Stun

I don't know. Here's what you're looking at when you start a game with a level 1 party of 6 in IWD2's HOF mode. 1) You're naked and armed with Quarterstaves as you step off the ship. Your Party members have between 6-15 HP each 2) you all have 1 attack per round, and you can do anywhere between 1-15 points of damage per successful hit. 3) If you're quick, you can manage to equip half of them with leather armor before you start seeing goblins all over the place. But you most definitely won't be able to equip more than one or two of your guys with missile weapons (in order to "lure" or "kite" individual goblins away from their packs) In the meantime... 4) In HOF a goblin has about 100hp, and does about 15-20 points of damage per hit. In other words, 1 hit = 1 kill, so you simply cannot get hit... at all 5) there are... a LOT of goblins in the docks and in the warehouse, and in the tunnels. Twice as many as there are in normal mode. You cannot exit the prologue before they're all killed. I'm not sure what a bard song from a level 1 bard can do against this. or how a level 1 party who dumps points in stealth can succeed in whittling down a goblin via sneak attacks, let alone several goblins. And your mage is totally screwed. There are no scroll merchants in the docks Of course if you manage to kill 1 goblin, you'll get several thousand xp, enough to level everyone up. But all that's going to accomplish is that some members of your party will be able to take 2 hits from a goblin before they die.

IWD2's heart of fury mode is most definitely the toughest challenge of any of the IE games. I still don't see how it can be done without importing a fully decked-out high level party that already beat the game on normal, and thus treating HoF mode as if it was an NG+ playthrough.

Got a dedicated thief in your party? If so, the Melissan fight(s) is super easy. In fact you barely have to fight at all. There are 4 phases in that fight. Just litter the area with spike traps before every phase and she'll die by herself

I like the cinematic idea of Sharpe's Eagle-style smacking or stabbing folks with rifles but there are a lot of interface/implementation problems with it. Sorry. Really? Do the problems specifically stem from the fact that it's a gun? Because in the IE games you had stuff like magical throwing hammers/axes that you could choose to wield as melee weapons or ranged weapons depending on which option you clicked on in the weapon's "abilities" screen. Anyway, I have a question. Is Unarmed combat included in one of the categories that fighters can specialize in?

Btw, How can anyone read this and not jump for joy? 28 base weapon types? That's.... a lot. That's more than BG2! (9 more, to be exact) The mind boggles. Actually, that's about as many as TOEE had, But TOEE didn't even bother to include masterwork or magical versions of half of those weapon types into the game. So this is, like, perfect good news.

Interesting. I don't think you guys have ever discussed the weapon specialization system for PoE before. So.... I've got a ton of questions. What do you mean by themed category? Does each one of those categories contain a list of weapon types and then when the fighter chooses a category he becomes specialized in all the weapons in that group? Or is it something else entirely? And what kind of bonuses are we looking at?

There's a huge difference actually. In a video game a Romantic relationship is a Romance. Hell, even an extended *flirt* session can be considered a romance (as evidenced by those who say that you can romance Annah in PS:T) while a non-romantic relationship is a friendship/camraderie, and sometimes even a brotherhood. PoE will not have the former. This has been confirmed. It will likely have tons of the latter, though. Chris Avellone is a master at writing non-romantic relationships of all sorts.

I know precisely what he means. The first one isn't a romance. It's the usual friendship/comraderie present in most party-based games with fleshed out NPCs. And the second one is NOT what anyone is talking about when they ask: "will this game have romances?". It certainly wasn't what the interviewer asked Sawyer in the euro-gamer article that spawned this obnoxiously long, 3-thread discussion So no. Sawyer was clear. And Blunt. And he was speaking as a developer who knows the standard gaming terminology.... which is what everyone but Lephys is using.

Ahem. LOL If you can't comprehend that "we're not going to be doing romances" doesn't mean the game will be devoid of anything even remotely label-able as "romance," I don't know how to help you. I didn't invent words and their meanings. Are you dense? Sawyer was clear, and un-vague. And he didn't just say there'd be no Romances in PoE, he also gave the reason why there wouldn't be. He said that they didn't have the resources to do them to the Game's standards. That means no half-assed romances. That means no "type of romance not seen in other games". That means no "unrealized romances" (like the ones you're describing - like what NWN2 had with Neeshka, Shandra and Bishop) How you can interpret NO to mean "yes" or "sorta" is beyond me. You must be in serious denial.

comic book romances! Discuss.

Well for one thing, we're not quite there yet. In the minds of the more prolific posters of this topic, there's no "FACT". Case in point. From page one: Ahem. LOL Lets see if I still remember the 5 stages of grief. 1) Denial <-----we're here! 2) Anger 3) Bargaining 4) Depression 5) Acceptance Considering the fact that since the announcement, we've done more that 50 pages in 2 threads and we're on thread #3, and we've got people here STILL stuck on stage 1.... I really don't think this dead horse will see "peace" any time soon.

^ you can do that in Skyrim. You can be a Khajiit (cat person) and marry an Argonian (lizard person) Wait.... you can do more than that. You can be a Cat person Werewolf and marry a lizardman. And with mods, you can turn your lizardman spouse into a vampire. So a cat-werewolf marries an undead lizardman. Then, with the ring of Namirra, you can go munch on Nords and Imperials while on your honeymoon So Beastiality + Necrophelia + Cannibalism. *that's* how you do romances right.

The case for Turn-based? The case for Turn-based Dating sims. Edit: The case for Japanese Turn-based dating sims with Insect people. With full voice acting and frequent cutscenes.

I'm not squeaky, but I'll bite. Actually I can't name just one, since I've got a list of favorite RPGs and each one takes its turn as my top favorite depending on my mood. 1) Morrowind 2) Baldurs Gate 2 3) Icewind Dale 4) Planescape: Torment. Currently I'd say BG2, but it's a close call. Planescape would be on top but despite its brilliance it does so. many. things. badly. Ditto with Morrowind. I put Icewind dale on the list mainly due to how it made me feel when it came out. Before Icewind Dale, the only IE game I had played was BG1 which I had replayed about 100 times at that point. I was extremely ready for something new. So here came Icewind dale... a game very much like BG1, except the dungeons were better, the combat was better, the loot was better, and it let you get much higher in levels (that was a big deal for me at the time). Surprizingly, 15 years later, the game managed to also age better than BG1. Still, BG2 came out a few months later and blew everything away. Forever. As for Morrowind, I still play it. It's such a huge, and unique game, with such wildly detailed mechanics that have not been duplicated by the industry since. I have absolutely no clue as to how anything you just quoted begged this question. Really? You didn't read my first post on this thread (edit: which you quoted!) where I asked whether I can do a totally non-PoE related topic on the PoE forum without it being locked or moved.

LOL Who said it had to have anything to do with PoE? No. To both suggestions. I believe the current viewpoint of the moderation team is that if you don't like what's being posted here, feel free to remove yourself from the offending thread.

Aah, well it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with a far more controversial, but totally non-PoE related, subject and do a thread about it here, in order to test your theory out.

As opposed to the subject matter that came before it? Romance itself has nothing to do with PoE, since it won't have any. Which is why I'm completely baffled that the other thread has been allowed to exist here and even spawn a sequel. I mean, am I free to start a thread called: "the case for first person shooter mechanics" here on the PoE forums without it getting locked or moved? Just curious.

BG2 decided to take itself 'seriously'. The fracking was in the main questline. (Phaere). And, speaking of the underdark, the tavern there had harlots. And the backrooms of the copper coronet had some too.

^Viconia and Kivan...

They already have the phallic symbols _l_ that can already slot into other blocks. A Porn Tetris. Oh yeah, Tetris needs some loving and romancing. That's what I'm talkin about! I wonder if Tetris forums suffer through 25-page Romance threads.

They don't? So then would you support Romances in Tetris? After all, a Romance won't fit in tetris 99.9% of the time, but there's that one instance with the long straight piece that you can drop upright to eliminate 4 rows.... that's an emotional enough situation to allow a Romance to flourish. Right? Your Lephy-Logic says yes. Oh, now THERE'S a concept: "Aah, we just got done doing that gigantic dungeon and selling off all our loot. We have downtime until tomorrow when we take on the next giant dungeon. hey wait, I know, lets engage in a LOVE discussion together! lol

Would you stop trying to make my argument for me? Thanks. Leave that to me. I'm better at it. Ok. The marriage dialogue occuring right before the fight with Fiirkrag was just one example. In a party-based, combat centric RPG, there's going to be plenty of others. Having romantic dialogue when you're in an ancient crypt filled with undead is one. Having romance dialogue when there's 4 other people in the party at your side, listening to you, is another. It simply doesn't work that well. Romance works fine in NON-combat centric RPGs. Romance worked fine in, say, Planescape Torment. Yep. You're doing this on purpose. I said no such thing. I neither said Whole, or Part or any fraction. Because I wasn't talking about game parts. I was talking about types of games. Awesome. Is this the case with PoE? If so, please explain, if you don't mind. No, in the case of PoE we've got the Developer simply saying there will be no romances because they don't have the resources to do them. LOL In a forum with Sane people, this would normally end the discussion outright. But some of us aren't sane, are we Lephys. Good for Zelda. I myself am thinking about trying to mod romances into Tetris. So everything in the game is always mixed with everything else in the game? What? Do you have a problem with your refrigerator that you'd like to discuss with us?

Fixed. You're doing this deliberately, aren't you. But depending on a game's plot and nature, this can mean the entire game. And often does. In this analogy, the refrigerator would not be the game. It would be, like, the development studio. The game is the finished product (the dish).

I claimed no such thing. My example was how romances often change the gaming experience for the worse. If by "wrong" you mean: "Out of place", "uncanny valley", "gag-worthy", "facepalm inducing", "cheesy and forced", then yes. I'd call that a problem. The core problem, in fact. Romances and combat centric RPGs are generally not a good fit for one another because the "conflicts" are too different between the two. Sorta like Brocoli smothered in chocolate syrrup. Individually these 2 things are fine, but put together the end result is a dish that tastes....wrong.

This is an excellent example of the kind of fallacies that are frequently presented against the sheer aspect of romance. Instead of pointing out the flaw here, I'll simply ask: Wait. By all means, point out the so-called fallacy here. I gave a concise example of a core issue with romances in combat centric games: They often do not FIT. But lets see what you have for us. That would be ambient banter. Not dialogue. The example I gave was the latter, where the NPC talks to the player character and the player character responds. In such situations The gameplay literally stops so that the PC and the NPC can engage in a dialogue. But YES, if I'm about to fight a dragon, I do not expect nor want the game to instantly force me into some immersion-killing chit-chat with an NPC about their taste in wine. I'd much rather those NPCs act a little more realistic, and engage me in a discussion about, you know, that giant, fire-breathing dragon that is right in front of them. By the way, Bioware actually acknowledged that specific issue with BG2, and they fixed it. In subsequent games, like DA:O, Romance dialogue happened at camp... or it happened when the player decided to pursue it.