rjshae

Yes, it's very good; setting a proper mood for a serious drama. I enjoy celtic music so the Dirge of Eir Glanfath works for me, while The Road to Eternity had a nice dreamy quality to it. The prelude had a less than smooth transition at the 0:50s mark, but that might be from the little speakers on my HP laptop. It was otherwise nicely operatic.

Speaking of spells, I wouldn't mind seeing a more sophisticated system of spell learning. Hmm... how about if you always learn a spell at lower level of casting? Each time you cast it, or each time you rise a level, there's a chance your spell level increases. (Achievement!) You can bypass all of this by going to an instructor, or carrying around a weighty tome of your known spells. Yes I know the munchkin gamers won't like this.

Well at least nobody asked whether she had a cod piece.

Bagpipe-blowing scottish dwarves in kilts would be wicked! Joking, of course...

Another approach would be to apply negative consequences of magic use. As you start rapidly firing off spells, you become a magic 'sink' (rather than a 'source') that draws in chaotic energies from the surroundings. You start acrueing penalties to your saving throws and, at some point, your spells suffer an increasing chance of a failure or even backfire. Continue down that road my friend and, rumor has it, you may even be swallowed whole by a vortex of chaotic energy. The net effect of the accrued negative consequences is that Wizards will want to conserve their magic, using it only when necessary. Avoiding magic use gradually allows your body to return to normal, eliminating the penalties. Yes it's kind of a cool down system, but one that allows unlimited spell use... if you are willing to pay the price.

Gather all ye whinners and ye shall march forth and grumble...

I guess it's safe to say that death metal will not be in the repertoire? Love a well-done music track; it can really put the game over the top. Can't wait to hear it.

Having a house pet would be a nice touch. Maybe some hounds for a bit of hunting and a good mouser for keeping out the vermin. A nice touch would be to have the dog(s) give me a giddy greeting at the door.

Another notion along thee lines: What if the pop-up loot box had a bar chart of the party member's encumbrances along one side? It would show the names of the party members along with the percentage of maximum encumbrance, with the color changing as it gets near the limit. Clicking on a loot item would add a shaded region showing the percentage amount of encumbrance increase of adding the item to that character's inventory. The item could then just be dropped on the character name, rather than having to drag it all the way across the screen to the party icons. This way we could avoid having to reshuffle inventory because a party member has picked up too much loot. They could also add bags of holding to the list so we can drag items directly to those containers.

Yes, that would work better in the case where there are multiple loot piles. But I think I would still prefer it to be a pop-up, rather than a modal dialog. Thanks.

I'd actually like the option to obtain crafting skills from a non-adventuring specialist rather than having to spend the party's own skill points obtaining a proficiency. Sure it might cost a little more, but then you can focus on building the party's adventuring skills and gathering recipes.

If the setting and design prove popular, it might be better for them to license it out to a well-established company that's focused on table-top gaming. That would eliminate most of the risk of diversification and increase the odds of a successful game release.

Another poll with incomplete answers. Not really conclusive. Ah well.

The strength and range of opinions just means that people are passionate about their RPGs, which is a good thing. I'm not too concerned that somebody's pet peeve or preference is going to "wreck" this project.

Yep, plus there could be popup mini descriptions of an item when you hover over an icon.

Will this topic need a cooldown?

Well, but then the dead body's inventory would appear every time you mouse over it... that would be quite inconvenient, wouldn't it? Nope, because you "move the mouse over the corpse, right-click". But they could add an option to control- or shift-mouse-over in cases where that is preferable.

Hopefully this hasn't been discussed before... One of the elements of CRPGs I find tiresome is the modal dialog box used for looting a corpse or a container. You have to click on the corpse, possibly scroll through a menu and select the looting option, relocate the mouse to the dialog window, grab the items you want, then relocate the mouse and click on the close button. It requires at least five steps, each consisting of single-handed mouse positioning/clicks. When this is done over and over it can grow very tedious. Wouldn't it be nice if we had popup, mouse-sensive interface that functioned more like a graphical menu? You move the mouse over the corpse, right-click, and the menu pops up showing the loot items in a graphical array. You then click on the items you want and finally move the mouse well outside an area surrounding the popup to make it go away. The number of required steps drops to three and the last does not require a precise mouse positioning. (The shift key could be used to hold the popup open so you can click and drag, then make it close when you release the key.) What do you think? Please be nice. Thanks.

It's only overreaction if you start posting USING CAPS or GIANT FONTS! with different colors! Usually an indicator of a single-issue fanatic.

With a single-character game I enjoy supplying a big chunk of the character skill. But for a party-based game I just want to be the element supplying the decision making. That makes character specialization more significant and opens the game up to a wider range of players (including those players that are intelligent but not quite so coordinated).

Who needs a glowing aura? It's pretty obvious. Generic no-name bandit? Don't loot. Named miniboss NPC? Loot. And if one of the twenty no-name bandits had a randomly generated gem? I guess you'll miss it.

Not me. Perfection is the enemy of good. I'm just hoping they'll give us the table-top feel and atmosphere of the Baldur's Gate series, but push the envelope with new capabilities, refinements, and options.

Constantly finding the same mediocre equipment on dozens of corpses could get old really fast. I think that's probably why they don't do it. Yes it's useful to collect equipment at low levels for conversion into cash, but after that it's not terribly productive. It reminds me of the old gold-box series of games where you'd get a humongous list of ordinary loot frustratingly intermixed with a few rare items of value. Perhaps there is a useful middle ground? Bodies with higher value loot could be flagged in some way (with a glowing aura?) so that you know which ones to pillage. (The equivalent of checking the bodies for treasure.) You can then safely ignore the other bodies if you so choose. It might also be nice to have a tie-in with the appraise skill for successfully identifying high value loot.

How true. I also trust them to make common sense decisions on what suggestions to include and what to leave out. The limited budget will inevitably force some compromises. Hopefully the end product will sell like hotcakes and they can give us great sequels with more cool features.

Rage? I think not. That seems like a reasonable approach for a CRPG.