Jarmo

My take is D&D stat differences between races are by far too slight. I'd like differences to the tune of halfling max STR would be about 9, while elfs min DEX would maybe around 12. So yeah, you can make a halfling fighter, but the strongest halflings would be around the ballpark of the weakest dwarfs. And I wouldn't try to balance them at all, just model the world as best you can. So a halfling might get something like 6 stat points less than some other race. Would lead to many complaints of a totally broken system with only a few viable races and builds.

Yea. I think "the regulars" in this thread were sold on the first video with characters. I know I was. Making this thread less of a plea for the game and more about general rambling of armor and weapons. And yea, I saw the wink but went off on a tangent anyway as I'm like to do. What I mean, is if you're equipping a border guard to patrol the countryside, it's pretty natural you dont make them heavy knights but rather light horsemen. More so if the world doesn't have horses and everybody has to walk. Easy to see the appeal of wearing jacks instead of a 20kg hauberk. And if there is a war or battle, you fight in the same gear you have and are familiar with. This might well apply to adventurers as well. But if you know there's a battle coming up and the issue is not cost. Any medieval lords for example, that could afford what they wanted and did fight in wars, not just stand around in the back. Any notion anywhere that they'd go... hmmm.. the plate would hinder my mobility so I'll go light and agile.... As a further tangent. I know (stories of) some modern US troops would skip wearing bulletproof vests even if firefight is likely, if the weather was hot enough. Rather not go into fight sweating like a pig and dehydrated, even if that means you better not get in the way of bullets. ... now I actually recall seeing images of saracen leaders (who did fight) but didn't wear the heaviest armor. (Or did they fight? I think Saladin didn't for example, not in his old days anyway)

First reply, first jaw dropping surprise. But good reasoning!

Companion Poll is up. Ready to be pollinated.

Trying to doublepoll. Somewhat interested in seeing if the first and second question give similar or different results. Try your best to differentiate between quality of the game, the gameplay and stuff like that (which is not being polled and the companion quality (which is). Feel free to value, depth, quality, amount of companions, whatever you feel like valuing. NWN means also NWN 2 and the Mask of the Betrayer. Fallout also means FO3 and New Vegas. Feel free to elaborate why you picked what. Some games with companions were left out, including Arcanum and Skyrim. There's only 10 choices available. So sad. Please give input even if your favorite didn't make my horribly biased cut.

A party of travelers who most likely fight and kill more than the spartans in thermopylae...

Actually. DId some people ever choose to fight in lighter armor if heavier was available? Berserkers yeah maybe. No denying the usefulness of light cavalry in scouting and harassing or stuff like that, but wasn't it rather the case you have light cavalry so better make use of it. Did some army decide that nah, no we'll rather have light infantry than heavy. I get not going to a hunting trip in heavy plate, but I don't get going into battle in furs if you have the plate as well..

One has to make a poll on the best companions. What other games should there be? I'd go with DA:O having the best ones, ME1 or 2 with the second best. Also liked the ones from Jade Empire. BG2 better than Torment, neither as good as NWN2:MotB.

Wow that's not a comment I would expect from you Jarmo, exploring complex dungeons is a cornerstone of almost fantasy RPG like D&D If you don't like multi-levelled dungeons what do you enjoy exploring? I'm not that much into all common rpg tropes. Say BG2, I liked it best when in the city. Villages, reasonable non-empty outdoor areas, locations like dungeons and such are fine but less so when they're built in level1->level2->level3 style. Say you come into an abandoned fort. I'd expect there to be the walls and gatehouse then courtyard. The main building would have some kind of entrance and then the "main room". On the sides few other rooms, maybe second level living quarters and a cellar. If we meet a boss enemy, that'd likely be in the main room or cellar if it's some giant-spider bugger. I wouldn't like to see the fort built in game style. Entrance, 1st level populated by weak enemies. 2nd level by some other enemies. 3rd level by undead. 4th level (the throne room in some deep low damp dungeon) where the main evilboss lives. All corridors and doors fully trapped up so the monsters living there couldn't possibly move around at all. Add a few levels if the game playthrough time is a bit too low.

I just hope the whole thing is optional and skippable. Long and deep dungeons are just depressing. I'm always happy to reach the end and alway sad to see there's yet another "stairs down". If there's good loot and XP rewards, guess I'll have to drudge through, especially if the endgame difficulty is based on the assumption that I did.

I'd guess there's a couple of morally ambivalent companions, a couple of more "evil" and couple of "good" ones. So if you want to play a particularly murderous monster you don't need to drag around miss goody plate, or the friend of snake demons wizard if you happen to feel morally compromised by necromancy. Might even be a case of "I'm damn well not adventuring with him." personality clash between a couple of potential companions. In other words, they'd probably be happy to make only 5 companions but realize not everybody is going to like them all. Minimum of redundancy and off you go.

While I'd love to select from a bazillion options, I'd also like there to be two options to choose first. 1. Start with default character. 2. Customize character. Where option 1 immediately tosses you into the game with a well balanced fighter. You're some dude, now face the adventure!

The only thing that really perturbs me along this line is more the race side of thing - It seems like there'll probably only be one companion of any particular race (save maybe human), which would be a little sad (but unavoidable). Still, other NPCs should be nicely fleshed out along the way, so I suppose we'll still get to see the contrasts between different characters of the same race. Now that you say it, the elf wizard is already in so my guess of elf barbarian is probably wrong. Amaua would maka for a good barbarian... or druid, in which case I'd be wrong.

2 classes not making the cut: Paladin, natural leader, but you're the leader. A potential source for conflict, but I don't think so. Barbarian, Chanter or Druid. All have nice potential, but... I'm guessing we might see an Elf barbarian, then... chanter is a new take on a bard, probably one they might like to use... so... I'd make my guess no druid. No Paladin, no Druid. Any other better guesses?

Well you know, Bioware said Dragon Age would be spiritual successor to IE games, though modernized. And hey, I loved it. It was all that and their vision of what all that means. Now Obsidian is going to deliver their vision. And I like the sound of it so far.

I'll just add (instead of waiting like I meant to) that while I enjoy making builds in D&D games as much as any other OCD player, and while I dislike what I imagine is going to be the PE stat system, it's still no big deal. I'm mostly in it for the story after all, companion interaction the second, stuff like that. Stat system is pretty far far down the list of stuff that can make or break the game, skills (talents and what not) for example are way more important.

Thats awesumps, because in Kotor2 there were a couple of "companions" I immediately wanted to dump into the first barren rock available. (And it would have been a good call too.)

Not sure if that's what Winter Voices developers were going for but... "Winter Voices uses stats like willpower, perspicacity, charisma, humor, and memory. That’s because you’re not fighting bad guys–the enemies engaged in the turn-based combat are feelings, memories and visions who drain your energy with offenses like “brood,” “cry,” and “resentment.” And there’s no way to strike back at them; with only defensive moves in your skillset, players have to evade enemies, survive for given lengths of time, and manipulate surroundings to achieve their goals. Sometimes, the only available option is to lose." Started it, didn't finish. Not because of the game but because of that's what I do.

Yeah. Isometric 2D game with some 3D elements, like characters and effects. It's not going to be the whole world, just some select locations. PS. Nice avatar.

I would expect, now that the software side is in order, all macs to go to whatever they call "retina" resolution (not necessarily 4xHD as such) in a pretty short time, not necessarily next year for every model, but close. Having that.. does win 8 already handle different resolutions with grace? I gather the "square blocks" new interface does, but how about the "normal" desktop? And programs? Because the hyper-resolutions wont be common if 4x sceen makes Word toolbar so tiny you cant use it. That's why 1600x1200 laptop screens were premium 10+ yrs ago, and instead of becoming a standard they just disappeared.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9059 Left: Sawyer before Q&A. Right: Sawyer after Q&A. Maybe not after the Q&A, definitely after reading the whole ensuing discussion. Anyhoo, I think I'm done discussing until there's some actual new info. I mean, you can analyze a sentence 10 pages no problem, but after that it goes a bit stale...

Not exactly sure what chips they are actually, I think they're pre i7, basically the system's comparable to a core2quad. I picked it used, solely because the previous owner had installed a 240GB SSD in addition to 2x 1TB HD drives (were raid-0 but I turned them to raid-1 storage). A funny side note, the second CPU daughterboard died a little a while back, taking half of the system RAM with it (6 GB remains). I meant to do a lot more video editing with the setup than I actually did. Pretty darn big and heavy system for web surfing, and accidentally kicking it causes bleeding wounds because of design. Sharp aluminium corners.

Does running Mac OSX and netscape count as something totally alien? Workstations, it's just the same as with a "normal PC". The only hiccup is if you also pack a workstation GPU, even then everything will most likely work, just not as fast as you'd expect. My home mac is a bit older 2 CPU Xeon system with the awesome total of 4 cores @ 2,66GHz !!! The speed! The current systems are pretty darn good with these setups actually. Most likely the games and such can't even tell the difference between 8-core CPU and 2x4-core system.

A bit more thinking about this, assuming a lot of stuff, nevermind what it makes u&me. Yeah, I believe the system can work. It's going to be pretty simple, easy to grasp, functional, all that. In a word, good solid system for a CRPG. Me no like, but nevermind that either right now. The other thing about no dump stats and your character always going to be viable no matter what stats you choose. Suggests to me one thing and then one or the other. The one thing first. When encountering a new system, there's always a puzzlement of what stats to pick, then you found out you screwed up. Basically you only know what to pick in the beginning once you've already played through the game. Which is not nice. Then the other. Either you're going to be getting a lot more points during the campaign, DA:O style, so you can steer developement into whatever direction you find you want to steer towards. Enough points to make the opening stats meaningless. Or the stats themselves are relatively meaningless, like 10th level character getting +10 to attack based on level, +3 based on weapon and then +2 based on high stats. And the whole thing just looks like, trying to do away with stats and keeping them at the same time.

Pretty much exactly this. With some room to disagree what "one of the toughest opponents" would actually mean. This also, though the way game mechanics usually work, a fighter type is is almost helpless without equipment, while a mage loses some bonuses but is still going to be at almost full strength. Nevermind a druid wildshaping to a naked wyvern or something. Anyway, to me the important bit would be why a warrior character could survive (not laugh off) a fight like that. If it's the D&D 3.x system of "I have 260 HP and they do 1-8 per strike if they hit, then not perfect at all. If it's dodge - punch the lights out of the first assailant - grab sword and shield - block block block - sweeping strikes. Then yeah, sounds like an awesome fight if you survive. I'm almost a total opposite. If you're an amazing fighter, you should be effective if you're down to a dull sword and a leather shield. Meaning, you hit 3 times faster than when beginning and you hit 90% of the time, not 30% like before. But yeah, maybe that dull sword doesn't cut through armor like the magic scimitar you had before and maybe the wool tunic doesn't quite stop the incoming hits like the plate did.