rjshae

I do hope they don't follow the path of those ridiculously overpriced backpacks in DA:O.

I have a notion for a Cipher-specific combat ability: Combat Lore. Each round that the cipher has been fighting a civilized or semi-civilized creature, he automatically makes a lore skill check (opposed by the opponent's intelligence and level). On a success, he recognizes specific aspects of the fighting style and preferences, allowing him to draw upon obscure knowledge and make crafty adjustments to his tactics. This grants him a +1 bonus to attack and defense against that specific opponent.

In that case, we may have a position open for you in upper management...

The scene flashes forward to your funerary rites. Your friends and companions are standing around your grave. Each, in turn, presents a eulogy in their own inimitable way; on the whole it is a sad, moving experience. Finally they wander off. You try to move your character, to cast a spell or sing a song, but nothing happens. Gradually the light fades into the evening twilight. A gloomy storm rolls in and the rain beings to fall. It grows every darker as night falls and the precipitation grows heavy. The seasons pass. Occasionally one of your friends drop by to leave some flowers and say a few words. But this happens less and less frequently. Spring turns to summer, then comes fall. The leaves from the towering oak gently fall onto your grave. Finally, your lingering soul loses its grip upon the mortal realm and returns at last to the great wheel.

But that (50% or less) is pretty much the tabletop gaming experience. I suppose if you were only going to play it through once then you'd want to hit most of it. That spoon-fed approach isn't for everybody though.

Merry Christmas everybody! Santa's on his way...

For me, the linear flow in IWD2 doesn't make an area feel better designed. It just feels pipelined like a factory floor. I've attempted IWD2 twice, but became bored from the linearity. The looser area designs of BG gave more of a sense of choosing my own destiny. Yes there were some bottlenecked areas leading to boss battles, but the looser mix of destinations felt a lot more like the table-top experience.

Yeah, that forest was a nuisance. But at least it was satisfying to finally finish it. I like forests in RL and the map for PE seems rife with them, so hopefully the game will include at least some wilderness exploration with multi-map forested areas.

Prior discussions mentioned Chanters being able to chain spells, so I'm pretty sure they will. If anything, I'd guess that blasts will be unique to wizards and that chanters will have some direct combat capability. I wonder though if by chaining spells they just meant a queue of spell actions, or if the chained spells would interact in some manner? Shrug.

The one exception I'd like to mention is that of skills that normally take an extended apprenticeship to acquire. Realistically, it should be decidedly difficult to acquire such skills, unless you've already attained them as part of your starting class.

A few points: Just to enhance the plausibility a bit, I think there should be some circumstances in which the party can not access their Stash. For example, if they step through a one-way portal into another dimension, there's going to be no way they can transport loot back to their resting place. Hence, any circumstance in which they do not have access to a resting spot, they shouldn't have access to their Stash. Likewise, any time they are operating under a countdown or when they are being held prisoner. To limit potential exploits, they may need to limit what you can do while your stash is open. For example, if you are placing new loot in your stash, they would need to prevent the older stash-based loot from being transferred or dropped. What I would like to know is whether you get access to your stash when you're at a store. Will you need to transport salable goods to the store, or will it always be available?

It doesn't matter what the developers do; somebody isn't going to like it. Squeaky wheels are going to squeak.

Considering that underground areas are normally pitch black, creatures that hunt by touch and use entanglement and/or paralyzing toxins probably make evolutionary sense. Perhaps something that uses a Roper-type range attack to catch and paralyze its prey, while employing feathery antennae to sense movements. It could have a worm-like body so it can slither through cracks, then unfold its arms when a prey is near. For giant insects, I suspect that a centipede-like form is more realistic. The individual arms don't need to be too large, yet it can grow to a significant size. Perhaps give it a stinger arm and grappling mandibles. It would be relatively slow compared to other animals, so it may need to rely on surprise. Perhaps the outer shell has developed a chameleon-like camouflage ability that allow it to remain in place, then ambush a passing animal. For draconic beings, I'm not too fond of the color dragons from D&D. Instead, creatures that have adapted to individual biomes would be fitting. For example, a Forest Dragon could be long and sinuous so it can wiggle its way between the growths. The arms would be long and grasping, allowing it to pluck victims off the ground then bite their heads off. It may still have wings, but they are built for gliding across open meadows.

It might depend on how they display the inventory. With a grid system, tabs might make less sense. But they could always do a combination: a grid tab for inventory placement, then item-type tabs for displaying item properties.

One of the best ever pets in a video game was in Torchlight (and its ancestor: rogue-likes such as Nethack). Totally unrealistic, of course.

If any of the classes are restricted by weapons, it should be based on practical reasons like cultural preferences, legal restrictions, roles in combat, or training availability. Hence, rogues may tend to carry weapons that are easy to conceal or are useful from ambush, while druids would likely use weapons that can be crafted from natural materials found in their area. Possibly the chosen character background could be used to determine what weapon training your character has received on a per-class basis.

At least the isometric view removes one of the reasons for pausing: rotating the camera to see what is going on. Another reason for pausing is to see what sequence of actions your characters are up to. Drakensang did a decent job of communicating this by showing action icons next to the character portraits. The problem there, of course, is that you had to keep looking up from the battle to see the character portraits. I'm not sure if there is a better way to communicate this information, besides the animation sequences. Shrug. In the IE games it helped that spell casting was made obvious.

Speaking of "wapon" scaling, how's this from Dark Souls 2?

Yes, that was my thinking as well: that it functions like a storage chest. A portable storage chest so you don't need to keep trekking back and forth to your base. It's a reasonable approach and I'm still not seeing a cause for significant concern. If there are some specific design issues with it, well then presumably those will show up during testing and the designers can fine tune it. What I didn't like about the inventory system in the old IE games were cases where you would overfill your carrying load, then need to spend several minutes shifting pack loads around until everybody was mobile again. Hopefully the Stash will reduce or eliminate this problem. That seems like a positive in my book.

Suddenly the sheep start to look nervous...

A more detailed spread of scholarly skills would require that the party is going to spend a lot of time performing research or investigation. I'm not sure whether that will be the case in PE. Having multiple scholar skills may be counter-productive if they have little use in the game. Players won't be happy spending a bunch of points on a skill that has a low value.

^^^^ D&D Paladin also had turn undead, IIRC. For me the ability to sway undead seems logical because of the priest's association with funeral rites. It's an important and distinctive element of the priest class in D&D that elevates them past being a simple healer.

A point? Nope. Just wanted to chat about wildlife, so I threw out some discussion points.

True. Giant flies would be more like rabbits and deer; added for a bit of flavor rather than being something perilous. But you don't get many birds in dungeons, so you'd need something to catch in those giant spider webs. I'd actually like to see some giant centipedes appear in the game; I know they're probably difficult to render well, but for me they've always been a staple of low-level dungeons. Hovering creatures, like harpies and stirges, seem okay to me, as long as they show some vertical range of motion during animations.

I like to see just enough detail to differentiate the weapons and make the tactical choices interesting, yet not so much that the game gets bogged down in details. But the developers are in the best position, and have the necessary experience, to make that choice. I'm sure I'll be happy with the combat system they decide upon; what I've heard thus far sounds decent.