rjshae

This isn't true. Compared to D&D, they've actually expanded the range of possible Wizards. You can now have a stupid brute who can cast targeted damage-causing arcane spells in a powerful manner. This just isn't possible with a game system where arcane magic is entirely dependent on Int. You can still play a physically weak but mentally powerful Wizard by focusing on AoE spells and non-damage spells. In many battles, a larger area will more than make up for a diminished damage rate.

Might in PoE isn't anything except a representation. One may choose to intepret it in a certain way, but it isn't defined as a specific physical property. I choose to interpret it as muscle power that serves as a magical capacitor; you choose to view it as a property of the mind. Either way works; they both could be wrong.

Must a godlike always have a unique head that prevents wearing a helmet? Couldn't they have, say, unique feet that prevent wearing shoes?

It's not at all abhorrent. Sounds like a sensible option to me. I'd like to see them take it even further and provide an optional After Action Report with different levels of detail. But I know that wouldn't be a priority.

Gen. Michael Hayden: N Korea will make nuke capable of hitting Seattle! Situation will be dire as soon as they can hit a city worth saving. — Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) April 6, 2017 Disregarding the pure evil nature of her statement, implying that an opponent can strike a U.S. city without repercussions will encourage that opponent to do so. The only logical position is to say that a strike on any U.S. city is a strike against the entire country, be that city Seattle, Detroit, New Orleans, or M. Coulter's kitchen.

^ How about a magic item scrounger who'll look for a magic weapon of a particular type... for a favor?

The end of the game is the point where your character is supposed to be at their highest level, and accordingly the items are among the best you're likely to obtain. It wouldn't make sense to put them earlier because they'd let you plow through any battles. An alternative would be to have upgradable items and make the best upgrades available toward the end.

Bring new meaning to the term 'spanner'...

Well... they're not Christian, so the religion is entirely different. They are also a colonial power, which is behaving more like the Western European nations of that epoch. (Presumably then they don't own a spice trading monopoly?) But otherwise yes, they are deliberately modeled after Renaissance Italians. To me that's a break from all the masses of fantasy works based off English culture.

Tile use made sense in NWN because of the primitive graphics requirements, restricted number of tile variants, and limited walkmesh flexibility. But increasing area design flexibility requires an exponential growth in the number of tiles needing to be developed. There'd be no reasonable way to, say, make a Fallout 3/4-style area map using tiles because the memory requirements on the end systems would quickly become prohibitive. Exterior area tiles are not going to cut it; they only made some sense for interior areas of NWN2, and in many ways they are very limiting for game design. Ideally, for maximum efficiency, you want to make repeated use of each tile, but what this does is produce repetition and tedium. NWN areas all end up looking pretty much the same, like an enhanced version of a GoldBox game.

I suspect they won't answer that right now because of marketing reasons. They'll let us know in due course.

Agreed. I'd say grazes of disabling effects should merely be debilitating: strong enough to allow a sneak attack from a rogue, but not strong enough to prevent all actions.

Twin Elms actually seemed better on a subsequent play through. I think the change of pace following the Defiance Bay events may be throwing people off a bit -- that made the Twin Elms section feel anticlimactic. When I went through the White March after Defiance Bay, it made the pacing in Elms feel more like a pleasant interlude.

A possibly far fetched scenario would have Beamdog making an IWD2:EE release, then working on a sequel.

An "Exertion" talent might work for this purpose. You take a modal talent that lets you use a different attribute to determine your Might damage bonus: Wizards use Int; Fighters use Con; Priests use Res, Rogues use Dex, &c. However, this talent always causes endurance damage each time you use it. This talent would let your wimpy Wizard cast a devastating Fireball by focusing her massive Intellect on the task, but leave her more physically exhausted afterwards. I suspect this wouldn't be unbalancing because the player must weight the cost versus the benefit during each battle. Sure they could min-max the different attribute, but most of the time the endurance penalty would be too steep to allow constant use.

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.