PrimeJunta

Re moving and recovery, it feels odd not to be able to nock another arrow while moving. On the other hand cranking an arbalest or loading a muzzle-loader while running would be even odder. If it would be possible system-wise, perhaps keep heavy ranged weapons as they are (no reload while moving), but make light ranged weapons--bows, basically--loadable when moving, albeit at a slower rate?

Yeh. I also saw a grimoire lying on the ground at Dracogen.

Okay, second impressions. Finally managed to put some time in. Playing at Normal. Rolled up a cipher. I'm not playing all that well; I haven't had a TPW but have had to rest rather a lot. The teleporting spiders are odd unless they're actually supposed to do that (phase spiders?). Some of those DoT effects feel way over the top, Deep Wounds, poison, that sort of thing. Partway through the Dyrford ruins at this point. Those cultists are dropping distinctly nicer loot. First off, this feels like a game, not a clusterboink. That is good. Now it is actually possible to explore it and see how things feel. There are scads of bugs still, especially in stuff like status effects--BB Fighter is currently permanently Dazed, for example, unless it's just a dwarf thing. Movement is definitely slower. So are load times. Combat feels way more controllable. Still awfully fumbly since I don't have a good handle on what the things do; exploring them. Cipher's Soul Ignition has been nerfed, perhaps a bit too much, now it only seems to be doing like 1 damage (well, the couple of times I tried it). This is a long way from the "IE feel" yet, but it's a giant leap closer. So giant thumbs-up for great progress, but there is a ways to go yet. More comments will follow.

Yeh, the mechanic itself is fine. Lots of stuff needs adjusting though. Damage, DT, HP, deflection, stamina/health damage ratio, DoT things and so on. It's kind of to be expected that the numbers are all over the place at this point.

It's fairly unlikely there'll be a lot of bugs specific to Mac/Linux. Once the engine is running nicely what's in it should be identical cross-platforms, bugs and all. I dig the impatience though. Would rather not be booting into Windows H8 myself.

They did also lay out in considerable detail what they felt constitute an "IE game spiritual successor." First in the initial pitch, then in the updates over the course of the campaign. As I said, it's remarkable how little they've drifted from what they described there. It is not reasonable to expect them to adhere to your personal interpretation of what the IE successor ought to be. Being disappointed, feeling that they missed the mark, feeling that it's not fun, and so on is a different matter altogether. Helm isn't saying tha though. He is flat-out claiming this: That is a lot more than a subjective impression. It is also a lie.

Sounds like the burrow is bugged then. Don't mind fast enemies, as long as they're not all like that actually... looking forward to trying it out this afternoon/evening.

Helm, I generally enjoy your butthurt, but I take issue at bald-faced lies. Tell me again: why do you lie?

No they're not.

I took a very quick spin before work and... is it me, or did they also slow down run speed a hair?

Tell me, Helm. Why do you lie?

Am working so can't check yet... anyone see if Soul Ignition is still way OP? I have a hunch the overly-deadly poison may be related. If DoT is generally bugged, then your DoT effects will be as murderous as theirs. If that's the worst thing wrong with the new build though they aren't doing too badly. So I guess for now... just enjoy the extra challenge, no? There is a "slow poison" I believe -- don't remember the name, but it's a priest spell that temporarily suppresses hostile status effects. Don't remember if I tried that against poison in the previous build though.

:reads thread: Man, we are an excitable lot, aren't we?

I'm with Ganrich. Give the other classes healing abilities. They don't have to be as good as the priest, but they should be a quarter to a half as good. Indispensable+somewhat boring is not an ideal description of a class, but that is currently what the priest is, more or less.

Such as...?

Re ciphers, I'd actually like them to gain Focus a bit faster, but have the starting pool lower. It feels cheesy to be able to open up with the big guns. It'd be more interesting if you only had some of the lower-level abilities at the start of the encounter, and had to work your way up to the higher-level ones. (Which do need nerfing, yes, especially SI but also the durations on some of the others.) Re monks, at least I didn't find it difficult to get them aggro'ed. Just stay in the front. Bit of a one-trick pony, but a fairly effective trick.

I love the idea of the Crises in T:ToN. They're also totally not what you'd expect to find in an IE successor. The thing with PS:T is that that game's distinguishing characteristics really don't have much to do with the engine. It's all in the writing and art direction, and those could be executed in almost any medium—book, comic, film, first-person, third-person, top-down, real-time, turn-based, you name it. So they have a lot more freedom about gameplay than the P:E team ever did, as these threads demonstrate.

Eh, perhaps I ought to start another BG2 playthrough. The writing is just so sick-inducingly bad I'm not sure I can take it. Maybe with another completely self-rolled party so I can avoid the companions...

Edit: never mind.

403 millihelms.

Man, these mood swings. I went back to the KS a while back, read through the original pitch pretty carefully and skimmed through the more important updates. From where I'm at, the mission has drifted remarkably little. There was a lot left unsaid there, of course, but most of the things people are complaining about the most loudly were actually explicitly stated. I agree that dropping combat XP was done a bit stealthily and it does represent a significant departure from the IE precedents, but the rest of it is all there. RTwP party-based combat, check. Fighter-ranger-priest-wizard-rogue, check. Fireball, Knockdown, Magic Missile, check. Big bestiary, check. Map with location you click between to travel, check. Pre-rendered 2D art, check. Classes, levels, XP, spell levels, six attributes, gain level 3 spells on level 5, check, check, check, check, check, check. Even the UI looks like the IE engine ones. If it was any more like the IE games it'd be a damn carbon copy, which would be boring. For those of you saying that this is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!!!11one! than the IE games, please grow up. It's not. Really, it isn't. As a thought experiment: which series of games does P:E resemble more than the IE games and why? Discuss. (Darklands? Oh please. Darklands had learn-by-doing character advancement, big-time dominant strategies (heavy plate FTW for everybody), completely different character generation and skill system, completely different-flavored, pseudo-historical world, and to be able to get anywhere at all you had to grind like a porn star. Those CYA panels do not make this a Darklands clone. Seriously.)

Pretty good, @khermann. I'd rate that at about 350 millihelms.

@Karkarov Touché.

They did that. Also the music and the writing.

I liked SRR. Dead Man's Switch was pretty light fare but well written and atmospheric, and Dragonfall was downright good. Of course they're RPG-lites compared to what P:E is shooting for, but they were pretty good at what they were. Not without their flaws of course but all in all quite enjoyable.