rjshae

I think the fact that they are professional game designers says a lot. We all have our own personal preferences in what we desire for a game, but they are the ones who will have access to the full picture and the experience to know what makes the most sense in terms of implementation. I trust them in the sense that I trust the plumber to fix the plumbing or a lawyer to understand the law (plus their record speaks for itself).

Perhaps the developers could include "accomplishments" that apply to mundane weapons, shields and armor? If you use a piece of gear repeatedly throughout a large stretch of a game, then that very familiarity with the item's idiosyncrasies could actually provide you with some interesting bonuses? Said benefits might not be as good as those from a superior item, but they'd be enough to make it worthwhile for you to stick with the familiar. The developers could even allow some customization of the item, giving it a name and allowing it to receive some unique enchantments that are specifically tied to your soul. Maybe they should give every piece of equipable gear an idiosyncrasy modifier? It could be zero for well-made gear made by a local craftsman, or negative for gear made by other races and cultures (and/or badly made gear). As you use the gear for a while, or have it adjusted by a craftsman, the negative modifier goes away... and eventually becomes a positive as you use it over the course of several class levels.

Yes I really, really hope they can fix path finding and make the path following algorithms look a little more plausible. I.e. more like following a cubic B-spline than a segmented line. I know it's a complicated problem when you include collision avoidance, but it would be very nice if they can pull it off.

They're just bits in a computer. I swat 'em like flies and save the pacifism for living creatures.

Snotty nobles that hold a handkerchief to their face as you approach and bid you begone because you're beneath their notice. A shifty-looking black market dealer standing in a shady, back corner area of the slums. Grumpy dwarves who like nothing better than drinking you under the table then bashing enemies with a battle axe. Bored, barely helpful guards who would rather have joined the army. Insane fanatics preaching at a street corner and actually being listened to seriously by a group of locals.

A feature I enjoyed from the BG series was the ability to overhear enemies that you could not yet see. That added a lot to the atmosphere, although some dampening and distortion from the dungeon acoustics would have been welcome as well. I'm replaying Fallout 3 right now, and the ability to overhear creatures I cannot yet see gives the game space an inhabited feel.

Yes the NWN2 updater is nice, but it's also reassuring that there is a downloadable patching system as an alternative. I've used the latter several times and it worked fine, but some stronger reassurances from the publisher would have been welcome.

I basically like being able to form a front line of hardened fighters and summoned creatures, then managing the ranged support: archery, healing, spell casting, sneak attacks, and so forth. The latter forms a type of reserve unit that I can target against specific threats or use to shore up weak areas of the front. To me that's the most interesting element of the fight. But then I'm an old board wargamer, so I enjoy making tactical adjustments and managing it as a small battlefield. Hence, I'd be interested in skills that allow the group to fight as a team, maintain a cohesive front, and perform special strikes against specific targets.

We've had this discussion before. Do a search on the threads and you'll find this isn't a universally welcomed option.

My understanding is that plate armor was particularly effective against slashing weapons such as the scimitar, but less so against impacting weapons such as the war hammer. Impacts would transmit their energy through the solid plate and hence needed to be absorbed by the padding underneath. This could perhaps be modeled by a bleeding wounds system: penetrating weapons inflict lower amounts of base damage but cause bleeding wounds that last for several combat rounds. Softer light armor can then be at least as good, if not better at absorbing impact damage as plate armor, but it is easier to penetrate this armor and cause bleeding wounds. Medium-type armor can represent a compromise between the two: decent armor that is good, but not excellent, at absorbing both penetrating and impact damage. Having separate classes of penetrating and impacting weapons results in a rock-paper-scissors system of weapons vs. armor. Using a fully-developed bleeding wounds system gives the player an additional factor to be concerned about during combat. The player can sweat bullets as the stamina of the wounded front line fighter continues to drop for an uncertain number of rounds, making healing that character more of a priority. The wounded fighter may need to switch to defensive mode for several rounds while waiting for the healing magic to come.

The DA:O camp sites were actually a pretty decent idea. A little variety would have been good though.

Another biased poll with answers deliberately worded to skew the responses. Meh.

^^^^ Fair enough. But to implement a realistic age system in a RPG you'd normally have to use a point-based build like GURPS or Champions. That way you can balance out the decline in certain stats due to aging with an increase in skills from the greater experience. To do it in a D&D-type game you'd have to do something like transfer unused ability score points into some amount of additional skill points and higher caps on certain skills.

Let's see... half the number of animations in order to allow left handed weapon wielding? Which to choose? Hmm... Hard luck lefties. (<-- note the left-handed animation.)

If it's a medieval society that doesn't have many defenses against disease, most humans probably won't live to a ripe old age anyway: 18-30 seems like a reasonable range for adventurers. I'm not sure what the impact of that would be for the other races. Perhaps elves, dwarves, and the "God races" are not as susceptible to common diseases? Possibly they could allow players to select a background that includes a preset age? Somebody with a background as a wizard's apprentice or a priestly scribe may be older than a militiaman or a pickpocket.

Honey, the cat just coughed up something... and I think it's moving.

A zoom would add a lot, IMHO. With the increased resolution, it would be a nice touch--not so much for tactical combat--but for searching, thieving, even just to get a closer look at your avatar's armor, etc. I've been playing a little IWD II recently, and think a feature like this would be useful and appreciated. For situations like walking your party around a town, you could zoom in and get a closer look at your immediate surroundings, instead of just looking at a screen full of rooftops. Same goes for a narrow dead-end tunnel, when the rest of the screen is black. I have this sneaking suspicion that the zoom won't have quite the range you're expecting. The area pixmaps likely won't scale well, so there's no point in allowing zoom down to the point where you can see the armor details. My guess would be down to 2-4 × normal.

Yuk. Italics should be infrequent and used properly. I'm not visually impaired, but the same guidelines provide a good standard for readable computer text. http://www.textmatte...isual_impaired/

Anti-aliased text with good contrast, infrequent color and style changes, and a minimum of eye strain would be preferred, thank you.

Look it's a herd of trolls...

I like this approach, it makes each armor type feel unique. Something similar has already been seen in Arcanum and Fallout. For example, Arcanum's plate armors caused the wearer to suffer more damage from electrical attacks while Fallout's metal and Tesla armors were better at deflecting laser beams than most other armor types. Scientifically that's backwards. The better conductivity of metal armor would cause electrical attacks to channel around the wearer and into the ground. http://jockohomo.tum...h-voltage-tesla Heat and cold would be a problem though; they should just go right through to the inner padding.

In addition to the formulae and ingredients for crafting, I'd like to see more sophisticated infrastructure requirements. At the low end these could just be a few basic tools and a work bench. But as the item potency grows, so should the support structure. This would lead to a work room with tools, workbenches, a master craftsman, journeymen assistants, common and rare materials and components, plus, of course, the recipe. It should also take a significant amount of time and labor to finish a significant magic item.

I don't think this would be a good idea. Are you going to give every human enemy some freakish ability? No. Novel abilities should be rare so that they stand out when encountered. The developers can provide enough of a challenge with interesting tactics and situations.

You mean, don't make it like the Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale series end games? Or something else? It was more a bit of paranoia creeping in that things would go the route of most MMO's lately (including DnD Online) in that for most of the game one is progressing through various tiers of magically enchanted items that could easily be farmed. Enchanted items in my opinion should be the endgame; they shouldn't be commonplace junk. It's all summed up in the fact that running around with magical gear just doesn't feel magical in many RPGs, since it's so mundane. I'm big on mechanics that are interesting enough to function without magic and enchantments; they've already said the setting is low-magic in terms of healing, so maybe that's a good sign. I just think that modern RPGs have just generally become saturated with enchanted items, such that you're behind the curve if you don't have one by level 3, and I don't like it. Thanks for the clarification. I can relate to your viewpoint, and the economics of enchanted items doesn't make much sense in most cRPGs. From another perspective though, a scarcity of enchanted items for the general population doesn't necessarily equate to magic impoverishment for the party. In a medieval society, potent and costly magical items are likely to gravitate toward the wealthy and powerful, who, through quests, are also frequent targets of the party's activities. Thus one might expect that the party would be much more likely to accrue enchanted items than most. Where the presence of plentiful enchanted may make less sense (to me at least) is with a street vendor who is somehow selling expensive magical goods to the locals. Most of the ordinary population in a medieval society can't even afford decent armor, so how would they ever get their hands on a powerful magic item costing tens of thousands of gold pieces? Such items would be held close to hand by the rich and the nobility, so purchasing these goods should be difficult. Perhaps it requires an exclusive agent to handle rare goods, in exchange for a hefty deposit? Anyway, my 2cp worth.

...The written word is not a form of magic. They were keeping meticulously detailed census records in Britain during the time of William the Conqueror and even before. This is not magic. It's simple administration for the purposes of taxation and the levying of soldiery. The written word is as mundane and un-magical as you can get. Mmm... true. But completely besides the point.