Heresiarch

The obvious answer is that neither should be a skill to be invested in. You just answered that yourself. If a player rolls a rogue with high lockpicking skill, but then gets a companion who can smash through every door, why should't he feel bad? If there is no unique content to find with his supposedly unique class, what was the point with rolling with that class? Just because he wants to look badass in a black cowl? Sorry, but style and roleplaying is't everything players want when they choose their class. It's very bad in PnP when one of the players feels useless because party does't let him get his unique content based on his skills. In cRPG, it's... just moderately bad. I think I can hear a very disgruntled PnP player here. If any player in the party gets bored it's GM's fault for not being able to involve all the players. If I play a rogue I don't necessarily want to run up to every chest to check it for traps and open the lock. It is extremely boring. I want to sneak up on people and garrote them to death. Not every class has unique abilities. Far from it. What can a fighter do? He swings a bloody sword and he doesn't day, "Hey, my barbarian friend, it kinda sucks that you get more damage bonus for that two-handed axe of yours and all that extra dice for HP, since I am kinda the warrior, you know. Just grab a toothpick instead of the axe, so I don't feel useless or I quit playing." Same goes for monks (spell-resistance does not count as a bad ass unique power does it?), sorcerers, swashbucklers, you name it. You are trying to argue that rules in the party matter, because otherwise people would fell useless. Well, I've got news, not every game is an archetypical PnP with boring dungeon crawling and unimaginative GMs. Some games are about actual roleplay (which is not limited to picking locks or other special abilities, by the way), where classes are dictated by character and profession. They are about party synergy and interactions, not about being useful to the party simply because you can pick locks or heal wounds.

This is a terrible attitude. It hurts the nature of the classes and good what can come from class-based system, because they cease to be special. It will hurt possible companions, as noone will provide player with unique content. It obviously will hurt replayability. It even hurts the setting (why magical skills should have substitute in mundane skills?). And as you already mentioned that then players will just get every class and that actually hurts party composition options, I'll say that only part of players pick up companions out of their effectiviness; a lot do so because they like the characters or naturally prefer specific party compositions (like mage-heavy instead of balanced, ect.). So no, not being able to pick locks does't matter to many players, as they will just replay game with other party later and enjoy new content they missed the first time. Yeah, right, if your barbarian can shoulder-smash through a door, surely it will make your rogue look bad and useless. Say what? How does that even make sense? The unique personality of companions matters, not whether the companion blasts enemies away with magic or sword. What adds to replayability is the thrill and variability of combat, achieved to multiple tactical approaches player can take to a given encounter. And no, the fact that you can pulverize enemies just as effectively with a sword, as you do with magic, doesn't take away any uniqueness. Neither does the ability to open locks without a rogue.

So how are you going to fast-talk, steal the money or sneakely approach danger without your rogue skills? I am going to use my warlock skills and turn invisible to avoid combat or to fast talk I'll make myself irresistible to the opposite sex, so they will barely listen. Or to the same sex. Or to both sexes. Don't see how that plan can go wrong. Anyway, my point is that many classes can have access to same or similar talents. It should be a different variety, sure, but there is absolutely no need for class-exclusive skills, the effects of which cannot be reproduced by any other class.

Skills are your instruments of roleplay in cRPG. Without unique set of instruments, you won't have any unique roleplay. Well, maybe there is a nicer way to say it, but you're wrong. Uniqueness comes with the player, not with the class. RP is not about having a certain ability, it is about achieving results with different methods. Lock picking skill doesn't make a rogue, but ability to fast-talk, lust for money, sneaky approach to danger, and the other such qualities do. If there is a locked door in your way, a rogue could pick the lock, a barbarian could cut through it or a wizard could pulverize it with a spell. If the only solution is going to a tavern and getting yourself a rogue to open doors for you, then you have RP all wrong.

I think games should move away from obligatory party roles. It adds to the diversity. If a rogue, a mage and a cleric are all must-haves, the choice of classes is actually very limited. I think MMORPGs first picked up on the fact, that class should be dictated by necessity. For every specific role there should at least be a number of classes who can fill it with roughly the same efficiency. Classes should all be about style and role play. So, yeah, there is nothing wrong with a fighter/mage. It doesn't mean that he should be able to land devastating 10th level spell "Utter Mayhem and Mass Destruction", as a pure mage could, or possess the same combat abilities as a fighter does. But he can use a certain spells efficiently and make up for the lack of training with magical self-buffs. This would make him just as effective as a pure class character only in a different way. By the way, in AD&D (and I consider all the editions after that one to be heretical and in a dire need of purging by fire) you could dual class a fighter to a mage and turn into an ultimate weapon of mass destruction... provided you live long enough to enjoy your fighter levels back.

Personally, I hold NWN2 in high disregard. I think the original campaign is the most abominable and stereotyped approach to making RPGs a man could think about. I hated every character, every dialogue, every situation. It seemed like whoever came up with those used the book The Most Used and Abused Fantasy Clichés of All Times. Even MotB wasn't good enough for me. The story was awesome, characters were great, but the gameplay seemed extremely lame. Luck was the most important factor in major battles, not strategy or skill, which I absolutely hated. Also D&D 3.5 class system is terrible to implement in a videogame. I don't like to minmax with my characters, so ultimately all my builds turned out fun, but performing poorly in combat. That gradually takes me from the rant part to the actual thoughts on replayability. I think the most important aspect of whether someone is going to play a game again is not the RP part. It may sound like a paradox at first, but really, there's no RPG out there, where RP leads to vastly different results. Whatever you say, whatever you do, NPCs are likely to forget your attitude and behaviour right about time they are saying their second line. Because that second line and everything after it is pretty much independent of your choice. So on your first play-through it does feel like you have one. But when you replay the game the illusion of choice pops like a soap bubble, since you see first-hand that your action ultimately don't matter. That effectively puts a gun to RP's face and pulls the trigger. The only exception is Alpha Protocol, where exactly every choice has a consequence and the story is tailored by your choice (unlike in The Walking Dead, although the games shamelessly claims it to be so every episode). So the main factor is still the quality of the gameplay. All the games I replayed (including Baldur's Gate 2, Witcher, Dead Space (the whole series), Mass Effect, Max Payne 3, Batman: Arkham something series, X-com, Odium and whatnot) had very engaging gameplay with tactical elements. Simply put, in all of those games killing stuff just never gets old. So if you enjoyed the gameplay chances are you are going to replay the game. Even if it was massacred by a horrible ending like ME3.

I`d say that there is no point, unless a weapon is really exotic. If an insert-a-race-name-here axe handles like any other axe, anyone could use it to the same extent. So there is little point in giving bonuses for using dwarven axes exclusively to dwarves. On the other hand, if a weapon is truly exotic (not D&D exotic, mind you) then culture-specific proficiency actually makes sense. It doesn't look too convincing if a western knight is proficient with a katar, for instance, or a mongol warrior is familiar with a morning star. But tying weapons proficiency to character background could be a little tricky.

As I've mentioned before I strongly believe that all lies/bluffs and such should be either tagged or colour-coded. Not because it's an aid for a dumb player, but because it makes easier to get the intent of the author who wrote the dialogue correctly. This eliminates the annoying situations when lines mean not what you think they mean and saying seemingly harmless things results in a disaster. The problem is all the more prevalent with the recent approach of summarizing the lines (like in Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and The Old Republic, in which it largely ruined the one and only decent experience the game had to offer), but it happened sometimes in BG as well. Colour coding has already been done decently in Bloodlines. I see no reason why it can't be improved upon and used in PE.

Frankly, I prefer BG2 design with a single main location, several locations to travel for side missions and being locked away at times in far-away places. Also I like returning to the same place again and again, seeing how it changes over time. I even liked DA2 because of this, horrible recycled dungeons and lame countryside notwithstanding.

It kinda makes me wonder why anyone would want a console version of a PC title that would obviously be horrible to play with a controller. Like an FPS or an RTS or a cRPG. It makes sense that people want console games ported to PC, because not everyone has a console. But I really doubt there are any console players who don't have a PC.

I Hope to God this isn't a dagger he's holding. On a sidenote, I love the detailed approach to the Pantheon. It really gives a nice feel to the game, when gods and religion are neatly defined before the actual stroyline, not added-on later as an extra gimmick.

I should say that "evil" options must be at least tempting in terms of reward. If they are not, as it is often the case, you play a villain with no incentive other than doing bad things for their own sake. Murdering innocents and eating babies isn't everyone cup of tea, so a more conventional approach to villainy will make this path more attractive and interesting to many players.

That reminds me of the time I first saw the defence minigame in Revelations. Words escaped me. Seriously, all the games that had enjoyable minigames (KOTOR, Witcher, Rage, Fallout to name a few) had those minigames in a form of some in-game activity. This includes brawls, races, cards and the like. On the other hand, having an entirely different (and half-arsed too) game inside another game never works out well.

That's really awesome. Hats off to the person who came up with this great idea and made it a reality.

Cursed items are only good enough to be included if their flaw is outweighed by its usefulness. It only makes sense when the player himself does not want to unequip the item even though it can make the character kill his own team mates in frenzy or do something equally bad. One of the best examples in the literature (which is kinda full of cursed items when you think about it) is Snaga in Gemmell's Drenai saga, a battle axe possessed by a demon, which belonged to great warriors who later all became crazy murderers. The protagonist has to use it to get his wife back who has been stolen by slavers. He cannot do without it, although the reader and later the hero himself is well aware that the weapon will eventually become his downfall. That's the kind of thing that makes for an epic story. Cursed Gauntlets of Fumbling? Not so much.

Actually, I am good either way as long as it does not involve posh accents. PST with all the Planescape speech was completely awesome. What's the chant? Cutter, basher, deader, berk, clueless, sodding... what's not to like there? On the other hand, Witcher used pretty modern language (much like Sapkowski did in his books) and it too sounded awesome. They conveyed different things. Planescape is a strange and alien place with its own culture and denizens. The Witcher world, while completely alien, is pretty much the same thing as today's world still prosaic with trivial racism, poverty and crime problems. So the answer is whatever the devs see fit.

Their fervour is in part justified by how people try not to hurt anyone's "religious feelings" at the expense of everyone else. So people naturally got tired of all the self-righteousness. The outrage is not against Christianity, mind you, it's about suggesting that the game should conform to religious dogmas. I am not trying to tell people what to believe in, but the fact that you believe in something doesn't make everything that does not conform to your faith or even jokes about it a taboo. If those things make you feel bad or insulted, you're too insecure or not strong enough in your faith to simply disregard them. So in a sense I am also hostile to the idea, but I believe that nothing like this is going to happen anyway.

To be fair, dispel, remove magic, secret word, spell thrust, breach, pierce magic, true sight, warding whip, ruby ray, pierce shield, and spellstrike are all Things That Exist in BG2. And while the game includes tooltips to help you tell what is what, it is pretty unintuitive and can be very irritating for the unitiated, so I can't in the least blame a person for wanting to avoid the whole thing. Which will probably be feasible in PE, albeit not ideal, as they've said that they want to avoid combat scenarios with "must use X to win" encounters (e.g., "monster immune to all weapons below +3"). Remove magic is a combat version of dispel, it leaves the buffs alone. Ruby ray removes one protection spell of any level. Spellstrike removes them all. Secret word as a less potent version of the ruby ray. Spells thrust is the same to spell strike. Breach removes all combat protection buffs from an enemy. Pierce magic is secret word plus lowering spell resistance. True sight dispels invisibility and illusions each turn on enemies only. Don't remember about warding whip, but it was messed up somehow and, hence, useless. Pierce shield is improved pierce magic. You also forgot to mention greater malison, which lowered saving throws, and lower resistance, which did exactly what it says on the tin. Loading them together with pierce magic into a spell trigger made for a blast against spell casters. Also spell shield saved you from a single protection-breaching spell, including spellstrike.There were also immunity spheres, spell-turning and spell-absorbing abjuration spells, all of which were nicely balanced in my opinion. That's just from the top of my head. Before you ask, I have a life. Last time I played BG2 was in 2002. Also I'm no big fan of D&D. I am more into WoD when it comes to roleplaying. So either I have a phenomenal memory (which I don't) or such a spell layout is pretty easy to memorize. It is also much more tactical than the dumbed-down version from NWN2, where spells were so boring and repetitive I started to think that developers were strictly prohibited from using any imagination.

I'd prefer occasional blog entries telling about the fun bits rather than streams and videos. Those things are much better suited for action-oriented games.

I just want to mention that the game is a work of fiction. Using diabolic magic in a game is not the same as using diabolic magic in real life, just as killing in a video game is not the same as killing in real life. I suppose that's why games are so popular in the first place. If I had committed even a fraction of all the cruel and gruesome stuff my game characters have committed, I would consider stabbing myself to death with a pen knife, thus sending my soul to a well-deserved eternal vacation in hell in some pit, filled with flaming worms up to its nostrils. To summarize, I find it very hard to believe that doing evil things in a video game makes you a less virtuous person.

Never liked VTMB for discouraging combat approach. But on the whole a fixed reward for every encounter should walk well. Whether you kill 100 orcs or kill 99 and let the last one run away or just sneak by or kill 50 and sneak by 50 you still get the fixed amount of, say, 10,000 XP. That's the way it should be in a cRPG. In a general case every approach a player might choose is viable and not punishable by less XP. It's not less choice, it's simply fair reward. Of course, that does not preclude you from getting quests whether killing is required (say, you have to eliminate monsters) and, hence, XP and monetary reward for each kill is ok. Neither does it mean that killing should always give XP. If your task was to talk a person into cooperation and you murdered him instead, you get 0 XP for failing the quest. If you have to sneak into a house undetected and murder a government official in a way that makes it look like an accident, you won't get any XP for charging in guns blazing and slaying everyone.

The as a nice digging mechanic in Konung games. If you used your showel if the right place, i.e. under gravestones or in various places, indicated by NPCs and lore, your loot just appeared on the ground. If you did it in the wrong place, nothing happened. It was pretty good, except for two issues. First, player may not be smart enough to figure out that devs have planted a treasure chest in this suspicious mushroom circle, specially if half a dozen same ones, he encountered earlier, turned to be undiggable. Sometimes there was no indication that any king of treasure is present whatsoever, but still it was there. This problem was solved to an extent by introducing a rare and costly consumable, a magical mirror that revealed all hidden treasure in the location. It was exploitable to some extent, since you could save, reveal the treasure, memorize the positions on the map, load, and dig it all up, keeping your mirror for another time. There was also the challenge of finding this revealed treasure, on the other hand, since it involved running around the whole location looking for loot bags on the ground. They were highlighted a bit, but still pretty hard to look for. Which makes me think that it's not the best way to implement such an item. Lastly, treasure places were static. Meaning that on your second playthrough you could go all, "Oh, don't bother me with your rather lengthy quest, soothsayer. I already know that the piece of the legendary bogatyr sword I'm looking for lies buried under the shadow of that huge tree stump. Better luck with ignorant heroes next time, Old Horse!" But I suppose there is no way you can totally eliminate all possibilities of replay meta-gaming in an RPG.

I have to heartily disapprove of the whole idea. Stealth should not be an alternative to combat It should be an optional element which lets the player gain tactical advantage over his enemies, by heaving his rogue sneak behind enemy lines and blow up his gunpowder barrels. Or poison his wells. Or murder his women and enslave his children. Or simply wait there until after his mates engage the enemy to backstab the exposed leader, commander or whatever. Anyway the whole thing should end in a skirmish. Not to mention that any game with "sneak is for everyone" mechanic ends up making it useless for everyone, except the characters who heavily invested in the skill. So it does not matter if rules allow fighters in full plate to sneak. They end up doing it so terribly that it's pretty much the same as not being able to sneak at all.

I have no problem with armor variety, but I like consistency. If it's actual armor and not a fetish item from the local equivalent of a sex shop, it should be functional, not just a chainmail bikini or a plate codpiece or whatever. If it's a piece of exotic clothing from extremely hot countries, which leaves the wearer on the verge of being practically nude, it should elicit appropriate reactions from NPCs. Same could go for a courtly dress worn in a place with too hot a climate or tradition for skimpier clothing. If overly sexualized or otherwise inappropriate clothes are totally disregarded by everyone around it feels like fan service. And for very immature fans at that.

The existing description of paladins doesn't actually tell much about how they play. If they turn out to be another dps/buffer I would be disappointed. Mainly because I consider buffing classes to be abundant as they are. As for their lack of divine special abilities, I'm more than fine with that. Seriously, if anything paladins should be nothing like the D&D stereotype.