mickeym

Couldn't think of a more specific topic title that expresses my feelings, sorry. The thing that I liked about Baldurs Gate is that it didn't have so much stuff in character creation. Fighters could do hardly anything apart from attacking, rogues weren't much more complx than fighters with their skills of stealth and trapping, and it seemed like it was mostly the spell casters who had a good 90% of the character building depth with their magic spells, specializations making the plain old grunts and rogues of the party seem very shallow in comparsion. The fighter and rogues roles in combat were determined within the first few levels of character building, and compared to mages there was very little they could do to respecialize the things that they did. I actually liked how very simple that BG was, because it made sure that a players party members would evolve along a very easy to predict paths, which I believe is one of the biggest reasons for why the difficulty of combat remained fairly consistent all the way through the series. Compare this to the much more convoluted systems seen in Neverwinter Nights... the developers had an extremely difficult time predicting just how strong the players group could become throughout the NWN2 campaign and it's expansions. This basically forced obsidian to err on the side of caution, they couldn't make a whole lot of assumptions on what sort of group the player would have in SoZ, and so a player who built an extremely powerful party could pretty much just walk through the whole game while barely lifting a finger and letting their own party A.I scripts resolve things with minimal player input. Which one is this game more like, BG or SoZ?

Anomen. Why did the worst personality in the game have to be one of the most powerful recruitable NPCs? WHY?!

Maybe I didn't explain clearly enough, but I'm including characters like Anomen and haer as magic users. Sure, they can both be pretty amazing at melee, but not before at least a minute of preparation and the best magical equipment you can equip them with. Before you know it, you've spent the better half of day (in real life time) just going through the motions of powering them up and that's far more time than necessary.

Fighters were a neccessity for people such as myself. Not going to lie, a group consisting entirely of magic users was by far the most effective way to get things done, but I think you'll find that you can progress through the game a lot faster with a couple of simple fighters such as Minsc, Korgan and Keldorn. They were always a great trio and could crush just about everything long before your magical party of six could reach their potential. And then they'd have to rest and rebuff every five minutes. So ****ing tedious. I'd rather keep it simple and clear out the whole world map than go with a magical group that would take an equal or greater amount of time to complete the athkatla quests.

what are you even talking about half of the time?

I'd say that Redcliffe was one of the overall highlights of the RPG genre. If the rest of the game were on that level I am certain that Origins would be remembered as a classic by anybody with an interest in the genre.

What's wrong with having deep combat in a RTwP game? Pretty much. Doesn't have to be anything wrong, but I think that it had room for improvement. It's just that they used a turn based rule set for a real time game and gave no accurate way of keeping count of the rounds, and as for the special effects.. have you SEEN how saturated the screen can get with that stuff flying around. In throne of bhaal against epic level group vs group battles I pretty much have to memorize where each character is positioned and in what sequence the characters took their "turn" in, or else you can get screwed over pretty easily, especially when I've got difficulty mods. It's like cats and dogs living together to say the least. Imagine what a teleport field on top of a cloud kill on top of a spell triggered trio of fireballs looks like and with half of the characters having that stupid white sphere around them. Do you see how that could be difficult to manage? DAO had som much less clutter in battles, which is a major reason why I like it in spite of how much a dumbed down BGII wanabee it is. Why has nobody made a mod to make Throne of Bhaal less of an eye sore? I hope that the enhanced edition has a mode to simplify all of the spell effects.

Yeah, in BG you coud block a gap you can also stand with bow waiting for mose big creature to blick in and kill it from safe ditance, the same you coud do in skyrim, killing giant with 100000000 fireballs standing on some high rock. I think that this was more glitch not tactic ... do you think that in real life a 1 warrior coud block whole corridor ? He whoud be pushed up bu someone stronger ... the same like in DA O ... DA O was Better in tactics becouse you can not you some glitches to make sure that mages are safe, mages must work to be safe for example magical traps or traps made by your thiefs. Secondly dragon age was better in tactis becouse you got spell combinations, thirdly Dragon Age was better in tactics becous fighters have not only one gole "Atack" fighters got whole types of abilitys so playing fighter was something more then "click on a fighter age click on a enemy" ... Besies mage coud still be abe to block enemys ... there was a spell callego "SOUL PRISION" or something like that ... that coud make character not move, and if it was for example a "ogre" and thin corridor the darkspawns that where behind him where blocked. In BG the only role of fighter was "Click and go" where mages have whole types of spells ... in DAO we also have spells, even spells combinations and even fighter have some activ abilitis ... so yes DAO was better in this ... Better tactics...? lolno. It's good that plugged up the door blocking exploit and a lot of the things your saying it did can all be great, in theory. It's just the implementation was really dumbed down, and I believe that the finger of blame can be pointed towards the crafting system and how overpowered it was. My strategy for majority of battles were to equip mages with items that lowered their threat levels, and my tank with itmes that raised their (as well as several very powerful defensive items) threat levels, used taunt when needed, and spam healing potions and magic. All the baddies would die with the tank just chugging away at bottles like its new years eve. That's literally all there is to it +/- threat level equipment, and crafted potions. It's too simple.

Yeah, I also like the whole "micro management " @ mickeym Did you play the pen and paper D&D before BG2. If not I can understand the rules being a little confusing. Not really confusing. It followed the usual RPG rul of bigger = better. the heavier armor usually protects better, the character with higher combat attributes fight better, the more the +++ an item has the better it is. It ws my first and I got into it just fine. Took a little while to understand thac0 and AC, but I got by just fine with ony a vague comprehension that bigger = better. I think that people were just mad at enhanced edition because it's one of the few games where you need to spend a good 20-30 minutes getting acquainted with the basics. I imagine that people were more accepting of the rules back in the 90s, but I wasn't really active at all on the internet.

Part of the problem is that BGII tried to give a real time with pause game the depth that is normally reserved for turn based gaming. Also, nowhere did I say "copy Dragon Age wherever possible". Obviously the DAO camera was a huge problem because it didn't zoom out nearly far enough, but fortunately it's alreay confirmed that PE will be a fixed perspective with no overhead view so we already know what to expect from that. Baldurs Gate 1s late game and BGIIs early game were both quite good for me because they had just enough depth to be interesting but not enough that I found myself taking twice as long as needed to complete a simple action such as fireball.

Love it or hate it, there is no denying that Dragon Age was much less unweildy than BG (that game that origins was a spiritual successor of) when it came to controlling the actions of each individual group member than Baldurs Gate. BGII was ****ing micromanagement hell, especially once you hit around epic levels and had to take on armies of giants, demons and Dragons in the BGII expansion. I kid you not when I say that I actually spent more than HALF of my gameplay time in BGII: ToB just moving characters around, casting spells and squinting through all of the speciall effects. All so I could make slight adjustments to my formations before letting the fighting proceed for fractions of a second. That type of compexity in gameplay has no place in a real time with pause game at all, and sadly a lot of that aggavation had nothing at all to do with the gameplay, but poorly designed interfaces and no obvious ways of modifying AI scripts. See how each companion in DAO has the status bar running parallel with the skill buttons? See how an ability bubble pops up above the head of the characters whenever one is used? See how you could script characters to automatically handle basic tasks such as drinking some health whenever it drops too low? These type of design decisions are fairly obvious nowadays, but it sadly didn't occur to the BG team. And I think that PE eternity could improve the feedback even further by dividing the short term status effects from the long term. I must have been a much more patient person than I was 10 years ago, because I just can't replay BGII anymore without getting bored or frustrated at how unweildy the interface design is and how I control even the most basic actions of my group all of the time because they're dumb. Basically, please be more like Origins and less like BGII. Blasphemy, etc.

Try it with Sword Coast Stratagems It was when I played BGII with Sword Coast Stratagems mod that the millions upon millions of magic spells on the battlefield simultaneously with no real cool down timers on display became massively frustrating. Couldn't see **** half the time, and I think most would agree that the IE system of "okay, so I unpaused for 2 seconds here, then 1 second here, 3 here and another 3 seconds there" is too convoluted for keeping track of how much longer you'll be protected from magical weapons. (yeah, I know SCSII is designed for highly experienced baldurs gate veterans, and I used to be one of those. My days of been able to throw down precision lightning bolts from the other side of the map have been and gone since around 2005 however, so I'm at a point where I'm knowledgeable enough that original BG is totally unchallenging but have forgotten too much to have a good enough feel of the gameplay for gameplay enhancements.)

While I guess it doesn't have to be the case, it just is in some games. I think my own opinion of games regarded as classics such as BGII differs from the mainstream in some ways, two of them been the way that it handled time and special effects. First of all, I didn't think it was cool or awesome to have most of the people in a high level battle to be buried underneath a heap of persistent protection spells and area of effect magic, in fact I found it extremely irritating and I have no desire at all for Project Eternity to make it harder than it has to be to observe the tactical situations. The other problem was the fact that unlike turn based gameplay, it's kid of difficult to keep track of how much time has passed between the start of the battle to the present moment. This can make it really difficult to manage high level battles in which there can be several short term persistent magic effects counting down to zero simultaneously so I'm kind of hoping that we won't have to keep a stop watch handy just to get a rough idea of how much longer that timestop (or whatever) is going to run for. I believe that this is the kind of info that the game should make easily accessible at a quick glance. Anyway, just hoping that PE will let me opt out of these two pitfalls which I believe other RTWP games (BGII) failed spectacularly at.

You know that games like NWN2 and BGII could be absolutely saturated in spell effects (firestorm + teleport field + cleric buffing spells + globe of invulnerability... etc...) and this wasn't really a big problem in the early game. but get into epic levels where you'd fight some of the "the five" bhallspawn leaders from throne of bhaal? ****, I'm positive that I spent more time in pause mode squinting at the battles in a vain effort to figure out where the baddies were and what the **** they were doing in pause mode than actually playing. Actually I'm pretty sure that all of the infinity engine games are guilty of this, as well as Neverwinter Nights. If you artists could figure out a way to disown that particular bit of **** ****ery from this project eternity spiritual successor of IE, I'll owe you a beer.

Not at all - the ending was product of Bio writers being incompetent lackwits with delusions of literary mastery. Not even two years more time of development could have saved that trainwreck. I'm not asking about what people thought of it, I'm making a point that it was clearly missing a whole lot of plot development between the Asari world and catalyst.

This would be true if Obsidian had all of the time and money in the world to develop it to whatever perfect standard that they have in mind with no feature excluded or under developed within the 18 month time frame they've set themselves for completing the game. I'm guessing that it is super rare that such games are ever developed. And the kind of romances that people are asking for are a lot of work, so you are most likely wrong that having them in the game won't make other parts of the game suffer. You know, I've noticed something about Kickstarter funded games. You go on the forums and you see arguments like this. They basically amount to "I don't want it so I'm just going to say that they're under a limited time and budget so it shouldn't happen, that way I don't look selfish for saying my wants are superior to the wants of others!" think of it this way: imagine how much more complete that the rushed ending of ME3 would be if Bioware hadn't spent so many long hours of creating romance cutscenes, dialogue, animations and acting. Would you rather have had a better ending if it meant fewer romances? Can't have everything you want, and developers have to make these decisions all of the time. It's one or the other

This would be true if Obsidian had all of the time and money in the world to develop it to whatever perfect standard that they have in mind with no feature excluded or under developed within the 18 month time frame they've set themselves for completing the game. I'm guessing that it is super rare that such games are ever developed. And the kind of romances that people are asking for are a lot of work, so you are most likely wrong that having them in the game won't make other parts of the game suffer.

On one hand there are characters which add to the plot, the story, lore and so on and on the other there are those which are there for the sex starved gamers. No romances. It's the only way to be sure. And would everyone please quit holding up BGII as a positive example of how romances should be done? It stereotyped romances just as badly as the other Bioware games and none of them. There was the cliche tough bitch, Viconia the schizophrenic nympho, and some broken down baby who had her feathers clipped who could only be saved with "the power of love!!!11" Then there was some idiot, that guy-who-must-not-be-named.

The gift system is actually not all that unrealistic. I know that I'd be pretty happy if someone would just randomly gift me a lot of stuff.

Waste of time and story branching.

If Valves TF2 has taught us anything, it's that cosmetic DLC can be a real gold mine. If the developers can find a way of adding some cheap (cheap for them to implement) but cool optional cosmetic crap into the game it could pay for itself multiple times, easy.

The reason why I'd back any money into this thing at all with as little knowledge of planned content as has been given is because I have total faith that your (Obsidians) talents of game development are better than mine. Pandering to what the community and player base ask for is where artists (including Bioware) start to decline into mediocrity. Just something to keep in mind.