PrimeJunta

They already said elsewhere that they want to encourage players to post Let's Plays etc., so that would imply "no." Keeping track of so many NDA's would be a major PITA too.

Why not?

Or, rather, did not get shafted. :ducks:

Corrected link.

I wouldn't mind if Obs hangs a big NO KISSING sign on their front door. The promancers have Bioware. Surely antimancers deserve a champion as well?

I won't play co-op/MP because there's nobody I want to play with. I will probably give D:OS a spin at some point though, but going by what I've heard it doesn't really seem to be my cuppa.

I must be turning into an old fart because I have no desire whatsoever to express my sexuality in a freakin' computer game. I'd rather express my homicidal and larcenous tendencies.

Gotta say I liked George Ziets's ideas for a BG3. [ http://new.spring.me/#!/GZiets/q/414930203056307948 ]

@namelessthree It's generally considered good form to lurk a bit and generally familiarize yourself with the environment before jumping in. Otherwise you might inadvertently step in some doo-doo, which is kind of what happened here. I for one appreciate your intentions and the generally good grace with which you've handled this thread, but srsly -- you wouldn't have had to do much homework to notice that this is if not exactly a minefield, at least a field recently inhabited by a large number of ruminants with poor digestion. For example, type "romance" into the search field at top right, and then notice the large number of locked threads about it. Bit of a giveaway that, really.

You're right, they can and they do. However, the extra stretchgoal poll was not quite the same thing, as it wasn't about a design decision but about funding. To my knowledge they haven't polled about design decisions, even if they have floated a number of trial balloons. Look at T:ToN. They did call a poll about combat style. The upshot was that (1) when they made the poll, they already had a clear design preference, which they stated, (2) the poll was nearly evenly split, and (3) it caused a lot—like, really, a LOT—of bad blood among the backers. Many RTwP partisans felt that inXile was unfairly skewing the polling by indicating where they stood, and when the poll was nearly evenly split, a lot of them were really, really upset. The poll was a mistake.

@bonarbill I thought the poll was a bad idea. The question ought to have been settled through playtesting if the designers couldn't make up their mind about it. Trial balloons are not the same thing as design by poll though. If a designer wants to find out what the general feeling is about a particular idea, there's nothing wrong with floating it and seeing how it goes down, or up, depending. Polls are bad though because they create the expectation that the result determines the design, and a secondary expectation that other similar ideas are also decided by poll.

Design by committee is a terrible idea. Design by poll is worse.

Sorry, dude, but your original post was too about romances (plural), not roleplaying options in general. You did assert that no romance = no roleplaying options, but that's an obvious non sequitur. If you had been concerned about roleplaying options, then you would have written a completely different post. Romance might have been mentioned in there somewhere, but it would not have been the main theme. Like this, for example: "Hi folks. One thing's been bugging me about P:E from the start. It's all been very mechanically oriented, and most of the stretch goals were stuff like a megadungeon, a stronghold, and more character classes. I really enjoyed the relationships I built with my party members in PS:T and BG2, and I'm concerned Obsidian might be neglecting this aspect to make a more IWD-like dungeon crawler thing. What are your thoughts on that?" Had you done that, I'm pretty sure you would've gotten a warmer reception here, and the discussion would've been better too. 'Cuz the romance thing with P:E is the to end all 's.

I'd prefer the Mac version as well, although booting my iMac into Windows is no huge chore. The funny thing is that the Mac versions/ports tend to actually work better than the Windows ones, when present. Shadowrun Returns runs more smoothly, the GoG port of IWD2 is way better than running it on Windows, and so on.

Here's another crude example of "different but equal." Suppose fighters are great at killing living enemies but suck at destroying undead, and priests are great at destroying undead but suck at killing living enemies, and a game has roughly equal numbers of both, but with some encounters only living enemies, others only undead, and some mixed. Personally I like it this way, and going by what we've heard, it sounds a lot like how P:E is intended to play. If you have barbs as the front line, you'll breeze through encounters consisting of a large number of average-strength enemies but will have a much harder time facing a few tough ones; if you have fighters in the front line, vice versa. If you have a mix, you'll see a more constant level of difficulty. Having some classes be objectively weaker than others annoys me, because why would I want to play an objectively weaker class? If I want a higher difficulty, then I'll just crank it up in the settings. If that's not enough, I'll go in with a smaller party. If even that's not enough, I'll solo. I have a hunch that P:E is going to be tough enough that very, very few of us will manage to solo it at Trial of Iron and Path of the Damned. Personally I do not see the attraction of playing with an intentionally gimped build. It sounds like an unnecessarily convoluted way to raise difficulty when there are settings in place to do explicitly that.

Frankly, I think that from Obsidian's POV the so-called public beta is marketing only; something they're doing because that's increasingly become the expectation with this type of thing. They've got their internal QA, they've got the publisher's QA, and they've been doing this for a very long time. It's too late in the process for the public beta to provide much meaningful feedback that could make it into the game, and since it's only a small off-critical-path portion of the game, it's unlikely to catch a large number of bugs either, most of which will only manifest in particular places in the game. This is qualitatively different from how inXile did it; they really did throw WL2 out there early enough that player feedback could make a material difference. Which was a brave thing to do, because by definition the game was not in great shape at the time and it showed in the feedback.

At this point I think it's better to think of it as a pre-order rather than backing a project. If you have issues with the way it's worded, then wait until it's released or they formally rename it (which, IMO, would be a good idea).

Yep, they already covered that in some detail. My favorite thing is still skein steel—drawing a soul out into copper, then alloying that with iron to create a supernaturally strong steel. Evil of course. If I was an evil overlord, I would so do that to all my enemies.

@Stun Nope, having stamina drop to 0 doesn't make you Maimed. Having health drop to zero will, and if you get hit when maimed, you die.

Before reading anybody else's lists, and trying to be as specific as I can instead of "IE game successor is awsum," that is, listing things specific to PoE. Pluses: + The era. Renaissance-level settings are way underused in fantasy RPG's. + The coherent lore and worldbuilding. What we've heard about the states and cultures of Eora makes sense in a way that few of PoE's peers do, and the lore about souls gives a great background for magic. + The class differentiation. Instead of having several almost-same classes (fighter/ranger/barbarian/paladin, wizard/sorcerer, cleric/druid etc), each class has clearly distinguished strengths and weaknesses. + The scope for variants within classes. In AD&D advancement is almost completely on rails, and in D&D3 core (not counting prestige classes) there are very few ways to build an optimal character within a class. + The melee rules. I really like what they've said about (dis)engagement and the various abilities classes have to play with on the battlefield. Minuses: - Some of the mechanics could use better grounding in the lore. For example, the skill bonuses for many classes seem pretty arbitrary; just assinned so that each class is a little different, with a transparent post-hoc rationalization for them. Why not allow players to pick them on character creation if they're not central to the class's mission (like Rogue and Stealth?) - Not convinced about the monk. Both the concept and the mechanics seem contrived and out of place. - Not convinced about the stronghold design. It looks slapdash and not something that would actually work as a stronghold. - Not convinced about the art direction with Glanfathan ruins, especially the statuary. Looks too modern and familiar to my eye. - Not convinced about orlans. From what we've heard, they seem a bit tacked-on gnome/halfling substitute (plus, furry).

You know what's the problem with these class updates? They make me go "now that's the class I want to play," every. damn. time. And I've already used most of my paid vacation for this year.

As an aside, the only alignment I really like in D&D is True Neutral precisely because it's such a bloody impossible ideal to live up to. The way I've envisioned it is as a 'God's eye view' of the world, a totality where everything relates to everything else, and concepts like good, evil, law, and chaos are just somebody's opinion, and being born, living, suffering, and dying are just sh*t that happens. If you're actually in the world, how are you supposed to live with that? (Also the way most D&D modules and cRPG's did it--"in the name of Balance, quoth the Druid as she sicced her badger at the bladelings"--is just dumb. The major exception are the Dustmen of Planescape: Torment. They had a somewhat coherent philosophy of life built around True Neutral, and a few of them seemed to even grok it.)

The vibe I'm getting is that animancers are more like astrologers or alchemists—researches of forbidden lore who mostly hang around in their libraries and laboratories making discoveries and doing horrible things with the results. We've heard of skein steel (drawing a soul into copper and alloying that with iron to create an extra-powerful steel), or binding the soul of a person permanently to his body so instead of dying he'll become a fampyr, darghul, and so on. This doesn't feel a natural fit for an adventuring class. I would be surprised if there aren't important NPC animancers we get to interact with though.

I care. I just made a wager. Which I'm going to win.

I would like to have a few highly powerful weapons present in the game. I would absolutely not like them to be as common as they usually are in current games. I think acquiring one should be a special event. Distributing them with random loot is not much fun. Fighting a big powerful plot-important meanie to walk away with his sword can be fun, but that's what you do like, in every cRPG ever so I'd prefer they do something a little different, at least some of the time. Some ways of gaining special weapons that I've enjoyed: Hunting for them by following clues in Morrowind Finding pieces to assemble them like in BG2 Sacrificing to a god to be granted one, like in NetHack That one badass sword on top of the pyramid in Gothic 2 that I had to sneak like mad to get Betraying and killing all your companions to bind their essences to something that used to be called the Scythe of Chauntea like in MotB So yeah, that kind of thing.