Zeckul

ICEWIND DALE 3 CONFIRMED

That doesn't cut it in the world of music and game copyright though - You need a written agreement to ensure that your let's plays aren't false flagged and that you can actually prove to websites like Youtube that you're allowed to do so. So a confirmation that they're using Paradox's policy or putting one of their own up would be great. Ha! Good look "proving" anything to Youtube. If you don't want issues just disable the music. It doesn't seem that prominent in PoE anyway.

Looking badass.

If I don't die in the next week I'll be playing Pillars of Eternity!

Icewind Dale, what else?

Characters knocked down unconscious and rising up as soon as the last enemy in sight is defeated is not realistic and somewhat breaks immersion. But it's still a lot more plausible than the party having access to an infinite time warp mechanism allowing them to set waypoints in time (saving the game) and travelling back to any of these waypoints at any time (reloading). I think the main advantage of the former is to dramatically cut down on the number of times you'll resort to the latter in ordinary gameplay, and that's a great thing.

Didn't watch all of it, but was happy to see combat evolving at a tolerable speed and without tons of micromanagement - as it should be, even on "hard" difficulty. Environments are beautiful and I'm very excited to explore this new world. Perhaps it's not fair to compare any dungeon level to Durlag's Tower or Watcher's Keep - those were the highlights of the entire BG series, but most encounters in BG weren't remotely as interesting as these. Lots of random packs of hobgoblins and wolves and xvarts. These dungeons also shipped in expansion packs and reflect a degree of mastery of the tools that Obsidian may not have time to acquire during PoE's development but may reach in future installments.

It's interesting how IWD is both so flawed and so fun to play. As you point out so many things require knowledge of what's to come, in party design, spell selections, pre-buffing tactics etc., which makes the game obtuse and frustrating on a first playthrough; but then as you learn how to play it well, the sheer variety of party compositions and tactics make it incredibly replayable and interesting. Modern games usually try to do away with die-and-reload gameplay... except for Dark Souls that is. And Dark Souls is a ton of fun. It's intuitively wrong to punish the player for not knowing about something he couldn't have known, but isn't it fun?

In this style of game, this is a stupid notion - ESPECIALLY because the side content is not scaled, you could go to the same area at level 4 or level 8 like in the IE games and you are supposed to be able to reap the rewards of going there early. That's the whole ****ing point of doing content in a non-linear fashion. Getting the visible items on the characters you fight is not the only possible type of reward for defeating them. What I'm saying is that this system puts more constraints on encounter design in terms of what you fight vs what you get. You can't give an enemy some ridiculous weapon if the player will end up with that and it completely breaks the game for him.

I can imagine that this could create balance problems - they might want to pit you against enemies equipped with great gear but not necessarily let you get their gear - as well as generating a ton of crap loot that players will have to sift through if they don't want to miss actually useful items. Is the only argument for this familiarity or expectation based on prior experience? That doesn't seem like a very good reason. The only thing that would really bother me is enemies dropping nonsensical loot (i.e. Diablo - bats dropping full plate), but I wouldn't mind the game filtering out the generic crap for me.

Don't you think that making rest depend on consumables could lend these players (of which I definitely am part) to treat spells as they do consumables? This might even create some metagaming, i.e. you need to know the area and encounters to plan exactly what to spells to use and when, rather than being able to improvise on the go without fear of running out of vital resources later and be forced to reload from some much earlier point. IMO camp supplies should be abundant to prevent such behavior and unpleasant experiences, at least on easy and normal difficulty. Still prevents players from abusing rest, but shifts focus away from resource management which isn't much fun in my experience. Give me plenty of challenge but plenty of resources to deal with it.

One point to mention also is that if there's voice over the written dialogue then the UI sound will conflict briefly with the spoken dialogue. So, I agree it should be removed.

I'm not sure you are correct on skeletons and spiders in BG1. The 4th level Spider Spawn was a new spell in BG2 and for the 5th level Animate Dead I'm not sure there's any scroll for it in BG1. It's true though that there was no limit on the number of summons which allowed for completely broken summon spam tactics. I probably wouldn't have beaten Sarevok without my trusty wand of summoning You're probably right that I underestimate Monster Summoning, but with Priests getting Animate Dead at level 3 I never found a need to summon anything with my mages.

That's a well thought-out explanation but I'm not entirely convinced. Concerning summoning, wizards were the worst summoners in BG. Their first summoning spell was the 3rd level Monster Summoning 1 which spawns such weak creatures that they can only serve as a brief diversion. The entire Monster Summoning line was basically this weak. Mages could summon elementals in BG2 but they were relatively weak (compared to priest summons), had a very long casting delay and a chance of the elemental turning against the wizard so this could only be used pre-battle. So I'm not terribly concerned that wizards are not summoners in PoE as they never were good summoners anyway and PoE tries to do away with pre-battle metagaming mechanics. Absence of utility magic - Fleet Feet, Arcane Dampener, Minor Grimoire Imprint look like valid counterexamples to me. Spell damage - I haven't played the beta much, but based on its description Minoletta's Missiles look more powerful than Magic Missile until character level 5, with a fixed 3 missiles. Jolting touch is basically chain lightning at level 1 - probably not doing a ton of damage but better than anything a level 1 mage could cast in BG. There are lots of AoE spells with damage over time, much more than in BG it seems. Effects like death, petrification; the 6th level Gaze of the Adragan petrifies enemies within the area of effect so it's like a much more powerful version of the 6th level BG petrification. Also "The 6th level Death Ring "potentially destroys those with low stamina" so similar to death spell, more situational but potentially more powerful - could conceivably kill higher level targets. Seems more interesting to me than the all-or-nothing Death Spell. BG had no spells of lower level with such devastating effects. Immunities - high-level immunities led to problematic gameplay in BG2 - basically an obscure rock-paper-scissors dispelling game, I despised it so I welcome less focus on immunities this time around. That said, Arcane Reflection and Minor Arcane Reflection are spell immunity spells and there are several spells that grant effects similar to mirror image or increase defense in some way. All the very interesting spells you mention - Simulacrum, Project Image, Time Stop, Limited Wish, were very high-level spells in BG2 and BG2 was a high-level campaign. PoE is not a high-level campaign, it's more akin to IWD in its reach. There's no reason to expect very high-level spells in PoE. Mages were never that powerful or interesting in low-level D&D, they got ridiculous in high-level D&D and BG2 illustrated that but there's no reason to expect PoE should be anything like BG2 or high-level D&D in regard to its mages.