Caerdon

Don't worry, we aren't. Quest like that tend to be fully optional side-quests we can simply refuse.

You can't be this thick. In order to get to the cave, you have to get through the area where the beetles roam. Whether you kill them, sneak past them, lure them away or find a way around them, you have to get through that obstacle somehow. Let's put it this way: if there were no beetles at all, it would be easier to get to the cave - because you'd only have to deal with the spiders - and you would get less XP.

I guess it's just the games that I've played, then. I honestly can't remember any old-school game aside from Diablo where this happens. Maybe you can educate me.

No. You got 1500xp for getting through the beetles and spiders.

I agree. It seems to be very common in modern games, though. For some reason.

You see the cross appear on your portrait, you hear that sweet sound... it's time to level up! However, in some games it's not that simple - you might only be able to level up while resting, for example. While that idea is a remnant from tabletop games where it makes a lot of sense, there are some arguments to why it could be a good thing in CRPGs as well. So what do you think, should there be some limits to how, when and where you're able to level up you characters? Personally I'm voting for while resting, but honestly I'm a bit torn between most of the latter options.

Also, I forgot that in this game shields incur a penalty to your attack rate and, in case of heavier shields, to your accuracy as well. I'm not too enthusiastic about that. You're already sacrificing offensive potential by not using two or two-handed weapons, and while I understand the concept behind it, I don't think it's even particularly realistic. In fact, because you can use your shield to defend against opponent's weapon, that leaves your own weapon free to attack, so your attack rate should go up (at least with bucklers and lighter shields). Obviously game balance must be regarded as a whole before we can arrive to any conclusions, but...

1) I agree - to a degree. But I don't really see these as mutually exclusive, even if shield were the better choice in most cases. 2) A "tank" definitely needs something to stay alive. If a heavy armor is good enough, that's fine (and it would be fine in reality, but games like this tend to mix armors, shields, two-hanhded weapons etc. in a rather anachronistic way). Frankly, a dual-wielding tank doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Seeing we only have one pet slot, there'd better be a place for all my pets to scamper.

It's insanely powerful against numerous, weak opponents. Against a single, powerful opponent it's useless. These kinds of abilities tend to make you feel like you're doing very well - until everything crumbles down into total charlie foxtrot, which is why I'm not a huge fan of them.

Alright. How exactly will the game determine that you've completed the level? (you found the stairs to the next level? You've murdered all enemies in the level? you solved all the level's puzzles? you've killed the level's assigned boss?) You're not even trying to understand, are you? These concepts aren't that difficult. You could get XP for unlocking the next level, completing a puzzle or completing quests within the dungeon - one of which could be dealing with the "level's assigned boss", whether by killing it or getting rid of it in some other manner, like imprisoning or crippling it in some way.

Yeah, that's what I meant as well In reality shields are extremely effective at protecting the wielder, in IE games you got, what, -2 AC or something? Ridiculous. Dual-wielding should give you a bonuses to deflection (only against melee), accuracy and attack rate and a penalty to critical damage. Just as long as those bonuses are kept small enough to keep the shield the preferred choice in most cases.

You're both right. We'll see soon how things really work. Ideally all party members will require rest roughly as often, and it seems likely that in more complicated encounters a single fighter can't draw all the attention, so in the long run damage is bound to be distributed a bit more evenly. I think that should generally be an easy decision. Only very specialized characters should be using two weapons at once. My opinion, of couse. As an aside: do we know anything about dual-wielding mechanics in this game? I can't remember any updates discussing this...

In PoE, every class can do those things.

I'd say the offer quite a lot of extra protection for minimal added weight, loss of awareness and discomfort in hot weather. They just might prevent someone from lopping your head off, and they also protect against downwards halberd slashes and such.

I definitely like the idea that you could adjust the balance between stamina and health, but tying them to specific attributes might be a bad idea, or at least it'd require some heavy balance adjustments to make sure all the attributes are equally worthwhile again. Here's an idea: Have a slider in character creation that you can freely adjust. One end of the slider represents a character that has low stamina but high health, the middle represents the current, balanced approach and the other end would be a character with high stamina but low health. The slider would then just interpolate between these three points, which the developers could adjust separately to make sure the system is balanced as a whole. After character creation, every time you level up you could, if you wanted to, adjust that slider one notch to either direction, just to fine-tune your character.

I hate small pop-up windows that don't utilize the screen space available. It's not like anything's happening in the background while you're leveling up, so why not use the entire screen? I'd rather make all the rest of the windows take up the whole screen as well. The up-close-and-personal character model is also used in inventory page, so it's nothing that clashes with the game's aesthetics. In IE games the paper doll was used in inventory page only, so isn't this an improvement towards more consistent aesthetics?

Good ideas, everyone! I definitely agree that it's way too early to arrive to any kind of conclusion, I was merely a bit concerned after all the videos. That said, if there's a problem, no harm in being prepared. What I was thinking was that maybe a fighter could regenerate some health while he regenerates stamina, but only when it's the fighters own regeneration ability that does the healing, not potions, spells or anything else. Maybe a 2:1 ratio which would be further multiplied by the usual 4:1 stamina-to-health ratio, so every time he regenerates 8 stamina, he also regenerates 1 health. This would mean that if the fighter takes lots of small hits that his own regeneration can handle, he would essentially have barbarian's stamina-to-health ratio. However, if he's badly injured and needs healing spells or potions, those would not return any health, so the more you have to rely on them, the more his effective stamina-to-health ratio would approach the usual 4:1. So what that means is that now we have a fighter that can deal better with minor encounters where he only receives smaller hits and grazes, but this wouldn't really help him at all at dealing with more difficult, major encounters, where he'd probably need to rely on additional healing. Obviously testing would be required, and like previously mentioned, it could very well be that there's really no need for any of this.

Nah, just half of them. Grey DeLisle voiced the rest.

Obsidian should hire George Takei to voice a main character. His voice is just... oh myyy.

My first character will be female elf nature godlike ranger with antelope companion and hunting bow as main weapon. I don't really know why, but I settled on that quite a long time ago.

I also have to wonder what's the fascination with small windows in middle of the screen. Why can't inventory, character record, bestiary etc. just take up the entire screen? Frankly, I'm a little afraid all the UI elements have fixed pixel size and will look tiny on my 2560x1600 display - which I've had for about four years, so it's not exactly brand new tech. It's 2014, resolution independence should'be been figured out by now.

Well, I can understand double-edged blades. But fighters are meant to be frontline stalwarts, and it seems silly to me if they were something you tend to keep in reserve and only call in when you really need them. "Overall, fighters are designed to be low-maintenance, reliable, and long-lived even in marathon battles." That's the official word... and well, that's what they are in any single battle, but overall, it looks like they're the most high-maintenance class in the long run.

I think Tab (or whatever key) should highlight all the things you can highlight with your mouse: barrels, chests, doors, objects you can interact with. However, you should never be able to highlight things that are deliberately hidden until one of your characters has actually spotted it via a perception check. In other words: there should be no pixel-hunting at all - you can only highlight what your characters have actually noticed.