mstark

I still really like the idea of having "epic" class monsters that are completely disconnected from any quests, and can only be found through exploring. If these monsters would give a significant chunk of experience, you'd be indirectly rewarded for exploring if you actually manage to overcome these encounters. In addition to the loot, that is. Fighting an ancient dragon, like Firkraag, is certainly an experience few have had - experience points represent exactly this. Valid point. And I think the solution would be to introduce different classes of "monsters", as suggested earlier in the thread, and by Ieo. @Ieo, what do you mean when you say "in a vacuum"?

It's strange to me that less people appreciate & join the actual discussion when someone makes good points, and go on bickering about what they want/do not want, without offering solutions. Or start talking about which systems are their favourites, even though they stray far from what PE is guaranteed to be all about. I hope the devs will be able to find the actual suggestions to [improve] their suggested (and already awesome) system in this verbal pit of sewage .

You might want to have a look at this thread, and you might be happy to hear that the developers are looking at it: http://forums.obsidi...han-resolution/ It addresses the issue here and suggests solutions for it.

Adam is working on connecting another mic just now.

Can't wait to see what improvement attaching that perverse mic will make to the sound quality of this stream :|

"Trivial" is relative. For a level 10 party fighting a zombie would be trivial. For a level 1 character this encounter wouldn't be trash or trivial. The word "Trivial" here isn't used in relation to the player character, but simply as a classification for some types of monsters. Better explanation: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61543-are-you-for-or-against-gaining-experience-points-only-for-completing-objectives/page__st__20?do=findComment&comment=1242531

KS + PayPal combined nearly at 3.4kk now Are there actually any doubters left out there? I'm gonna place my bet on 3.9kk total pledges (3.8kk from KS)!

I'm all for it, but my hope is that they'll introduce a system that allows keeping some of the excitement of certain encounters: this was suggested by Ieo in the Update 24 thread: Introduce 3 different enemy types: "Common" enemies that would give minimal XP on kill, think random monster/bandit encounters & roaming, hostile, animals. Can potentially be quest related. "Trivial" enemies that give no XP, would include NPCs, and are generally always linked to quests. "Epic" enemies, they give XP comparable to completing a quest when killed (think Firkraag), and are never quest related, but found through exploration (a rewardable achievement in itself). This would (in a truer sense?) accommodate for all play styles, while hindering abusing the system by doubling back and killing the NPCs of a quest you just finished, simply because that's the most "rewarding" way to play.

I think it sounds like an amazing system, very happy about it. It'll probably mean a whole lot of reloading your quick saves when you fail miserably in an encounter, but doing so and changing your strategic approach to a fight is part of the fun - I love doing fights over and over in BG, it's a learning experience, since using the DnD rule set & strategic party based combat makes it so much more complex than any other game (and for people who hate chain-reloading, there's Iron mode) I do remember chain resurrecting in many fights the first few times I played BG2, because I sucked. Badly. I also had never encountered anything like DnD rules before, and the complexion it brought excited me to no end. I really hope PE will bring this complexity back, even if the entire world & ruleset will be developed within the span of a year. I have high hopes for it. Some encounters were pretty much balanced after the fact that you can resurrect mid-combat, though.

It's still the responsibility of designers to set up mechanics that don't screw with the player's desires. BTW, this sort of XP bias can work in ANY direction, not just combat. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you earned markedly less XP from mission to mission if you didn't stop to hack literally anything you came across -- even terminals for which you already had the password! For the world monsters per exploration-- There could be different enemy types granting different xp as well. "Epic" class enemy wouldn't be linked to any quest, for example, but give good xp for the challenge. "Common" enemies could give minimal world-kill xp. "Trivial" creatures, even NPCs, would give no xp and must be linked to quests. Not sure how that would work out in the UI, though, in terms of identification--or perhaps it's something discovered only after the fact. This is exactly what I would like to see in this game . It solves the problem the developers are worried about, us abusing the system, but keeps the thrill of fighting badass monsters and making it rewarding (without artificially tying them to "quests"). It follows the model of "don't break what isn't broken" while addressing the flaw of the system

Sounds amazing The new Obsidian Order thread is here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61517-the-obsidian-order-of-eternity-wants-you-part-4/

I think it took me at least 26 minutes to get our of Irenicus' dungeon most of the time... Same ...at least. I like playing these games the way they were meant to be played - patiently, exploring every nook and cranny! But figuring out a way of completing the game in 26 minutes is an impressive feat to say the least, and watching the video of it is disorienting. I love when people figure out ways of breaking my favourite games to do awesome stuff . Most companies today try too hard to protect their games against that kind of stuff. It removes a lot of the games spirit. (Not saying games should intentionally have serious, game-breaking flaws.)

I think I just drooled a bit reading the opening post. I hope all this is possible *prays to the OEI Gods*

It would be amazing if they'd provide a minimum of 3 sets of assets, a retina (2.0x), a high res (1.5x) and a regular set that'd work on most monitors today (1.0x) . That way you'd be able to toggle the scale of everything to acceptable levels on a very wide range of devices. They could either render everything at 2.0x from the start, and downsample it (with virtually no quality loss) for normal monitors, or they could render it at 1.0x first, and release high DPI patches once those renders finish . The best thing is that, if the game has the capability to handle DPI scaling (the engine would be able to scale maps/sprites, 3D objects, collision coordinates...), then either they or the fan-base could release any amount of differently scaled assets, to fit everyone's taste. It would also be absolutely amazing for modders if the map sprites were as easy to change as character portraits are (though I can see how not easily changeable collision coordinates might pose a problem for this). ...always rambling...

I'm more than just a bit sad that one of the few combat elements that required actual skill (aiming/estimating) is being removed :/ Please make this radius indicator optional?

I'd be happy if there were "epic" monsters scattered around the world (think Firkraag) that you could kill, that would give exp without being linked to a quest. If the monster was linked to a quest, you would either first have to find that quest to "unlock" that monster, or else it'd be possible to find the monster first, kill it, and break the quest... or complete it without being aware of it, which isn't ideal, because if you knew about the quest, you might have wanted to solve it in another way than killing. It'd risk becoming a bit stilted and artificial, just to prevent people from breaking the system. Either way, rambling, and I'm sure the PE developers will solve it gallantly

Lovely, lovely update. Lovely, lovely systems. Agreeing with this wholeheartedly!

I don't think anyone even wants full VO. At least not a majority. So they're not even considering it. It's not just about the money, they've got just about 18 months to get this game to the market, not long.

lol, it's flat out retarded anyone would claim that beating a game using glitches means it has no content o_O You can beat BG2 in 26 minutes, but the game still has ~100-200hours of content, if you play it to enjoy it rather than to break it

Depends on what you do with your computer, but yes, most games lack support for more than 2 threads, which is bad for the game and bad for gamers. That does meant that today, it's usually better to have fewer cores with higher clock speed, if all you do with your computer is gaming. If PE does support multiple threads, it'll benefit all of us, since there isn't a single current-gen processor out there with less than 2 cores/threads at the moment. However, if you're not just a gamer, and you do any form of actual work, or use productivity tools, you'll be very happy for every extra core you can get. Multi-core support is more common in productivity tools.

Oh, awesome! Thanks so much I'm usually not able to follow the KS comment streams

You have never played the Total War series. Literally miles out of their way. Haha, I haven't actually, and I suppose I should be glad about that

Wasn't BG2:SoA rated at 200 hours for playing through all the content (not just the main quest)? I seem to remember something along those lines on my game box (that box is now in another country, so can't look it up :|)

It makes me very happy that there are more people who realize the importance of this, and keeping the game playable at native resolutions on the incredible variety of DPI densities out there . Thanks for telling me! Please excuse my ignorance, but how do you know this? (I was hoping to see a shiny green "Developer" reply at some point )

BG2 had one of the worst pathfinding algorithms in any game, ever, heh. Something the PE team has admitted, and said they will greatly improve on. Played it recently? Every time you issue a new move command, the character stops for nearly a full second before it gets executed. Characters get stuck on each other. Characters very often set of in the completely wrong direction. (AMD is a processor manufacturer, they made both LV, ULV, CULV and full power processors... just like Intel. There's no great difference in performance between AMD & Intel, if you look at price-to-performance ratios AMD even comes out on top. You will be very happy for multi-core support if you're on a ~1.2Ghz ULV dual-core processor, whether it's made by Intel or AMD.