Caerdon

After seeing all the recent gameplay presentations, there's one thing that keeps bugging me. Fighters are great front-line combatants. They can tie up multiple enemies, and in any given encounter, they can take a lot of punishment, both because of their great defences and because of their regenerating stamina. However, because of their regenerating stamina, and because of them getting much of the attention, it seems to me that fighters tend to lose a huge portion of their health during even a relatively easy fight. This could be a concern. In IE games, you generally needed rest after a big fight because your spellcasters were out of spells - but your fighters could go on for a long time, as long as they received healing in some form. But in PoE many spells are per-encounter and you can only regain health by resting, and as a result, the tables have been turned: it's the fighters that require rest after every battle. Unless we're talking about really major battles, I think fighters should be durable enough to handle two or three encounters. Frankly, I'm not sure how exactly to feel about this. But to me, fighters don't seem all that durable after all. I really like the stamina-health mechanic, but I think that in order for it to really fulfill its purpose, something should be done with fighters. Maybe they should also be able to regenerate a portion of their health when they regenerate their stamina. Maybe they should have barbarian-like thick skin, even if not to the same degree. I really don't know. For reference, in this video the fighter is almost dead after fighting a few beetles - and the paladin isn't doing well either: http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive/b/558125934 What are your thoughts on this? Does it seem to you like fighters are doing the job they're meant to do? Should something be done about all this? Of course, it isn't long until we get our hands on the beta, at which point we're all be a bit more enlightened... but who could wait that long?

I guess I should name my elven druid Pihlajatie.

Thanks for the info, Labadal!

He wasn't really putting any real effort in his play and paid the price (which, IMO, is what should happen, even on easy). Also, auto-attack doesn't seem to functional yet, so constant micromanagement is currently required for the whole party. Hopefully they'll fix this soon, if they haven't already.

It looks like you can rotate characters in PoE chargen, but I don't think zooming is necessary - chargen already displays characters much closer than they're really meant to be displayed.

Would someone please explain to me how anyone would suffer from a perfectly non-intrusive feature, the use of which is completely, absolutely voluntary?

I didn't say any of those things- i said that if you do use queue (even manually), you will then have to manually unqueue things manually a lot as the tactical danger of the fight changes. Basically, Queuing enhance the strategic aspect (macro) at the detriment of the tactical aspect (micro). It's even worse when you consider that in order to make queuing /work/, you would have to completely change the balance of the game even for those who don't use queuing. Basically, i want my strategic aspects to be in the character building/gearing/grimoire selection, and not in the actual combat itself. I want the combat itself to have /challenging/ tactical gameplay, and in order for the tactical gameplay to be challenging, it must constantly present new difficulties/challenge that the player either didn't expect or didn't consider likely, and as thus will make queuing a hassle. You seem really confused. If the situation changes, you just give commands as you always would. It will clear the queue of all actions. Zero extra effort required. And what's this talk about "balance"? Please, please tell me how the capability to queue actions affects the balance in any way? Words like "tactical" and "strategic" don't mean what you think they mean. They both involve planning, prediction and reacting.

Just because something is implemented in a particular way in some other games it doesn't mean that's the only way to implement it. I always try to think how things should function in context of this game instead of just applying them blindly from other games, but maybe that's just me. And maybe you don't see much value in being able to chain actions together with an action queue. I do. I think it'd be really nice if I could tell a character to cast a debuff at a target and then keep firing arrows at another target without having to give commands at two separate occasions. It would allow me to focus more on the actual tactics instead of handholding.

I don't get it - who's forcing you to queue AoE abilities? Why do you guys keep insisting that having an action queue means that every action will be queued and you have to manually unqueue them? It's the other way around. You queue actions when you specifically want to do that - otherwise you just play as if the queue didn't exist at all.

That's not the reason I'm asking for an action queue.

Of course it's the "most aids thing ever" - that's gotta be the worst possible way to implement an action queue. I'm not talking about the party AI queuing up actions while I'm not looking, I'm talking about the player being able to queue commands. Which would enable you to play exactly as you dictate under "No Action Queue" above. Now you're insisting on your own definitions of strategy and tactics. You could just as well say that this game only operates on tactical level. But enough with semantics; being able to plan ahead is just as important as being able to react to a changing situation, and that's what matters. And please tell me how would my implementation of an action queue change the way you issue orders to your party, assuming you refuse to utilize that completely optional feature? Hint: it wouldn't. (And it's quite funny how "altering how you command your units" is somehow inherently evil in your eyes...) Baldur's Gate 1 is not a very good example of tactical combat. There's really not much to it. Baldur's Gate 2, however is a much better example. Sure there are ways to cheese the crap out of encounters, but you would not have known those cheese combos, you would have had to either learn them through lots of play or (most likely) read a DSimpson walkthrough or some other online information that says how to beat encounters easily. This is because there is a lot of OP spells and **** in the IE games. PE is being designed with much more balanced gameplay so that hopefully there will not be one solution to everything. If you do the same **** over and over again in that situation, that's your choice. Well, with BG I was really referring to BG series as a whole. My bad. While BG1 will always have a special place in my heart, I've definitely logged a lot more hourse in BG2. And just so you know, I loathe cheese in all its forms. You seem to assume that just because I want an action queue and because I commonly plan my actions a few "rounds" ahead - often quite successfully, I might add - I'm somehow "doing the same **** over and over again".

How on earth would an action queue affect game balance at all? With pause (including autopause) you can already chain actions as much as you want. It's a convenience feature, nothing more. And this game already has numerous optional convenience features, so I really don't see how that's "not the mindset that this game sprouts from". Of course the default would be that whatever command you give to a character, it replaces the current action or action queue. But you could, for example, add it to the end of the que (or the current action), say, by holding down the shift key (just like queuing up movement commands functioned in IE games). Sure, but if you're only reacting, you're not playing very tactically at all. You must also be proactive and have a plan. There's nothing wrong with being able to queue up a couple of spells or other actions when you have a good understanding of how the battle is going to proceed. You can always react and change your plan if things don't go the way you thought they would. Seriously, the number of times I've executed a preplanned sequence of spells in BG is downright incalculable.

Don't like it - don't use it. Simple as that.

Which would require balance checks, lest you fall over the cliff to your doom, or onto the tiles themselves. Assuming a "typical" railing, it'll be 6" wide at the most ... so, (D&D) DC is 15 (assuming no other obstructions, e.g. slippery, or loose stones, etc.). L1 character who didn't take any ranks will have a "fun" time making that (even a DEX=18 character still has a 50% fail chance). What does D&D have to do with any of this? Just look at the trap, those railings are wider than the player characters' hips. Bypassing that trap would be trivially easy in real life.

Why are you guys talking about budgets? It's not about budget, it's about priorities. For example, inXile asked WL2 backers how much resources they should spend on character models and other graphical stuff; the backers got exactly what they asked for, and now an even larger portion of those resources will be spent on writing. If you ask me, PoE is looking good - and in many places much better than I ever hoped for. But is Obsidian focusing enough on gameplay and content? Time will tell. My impression is that they've gotten the balance just right.

I really only like puzzles when they make sense. Unfortunately they very rarely do. While PoE looks awesome in so many ways, the floor tile trap puzzle in the first dungeon is really stupid. This is accentuated by the fact that it's only an obstacle because of engine limitations: in reality anyone could bypass that trap by just walking along one of the ledges on either side of it, and you could easily jump over at least one tile if necessary.

I think it'd be great if the expansion had a relatively self-contained story set after the story of the main game that would also set up and foreshadow the sequel - although it shouldn't give away too much. Uh... what?

The Witcher series has Mahakam, practically an entire nation inhabited by Dwarwes and Gnomes. It's never been seen in the games, though.

He's not talking about RPGs, but isometric, patry-based RPGs with RTwP combat. Like Wombat mentioned, they weren't actually the first, but they definitely popularized that type of games, which is one definition for "creating a genre". EDIT: Damn ninjas!

By that logic, why should we care about combat or any other game mechanic as an end goal? The game being fun should be the goal. Of course we care about difficulty. We care about magic system. We care about lore. We care about attack resolution. We care about classes. And so on. In short: we care about this game.

And you don't think that's a problem?

Dungeons in IE games have always been built largely from tile sets. That's not going to change and anyone shouldn't expect that to change.

What 'known classifications' are you referring to? The platform is PC. OS X and Linux are operating systems. Why they use 'PC' instead of Windows in that list is a bit strange, but in any case the three quoted are referring to PC operating systems, not different platforms. The word "platform" can mean many things. If you mean hardware platform specifically, then you're correct. But generally it refers to computing platform, which includes the operating system.

Female godlike aumaua ranger is very likely to be my first protagonist.

Parallax scrolling is generally not applicable for this type of game, as there's always a fully opaque background (the ground) close to the point of attention and nothing in the foreground that's not connected to the background. However, there are potentially some situations where it could be used effectively. For example, if the map is located on a platform magically suspended kilometers up in the air, the distant background could scroll at a different rate than the platform the characters walk on. I'm not sure what parallax mapping has to do with this subject. It's a completely different animal. (EDIT: I've no idea how I missed sesobebo's post above and ended up saying pretty much the same things... oh, well.)