Hiro Protagonist II

I didn't find the gloves so I had to level up to unlock it. Ah, I didn't know about dialogue only for your character. I thought it took all your party members into consideration like the tasks. I did miss out on dialogue options though, thinking the NPCs didn't have enough in their attributes. Oh well. So if your character doesn't have enough Resolve or Intelligence for your Rogue, you basically miss out on all those dialogue options throughout the game, even if an NPC does have the required attribute. Seems worse than I expected. eg. My Druid is speaking to someone, has the required Resolve but looks at my attributes and the game says, Nope, not enough. At least you can mix-max your characters for the tasks as you've said which is what I did in my play through and what I'll be doing in the final game.

I created a Rogue and when I started the game, it added four other characters to my party. Fighter, Rogue, Priest and Wizard. which I didn't know. So I had two Rogues which wasn't too bad but did seem like a waste. The rogues had different attributes and I min-maxed my Rogue and it was pretty much the same as the Beta Rogue. I also bought a 6th companion from the inn being a Ranger with Bear Companion which I found pretty good. The bear packs a punch and took down many enemies. I also min-maxed the Ranger with Mig 19, Con 18, Dex 18, Per 15, Int 3, Res 5 just for the lulz and found it to be pretty good. Yes, there are dump stats. Or should I say, the attributes are so small in variance you don't really notice the different builds. At least I didn't with the two rogues in my party. The important stats I found are your skills like Mechanics, Lore, Athletics, etc for the different tasks. Don't have enough mechanics to lock pick? That lock in the tower in the town will stay locked until you level up. No random dice rolls. One problem is you can't level up by killing things, so you have to find another quest to find and then complete it to level up and then you can raise your mechanics skill and go back and lock pick that lock in the tower. The Survival skill was useless, but to be fair it is the Beta so there was no use for it that I found, but it may come in play in the final game. And some of your attributes are important too like Might for tasks. So it's wise to min-max each character so each has an attribute and skill maxed for the tasks. But this makes me want to min-max to get access to all the tasks and dialogue options. While the design decisions seemed good in theory for some people on this forum, in practice it's a system for a min-maxer powergamer like myself to abuse. And then it becomes the default for me because I then have all the options opened. if I don't min-max and decide to 'roleplay' I'll probably miss out on those options. And as Monte said, combat is a like a scrum. Enemies sprint in and you're locked in melee. It's just one big cluster****. LOL.

Sent to you.

Do you want a beta key? I have one spare if you want to play it?

^ I agree with the above two posts (mutonizer and Lioness). This is the first rpg advertised with tactical combat where I want to avoid the combat. And if I have to engage in combat, I'll use every exploit so I don't lose too much health. I've never rest spammed at the inn so much in a crpg. Even the IE games, I never rest spammed so much. I could just cast cure light wounds or something similar and continue. With PoE, if one or two of my party is around 50% health, I just go back to the inn and get 100% health. It hasn't stopped the degenerate game play of rest spamming, save scumming, etc. In fact, it encourages me to do it more. The issues aren't the bugs for me, it's the game design. And it isn't much fun trudging through dungeons for the last hour getting scrap loot to sell for coin. Just give me the coins and be done with it. Or give me a sell button in my inventory instead of going back and selling the stuff in the town. Also, just give infinite amount of money to the merchants instead of 3000 or 5000 coins. It resets when you leave and enter the town anyway. PoE also encourages me to min-max skills so I have one person with max Athletics, one person with max Lore, etc so I can get all the dialogue and quest options. Because a task asks which character do I want to use for a task. Easy, use the character with the max attribute that can complete the task. It just isn't fun for me in it's current design and Obsidian are in bug fixing mode, not overhauling the system which is a shame.

I'm going to use a walkthrough and try and avoid as much unnecessary combat and exploration as I can. Be great to see who can finish the game with the least amount of kills.

LMAO The quest is solvable fool. It's a random thing with loading a saved game. That's what you have to do. Fortunately, I saved my game before I handed my quest into the Lord with his daughter. I decided to load the save game after I made that post and I WAS awarded the quest xp. So maybe you should be looking at the bug forums. Gotta love that degenerate gameplay with reloading. And I already brought up the broken exploitable A.I. before the beta was even released. And Obsidian has confirmed the A.I. won't be as tactical as a game released by some of the core team by them more than 10 years ago. eg. IWD2. And the beta has confirmed what Obsidian was saying that the A.I. won't be tactical as IWD2 regardless if it's a beta or not. It has nothing to do with being a beta or KS. Obsidian confirmed this game won't have as good as A.I. as IWD2 after the KS ended. Ponder that for a moment. PoE won't have the tactical A.I. as IWD2, a game that a lot of the core team have experienced with and a game that is more than 10 years old on an outdated game engine.

Okay Mayama. End thread for you. bye bye.

I've been mostly silent on the beta forums. There's a lot of problems and Obsidian know they have problems with the game. One of things I find truly remarkable is the exploitable enemy A.I. I made a couple of posts when the video was released some time ago when the gameplay was released by gaming websites. Ooze and enemies exploitable A.I. by just watching the gameplay footage. I could see exploits already. Playing the beta, the enemy A.I. is even worse than I could possibly imagine. Seeing four enemies in a room in the Dyrford ruins with your party at the door but they don't attack you because you're somehow out of their range. Even though they appear to be in direct line of sight to you and should see you. You throw a fireball and hit all four enemies but only two rush your party while the other two enemies just stand there half burnt. Presumably because those two are still 'just' out of range and can't see you. I don't know. That's just an assumption on my part. If it's true, then words fail me. You pull your party back so you fight those two rushing enemies, so you don't accidently trigger the other two who are standing there twiddling their thumbs. Kill those first two. Wait for your stamina to get back to full and edge close to the door again and fireball the other two guards. They'll probably have some health left but are no threat to your party at full stamina. Or you see a couple of enemies and get your fighter to move a couple of steps at a time and get one of the enemies to rush your fighter while the other just stands there. You pull your fighter back and then ambush that one enemy. Then you send your party in to kill the second enemy. Perfectly valid tactic drawing an enemy in for an ambush, but you would think the enemy would tell his friend instead of rushing alone. Enemies only attacking one party member and ignoring the rest of your party. So you make sure enemies attack your beefiest tank while the rest of your party go to town on that enemy. Fights usually last 5-10 seconds. Then you back away to make sure you reset your encounter powers and then rush in and kill that second enemy. And then there's the set patrols of the guards that you can see and exploit. So you make sure the (usually one enemy) patrol goes by, then attack that lone guard when the patrol is gone. And then wait for the patrol guard to come back to kill him. Perfectly valid tactic. The fog of war opens up and reveals too much and you can see enemies two rooms away and around corners. And you can exploit this by drawing one enemy out at a time. You rush an enemy and some enemies don't seem to attack for some time (they seem to be busy doing something) and then start attacking you when they're half dead. If a feral druid is at range and throws a spell at you, your party can run away and the druid stops chasing you. You can then wait out the effects of the spell. Druid now has wasted his spell and you can go in and kill him pretty easily. I could go on. Hopefully the bugged AI with enemies getting hit by fireballs and not doing anything and enemies 'busy doing their thing' while get whacked by you will be fixed. There needs to be a lot of work to get it up to the standard of a 15+ year old IE game. It does seem weird to say that a game from around 15 years ago does things better than a modern game today that it's based on. And this is just the A.I. There are many other things that I think is wrong with the game as well. Overall, I'm pretty disappointed.

I can't wait for a game guide to come out with all the locations of loot and enemies on every map. The optimal way of handling quests. And also the minimum stats you need for different things, like lock picking. Frustrating when you spend hours fighting your way through Dyrford crossing, Dyrford Ruins and come up in the tower in the town in the locked room and your rogue is 1 or 2 points below the minimum lockpicking skill to get out of the tower. And then you have to back track through Dyrford ruins, Dyrford crossing to get back to the town because you never got 1 point of experience and never levelled up. What a waste of time. No other option like breaking the door down. Nope, need to back track through the previous maps. And when I did see the Lord to hand in the quest about her 'daughter' I never received any xp. The same with handing in the quest for the guys just outside of dyrfood. I let the Orlan go and reported back, I was honest and they instigated a fight and I killed them. No XP whatsoever. I have no idea how you get xp from those quests or if my game was just bugged. Or if there is a 'right way' to get xp from those quests. I'll be avoiding combat and exploration like the plague unless there's some uber item to get or if it's quest related. The enemy AI is laughable though. People complain about the IE games with exploitable AI, PoE is a shocker. I know it's a Beta, but I can't see the AI being dramatically improved in a couple of months. I made a post about it some time ago and I'm using the same strategy that I posted before. Also, what I found funny is if a feral druid throws a ranged spell at you, you can run away before he gets to your party and you can 'wait out' the status effects. And then go back in and kill him. But yeah, so many AI exploits. There really is no point to combat in this game and no point in exploration. One of the things I did enjoy was clearing the fog of war in the IE games, not with PoE. The fog of war can stay there if I know there's nothing worthwhile to get.

I'm really dreading the mega-dungeon.

From what I've seen on the Codex, there's a lot of enthusiasm from a lot of posters for DA:I.

Stun, is that an admission you're not buying DA:I? Or are you going to be waiting after it's released to see what people say?

I'm not sure how you would make the forum inclusive of backers only. It seems like a lot of work with cross-referencing of what backers have paid for. I don't think Obsidian would put the time in to do this. They'd just open a new sub-forum and look at the threads being created with screen shots, youtube videos of bugs being replicated, and presumably address those bugs. Also, people will be streaming their gameplay videos on twitch and youtube. Non-backers will be watching these video and someone might come up with a suggestion to balance something, or other legitimate suggestions. Should we ignore those people who have valid suggestions? But it is a good point with what threads should be created. Purely bugs or will the new forum be flooded with opinions and whining instead of constructive criticism and suggestions. I wouldn't want to see threads created with 'why you make Barbarian so OP???' and the bug threads being buried. Maybe have two forums. Technical Support for bugs only. And a second forum for Beta General Discussion for other things like suggestions, balancing, etc. and the usual 'Why no love for the Mage???' threads. Also, excluding non-backer members from the beta forums would only make those backers create threads in the other forums like the PoE General Discussion. It would be a mess. Best to keep it all in one spot. eg Technical Support for Bugs and Beta General Discussion for the rest including all those whine threads. We're still going to get threads complaining about stuff regardless of which sub forum it's in.

Would've been good to see Obsidian put in an ability called the 'bonehead manoeuvre' with the godlikes. But Obsidian seem to flip flop on pop culture references.

I notice the godlikes are all brunettes. Would be good to see some other colours coming out of their heads. I wonder how hard it is to change the black mist to another colour.

Probably easier for Obsidian to create a new sub forum called 'Technical Support' like they have for their other games where everyone can create threads and report bugs with screen shots, etc. than to contact Obsidian direct through other means like email.

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2009/04/16/the-art-of-letter-writing/

BG1, BG2, NWN, DA:O, KOTOR. I include all expansions in my list. Saw the decline happening in Bioware from NWN OC (2002). KOTOR (2003) cemented that decline for me and didn't buy any more games from them for some years. Their marketing fooled me into thinking DA:O (2009) was a spiritual successor to BG. Yeah, that was the last game I bought from them. I prefer low level parties which is why I like and play BG1 more than BG2 as well as many other reasons for liking BG1.

That's a first for me. Bioware did make Baldur's Gate.

Yeah okay Lephys. Everyone has moved on, except for you.

It's a computer game. You have 3 options, One option he stays alive, the other two he dies. That's not realism. You wouldn't kill a person in real life or convince someone to commit suicide. Or would you Bruce?

Nothing like realism in a game. roflmao.

I agree. And Adam posted about bugs with weapons 5 months ago and how they didn't scale properly which made him laugh. So I can see the big head feature something they were laughing at in the office as well. And clearly you can hear them laughing in the video Sarex posted. The work in this would have been the toggle button in the menu since they were already working on this with the end goal of scaling weapons as Josh posted. All good fun.

The D3 mock up looks crap. And it would break immersion to have a colour portrait and pencil sketch that don't even look the same. And the way dev's are doing it is just a continuation of IWD2 with the model in the inventory. It's just a natural progression of the IE games. Going to sketches is a huge WTF. For people who say it breaks immersion with the colour portrait not looking like the in game model, I would say a pencil sketch breaks immersion as it won't even look like the in game model as well. And it feels really cheap. Yeah we could have done 3D models in the inventory but went with a pencil sketch instead.