tajerio

I haven't got any interest whatsoever in W2. Might play it a couple years down the line, but I dislike postapocalyptic media of all sorts, so it wouldn't make much sense for me. I think DA:I will come out before PoE, so I'll likely be going with BioWare's latest first. If they come out about the same time, I'll probably still play DA:I first, because I don't want to be comparing BioWare's writing to Obsidian's writing while playing a BioWare game.

No numbers--Josh didn't give any. I also extrapolated that the differences might apply to more than one set of stats. Well, make up your own mind--he posted this about a week ago:

Could be, but Josh said over in the SA fora that the values of raising attributes in CC aren't all equal. One point of Perception gives a bigger boost to interrupt chance than one point of Dexterity gives to accuracy. So that's another way to balance their utility.

Wouldn't they be Risen? ...I'll show myself out.

This isn't actually contradictory to what I said in any way. The lawfulness is obviously an issue. The problem is that "not tolerating evil," which is a fundamental component of the paladin since the Chanson de Geste, and "behaving in strict adherence to the principles of law" often don't go very well together. But that's going down perhaps another rabbit hole.

I thought it was actually perfectly fine roleplaying for a character who doesn't tolerate evil, but evidently the silly class doesn't mesh as well with that element of my character as I had originally thought.

You reloaded so you could kill them? By reloading, all the dialogue that happened prior didn't exist and your character just killed them for no reason other than having an evil alignment. As Volourn said, the dialogue from both Xzar and Montaron would be about the Nashkel Mines and they would have asked to join your party. When you have NPC's asking to join your party, that should tell you they are companions, even if they have an evil alignment. Not something to reload and kill them. Also, the game wouldn't let you kill them after you talked to them? Are you playing BG:EE? Because I don't recall something like that happening in the original game, but then I never tried to kill them either when I decided not to take them. I don't really care if they're supposed to be companions or not. They're Evil, I'm Lawful Good(ish), so the only way I'm travelling with them is if they're in my custody. And it's not like the dialogue actually tells me anything. All I know from that is that they're pretty clumsily trying to manipulate me with one healing potion and some silly blabbering about debt, and that they want to go to someplace called Nashkel to investigate some metal problem, neither of which I know anything about at all.

That's kinda my attitude too. As Volo says, I don't really get paladins, so I'm trying to RP one in BG just to see if I can. Results thus far are, obviously, mixed.

I actually did Detect Evil, then talked, then attacked. It wasn't quite so psychopathic as that. Edit: I couldn't actually attack them after talking to them, which I thought was a bit stupid, so I reloaded and attacked them straight off since that was the only way the game would let me do it.

Bit of a misrepresentation of what I said. In a proper P&P game I wouldn't ever have killed those two dudes--I'd have bothered them about why they were detecting as evil and what they were doing just hanging around on the road in the wilderness until they attacked me out of sheer frustration. I'd only ever consider it if it happened to be a binary choice. In a city, obviously, there are local legal authorities to whom I would bring any concerns if I started detecting evil mages hanging out on street corners watching the passersby. Also, unless you are the hardest of hardarse DMs (which wouldn't surprise me), why would you define the act as CN but make a paladin fall for it? I'd want at least a few CN acts or one evil act before I started making people fall.

I was very much prepared for the game to inform me that it was an evil act and that I was going to fall because of it. Letting them prance around seemed a bit too Lawful Stupid, and if I have to play a paladin that way I simply won't and I'll just accept the consequences (or play another class). Of course nothing happened. Edit: Although, after looking up how Detect Evil works, it's kinda BS that I can Detect Evil on two dudes with a total of 2 HD between them, and it ain't quite the class of divination I thought it was. Plus, thinking about it the way you all do seems to make more sense within the constraints of the game. I'll reload to let you live, Xzar and Montaron.

Well, in P&P it would have been handled differently. In this encounter in BG1 I literally have two options: I can let two guys with the Evil alignment walk away and do whatever the hell it is they're doing in the Sword Coast unmolested, or I can kill them. I can't bring them in to the local authorities, because I don't have the option to take them prisoner, and in any case there are no local authorities. Nor do I have the opportunity to interrogate them in any intelligent way, shape, or form in the dialogue--as in, ask them why they showed up as evil when I did a Detect Evil on them. So I had to decide which scored higher on the index of Lawful Good--leaving them alone or killing them. I mulled it over for about thirty seconds and decided the latter. Any reasonable DM would have given me more than the binary option of do nothing/kill them.

After finishing PS:T I decided to keep it moving with the IE games. Now I'm a paladin on the road to the Friendly Arm Inn in my first ever playthrough of BG. Did a Detect Evil on these two dudes who were just standing there on the road because the dude I met before that said they were suspicious-looking. Came up positive, Imoen and I killed them (RPing paladins is so much fun), and we took their stuff. I Google their names, just to see what their function was, and it turns out they're practically the first two guys I can recruit to my party. I already love this game.

I wish I cared as much about anything as these guys care about everything. I would have accomplished so much more in life by now.

Even with crunch time a month isn't enough time to get that much polish on the game, hopefully it was a publisher decision to push back the date closer to the holidays rather than because of a fault with the game. Because if its the latter we will probably see it on the final product and I kind of want this game to be good. Well, an extra five weeks is still valuable time. I'm not saying that the game is currently broken, but probably that they believe the game wasn't going to come up to the standard of polish they wanted in time for a 7 October release. That's certainly what all their official statements are saying. Now, it's totally possible that a closer date to the holidays makes the delay more palatable to EA, but I have trouble crediting that as the driving impulse.

My suspicion is that the delay has a lot more to do with the fact that BioWare haven't ever built an open-world game (even this semi-open world style of DA:I). Well, unless you want to count BG, I suppose, but I wouldn't. In any case, they're probably running into types of bugs they haven't dealt with much before, and in order to not have their first foray into the open-world style of gaming be a buggy mess, they likely asked EA for extra time. Which BioWare got, because EA knows that they need a success here.

They couldn't have called Baldur's Gate 'Bhaalspawn Chronicles' for the same reason they couldn't have called Citizen Kane 'Rosebud was his Sled'. I dunno. In the second case, it would have saved everybody some aggravation.

This is what I mean by different definitions. Deionarra was the only plot device in any cRPG I've played that comes close to my understanding of 'romance' in the classical, literary sense. She, however, has nothing to do with 'romance' in the dating-game/harem-anime/dime-store-romance-novel sense. So at least some of us may be talking at cross-purposes. I.e., I'm all for more Deionarra, but dead against more Aerie. I'm more or less in agreement with this. Romance as story in a game can work (as in PS:T), whereas romance as a gameplay element really doesn't (BioWare games). The problem with executing the first, though, is twofold. First, for a romance not to make me cringe, in any medium, the surrounding story has to be good, and the romance has to be executed at an even higher level than the rest of the story. In terms of RPGs, this is an issue because I've only played two that I thought had good story (PS:T and MotB). Those games both had romances in the story that made sense (TNO & Deionarra, Akachi and his beloved), though the MotB one is weaker I think, and the game sadly does employ romance as a bit of a gameplay element as well. But if a game with a merely enjoyable story tried it, like, say, a BG2? Nope nope nope. Not gonna work. Second, romance as story nearly demands that the PC be a fixed character. I dislike this deeply, because one of the joys for me of an RPG is creating my own character. That's why the heinous "mature" romance with Triss in the Witcher drives me bananas (well, part of the reason anyway). I don't have a good story hook as to why I should care about her, because the story flat out just isn't that good, and consequently she just pisses me off. PS:T only gets away with this by virtue of being incredibly good, and also not forcing me in the present to actually do anything about Deionarra at all. MotB takes the other route and has the romance as story not necessarily directly involve you, the PC, per se, but still be central to your story. Basically, if there's gonna be romance in your game, it can't be gameplay. It's gotta be story, and it's gotta be damn good story too.

Planescape:Torment. For the first time (I know, I know). I'm in the Lower Ward right now, mucking about and listening to Annah's accent. The combat is thoroughly mediocre, and character customization is a little limited. Then again, I had just come from NWN2, based on the "you want options? We got options. Options for DAYS!" ethos of 3.5. And pixel hunting is awful. But the story. The characters. The world. All of it's so incredible. Just leagues beyond anything else I've ever played. I didn't think it could possibly live up to the hype it gets on these boards particularly, let alone surpass it. But it has.

Not perhaps strictly on topic, but wow games are a weird market. Especially for the big AAA games. The prices are stickier than just about anything else you can think of.

For most games, I can't be arsed to think hard enough to play at a level above normal. There simply isn't enough reward for optimization, because generally upped difficulty consists of things like ballooning HP and armor and double damage, and I don't find that interesting. I am intrigued by the approach PoE is going to take, though, by adding in or subtracting foes depending on the changing difficulty settings. That sounds interesting enough to be worth an early go at playing on hard.

We already know your thought process on this. Casting an illusion spell on yourself to look like someone else so you can romance that person's betrothed and they have no idea you're taking advantage of them. That's some weird creepy fantasy right there. Okay the creep factor just went off the scale. That seems like an excessive level of effort just to score an imaginary point over someone else. Then again, what else is the nature of a romance thread?

Yeah, I'm only allowed to say that there is a beta and I'm in it :/ Do you think it'll be released soon though? Well, they're planning to release it with a little lead time before the game comes out, and the game comes out in less than three months. So I guess it depends on your definition of "soon."

There're a lot of pixels being flung around here, and they're obfuscating the dispute a bit. But is it correct to say that for you, Gromnir, you feel that the average person in Eora doesn't feel enough antipathy towards animancy, since it's mucking about with a part of himself he knows is eternal? If that's the point, then I'm with you--I don't think that wariness and general disapproval quite cuts it. But perhaps the point is something else entirely?

In Eora, is your eternal soul actually YOU, though, or is it just a piece of what goes to make you up? Depending on how that's understood among the various cultures, there could well be plenty of people who would risk crazy things in order to save themselves.