PrimeJunta

Since you asked... I am Prince Consort. My wife got a position at the university here, and I came with. The company I work with already has a distributed software development team so it was no problem to work remotely, so I could even keep my job. We're renting our own place. I have been known to play role-playing games from time to time. I have other hobbies but most aren't all that social (photography, writing, that sort of thing). I think point 1 already covered that.

I doubt they're going to replace (m)any mechanics. (No pressing need to either, IMO.) They are going to add a lot of talents and tune a lot of stuff, and (I hope!) do something about the combat feedback at least; however there really isn't much point to do that if the beta is borderline unplayable. As to the listening part, I'm sure they are. They do have to do a quite a bit of filtering to get the signal out of the noise.

Eh, Finland's like that in the winter too, only even colder and darker I'd expect. I feel quite un-social between November and February too. I've been introducing myself to the neighbors a bit; there's a nice young couple just across, some old ladies downstairs, the concierge named Peter, and so on. I wonder if there's a RPG club here somewhere? If there is maybe I'll join that...

Ha! I'm actually living just next to Riis Skov, which is super-nice, especially for the dog. Went for a little run with him there this morning actually. There's even a sort of outdoor gym there with a fantastic view over the Aarhus Bay; it really invites you to do a small workout after the run. It's a nice little forest, very civilized. Don't have many pictures yet, but here's the view from our balcony this morning:

I've just relocated to Aarhus, Denmark, for a year and a half. This is way cool so far. Very similar to Finland in most ways, which makes the differences stand out—like, better selection of higher-quality stuff in the corner supermarket, different fish at the fishmonger, generally better attention to "quality of life" stuff with what seems like more sensible rules that leave room for common sense (like a "dog forest" which isn't even fenced out, and just has a signpost saying 'dogs off the leash - but under full control,') much better cycling arrangements... but no sorting of garbage, weirdly old-fashioned banking with international credit cards not accepted in many places, general dearth of goat cheese, electric sockets up by the light switches instead of where they belong, near the floor. Everbody also seems extremely laid-back, open, friendly, and welcoming. Annoyed at not speaking the language, especially because it's so close I can almost feel it—I speak Moominswedish kind of OK, and it's close enough that I can understand written Danish pretty well. I also look pretty Nordic and people talk Danish at me. But no clue what they're saying. Going to enroll in some language classes as soon as I'm properly registered. So, any Danes, or expats living in Denmark here willing to offer any pointers?

I need to pee.

@Azrael AFAIK there isn't a "Feudal Japan" stand-in in P:E (although they did say that Island Aumaua have some Japanese as well as Polynesian influence to their clothing). IMO a katana would be out of place, since it evokes the samurai so strongly. At least Forgotten Realms had Kara-Tur which made it somewhat plausible that a few might find their way to the Sword Coast. I've no doubt someone will mod them in soon enough, though.

Admittedly it would be a bit of a waste to shoot dead people. Although capital punishment for offenses against taste is taking it a bit far...

If I was running the beta, I'd set up a separate instance of an issue tracker only for that, with the possibility to file anonymous reports. Then assign a QA dude or two to trawl through it, resolving the duplicates, invalid reports, and known issues, and zapping the new ones over to the internal system the devs see. It would save a lot of work over having the trawl through the forums for the same info, and we would get at least some idea of what's going on.

@Quantics ... only in a perfect world. Problem with an issue tracker is that if it's used right, a LOT of stuff goes in, and gets processed fast. There will be invalid issues, duplicates, "could not reproduce" stuff, feature requests filed as bugs, and what have you. Even if you have really good discipline with that stuff, in a project of this scope just taking a dump of all issues between build A and build B, with a list of known unresolved issues, will produce something that's really big and really chaotic. Some companies have balls of steel and put the whole thing in public, but I understand and sympathize with not wanting to do that. (We don't do that, as a matter of fact. We have internal release notes which do contain a list of everything that's been addressed, pulled directly from the issue tracker, but that only makes sense after the product lead has gone through everything and made sure they're marked with correct "Affects version" and "Fix version" fields, and then only if you're familiar with the architecture of our products. Then we prepare—manually—public release notes which explain the same stuff in terms understandable by the customers. This process takes easily a couple of days for a big release. We do not do this when iterating rapidly e.g. in a beta, because it would add a lot of friction to the process.) Short version: I don't think we can handle the truth. There's enough bellyaching as it is.

Guys, how about we let Obsidian worry about the release date. None of us have enough information to make an educated guess about how far in calender time we realistically are. Too many unknowns: how many people are on the project ATM, who is working on what, how efficient they are, are they working on their own code or somebody else's, how robust their QA pipeline is, what the overall state of the code is (i.e., how easy is it to work with), and so on. Seriously, we don't.

A bit LTTP, UpgrayDD. I just went over this with Stun, and even he ended up admitting that Josh's design approach does not necessarily lead to the conclusion you're presenting. The fact that the beta currently has too-wimpy stats is neither here nor there.

Ah, right. Yeah, BioWare does do the cinematic thing well. That's the bit I liked most about the Mass Effects also. It's a shame their writing is so uneven.

@Karkarov, seriously: Fallout is all about feel, and at least for me the parched wasteland thing with corrugated iron shacks among blasted ruins is very central to that feel. It wouldn't feel the same if it wasn't that. (In fact Honest Hearts which was set in a very pretty wilderness felt "wrong" for me for that reason.)

Edit edit: Nevermind, that would be a tangent. Thank you for conceding the point. (Never imagined I would see the day...)

No, Stun. It would mean that a fighter who dumped Accuracy would have to use high base Accuracy weapons to compensate, and a fighter who dumped Might would have to use high base Damage weapons to compensate. See? And if he dumped both, he could still stand there, soak damage, and engage enemies. If you pumped RES and CON and equipped a heavy shield, he could be extremely useful even if he never hit once; he'd tie up the opposition while your damagers do the damage. Don't know if I'd want to play a fighter like that, but it would certainly not be un-viable.

You can, but you can't be Fallout.

What if different weapons have different base damage and accuracy? You know, like in P:E?

Stun, for spits and giggles: roll up a wizard, dump RES, wear heavy armor, and do some casting in melee. Then tell me how it worked out.

No. It. Won't. Damn, you stubborn. But I'll try again, to make this really really simple. I'll completely divorce it from P:E, just to demonstrate how it can work. Suppose you have three stats: Durability, Power, and Accuracy. And suppose you have enough stat points that if you want, you can dump one and pump one to the max. If you have high Durability, you can stand in the front line and take a pounding. If you have high Accuracy, you hit a lot. If you have high Power, you do a lot of damage when you hit. Suppose additionally you have four kinds of weapons: Bazookas, Nerf guns, Sledgehammers, and Rapiers. Bazookas and Sledgehammers have high base Power and low base Accuracy. Nerf guns and Rapiers have low base Power and high base Accuracy. Now, let's see what happens when you dump each of the stats: Mr. Glaskanon -- Durability -- you can use all weapons effectively, doing a lot of DPS, but you won't survive long in the front line. A tanky strategy is therefore out, but you'll be lethal with a Bazooka or Nerf gun, and if you have a high-Durability character to draw fire, you can run into melee with a Sledgehammer or Nerf gun for great burst damage. Joy! Mr. Mauer -- Power -- with your low power, Nerf guns and Rapiers will do next to no damage, so you better use Sledgehammers or Bazookas. With the points you shifted to Accuracy and Durability, you can stay in melee nicely. If you pumped Durability, you'll make a great companion for Mr. Glaskanon. Sir Whiffalot -- Accuracy -- since you dumped Accuracy, you'll whiff a lot with Sledgehammers and Bazookas, so you better stick to Nerf guns and Rapiers. You'll be able to survive in melee nicely and do significant damage because of your higher Power. See: three different dumps, three different tactics. The same principle can be applied to any number of stats.

True, but OTOH there are classes which can be usefully played without contributing offense. Notably the priest; buffs/debuffs/heals is what they do and they don't need accuracy. I don't know how much the wizard's AoE spells benefit from higher accuracy either.

Ugh. Stun. Two separate things. One, the state of the beta. Here, we are entirely in agreement: currently you CAN play with all 3's and not feel much of a difference, and that is a Bad Thing. (Also: this is trivially easy to fix, just double the bonuses and adjust the base values down accordingly.) Two, the matter of principle. You claim that Josh's "no bad builds" principle logically implies that dumping a stat must have no negative consequences. This is not necessarily so. In fact Josh said at some point that he wants us to feel the pain and enjoy the benefit if we dump/pump stats. A possible consequence is that particular stat distributions make particular tactics more or less viable, right down to "practically un-viable." As to the classes, here you're empirically mistaken. You cannot currently make a viable melee ranger, or ranged monk, for example. Only some of them -- the wizard and cipher, in particular -- easily lend themselves to both melee or ranged builds.

Nuh-uh. Does not follow. If you dump a stat, you put the points somewhere else. Ideally that'll just mean that some tactics will become un-viable, while others will become viable. This approach is entirely compatible to making the stats as punchy as you want. I don't think Josh's intent is to make a character with all stats at 3 as viable as a character who has distributed all the stat points, even if they're distributed completely at random. That would be silly.

Currently PER is unambiguously dumpable except if you're really big on dialog options or are making a gimmicky special "interrupter" build. The other attributes are mostly useful to most classes. However IMO they do need more bite. Ironically the only stat I've actually regretted dumping is RES -- having RES 3 makes it practically impossible to do slow things under attack, like casting spells or using slow weapons. Right now that's the stat I'd dump last, although I don't know how much better RES 18 is than, say, RES 12 ATM.

The XP system in the beta is very rough ATM. It does need a lot of work. I haven't even checked how it behaves e.g. if you go to the ogre cave before getting the quest from the farmer. It has to be able to handle situations like that somewhat robustly.