PrimeJunta

@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.

Objection! DA did not have good storytelling. Well, not much, anyway. The dwarven noble origin was good, I admit, as were a couple of the Orzammar quests. The rest was dullsville.

@Stun, you do realize that you're talking about accounting values only? If you make the base value 10 and apply a 1-point bonus for every attribute point over 10 and a 1-point penalty for every point below 10, you'll end up with a range from 1 to 18. This is exactly the same thing as making the base value 0 and applying a 1-point bonus for every attribute point. I.e., you can get the spread to exactly where you want by adjusting the base value and bonus per point. If you think it's aesthetically more pleasing to drag the zero point up, that won't affect the gameplay at all.

That, and the combat needs to be de-clusterhugged, and needs more feedback. The AI is also very rough and way too exploitable. These need fixing first. After that and your list, there's B-priority stuff like a cleaner, more consistent UI, better inventory, and what have you. None of these are what I'd call scary-looking things. The only question is how long they'll take to fix. Of course, that won't mean that the hardcore cult of the Anti-Sawyer will be happy, but then I doubt they'd ever be, short of seeing him tarred, feathered, and run out of Obsidian on a rail. Edit: @Gladius no it doesn't. There's a perfectly good combat system underneath the bugs and half-implemented features. It just needs to be dug out.

Helm. I think they'll blame Helm. Edit: (I know I would.)

@IndiraLightfoot re the classes, I'm not hugely worried about even that. All the classes work right now, relatively simple balancing issues aside. They are committed to the expansion and want to make a sequel, which means they'll be supporting this for a while. Adding depth to the classes is a pretty simple thing to do post-release, and if they keep a brisk schedule about it we'll see them get better even as we explore them.

"Wackadoodle bottlecap currency?"