PrimeJunta

Yes, that's the one you got right. Yes, there will be no hard counters. However, that does not mean there will be no counters, full stop, nor that there will be no effects requiring (or greatly mitigated by) counters. To take a trivial example, there will be elemental damage, and I'm pretty sure there will be counters that help resist elemental damage. They just won't be hard counters, i.e., effects that completely and reliably cancel out effects that would otherwise be immediately lethal. Somewhat, as in completely, yes. Yes, we know there's a "flypaper" ability for fighters. What you pulled out of your behind is that it involves messing with or switching off enemy AI. It merely means that a fighter can stickily engage multiple enemies at once. I would expect that enemy fighters have a similar ability. Not when you get the known facts wrong, or are pulling speculations out of thin air and describing them as facts.

Indeed. I think only one of them is right (the first one). As to the others -- Hard counters. True, there won't be any. However, @MReed doesn't appear to know what "hard counter" means, since we certainly don't know that counters won't be required. Equal roles. In fact, we know the contrary -- classes are more differentiated in combat than in the IE games. What we do know is that classes will be closer to each other in combat power – i.e., we won't have the situation where wizards are useless at low levels and gods at high levels, or that rogues or bards kind of suck in combat at all levels. The second part is directly contrary to what we know, i.e. that fighters will have more modal/passive abilities and fewer active abilities than, say, wizards. Interfering with AI. Wut? Josh was describing disengagement attacks, not something "interfering with AI." I.e., fighters pack an extra-mean punch when an enemy tries to disengage. Presumably the AI will take this into account when deciding what to do, just like you would if you were fighting a fighter -- but this is nothing like aggro mechanics which they've said won't be in the game, and which are interfering with the AI. I.e., another fine post from the Bitter Brigade. He forgot to whine about "no combat XP" though.

I <3 this thread.

Haha wow. You realize that you just called three big-ticket backers ugly and identical?

You know what's the hardest thing about making a game (or pretty much anything that involves more than one person, as a matter of fact?) Project management. Everybody has ideas, there are scads of skilled writers, artists, musicians, modelers, scripters, testers, and programmers around, there are great tools, there are great marketing channels; you name it. But keeping that whole pack together and getting it to produce a coherent whole, now that's tough. One reason I feel optimistic about P:E is that the guy in charge produced IWD2 in ten freaking months. That's some seriously badass project management mojo right there.

I don't know what the numbers are, but DA:O certainly felt much more same-y than BG, in terms of enemy variety. On the other hand, IWD2 is feeling pretty DA:O-ey in terms of same-yness so far, although I'm sure that it has a huge variety of things, since it benefits from and builds on the bestiary from its elder siblings. I think that feeling of same-yness is created by having lots of near-identical encounters strung together, even if in the end you have so many that the total variety is pretty big. I think two or three similar encounters, tops, should be enough; after that it just becomes rote, a chore, even if by then you've figured out the tactics to get through it quickly. A thing that adds to it is having many variants of the same type of critter that only differ in power, even if it's not actually mechanically done via level scaling. DA:O had both. In spades.

@Lephys Josh also said you can only carry camping materials for 2-6 camps, depending. I.e., rest-spamming is still out.

Remember that Star Wars: A New Hope translation where "Must be some kind of drill" became "Sen täytyy olla jonkinlainen pora?"

If genre definitions become a straitjacket, that's a problem. As a shorthand way to categorize things so they become easier to find, they're OK. Personally I especially enjoy genre crossovers. Perdido Street Station, to name one.

Genres have fairly strict definitions though. Libraries and bookshops use them to classify things. I'm not sure it's helpful to knowingly violate them.

@Malignacious, this is not the game you're looking for. :jediwave:

To be fair, some of the classics had lots of repetitive, filler combat too. I'm on an IWD2 playthrough, and it's starting to wear me down. IWD1 had much better variety; things were changing frequently enough to keep it interesting. It's really too bad they didn't have the time and budget to do that, and had to build length by throwing mob after mob of goblins/orcs/Aurilites/ice trolls etc. at you. If there was a mod that removed 80% of the combat I'd apply it.

Fluid terms. Change with context. I think they're more about who the protagonists are, what motivates them, and how the world is portrayed. I understand 'high fantasy' to be a near synonym of 'heroic fantasy.' Villainous villains. Threats that threaten the very existence of the world, or something damn close. Ancient bloodlines. Noble knights. The wise king who has gone over the sea, leaving the kingdom to the perfidious pretender. Ancient and terrifying secrets. Capital-G Good and capital-E Evil. That sort of thing. And 'low fantasy' to be something at the other end of the scale. Muck-filled streets. The cutthroat struggling with his remnants of conscience. Corrupt politicians. War, but not one about Good and Evil, but about power, wealth, glory, greed, and usually the protagonist is someone who's just caught up in it as an outsider. Sex. Crime. So it's totally possible to have high-magic low fantasy, or low-magic high fantasy. The Witcher is high-magic low-fantasy, for example. Can't think of a low-magic high-fantasy classic off the top of my head because few high-fantasy authors can resist the temptation to also put in high-magic. Robin Hood would fit the bill, if it wasn't usually classified as historical fiction. It's also totally possible to write a low-fantasy story in a high-fantasy setting. Kirill Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer is a low-fantasy take on Middle-Earth, for example. Edit: ho, cancel that. I looked it up and it looks like I had the term completely wrong. As did you. It's actually a more interesting distinction. Quoting: "Low fantasy is a sub-genre of fantasy fiction involving "nonrational happenings that are without causality or rationality because they occur in the rational world where such things are not supposed to occur."[1] Low fantasy stories are set either in the real world or a fictional but rational world, and are contrasted with high fantasy stories which take place in a completely fictional fantasy world setting with its own set of rules and physical laws." [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_fantasy ] I like that definition more actually. What term should we use for the kind of stuff I mistakenly thought was low fantasy, though? We have 'heroic fantasy' for the other kind.

@BrainMuncher, P:E doesn't have combat XP.

I don't have the references, but I'm pretty sure Josh said dialogs will work according to 1 and 2 at least. I.e. if you want to surf the dialog trees the only way to do it is by savegame abuse. The journal will probably auto-update with relevant info though, and I expect there will be a pretty long dialog log you can scroll back on too. As to 3, IMO it should be more of a situational thing. I have no problem being able to have the same "What can you tell me about Targos?" conversation with the barkeep over and over again, but yeah, for plot-critical NPC's it should work that way.

@constantine, yes, they do and it does. However, it stopped making sense the minute they introduced the sorcerer. That IMO is the biggest downside of the class, even if mechanically it's more enjoyable to play.

Back in Usenet days, a troll was considered a failure if he had to post in the thread he started.

Yes to the title (I'm fairly certain). But probably no to the questions in the message body. P:E's entire animation budget is probably less than what DA:O's trailer cost to make, and that is bound to show, whatever tricks they pull out of their hats.

As an aside, I don't see any conceptual problem with the rogue-as-damager and warrior-as-defender roles in P:E, even with this whole "full-time-battlefield-dweller" thing. I would expect that a full-time-battlefield-dweller's primary skill would be to be very good at not dying. I.e., defensive, recuperative, as safe as possible, including factoring in the risk of getting executed for cowardice. I.e., he'd be someone you can park in a formation on a battlefield and expect not to get killed nor to run away even as horrible things are happening around and to him, and to get in the occasional stab when the opportunity presents itself. Whereas the talented amateur who doesn't actually live on the battlefield would be foolish enough to go for riskier, showier, more damaging strikes, while sticking out his head more. My guess is that one-on-one, toe-to-toe, the P:E fighter should beat the P:E rogue, by the way -- but that in party statistics, if both are played to their strengths, the rogue would rack up more kills. Next topic: samurais and ninjas. Which is better and why? Discuss.

@Lephys and others, the conceit behind Vancian casting is that spells are discrete entities. Like pokemon if you will. The wizard "memorizing" a spell is capturing that entity in his mind, ready to be released, and once released, it's gone. It's totally not like remembering a thought or knowing a muscle movement. More like, I dunno, putting a genie in a bottle and then releasing it when needed. It works in Vance's fiction, but as a gameplay mechanic it's bloody tedious. @Mr. Magniloquent, yeah, I do find the sorcerer limiting as well. As I said earlier, both classes are badly designed. Another downside of the sorcerer is that it doesn't fit the metaphysics of Vancian spell-casting, which only makes sense if you think of spells as bottled-up entities. There's no problem with the classic classes -- divine casters are given those entities by the gods they serve, arcane ones pull them out from wherever they come through skill and knowledge. If this is the case, how come sorcerers have a flexible supply of each type of entity? It makes no sense. I.e., the sorcerer and her divine counterparts are yet another attempt to patch a clunky, unenjoyable mechanic in D&D. As usual, it solves some problems but introduces others, and makes the entire system grow yet more hair and become yet less coherent. OD&D worked as a system; no edition since has (with the possible exception of 4e which I haven't played, and which I don't want to because it doesn't focus on the things I want from a PnP system.)

Permadeath is an extra option you have to enable separately. You can play on hard without permadeath. or, if you want, on easy with it. It's also part of the Expert Mode option set. Source: http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Mode - follow the links for references. See also http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Health#Health .

@Gfted1, close, but no cigar. Running out of stamina does indeed cause you to drop in combat, but you won't be maimed when you wake up. However, if you run out of health in combat, then you will be maimed, or, in Expert mode, dead.

Windows 98, ME, and 2000, I believe, just like the originals.

That is sad. I had missed that news. I didn't know anything about his life story either. His work lives on. That's more than can be said for most of us. :salute:

OT @IndiraLightfoot I just gotta say, great avatar. That drawing always was one of my favorite pieces of D&D art.