Stun

Yes. That's the first thing that popped into my head when I saw 1-h spears: TOEE, which had a staggering list of weapon choices - including semi rare weapons that you don't often see anymore in RPGs. Spiked chains, Ranseurs, Cleavers, Glaives, Staves and Rods that you can actually use as melee weapons....

1-handed *and* 2-handed spears? Wow, is this going to be the greatest game ever, or what?

Yes? More often than not, in games that implement item destruction as a consequence for container bashing, the items destroyed were often inherantly fragile.... such as Potions (which ARE made of glass), or spell components (flowers, eggs etc) Or scrolls, (which are easily burned, smeared, stained) or jewelery (it's very easy to damage a pair of gold earings, or necklace or ring with just a bit of force, let alone from the impact of a massive war hammer.) Personally I'm *all* for a lock-bashing choice-consequence system like the one we had in NWN2 and KOTOR2. Locked containers are meant to be unlocked by a skilled lock-picker. If you want to take the easy/lazy way out and just bash that container open, then the option should be there for you, but so should the consequences for doing something the 'wrong' way. I don't understand this one. What you're describing is not a flaw in game design, it's a flaw in player behavior. Unless you're asking for the game to place strict time limits to buffing (which would be really stupid game design and not at all in the spirit of the IE classics.) As it stands, most *good* games, like the aforementioned IE games, had spell durations, so you did have to be semi-mindful of when you casted some buffing spells since they could expire before the fight if you took too long in your buffing session.

Well, that would be stamina, yes. I'd never argue that quick stamina regeneration was "magic" or unrealistic, because it's not. One's stamina regenerates rather quickly in Real life. No magic needed. We were talking about Health, though, and specifically, your health bar. And the only thing we've been told so far about the health bar in PE is that 1) it doesn't recover quickly and 2) only rest will replenish it.

Is a Straw Man really necessary here? The IE games had auto-regenerating health. When you rested, your health regenerated. If your constitution was high enough, you regenerated. if you found hp regen items and equipped them, you regenerated. But they also had healing magic, if you wished to speed up the process for a cost. What they did NOT have though, was the retarded, stupid, illogical, dumbed down for the kiddies system where you were totally free to throw caution to the wind and let yourself recklessly ignore your health bar and let it go down in a fight simply because it wouldn't matter. . . .because you'd be instantly restored to full a few seconds later after the fight and ready to do it all over again. You wanna talk about "magic" and, "unrealistic" nonsense? There it is.

Yeah, something sounds wonky with the inventory system they've described. It could be that I just don't understand it, or it could just be too convoluted for my tastes. I'll ask again: what was so wrong with IWD2's inventory system, that they felt the need to utterly redesign a brand new system for PE? Other than that, everything else in this update sounds great.

Ok, this is far beyond my threshold of worthless message-board debate Tedium. So I'm not going to totally engage, here. Instead, I'll just try to sum up your "desires" in one simple sentence. And also, since you've been extremely careful not to give anyone on this thread an Example of a game that ever did what you're proposing (probably for fear that it would kill your entire argument if you did), I'll go ahead and read your mind on that one, too. Here goes: You want a (limited) party-based version of Witcher 2... complete with QTEs and all that stupid split-second-reaction-or-die crap it contains. Am I right? Of course I am. Yeah... No F***ing thanks.

Actually.... yes, you are. I don't see how you can call it anything else. You're advocating that the player be able to effectively carry out every attack, counter attack and defensive action of 6 individual characters, each having their own huge set of class abilities, special attacks, spells from spellbooks and memory, against a computer-contolled group of enemies with similar arsenals.....all on the fly, without pausing. That sounds pretty darn L33t-ninja to me. You've either never played an RPG in your life or else you're being deliberately dishonest here to get a rise out of us. There is NO WAY any non-dumbed-down party-based RPG combat system can offer a truly tactical experience in the spirit of the old school rpgs by forcing what you're suggesting upon us. Limiting pausing simply won't work. it will eliminate thoughtful tactics and replace them with twitch-based hand-eye coordination. And you know it. Again, PE is not an FPS, where all you have to think about are the guns you've got in your hands and where the enemy is. It's a game with more than a half dozen different classes. Each one having dozens of abilities and special attacks for the player to choose from. It's a party-based game where high level spell-casters will have spellbooks containing dozens upon dozens of spells. Its a game where you'll probably find your party split up on the battle field, with mages dueling each other in the back, while your warriors fight off enemy warriors and archers on the front lines..... at the same time. Oh *Bull*. If that's all you wanted, then here. let me suggest a game for you to try out: Baldur's gate 2. Go get it. Play it. Roll yourself a specialist mage. Then venture out and find yourself a cleric. And a berserker, and a thief, and maybe another mage. Now take your party out and try to defeat the game's mind flayers, liches, beholders, trolls, vampires, dragons and garden variety spell-casters. Then come back and tell us how it went for you. How... even with pausing, the game STILL demanded that you drop the right spell at the right time against the correct opponent...with Pain and death being the punishment for failure. How... even with pausing, the enemy mage still managed to get his power word: silence off on you before you could could finish casting Finger of Death. Or how that enemy warrior STILL managed to land the killing blow against your cleric before she finished casting Heal.

Indeed. As much as I dislike the whole notion of murder-grinding for exp, I wouldn't be very entertained by a game that allows you to do away with it outright. It's got to be a major part of the experience in order to keep my interest. Otherwise why bother with all the detailed classes, combat abilities, weapons, spells etc? But that said, a perfect RPG imo would mix it up to stop the monotony. A reasonable ratio of must-kill to can-subdue... say 3:1. For every 3 encounters, give us one where you can talk your way out, or simply incapacitate the enemy so you can move on.

I just don't see any authentic point of imposing limits on pausing. Speaking from a purely gameplay standpoint here, The arguments you've given (e.g. that it's a clear advantage to the player party since the enemy doesn't get the luxury of pausing the game when it wants. etc) are the type of arguments that look valid on paper, and do pass the logic test..... but they don't adequately translate well in the actual game, since there's a lot of reality/technological intangeables at play here that do, in fact, balance out the so-called advantage of pausing that the player has over the enemy. For one thing, we players don't have computer-based brains. UNLIKE the enemy, we typically do not instantly have every spell, every ability and every consumable memorized and placed on que for nano-second speed usage. Instead, we've got lists, trees and large inventories that we have to look through and read and assess. We have fingers that have to hit the correct buttons. Even if we *know* exactly what we want to do, we still have to take the mouse/keyboard and click on it. We have eyes that have to look around to see everything. We have to operate within the confines of an interface. The enemy is not burdened by any of this. Instead, it just *knows* and just *does*. We also have to deal with people calling us on the phone, interrupting our combat. Or having to go to the bathroom in the middle of an encounter. Or having to hold a cigarette in one hand, while trying to control the second-by-second actions of 6 characters through a UI's menu options with the other hand.. So yes, I say, let us pause whenever we want. Also a sidenote.... the bottom line here, really: The IE games didn't have pause limits. And they were fine. Better than any game I've ever played that does.

Lets remember that there's a sizable portion of us kickstarter backers who wanted turn-based combat. Turn-based, of course, *forces* combat pauses every time its the player's turn to attack. By Employing real time with pause, Obsidian is admittedly offering up the most logical compromise: allowing real-time fans to enjoy uninterrupable combat flow, while giving turn based fans the ability to emulate turn-based combat by pausing whenever they want (to issue orders, think about their next attack, etc.) To suggest that Obsidian somehow put limits to our ability to pause the game..... Well, that would not only break the compromise that they peddled in their own Kickstarter promotion, but it would also be a huge gameplay departure from every single one of the IE games they claim to want to recapture the magic and tactical combat of. Therefore, I'm against it, even if it does "fix" so-called 'cheater-illogic' like being able to cancel an attack you started, or being able to do stuff outside your turn or whatever. Not that any of this makes a lick of difference. They're not going to put limits on pausing anyway. This is an RPG, not some shooter or RTS game.

It "might", but it would have to go against current consumer trending to do so. Digital downloads for PC games have been surpassing hard copy sales since 2010. But regarding your main point, The fact that a boxed, retail version could make the game sell better does not overcome the fact that Obsidian would have to spend their hard earned profits to mass produce those boxed versions and then get them shipped to retailers to BE sold. And That's... not cheap. And for that matter, PE would be guaranteed to sell better if Obsidian decided to also spend Millions of $$$ on a lavish marketing campaign complete with a 60 ad spot to run during the Superbowl. But they're not going to do that either... for the same reason...

Baldurs Gate 2, for all its legendary status and mythic level "pull", sold about 2 million copies - making it the biggest selling Infinity engine game ever made. The "problem" here is that 2 million copies is nothing by today's massive sales standards. You'd be hard pressed to get a retailer like Walmart or Best Buy to commit shelf space for a PC exclusive that's only projected to sell 2 million copies, the majority of which are expected to come from digital downloads anyway. And the fact of the matter is that PE would either need to be an MMO, or else be avaliable on consoles in order to sell more than about 2 million copies. *ever* So yes, it IS a niche product, relegated to the fringe of the gaming world, just like Any single player, PC exclusive title will be, by definition. It will never make financial sense to do a retail version and hire out a mass distributer to ship it to stores. The good news is that just about every dollar that PE does make will be pure profit for Obsidian, since the cost to make the game came from our pockets, not theirs. So if PE does manage to sell as much as BG2 did (a huge Optimistic If, btw), it could end up being Obsidian's most profitable game. And that's the only thing that should ever matter.

That's called inventory management, btw. Or as Josh calls it "loadout decisions". its a gameplay *strategy". But you can call it a "hassle" or a "problem" if you want. Me, I never had such problems in the IE games after the first Baldurs Gate, since they gave us gem bags, potion cases, bags of holding, scroll cases, and oh yeah: storage chests in our strongholds. And IWD2, the game Josh said he and Tim were using as a starting point...? The inventory system was just about *perfect* in IWD2. Or about as perfect as you can get with a slot system

That statement from Josh may explain the function of the first tier of PE's proposed inventory system. But it doesn't explain the 2nd. From reading and rereading the update, the best I can decipher from it is that the 2nd tier is like the "junk" tab that Dragon Age 2 had. It is inaccessable during actual exploration and combat gameplay, which means it's unrelated to the issue of gear loadout strategy. That and it's a redundant feature, since its main function is to serve the exact same purpose that a storage chest does in a player house/stronghold. Add to this the fact that they've also decided to eliminate inventory weight restrictions and what we get is a system that actually *removes* what little strategy and decision making the old IE game inventory systems had. That's a negative in my book. But I'll keep an open mind. They just might succeed in their attempts to re-invent the wheel.

We actually know a good deal about what the plot/goal would have been. Wiki has a summary on it, gathered from various interviews with the devs back in the day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur%27s_Gate_III:_The_Black_Hound Thing is, I'm not sure what the point would have been to call it BG3, beyond the obvious marketing/sales benefit of doing so. Because it otherwise isn't even remotely related to the first two games in plot or setting.

Indeed, that comment sounds like Priests will be healers, just not "strongly dominant healers" (like they were in the IE games.) Of course, the pedant in me wonders what they mean by "healer". Priests in PE could just be limited to being able to "heal" specific afflictions, like diseases, or poison, or level drain, or blindness/deafness etc. Instead of actually being able to directly bring your hitpoints back up.

It hasn't been out sent yet.

PE could indeed end up with blockbuster PC sales. But that has nothing to do with whether you'll ever see hard copies of it on store shelves. Digital sales *alone* can easily propel the game to the top of the sales charts. The bottom line is that Obsidian has not announced a distributor, and has vocally rejected the notion of a publisher. The entire point of doing a kickstarter was to cut these 3rd party entanglements out of equation in the first place. So I seriously doubt they're going to just turn around and start seeking the assistance of either one when they really don't need to.

The only problem I see with being able to import your 30th level character into a new playthrough (like you could in the Icewind Dales) is that the PE campaign uses defined, named NPCs that you can find in the world and recruit into your party. Which means you'll probably find yourself in a situation where your main character is level 30, while the rest of your party is, like, Level 2. lol That can wreak all sorts of havok on both the story and the gameplay, regardless of the difficulty setting. Of course even that's not a problem if you're 1) soloing; or 2) just going the Adventurer's Hall route with a full party of characters that you made (and then imported into a new playthrough) But, like you say, there's always the "those that don't like it can simply not do it" counter/equilizer.

Wait.... Where did that come from? Is there any more of these unadvertized Dev game-design info things floating around that I might have missed over the past couple of weeks?

Well, in BG2, each NPC had their specific reasons to follow you. And with the exception of Edwin and Serevok, those reasons never had anything to do with how powerful/important you were in relation to themselves. I'm hoping PE's NPCs will be sorta like that. But back on topic, I'm in favor of my companions being equal to me, or a little more powerful, mainly so that I don't have to constantly waste my time playing baby sitter - or having to pile them up with the best gear in order to keep them competative in combat. Again, citing BG2. In BG2, most of the NPCs were notably weaker than your PC, They always had at least one stupidly low stat, or some-such that kept them from being anything resembling optimal. This grated on my nerves. Take Minsc, for example. On the surface he's a powerful warrior-type, with high constitution and super high strength. Great, right? Well no. He had 8 intelligence, which means Mindflayers ate him for lunch. Then we have Viconia. Almost a perfect cleric. 19 Wisdom, and 65% magic resistance. Sounds great, right? yeah, until you look at her strength: 9, which meant you couldn't equip her with heavy armor, Or the Flail of the Ages, and so all of the wonderful, melee-combat enhancing cleric spells that Clerics use to become powerhouses in combat were completely worthless for her. Almost All the recruitable NPCs had silly weaknesses like that, with the possible exception of Edwin, who was a better mage than the PC simply by design (he got 2 more spells per level than any other specialist mage was allowed to have) Thus, I never left home without him.

Yeah, especially on threads/debates about the more contentious issues, like that giant thread we had a while back about Vancian casting vs. Cooldowns on spells. Sawyer came in, engaged us, told us what the plan was, and voila -- discussion on the issue settled itself down. Some people moved on, unhappy with the plan, while others moved on, totally giddy about what they just heard. But both sides got their curiousity slaked.

No, you're being greedy. Just kidding. I don't completely disagree with your point. Whenever I see transparancy being pitted against just about any other method of operation, I'll side with transparancy. But.... I think we're currently getting a reasonable amount of it. The weekly updates already contain many magnitudes more information on the development process than I've ever seen any game company give this early in development. (although failed renders, and rejected concept art/ideas would be awesome to see, and there's probably a ton of it laying around that they could show right now) If I were to suggest some sort of improvement on the process, though, I'd say that it would be a great boon if people like Josh, or Adam, or Tim or whoever, take turns spending a little more time here, on these threads, engaging us, asking and answering questions, etc. It doesn't have to be an extra 40hr/week part of their job, because that would be silly, but just a few hours a week (perhaps on weekends) would make a huge difference.

Really? Not that bottom-up isn't viable, still, it's not the only one. It's the standard. From your link: Conventionally, buildings with underground basements are built by bottom-up method where sub-structure and super-structure floors are constructed sequentially from the bottom of the sub-structure or lowest level of basement to the top of the super-structure. Though this conventional method, also called as bottom-up method, is simple in both design and construction Yes? Or much earlier? Fantasy dungeon settings typically occur in ancient times, or, they occur in modern times but the structure itself is an ancient ruin. To put things in perspective, In PE's world, for example, the printing press will have not yet been invented, so the notion of giant, motorized industrial cranes (or whatever it takes to build a structure top-down), is an impossibility. Of course, we could take the easy way out, and just say that the builders used telekenetic magics of epic proportions to build a massive 15 level dungeon from the top down. lol That's irrelevant. The measurable age of a structure (what we're discussing) begins after its first floor has been built and has become habitable.