IndiraLightfoot

I do too. LordCrash is great! So, let's have those corners of your mouth pointing upwards again, shall we?

LordCrash: While I agree that this particular update was packaged as pretty much a closed deal, I see no need to bad mouth the devs and speculating about their work process. I think a decent analogy would be an academic or a team of academics working on a short paper with the goal of one day submitting it to some prestigious journal for publication. They have a set of ideas that they think will fly. Then, they sit around a table and come up with a structure for presenting that idea in a brief format: the article. Before they would even consider sending it off to that prestigious journal, with its hard scientific and quality criteria, including peer reviews, any responsible group of academics would let others read their draft and get as many comments on it as possible. Some of them may be trusted colleagues, but also strangers to them that can give them different a perspective on things. These academics are rarely in need of polls or opinion statistics per se, but they are very much in need of various opinions on their presentation of the subject matter, qualified and sometimes non-qualified. This is not design by committee. Thanks to KS and Obsidian's partly open creative process, we get to mouth our opinions, because they want us to. They have explicitly told us so. Hence, in this case, the ideas didn't fly that well. The devs (the group of academics) realize that they need to adjust or have a new take on their set of ideas before going through this process again and come up with a new draft for this article: reiteration! A better analogy, however, for this is rather a dissertation. Then a lot of things get ditched because they don't fly well. Also, kill your darlings is a must and all that jazz. I fear your disappointment shines through. All this has been done in good order, it's just as it should be, and I am looking forward to several more of these hotly debated updates. The amount of fun is priceless!

This is what I was after! Thanks for the telling example.

I'm happy with this decision! In another thread, Sensuki brought up a little used feature from 3rd ed D&D; skills getting enhanced by several party members having it - skill pools, if you will. That concept I think has a lot of potential for certain systems.

No need for a "LOL"! This is great news and a sound and well-founded decision. I'm glad they got that out of the way fast. In that way, they can get on with all the other pending issues.

Alanschu: I haven't played them, so I wonder: Do you mean that they are not random all (except that LoL crit system) as opposed to, say, COH2?

Thank you, armchair dev, for that lengthy essay on crafting and item degradation! The real gem here, I reckon, is that quote you dug up from D&D 3rd ed. That would be a nice party feature that makes certain skills of all the individual characters in the party count as one, like a skill pool. In that way, you could make a crafting power house, if you want to. I'm sure there are other skills as well that would benefit from such a solution - possibly non-combat skills.

On the horrors of war. Here's some extremely rare WW1 3D footage from the French side. It is indeed harrowing pictures: http://io9.com/rare-3d-camera-found-containing-photos-from-wwi-669397198

True as true can be! COH2 is just a game of strategic and cinematic entertainment on a computer. Real war is unspeakable horrors IRL.

Quinn should be very proud. Pulling that off in a RTS game is no mean feat. There's one thing in a FPS, but here you got the eagle-eye view and zoom in, and in some weird way the brutal context of war has never been clearer.

I'm old-fashioned here. I think the small easter eggs and nods to other computer games that we see in most games post year 2000 are lame replacements for what I think should be a lot of exclusive, meaty and diverse content depending on what you are playing as and how you play the game. I know it's not a financially sound way of saving money and time, but if there's one thing I love of games of yore is how much exclusive content there was, and how hard it could be to reach even one of those secret gardens, weird planes or what not. Obviously, I'd love to see a CRPG plum with that. Funny thing is - if you design the entire game with that in my mind from the ground up - it wouldn't be such a big deal, because you have six characters, and they all make loads of choices and pick certain identities, so it will still be a patch work of RPG exuberance.

Weapon vs material is an interesting idea! If degrading should be in at all it should make sense that way. Still, I would love to see magic weapons and armour be immune to degradation. Of course, you could go on and say that magic items can damage other magic items, but I think for simplicity's sake that is a futile direction.

Drowsy Emperor: Yeah, COH2 is more like a game of croquet or boules, rather than tennis or badminton. Still, in war, critical hits and all sorts of contingencies are very real factors, so you could argue that COH realism>StarCraft realism for that reason alone. Cover and sight certainly strengthens the "real feel" in COH2. War is never, ever a game of chess on a clean board with neat squares.

Message sent, Monte Carlo! Perhaps this will be the start of an Obsidian Platoon of Buffoons, given that clown scout car and all. And yes, what I really appreciate is this "you are there"-quality that Relic has managed to instil into the game. StarCraft I probably wouldn't touch with a stick, but this makes me think I am reliving a part of history through a game - it's almost hindsight educational.

Malekith: Thanks for the link. As I don't follow Josh on Formspring, it's great to get to hear what he thinks about these core things. Having read it, I feel even more certain that we are in for one helluva ride!

JFSOCC: Precisely, just as long as no classes and combinations thereof become walking story picklocks, as it were, of the entire content of the game. I love combos and multi-classing, personally, but given the variety of classes in-game and the party size limit, it would be nice if it at least took two playthroughs to experience the bulk of the game's story content.

Chrononaut: Also, OEI has made it clear from the start (during the KS and afterwards) that they want an active, engaged and creative community. They really seem to appreciate the input. I'm sure they can sift through all suggestions, comments and polls here and make qualified decisions on their own. A few times, it may lead to changes, but then it should be because they feel it's the best way forward.

Sensuki: True, I almost forgot about that. That I did like, as it may ordinary weapons ordinary, as they should be. Perhaps PE could go that route.

One aspect I didn't like at all in Skyrim. Your antagonist got to be a jack of all trades, and even worse, you could do all quests, even become the head of factions opposing each other. *Shiver!* Here we get to become an entire party of characters, so I think it's important to make characters exclusive. Ideally, a party with six different classes shouldn't be enough to even discover/open up half the game. For that you need to do new playthroughs.

FNV is the only exception that personally didn't get me annoyed.

Josh, Falcon Swiftblade summed up potential things to throw money at very well! Vanity stuff and optimizing party travelling and loot hauling would be great money sink avenues. I mean, the only item durability system that made sense to me and felt a bit of fun, was in FNV, but that fits that setting like a glove. And you know what Johnnie Cochran said: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit!" EDIT: I'm not one of them that will spend on any stronghold, as it doesn't excite me much, unless it is done the way Monte Carlo is proposing earlier in this thread - a quest-heavy approach - think NWN2 stronghold, but a lot more interesting quests that I can spend money on: bribing, salves and what not.

Agiel: Clown car! Haha, that's precisely what it is! Calax: I feel you. I'm normally turtling in many games too. This is a whole way of strategizing for me, it's sometimes weird, but a whole lot of fun. Alright, I've been playing COH2 for 40 hours by now. Most of that time I've hauled my sorry ass onto the multiplayer battlefields (over 50 matches of all sorts), and lost a lot of games. My wins and the most entertaining matches have been 4 on 4. If nobody is lagging and the two teams are even, it's pure joy! In multiplayer, I have picked Germans and Soviets equally often, just to learn the basics of the game and to see if I get to build up some favourite tactics. I have had some limited success with a Soviet infantry spam of mine, but that's about it. I have also finished the campaign on Conscript level, and it was actually very good. Taking Berlin was exciting - it felt like history in the making. Sadly, I screwed it all up at the end. You were supposed to capture the point just outside the Reichstag, but did I get that? Nope. I hammered the Reichstag itself for twenty minutes. I dropped bombs on it - precision and incendiary - I pointed heavy guns towards those wings and bombarded away. I put four tanks outside and shelled the building, but for the love of God, it didn't crumble, and those health points of the building sections weren't dropping. Finally, I saw that white outline at the stairs of the Reichstag and that's when I realized my noob mistake. The story of the campaign was quite decent too. If I was a reviewer, I'd give this game 9 out of 10. And that's from someone that hasn't played RTS games, and thus not the original. I'm revisiting the campaign on Captain level now, and I still love it. If there's a honey moon phase for great games, this game has one heck of longevity for its lovey-dovey qualities, I can tell you that. All I could wish for are more maps for those multiplayer matches. And I have all that theatre of war goodness to munch on too. As I got the game from GMG at a steal of a price, I just went ahead and bought myself the collector edition upgrade. So now I have nice looking vehicle skins, and yesterday I got five more commanders too choose from. The German ones were cool.

I tried to be open-minded, I thought it over, but my brain had degraded below 25 %. The answer I gleaned from the grey-cell meltdown. It was a resounding "not on my watch". I'd hate for item degradation to become a force-fed money sink.

I'm one of those that never cared about crafting in IE games or NWN games. Like someone said, it was a lot of junk that I had to sift though to find the things I was looking for. However, in other games I've appreciated some aspects of crafting. Perhaps the most important aspect is the possibility of vanity items. I played on a persistent NWN1 world, and there I merely crafted in order to make nice-looking items, and it was pretty fun, actually. Another important aspect is that I would love to see crafting that created items with slightly varied stats, as an incentive to do it all. I'll prolly be roasted for this: But I actually liked Diablo 3's endless variation to items crafted - but I hated it for being a game where everything was about the gear. What I am talking about here are subtle differences that are not, or at least very rarely, affecting the gameplay in any major way. Furthermore, never ever make the crafted stuff better than what I can find while I play through the game - it should be on equal footing. The greatest flaw of MotB was that elemental-crafted weapons got absurdly powerful, for instance. As for item degradation, I usually detest it. It's such a chore. And no need to even mention Diablo 3. Here, I think Tim is walking on really thin ice, indeed. Will this even be remotely fun? Perhaps it will, but for now I remain sceptical.

All this talk about RTwP, combat and gameplay in another thread got me pondering over what kind of pace they game will offer. It's a party-based game, but that doesn't stop it from being pretty fast-paced as far as the encounters go. And if you don't press pause a lot, it will be pretty intense. Personally, as someone that really knew the D&D systems at work in, say, BG2 or NWN2, I could build pretty decent characters and then furnish them and plan ahead for encounters rather reliably (except of course some boss fights and surprise badgers). Still, I pressed pause a lot more in BG than I did in NWN2. One reason for that was of course the quick kneelie for a rest in NWN2, whereas in BG2, I was often in dire straits because of no favourite spells left, for instance. Another reason was AD&D vs 3.5 ed D&D. The latter was more versatile while at the same time not so locked to a few options, especially not at higher levels. All in all, this meant that I could play through NWN2 considerably faster than BG2, despite both games having plenty of misses going on during battle. What do you except the gaming pace of PE to be? And I guess I'm referring mainly to combat pace here. In short, how often will pause be a necessity? Also, how squishy will the characters be? In high level NWN2 with a good armour, a few standard magical items and the right protection spells going, fights could last for ten minutes without pause! Perhaps PE will be much faster, and thus necessitate pause for that reason alone.