PrimeJunta

Not this again. I'm 43 for crying out loud. I've done my share of dying and reloading. We're not all konsole kids here.

I don't particularly care for BG2 mages either. But I still think casters in P:E ought to be less easy to suppress/murder somehow.

@Karkarov there is a continuum between "dead with one volley" and "Kangaxx" you know. It's not either-or.

The writing is clearly miles and miles better in P:E, the quests have more alternative solutions, the dialogs are much more reactive to stats, class, origin, skills, disposition, and reputation, the content density is better, most classes are more versatile and interesting, and despite some niggles e.g. about the complete removal of spell counters I like the combat better as well. (Fact is, I'm not enjoying BG2 all that much.)

It's not faster than in the IE games.

Crowdsourcing a "community portrait pack" for P:E ought to be pretty simple, especially as the portraits don't have a single distinctive style. There's plenty of CC licensed art to be found, and I'm sure there are plenty of artists in the fan community as well.

The beetles do punch too hard, but other than that I disagree. Both movement speed and view distance feel just about right to me, and enemies certainly can't scoot past the front line without a penalty (unless they have special abilities, like the beetles' burrow). I also find it relatively easy to stop the fights from turning into a mosh pit, and AoE spells both useful and quite easy to use.

That would be a major change as I believe the AI relies heavily on tracking who's engaged with whom. I would be extremely surprised to see something that big this late in the process. Status effects in general are much less scary than in the BG's as (1) the durations are shorter -- like, WAY shorter -- and (2) they can be universally countered with Suppress Affliction. (Personally I prefer it this way, except that I'd like countering to be a bit more complex. It's not 'game over' if you get slapped with an AoE status effect, like could happen with Horror/Confusion/Chaos if you were a bit unlucky with your saves etc. You usually have time to do something.) That said, in the earlier BB builds there were some seriously scary status effects; there was a spider which inflicted Petrification which meant that all your damage went straight from Health, which meant that unless you got really creative really quick, a Petrified character wento to zero health (=maimed or dead if permadeath is on) in no time flat. It's no longer there in BB392 at least on Normal difficulty; may still be on Hard or PotD.

There is a cipher-specific solution to one of the quests in the BB.

The stealth system is pretty straightforward: each character (yours and theirs) has an invisible "noise circle" and "detection circle." The size of the "noise circle" depends on your stealth skill. If a character's "noise circle" intersects the "detection circle," its selection circle will start to fill up, first with yellow, then with red. The speed depends on your stealth skill and how close you are to the "detecting" toon. Once it's full, you're detected. I.e. there's a "grace" period within which you can retreat back to the shadows when you risk detection. And you most definitely can sneak up on enemies. I've done that in the Skaen temple with BB Rogue (and rogues of my own) a quite a bit. The difficulty settings affect the number and type of enemies. Only Path of the Damned also affects their stats.

Why do you need the rest of the UI when you're in dialog? How are you going to read the dialogs if there's only room for a couple of lines?

Wizards are fine mechanically, as in, highly useful to have in the party. Some of us just find them a bit one-dimensional compared to their DnD counterparts who had a much broader repertoire of spells than just damage, debuff, or self-buff.

Perhaps it's actually a good thing that the portraits don't have a uniform style. Portrait packs won't stand out so much, in a bad way.

Wizards have Arcane Shield, and it is true they don't use it much. Thing is, firearms bypass it completely. Other caster classes don't have anything analogous.

I liked the party banter. Especially the pacing, with the pauses in between. I wonder if whoever wrote it is a fan of Kaurismäki films? That bit of dialog was very Kaurismäki. Laconic.

@danielkx The metagame aspect is IMO true to a significant extent for BG2, and even there it's not so much the battles but which quests to take in which order, and where the really good lewt is found. We've been discussing this a quite a lot in the "Let's play BG2" threads, and I get the impression that metagame knowledge -- learning to play BG 2 by playing it again and again -- is kind of the whole point for many of its most hardcore fans. And no, it's not exactly my thing; I also find my enjoyment level crashing whenever I make a decision based on metagame knowledge, whether it's about quests to do or combat preparations to make.. It is however not true with IWD, for the most part. I did not feel like it was suckerpunching me. I talked to various NPC's and paid attention to what they said, and they did tell you quite enough for you to figure out what to anticipate. What you do have to know though is something about the DnD bestiary. If you have no idea what an umber hulk is, hearing that a mad mage is building an army of them won't help.

I wasn't talking just about wizards though. I said "casters" in the topic and "spellcasters" in the message body, and I meant it. Enemy chanters and druids are just as un-threatening as they're so easy to interrupt/chunk. Why I think this is a problem? Because figuring out how to take out the biggest threat in an encounter is half the fun. If you have casters with dangerous spells -- and yes, the spells are dangerous -- but there's a simple, reliable, obvious, and near-universally applicable tactic to take them out, then the combat suffers. Caster? Opening volley. Then do the actual fight.

What do you think is the issue then? Other than the usual "Josh is mean and just does this as a personal affront to moi" one that is.

By the time you get blunderbusses in the demo you're past the beetles, and the rest aren't armored. I've used them against Skaen archers (and chanters) and of course that adventurer mage, and they're super effective for that.

I saw one use an invocation once. Somehow missed him in the fray and murdered the archers instead. Usually they're shredded way before that point though.

FWIW I agree that it would be cool if there was more background buzz in the cities. Somebody mumbled about Unity's limitations. I'm pretty sure the cause is something like that rather than "content density."

On the contrary, it's the mob control stuff that's been neutered. They're pretty much grenadiers only.

Thank you for conceding the point so gracefully.

Suit yourself. It's not what Josh means by "content" when he says that Athkatla had a too high density of it though.

Right, so you prefer mages to be less threatening than other creatures in an encounter. That's what I thought. Thank you.