Sarog

Please no Bioware-style affection points harvesting minigame that equates loyalty with wine and baubles.

I despise the "Christmas tree effect" that a lot of RPGs encourage. You find the shiny magic bauble you want for your fingers and toes, neck and shoulders, do the same for the five other dudes you're rolling with, and suddenly that Excalibur at your side feels a lot more mundane. Inevitably you are swimming in so much magic stuff that each new piece of loot you get is reduced to a GP value and you're left pawning the ancient treasures of the sunken city of Nonesuch to some dirty innkeeper so that you can afford those Boots of Awesome you've noticed while window shopping. Meh. Honestly I'd prefer it if every magic item was unique, and that most of the good ones require you to collect fragments to reforge, like the disassembled weapons in Baldur's Gate. Few things make magic seem more lame to me than scrolling through page after page of This-And-That coming in all its different +1, +2, and +3 varieties.

Eh, chosen ones and destiny and the like are a bit too juvenile for me. They appeal to adolescent notions of inborn specialness and warp our perception of the franchise. Give me characters who aren't special in the least. People who are perfectly typical for their social class, and succeed or fail based on their character attributes interacting sensibly with the world around them. I'm not going to get my way though, because we know that inborn specialness is already a major thing for the franchise, because some people just have better souls than other people. Not my particular narrative preference, but I can live with it. I loved Baldur's Gate after all. I just hope that inborn specialness isn't ramped up too much, with things like a "chosen one" soul or "THE PROPHECY!!" or the like. One of my favourite twists on the chosen one trope was how Arcanum dealt with it. The narrative told you from the beginning that you were the chosen one, the reincarnated second coming of the messiah. Then you meet the guy who you were supposed to have been in your past life, to realize "oh snap, I'm just some dude who was at the wrong place at the wrong time!" That was glorious.

Yes I think it should be present in the world. Whether it is a major concern in the game for us to deal with depends on the writers really, but in a pre-modern world slavery should be present for authenticity's sake. Ideally, though, it shouldn't be the Atlantic chattel slavery that most of us think of when we hear the word.

Baldur's Gate 2 style tutorial that is a separate module. Mandatory tutorial levels at the start of a game are irritating in the extreme.

The weapons that you have to assemble are the most memorable. The likes of the Flail of Ages, the Equalizer, and the Gesen short bow were some of my most treasured RPG possessions, and I still remember them even after I've long forgotten the name of every weapon I ever used in Dragon Age.

Have to echo the requests for no scottish dwarves. Partly because it is a massive cliche. Partly because scottish dwarves tend to have exaggerated Austin Powers accents that don't actually sound like any scotsmen I've ever met. If dwarves have to have some real world derivative accent, make it Norwegian, or Greek, or Dutch, or something new.

I always want to have at least one properly lawful companion character who represents the ethical, political, and religious viewpoints of the principle nationality in the game. Companion characters tend to cover the general range of rebels, free-thinkers, crazies, schemers, special snowflakes, and other interesting sorts of people whose status as being interesting is often, at least partially, derived from them being very uncommon sorts of people. I always like to have that balanced out with at least one companion who is entirely mundane in his/her history and abilities, and who is strongly committed to the status quo. Whether this is a grizzled soldier, an uncompromising sheriff, a magic-wielding diplomat, or a thief with strong, common roots... these characters can be just as interesting as the one-in-a-million sort, and help provide important social context to the narrative. So I'd like at least one companion of this general sort, with no preference to more specific details.

We know that the game isn't going to be fully voice acted. Which is a good thing, because that would cripple the budget and restrict the amount of dialogue. So long as there is some voice acting, as there were in RPGs before "fully voice acted" became a thing, I'm happy.

This is rather a "sure, why not?" thing for me. No reason why I wouldn't like it were included, but wouldn't notice or care if it wasn't.

I fondly remember the Flail of Ages from BG2. Finding the pieces in a castle overrun by monsters and filled with tragedy, assembling it, and improving it in the expansion. I loved the lore as to how it was created and why it was divided as well.

If I recall, firearms in this setting are much closer range than what you I think are suggesting. I don't mean snipers, if that's what you're suggesting. Archers in RPGs are often your most optimal mage-killers in combat encounters, from the old infinity engine games through to the likes of Dragon Age. I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a firearm to have the same range as a shortbow and fill much the same role in combat.

I do like the idea of firearms being a mage-killer's weapon while still being crude enough that swords and armour aren't obsolete yet. Gameplay-wise, archers usually end up being your mage killers anyway, and I think the combination of the ranged combat role with this lore that guns are especially good at penetrating magic defenses is a sensible one.

Killable. It is going to be an M rated title, so what is the point of slapping morality-armour on children? It isn't like making them killable means included scripted torture scenes or anything really upsetting. Would just be exploding pixels.

No single work of media is in and of itself responsible for larger patterns of culture. Nor is any single work of media responsible for addressing/overturning such patterns unless it is explicitly concerned with it. When a work of fiction, set in a world that isn't our own, is deliberately concerned with the representation of specific real-world demographics with the intent of advocating the interests of said real-world demographics using the fiction as a proxy, then that fiction become political allegory. Political allegory is its own genre, and it can't be mixed into other sorts of fiction without leaving the bitter taste of allegory behind.

A house, by itself, is not worth it, honestly. What does a house involve? A storage chest? That could just as easily be put in an inn or factional headquaters. A place for companions to go when they aren't with you? Again, an inn or faction hq does this fine. What else is there? Skyrim armour stands? Unlikely in an isometric. Buying/arranging furniture like Fable? I guess that could be an interesting minigame, but is worth investment? Anything else I can't think of? Whatever it is, if it is limited to "house" it can only be underwhelming. I just so happen to live in a house, and as such don't find them particularly exciting. Castles and towers are fun, though.

Jim Cummings is a god. Without him we shall surely fail.

BG class strongholds, and accompanying storylines, add significant replay value that more recent RPGs lack. Having these strongholds be different and have different content on a class-by-class basis makes your class choice meaningful in a narrative sense as well as in a mechanical sense. The NWN2 fortress was a bit of a clumsy one-size-fits-all to be honest. I could get into it when I was playing a military-type character, but lording over a military installation as a druid was not the least bit satisfying. The class strongholds in Baldur's Gate 2 were one of the best things that game did, and went a long way to making class choice satisfying.

A "house", though, is a very underwhelming thing. Skyrim style housing is very difficult for me to care about, no matter how much customization is added.

Yes, but only if other BG2-style class strongholds are on the cards. Wizards getting a tower without warriors getting a keep would be frustrating.

Nothing. The story would progress in the same way, absent of Yoshimo. Which I think is the right approach here. Companions will obviously have their awesome, scripted stories and role in the game. But give the player the option of foregoing that if killing the character earlier fits one's personal roleplaying narrative. It doesn't have to be accounted for. While the ideal RPG might react to every little thing we do in an intelligent way like a DM consciousness, no one expects that. The writers should concern themselves with their own scripted narrative and events and not have to try to predict everything we might do and account for it. You don't need scripting for decisions that you reason through on your own initiative, because these fall under your own personal narrative that is unique to you, but walks hand in hand with the game narrative. Allowing that personal narrative some freedom by giving the players the ability to exercise small displays of free will without being constrained by the narrower confines of the scripted narrative would resolve a great deal of the frustration caused in other recent RPGs. If you can, within your own mind / your character's own mind, decide that 1) this companion is bad news for reasons X, Y, Z, 2) conclude that simply telling this companion to take a hike is unsatisfactory for reasons A, B, C, and then 3) kill this companion as the conclusion of this personal roleplaying progression, then all the game needs to do to cap off the experience is to slap some appropriate reputation penalty on you and let you get on with it. Having this sort of freedom was a source of great roleplaying satisfaction to me in the old RPGs, and I think that allowing such small freedoms makes a major difference in allowing you to feel like you actually have some agency in the world and aren't just being dragged along for a theme park ride in a straightjacket. Ah, but let a player decide how he feels about his companions and act appropriately. A companion is not automatically your friend. A companion becomes your friend in the moment that you decide that you like and value its companionship. Deciding that you despise the companion is perfectly legitimate; companions being hirelings, rivals, or allies of convenience is common enough. That's just good roleplaying. To again use DA2 as an example of companions done thoroughly wrong... in that game, you are forced to have these decade-long relationships with this group of people. But because the game encourages you to take a stand on its central narrative issue, and because several of these companions have polarized stances on said issue, it is rather inevitable that any given player character with a properly formed identity is going to despise at least one or two or three of these companions. And yet, you are forced to accept these people as a long term part of your life. The old RPGs didn't attach you to companions by some unbreakable celestial umbilical cord. They let you choose which companions you valued and wanted to keep with you, and they let you deal with the ones that you didn't however you wished. Only in rare cases did plot armour and railroads force you to suffer a companion, such as with Imoen's role in the BG2 plot, but even then the plot armour was temporary. To go back the example of Korgan Bloodaxe, or Edwin or Viconia... these were evil companions whose relationships with the player character weren't a simple matter of friendship, but based on personal interests. They were awesome characters, but if you were playing a good character it was entirely legitimate to dislike and distrust them. Having the freedom to kill them, rather than just giving them the boot and unleashing them on the world, was a meaningful option if you were playing the sort of character who would be so violently direct. Likewise, if you were playing an evil character you could kill the moralizing characters who you feared might one day pose a threat to you. There is a lot to be said for allowing players to make up their own mind regarding how they feel about a character, and giving them the freedom to act on that. Roleplaying in a cRPG can be, and has been in the past, so much deeper than narrowly interacting with scripted events.

Considering how terribly some RPGs in recent years have suffered because of rushed development, I don't care about delays so long as the product isn't shipped in what appears to be Alpha stage.

Yes, but not Disney's sort of pirates. Whenever I see pirates in games, they always seem to come with at a least hint of comedy. Pirates that are actually scary would be a great novelty. But I'm a sucker for anything naval in my rpgs, and gunpower tech means awesome cannons.

That's fair but it still seems to me that, with subversion becoming the trend that it has, every franchise that uses those races is going to have to play subversion-leapfrog to out-subvert the last guy. Whether that is subtle and intelligent (as we hope and expect P:E to be) or clumsy and poorly considered (the way that, say, Warcraft subverts things, to scrape the bottom of the barrel), we're still seeing what is essentially a domino effect as each new franchise scrambles to find a new shade of lipstick to put on the same courtesan. If everyone is subverting, what is the point of all choosing the same mold to deviate from? Well, the instant familiarity of knowing what an elf and a dwarf is, sure, but that's a double edge on account of the fact that many of the people who are attracted by the familiarity of a specific race like the elf are then subsequently alienated when that race deviates too much from the mold (ala, "these elves are too short", "those elves are too feral"). Tolkien races come with so much baggage, both in terms of what people expect they should be (if you don't live up to that, you're doing it wrong), what edgy new things other people expect you should do with them (..and if you don't live up to that, you're also doing it wrong), and the new things that other franchises are doing with them (which your innovations will be juxtaposed against). Obviously we're getting them for P:E now so we'll have to see how they are done, but the baggage will still come into play and in a vague, general future-ish way I hope that franchise-builders stop using the same mold if they only intend to break it anyways.

This is probably its own conversation, but I'm of the view that this sort of approach sucks. Those games, Dragon Age 2 especially, rather gave me the sensation of wearing a straight jacket. Not being able to interact with npcs who haven't been given scripted events can be frustrating.