IndiraLightfoot

And 25% of that correct percentage was about killing Darkspawn in the great outdoors. The endless repetitive attacks of Darkspawn certainly dragged DA:O down a lot. If I encounter any of them in DA:I, I will kill them with extra fervour and disgust, and if they turn out to be too many, I might as well quit. I have developed quite a Darkspawn allergy. DA: Awakening was like "Look who's talking!". And DA2 and its "Look who's talking now!" take on Darkspawn was nauseating.

I'd rather tally that up to Seari just giving us a wink of where he stands on the issue.

Quetzalcoatl: That's not correct. See link: http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/16524/spells-and-hit-dice In PnP, it affects 4+3 lvl HD, but in BG it has been simplified to "monsters above level 4 is immune". BG1 is for a party of level 1-8. I have used it extensively when playing BG 1: EE this year. I'd say, it's one of the best spells around in that game.

At least, give the new player clear feedback on what is happening. Invisible engagement attacks are nuts, and they shouldn't hit all the time. An AoO system like that in NWN2 is a bare minimum requirement for it to work (but with top-notch feedback).

I know. That badly needs to be changed. If you want, you can give your own party supernatural non-combat movement speed as well. Just press "D" - Josh showed us that in the vid.

Great suggestions! Implement them now, OE!

Shevek: Thanks for the vid! There are lots of points in it I agree with: -Once we've built the characters the way we want (and we are used to playing them), combat will be easier -Once itemized, it will be easier -Disengagement attacks (although slightly broken), is almost a non-issue (I even like the premises behind it) -You can wear armour on chars and still be successful (I've never done that naked char playstyle) -You don't need to pause excessively. I'm like you, I paused about that amount as well (however, in BG and NWN, I often didn't pause at all - not at the start, nothing) -You don't need to use many spells or skills, even on hard -Like others have proven, hard in PoE isn't that hard Still, I remain adamant on (and I sorta heard in your tone while playing it that you do agree to some degree), that this kind of combat isn't much fun. Why? -For it to work, you need to repeat the same tank(s) at front, and ranged char(s) at back system all the way -Baddies move too fast -You get jumbled melee messes, and with the bright spell FX on top, you can hardly see what's going on -Imagine playing a wizard with almost no armour, dual-wielding stilettos at the front, and then a fighter with a bow at the back. Well, PoE isn't very kind to those kind of set-ups, especially not when you level up and pick abilities and skills.

It was very nice to watch this opening part of the game. Art wise it's spot on! Combat, especially for a noobish person like Jesse Cox, is not good. See my comments on that in my "Road Runner"-thread in the backer beta discussion forum and also in Shevek's thread on his playthrough at Hard difficulty. Not me. It's great that a noobish person gets to react to the game and play it. Nothing displays its shortcomings better. Notice how Josh had to give instructions and adjust his actions ever so often? Let's just say that there won't be a tutorial Josh in-game, helping noobs out when the game is released. I'm awfully tired of that very battle music tune, but I love the music style and the mood it gives this game. I agree. This was really missing. Overall, with the music and the sound effects in, this is such a beautiful and promising game. Fix the combat, add in a few animations, slow some stuff down, improve the combat feedback, improve the UI in places, and obviously some skill and attributes issues, and we should have a winner!

Alright, I just got to watch Josh's stream with Jesse Cox - a guy who's never played PoE before. http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive/b/588477048 At 16:20 into the game, two wolves approaches his flamehead guy and Calisca, or should say rush at them at super-canine speed. Jesse panics (a natural reaction), and he doesn't pause, and they are about to chew those two up, when Josh hollers "Pause! Pause! Remember your IE training?" or something like that. Jesse is a pretty seasoned gamer. Don't you think? And he was caught off-guard by this spooky speed, and Josh behaviour certainly lends weight to PoE BB being what Sharp_one just described as "pause with real time". Something needs to be done about this. Imagine how many noobs or noobish players who'll play the game and simply get fed up with it in the first hour, or perhaps they will pause like crazy, or pick "slomo". Also, at 24:40: When his Flamehead char goes down, and Calisca once again saves the day, watching that, I realized another speed aspect that is simply too fast in PoE right now: The hit animations! They twitch - they are super-fast, like that Matrix vid I just posted earlier. They need to slow down the attack animations, literally, and have that as a factor in the combat system. At 50:10: Jesse in combat: "Can I run, or?" Josh: "No." (Due to disengagement attacks) Jesse: "So, just shield up and pray?"

Gfted1: Very important point - each guy in your party is having her/his own action round, and even worse, it's not a regular beat, it's regulated by which action he/she takes and if it is interrupted. EDIT: No matter how good the UI feedback is on those ever-changing and not-the-same-between-party-members desync-rounds, it will always be a mess. It's no way to fix that. Sorry. Personally, I would imagine an easy enforced pseudo-round system that gets clearly displayed before the player in some neat UI, and which all attacks, spells, and defences base themselves on is the single most important change this game needs right now. Sigh. I fear, PoE combat will be much more varied and fun party-based-wise and tactics-wise if we indeed turn on the slomo mode. After the next BB patch, I will try it and get back on how it felt.

Yeah. The story in Skyrim was forgettable and the entire main plot meaningless. 90% of the game was the explorative feel, and to go and do stuff your way. I certainly stretched those limits to the max. Unfortunately, the game was for too rigid for my liking. You couldn't even kill important NPCs, unless specified as a quest. Pfft!

As of yet, no. I wanted to get a feel for the game in normal mode before trying something I have never seen or used in any previous CRPG. However, if this kind of zippy combat persists, I most likely will.

Just to give you a fair representation of how combat feels right now, when controlling merely one of your party-members and getting bum-rushed by a number of eager enemies, I present the following as a comparable intense feeling: To think, you could get this much action in an isometric CRPG hearkening back to the IE classics. I am speechless.

Recently (this year), I've played IWD2 and BG:EE, and I only paused now and then (I am an old D&D fanatic, though - and I have played these games a lot in bygone years). Many fights (trash mobs) I needn't pause at all for the most part. Playing PoE, I can hear someone screaming behind some wonky tree: "Run, Forrest, run!!"

Skyrim for PC did get heaps of review scores of 90-100! So, in comparison, DA:I is getting pretty low scores (the scores are notoriously inflated?).

I haven't played KotDP, sorry. :/

I think Josh said that recovery times should be made to take longer across the board, so that would help. 20% of supersonic speed is still pretty fast. This would be a perfect thing to test on the beta backers. I'd love to test it at 50% speed, just to have some exaggerated benchmark. Perhaps lower some weird damage spikes (still mostly poison and bleed effects over time, no?) that make some of your party members go bye-bye in a couple of seconds even on easy? Of course, you could raise the DT of the player characters as well, which would give you time to react more and better, I suppose. EDIT 2: I urge anyone who can use a hack in the game to make a party of all priests, and then use that party in a RPG-y way, using various abilities and different combos, all in real time (with next to no pausing). Good luck!

I have a gut feeling that the more rowdy crowd digging the juicier bits of Game of Thrones will have a ball in DA:I. The possibilities are endless!

Meep, meep, peeps! I was taken aback when I saw this getting flaunted in big letters: "Pausable Real Time Combat". It was advertised early on, at 0:34, as a big selling point in the latest trailer for PoE. Add to this that the Obsidz seem to be completely satisfied with the super-human combat speed on all enemies (except some wolves, beetles and ghosts). They report that combat felt great. It was a blast. The QA is happy. What I don't get is this: Even the best and most experienced BB players, pause a lot, since, obviously, baddies move extremely fast even within a few micro-seconds. Still, Obsidian, uses "real time combat" as a big selling point, which it simply can't be described as, not seriously, anyways. Also, as someone that rarely paused in NWN2 (It's fast, but enemies stand stillish a bit via invisible rounds) and not very often in the BG series, I can tell you it is a nightmare to try this even on Easy difficulty currently. This is in fact a pause-based game with real-time forwarding. I wish for some seriously convincing feedback on this. EDIT: Just a reminder to all, including Obsidian - This is a party-based CRPG with loads of abilities. Imagine a party with all druids and priests.

Some info on levels and level cap and skill points to plan for: from Reddit: "You can finish the game at about lvl 20 from what I've seen but the soft cap for actually doing most of everything is at around 25-30 (according to the devs) - but really you should plan your build for around 24 points. You start with two skills unlocked (2 points), you can unlock at least one point with inquisition upgrades (1 point), add 20+ levels (20+), human gets an extra point (possible +1) = ~24 Skill points (25 for human). You will get more than that if you level up all the way to 30 obviously upto ~34 skill points. This assumes no 'skill books' or missions that unlock a skill point. So possibly even more."

First released surface pic from Philae on the comet: Welcome to a comet! First CIVA images confirm @Philae2014 is on surface of #67P!

[spoilerish] Cantousent: Poor Disco Jamie died in Whittier, in my case, and Provost died on the second Rail-thugs map, but then magically was reborn and appeared in a few Cali-maps, before getting killed again. So weird.

Size of comet 67p relative to LA (drawing @quark1972) pic.twitter.com/niKCKJFLYq

How cool is this? THE SOUND OF A COMET!!! Comet noise goes viral Posted at 17:01 Our colleagues at #BBCtrending write: The sound coming from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has caught the imagination of hundreds of thousands on social media. The scientists are just as surprised as social media users. "This is exciting because it is completely new to us. We did not expect this and we are still working to understand the physics of what is happening," Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier, head of Space Physics and Space Sensorics at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, explained on the ESA Rosetta blog. EDIT: It sounds like the Predator! http://www.cnet.com/news/rosettas-comet-is-singing-and-it-sounds-totally-bizarre/ Oscillations in the magnetic field around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko produce a song that is inaudible to humans. Listen to a version of the song at a higher frequency.

Mark Bentley, planetary scientist involved in the mission @msbentley Posted at 16:59tweets: Deciding whether to re-fire the harpoons is tricky - without the hold-down thruster, presumably @Philae2014 could recoil? #CometLanding Decisions to be madePosted at 16:58 The Esa Operations team confirms that the harpoons designed to attach Philae to the comet did not fire. But they say the lander is in great shape, and the team is "looking at refire options".