TheTeaMustFlow

After comparing my experience of playing New Vegas (on PC, with a console to fix things) to my friend's experience of playing New Vegas (on a console, which meant no console - irony points ahoy), and from what I have heard about other games Obsidian have developed (almost always great, almost always buggy), I would be a little wary of playing an Obsidian game without access to the console.

My condolences as well.

Out of curiosity, is the Portuguese language setting in most games etc South American Portuguese or Portuguese from actual Portugal?

This should answer some of your questions, but unfortunately a lot of them just haven't been answered at this juncture. Much of what we `know` is vague, incomplete, and/or speculative, and I believe very little technical information about the formulas, hardcoding and such has been released. 1. The linked page contains links to three music samples. 2. Based on comments from Obsidian, max level reached might possibly be around 10-12 range, but this is highly speculative. I don't believe there are any forms of prestige classes or multiclassing as such, but there will probably be options for high level characters that amount to something similar, but again, speculative. 3. Unknown. 4. Unknown. 5. Unknown. 6. In some form, but I'm not sure whether they exist in and of themselves or as part of other items (e.g. armour) 7. No idea. 8. VA is present but not universal, similar to most of the Infinity Engine games (e.g., Baldur's Gate, NWN1). I don't know whether there is support to add more, but given that it's very easy to do in most such games, you probably can. 9. No idea, though I think something on this may have been released. 10. As 9. 11. Obsidian will be supporting the game post-release, but to what extent has not been stated. 12. I believe that some classes will have some form of summoning (esp. wizard, maybe also druid), but I'm not sure of the nature or extent of it. Ranger has an animal companion, if that counts. 13. Um, I would expect there's music pretty much all the time? I don't really understand where you're going with this one... If you want a list of what music happens when, I don't think it exists yet. 14. Unknown. For many of your questions I would recommend looking at the wiki, the page I linked, or using the magnificence of google.

Personally, I actually prefer no voice acting to partial. I just find sudden switches between voiced and not voiced jarring, and I have a special, silent hatred for the often random and nonsensical greetings of Baldur's Gate (except for Minsc's ones). Thankfully, my strange idiosyncrasy isn't really a problem, thanks to the wonders of the mute button.

Personally, I might think about heavily restricting all magic items (having most item improvements come from superior craftsmanship and/or materials)... but then have all magic items be awesome. The concept of a `weak enchanted item` is a rather silly one, and one that occurs only in games.

Thanks very much for the responses. While it looks like I'd be better of not forking out however much money I'd need for the beta, it still looks like the final game is going to shape up very well

As one of those poor souls lacking the wealth to fork out £110 to get to backer beta tier, I'd be interested to know how much those who do have it are enjoying it, and why.

I actually forgot November didn't have a 31st. So I'll go 30th.

I guess I'll guess 31 November.

Oooh, shiny. But wouldn't crossbow fit better in the peasant weapon group rather than the knight one? It wasn't exactly an elite weapon.

To be fair, if such spells exist, it's not unreasonable to suggest that enemies might be aware of them. If they know about magic, then (after seeing their friend suddenly turn on them after the bloke in the dress waved his hands at him) they might well think `Oh crap, they mind-controlled Jimmy!` before `Oh crap, Jimmy's a traitor!`.

SA?

Perhaps it's not a cow, but... That's No Moon.

No Grenade-Tomes? That's it, PoE is officially RUINED FOREVER.

I'd quite like the idea of some increased difficulty that became in effect level scaling, as long as it was justified within the plot, and not simply based on arbitrarily increasing enemy stats. For example, say if within the story there is some kind of deteriorating situation or tension building up (as there normally is), such as nations coming closer and closer to war, some kind of dangerous magical phenomenon becoming more widespread, or even just the crime rate in a city district going up. As a consequence of this, as one gets further into the game (or even just dependent on level, as long as it didn't appear to just be based on the PC's xp totals), some encounters are strengthened. At the start of the game, everything's more or less calm, so that guard post's manned by a few lazy unskilled militiamen, and the cave's only got a few wolves inside. Halfway through, things have gotten worse, so the guard post has been reinforced by some real soldiers, and the wolves have been chased off by the demonic rabbits coming from that gateway to hell that's opened up. Then by the endgame, everything's gone pear-shaped, meaning that the guard post has been overrun by powerful necromancers, while the demon rabbits have been breeding and one of them's eaten enough souls to become a mighty Doom Hare. I remember that New Vegas had something like this (with the NCR and Legion sending in their veteran troops in preparation for the looming battle and to make your life harder), and it worked quite well, justifying the increased encounter difficulty and adding to the feeling that "a storm is brewing".

I predict we will have to deal with some Ungern-Sternberg style looniness, with your friendly neighbourhood villain happily massacring cripples and invalids because it will obviously send them onto a better life.

surely (I say, with no real knowledge of programming or pathing) it wouldn't be too difficult to set party AI to follow the leader's path exactly, as they would logically do, given that it is the only path known to be free of traps. Programming that wouldn't be making the game too easy, it would be removing frustrating `fake difficulty` by giving the party a modicum of common sense, making it so the challenge is dealing with the traps, not your terminally stupid allies.

To be honest , in any game which allows much in the way of looting, I don't think I've ever seen a remotely realistic inventory system - even in, say, Baldur's Gate, characters can still carry around multiple spare sets of armour and skip around totally unimpeded. This is just as well, because having said remotely realistic inventory system would result either in no fun, or no looting (which would be no fun). So I totally support the inifinistash. (though it might be nice if there was some little explanation/handwave on bag of holding lines.)

I'm going to do you one better and say that evil comes from only one source: selfishness. Sociopaths can still lead just lives without having a wealth of feelings, Ideologues might still have a strong moral fiber that stops them from losing sight of what's good. It just comes down to the point where your actions might hurt someone else and balancing self-interest against the well being of another. I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you both here. Certainly, selfishness can drive people to do evil, and corruption is one of the biggest things preventing people doing good. But the thing is, selfishness means selling out whatever ideology one supports, or not possessing one at all. And when said ideology is a relatively good one, then yes, that's bad. But not all ideologies are good. The mass graves of the twentieth century stand as testament to the evil that the worst of ideologies can cause. And where such ideologies hold sway, the selfish and corrupt, who sell out and weaken that ideology, are far better than those who follow it, though those loyal ideologues may well be far from selfish. Who is worse, the greedy German border guard who lines his pocket by smuggling Jews across the border to Switzerland, or the loyal man of the SS who bravely lays down his life for the cause? And yes, I realise Godwin's Law has just been officially invoked, but we're discussing the nature of evil here. Bringing up the greatest historical exemplars of evil is to be expected. Which is good, because I'm going to bring them up some more. Walsingham, I refuse to accept that no-one, ever, has been evil in the name of an ideology and honestly believed that ideology (rather than using it as an excuse for selfishness or to hurt people for pleasure) while not acting under another's authority or lacking the ability to know better. While I must admit that the world's greatest ideological murderers were probably insane (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc.), there remain plenty who weren't. Take Lenin, for example. By all accounts, he was an honest man who truly believed in his Bolshevik ideology, and did not act selfishly, or take any particular pleasure in the pain of others. Furthermore, he was certainly exceedingly intelligent and well educated. There's no evidence to suggest he was in any way insane. None of these factors stopped him from killing thousands upon thousands, actively and openly supporting a doctrine of revolutionary terror, taking bread from the mouths of the Russian people to feed his war effort against the White Army (War Communism) and authorizing countless war crimes. He was not `broken`. He was not following orders. And he hardly lacked facts or analytical tools. Yet he remains one of history's greatest mass murderers, his crimes only overshadowed by the far worse murderer who succeeded him. Incidentally, the spellchecker says analytical isn't a word. Silly spellchecker.

Ugh, Children. Glad I never was one... In all seriousness, I might be in a minority here, but I've never been a fan of rpgs like this letting you go on a random killing spree, against adults or children. It's taken pretty much as assumed that the PC is, if not actually sane, at least to some degree functional, and not likely to randomly (ie. purely by player choice, not for Reasons Of Plot). To me, it seems to hurt immersion more if it is even conceivable for the messianic defender of truth, justice, and the Dyrwoodian Way to randomly go Anders Breivik on the innocent townsfold, than if it isn't, whether children have reentry-grade plot armour or not. If there are massacres taking place at PC hands, there should be an in-story justification for them. On a side note, you could do a bit with varying definitions of child. For example, in A Song of Ice and Fire, Sansa is considered a woman grown and fit to be married at the age of thirteen. Maybe the Aedyr Empire considers anyone who's undergone puberty as an adult, and are shocked and outraged when the Vailans start stringing up Aedyr officers for using `child soldiers`.

What is a Skurut? And when did Gandalf kill one with anything?

While I do generally prefer playing a selfish, manipulative, devious, Machiavellian-if-The-Prince-is-all-you-know-about-Machiavelli villain, let's not reject the bad old kill-kittens-because-it's-fun stereotype as well. Yes, I'd generally prefer being Tywin Lannister, like Malekith said... but sometimes, you just want to be Gregor Clegane.

Assuming that I understood you correctly and, to put it simply, you mean `following a code or set of rules` and `focusing purely on the results of a specific action`, the problem here would be that a deontological choice can mean a lot of different things. One could argue that both a Conservative and a Marxist would be deontological, as they both likely follow specific codified set of values, but that doesn't mean they are at all similar, or view the same things as good. Similarly, both an Anarchist and a Fascist could be considered consequential, as both anarchism and fascism reject dogma, theory and program - but they, too, would be at each others throats.

If I remember correctly, hit points in ye olde d&d manuals were always meant to be an abstract representation of general grit, the ability to turn a deadly blow into a more superficial one, and plain luck (essentially, action movie plot armour), and most `successful` attacks were not meant to be direct stabs and shots to the gut, but rather relatively minor wounds - scratches, cuts, bruises and grazes etc. Getting your hit points reduced to 0 was, rather than arbitrarily falling down after one direct stab to the gut too many , either being slowed down enough by all the previous minor wounds to allow this attack to actually be a direct stab to the gut, or your `luck running out` and finally receiving a direct stab to the gut after so many lucky escapes. If represented like this, I really don't have a problem with the hit point system - it was meant to represent `action movie physics`, which I generally feel fits better with the idea of a small team of misfits beating impossible odds than something more gritty and complex. Particularly in a game where we don't have direct control over making sure our character does not get a direct stab to the gut.