Zeckul

Before we start tuning a lot of values, we need to get the basic bugs fixed. The next update to the BB should clear out the most frustrating aspects of simply selecting, moving, and executing commands reliably. Then we can look at overall combat speed tuning, among other things. Yup, this is why after playing 30 minutes with this I thought "I'm reserving judgement on all the systems until it gets minimally playable". Lots of interesting discussions going on, but even with a combat system designed by God himself people would still not be having much fun and try to blame it on the combat system.

Practically unplayable. I couldn't get to the ogre because one of my characters would get stuck in place indefinitely for some obscure reason. My PC would suddenly get stats boosted by like 10000% and become unkillable. Combat feels unresponsive and basic party AI doesn't work well. This is all bugs, not design flaws, so it's still going to be awesome. Graphics are pretty much all that one could have hoped for and the UI (once polished) should be among the best if not the best I'll ever have seen in an RPG. If I had more time I could explore a bit more but there are such major issues at this point that I feel like waiting for the next build to retry it.

Tentative bump?

Apart from you not liking the current system and preferring a more "traditional" one, what gameplay advantages would you get from changing the attribute system?

Deer didn't attack on sight

I found the IE games very difficult initially. Now I find them kind of easy but that's the result of much learning. I like that I find PoE similarly challenging but in a system that's completely alien to me and will require learning from scratch.

Wizards are one of the strongest classes in the game right now. Have you tried opening the spell bar by clicking the character portrait of the wizard and selecting a spell from one of the level categories? I can't cast any spells with my wizard in the beta. When I click his portrait I see some buttons like "I" "II" "III" referring I suppose to different spell levels, but when I select any of these, the selection menu becomes empty, there's nothing to see.

The game is too buggy in its current state for me to form a valid opinion on this topic.

I agree, this is one of the first things I noticed as well. We want to look at our characters! On that note, Fable had an almost tongue-in-cheek character closeup mode where it would be like 10 cm from your character and you could admire all the polygons and texture stretching. Not that I'm asking for that in PoE.

I can easily see how the animated foliage effect would have been deemed unconvincing and removed for artistic reasons. Perhaps this still is WIP?

V-Sync always introduces at least a single frame of lag, since it requires at least double buffering to function. Some games render multiple frames in advance, which only compounds the problem. Further, some games have seemingly terrible implementations of V-Sync that cause inexcusable amounts of lag. Add to that the tendency for V-Sync to cause extreme variations in FPS, and you get some serious issues. All games use double buffering (at least), regardless of VSync. The only difference VSync makes is whether the graphics card waits for the next refresh to flip the front and back buffers; without it may flip it in the middle of a refresh creating an incoherent picture. A properly implemented buffer queue doesn't result in added latency even with multiple buffers (the most recent one is always selected), but some games have terrible implementations indeed. I would assume Unity does it properly.

Unless the game engine is doing some weird buffering, you should always be seeing the most recent frame. Your display can't be any closer to real-time than its refresh period (well, half of it on average), so you're can't get more up-to-date info than that. Another explanation for added latency with vsync would be that the game engine ties the simulation step to the graphics frame rate but that is uncommon these days. In and of itself vsync is not a mechanism that adds latency.

Current NVIDIA drivers are 340.something, just FYI.

Also seen this in the dialogue log (bottom right of the screen) after entering the Dracogen Inn. After some time though it reverted to the right size.

Perhaps the option should indeed be there, but it should be on by default. Most players should have the game running at their display's refresh rate as it's not graphically demanding, so they'll benefit from the absence of tearing. Vsync adds no mouse lag if you're producing more frames per second than the refresh rate.

Known issue: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/66785-known-issues-list/

There's probably no point reporting any system specs, this certainly affects everyone equally. There are precious few possible bugs where basic hardware specs like CPU, RAM or video card would matter. It's much more important to give a precise list of steps to reproduce the issue (note that this was well done by the OP). Just some general tips.

You should post bugs under the Bugs and Support forum instead of Discussion.

Ok, here are my notes after an hour of playing: Language - My Steam is in French and the game installed in French. I started the game once. Then I exited, changed the language to English (through the Steam UI). Now the game launcher appeared in English, but the rest of the game was still in French. It doesn't appear like I can get the game in English at all except perhaps by changing my Steam language and redownloading. - Lots of strings missing or not translated. All "Magnifying glass" - points of interest strings are missing, I just see a dark background with nothing on it; UI strings, dialogue options, etc. I won't report them in detail, there are so many everywhere that I assume that little polish has been done in that area yet. - "Godlike" was translated "Dieu" - literally "God". Really? Should be "Divin". Character creation - Anti-aliasing is missing on the character. Awful pixel crawling on the chain mail, needs some AF or something. - No way to go back to the main menu, at least that I could figure out - Some words that are too long appear miniscule, i.e. Détermination on the attribute selection screen - No way to zoom on the character's head, making head/hair customization more difficult. NWN2 did this automatically. - Hair/skin color buttons didn't work and all their strings were missing. - Portrait selection: shouldn't show female portraits for male characters and vice-versa. - Voice selection: same issue as for portraits. - Hearing in-game music and ambient sounds is weird, should have its own music like all IE and NWN titles In-game - After the loading there are a few seconds where you faintly see the game world but it's unresponsive. Should keep the loading screen until the game is ready to be interacted with. - Dialogues: I've seen lines starting with the ending "!" of the previous line, should respect non-breaking spaces. - Double-clicking the ground with at least one character selected should center the camera like in the Infinity Engine. - Right-click and drag to rotate formations has the formations not properly centered on the cursor. - I wish I could zoom one or two notches closer to admire my characters. - After an area transition, it takes two clicks on the first character you click on to select him. Afterwards it only takes a single click. - All items descriptions seem missing. - Some items (like the flour bags you find everywhere) are stackable, but you can't stack them yourself in the inventory, they just auto-stack but not perfectly. - Inside buildings, ambient sounds are almost inaudible; music takes too much space. I reduced music to 20% and still didn't get much ambient sound. They should play much, much louder. Just fire up BG the first inn or IWD the first inn, that's what I'm expecting. - In the Dracogen Inn, the NPC called NPC_Pace was half-transparent. This seems unintended unless she's a ghost or something (which she didn't seem like). - Butterflies animations fade in and out which is very strange. Butterflies don't phase in and out of reality. They also seem to like flying in straight lines while butterflies actually tend to fly around spots that interest them. This might seem like nitpicking but if you're going to have ambient animations they might as well make sense. - This may be by design, but I was very disappointed at the lack of NPC reactions as I stole from their property right under their nose. Really? Stealing should have some consequences, I mean I understand in most IE games there usually was none, but that never made sense to me. Also it makes it so that since stealing is free and not acknowledged by the game in any way, it's made morally neutral so it's actually just the smart thing to loot everything everywhere. This puts an unnecessary emphasis on looting and feels highly unrealistic. I hope Josh reads this. Journal - When you get the quest pop-up at the top-left of the screen it'd be nice to be able to click on it to automatically open the journal at the right page to get more details. - the Notes screen is somewhat broken: cannot give titles to entries. - the tabs on the side are unintuitive, you can open/close them when you should only be able to select them (there's no point closing a tab, it seems). 2 out of the 4 sub-screens (IIRC)have only one of these tabs so it seems pointless. In general this feels unfinished and it's unclear how to use it. Level-up screen - All "compétences" (skills? talents? I wish I could switch it to English) descriptions are missing. "Points remaining" is untranslated. - At the top of the screen there are three tabs, all are clickable but the center one does nothing when clicked on. It makes you wonder if this is broken or intentional. - The icons layered on top of these tabs look out of place.

.... You frighten me. Amused response: lol. Serious response: I didn't specify it, but I did mean that I can't do it because it's actually morally wrong and not simply because it would get me into trouble or something. If playing evil in RPGs doesn't entail finding enjoyment in pretend immorality then I don't see what's the point.

Update 16 had this: I hope any binary or otherwise obscure formats will be disclosed soon after the beta goes live. I would love to get started making some tools so that they're ready for the gold release. Any news on that?

Something evil-friendly where you can do truly monstrous things like NWN2:MotB. Man playing with One-Of-Many was fun. Remember sending an entire family the wrong way so they'd get eaten by a tribe of savages? And then going back, slaying the entire tribe of savages (including the children) and dancing on remains of the family there? That was fun. I can't do that in real life.

Wee some people still remember me. I might put up some PoE content on a new "Zeckul" channel although I'll have no more insight into the game than anyone else. I'll let you guys know if I do. Beta testing is more about providing feedback to the developer regarding bugs and areas of improvement than getting early access to the content. I was on the BG:EE closed beta team and it wasn't much fun, just test, file bug report, test, file bug report, etc. Apparently Obsidian isn't looking for user feedback regarding most content right now, rather with the basic systems and classes. I've not heard anything to the effect of a more "complete" beta somewhere closer to release but it's possible I guess. As for avoiding spoilers that's specifically what Josh said at Gamescon regarding the limited size of the beta, and was a concern raised by many right here.

It looks so much like Baldur's Gate! At the same time the setting and combat system are quite deeply different so I'm sure it'll be a distinct, memorable experience. Anyway, this game has everything going for it as I said before. The only thing I'm actually worried about is that it's creating such incredible expectations that it might fail to meet them, but that's a rather nice problem to have. Fans of good old games tend to be uncritical of them and hypercritical of anything new and different. Baldur's Gate had plenty of flaws, some quite major. I'm pretty sure those are just placeholder. I agree. It's such low-res art anyway, it wouldn't scale on any other UI element than these tiny spell selection buttons. That said, the IWD2 spell icons did look great and I'd only be slightly disappointed if they were actually re-used for this game.

That's what I was always planning to do. But if you're going to use the word beta with a 25 dollar buy-in people will have certain expectations. Backer tech-demo would have been more apt. Yeah but paradoxically one of these expectations is for the beta not to spoil much of the main quest (repeated time and again on these forums), so unless you were expecting Obsidian to produce a lot of unique content for the beta which wouldn't make sense, it was either going to be a few relatively unimportant side quests or some huge spoilers.