IndiraLightfoot

^This is very true and a rare piece of knowledge gleaned from absurd amounts of replays of D&D CRPGs. Having six characters is usually tougher than when you settle for four, even in CRPGs that don't have pooled xp, as it were. It often comes down to the best gear getting shared among fewer characters, and also, it's easier to perform consistent solid tactics with fewer pawns. Four is actually something of a sweet spot. Character 5 and 6, I usually tend to lose interest in or don't care for that much. Playing with a party of four in M&M certainly feels balanced enough. The classic D&D party of a fighter, magic-user, cleric and thief says it all. They are four, not six!

Indeed, ArtB. And very nice idea, Suburban-Fox! So when we get our stronghold, perhaps we get to make our own coat of arms. And if not in PE vanilla, perhaps in the expansion?

I'm dreaming of a city of Lody, and what an appetizing canting arms it would have!

"Amphibia, reptiles, and insects sometimes occur, particularly toads, serpents, adders, tortoises, scorpions, snails, grasshoppers, spiders, ants, bees, and gad-flies. It is singular that such despised and noxious creatures as the scorpion and the toad should have been adopted as marks of honour; yet such, in former times, was the taste for allusive arms that the Botreuxes, of Cornwall, relinquished a simple antient coat in favour of one containing three toads, because the word ‘botru’ in the Cornish language signified a toad!" Mark Antony Lower, 2012. This entire e-book on heraldry is available for free thanks to the Gutenberg-project. Perhaps can add it to his inspirational literature? http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38951/38951-h/38951-h.htm

Yeah. I was level 21, I think. Great job, Enoch! And that secret-detection spell can indeed be made permanent, but that would require spoilers on my part.

I just spotted a mistake of mine. It should be Mr Smith's agents of course, and not Mr Anderson's!

Sound advice, so I took it to heart: Since I've played the NWN1 series to bits and modded that game as well, I can tell you that there were indeed rare occasions of level-scaling and spawned generic monsters in that series as well. One was removed, but it was glaringly obvious early on: If you imported your characters from NWN you got a larger, level-dependent quantity of skeletal devourers in the Temple of the Winds, which were a true pain in the ass (I remember that vividly). Now, please carry on as before...

Here's me adding more fuel to the fire: Sharp_one: That's not at all true for NWN2: Storm of Zehir, which have plenty of random encounters. Also, in a few places in the OC, you have invisible spawn triggers that actually dish out various baddies - orcs, for instance, with a little random loot on them - and some players farm these places to level up quicker. And yes, do carry on...

Amazing screenies!! It looks much better than Euro Truck Simulator 2. Can't wait till truckin' galore!

A warm welcome back! And yeah, Josh has been busy posting some amazing info. Check out the most recent stuff in the heraldry thread in the general subforum.

Gosh, I couldn't possibly disagree more. It can be immensely fun, and quite satisfying. Have you tried it? The fact that you can solo the game and that the devs didn't design mechanics that require a party is probably the BEST thing I've heard about this game so far. Speaking as a giant IE game fanatic, I can say, with great emotion, that some of my most memorable playthroughs of Icewind Dale, BG2 and BG1 have been Solo Runs. I rank the freedom to pick the size of my party pretty darn high on the list of "Things I really want from this game". And Kudos to Obsidian for understanding this! And it's not just soloing. Taking just your main character, and one other companion that you really like, can be equally fun. It's just a different dynamic to the game. And its value goes up in any discussion about a game's replayability.. Karkarov: I agree that it should be pretty darn hard to solo any party-based CRPG. However, when you have played a game you really love a few times, a solo playthrough can be really fun and challenging (if the game designers somehow have made just enough leeway to make it possible in the first place, that is). Stun: On this, I agree with you 100%. I have soloed BG1, BG2, the entire NWN1 series and the first two NWN2s. I began doing it after a few passes with wonderfully varied parties, and it became almost a sport on its own. My favourite so far is one run I had through the NWN2 OC and MotB with an air genasi build that essentially was a fighter-heavy stormlord priest thriving among electricity. It was truly awesome, since the excitement of passing some encounters were intense. And sure, it took plenty of reloads at a few bottleneck encounters, but I didn't mind that one bit. Is it less RPGy? Hardly. Did I need some metagaming knowledge. Plenty! Still, if you love the setting, the system and the general gameplay, replays and reloads are just sweet parts of one fun way of playing it. It will never be the same as your virginal playthrough of a CRPG with a party and a few companions, but it is something else. Karkarov again: Give it a whirl someday. Perhaps it is an acquired taste, hehe!

Hmm. After having thought about it some more, it seems obvious they've just literally tried to translate a German word "unbändig", which means, amongst other things: irrepressible, something or someone that cannot be suppressed, held back or put down, voracious.

Unbended is like an archaic form of "unbent", but it doesn't help. It's a pretty hideous name. Somehow it sounds like some Christian fanatic pamphlet for zealots hell-bent on "curing" homosexuals.

Playing "evil" characters in CRPGs are rare occasions for me too, and then typically it's been a matter of me trying some special class, like an assassin or an anti-paladin. And my "evil" almost always stopped at some overly selfish and slightly too murderous (weird how much of a killer all of your good and neutral characters actually is, too, btw). Thus, playing MotB came as quite a bit of surprise, and I mean that in a wonderful and weird way. That game actually made an evil playthrough interesting, coherent and viable for me, but yeah, a sense of profound sordidness engulfed me after a while, but I kept going till the end with that wall and all. And One of Many alone was a fab party companion! Hopefully, Obsidian will make morally varied playthroughs that are truly different and entertaining. My latest playthrough in FONV is in fact an evil one, but that setting is so disturbing to begin with. I almost shoot anything that moves or talks, which is certainly out of character for me.

All I know is that party-based CRPGs with lots of classes, races, skills, choices and combinations are so darn fun. Like PJ, I will go for a story-ased playthrough first, and probably the second time too. Then I'll start to get more systematic and experimental, and then I most likely will be making all characters myself. A solo playthrough will perhaps even be in there later on. One thing that sounds cool is having an almost all-range party (some using bows and crossbows, others guns, and then yet other spells.

It's the opposite in fact, in mmos and mobas like Diablo 3 and League of Legend you have the opposite of a sticky engagement, you have orb walking (kiting), what that is is you moving your character away from your enemy or in front of him, between attacks. To further explain it, while you wait for you auto attack to reset, you move your character. Now what is the point of this? Well, every character has a range on his attack (or auto-attack as it is called), so with moving between auto-attacks you gain distance from them and take less dmg or no damage at all if their auto-attack has a shorter range then yours. It can also be used to stay in range of the enemy. That is why I say it's the opposite in PoE, if you try to kite the enemy you will get smacked in the face with the disengagement penalty. Indeed, and this took me awhile to figure out in D3. Basically, this means that certain animations can be very time-consuming in the midst of combat, and thus effectively gimp your character, which isn't apparent unless you really dig up info like this. I really, really hope PE comes with extensive and clear combat numbers so that the combat log includes stuff like this instead of more or less hiding them. This irks me as well. Any news from Obsidian should be posted here ASAP, as we would love to hear about them straight away.

Can these arguments be made into a poster and be mailed home to me?

I just bought the expansion in this sale. And the vanilla campaign at least merits a playthrough or two - treat it as one long tutorial quest line.

Mor: You are absolutely right. That was going on in the Mere, and it had something to do with the King of Shadows. You met a druid in bear form, and later on, more crazed druids, hehe.

Another example of a MMO clone sp rpg is of course Kingdoms of Amalur, which have most of the faults you describe there too.

Black Isle, of course! Every time is see that intro, I almost tear up.

OT, I know, but Steam has this big sale on Shadowrun Returns, and all this talk about it made me get that expansion, Dragonfall. And it seems to have a few nice reviews under its belt too. PrimeJunta: I like both; confining classes and classless systems. And classless systems come in all sorts of varieties. The one in Skyrim comes to mind (what you do often you get good at), and then we have Path of Exile's extremely large and complicated skill tree . Still, since I really like D&D 3.5, it's hard to beat that huge variety of classes and prestige classes on offer there.

Heh, now I wish that tried that decker archetype! In IWD2, I have a thief and a monk in my party, but I only see that as me picking stuff I like to play. I've already completed Shadowrun Returns vanilla with a human street samurai, and now I've begun a new playthrough with a Physical Adept troll. I think what matters is how fun and varied the classes and races feel, at least to me. If a class is a bit OP, I wouldn't mind that one bit. Another example: In D3 vanilla, Blizzard was overly anxious in matters of balance (well, real money was at stake, hehe), so there were endless tiny patches nerfing all sorts of odd builds, just to make sure that everything was just even, so the entire field was levelled, and it actually felt pretty dull and barren. It was certainly one factor that made me stop playing it.

Yeah, this is indeed the crux of the matter. The balance-discussion aside (I do believe balance can go together with classes feeling different enough - for instance D3 RoS), I also read in this is an urgency in keeping classes and even races distinct. Failing to do so, certainly would mean that the IE-magic has dissipated. When playing NWN2, it is a world of difference if you pick a Warlock, a Paladin, a Rogue or a Wizard, for instance. I really, really enjoyed that. It would be absurd if each class in PoE turn out to be more or less equally combat-savvy (something that actually is something of an illness accrued from MMOs - all classes being battle geniuses, just like in D3 I just mentioned). I hope one or two classes, at least, are more survivalists or sneaky silver tongues, or perhaps letting summons do the fighting for them (like Druids). So, I want to see differentiated classes and races.

I know. And we're already getting reasonably realistic armours and weapons, so if they differ slightly gender-wise, or if they are a bit exaggerated for greater visibility, I think that's just as fine as if they didn't. It's nothing to get worked up about. It is indeed a fantasy game.