sparklecat

Let me just highlight this quote from there too, since it's something I've been wanting to say: "Overcoming societal obstacles and breaking gender barriers is not a power fantasy for me. In fact, a lot of the time, it’s part and parcel of my day-to-day reality. My power fantasy takes place in a world where those issues are gone, where I can be a champion without any red tape. The minute a game reminds me that my ass-kicking heroine is viewed as lesser — even if it’s done in a way that coaxes me to prove all the haters wrong — it feels like a slap in the face. It’s not fun. It’s frustrating."

Wouldn't mind seeing a small village grow up around my stronghold over time, but I want old, established big cities with their own secrets and history in relation to the rest of the world.

I'd actually love to see a bit of ridiculous arms and armour put in. With the appropriate stats, of course. I could see a shop on the main tourist street of first big city you come to selling it!

Don't forget that the game already has sold just shy of 75k copies, 18 months before it's even due to come out. That's a huge success right there, in my books. And for my part at least, I can tell you that if my boxed copy hadn't had a digital download included, there would've been another copy purchased by my buddy, meaning actual demand at this early stage is higher than even the backer numbers imply.

Can't imagine it'd be that difficult to put in a huge, lore-related, dungeon-spanning quest that people can just ignore in favour of killing things if they prefer. Maybe make it an alternate way of getting to the final reward: follow along with the quest and open the shortcut, fight the dragon in front of the main entrance, or open the shortcut AND kill the dragon!

Yeah, I've pretty much been picturing everyone opening up desk drawers and pulling out those sketches and world-building ideas they'd been working on for years in their free time when PE started to seem like it'd really happen. Eighteen months seems possible to me, even with how much more they ended up raising than they'd expected.

...this would be so cool.

Money could be used rather well in terms of donations or supply purchases that benefit factions, to improve your reputation with them/decrease it with their enemies.

Post is positing this situation: I have given enough that I'm supposed to get beta access. Obsidian says my agreeing to a NDA is necessary for me to have that beta access. I say no, I won't agree to that. What now?

$140 for collector's edition (which includes a second digital download copy of the game), +$20 for shipping, +$40 for two copies of the expansion pack = $200 total. One copy of the expansion is included at $165+ tiers, but the $165 tier is a digital only one. The next physical tier after $140 is $250 + $30 shipping, and you'd still need another $20 for the second expansion then for a total of $300. If $200 is too much for you right now, you could always give the $160 for the collector's edition + shipping and pick up two copies of the expansion once it's actually released.

What do you want to personally get out of your pledge, in items? How much will that cost, in tiers and/or addons? How much would you be willing to put towards this in itself, even if you didn't get anything for yourself alongside? Add those numbers together.

I'm actually a little worried about it getting too big and winding up feeling monotonous, like I'll be stuck in this dungeon for the rest of my life. Hopefully it'll be possible (and neither hugely affect the difficulty nor leave me feeling guilty about the prisoner trapped at the bottom or whatever) to do a couple levels at a time, going away for some outside sidequests or main story in between. Either way, I also hope that our companions will have a lot to say about the dungeon, and talk with us about how that mural over there reminds them of Great-Aunt Esmerelda, since regular companion character development is one of my best ways to continue feeling absorbed in a game.

Went from 120 to 280 yesterday! And while I'd happily give thousands if I had it, that's really got to be my limit.

What I liked about the BG inventory system was that I could effectively use my party members as a means of sorting my inventory, though the weight limits based on their strength weren't ideal in that respect. PC carries anything I want easy access to, the mage has scrolls and potions, bard's got anything still unidentified, fighter has stuff I'm going to sell, etc. I wouldn't mind if there was one inventory shared among everyone, but where you could have a bunch of user-defined tabs to sort all your items into.

Yeah. I adore abilities where it's very plausible that my character can start off as someone who's only interested in helping and protecting others, and then because of using something inherently corrupting to do that helping and protecting (possibly with the addition of some unexpected external event making sticking by their principles especially difficult), ending up very fond of the power and unable to give it up. Let me start off wiping a couple memories for someone's own good, then taking a bit more next time, reasoning that using my powers in a way that benefits me isn't so bad if I'm helping the innocent I'm affecting at the same time, or maybe at least if I'm not hurting them... And let my companions react to this; not just "you did a bad thing and I am a good person and I disapprove, you evil person", but "you usually do good things and you just did a questionable thing and now you're continuing those questionable things some more, what is going on here!"

Love this idea. Anything where you can get extra bonuses based on knowing and understanding your companions and how they're likely to react to a situation, I like. In general, what I hate is not knowing what my character is going to say when I'm picking an option, and having any sort of timer. The latter is just incredibly stressful to me; I quit AP after the very first conversation.

What's wrong with using banknotes?

That sounds like a lot of micromanaging of your spell lists, though. Also like you'd tend to find a couple groups that work for the majority of encounters and stick with them, rather than experimenting with something new, or pulling out that little-used spell in a tight situation because nothing else is working, which is basically why I favour having everything available - more likely to go "I wonder if this might help?" at some point, which is where half the fun can come from. One of my favourite Baldur's Gate II memories was a time I was having trouble with the final fight, pulled out a scroll of sphere of chaos on the grounds that I couldn't make things much worse by that point, and ended up with Irenicus turned into a squirrel for half the fight.

But BG did that by the end. With Ascension you were challenged enough, sure, but the base game? I should not have been able to put up a few basic buffs, wander into the final battle with Amelyssan, and win first time through. There's just no fun in realising that your major boss battle is never going to be challenging or interesting. Sarevok was better. That certainly wasn't a fight I was finishing without a number of tries. Think the problem with the series was just an underlying one, actually; mages/clerics just got too powerful by the end, and they had to make the fights doable if you had a party heavy on the fighters & rogues. if you're going around with 4 of your people magic users...

Basically I think the difference is whether the system encourages your character to prepare for an unknown fight in advance, or for you to do so.

There's a difference between origin and starting point; compare Baldur's Gate and Fallout: New Vegas. Origin is "this is who you are, where you came from, this is what most likely motivates you and whom you care for, these are the choices you've already made", and they're only ever gonna be able to make so many of those. Starting point doesn't necessarily have to dictate anything personal about your character. So Candlekeep, Gorion, Imoen, all of that was origin, and yeah, it was restrictive in a lot of ways. Waking up in New Vegas after having been shot in the head was where you started, but who you actually were beyond someone who took at least one job as a courier was up to you.

Sure, but what if none of them are what I have in mind? What if in DAO I wanted to play a human fighter who wasn't a noble? Or what if something is broadly what I have in mind, but there's just that one fixed detail that I really can't get past? Like... yeah I want to play a city elf, yeah I'm ok with this one-parent background and I guess with these friends you chose for me, yeah of course we live in poverty and are oppressed by the rich nobles, yeah ok it's my wedding day, but why in the world do I appear to be marrying a guy? There's always going to be something that has the potential to really ruin your immersion right from the start, and the more you make predetermined with an origin story, the more chance that'll happen. I just don't want the game telling my that my character's chosen to do something before I appeared on the scene. If it can be done by only fixing details that are out of their control anyway, like family members, I could live with that, but it generally makes me wary. Also, I just think there would be way too many they'd have to make, with all the class and race possibilities being discussed.

Spells are exceptionally complex and consuming, so they are PRE-CAST. Think of those long, long rituals. Basicly, that fireball? You cast it before you got out of the tavern, inscribing it in your brain. It is there, waiting for you to release it with the final words/gestures. And a mage can only hold so many at once. Technicly, a mage could try to cast a fireball on the fly, but I don't think your enemies will wait for an hour for you to finish. Makes sense when you look at it like that, don't it? I dunno man, I guess it makes sense, but it still makes me feel like I'm a USB stick :D

As I understand it, all paper money is is a bank's promissory note, saying "bring in this bit of paper and we'll exchange it for the precious metal equivalent." No reason weight has to really be an issue, and being able to write a cheque to a merchant, or how suspiciously they look at your banknotes (assuming they do at all, maybe the banks are a major employer of wizards to detect and prevent counterfeiting, maybe the world's supplies of whatever's backing the currency is quite limited and tightly controlled by them so trying to pay with significant amounts of actual gold is an awesome way to end up arrested most of the time!) depends on your reputation in the area. Regarding barter systems and such, I like systems where whom you're selling to affects how much you get. So the weaponsmith may take your spare jewelry in trade, but since he has no idea how to value something of that sort and neither do you, one of you is gonna end up cheated. The jeweler, on the other hand, has absolutely no use for the spare leather armour and is going to give you very little, regardless of what sort of enchantments you're swearing it has, so if you're trying to reduce your weight, time to make some hard decisions. And nobody wants those 47 halberds you gathered up when you were killing orcs, what are they gonna do with them all? But since going shop to shop can get really boring after awhile, also have a general pawnshop that buys everything (within reason) at a moderately discounted value.

Origin stories of that type are cool in general, but I think they're too restrictive for this. IMO, one of Bioware's biggest problems recently is that they're moving more and more towards having you play their characters rather than making your own - and while that's fun too sometimes, it's not really the sort of RPG I'm looking for here. Hence why I would take money away from my pledge if it helped stop a voiced PC. Anything that feels like I'm discovering something about my character rather than determining it, anything that leaves me feeling like I'm just watching a story play out and occasionally taking the driver's seat for a brief period... no thanks.