IndiraLightfoot

No. More information clarity and better feedback, there is a difference. Having exclamation marks above quest givers head is hand-holding, but having a concise and nicely written journal is info clarity and good feedback.

They are absolutely fine. Loading bars are so yesterday. Loading tranquillity is the new black.

Noviere: Hah! I just saw those distinctly pointed ears and no beard (I'm an old D&D'er), and assumed she was a short, but very murderous wood elf! Also, is Harding by any chance an evil nod to Tonya Harding?

Great gif just above ^ Anywhoo. Here's the latest Twitch stream gameplay with Mike Laidlaw, which is a guy I really like. His cool somehow. This is but part 1. Click on link at end of vid, and then you get to see part 2. They play a dwarven warrior, and they talk about crafting and crafting rune slots, etc. You get to name items you craft. How cool is that? EDIT: You start with a basic set of companions. To get to the rest, you need to find them by doing quests and progress. And apparently they are not "super hard" to find. EDIT 2: The party is level 5, and just like in Skyrim, they see a Dragon fly by over the foggy horizon in Storm Coast. Also, an elven warrior that Bioware calls the Murder Queen rigs the camp like a beachhead before you arrive with your Inquisition party. EDIT3: OMG!! The water and the surf and the beach and the boulders and the rain and the trees, they all look fabulous in Storm Coast. Wow! EDIT 4: The geographic variety is at least on par with Kingdom of Amalur's, and that one was great. Also the map's are bleeding hugh! This means murder to any social life you were planning. I intend to cancel X-Mas and New Year's and then pretend to be sick. In reality, I've locked the door to my gaming cave, and then I'll play till my eyes and fingers bleed. EDIT 5: Laidlaw is right! Planning tactics for each encounter is like American football. Hehe! EDIT 6: A giant and a dragon having a go at each other. That certainly beats Skyrim, and you can disengage from encountering one of them beasts in level 5, but you will most likely die trying.

That's nice and all, but ideally, and especially for noobs and just for better feedback, each stat on the window for the unequipped item compared should have a green +2 or a red - X % next to it, so you see at a glance which stuff that gets affected.

All of these are culprits at the moment. All this taken together makes combat feel like Charleston with jazz hands and all the dancers need to pee but the only WC is always floating around the controlled PC! If you take a look at the vid where Sensuki has removed Combat Disengagement, it's still ridiculous. Quite honestly, it's a constant pausing, and despite this, enemies have time during fractions of a second to move far too fast and far too much. If you don't pause, the enemies are barely distinct units doing distinct actions which you as a player can follow and counteract. In fact, all the baddies feel like one big combat fluid that's pouring over the character that the player is controlling in any given moment. I almost hate it. Compare this to Sensuki's IWD-playthrough vid, and all of the sudden I feel at ease again, at home - that is how party-based combat should look like, feel like and play. I feel in control of what's taking place - I feel in control over all of my party member and of all the enemies I need to deal with. EDIT: I feel that the entire point of combat right now is having 1 or 2 semi-invulnerable or at least very resilient tanks, and then you are almost forced to use the rest with ranged weapons and ranged spells, just in order to wrestle back some of that sense of control. In the IE games, I could easily make a party of all wizards or all fighters. A party with no tanks? No problem. Good luck with a glass canon party (using an ARPG term, sorry) in POE right now.

After 333 was released, most things are coming together quite decently, but there is one thing that does not simply fly: combat and combat feedback. PrimeJunta just did a great sum-up of how I feel about it: I'm afraid, OE ain't allowed any shortcuts and quick fixes on this one. They really need to make party-based combat fun, intuitive and challenging for all the right reasons, and not the wrong ones (too fast, too black hole-y, imploding, chaotic, and nonsensical). If you don't pause, or use autopause often enough, and just let it all rip, then a fighter will go down in 6 seconds on Hard, IIRC what Sensuki wrote on this issue. How can it become PoE's strength, instead of its apparent weakness? Discuss!

I like this new system. And I agree on all accounts. It makes building a character a fun and challenging task. The choices feel more meaningful.

I know, this is my main hate with this build as well. It makes it so much harder to choose your abilities and your skill points. You end up having to sacrifice something. And this is why I like this system. It's almost esoteric, and every choice matters. It's a bit like those amulets in WL2 - they often give you some bonus in one skill, but also drag you down in some other capacity.

5. I'm not sure what you mean, but for instance, if you pick up the shells after killing those beetles, they don't show up in the invo. They are actually automagicallly transferred to your stash. 6. He could be a half-fire-godlike... 7. I'm afraid you are correct. Not sure if it's them paying him homage or pulling his leg.

Lord Vicious: Yeah, I know, otherwise I'd have reported it as a bug. You can cast it on baddies too. I tried it on one spider, and that poor arachnid was locked away from our battle until we had time for it, so it works both ways. It's a very handy spell, though. Good thing is - the shell appears instantly and it works every time, and it can be cast while shape-shifted, and you can cast spells while inside IIRC.

"She's unstoppable! How can she kill our brethren with such ease?" Oops! Wrong game. Anyhow, I have already worked out a simple tactic that is working more than fine in PoE BB 333. In fact, it can't be stopped, at least not on the two outdoor maps. Well, I decided to try a druid this time. I called her Creepa, and she was a fast-healing, almost regenerating Nature Godlike. She transforms into a huge cat when angry. Nothing strange about that. Well, I maxed accuracy and might, and then I added some talents to add resistances and damage to her. Finally, my eye caught a fantastic 3rd level spell: Shell Beetle. Look at the stats! It last 30 seconds, so in her shapeshift form she can then cast it and get stuff like +1,000 Accuracy, and become virtually invulnerable. My tactics? Let Creepa the Shell Maiden run up on the fron line alone and put all the best of tanks to shame! The rest of my party gets to go range on the baddies, back stab, and even better boost or even cast AoE spells over her - since she's almost invulnerable in her 30 s shell. Merdeth and his gang not even 30 s later, all kaput. More Ultimate Tank Tactics Druid Shell Maiden Style: Right now, my Druid Shell Maiden is a beast in battle, with a chitin dome on top.

Hiro: Which I really like about it, oddly enough.

Overall, I must say that this is a pretty big improvement over 301. What I like after 2 h of playing: -All the talent options (It feels a bit like D&D 3.5, which I love. It feels like I can build all sorts of fighters, rogues, etc. Thumbs up!) -The new skill system. This is more fun and bound to our RPG-characters per se. The other was just meh, almost like most skills in 3.5 D&D. -The combat difficulty, at least on normal. -I like the combat feedback much better now, especially that light-snake effect circling around square UI icons, even spells. Perfect. -They have indeed made character models less ghost-transparent and ashen. Yay! It's more or less on par with Wl2. I guess they did call InXile after all. -The new xp system feels like a nice compromise. I like that new xp trickle in gradually as the bestiary gets filled - a very neat idea. Exploration xp, I can live with that. The more, the merrier, and this system actually works - I've played two outdoor maps with it. -The spell icons, the talent icons, the general UI feel is getting pretty darn good. -The loading screens are wonderful. -In short, this is how I expected the beta to be back in August. PoE has left its Alpha feel, methinks. Some issues: -Pathfinding is bad. I have my characters doing the shuffle dance indoors more often than I can count. -Combat, if you don't pause a lot, is still too fast and messy somehow. Perhaps I should try that slomo mode?

Se image below. This "Click and drag"-atrocity must be rectified!

After levelling up to level 5, the level up button isn't greyed out on our character screen. It should at least look like "Personal" on the tab in the upper right corner of that screen.

At the top of some text windows text lines get cropped, darkened and twisted, for instance the convo UI: And the Combat Log: I have not scrolled these windows, and they are virginal - untouched. Res: 1920x1080

All I know is that Skyhold will need some palisade-class double-beds, coz that Iron Bull will break the bed, not to mention rupture all sorts of inner organs.

Seari: I hate to break this to you, kid, but a 360 means that you would rotate all the way back to where you sat. All you did was spin full circle. P.S. Glad you like MotB. Most of it is sheer brilliance.

That's very true. death-threat intensifiers are more or less the norm in many online gaming communities, and even worse, if somebody reveals themselves as being female, gay or noob, some of these gamers of the new death-threatening breed keep such end-your-petty-life hate-speech up almost instinctively. Personally, I regard that kind of behaviour as a blight on the internetz. and I could only hope that online gaming communities had moderating systems that didn't allow for that kind of verbal abuse. We don't do it in the real world, so why do it in the real world online?

Just for you, Keyrock! I've played Civ:BE for one hour, and so far it's like a more intense CiV with more atmosphere, quests and a start that certainly is more threatening and alien. I picked Franco-Iberia, and went for a scientific and tech-y set of advantages. I landed on a planet with lots of islands and huge insects with chitin and miasma and horrific swamps everywhere. I've managed to launch a solar satellite, kill some wolf beetles and search some resource pods. The music and the sound effects are wonderful - it's all very sci-fi. I'd say the UI has been improved. I've also made good use of the AMD Mantle feature, so the game's loading quickly (I hardly notice it) on a massive map with maxed settings in 1980x1020 or whatever the resolution is called. It's pure joy and excitement so far.

Volourn: In this case, you're wrong. Anthropologists and sociologists have studied in detail cultures and societies all over the world, where death threats are part and parcel of linguistic intensifers and even outright accepted behaviour venting frustration and anger. A pretty classic example is Naples in Italy. Live there a few months - I dare you.

I fixed that for ya!

Yup! Sometimes, it's easy to forget that CRPGs are games and that they should be viewed, analysed and treated as such. The degree of roleplaying is rather a special breed of "roleplaying", where I fonze around with whack-a-mole/mini-one-armed-bandits in digital settings with nice graphics and sound FX.

What a fantastic 3D world! It's bordering on real-life - it's almost scary, but not as scary as that floating wooden spoon in the dark at the end of the vid. Let's just hope that the gameplay will be just as good.