PrimeJunta

I had an A4 graph paper notebook full of hand-drawn dungeon map, starting from a ruined keep at the top, all the way down to some rather hot places. Then I moved on to world maps and city maps. Found this one in an archive in EPS format, with only the dingbats designating cities borked into rectangles...

Criticism, even strong criticism, is not the same as dislike. I'm extremely critical of D&D as a system, yet I played it as my primary PnP game system for 25 years. I would not have done that if I disliked it. My criticisms of BG2 in particular are strongly related. It's a great game, but also hugely flawed. That is not a contradiction in terms.

Combining things in new ways is innovation too. In fact that's what most innovation is. I can't think of any game that has even most of this particular combination. Can you?

Whoa, the Bitter Brigade is out in force, I see. How does P:E innovate? I guess we'll see when we'll see, but one can always speculate. First off, it's billed very much as an evolutionary rather than revolutionary game. The innovation isn't going to be something knock-your-socks-off unexpected. It's going to be in the smaller things. Nevertheless, there's a quite a bit we know about already,. Technical. The 2D combined with 3D lighting and volumetric effects backgrounds are innovative. At least I don't think I've seen anything exactly like that anywhere, and they promise to take the top-down isometric experience to entirely new visual heights. Mechanical. The game mechanics design goals of P:E are pretty damn ambitious. It wants to be both diverse and balanced, eliminate cookie-cutter builds and parties while producing genuinely different gameplay for different builds and party compositions. Breaking out of the "fighters are strong but dumb, wizards are smart but fragile" mold counts as fairly major innovation in my book. Lore. The whole soul magic thing is original and highly intriguing IMO, and it looks like they've thought it through extremely thoroughly, from in-world explanations for the supernatural abilities various classes have, to magical materials like skein steel, to the politics of animancy, to its history, and so on. Time period/history. There haven't been many cRPG's set in the Renaissance/Age of Discovery period, and fewer still in a 'colonial' setting where a new culture arriving from overseas collides with older, established cultures. Even better, it looks like they're doing this in a way that avoids making it a transparent allegory for how it went down in our world; for one thing it appears that the cultures are on a much more equal technological/military footing. Languages. I don't recall seeing many cRPG's make even a slightly credible attempt at conlangs; fantasy names are usually just vaguely Celtic syllables strung together at random. P:E's have structure and feel and flavor. (That's a big, big deal for me personally BTW.) Funding and production model. Doing something of this scale through Kickstarter is pretty innovative in itself, even if they weren't quite the first to do it. What's even more interesting IMO is the way they're using and sharing assets. Unity is largely OSS, and they're sharing both their tech and some of their people with a 'friendly competitor,' i.e. inXile. I find that pretty damn cool because it's a win-win situation. That was just off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more -- but P:E looks pretty damn innovative from where I'm at, certainly more than the next AAA instalment in some well-established FPS franchise.

In most mythologies Heaven and Hell are places you can reach by walking. Used to be so in Christian mythology as well, certainly Hindu and Buddhist mythoi, and most definitely ancient Greek mythos. Olympus is an actual, real mountain in Greece, and there were several known entrances to Hades – Orpheus went through a cave in Taenarum, Odysseus through one near Lake Acheron, and Aeneas through another one near Lake Avernus. Yep, those are real lakes, one in Greece, one in Sicily. The idea that heavens and hells are somewhere 'out there,' unreachable through physical means, is a thoroughly modern one. The various religions pretty much had to re-interpret their traditions in light of the astronomical discoveries from Galilei on out. So IMO reaching Hades by going down far enough a giant dungeon system isn't out of place at all!

Hades. I would want to see us end up in Hades. A cold, still place where the shades of the dead wander, presided over by the vast, looming form of the god and goddess of the dead. At the bottom, obviously, and with suitable lore attached. But it would be cool if it was a place you could reach just by going down, instead of having to plane shift or such.

That's a Bethsoft peculiarity. I hope we won't see it in P:E.

Duh.

Perhaps a little paradoxally, I think random insta-kill effects only work in hardcore/roguelike modes. When dead means dead, you do a whole lot more to avoid them, which can be exciting and rewarding. But combined with unlimited save and reload, they don't make games harder, only more repetitive.

As I recall, the KS was shooting up way faster than they expected and they just ran out of ideas for a final stretch goal. Putting in that one was more of an expression of exuberance than an actual goal. If it were an actual goal, yeah, it wouldn't be much of a one, I agree. But then a friend of mine ran for the university student council with the slogan, "More of everything for everybody, or at least lots."

If you're really keen on this, just roll a d6 and allocate the points yourself. Not everything has to be a feature. Just sayin'...

Gotta hand it to @khalil. Not everyone has the gonads to do the virtual equivalent of walking into a Hell's Angels bar and going "You know what? Real bikers ride Hondas."

The Xaurip animation looked pretty good. Very fluid. Costumes need some work though.

So the only two options are forcing you to figure out everything by trial and error, and "massive handholding." No middle ground possible. Glad we got that cleared up.

PC.

I get a special kick out of beating a difficult fight. Sure, easy fights can be fun too, but it's a different kind of fun. The IE games had fights that were difficult in a good way (as well as sucker punches).

Not everything does, no. But IMO not everything needs to be survivable solely by adapting your tactics on the fly. I would like to see some encounters that really are so tough you will die if you didn't prepare accordingly – with enough hints available beforehand that you can prepare, without being forced to trial-and-error it.

I don't think there's much risk of MMO-style cookie-cutter party being required. Josh has explicitly stated that his goal is to allow as much party diversity as possible. I.e., that an all-ranger party will be entirely feasible and will be enjoyable to play – even if it'll be quite different from the "standard" one.

Druids what, in which cRPG's? At least in all D&D3 based ones, druids do the opposite of suck. They rule. Stomp. Win. They're the best all-rounder class, hands down. They heal, self-buff both offense and defense, debuff, area-debuff, area-damage, are extremely durable especially with long-duration self-buffs, they're supplied with a big honking meat shield, and they have that spontaneous-conversion summoning that's so powerful it's almost not even funny. If you want to solo any DnD3 cRPG, druid is the way to go. A while back I made an all-druid party in SoZ and it made the game a freakin' cakewalk. Battle consisted of (1) start, (2) everyone summon suitable minion, (3) watch them obliterate the opposition. Okay, for the tougher ones, (4) watch minions become killed so (5) summon another one. The only challenge was keeping track of which druid summoned which minion so I could have the right ones re-summon them. (Okay, I gave one of the druids high INT, Able Learner, and one level of rogue so I got those skills covered, but still.)

Would Kangaxx have been less memorable if there had been a possibility to pursue a lore trail of him, which would've turned up clues about his strengths and weaknesses? Perhaps accounts by adventurers who somehow survived an encounter with him? If this lore trail hadn't been forced on you, but had been something someone hinted at and you had to follow yourself?

So Josh announced that PE won't do GM sucker punches. Meaning, encounters you're only likely to beat the second, third, or fourth time around because beating them requires foreknowledge of what you're going to be facing and how. That is good in my opinion. I always thought this kind of thing was lazy design masquerading as challenge. However, it's not obvious how the game will or should play with this element removed. Something could be lost. In particular, I think preparation is a fairly important gameplay element in the IE games, whether we're talking about spell lists, pre-buffs, or weapon loadouts. I would not like to lose that. Conversely, I also get a kick out of beating an encounter even when I wasn't properly prepared. Some ways things could go: South Park style. All the mechanics are completely transparent. You can see the weaknesses and immunities of every enemy, with crucial defenses like Shielded and Armor visible all the time. This lets you adjust your tactics on the fly, using whatever you happen to have. To keep things even a little interesting, you have limited scope to e.g. switch weapons in combat. Encounters are balanced to be beatable even if you don't have exactly the right attacks and counters, but they will be easier if you do. New Vegas style. The game provides you with information about each enemy type through a variety of mechanisms. If you pay attention you can figure out how to fight them before you have to. If not, you can still play by trial and error. Encounters are balanced to be punishing if you play them wrong. Roguelike style. Encounters are punishing and some can only reasonably be beaten with proper preparation and tactics. They're not telegraphed beforehand. However, retreat is always or almost always possible and the game mechanics don't punish you for it. If an encounter isn't going your way, you can run away, rest to heal up, prepare properly for it, and try again. I'm sure there are others. Of these, I would prefer New Vegas style. South Park style takes preparation out of the equation, and roguelike style only fits comfortably in roguelikes; it also doesn't really work with restricted resting since there will just be lots of trekking back and forth to campsites. Ideally I'd like PE to provide information about the monsters and combat challenges in upcoming areas in in-world ways: people talking about them casually, mentions when quests are given, books, and perhaps specialists you could actively seek out and interview. New Vegas did some of this, but it could be taken a good deal further. Perhaps combine it with a Witcher style bestiary you could fill up not only by killing things but by researching things.

Maybe it'll be a Renaissance noir. Everybody mostly just standing around after dark while it's raining, wearing wide-brimmed hats, smoking meerschaums, and glaring at each other balefully, then somebody discovers a corpse in a sea chest, with blood going slowly drip, drip, drip on the floor. And eventually somebody catches a ship and sails off into the gray North wind. Probably not though.

It's far too late for Paradox to affect any of that other than difficulty. Those are design decisions, and will have been made months ago. Changing them now would be extremely messy (read: expensive). I'm quite sure both Paradox and Obsidian are fully aware of that.

Already been done. I remember trying at least avocado ice cream, tomato ice cream, garlic ice cream, onion ice cream. Also blue cheese ice cream which while not a vegetable falls in the same cateogry. Most very very good. I'm sure celery would be too. The trick is that they're starters, not desserts. PS. That was in France. They'll eat anything and make you like it.

D&D had spell variants too. They even had an entire mechanic for it, namely metamagic feats. And then there were straight-out variants like magic missile -> minor missile storm -> major missile storm, lesser dispel magic -> dispel magic -> greater dispel magic, and so on. I quite like metamagic actually; the thing I don't like about Vancian magic is that it's extremely rigid, and metamagic introduces some flexibility to shaping it. A metamagic-focused sorcerer is my favorite caster class in D&D. (Also ridiculously overpowered at higher levels, but hey.)