Caerdon

You could hit the cap for BG1 pretty easily hours ahead of the final boss as well so its not like this hasn't been done before in other games. I do think the cap for this game should have been at least two levels lower though. Everything has become trivial now. That it could be done in BG1 isn't really an argument that it's good, though. I really can't understand the buff to XP gains. I wish there was a way to turn the additional experience off completely, or maybe even nerf it globally, just a little. I personally feel that to hit the XP cap, you should have to finish almost absolutely everything in the game. And I agree that the game should've been capped at 10 or so, too, but eh, I guess it was not to be. I totally agree. I wish there was a slider along with all the other difficulty settings we could use to adjust XP gains between 50% and 100% or something. I hate hitting the cap.

Skoegul, Irenicus' dungeon is the most carefully crafted dungeon in the whole BG2. It's the first thing players see in the game and it's extremely important to the plot. You simply can't pick that to represent the overall quality of dungeons in BG2. In fact, most dungeons in BG2 are absolutely nothing special, just like in Eternity - and I say that as someone who loves BG2.

It's funny how you mention Sawyer every time you say something negative about the game mechanics, but the one time you point out something positive, it's the developers... I'd love to know how you know so well which decisions Sawyer is personally responsible for and which were made by others.

Yeah, I know it's not just the text, but proper text rendering is much more important than sharp UI graphics and icons (which would be great too, don't get me wrong). It really is a weird design choice that the game doesn't use higher quality assets to draw UI graphics. Even character portraits need to be upscaled on the character sheet, they're the same dimensions as in IWD2 - 13 years ago! (Especially weird considering the game easily handles custom portraits larger than 210x330, as long as the aspect ratio remains the same.)

I'm quite fine (though not really happy) with UI scaling, in fact I don't want character screens etc. to be tiny windows in the center of my 2560x1600 monitor. However, what I'm not fine with is text rendered at low resolution and then upscaled. There's just no excuse for this, and I can't understand how proper text rendering isn't a top priority in a game that puts so much emphasis on text and dialogue.

There's another way to fix that: make stats come with negatives that matter. This can be hard to do in a way that makes intuitive sense, but if strength, for example, comes with a little expense to speed, then a lot of strength comes with a significant expense to speed. Eventually the negatives will make your character so weak in one area, you'll question whether you really need to be that strong if everything's just outrunning you. It makes being balanced more attractive, without forcing you into it. It's also more realistic in the sense that in real life almost everything comes with a corresponding downside. Yeah, that's one way to approach the problem, though whether it actually addresses it depends largely on how different bonuses and penalties would stack. I'm not a big fan of such a system though. I think it'd make it difficult to get a good overview of the strenghts and weaknesses of a character, and it'd fundamentally change the idea a that a high stat is a good thing, making stat bonuses lose their purpose as bonuses. Besides, even in the current system putting a point in one stat comes with a corresponding downside: it's one point away from some other stat. I like such an approach when it comes to customizing characters as opposed to improving characters though. For example, I'd like a system where I could pick any number of Traits that come with both positives and negatives, with the idea that they make my character distinct, unique and more specialized, not strictly better.

Probably needs to be re-worked and not just nerfed. Maybe set it to prevent disengagement attacks so units can disengage safely. Yeah, forgot to say anything about that... I think it might not be all that easy to fix without having to basically create a new, different spell with the same name, so Obisidian might take some time to think and test how it really should be fixed.

I'm so f***ing tired of all this passive-aggressive Sawyer hate...

My guess: because it's so obviously cheesy. A lot of people love to cheese the hell out of the game as long as they can convince themselves that they're not doing it, that they're just good players playing the way the game is meant to be played. This is one reason why Cipher is so popular, for example. Withdraw in a choke point is just so blatantly cheesy that very few people can keep up that pretense. In other words: Withdraw cheese it the kind of cheese that's very, very easy to most people just to skip and ignore entirely.

After the patch Arkanis Gath will arrive to protect the backers when you attack them.

Everyone's focusing on Chill Fog and Slicken and saying that wizard is getting nerfed, but they're all ignoring that several wizard spells are getting range buffs... This is exactly what the wizard needs - at least in principle, we'll see what the actual changes are... All in all, the patch looks fantastic.

Well, to me (table-top) RPGs have always been more about collective, interactive storytelling than rule-oriented playing, but you certainly have a point. Characters in Numenera can certainly be "same-y", but I think a strength of the system is that it really allows you to create the kind of character you want that conceptually plays the way you want (though that, of course, depends largely on how your game master likes to handle things), even if they play the same way mechanically.

I'm really liking Numenera. Just Might, Speed and Intellect - really broad categories and expendable resources that even double as hit points.

Min-maxing is not about building a character that's good at something and bad at something else. It's about recognizing the most desirable stats and maximizing them at the expense of everything else, which get minimized. Min-maxing is taking it to extremes. Sure, everyone will try to creat "optimal" characters one way or the other, there's nothing wrong with that. But when you combine that with a system that gives you obvious "best builds", where there's no question that stat A is always better than stat B for a particular build, things get mindless and boring. What I'm suggesting is a system where you actually have to think about how much you're willing to sacrifice in order to put yet another point in that MIG or DEX.

That's not the problem. The problem is that there is only one kind of minmaxing, and it is unintuitive and dumb. Well, I think all min-maxing is dumb, but whatever floats your boat.

I think you're being just a bit overly critical here. Yes, there are definitely a couple optimal ways to distribute stats - however, deviating from that optimum is not nearly as devastating as it was in IE games. A tank might not benefit from MIG the way it benefits from CON, but it still benefits from it. As a result, min-maxers will still min-max, but other ways of building a character can still be used to build perfectly viable characters that don't actually waste any points. That said, the stats definitely have some problems, but what surprises me is that the majority of people (and devs, apparently) still can't see what the true, underlying reason for those problems is (my opinion, of course, but I don't think I'm wrong here). You see, no matter how much you move bonuses around, no matter how you rename stats, there will be min-maxing. Why? Because if stat A is better than stat B for class/build X, then a point spent in A is always more beneficial than a point spent in B. It's as simple as that. I said that about the early beta, and it's still just as true. The only way to fix that is to make stats give you diminishing returns. In simple terms, going from 5 to 6 in a stat should give you more bang for the buck (either by giving larger bonuses or having smaller "cost") than going from 18 to 19. This way even if stat A is more preferable for you than stat B, there would come a point at which you wouldn't want to raise A on B's expense anymore. A major benefit of this system is that there'd be no obvious threshold at which point this happens, everyone had to go with what they prefer on a personal level instead of a no-brainer, clear-cut best build.

I can't believe this hasn't been mentioned yet... The very reason DA:O had tactics scripts was because it was practically impossible to control your entire party the way it was possible in IE games. DA:O was designed by and large around the idea that you control one character at a time without a proper tactical overview, even if it wasn't strictly limited to such a control scheme. Pillars of Eternity doesn't have tactics scripts because it gives you full tactical control over the entire party, all the time. Scripts are unnecessary.

Well, duh.

Collectors! Put it on display or just to have it really. I have bookshelves of collector's edition games and movies myself. Sounds like quality doesn't necessary matter much then... Well, to each his own, I guess. I don't have too much extra space anyway, so I prefer pure digital releases. If I want a nice game map on my wall, I can always have one printed from my HQ digital map on any material of my choosing on any size I want.

Druid is my favourite at the moment, emphasis on those last three words.

Never understood the fascination with cloth maps. Seriously. What do you guys do with these things? Is cloth somehow a better material for maps than paper?

Anyone who has no extensive experience at fighting beasts, yet still wanders alone into a cave to fight a bear, deserves to die horribly. Try some common sense next time. I don't want to see monsters with their names written in red with a skull icon on top of them. I want to figure out on my own which enemies I can take on. And in my experience, save scumming is absolutely not necessary. When I face some monsters I haven't seen before, I try to make sure that I only fight one at first and that I get to fight in favourable conditions. Also, you can almost always make some educated guesses on how difficult any given encounter is likely to be, and the game often provides lots of little hints, if you're willing to look for them. So far I've loaded saves numerous times because of failing to execute my strategy correctly, but I haven't loaded a save even once because of grossly underestimating an opponent.

No, this simplistic view is just flat-out untrue. Managing probability and planning for failure is a major branch of tactics and strategy. If you just eliminate random chance entirely, you lose a lot of strategic depth. Also, a certain amount of unpredictability requires much higher analytical skills from players. Unsurprisingly, in ideal conditions there's a good balance between randomness and predictability. EDIT: That said, simply adding a random kill chance to a game is not good design. And while I love realism in games, I don't love it as much as I love good gameplay.

No, reducing overall damage output actually makes the game both easier and less tactical. The reason you don't think so is because your playstyle is reactive when it should be proactive. With low damage-per-hit ratio it's easy to react to problems. "Oh, my wizard is taking hits - I should bring my fighter close to protect him!" You may think this is an example of tactical thinking, and you're right - but it's only the lowest form of tactical thinking. High damage-per-hit ratio means you have to manage the conditions in your favour so that you stop those problems before they ever happen. If your wizard can only take one or two hits, then you should do something to prevent them from getting hit in the first place, and this requires that you understand the flow of battle and the multiple ways things can go wrong and make some contingency plans. This requires a noticeably higher level of tactical planning than just reacting to immediate threats. If you see high damage-per-hit combat as just frantically dealing lots of damage as fast as possible, that just reveals you're not thinking about it at a high enough level.

I never said the tactical/strategic thinking is in deciding when and when not to use spells. Most of it is in choosing and adjusting your tactics based on which spells you're willing to use in the current encounter. When you're conserving some of your resources, you have different resources available, and that leads to tactically varied encounters, as opposed to having the exact same resources available every single time. I'm still on my first playthrough, so I'm going forward "blind". And yet I've had zero problems conserving my resources in a sensible way. Some encounters I go through without using any per-rest abilities, in some I use a handful of those, and sometimes I burn most of what I've got. I've never found myself saving and saving and saving them for some imaginary ultra-hard boss fight that never comes. And you know what? More often than not I can look back at my decisions and I can say that I've used my resources wisely. How's that possible? It's because I'm actually not going forward blind. I'm scouting. I'm making educated guesses. I'm using my experience and judgment. I'm preparing, not planning. A chain of encounters progresses in a certain way, and with some rudimentary skill and experience, you can develop a feel for it, and when you pay attention to your surroundings, you can make some fairly accurate predictions of what kind of battles you'll likely face in the near future. (And just to be clear: I'm not a particularly great player, even though I've played IE games quite a lot.) Also, I don't see why every character needs to be superbly "interesting" all the time. If you don't need spells in some particular situation, just let your wizard auto-attack and focus on your other characters that probably have more interesting mechanics in such situations. That's yet another level of welcome variation: having different tools for different situations. I find the opposite. Since I need to "save" my spells I find that 99% of all fights are the same because my casters stand around autoattacking not wanting to waste the per rest spells. At least with per encounter my casters would do something on most fights. Interesting gameplay should come from interesting enemies not by restricting spell usage. Then use your spells more, you absolutely don't need to go through 99% of encounters without using per-rest spells. I really don't see the problem here, aside from that it sems to me like you're just not very skilled at managing your resources efficiently. Not to worry, you'll get better at it.