rjshae

To me it's good because it breaks with expectations and intrinsic biases. The game designers are already borrowing rather heavily from Earth history, so a little change up is necessary. You see the Valians and you immediately know it's a different world where you'll need to adjust your thinking to get ahead.

Yep, well Baldur's Gate Reloaded is around 2.5 Gb so yeah that's pretty beefy. It hasn't stopped 28,700 people from downloading it though. To me this stopped being an issue years ago, but I guess if you're still stuck on XP I can see why it would be a problem. As for modding other games, none of them have quite provided the game system I want.

I'm not sure how practical it is to even use tiles for 3D exterior areas any more. Modern games all seem to be based on custom meshes. Do we know what they used for the 2013 Neverwinter release? Or how about Sword Coast Legends? What I'd really like is a terrain modelling tool similar to what they demonstrated for Sui Generis. That worked very rapidly, yet it produced a quite natural-looking terrain. It could probably be expanded to sculpt a wide variety of surfaces and elevation variations, including flowing water channels. Vegetation could be handled in a similar manner. If it is fractally-based, then presumably the areas can be low bandwidth.

Well sorry but to me these arguments are like comparing razor blades. Is the razor blade with 9 blades superior to the one with 7? Well perhaps by a microscopic amount. I prefer the one with the tiltable head and 7 blades to the one with a fixed head and 9 blades. To me, the factors you raise do not make NWN any more inviting. The options in NWN2 are vastly more than I need. Your argument about the NWN2 exterior area building is based on corner cases. I can create pretty much any area I want. Would I like to have more than six textures per grid square plus one 16-bit color tint per vertex? Sure, but as you point out, that would come at a cost. We can make some very nice and realistic terrains using the current system. Yes, the features that make NWN2 area building vastly better come with a memory cost. What of it? Disk space is cheap these days. I've worked with the NWN toolset and found it rather constrained and unappealing compared to NWN2. I've also tried doing some mods for NWN, and found it quite limited because of the various size constraints. For example, there's almost no way to port most NWN2 tilesets to NWN because of the poly count limits and texture size constraints. It would take a ton of work to diminish the poly count enough, and the textures would need to be shrunk down and the normal/tint/illumination maps removed. The end result would be pretty ugly. Like I said, it's a matter of personal preference. I'll stick with NWN2; you stick with NWN.

Mmm no, I don't think I did. In NWN2, the flesh1, flesh2, hair, hat/helm, cloak, armor, shield, belt, and boots all have three tint channels, as do each of the armor parts: 2 bracers, 2 elbows, 2 arms, 2 shoulders, waist, 2 thighs, 2 knees, 2 ankles, and so forth. There's a vast number of variations, as well as model scaling, that allow endless tweaking. Sure it's not the same as NWN, and I can see benefits to both approaches. But kindly don't think that NWN2 clothing is particularly limited. There's also a pretty large number of clothing mods available for NWN2, along with armor, weapons, shields, hair, and the usual nude variants. Ugh, no thanks. I have seen the "rolling hill" mods for NWN. They're a pale imitation of what you can do with the NWN2 exterior area tool. In NWN2 I can create arbitrary terrains, complete with texturable surfaces, moving water, randomized trees and bushes, paintable grass, relocatable buildings, and, in particular, it doesn't have a boxy grid squished up look. Personally I prefer quality over quantity, so I'll take the NWN2 PW any day. It boils down to personal preferences. I like the power, party control, and improved graphics of NWN2; you prefer the ease and greater number of mods for NWN.

Kamal tests out a frame buffer visual effect that produces a mirror-like surface:

Kallister 68's previous tileset release is a homage to the Elder Scrolls sewers in Oblivion:

Kalister68 demonstrates his Larva creature:

Here's MERP UK's NWN2 Plug #11:

I'll take the Valian Pizza Trading Company, now with extra bread sticks and sauce.

Here's a couple of recent creature projects for NWN2: Ooze -- Larva -- Kalister's still learning creature animation, but to me they look pretty decent.

I'd like to have access to an optional After Action Report with three different levels of detail: Low, Medium, and High. I'd like to be able to find out, for example, how effective my Paladin's heavy armor and estoc were against this particular foe, or how many hit points damage was inflicted by a wizard spell. Just some statistical summaries for us number crunchers.

Well probably not, because protective spells are still available during combat. The buffing variety remains in place, but now you have to assess the risk in using those spells versus using attack spells. If anything, I'd say that adds complexity.

Not quite. Each armor type has a multitude of variations for different body parts, so it is highly customizable. Every piece of armor can be custom tinted, with each having its own tint map and channels. It's not that different really. Plus the graphics looks much better -- NWN are all angular low-poly models that look dreadful in closeup. That's the one area where I feel there is a lack. There's the free product GMax, which provides some of that capability. True, but I haven't found these to be particularly important. They're niche areas. Yes, the NWN2 area building tools are more powerful and allow vastly more variety, at a cost in longer building time. Sure you can throw together a cheesy NWN area in no time flat, as you can with an NWN2 interior area. But the remainder of the module takes just as much work in NWN as it does in NWN2 (scripting, conversations, custom creatures, sound placement, traps, &c.), and that is where I find myself spending much of the time.

An alternative would be to require sufficient refund to cause the airlines to reconsider the business practice. It's a calculated gamble on their part, since they are weighting the risk of overbooking vs. risk of profit loss from empty seats. If the international community were to require, say, a minimum x3 ticket price refund for each passenger being bounced, the airlines should, in theory, alter their practice to include a larger buffer of potential empty seats. That was a really ugly scene. It could have been anyone in that position.

I'm going to guess that the spirit animal does cold damage? Maybe they will also acquire some of the other abilities of shadows or phantoms?

Cirque du Pizza: The Art of Pizza Acrobatics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODOoYGTVvHc

There is a cursed weapon in PoE. Do you mean the Dissapointer or the Unlabored Blade? Both are "kinda" cursed but not really--the effect is temporary and limited to that weapon only. I assumed they were talking about The Grey Sleeper where you cant unequipp it. Yup. I'd have mentioned it, but thought it could be a spoiler to say so. I wouldn't call the Grey Sleeper cursed, because while it can't be removed it has no negative effects and that's *really* important to the idea of a "cursed" item to me. Really, PIllars only does half-baked "cursed" items--stuff that has negative penalties to the items effects, sometimes that can be overcome, or simply the "can't be removed" deal but with no negative effects associated with it. There are not any cursed items in the sense of items that bestow negative effects on the characters and cannot be removed until they are uncursed, which is really the definition of "cursed item" that I feel most people go on when they hear the term. There are many ways to build a cursed item, and they don't necessarily involve negative penalties. One just needs to open ones mind to the possibilities. Yes, but when one says "cursed item" there is a conception in the average RPG players mind of what a cursed item is, and Pillars *does not do that*. That's my point; "cursed items" as are generally thought of are not a thing in this game, they do *other* things instead because they specifically dislike the "cursed items" trope. Aye, fair enough. But this is a thread for crazy ideas we most likely not get.

^ Yes, that makes sense. I wonder though about the "shattered soul" concept that was discussed early on in the development of PoE. Shouldn't non-party members have more difficulty applying their might in this manner?

What I didn't like about DA:O tactics was that you had a fixed limit to the number of slots you could create, then you'd eventually earn more slots as if that were some type of XP award.

On top of a lonely volcanic island is a towering peak with a long, winding road leading to the top. There, the intrepid PC will find a grotto inhabited by a slightly crazed hermit philosopher by the name of The Mighty Grecko. This scrawny-looking old man has amassed a surprisingly large library of scrolls and tomes that all speculate on the nature of souls and magic. Grecko's ultimate aim is to determine why the spiritual energy of an individual seems to be directly linked to their physical strength. He can discuss the topic at great length, listing all of the numerous conjectures for this condition and he endlessly wonders why a scrawny wizard is only able to summon the most paltry fireball spell. In the end, the only viable conclusion he has reached it that it is "the will of the gods". He shudders at the consequences should it be otherwise.

It's a matter of semantics really. All of the PoE attributes represent more than one thing. Aye, I think I'll follow your example. *clunk*