Jarmo

Didn't occur to me it might be something else than carboard. The "box" kind of mislead me. I'd prefer carboard, especially the collectors or deluxe or whatever one, but it doesn't really matter too much to me either way. (because unless it's drm free dvd, I'm not getting one)

Even with normal humans, I'd like to see companions that "had good rolls" when making stats, if that's appropriate for the character. If someone rose to prominence from the gutter through her exceptional abilities, quickly became a legendary this and that, it'd make sense she didn't get her stats through standard purchase system, but rather made that 1 in a 1000 stat roll. Like maybe a few exceptionally good stats (charisma and dexterity) and the rest good or average, and no dump stats.

Now, I agree with the last sentence. Making women equal to men (in strength and size) is fantasy, but fantasy which not many will raise a fuss over. So it's probably the best course for Obsidian to take and probably the course they will take. But to the first one... sheesh. Suggesting that men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, is not a stereotype. It's a fact. It's not like anyone has suggested all men are strong and all women are weak, or that all men are stronger than any woman. In my earlier sexist thought I suggested women could have -2 to strength. That'd mean in standard DD rules, the strongest women would have strength of 16 while the average male has a strength of 10.5, and a man with the strength of 14 would already be considered a pretty strong guy. This is really sidetracked by the bigger=better thinking.

Have to admit I mixed your point with somebody elses. Yes I can absolutely agree with this. The percentage differences between sexes in our society can't be simply transfered to those in a more equal society, The diet absolutely has an effect, (I think even the diet of the parents does). I suppose in some amazon society, where men would always be malnutritioned servants, the women would really be stronger. As long as we agree that all things being equal, the same conditions for both, males are bigger and stronger.

Kind of would. Only that there's only the one giant you might get in one specific circumstance. And only the few shopkeepers have a reaction. And they have the same reaction to the demoness (or whatever she was), despite you needing a high perception to realize what she is. Nah, I think that'd be too much coding effort, just like TrashMan suggested. On the other hand, getting an ancient vampire or a demon warrior, who could pass for a human through glamour or by wearing full plate, wouldn't require coding for passerbys, but could still have unique abilities, lots of them.

About chinese athletes. I don't think any harder training would really add positive results. It's just not possible to spin this around to having women have the same body size & strength as men.

Assuming the ammo is limited, I'd really like to be able to get at least a portion of them back after the fight. Preferably automatically. Doubly so if the ammo is my 3 javelins or the single throwing axe.

One thing TempleoEE actually did almost right. You could at one point get a giant in your party, very, very powerful. But the villagers would just go yaaahh what is that thing and not deal with you. Which was broken in many levels. Mostly in that would anyone dare to refuse a high level party with a giant? There could be some ways to make some characters undesirable, but.. yeah. I'd want to make it a choice between keeping a trusted companion, or switching to a more powerful one. The benefits of keeping a friend would be more in the roleplaying area, not combat effectiveness.

Hey, a new forum to spoil with another tilted poll. So you'll meet potential companions. Do you want all to be equal in their abilities (within their class). Examples are incorrect, I don't remember the stats or levels or characters or stuff. That was largely the case in BG and such, the girl from next door is basically the same as a master assasin you come upon later. Granted, the girl is level 1 and the assasin is level 5 (but so are you and the girl when you meet him). Now this pretty much worked and didn't bother me much at all. All were D&D adventurers afterall. But I kind of would have liked some characters, like a finest swordsman ever, to have had significantly better luck with stat rolls. Where it really bothered me, were NWN2, DA:O, MotB. When I get a humongously powerful blade golem... well I was a bit disappointed it was just about exactly as effective as whatever fighter type I'd have around. Less so actually, given how fighters would have souped up weapons. DA:O, Sten and the Golem. Both are storywise presented as absurdly powerful creatures, yet they don't have anything to show for it. Neither is stronger than just another fighter, the golem is actually pretty weak compared even to alistari. MotB, bear gods and ancient devourer creatures... are just as powerful as any other companion. Now, I understand there's game balance to be considered. If some companions are more powerful than others, there's this minmax need to take the powerful ones. But if I get a demon from hell as a companion, I don't want him to be another Fighter: Level 8 Nor do I want him to be just at the same powerlevel as my childhood sweetheart. Opinions?

Sound strategy, that's what I did and what I'd expect to do here. You didn't run out of ammo in the first battle did you? So worrying over it means going back to shop every few battles. Not sure about throwing daggers and such, I know the stacks of 50 throwing axes were a bit silly in NWN2. (and I keep thinking of the enchanting line of some factory, producing enchanted arrows by the thousand) But there's the thing about returning hammers of thor, bows of unlimited ammo and stuff like that. Those do lose the charm if everything is unlimited, so maybe I'm in the limited everything side after all. But I'd still kind of rather have the convenience, I spend too much time on inventory anyway. Damn.

I was going to vote "of course limited", but then stopped to think about it and went with "unlimited standard". You'd always just stack a huge bunch of them and never ran all out. Or just went back to buy more. Realism yes, but pointless busywork nonetheless. Not going to cry over it though, if the arrows are limited, and I expect they will be. But if we're going for realism, a longbow arrow would weigh up to 100g each (1500 grain), that's 10kg for the stack of 100. (But maybe go with "fits all kinds" standard arrows, maybe 3kg for a stack of 100) 100-200 is what mongol warriors had, and they had horses to help. I don't know if any other troops had nearly as big an arrow load. I wont mind if the game goes with heavy arrows either, but I probably wouldn't use archers much then.

Actually something like that bothered the hell out of me in Mask of the Betrayer. Going in, the character has already beaten up the end boss of NWN2, who in turn was strong enough to beat armies, legendary heroes and elder dragons. Yet halfway through MotB, the characters face orcs who are scaled to be level appropriate opponents, dunno.. 200HP each or something, and near the end after beating some more legendary opponents, there's another pitched battle against a bunch of guardian gnolls, again level appropriate. It didn't seem to matter then, if the opponent is some fiend from hell, or an orc, just scale the slider so combat is suitably hard. Now I don't know if the battles scaled or if they were just designed as such, but that's something I'd rather not see here.

That's actually saying it pretty dang clear and precise.

I'm really looking for replies as much as votes, since the poll can't tell what someone actually means. I'm assuming those voting for 100% character skill, don't really mean players battle tactics shouldn't matter, but rather something like the timing of attack clickety-clicks shouldn't matter (or exist).

No. Seriously. Men have bigger bodies and that's about it. Is that really such a horribly sexist thing to claim that I'm all broken up misogynist for it?

Nah, that's just being PC. If you wanted to be realistic, it'd be something like: Males +2 strength. And nothing else. If you want to be PC, it's better to use the old "no difference" than to start fabricating stuff. It's obvious men are bigger and stronger, but with gameplay features that's about it. Completely unfair, but women are not more intelligent or dextrous, or anything, (unless by a tiny percentage) while men are significantly larger and stronger. One could argue women have higher charisma, but even that disregards lots of stuff, and is based on cultural bias. (the same bias that causes men to seem to have better leadership skills, ie charisma)

So there are about two kinds of games. The first kind, where the game character remains constant, but the player learns the game and can pass more and more difficult hurdles. The second kind, where the player doesn't learn anything, but the character becomes more and more able to pass hurdles. Now, rpg's are always a mix and the second kind of game doesn't actually exist. But there are aspects, like lockpicking. In traditional games you click a lock and the character attempts to pick it, twenty levels later, you as a player don't do the mousework any better, but the character can do his bit with confidence. (NWN style) Or there's the mixed way where you do some puzzlework and based on that and character skills, theres success or failure. (Mass Effect, Alpha Protocol, Oblivion) Combat is mostly either (very rarely) totally player skill based, or a combination. But the combination can lean one way or the other. The totally character based combat model would be clicking towards the enemy and hoping for the best, NWN with fighters and KotOR were pretty far into this direction. Skyrim and The Witcher or Mount & Blade being more based on player skills. Baldurs Gate and the likes being somewhere in between. (That's not taking into account the overall difficulty of the games, just the matter in question here). So, just wanting to know what would the folks prefer. When there's a challenge, should the outcome depend on your characters skillset, or yours?

I'd love to see an rpg where these things really play out. But I'm not expecting that from Eternity, nor do I think it'd be a wise from Obsidian to go there at this point.

That poll was actually "a bit" biased in the way the question and choices were given. When I voted, I was thinking of Oblivion and New Vegas, the scaling of which I hate, but it's more complicated than that. I actually did give about the same answer in the comments as here, at some point. Basically, I'd like the game to be of free roaming style, where you get some indication what kind of areas you're in and if you stop to think, you can probably guess you're in way over your head and have to backtrack for a while. In that kind of game I wouldn't like the scaling to exist. At all, in any form. Explore away and when you see a stone giant, run like hell! But if it's a "we can go here, here, or here" I wouldn't like to go through absolute hell first, and then have the remaining areas be a cakewalk. Without scaling, the logical option would go Icewind Dale way, and make the game simply linear. Don't give the choice if there's only one correct answer. The point would indedd somewhat go away if Eternity was a down to earth realistic game, but I assume and hope it won't be and we'll instead see the champions rise to very high power levels indeed. -- Have to see about this one actually. If it's a case of KotOR I approve, if its New Vegas, it's a mistaken direction.

ME1 costumes didn't bother me. Everybody wore armor that looked like something that might be usable. ME2 bugged the hell out of me, in that these two outfits give equal protection: ... and I'm not even talking about Jack.

I'd vote for NWN or KotOR, but neither is available.

Pretty much the way it was done in KotOR then? I approve. Giving you a freedom to choose from 3 places to go next, but having only one of the choices be the correct one for your level, is actually not freedom at all but frustration.

Oh, maybe my team would tolerate an extra member by now (hated by two others). Playing Prophesy of Pendor and I could use an extra trainer.

What I liked in DA:O though, was how it gathered (some?) statistics elsewhere and you could just look who's doing what % of overall damage. I'd like to see something like that, more detailed even. Overall hit percentages for characters (today/all time), hits taken, kills, damage dealt. So if you like, you can go and see who's not pulling his weight. Oh, Angry Bob cant hit worth crap with those awesome twin dualblades.

The threads could be combined? Anyway. I dislike it when village merchants are real cash starved paupers, yet still have 15 millions worth of gear in their shop. If I had 150 weapons, 8 of them magic, and 97 full suits of armor, I wouldn't be in some tiny hellhole scraping for pennies. I'd like the merchants wares and wealth have some connection. If there's some corner shop trying to sell wooden clubs and a leather cap, I wouldn't expect the shopkeeper to be able to just purchase a truckload of diamonds from you. However! I'm sure even a poor merchant wouldn't just turn down a rare magic item. An option I'd like to see, would be something like: I can't give you the money straight away, but I can make inquiries. Leave the item here and come back in a week and I should have found a buyer and have your money. You'd get less money than from going straight to that one shop in the capital, but you'd get something. Well.. unless the shopkeeper would just took of with your treasure cart. Which could be a miniquest.