mstark

I am of the opposite opinion. I can understand some might not want dialogues to interrupt them without them having a say, but it made for some really good moments in BG/2. I'm all for dialogues taking you "out of the game" and into a reading environment. I'd be very happy if commoners, who don't have anything to say, wouldn't bring up a dialogue window for their single sentence, generic, replies. That was just quite annoying in IE (jarring). I'd be happy for whatever generic things they have to say simply floats above their head for a bit if I click on them.

I believe they've said they won't scale monster levels, but if you're higher level, an archer might become a mage, or an encounter with 4 enemies might become one with 5. Can't remember where/when this was said, correct me if I'm wrong .

Would be awesome if missiles visibly hits the ground, gets stuck in wood, and ricochets off of stone

Possibly not exactly what this thread is about, but: One of the most interesting things I'm looking forward to seeing, that the devs are experimenting with, is dynamic lighting on 2D imagery, which modern rendering techniques allows for. Eg. a torch can light up a 2D object from different sides, as if it was rendered in real time. That has the potential to make the game look incredible, if it's possible to pull it off without crippling system requirements. For me, the most interesting bit is how absolutely beautiful 2D pre-rendered games tend to be, I'll take that over easily animated falling rocks in 3D any day

This makes a lot of sense, but it sounds like a nightmare to balance, a hard cap might be better for a game like PE. Some players will only go through the main quest, which means it will have to give you enough exp to finish it without trouble, while some people will go and do every single quest available. With no level cap, there's potential to seriously out-level a lot of the content if you want to finish all of it, making it feel severely unbalanced and un-fun. They could make the XP curve exponential, while keeping XP amounts gained throughout the game linear. This would act as a soft cap, where, if you do only the main quest, you might end up at level 8, and if you do all the content you'd end up at level 9-10. You keep getting exp at a similar rate throughout the game, but the amount of exp required for level 9 might equal the exp required to go from level 1-8. It'd make it impossible to reach higher levels until an expansion is released with higher experience rewards, and would also make it easy for modders to allow players to reach higher levels.

I hope no "end game" gear will be available from merchants, only from side/alternative encounters (think Firkraag). Unless it's part of some epic quest to unlock a black market where you can buy decent gear at outrageous prices, or decide to shut down the market by killing everyone and stealing the items. If the game is going to be anything like the (D&D) IE games, there isn't really such a thing as "end game" gear. No gear is really THAT much better than any other gear. A +5 sword, while obviously better, isn't that much better than a +1 (though there were some unique modifiers that made items clear best choices). If you knew where to look, you could find good, viable "end game" items in Baldur's Gate by just exploring. IWD, while on a similar item power scale, was a fair bit more linear in the way you found loot & how it scaled, I preferred the BG approach. Whether I could afford them or not, I would hate seeing items that are clearly better than those I spent hours exploring every nook and cranny of the most dangerous tombs & dungeons to find available from a merchant once I get to an end game area. As for different cities having different supply & demand, it existed in games like Freelancer (and other space/travelling/trading sims), and, in my opinion, turns an otherwise enjoyable single player experience into a MMO-ish grinding/trading experience, since it encourages buying items in one place, travelling to another, selling them... rinse and repeat until you've evened out the market and the profit isn't worth it anymore.

IE games, with a few notable exceptions, never allowed you to buy end game gear from vendors. You had to go out in the world and find it. Great system. The items in shops were usually good enough for most encounters in case you didn't like adventuring, but the best stuff you had to fight for.

Great read, thanks for sharing

I'm happy for level caps, and I'm also happy for mods that remove them. I'd love if the games play out as the BG series--an epic, continuous story, where you never directly cared about what level you were as long as it made sense for the part of the story you were in. Level, experience, and items are cool and all, but in this game I'd like to see the story come first, and mechanics & equipment designed to complement it. D&D was only a set of rules used to make telling the story of Baldur's Gate possible. Heck, D&D is designed ground up to be a game system for a DM to tell a story with.

Remember this is going to be single player. You play it through, and that's it. You don't grind and grind and grind for items until your hands are bleeding, unless you're doing something wrong. I doubt we'll ever have to worry about our character being able to make a dent in the economy of a world that you're just passing through. The thing with a "dynamic" economy is that, in most single player games, the only dynamic part of it is the player. If the played buys 10 beaks, the price goes up. If the player sells 20 beaks, the price goes down. That's not a dynamic, living, market. That's an annoying mechanic that artificially and predictably limits how much you can sell/buy at any given time. Simulating a real living market, with inflation, deflation, price fluctuations, great depressions... is huge and cannot be emulated by basic "buy x items, price rises by y amount" mechanics. So far, in RPGs, I've found all such mechanics remove from the experience rather than add to it. It's a good idea, but seems like too huge a task for anyone to bother with building such a mechanic when it's really not core to the game play of something like PE. I wouldn't mind seeing a market with static buy/sell prices. PE isn't going to be much about grinding (I hope), so you'll probably never be selling 100 of item x to merchant y, and, as such, you'd never have a noticeable effect on the market. Having to travel to different cities to sell certain goods, just because you've inflated the market in one place, just feels "gamey". It's not realistic, because your character is the only one affecting the market, and it's annoying because you have to travel around just to sell basics for maximum profit. If it was a trading sim, that might be fine. IE games handled this by making basic equipment pretty much worthless. Easy to buy, easy to sell, for low amounts of money. Rares, items that you could never find more than a few of, were given a higher price. Yes, you'd end up with more money than you could spend by the end of the game, but money was never an important part of the game play in any of these games (apart from the beginning of BG2). The best bit: having a lot of money never meant you became overpowered, it was just a convenience in the late game. Maybe, if the character in one part of the game sets off a huge forest fire, the economy could be affected somehow. Eg. herbs become more rare and valued in the immediate area, or if we flood a mine weapons & tools prices soar, but that'd be one off scripted events.

The only problem I see with being able to import your 30th level character into a new playthrough (like you could in the Icewind Dales) is that the PE campaign uses defined, named NPCs that you can find in the world and recruit into your party. Which means you'll probably find yourself in a situation where your main character is level 30, while the rest of your party is, like, Level 2. lol That can wreak all sorts of havok on both the story and the gameplay, regardless of the difficulty setting. Of course even that's not a problem if you're 1) soloing; or 2) just going the Adventurer's Hall route with a full party of characters that you made (and then imported into a new playthrough) But, like you say, there's always the "those that don't like it can simply not do it" counter/equilizer. The Baldur's Gate games allowed you to do exactly this, I found it fun for about 5 minutes to run around with my lvl 40 thief in Irenicus' dungeon after leaving my lvl 8 companions behind. The IE games all supported "importing" any character into a new game, it wasn't really a NG+ feature, but a convenience that could be abused by importing max level, uber equipped, characters.

This.

They never promised a map editor or modding tools, as they wanted to focus the entire 18 month development period on making the game as awesome as it can be. Lots of people requested it, but it's not likely we'll see it with the initial release... maybe later if the game sells well enough

Since we're talking about outputting mainly 2D graphics, there won't be any problems whatsoever with 4k performance--one of the huge benefits of PE compared to the rest of the market is that it'll look so fantastic in 4k, and still be playable, as compared to 3D games where polygons & textures matter. Comparing PE to a badly optimized 3D game (hello ArmA or Chrysis) isn't going to tell you anything--you can't compare rendering polygons+applied textures vs. rendering just textures (2D assets). You might experience some lag (in the game it will be known as loading times) if you open a 20k by 20k jpeg, and a 2x one would be 40k by 40k pixels. The only thing you'd have to really worry about is the 3D assets, simply scaling them to twice the size will not increase their polygon count and won't affect performance, but you might run into problems on graphics cards with low memory if you increase the texture quality of the 3D models. Many current gen graphics cards have the capability to output 4k (most common "4k" res: 3840 x 2160 and 4096 x 2016), incl. intel HD 4000 & current gen AMD/nVidia cards. Problem is that motherboards, cables, and ports are behind (understandably so, there are exceptionally few 4k screens on the market). The HDMI 1.4 specification supports 4k video over a single cable, but so far I know no motherboard/card that has implemented it to its full capacity yet (and why should they? They'd much rather sell new motherboards when 4k screens become available than include it now). Just wait for CES in January, and we should start seeing the standard being more adopted by manufacturers, now that the screens are on their way

We don't know much about the races yet, but if we're getting anything similar to elves (their lives spanning millennia), it'd be great to see a unique take on how such extreme lifespans affect their architecture. I imagine they'd be thinking much further ahead than mere men, what materials & architectural constructs would they use?

What can I say? I want the game to play very much like the old IE games. Yes that means buffs, yes that means some fights wont be possible to beat without buffs, yes that (might) mean it will be possible to abuse the system, but it's not about abusing the system, or steam-rolling every single encounter, it's about enjoying the story. If you didn't figure out to use buffs, too bad. You won't be able to beat some of the most challenging alternative encounters in the game, those who do figure it out will win with a true sense of achievement. Those who don't figure it out will still be able to enjoy the main story, and the majority of the content. I certainly did not figure everything out until after having played BG2 more than once, and read a lot about it online. That's not a bad thing, the game was so good it made be actually do research about it... imagine if your school assignments got you that excited about doing research. Back to buffing, I don't mind it, and if we get action queues it will be a whole lot less tedious. The people saying "no 10 minutes of buffing", well, you'll be happy, because that would never happen. What are the alternatives? Single-click-execute-all-actions-macro, or limiting buffs to a few passive ones that are always active until you switch them? No thanks. I've got either WoW or Diablo 3 for that, and I hate both with passion.

Found it :D http://goo.gl/maps/Xu9SZ The place is so beautiful, now I want to go travelling!

He's definitely jacked. I can tell from some of these pixels and from seeing quite a few WIPs in my time. But you can also tell he's clearly ticklish. When I get my hands on this game his secrets wont be as safe as he thinks. Ok, we're back on the internet.

What if this is WIP, and this is the initial concept. And once his history & story is figured out, they will make sure to adjust this WIP art to fit his character better? Try not to make up a story for a guy who doesn't have one, and then proceeding to criticize his looks based upon it. Don't compare him to other characters, because we don't know if he'll be anything like them (and I hope to god he won't, unless it's intentional).

The images file names are AumauaWizard and AumauaBarbarian, that should be official enough? Or maybe I misunderstand? Seems those who are happy about them are actually realizing it's WIP, and try to imagine their potential, whereas those who are unhappy are preemptively picturing a disappointing final result. I suppose that might be part of the purpose of showing WIP this early, to see what feelings the concepts elicit from the community. As far as line drawings go, they're pretty damn good, and they certainly managed to get a reaction. I like how this thread has created a constructive discussion, hard to believe this is actually on the internet. Good food for thought.

Map looks very small, cramming a desert, grassland, and winter biome together. It works for some games, where you sacrifice realism to create a logistically enjoyable experience. So far, it seems like the PE devs aren't considering doing that, since they're developing a "realistic" world as part of their own IP. Never played that game, but it looks awesome :D. How's the story/gameplay? Looks like a mix of something between IE and Diablo 2?

Yeah, the game will likely have fast travelling between areas, in the same way as Baldur's Gate 2 does: once you know of a location, you can go there. Creating all the landmass in between for people who would rather walk the entire way is not really feasible without tiling and repeated use of areas, this again defeats the point, since the only real reason to walk the entire way by foot would be to have a more realistic experience (ruined by repeated tiles), or to experience the scenery (there's no way they could fill it with enough content to make it worthwhile). While it could be amazing to have a large seamless area to explore, I don't think they should go the route of Skyrim and create a huge & awesome, but rather soulless, world. I'd rather see many smaller, separate, highly differentiated, and content rich areas. I want to experience an awesome story, not a glorified Google Maps If they did have the manpower, time, and money to actually make a seamless world filled with the same amount of content and diversity as we'd see in a BG2 style map, I'm all for it. That's why I think it could possibly make for a good expansion to expand a smaller area of the map to be a large, more seamless, one. Just to see what it'd be like . Edit, Example of a BG2 style map, with 20 exterior areas. Imagine each area is 20,000px x 20,000px: Here's an example with these 20 exterior areas placed beside each other (80,000px x 100,000px). Visualizing how much work would be involved in creating the entire map as one seamless world:

It would be technologically possible to make an "open roaming" world in 2D, they'd still render their map files at 10-20k pixels square in a seamless manner, and create an engine that intelligently loads surrounding map areas in the background as you walk around. This would avoid overloading memory, and due to relatively slow travelling speed, the loading would never be seen and it would appear as one seamless world. But I'm all with Ieo on this one, it's not really desirable for a game in this style. For one, it'd be impossible (time & cost) to make a world large enough to incorporate any form of realistic differentiation in geography. Not to mention that without fast travelling systems it'd take you hours of walking through beautiful, yet pointless, terrain to get anywhere, and implementing a fast travelling system kind of defeats the point of making it seamless to start with. I would love to see something along those lines appear in an expansion, though. Say, the first expansion of PE would add a seamless, huge, map that covers the entirety of a section of the Dyrwood. It would be large, and allow seamless walking from one end to the other, but not so large as to make it impossible to fill with a decent content density.

Lol, never thought of it in that way .

The IE games did have bedrooms in their inns, and a number of characters/NPCs/events tied to them, so as not to make them a pointless addition. I think it's fair to expect similar attention to detail from PE.