogues, monks, barbarians, and paladins, and if so it only makes sense that certain weapons would have benefits/detriments for certain tactical styles.

Yep, you could, it was just more tedious because the time it took to click through stuff was (often) longer than the time it took if you could just hotkey stuff. Personally, I am hoping they allow for a broad range of controller setups. I like to play as much as possible via hotkeys and keyboard commands, so I always want the ability to scroll through characters, abilities, and enemies just using the keyboard, particularly when the little jerks move around so I have to pause in order to click on them. I prefer to play without pausing as much as possible--I consider the challenge of giving my orders WHILE the combat is moving along to be a large portion of the fun, and the pause is ONLY there, to me, as a safety valve for when I get overwhelmed--if I HAVE to use it constantly the game's not fun for me.

If I could have ANY mechanic I wanted, I would actually have a peculiar hybrid mechanic where you assemble responses by either typing words or by picking several options from a lengthy list of keywords, emotional tones, etc, and then you get a "line of dialog" (and actions) for your character from an invisible list based on a complex parsing system, followed by an NPC response. But, failing that (which would be pretty much an entire game in its own right), I'll take the list of numbered options. I'm not OPPOSED to the Dragon Age/Mass Effect dialog wheel thing, I think it's a fine mechanical option in a cinematic style game, but for an IE game where your character is one inch tall and you're not trying to pretend dialog is a movie scene, something like a dialog wheel or tone indication would be hilariously out-of-place.

I suppose this is a question of sorts aimed at the devs, but I was just wondering--we're getting new classes as stretch goals but not new companions. Does this mean that we're going to have one each of a Fighter, Wizard, Priest, Monk, Ranger, and Rogue companion, but no possibility of a Barbarian, Cipher, Chanter, or Paladin companion? Maybe I just can't count and I've forgotten how many companions total we've gotten so far.

Well, now that they've basically announced these classes, I have to say one thing: I consider Paladin to be a mismanaged joke class. It's always either Super OP or Super Pointless. More on this below. Bards, on the other hand, can be quite cool if they have their OWN set of abilities they bring to the table instead of being a lackluster little not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman half-class. Dungeons and Dragons Online actually does this well because bards have one thing that NO other class has: the MONSTER cc of Fascinate and their unique bard buffs. (Bards in DDO can cc stuff nobody else can because they can get their Difficulty Class 20 or even 30 points above even the best casters.) All of their other class abilities which would be lackluster without real niche appeal just LINE UP behind that fascinate and make bards Really Cool instead of Really Superfluous. They'll never be AS good a caster as a wizard--but bard caster + fascinate/buffs is a great character. They'll never be AS good a DPS as a barbarian, but DPS + fascinate/buffs is a great character. Same for healing, traps (if you take a couple rogue levels), whatever you like. As for paladin, I just hope they do the poor buggers well, is all. Even in DDO (which I consider an exemplar of this category of game, I have yet to find one that does it as well) paladins are screwy. They need too many high stats to take advantage of their class abilities (strength, dex, con, AND charisma where a fighter built along the same lines needs . . . strength and con), and if you DON'T go that route, you're better off playing a fighter and getting the dang extra feats. Too many of their abilities are charges-per-rest so you never really get the benefit from them that you really ought to--you either use them and run out, or you save them and don't use them at all. That, and since they're generally built toward specific types of foes (demons and undead, in DDO), whenever they're NOT fighting that type of foe they are seriously underpowered. At present, the only really valuable attribute paladins get is high saving throws, which is not something you build your character around. They make a decent tank. But so do fighters and monks and those classes can also maintain more flexibility while doing so. Granted, it doesn't HAVE to be like that, but paladins have a huge tendency to either be all-out more powerful than other melee classes or get jammed into a niche that's too narrow for an entire class. Like bards, what they really need is one BIG (and if not universal than close-to-universal) defining ability that lines up their various sidelines and turns them all into a Nice Class to Have.

It'd be an interesting concept, to be sure, maybe tied together with a system like they have in Dungeons and Dragons Online where when you pick up loot everybody in the party gets "their own" stuff--basically the game auto-divides the loot drops. And then you could have a system where you can try to swap stuff with companions by either buying the item with cash or swapping them another item of similar value (this being tied to personality and various skills). It'd certainly make for interesting vendor visits as the companions offload various junk items (or, items they consider junk) and buy potions. You could even have personality oddities like one character being a pack rat who refuses to sell ANYTHING without prodding because they "might need it", while one is a miser who won't spend cash even on necessities like healing potions, while a third is perpetually buying useless trash. (This would definitely have to exist alongside a system where you don't have to constantly stock up on stuff like ammo, though, otherwise you'd be having a war with this AI every time you went in a shop and it would become UNBELIEVABLY annoying.) This could actually be a really cool mechanic if the unique super-items always go to the PC for distribution, and you can get a ton of cred (or a lot of hate) from your companions depending on how you choose to distribute these throughout the party. It could be an interesting sort of mini-game, but like all mini-games it has the potential to get Really Old, Really Quick. If I were designing a system like this, I'd want to put in a Bother All That Nonsense safety valve of some kind--maybe when you hit so much rep with a given companion, they stop arguing and let you manage their inventory/money directly. (Which, also, would be an excellent reward for going to the trouble of gaining rep with that companion.) Maybe after you give them that super-item they REALLY wanted, they stop hassling you. Maybe after they acquire a certain total amount of cash they stop caring. Or after you do their loyalty mission and they stop thinking of themselves as Your Hireling and more as Your Friend. Done like that (in that the mini-game aspects hopefully only last as long as they're entertaining), this could potentially add a cool dimension to the game--it'd be another level of interactivity that could tie in with the story. Done just as a floating system without terminus, though, I'd rather stick with the Strip And Ditch method.

My favorite was, beyond a doubt, Call Lightning in Planescape: Torment. (Fall-from-Grace could cast it.) The effect was incredibly fast, beautiful and it did tons of damage. I honestly can't say that anything else in the other IE games really impressed me--I barely remember them apart from the probably 50000 times I cast Breach in BG2. If I could have memorized Breach as all of my spells starting at level 5 and going up, I probably would have. I'd have to say my favorite spell MOMENT in an IE game was definitely the time Aerie disintegrated the dragon, though--the green dragon you fight in the elf city just before you tackle Irenicus himself. I wasn't even paying attention to Aerie--my party was getting hurt, things were looking bad, and then boop, dragon disappears. I was like, WTF. I didn't even know you COULD disintegrate the stupid thing. Must have rolled a 1 on something. My usual strategy for dealing with dragons was casting Feeblemind on it 6 or 7 times until it stopped fighting back. But Disintegrate is good too. :D

My personal, ideal leveling-up schema is one in which: 1.) you start out pretty awesome 2.) you get "level up" points very frequently 3.) those points are great for making you broader, but when concentrated increase overall power in only a very tiny way. I like games where you can, theoretically, bring in a brand-new character at a later date and still show well vs. characters that have accrued xp for a while, which you cannot remotely do in systems like, say, D&D. It works with Deadlands, though. No, I'm not interested in a Baldur's Gate style system where you hit level 5 quickly and then stall out for several hours. Because it is 100% incorrect to say that old AD&D 2nd edition was a "slow progression" system. The first few levels were actually pretty quick, about comparable with 3.0 or 3.5. Then it started to drag, even though (unless you were a spellcaster, of course) you were getting less and less to show for the increasing amounts of xp you had to hoick down in order to level. I particularly don't want a system where it takes different classes different AMOUNTS of xp to progress. Bleh.

Remember Kotor2's "tutorial" where you play as the droids? They could very easily take a page from that book and let you play as another character for the tutorial if you decide you want to play it, and if you go ahead and do the tutorial maybe you get a couple extra trivial bonus items like a few bits of extra ammo/health pots/mana pots/a couple gold in your starting gear. Or nothing at all, since you can freely decide to skip it. If they do a "tutorial" that's more like Peragus IV AFTER the droid section, though, I will NEVER get tired of it. That whole section of the game was awesome beyond belief.

I don't want this either, I'd prefer to have fun mechanics instead. Resting has been a horribly degenerate mechanic in IE games thus far, I'm hoping they find a way to make it functional without random restrictions.

Save, yes. There are dungeons where you can't rest IIRC, although that may have been due to mobs being out of sight around the corner, I can't remember now. I do know there were places in BG2 where you just flat out couldn't rest.

So, what you're really asking here is, should the underlying game mechanisms be degenerate or no? In general, I prefer non-degenerate underlying systems. These aren't the same as "restricting" the player, though, in the sense that the player is aware of some artificial limitation being imposed to "fix" a problem. For example: Degenerate problem: people pull 2 mobs, rest, pull 2 mobs, rest, pull 2 mobs, rest . . . "Restricted" solution: "You cannot rest here" Functional solution: You can only "rest" at special pre-placed locations. The functional solution is invisible because that limitation covers the entire game. It is ALWAYS like that no matter where you go or what you do. I would much rather have functional design than a system that is degenerate or restricted.

Actually, this is only sorta true. What's difficult to program is an AI that is smart enough to challenge the player but ALSO dumb enough to let the player win at least some of the time. Since players come in so many, many different levels of skill, too, they usually have to err on the side of stupidity. This is the GM's problem in pen and paper, too--if the GM wants to win, they can. They can have every monster go straight for the healer and wizard like gangbusters. They can have all the archers shoot ONE person (the fact that they'd do this in BG was one of the things that made groups of archers so horribly nasty). The GM can have the Evil Wizard scry on the party (the only spells that prevent scrying altogether are location-based, useless while you're actually adventuring) until they are low on resources and need to rest, then use Greater Teleport to dump a ton of monsters on them. After all, players do this stuff. I've had players summon 100 lantern archons or arrowhawks to kill a boss--each may only do a little bit of damage, but their primary attack is a ranged touch attack of a type that basically nothing resists. If you have them spread out, even the biggest AOE spells won't get rid of a substantial number. This is also part of the reason why at higher levels (anything past, say, a single big boss is a joke fight in D&D--there are too many ways to cheese them out.

There's going to be one regardless--enemies have to have SOME kind of formula for deciding which character to attack. What there may not be is abilities that directly affect aggro--so the only way to get it or keep it may be to be the first character in sight or to do the most damage. I'm fine with that--party-based games are rarely designed so that ONE character can safely eat ALL the aggro. I also don't mind if they have enemies who ALWAYS default to aggro on casters--this could be a feature for higher difficulties, even, where enemies will ALWAYS use their abilities on the character who is (theoretically) weakest against them. You could also have mechanics where some classes (fighters, perhaps) can choose to soak damage/spells directed at a given other character.

If only there were more to being a fighter than swinging a sword.

Actually, you had to give up two, because in order to become an Eldritch Knight you needed proficiency with ALL martial weapons, which you could only get from taking a level in a class with that proficiency--taking the Martial Weapon Proficiency feat gives you proficiency with ONE martial weapon. Whoops nvm, somebody else noticed.

Even with normal humans, I'd like to see companions that "had good rolls" when making stats, if that's appropriate for the character. If someone rose to prominence from the gutter through her exceptional abilities, quickly became a legendary this and that, it'd make sense she didn't get her stats through standard purchase system, but rather made that 1 in a 1000 stat roll. Like maybe a few exceptionally good stats (charisma and dexterity) and the rest good or average, and no dump stats. Eh, I don't see any problem with this, because all the best GEAR is still going on my character. I don't really care what stats the NPC companions have, only whether they make my character more ossum or not. I don't care if you have 18/00 strength. I needs me a wizard. Although a PE version of my housemate's character Alex the Stupendous would be hilarious. Maxed out his stats, and bought ONE rank in EVERY skill. Always insisted on being first the one to try anything that needed to be done. Very entertaining watching the rest of the party try to explain to him why he ought to let the person with the actual skill investment do it.