khango

Pre level five the IE games (mainly BG1 and IWD) are a total drag. Please no more pathetic level one. Did it really take you the first 20 years of your life to learn 1 spell? Are you really a muscled 40 year old barbarian who can't hit a damn bear with a sword in 10 swings? Enough is enough with the stupid low level crud. In Infinity engine terms you should start at level 5 or 6. (Though I guess in IWD II, things were a little different? I haven't played it through, but in the first part you could sure kill all the dumb goblin things with ease. Of course it's still stupid that you're supposedly a well known above above average adventuring company starting out as level one from a story perspective. Also, you came to fight but brought no equipment? Really? But I digress...) PST's cranium rats weren't so bad.

The utility of epic wizard battle replays can't be underestimated.

I don't think it requires intelligent video recording... it ought to be a lot like making a demo in quake or something, Probably replayed from recorded input and effect data, rather than video.

Agree the title isn't clear, though.

Battle replays would be awesome.

I'll be happy if all the notes and journals and crud you collect can go in a 'scrapbook' instead of hogging inventory.

I started with 50, then decided I wanted expansion + beta access, which is 95, which then rounded to 99 because Odin likes 9s. Or whatever. I thought really hard about the 110 tier, but in the end beta + expansion > special badges + postcard, pretty much. Mostly I wanted beta because I'm a Linux user and expect it'll need more competent testers.

Yeah, it looks like it'll be a lot closer than I expected. Obsidian probably did the math and tried to figure out what goal and final amount would get the most stretch.

In the stretch goal thread I expressed a view similar the one in this thread - namely that I wasn't keen on the adventurer's hall as a stretch goal because it seemed to be a rather unclear concept with the possibility of breaking immersion or causing lots of frustration for different types of players depending on how it's implemented. I suggested that a better goal would be an advanced player-character creation and management faculty, like a 'gallery of heroes,' which let you look at your various characters side by side and start games with them as main char + join-able NPCs at known pre-defined locations, such as specific Inns, rather than having some sort of meta in-game thing where you get a (for a bunch of gold) a vaguely random character of a certain class or have to (even worse) roll your party member in-game. With such a system it might also be possible to vary motivations for joining a party, so they could be mercs, or they could have some sort of semi-random story tie in, or they could just have 'childhood friend' cop-out (or maybe even bio-based?) back stories, but whichever might be radio chooseable when configuring your new game. Part of me thinks that that "adventurer's hall" might merely be a code name for 'Copper Coronet,' which wouldn't be so bad, though.

I kind of think the firefly people and waterbeards would be amusing. Firefly thief: Dang it, hide-in-shadows failed again! Shopkeep to waterbeard: Hey there! Quit dripping on my floor!

As a developer I think this thread has a very relevant concern. Even outside of the scaling issues, playing 2560x1440 @ 28" diag is vastly different than 2560x1440 @ 11" diag. Coping probably requires having a very high-resolution render and then choosing a zoom level/downsampling level that matches the current resolution/size combo. On that 11", for example, you'd probably want to be zoomed a bit more than on the 28", and their UI would probably need to take up differing % of screen area despite the same pixel resolution. However, I kind of assumed that the developers would be considering this - we live in an era when the traditional PC has a vast variance in resolutions and sizes. On the low end there are netbooks and ultrabooks that can vary from 1024x600 to maybe even 2560x1440 in a few really rare instances while remaining quite small. At the same time large screens are usually 24"+, not to mention the modern usage of 1080p TVs as monitors in some circumstances, and you've got just as large of a DPI variation at the large screen end of things, not even mentioning the enthusiast tendency to have multiple screens. So yeah, if they hadn't been thinking about this, I guess a wakeup call is good.

I haven't used chain contingency or horrid wilting frequently in any of my BGII+ToB playthroughs. If there's one thing I've found after hearing/reading about people playing BG II, it's that everyone had a different version of 'the approach that works.' That's why there are '50 ways to kill your Kangaxx.' I'm not sure what I did use a lot... something that removed combat protections I'm pretty sure. By all accounts the various clone-caster spells are quite powerful, though I've never used them much.

I'm against MLP world, but otherwise I mostly care about coherence of vision and consistency, not that it fall somewhere particular on the 'why so serious' spectrum.

I'm hoping there's a unicorn hunt.

I'd be all for high-level characters with the right abilities being able to become lichs, and I doubt the whole phylactery thing would ruin gameplay -- when you die you respawn with no items next to wherever you stashed it... Maybe even potential for converting your whole party to undead.

Count me as someone who doesn't think the infinity engine games have terribly broken potion systems. Now managing them in inventory was a bitch, especially once you accumulated lots of junk. And I pretty much never had a use for many of the set dext to 18 style potions, But give me a potion of storm giant strength any day. When you're low level they helped mitigate quest order issues and balance issues somewhat, too. My one gripe is that I hate scrambling through inventory to use them, because let's face it, you never end up having the potion you want in your quick item slot. For some reason it's always buried in random character x's potion case.

If you want a unique take on a necromancer and vampires I really recommend The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington. It's a fun and amazing read, perhaps even set in approximately the same 'period' as PE, though it's not really fantasy.

I am of the party that thinks the map could do with some tweaks and improvements, and perhaps some more interesting geography and better naming even outside of the question of artistry. However, I do not view it as something likely to have a huge +/- effect on the overall game.

When I think of warrior monks, I think of something more along the lines of: ^ I want the monk class to be like these guys. Yay for armorless zealots of doom, not Zen kung-fu.

I'm all for firearms. I also love the fact that it looks like the era will have rapiers! After all, what's a highwayman without his sword and rapier? I don't get all the firearm hate. Forgotten Realms & the planes are filled with mad scientist gnomes and such making flying ships, tanks, beams, golums, robots, crude cloning machines, etc, all made from mixtures of magic and engineering. What's a dueling pistol or two?

I don't need floating compass markers, but in the giant cities and such it really helps if houses have name plates or map markers. While I agree that in-game floating markers are a mistake, to a certain degree it feels weird when you barge into people's living rooms because you don't have a clear idea of what's where or you're looking for a random encounter. So I think it's good for quests to get map markers, though if they managed to give every building a nameplate or sign, that'd probably work, too.

Honest-to-goodness unwinnable situations irritate me. In the '90s I played the Starfleet Academy videogame and repeated the Kobayashi Maru endlessly because I didn't realize how it was supposed to work. In PS:T they talked up that guy with the skulls like mad, but you couldn't even fight him. It was so obnoxious. Now I'm all for Kangaxx-like encounters, though if you use a little bit of strategy he's not hard to kill. Particularly if you have a barbarian in your party you can pretty much just enrage and attack him, though if you don't, then you've got to get some spell immunities or summons to distract him. But yeah, when I didn't really know what I was doing on my first play-through, he was pretty much impossible. So yeah, bring on the crazy ridiculous critters that you actually have to figure out how to fight.

I think they'll hit ~$3.2 mil, but just my opinion. Maybe there will be a last minute surge that's even larger than I expect.

Looks great, though my first though I keep wondering if the water will be animated. Otherwise, I tend to think it might be a segment of a larger area - the largest DL was only about 1 large monitor in size, I think, and I'm kind of figuring individual areas are probably several large monitors large. But yeah, looks amazing.

I'm hoping chanters will have an ability to 'harmonize' so that their songs get a bonus if more than one is chanting at once. I think it'd be cool.