Hypevosa

I agree with the checkpoint saves spoiling the challenge---I much prefer just a general autosave whenever entering an area, which could be large like a world map region or really any new area. I think DA:O had the much more obvious checkpoint saves. See, at the same time forcing you to fight those easily dispatched groups of kobolds again is also just an annoyance when the player now knows they can just save and reload right before the big fight. Why make them die first so they just know to save and reload later if you can have a system that just saves them the menu jaunt instead?

I agree with him in that saving and reloading constantly is just a pain. At the same time, having any sort of checkpoint system that is visible is also an issue - I've played a few games where they'll save right before big fights and it was a dead giveaway and ruined much of the surprise. If we could somehow keep a checkpoint system of that sort in the background, so saving constantly and reloading constantly wasn't necessary but automated, I'd like that.

you know what I'd find interesting? If you sold an item to a vendor and there was a chance that someone you fight later on stole or bought that item for themselves and use it against you... ;D

The enter-a-small-dungeon thing reminded me more of the Pocket Plane in BG2, which was certainly convenient. That reminds me--I wonder how convenient the player house will be in terms of travel and storage. The floating disk---I wonder if there could be magical containers (bag/pack type) that require soul power to properly use, and in exchange, are powerful enough to carry a giant load. I mean, it would still be a bag of holding in practice, but there'd be a lore reason and some 'cost' for it. The bag of holding is infused with the soul left in a rogue's severed hand... ;D

I understand how chess works, have since I was 5. What you don't seem to understand is that, so long as strategies are sound, criticals and critical failures won't make a difference. If one enemy criting your warrior makes your entire strategy for the fight fail, your strategy needs more work until it's solid enough to withstand the whims of fortune. If you can't adapt quickly enough to save your butt when things go wrong, you need to learn to think on your feet. You keep focusing on where criticals just speed up the inevitable - if your strategy was already sound, you'd have won anyways, would you not? A critical hit just saves you a few seconds. If you have a losing strategy you'll lose the vast majority of the time anyways and the game will crawl for you if that doesn't change. I'm focusing on where criticals or critical failures are the fires by which your strategies are tested instead. As long as you can critically fail and your enemy can critically succeed, your strategies risk being broken. Can you survive without your spell caster? Can you survive without your warrior? Are you vigilant enough to see where a weapon has flown and go pick it up? To go back to chess, could you still win if you start out missing one of your pieces?

Eh, knight and bishop, get it ? It's a CHESS reference for gods sake. I got it, but this isn't chess You apply your game's rules to this one and I'll apply my game's rules to yours. More to the conversation, I always assumed that the pieces in chess were supposed to be entire squads or some other large group of soldiers... you know, it's hard for everyone in a group to critically fail and/or everyone in the other to critically fail. When your battles involve so many people, the strokes of fortune and misfortune are negligible.

Though it's not an optimal stance to use a bow. Bows are best used standing for best draw strength and accuracy. But it would be cool if, for instance, you could shoot arrows while sneaking crouched with a reasonable amount of accuracy penalty. Actually, having actually practiced with a bare bow in unusual circumstances, I can safely say that there's no reason for an accuracy penalty while crouching as you can cant the bow and still hold it very steady while crouched or at least hunched over. As your draw distance is decreased though, your "range increment" would suffer though (a -2 to attack for every increment beyond the first the opponent is away from you in D&D), so a further away enemy would be more likely able to dodge. If your bow had a strength modifier to its damage, you'd lose 1 point of damage for that as well. The only reason I can really think you'd want to crouch while using a bow though would be to keep yourself hidden, or at least make yourself a smaller target for another ranged combatant.

Ah, I remember now, my knight critically misses your bishop....oh wait, that never happens. Luck and misfortune happen. Ultimately, your strategy is either good enough to compensate even for that, or your strategy crumbles at the slightest change in the winds of fortune. Your knight in his foolhardy confidence swung at the bishop without taking care to mind his footing, causing him to trip over the bishop's staff, prone, and miss his attack.

I'd assume rare means that, if you're going through a level of a dungeon, you find maybe 1-5 healing potions of varying strengths at absolute most, and the off non-healing potion. Very rare like I want with scrolls would mean 1 to 2 per dungeon floor, and only because there's so many different spells that finding scrolls that are genuinely useful of those 1 or 2 is unlikely in itself. The exception to this is what enemies carry - if you can kill them before they use all of them, you've earned them for yourself. (and that means I expect enemies to actually carry and use these items)

I like potions and scrolls since they give a player more options than just resting to allow the party to keep going.

Terranigma reference? :D Nope, just a DM for D&D. I had a player actually raise enough money I let him buy a portable hole - it just made doing treasure easier since he was so insanely strong he could lift near anything anyways, so he would just pile treasure into it since he and the group had a fancy for hunting dragons. I was always sure to check if a bag of holding was in a horde though ;D Tensor's floating disk is sadly underused in D&D I've found - such an incredibly useful spell with a little creative application. We had a game where one of the players was magically altered to be almost spherically fat - so a mage used tensor's floating disk and the group helped him make a disguise check to paint and prop him up like a beholder, the check was so good that only the enemies who had seen one before or made an epic spot check managed to see through it (5 enemies of a camp of 30+). Tensor's floating disk is great for dragging dead bodies, transporting gear, or even moving players whose legs are not functioning for one reason or another. Carries a huge load at higher levels and lasts hours at a time. I love it.

I proposed a portable hole in my inventory thread that allows you to essentially enter a small dungeon where you can just drop gear you find, I imagine this would be a very hard find or very expensive at the least. Also tensor's floating disk for mages to help tote gear around for the group.

Console ports are an entirely different ball game - you're asking developers to convert entire programming languages, in essence making the same game multiple times and having to learn all the little intricacies of one language to the next to make the game work on both. Programming games for playstation is a notoriously arduous process. You're also asking them to try and go from the most universal input devices (mouse, keyboard) and attempt to rework everything to work with the extremely limited console controller. The undertaking is nowhere near equivalent to asking for a simple multiplayer co-op option. And trying to squash people for wanting to understand why something has been said doesn't help anyone. I'm questioning the complexity of a multiplayer option for this game because of the fact it appears as something one programmer, or two if a $100,000 goal was set, could accomplish over the course of a year, and would result in easily thousands more sales more than paying for itself. Wanting to understand how or why something is shouldn't be considered a bad thing by anyone but those who don't actually have the knowledge to explain.

I think this mostly would be determined by the question: Is this a single player's adventure with a party (like in BG), or is this a whole party's adventure (IWD?)? This would tell you if characters exist in another player's multiplayer game or if they appear and disappear, who can save, etc. In the case of pausing, I'd say there should be a 5 second cooldown on unpausing, but not pausing, this way you don't have anyone immediately unpausing things but those who need it can pause whenever. This is still a rather short list of questions though, and it doesn't feel like a tremendous undertaking for even a single programmer over the course of the game's creation. Unless there really are hundreds or thousands of issues that we cannot fathom without someone who has attempted to make multiplayer for a game like this before. As I admitted, I've no real experience with networking, it may be alot more complex than simply having the server correct clients when a blip in the engine means an inconsistency. With other games like an FPS there can be hundreds of important variables all changing all at once and any character can, in a hundreth of a second, change what they're doing, which is why it's such a complicated process, but in a game that is almost turn based like this one, and shouldn't have more than 40(?) NPCs/PCs on screen and doing things at once, I'd think the process would me much simpler. It's why I'm curious to know what complications there are.

Lawfully aligned? I find the bit of chaos to be more fun when even the most awesome of characters can really muck things up now and again. 5% I've felt to perhaps be too often for any character beyond level 5 or 10 (I'd have you roll another d5 to make it a 1% chance instead) but it still is far more interesting than assuming characters are absolutely perfect.

Prone is likely in to support knocking foes down and getting knocked down yourself rather than allowing attacks. Chances are your character will always get up on their own - the only reason in D&D getting up could be a problem and that you may want to attack while prone was because getting up ilicited an attack of opportunity from your opponent since you are vulnerable. I doubt they'll have AOOs here, you'll just lose your attack for that round instead.

In D&D there is a way that levels can be permanently drained from your character by undead if you fail a save. I actually have a character, a Psion, who was originally made for the world's largest dungeon in 3.5 - and I transferred him to a new campaign by having him defend his sanctuary from an illithid assault that included enough necromantic mind flayers and their undead that he was overtaken in the assault and essentially drained back to level 1. My point is that you can have in game reasons, lore and whatnot, for a player losing levels and being severely weakened. In BG2 Irenicus is experimenting the hell out of you and keeping you in a cage... I could easily see that as something that would explain alot of level and stat drain.

I agree, hate lists. The idea of having a button that allows you to see the inventory of the whole party is something I like, but individual inventories should be viewable as well. You don't need a bank system if you have a good barter system and items that are valuable but lighter in weight. A gem that's worth 300 gold you can just keep and use in barter later. Encourage people to keep good light weight treasure instead of just selling things instantly - you can also just give the party the ability to buy means of travel like a carriage for keeping such things. Why would 6 people always choose to walk if they were filthy rich and could buy a carriage so they could keep their strength up and even rest during the journey if they needed? Almost like Identify for magic items, gems should be appraisable by merchants if player lore is so low. I'd think your average thief knows his gems though.

That fight in kungfu hustle is one of my favorite movie scenes ever.

Don't really want a cap - just don't have any additional features past a certain point that aren't level based. For example a rogue's sneak damage dice are level dependent, it just stops getting special feats after level 20 in D&D.

Ieo and others are just afraid that the game would suffer for the addition of multiplayer. I'm certain there are capable members of the community that would work along side obsidian pro bono so they could put it on their resume at least, and if not because they thought it was a worthy addition. A mod, or an official add on, it doesn't matter really. I still have to question how hard it is to simply have blank AI's for NPCs on each player's computer and essentially have them wait for commands from the other players over the internet. The only inconsistency I could think of would be the random number generation between each client and in that case set one computer host as responsible for the random numbers generated. Why wouldn't a simple system like this work? (I have no background in networking)

I'd have to question what you know about Bards because trickery/subterfuge isn't what comes to mind with a Bard. Arcane Spells and songs is what comes to mind when mentioning Bards When I mention bards, I think about people who are good at sneaking around because a bar full of rowdy patrons is bad for breakable instruments, someone not opposed to lifting a few coins out of someone's pocket to pay for their room, someone who misleads would be attackers by bewildering them with a dance or song long enough for them to spot the fastest way out, and whose silver tongue can seduce even the most chaste of women. Someone for whom learning basic magic tricks adds to the performance and their ability to charm and bewilder. This is trickery and subterfuge. They fall under the archetype of the rogue for this game.

I just want enemies who are intelligent to target the greatest threat if they aren't being effectively blocked by another character.

I'm windows 7, and what you do with the widescreen mod is make it so the settings you make are smaller than your full screen size. My screen is 1366 x 768, so my widescreen mod is set 1360 x 768 and I play in windowed mode.

By that logic, you only need one class. Everyone can be want they want by channeling into their soul. Everyone starts as a level 1 commoner with no class. It's your choice what you eventually become - someone who falls under class archetype "rogue" (which the devs has stated is anyone who uses trickery/subterfuge, etc to get their way and what they want (sounds like bards to me)) could choose to follow music. I mean, if you can melt into shadows without using your soul as a crutch, would you not maybe find other things you could do with it?