rjshae

Fair enough, you do realize that Bioware has tried very hard to improve DA:I on almost all levels ( and I assume that will include Romance ) and it has been receiving mostly favourable reviews? DA2 has a score of 82 on metacritic from the critics; a high score doesn't mean it will be well received by most players. (Note that I'm part of the 27% who actually enjoyed DA2.) I didn't find the 'romance' options in DA2 the least bit compelling. I think they would have done better to skip those and focus on improving the rest of the game.

Of course they can, but at a cost. It's a matter of weighing the required development and testing time against the potential pay-off for a lower priority addition.

YESSssssss! I think whip weapons are harder to implement because of the unique animations required. Plus perhaps their most effective ability is entanglement, which also requires animations, additional graphics, and special coding.

It's perhaps best not to think of 'Spiritual Strength' in terms of sentience. I find the concept to be similar to the Chinese Qi, or life energy, so it may not be as familiar as Western philosophies used in most fantasy games.

There's this, and there's also the fact that our tastes change as we age. At this point I like to see a deeper development of character interactions, more compelling reasons for engaging in combat, and well crafted challenges. A pretty view is enjoyable for a few hours, but it doesn't carry the story for me.

Perhaps a modder will add in some camp followers that the promancers can ply with sweet words and various gifts acquired from exotic ruins? Like a saucy young barmaid bravely rescued from a burning pub.

They are still listed on the original Kickstarter page.

We clearly have different perspectives here so I'm not sure how beneficial this will be to continue. I'll just say that because I enjoy (abstracted) elements A and B of a game, I would not find it as enjoyable if they drop element B and just have A. To me, A plus B provide more satisfaction than just A or B alone. Does that make sense? OTOH, providing an enjoyable element C instead of B could be an acceptable alternative.

But I'll bet your taste in books has changed since you were a teenager. When I go back and try to play a retro game that I once enjoyed, now I often find it to be just tedious and uninteresting. Even replaying BG/BG2 wasn't nearly as much fun. Games have evolved and so have our expectations of them.

It's the OK-K-K branch....

Congratulations, this discussion is 100% guaranteed to absolutely suck all the life out of a romance.... Bravo. Well done.

You weren't misunderstood, and I agree that a well-designed, creative, and novel encounter can be enjoyable in and of itself. But that's, what, maybe 10-20% of the total for a typical game? Most of the innovation comes with Boss monster fights. Would you miss the filler combat if it was gone from the game? Actually, it doesn't even feel like filler combat, at least to me, with the current level of difficulty in the backer beta, although they've achieved that unintentionally. I don't consider it 'filler'. It's a core element of most cRPGs.

You weren't misunderstood, and I agree that a well-designed, creative, and novel encounter can be enjoyable in and of itself. But that's, what, maybe 10-20% of the total for a typical game? Most of the innovation comes with Boss monster fights.

As an alternative, the designers could provide bestiary XP in the form of rare tomes that are primarily accessible via non-combat paths through the game. Suppose you had, say, a pacifist faction rating because of your aversion to combat, then perhaps certain like-minded loremasters will be willing to part with these unique wares for a small fee.

The problem you are asserting isn't the fault of the XP reward; it's a problem with poor encounter design. My assertion would be that, all else being equal, combat without the expectation of a reward will be less fun than combat with an XP reward at the end.

No its not supposed to be anything. At the very least the devs decide what is it "supposed" to be not you. At the most, using the word supposed to makes your whole sentence invalid. Their original sales pitch did lean heavily on the implicit tie in to the IE games, so it does strongly suggest there would be some similarity. "Project Eternity aims to recapture the magic, imagination, depth, and nostalgia of classic RPG's that we enjoyed making - and playing. At Obsidian, we have the people responsible for many of those classic games and we want to bring those games back…" "Project Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment." So yeah, the use of the word 'supposed' is correct here. That being said, I don't expect an exact copy because the state of the art has advanced since then.

I too like the idea of Bestiary XP, but it depends in part on how fine-grained they choose to make it. If you slay the first wolf that attacks you, then proceed to encounter 1,000 more in order to progress through the game, that could get old. Hopefully there will be different wolf types that you can tackle at different levels. Or else acquire new Bestiary XP at different levels for the same creature type (because you've learned more about it).

So frikkin' awful, you mean. Never has a more fiendishly subtle instrument of torture been devised by the hands of humanity.

They added romances to Icewind Dale too? .....please no. Bromancing the Bone; an intelligent club becomes a member of your party, forming a weapons set with Harry the Horned Helm and Sheela the Salivating Shield. Recharging the items requires a visit to the Last Bed and Brothel.

What do dyslexic zombies like to eat? Brians! *ducks*...

There's another way to look at this: replay value. If you can't cover every skill then there are side quests that you may not be able to complete. You can either wait until your party can satisfy that skill, or you can leave it for another play through. In other words, fewer skills means less replay value.

I can see where the benefits are from a coding and game development perspective; they don't have to worry about adding checks against a large number of skills (for balance purposes). If it was a PnP game though, I don't think it would be an appealing approach because it limits your choices for character creation and development.

I'm pretty much resigned to the skill system being the way it is; they're probably much too far along to make wholesale changes of that type. My current perspective is that the 5 Skills have become essentially a new set of attributes--they are general parameters that serve a relatively broad number of functions, rather than being fine grained tunable parameters.

I'm hoping that the AI will continue to be fine tuned in the patch releases. Movement impacts and FoW adjustments from environmental effects would be nice touches, and probably not too difficult to implement. Perhaps they will become available at higher levels? I suspect they would break the current system, since it is tuned for their absence. I sure hope not.