PrimeJunta

Hard to say much at this point, before the AI and pathing bugs that ruin things are addressed. I have a hunch it'll be pretty sweet once they are though. However: 1. Weapons need rebalancing. Haven't done any math, but heavy weapons just seem all-around much more effective than light ones, probably because so many enemies have DT's which reduce the light ones to grazing. Firearms seem too strong for the same reason. 2. Combat movement speed needs to be slowed down. As it is it's too frantic; I'm playing in slo-mo all the time (which feels a little too slow for most things). 3. The Health/Endurance damage ratio needs to be adjusted. Difficulty for individual combats is fine -- or would be if the combat worked as intended -- but I need to rest too often.

1. Add a facing arrow to the right-drag formation positioning UI, so it's easy to see where the party will be facing. 2. Overhaul the Stash UI. Use a split pane rather than a floating pane, which obscures the inventory. 3. Add "Cancel" and "Accept" buttons to dialog-type panes, instead of only being able to exit them with Esc or the closing cross.

Decouple Health and Endurance. Bind Health to CON and Endurance to RES. This would have two purposes: (1) It would make RES less of a dump stat (2) It would allow players to optimize builds for maximum tactical impact (pump RES) or maximum strategic durability (pump CON).

Hm. I suppose a lot of the design decisions in the IE games were bizarre, now that you mention it...

Hey, thanks! I'll try to remember to do that next time around.

The DT's magnify the effect too. I'm not entirely sure the combat math holds up to tell you the truth. Anything with a DT makes light, fast weapons as good as useless; they're reduced to decimal-point grazes basically, making slow, heavy weapons not just, say, 50% or even twice as effective, but, like, 10, 20 times as effective. Whereas slow, heavy weapons are still reasonably good against enemies with low DT, where those fast light ones would in fact be better. That makes light, fast weapons highly unattractive. It's a choice between something that's really good against a small subset of critters and useless against the rest, and something that's really good against the hardest-to-damage critters and OK against the rest. Bit of a no-brainer there, especially if you only have two weapon slots so there's no room for, say, light-melee, light-ranged, heavy-melee, and heavy-ranged sets. Come to think of it, four slots would mitigate the problem. I've nothing against playing RPS with weapons if that's how Josh rolls, but in that case I would like to have enough slots so that I wouldn't have to fiddle with the inventory all the time. I do notice that I've already switched to the heaviest weapons I can find and everything is suddenly a lot easier. I'm sure there are some situations where it'd be better to switch to something else but nothing that's giving me real trouble. So unless I'm missing something major, weapon balance is off. Maybe tune the DT's so that light weapons aren't so completely useless.

Progress update. Wooh, this is hard work. I haven't been actively trying to get deeper into the beta as much as just try out different characters and tactics on the beetles. Mostly because I tend to hit one of those force-reload bugs and then my inventory evaporates, which is tedious. I did brave it a bit, this time with a paladin. I got as far as the locked doors in the cultist dungeon before the inventory bugs got me. Specifically, the key disappeared and I didn't have any lockpicks so I couldn't progress. No huge loss because all my shields and some of my prime weapons had evaporated by then too. My quests had also already disappeared by then, which probably means I lost out on some XP -- I think I only got one batch when entering the ogre cave in fact. This time the bug that was forcing all the reloads and thereby disappearing inventory was the one where some of my toons completely stop responding to commands. I can select them by dragging on the ground, and I can do stuff like switch weapons, but they don't move, and I can't select them by clicking on the portrait. The unstick with a reload; don't know if there are other ways. That happened a LOT this time around, at least four or five times by then. I've also almost abandoned using melee because of the clusterhug bug. The fights are pretty easy to win with missile weapons and spells, especially once I got some firearms; at most I plonk BB Fighter in front to flypaper them, then blast away; they go down like ninepins. Guns, arbalests, and crossbows feel maybe a little OP in fact, especially compared to BB Rogue's hunting bow, which hardly ever seems to do double-digit damage. The web equivalent is really good for keeping the opposition in the line of fire a bit longer too. This is an enormously promising game.

Too complicated IMO. Turns the attributes into a soup which semi-arbitrarily adjust the final combat stats that actually make a difference.

@mrmonocle That's not correct. BG2 had about 275 maps, and rather recently P:E had about 150. Source

I'm actually perversely starting to like that the only way to play this is Trial of Iron, since reloading will leave you naked and shivering with naught but your bare fists. Er, if that counts as praise.

@MReed I'm actually kind of surprised at how calm things are here. Only a small minority noticeably butthurt. We're an amazingly positive bunch!

Hehe. The whole kickstarter thing is about sponsoring a project. I have no problem sponsoring it a bit more, especially since I was lukewarm about it during the original pitch and only really got interested as the project progressed.

I can confirm that items disappear also without saving/loading. I just started a new game, rearranged the gear in the party, and took the Medreth quest. When I went upstairs in the Dracogen inn, BB Wizard had lost his grimoire and weapon.

Speaking from personal experience here -- debugging and stabilizing while simultaneously adding new features is several times slower than if you're in feature freeze. If WL2 took 8 months, it's entirely reasonable to expect P:E will get there in 2 or 3, given the amount of stuff they had to flat-out add and change in WL2.

There are multiple solutions to situations, and the quests are nicely written and the solutions are tied to the writing, so it's a lot more than "go to place X, kill monster M and bring me the head" (although that may be one of the possible solutions). Wilderness has lots of wildlife waiting to ruin your day. No backpacks. I'm imagining there's a pack of invisible llamas following everyone around carrying the loot. Haven't noticed NPC routines. They feel very IE-ey, i.e. you'll find them where you left them, mostly. Dyrford appears to be in a peaceful area. Some bandits and annoying wildlife around, but no keep other than some ruins; seems to be a long time since the last war. Dyrford seems pretty agrarian. There's a currier, a smith, an herbalist, a peasant, and an innkeeper you can talk with at least. I'm kinda wondering about pastimes too actually, since apparently they've largely given up on attempting to making babies, although they do appear to jump at the opportunity when it presents itself.

Not all.

@Namutree what weapons were you using? Hint: "I will _____ you like a bug!"

I don't like pseudo-simulationist abilities at all. I'd prefer that you'd be able to put points into Damage, Area, Duration, Penetration, Interrupt etc. directly. Simpler that way.

@Sirabot That they need to decide how to allocate their budget between systems, graphics, and content is a fact. My priorities are my opinion. "Settling for less, not striving for quality, and ruining the industry" is childish whining.

Oh, poppy**** @Sirabot. I just have different priorities. They have a limited budget. If you want prettier graphics, they'll have to allocate more of that budget to graphics and less to systems and content, and I would much rather play a BG2-scale game that looks like this than a Shadowrun Returns scale game that looks a lot better TYVM.

Hm, yeah, that's likely to have something to do with it. Considering that Microsoft isn't supporting XP either, I think it's unlikely that Obsidian will test much (or perhaps at all) on it. Upgrade time or maybe switch to Linux and play that one (when it's out?)

Why not .zip them and attach that?

You must've been doing something wrong fighting the trash mobs. How were you fighting them?

Triple the budget while keeping the scope and mechanics the same, and I've no doubt they could make it look a lot better. For $4M, I'm more than happy with how it looks.

I like the names. Especially as there's some real linguistics behind them; they're not just completely made up by piling diphthongs one after the other, even if they're not quite complete conlangs. Don't mind the pronunciation difficulties. (But then I am something of a language nerd.)