Jarmo

Two things I want from the narration. One is to elaborate on what the new area is like. The visuals is one thing, but it's another to know the 8 trees we see on the area edge is the vast forest we just crossed, or that the cliff is the beginning of a mountain range. Or that this nice field of flowers was once a site of a vast massacre. To remind why we are here and later to tell why we were here and what we accomplished. Because really, after fighting a few hours and then continuing the next day I'm all foggy on what I'm actually trying to accomplish beside clearing the big mob in the next room. It's half to do with bad writing on many RPG's and half with just being adhd. But games just do work in a way of blah blah blah blah.. next dungeon.

Not sure if the posting works, being from facebook. Anyway, a way neat helm thingy that came across in the Byzantine military history group.

So, everyone just attacks Wizards? Trying to illustrate there can be multiple reasons to do that. There could also be someone with nothing but contempt for all spellcasters, ignoring them and their pink sparkle at his peril.

Differing AI's for different enemies is something I've advocated before. Not based on personalities as such, though it could bring additional color to fights. In additon to ones mentioned, there could be multiple possibilities. - Ignores women, because they're of no consequence. - Hates wizards, attacks them first. - Respects wizards, attacks them first. - Tries to take down the biggest fighter first. But the thing I've mentioned before, would be differing quality of AI's based on tactical prowess of the enemy. - Something like zombie or troll would just attack whoever is nearest. - An automaton might always switch target to whoever did the latest damage. - A party of dark elf commandos would use the best tactics the AI can offer. - A party of adventurers might have a couple of clever guys and a barbarian who just rushes in. - An evil spellcaster with delusions of grandeur might give no heed to whether his fireballs hurt his companions as well as intended targets.

Those sawed-off arquebuses are the awesomest pieces I've seen in a good while. Just brilliant. But the wall guns are the thing, in a world with trolls and ogres and more, those'd be all over the place. Or the predecessors, siege crossbows and other "light heavy" weapons. On a semi serious note. I wonder if the reason roman legions would carry around a bunch of Scorpion thingies when going into gaul and germania, real difficult terrain back then, if it had something to do with the possibility of meeting monsters or giants or something? (And they did actually meet war elephants or maybe angry rhinos which don't really lose out to an ogre). But I'm almost positive they didn't actually make them out of plastic.

Pretty much all production outsourcing nowadays is either Lawful Evil or Lawful Expensive.

Flamberge, sure, but serrated edges are a different thing - they're only useful for sawing things. I suppose they might stop people grabbing the blade, though (which is what a flamberge edge was designed to do), so maybe it could work... .. or they could be used to stop/grab a blade like this one does http://medieval.stormthecastle.com/armorypages/sword-breaker.htm

What I was going for, but probably didn't deliver too clearly. In addition to having special arrows (or rather self restocking quivers of special arrows), you'd be able to upgrade your baseline "normal" arrows through some upgradery in the fort or something. So after spending all the special arrows, you wouldn't drop down to standard wooden pointy sticks, but maybe to +1 (or 1d3 fire damage) , or maybe to armor piercing bodkins or something.

I'm leaning towards streamlining stuff as much as possible. Managing/hoarding/shooting/collecting arrows seems more like a bother than a realistic touch. I'd prefer something to the tune of infinite normal arrows in the main inventory but you go to battle with 50, and then a limited number of special arrows. Maybe later on, you'd get a source (keeps upgraded armory?) that provides infinite non-resellable +1 arrows. The mount and blade type with self-restocking special quivers would also be fine.

I'm all ready to welcome our silver nippleguard succubus mistresses and their golden codpiece sexomancer underlings, as long as their "armor" doesn't provide actual armor protection as such. Maybe it's magically enhanced to give protection, but the overall protection is still the armor part less, compared to a similar protections cast on an actual piece of armor. (unless there's some world works this way rule of "the less actual armor, the better the magic protections stick") Also, the users of maximum titillation armor/clothing should be the kinds of characters who would wear them. A modest warrior maiden would be offended, preferring to cover their modesty as well as gain armor protection)

I distinctly remember seeing sheathed weapons in one of the gameplay videos, so one hopes the feature is in. For myself, I'd be half satisfied with weapons just disappearing in non-combat situations if doing the sheathing animations is too bothersome. Bothers me surprisingly much to play a game where characters bumble about in a shop, waving flaming halberds and what not.

Well damn, now I want modding tools so I can add in a a female companion called Black Ilse. German accent, black leather, whips. A morally corrupt but fun character.

Well, well... £906,979 down, 47 hours to go. I'll be surprised and sorely disappointed if they don't hit the final 1 million stretch goal.

If an entire ethnicity declared war on you, babies and all, then sure. However, I'm fairly certain all the 6-year-old children of that nation/people aren't actually going to war with you. Generalizing is not necessary illogical though. To a racist your argument would sound a lot like: A rabbit came to my garden and ate my lettuce. But that's no reason to assume every rabbit would be a lettuce thief. A lot of them are surely good law abiding rabbits. Or to put it differently: The damn orcs are violent and evil, every last one of them, because that's what they are. It's a white mans burden to lead and manage those incapable of self rule. It's the best for everybody.

Ah, just when I was thinking of a theory where "hunger" would be of maybe "corroding" type, and would then be easily blocked by wearing a specific type of lizardskin helmet or something...

That worked just fine for me actually. For some reason I find it easy to make a mental leap of accepting levelup magic bonuses to whatever attribute, much easier than accepting the same attributes in character creation. So rolling up a woman with 18 STR seems wrong to me, or at least I'd imagine her some kind of monster bull then. But beginning with 14 and upping that to 20 lets me keep the mental image of a woman that looks like a normal athlete. Because the added points to STR don't actually grow muscles any more than the added CHA does a nose job. It's all magical exp stuff, much like vampires are real strong after sucking up a lot of blood.

Yea, color me surprised actually. I'd have thought the rapier (and what the heck is a smallsword then) weight to be more in line with a shortsword (even if there never was such a thing). But it's still the same thing really, long reach and real light compared to another sword with similar reach. The broadsword (or whatever the heck it was) in the video was 1/3 shorter and I doubt it'd give any less effective lunge damage. --- And yeah, apparently when I say "rapier" I usually mean "smallsword".

I believe very strong modding tools can help a game get some more sales. That's games like Neverwinter Nights, Total War series (up to medieval 2) Mount & Blade and ARMA2 (Shadowrun Returns is a maybe). The kinds of games where mods are total conversions that draw in players that wouldn't buy the game otherwise. Even then, the extra sales percentage would almost certainly be in the single digits (ARMA2 and DayZ is probably the exception). Then there are games like Baldurs Gate 2, Dragon Age, Icewind Dale or The Witcher. There are mods, I'm not sure what's the quality of modding tools is, but there's a bunch of mods anyway. The mods are nice to have, will certainly bring in some longevity to the game. I'm astonished if these kinds of mods help generate more than one percent extra sales.

Thanks for the link! Continuing the discussion - I think that rapier's significant advantage is, aside from its lethality, the reach it provides when lunging. Unless I'm again forgetting what the heck rapier was (thin long & pointy), I'd say the main advantage was the combination of speed (from being light) and reach (from being long), the lethality would be a happy side effect. (If it even was specially lethal, as compared to a "normal" sword)

Having just been on the other side of not getting to romantically hump all the companions, now its time to "win" by not getting stretch goals either. Sorta hooray. But seriously, I didn't just want the game on my hands sooner, I truly feel a smaller packet with less, more polished content (which I hope will be the result) will make for a better game. And while I'm happy to get my way in this (though I'd rather had had my way with an earth godlike companion), it sucks this also means lots of others don't get what they want and think would have made a better game. And I do value the opinions of (many of) the ones on the other side and it's possible you were right, we'll never know. Chin up everybody, it'll be a great game and it'll be on our hands in about a years time, give or take.

Personally, IWD1 was my first IE game and I found it to be unfairly difficult all the time, almost unenjoyable. IWD2 followed right after (got both in the same dual pack) and didn't find that to be nearly as hard. (In retrospect, it was way harder but I just knew the system already). Anyway, of all IE games, IWD2 was the one I most enjoyed playing.

If someone wants to open up a discussion thread on game plots and gameplay, I'll add something there about DA:O and BG and more. But it's a bit offtopic in this thread. As far as abilities, D&D system obviously has more ways to go than DA:O, but I really liked how all the DA classes had several valid ways to build them up. Not enough for endless fun, but more than enough to keep a normal player happy for several playthroughs. And I really liked how fighters and rogues had both active and passive abilities, meaning playing a fighter was more involved than just clicking at a target and waiting for it to die. But not crazy involved like ME2 or Jade Empire. And then to add some more fuel to my pyre, having regenerating mana pool made playing a wizard/cleric/whatever fun for me, the way it was never fun in IE games. Sure, having a wizard in party was always necessary and useful, but in a resource kind of way, not in a hero way. BTW, I just remembered one thing where DA:O was real not fun at all compared to IE games. The stats system. Doesn't matter at all what you pick in the beginning, when you get 200 points more during the game. And there weren't many ways to make valid characters, just pick a way and then pool points accordingly. And the second thing was the equipment/loot level system, where everybody begins with weapons made of cow dung and then goes on to see every street punk carrying mithril by the endgame.

God, I hope not. That's way too many materials to be creadibly used in the same period. Once you get steel, you don't use bronze anymore, since steel is better in EVERY WAY. So you can either have only 2-3 different materials of increasing quality TOPS. Aside form that, you can have materials that aren't necessarily better...just different. Like silver. So maybe "only" Steel -> Masterwork -> Valyrian Steel -> Mithril ...and then any of those could be magical. Though if it takes a lot of cash and effort to magify stuff, maybe it'd mostly be masterwork and forward.

I'm not an expert, mind you, but from what I've read it would seem that a rapier is a far more lethal dueling weapon; using a saber against one is actually putting yourself at a severe disadvantage. Oh and I'll definitely be looking to add some more examples of the Commonwealth designs! You're right. The rapier will either kill you, or at least very severely wound you (like pierce your lung or something), or it will do very little. Since the wounds caused by rapiers are so small, there's little damage from each stab, unless the stab is precisely placed in a critical location. A great example of this is the battle of Waterloo, where the English light cavalry used sabres that caused tremendous damage with each swing, but did not necessarily kill very effectively. The French, on the other hand, used thrusting swords for their heavy cavalry, that didn't cause great damage, but could kill with a single well-placed attack. The French soldiers complained about the barbarity of the English sword, actually. Not an expert either, but I'll add my 0,015 euros anyway. Yea, sabre vs rapier in duel, the rapier has the advantage. But I'd guess the weigh difference ie the speed of the weapon wouldn't be so huge that the difference would be night and day. Those are still pretty light weapons, not heavy hacking swords. In cavalry use the sabre wielders have the advantage, slashes with curved swords are much less likely to get stuck in the opponent. That's why, overall, cavalry tended to go that way all over the world. The exception being when the opponent is expected to be armored, then the heavier thrusting sword has the advantage again. Then again, I'd also guess a (light) spear would have the advantage over the thrusting sword (but wouldn't go so nicely with a dress uniform)

Because it's a real-time game and I only have one character. The rest are teammates, not brainless zombies. I don't mind controlling the whole party in ToEE, but that's turn-based. Lot's of things happening simultaneously, I can just see the gameplay being *pause* give lots of orders *unpause* watch the battle progress for a second *pause* repeat And yeah, Dragon Age: Origins is a lot better game than BG2 in terms of gameplay, plot or characters, actually in any terms I can think of right now.