soulmata

I finished my pre-2.0 POTD run as a Cipher with 8 con and it wasn't very difficult at all. I think I got KO'ed maybe 6 times through the whole game on my first run. I've started a post-2.0 game as a very similar Cipher, but with 3 con (I've traded the CON for PER, because of the accuracy changes). Definitely a different game, but so far, up to Defiance Bay, I've yet to be knocked out one time. Haven't tried as a Wizard yet, but as a 3-con Cipher wearing rags, I'm pretty damn squishy. The primary tactic I use is to try and disable or suppress everything immediately so there is no chance for them to get in range. We'll see if it pans out.

Latest patch, using Steam. To reproduce, I'm guessing: * Talk to the Stone Watcher, tell him about the Leaden Key * Leave and go do other things (In my case, I completed Heritage Hill first) * Come back. Stone Watcher acts as if you've already cleared out down below * Can't enter Sanitarium because the door is quest locked. Can't seem to fix. Main quest can no longer progress and it's a Trial of Iron game so I can't reload.

What would that accomplish? The effect sticks no matter how far you run. And it looks like the consensus is so far to deal with it out of range, i.e. confusion. Thanks.

I'm patched. It wears off after combat or after the timer expires. I'm just talking about the plain damage it does. My level 9 (now 10) party gets massacred by it due to how fast it drains health and that it stacks.

Very plentiful. Twin Elms on Hard/Expert and I have 70k, along with about a page's worth of unsold blues. I generally do not buy or use potions much, but I do buy all crafting ingredients from all vendors, I buy whatever armor/weapons/items I want and I have taught Aloth every spell we've come across. I've also fully upgraded and fully staff the Stronghold (but, oddly enough, even though all upgrades are in, Steam hasn't given me the achievement). I turn down all monetary rewards (My Benevolent score is like... 4? 5?), and I paid for the amulet in Defiance Bay (4k). I was able to fully upgrade the Stronghold before "Turn 5" by not turning in quests but selling loot. That probably had a lot to do with it, since I'm getting around 700-1000 from taxes (which is kind of odd - even with 51+ security, I'm still losing a few hundred to "bandits"). I also completely obliterated everyone at Raedric's Keep and sold their nonsense. I can't see myself spending all this unless I suddenly got the urge to start buying up every single item I see.

Note to date I've been using Suppress Affliction to try and get through the fight fast enough, but that's quite often not enough.

Scenario is: Party level 9, main character Cipher, Hard/Expert. To this point, not much has been super challenging. There have been some tough spots, but nothing that wasn't manageable by thinking up some tactics. But what the crap is the deal with Plague of Insects? This spell seems absurdly imbalanced, to the point where I have to wonder if I'm seeing what I'm supposed to be seeing. The description of the spell implies it does a huge amount of raw damage over time. Raw damage, as I believe, bypasses DR and affects you directly. That part I'm behind. What I'm not behind is just how insanely high that damage is, to where often encounters with Ogre Druids are leaving my party dying (red health) before they lose EN. When I look at the tooltip and the damage output, here's what I see: "89 damage over 29.75 seconds...", which would be something like 3 damage/s Then, I watch the health of my party - health plummets at 3-4x the rate of Endurance. On all my characters except the tanks, their health drops *faster* than Endurance. It's not even possible to heal through that - if I try to keep them awake, they will die, even from Green health at the start of the fight. Additionally, multiple plagues seem to stack - which makes sense for some damage types, but this seems out of control. OK, so that said, exactly how am I supposed to deal with Plague of Insects without resorting to fog-of-war nuke tactics like charming from just outside engagement range? Given the relative difficulty of an Ogre/Ogre Matron/Ogre Druid, I feel that one single spell should not be the difference between "a relatively easy fight" to "this fight is luck based". I must be missing something! Can it be dispelled?

Intelligent interaction / looting: It's nice that with the party selected, if I click an object, the nearest character will try to interact with it rather than the party "leader" running from a billion miles away to be the first to get it Indiscriminate murder: It was nice that the game didn't artificially restrict my impulse to completely slaughter the town, except, of course, with a group of adventurers at the inn that butchered me. Exceptionally well done art. The backgrounds in particular are fantastic. Very nicely done. Intuitive character creation: It's plainly obvious what you're making and what you're getting (mechanics aside)

You're trivializing an important mechanic because you don't see the value in it. Not everyone wants to play puppet master, and would reasonably expect that "intelligent" agents, such as NPCs you have recruited, can act in an intelligent manner if required. No one here asserted they want the game to "play" fights for them. If you like monotonous grind, more power to you. That doesn't mean everyone shares your viewpoint.

Having a player-controlled list of conditions and actions is a far cry from "having the AI do everything." The point is to reduce the amount of monotony when you are fighting dozens of trivial fights, where the individual actions don't matter so much. If I have a working strategy for fighting a pack of goblins, and I encounter goblins six thousand times, I don't want to tell my party to do the exact same thing six thousand times. That's not immersion, that's your PCs being so stupid they can't recall "Oh, right, goblins don't need heavy nukes, just switch to a nice melee weapon and close the distance." It also lets you keep some fights going rather than having to pause constantly. If you can be reasonably assured your PCs will drink a health potion if they get low on health, you can focus more on taking the fight to the enemy rather than babysitting your entire party.

BG's AI scripts were absolutely terrible. If you gave a mage an actual "Mage" AI script, they would do things like use Horrid Wilted on goblins and gibberlings, hurl magic missiles at magic-immune creatures and more or less try to burn all of their magic in a single fight. Additionally, AI scripts didn't make use of items as well. Even with 3rd-party improvements like SCS, leaving combat decisions up to the AI was almost universally bad. I generally defaulted to telling everyone "engage enemies from a distance with equipped ranged weapon", and anything beyond that I had to intervene. It was universally bad in BG, BG2, P:T, IWD and IWD2. It was not quite as bad, but still pretty bad, in NWN and NWN2. DA:O's party AI was superior. Hands down. The conditional system meant the player had a much higher level of control over their party members - it was a bad design decision on BioWare's part to artificially limit that by requiring you to spend skill points on tactics. There should have been dozens of tactics slots open from minute 1.

You're still approaching the problem from the standpoint of MMO development, which has no place in a single-player role playing gaming. "Class Balance" is meaningless in a single player game. You don't need to control it. Make your mechanics, make your plot, and then let emergent gameplay do the rest.

P:T I feel is a bad example - that game wasn't designed for balance, it was designed almost entirely to give you an interactive story. Combat and even class mechanics were non-important for the majority of the game. I get what you're saying, though - and you do have a good example with the assassin. Kit comparison is actually a great example in general - look at other kits, like the Beastmaster or the Jester. Some kits were ridiculously powerful, while others gave up good class mechanics for mechanics that didn't scale past the first game.

This argument is illogical because it is based on the premise that all skills in the game are applied equally to all environments. What about a character who has absurdly high DPS based on a high rate of attack with a low damage weapon, but is unable to overcome the damage threshold or damage resistance of his or her target? What about a character who relies solely on magic and can out-damage everyone else in many cases, but is rendered helpless when up against a creature or creatures who are resistant or immune to his attacks? What about a character who is solely focused on combat and nothing else, then finds themselves at a crippling disadvantage because an entire quest-line is focused around diplomacy or subterfuge? The 'dps' argument is contrite and pointless. It also reeks of someone who is accustomed to playing MMOs, where DPS optimisation actually matters. In single player story-based RPGs, most players are in it for the experience, the story, the depth of lore, the immersion - not optimising DPS.

It depends entirely on how it's handled. Bethesda had the start of something good with the Radiant system in Skyrim. It was definitely unrefined and lacking polish, but it found a way to procedurally generate quests based on templates that made the quests give you at least some immersion. For instance, each Jarl had a handful of quest templates. The templates were unique to each Jarl, but the locations and individual targets were pseudo-random. This meant while I know I'd get the same quest from each Jarl on a given playthrough, the area's I'd be exploring and NPCs I'd be targeting were different. They prevented this from breaking the storyline by having a handful of areas marked off-limits for randomly generated quests. That sort of system can work well, and reduces the amount of development time needed to provide 1000 quests. If you can instead make a templating system that only defines requirements for a given quest to trigger, you can then generate a large number of quests with less effort. Finesse is needed to make it truly shine, though - that's where Skyrim falls short, as you see through the veil and break your suspension of disbelief when someone hands you a quest and you know, immediately, it was a Radiant quest. None of that, however, compares to quests which have impact. I want my decisions to matter. If I'm given a sidequest to help deliver medicine to some remote village in the middle of nowhere suffering from a plague, and I opt to instead sell the medicine to a shady black market dealer, I want that to matter. I want that village to suffer and die out, I want to reap a huge chunk of change and I want people to know about it happening. If there are half the number of quests but twice the amount of impact from doing them, I'd be happy.

Obsidian has already stated they want to include mature themes in P:E they were forced to censor in other titles. Many of the most enduring games I've played have these elements. Remember the strung-out serpent venom addicts in Ultima VII? It made the pointless shantytown of Paws into an area you could emotionally connect to. Remember the Honorhall Orphange in Skyrim, and finding the creepy kid Aventus Arentino stabbing an effigy while chanting? It gave a more or less faceless war some actual impact beyond "oh some guys died." I would like to see all sorts of these elements in P:E. Picture these scenarios: 1) Your party encounters a dragon. Your party leader says, "Never fear! We shall conquer you!", and you go into a pitched battle that lasts for hours and manage to eek out a win, with only a few casualties. *or* 2) Your party encounters a dragon. Your entire party injects themselves with a powerful combat stimulant. Now, completely hopped up on amphetamines, they go screaming into battle, immune to pain and with a fervour and blood-lust in their eyes that makes even the dragon terrified. A few short seconds later, your party stands victorious, tearing the dragon to corpse to shreds and consuming the flesh raw. ... the aftermath being, of course, that half your party is now addicted to this stimulant and has to take it regularly, experience shakes that prevent restful sleep and randomly piss themselves. Drugs (including alcohol) have been a part of life, warfare and the human experience since the dawn of culture. To ignore it in a game that is for the players would be sacrilege.

When I originally pledged, the tier I selected said it specifically came with a physical copy *and* 2 digital copies to give away as gifts. Looking at the reward tiers now, that appears to have changed. If so, why? Where'd the extra digital copy go?

I think it would be an acceptable break from reality that these owned items simple vanish into nothingness when you give them something better, and re-appear if you were to ever take said items back. Then there's no need to worry about encumbrance. Of course, should I opt to savagely murder said companion in a back alley at some later point, I want full access to that equipment. Who else remembers really, really hating Nalia, and hating her even more when you found her enchanted ring wasn't on her corpse?

The first question is too loaded to answer accurately. The answer there would depend heavily on how effective the AI - which is to say, almost assuredly "paper doll" for maximum efficiency. There's a better compromise, one which is already used in numerous games (Fallout 3/NV, Skyrim, etc). The poster above me sort of agrees with me, but there's another step. That compromise is... All companions (perhaps excluding custom-made) have their own, default equipment, which you can never take from them - it belongs to them. However, since you are paying their wage, presumably, and/or are leading the expedition, you have the right to give them different equipment, and order them to use that instead. That can be paper doll style, just by sticking it on them. They will only use their default gear when you haven't provided anything. It's a clean and efficient way to handle it. You can't rob an NPC and leave him penniless and naked, and further the NPC can be geared up as well as you want without issue.

The opposite is true, really: Permadeath makes you ultra-conservative and extremely afraid to take anything resembling a risk. This works with the tone and atmosphere some games try to present, but it doesn't mesh very well with high fantasy. I disagree, and/or think you are misinterpreting my words. Comparing my own and my friends save games (using BG2 as an example), comparing our Ironman runs vs non-Ironman, the latter are item hoarders - you favors using spells or trying to "tough it out" rather than using your expendable items. We'd use lower-powered spells as opposed to our big nukes in an effort to save them. Compare this to our Ironman attempts, where every fight was fought to win. We'd be much more aggressive about using potions, wands and scrolls. We spent a lot more time making sure people were at 100% health. We'd make sure every scout had a backup and no one was left alone, we'd have contingency plans for everything. We'd be crazy prepared and see everything except hitpoints as expendable. Killing speed was much more important than killing efficiency - if you could end a fight in 1 or 2 rounds and spend 2500 gold in resources doing such, or end a fight in 2 turns and spend zero gold, we'd much more heavily favor the faster option. This is important because I think it reflects the conditions you're in quite accurately. That it's "high fantasy" is not relevant. If you die with 40,000 healing potions on you because you didn't use them, that's going to look pretty ridiculous.

Obsidian's stated on numerous occasions that P:E is intended to be "for players" and they will be putting an emphasis on "choice". That said, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect them to implement a saving mechanism that is user-configurable. I'm an avid fan of things like Ironman/Hardcore runs, where the whole point is to challenge yourself to see a game from start to finish without resorting to reloads. I'm really happy to see that appearing more often in a variety of games (Diablo 2, Diablo 3, Torchlight, Torchlight II, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Depths of Peril, etc). What REALLY bums me out, though, is when the game itself facilitates it, the developers always operate under the assumption that individual saves never become corrupted. Why does this matter? Particularly for Ironman play, but also for people who rely on auto-saves or checkpoints rather than manual saving, a corrupted save could mean trashing your entire game. So that's why my request to Obsidian is a little different than most others in this thread. Implement save game consistency checks. It's pretty simple - whatever writing mechanism used is irrelevant, so long as following a write to disk, the file is read and verified to be accurate - if not, repair or write it again. Ah, my dreams.

Permadeath is even better. If a character dies, they are dead and gone forever. Time to saddle up, head to the adventurers hall and hire a replacement. Hey who knows - with the concept of 'souls' in this game, perhaps a fallen comrade's soul could come to posses a replacement body, very angrily shoving out the existing soul or turning it into a grudging room mate. That's how I played through BG1, BG2, P:T, IWD and IWD2. And it made me a better player - when every fight could be your last, you start to get a lot more creative about how you approach combat. You stop hoarding millions of potions and scrolls, you stop relying on consistent RNG and luck to win, and switch to total war.

That's certainly one approach - if you use HP as a survival mechanic, any sort of injury reduces your capacity to survive and therefore might reduce your maximum HP, until you had sufficient healing to deal with it. The specifics of how it would be done are not really important, so long as it's: 1) Adds immersion 2) Is non-intrusive (it makes the game more fun and more in depth without becoming an aggravation) Obsidian has already commented on adding difficulty enhancements, including some sort of survival needs aspect - like needing to sleep or eat. Those sorts of systems synergize well with long term wounding systems. Further, I believe they help endear your characters to you better - if your character goes bravely into battle and thrashes the enemy, protecting his teammates whilst doing so, and comes out the other end bloody and battered, you're going to empathize with him a lot more than if he was always in pristine "I have no scars for I am a hero" condition. As development of PE continues, I hope some sort of wounding system gets at least considered. It looks like there is significant interest in it. Plus, scars are awesome.

Something as simple as this actually goes a long way toward keeping suspension of disbelief alive and adding replayability to games. When animals behave like animals - skittish and flighty. When humanoids behave like humanoids - territorial but not suicidal. When a group of enemies heavy in ranged gear but weak in close combat take advantage of this and try to kite the player.

A permanently gimped character is not what I am suggesting or intended. What I'm envisioning is a system more similar to the Fallout series, where a crippled limb will inhibit (though not necessarily prevent) your ability, and requires specialized care (a doctor, a trained priest, a magical augmentation, etc) to treat. For instance, if your fighter were to break his or her shield arm, they'll be unable to use a shield, or unable to use it effectively - have your party priest apply a splint, and they'll at least be able to fight well enough to get you through your current task, until such time as you can return to town and get them fully healed. It expands the complexity of combat and makes support characteristics of other classes more interesting. It becomes incentive to bring, say, someone with medical training along, to patch you up from fight to fight.