Heresiarch

I really hate the kind of race bonuses that make for minmaxer heaven like "race A gets a bonus for being class X". This effectively makes all other races taking this class subpar. It might sound like rambling at first, since no one actually restricts the player from choosing, say, an orc spellcaster, even though orcs come with with -4 modifier to the primary spellcaster stat. But there is really no point to such fantasy racism other than making minmaxers happier. And it does so at the expense of making those people who want to play extraordinarily smart orc unhappy, because they simply can't do that. Same goes for all class-specific bonuses. If elves come with a bonus to destruction spells and mana regen, what's the point in making them warriors? Or rogues? Or anything else other than spellcasters? If orcs come with a strength bonus, increased axe damage, low intelligence and high strength (that's devs practically screaming in your face, "make him a fighter/barbarian, goddammit!") would you choose him to be a chanter even if you really want to? Chances are you're going to regret it at some point, especially if your low intelligence locks you out of some highest-level abilities or makes you unable to effect enemies to the same extent a "class-specific" race would have. So yeah, I'm all for versatile bonuses to all races. Maybe even add a special affect to a class for every race. For instance, human spellcasters get a chance to place a nasty dot with every attacking spell, elf casters have a chance to restore a bit of their mana, and so on.

Well, I don't believe anyone could only use gold. Unless you go to the baker and buy the whole bakery. Gold could be rare though, since in many instances gold coins were only minted on special occasions. Like in Republic Rome Aurei were used to give out bonuses to the army on big celebrations. Copper and brass, on the other hand, have a lot less value than prescribed by the exchange rate, so government officials and wealthy merchants might refuse to take anything less than silver. Once again in Rome taxes were only collected in silver coins. So that they could be melted and minted into even more coins with less silver in them, when the government needed more money.

There are two issues with RPG economy: making money and spending it. You can totally make it adventurer-based, without making it loot-based. You can also make being rich interesting by giving the player slightly more options to spend his jink on something other than a measly assortment of overpowered end-game items, eye-candy stuff and investments that do nothing, but bring more money (notably, AC2). When it comes to making money it really depends on what type of game you're playing. Questing as the main source of income only makes sense when you are some sort of mercenary or monster-hunter. If you aren't then the abundance of folk, paying you all the more and more ludicrous amounts of money to do their dirty work, becomes disturbing. Looting and stealing makes sense if you're a thief or a bandit. Then again looting every corpse you come across and searching every barrel is extremely lame. To add insult to injury the kind of games that make you do that (notably, TES games for the most part) also offered laughingly small cash rewards for quests. So you ended up dividing items' selling value by their weight to get more bang for your buck, making wealthy only those adventurers who are good at math. I wonder why no developer ever tried to implement treasure hunting in terms of actually letting the player find wealth in a form of coin-filled chests. Sure I've seen plenty of chests in numerous games, but they had so little money in them, they must have had a false bottom. Same goes for getting rewarded with fiefs, land or any property, which provides a steady income. I am not even talking about investing money even though it's one of the most obvious ways to gain it. Balance out risk and return on investment and there you have another way of earning income. It might not be overly exciting, but everything beats looting every corpse and prying every odd nail you come across for vendor trash. Spending money is another thing devs have a hard time with. Sometimes all you get is over-priced gear, most of which costs extremely unreasonable amounts of money. Not because it's worth it, mind you, but because the game has to offer you something to buy even if it's not a fair deal. It still beats AC2's approach, where you only had more stores and landmarks to buy once you've purchased all the equipment. Why would you need to purchase property that increases your income when all you can do with it is buy more income-increasing property? It makes no sense whatsoever. The last evil is vanity items. Furniture and fancy attire costs so much that it must have been made out of pure gold, which it isn't. And the fact that the game is desperately trying to snatch the money away from you is obvious. There are good ways of letting the player spend money, but they are underused. Vanity items (preferably not merely eye-candy, but increasing your in-game status), expensive and effective consumables (my personal favorite), fancy gear (that isn't outmatched by the stuff you find in the next cave you stroll through), optional upkeep for your property (expenses for training and arming guards at you castle so that they can defend it better without you immediate attention), optional expenses on quests (for instance, buy a band of mercs to soften up some bandits before you strike, or paying a thief to steal a quest item for you, so that you don't have to break in guns blazing to get it yourself). There are numerous other ways of spending money on the kind of stuff that matters. Maybe, you can solve your companion's problem of owing someone a substantial sum of money (not a hundred coins) to a blood-thirsty criminal to earn his gratitude. Companion's, I mean. Or even criminal's. Maybe both. Bottom line, I really hope that money in PE is something other than simply a unit of account, demonstrating how much rusty gear you've scrapped and sold during your play.

Commandos was fun, but not very realistic. Such a system only works if you have a reliable way of dispatching enemies silently and in one hit. Fallout Tactics had a similar stealth system. There were no sound or vision fields, but crawling/crouching reduced noise and visibility and, hence, the chance of being detected while you sneak. But the fact that a single shot alerted all the enemies in the vicinity, who could activate alarms (and bring the whole camp down upon you) made the whole system pretty useless. Same goes for much never Jagged Alliance: Back in Action. The principle is there, but it's too long, frustrating and rarely works. Also I hate degenerate save/loading. One of the reasons I didn't like Thief a lot is it required plenty of the replaying until you became so familiar with the level, you could walk through it in your sleep. Maybe it's fun for some, but I consider it bad game design. The system worked much better than Dishonored, while being similar in principle. It lets you make informed decisions about your next move even on the first playthrough by the virtue of giving you superpowers. Also getting detected does not get you instakilled most of the time. So I don't want save/loading to be a must for stealth in PE. Probably the closest thing to the actual PE (while still having a stealth system similar to the one suggested) is Evil Islands. It also made heavy use of sneak tactics and sensory magic, allowing you to become less noticeable, to extend range of vision and to see enemy's vision cones. Which worked well in general for a single character, but I imagine that it would be a nightmare to use with the whole six-men party.

I really liked the single-word titles. Something plain, simple, and relevant. Like Fallout, Half-life, Prototype, Dishonored or even Battlefield. They are sticky and cool and appealing by the sheer fact of directly relating to the game. You get what it says on the tin, which is always heartwarming. Multiple-word names make good acronyms, but they feel redundant even without getting long-ass appendages. So how about getting very original and calling it... Eternity? Ambitious, maybe, but it's pretty catchy and appealing. If the story is relevant to the title in any way. P.S. Yeah, sorry, I know I was supposed to be sarcastic and suggest something along the lines of Puddle of Eternity or Something's Gate: Eternity. But I just don't feel like it.

Ironman mode is about making you cope with the results, not about making you replay the whole game when you loose. Hence, to have a decent Ironman mode a game should be relatively hard to screw up, otherwise no one is going to use the feature. So cranking up the difficulty on the Ironman is more than likely to simply make it unplayable.

Ironman could implement shocking the player with a nice 5 volt discharge every time he hits the pause. It should work like a good deterring measure in my opinion, not to mention that it's such a healthy and natural way to increase the game difficulty.

I still cannot imagine a large amount of physics-enabled objects in an isometric game. Call me old-fashioned. The best they do with PhysX at its full potential at the moment is making a lot of garbage fly around very realistically. Which I wouldn't miss much even in action games, not to mention cRPGs.

Actually, the fact that similar systems have been used only by RTS and action RPGs doesn't mean that you can't do it right in a cRPG. The only thing to look out for is fast weapons becoming superior to slow weapons in general, because their small, but often dealt damage averages out better and, hence, plays better. Not every combat situation has the luxury of having "fair" RNG due to the law of large numbers. P.S. Where "the only thing" means "the only thing I can think of from the top of my head", obviously. And, while I'm at it, it kinda nags me that they combine a no-miss system with only-natural healing mechanic. It is kind of obvious that battles are going to be a pain, if even kids armed with stick are going to do at least some damage to your characters.

I am by no means a video game developer, but using PhysX while having pre-rendered background and most of the objects? It seems extremely unlikely.

A game is a set of artificial limitations. That's why you don't win a game of chess by flipping the board in frustration because you're losing under the artificial limitations of the game. And a watermelon is a combination of molecules. That's why you don't eat it by shovelling pieces up your backside. Seriously, what's it with people and inappropriate comparisons? A game is a set of rules. Rules can take numerous forms. Artificial limitations are artificial, because they are illogical. If my character can't cast spells, because he isn't a mage, that's totally fine. If he can't pick up a gun and pull the trigger, because he is an elf, it's just stupid. The difference between two situations is so vast, that I believe pretty much everyone can grasp it without any further clarification.

I am a promancer and I officially want PE to be A Dance with Rogues reloaded. Every other person who wants romance for PE wants the same thing as I do. If they don't, they aren't persons. Probably not even humanoids. Most likely they are non-sentient, silicon-based life forms. Seriously, if the only two possible outcomes you can picture is no romance whatsoever and an interactive porn flick, no wonder you are so counter-romance. But works of fiction allow for considerably more depth and diversity, you know. Just some food for thought.

I don't like artificial limitations. Weapons can be unwieldy if you aren't strong enough, but being unable to swing a sword, because you are a mage or a cleric (yeah, I know D&D has it for clerics and bladed weapons) is just plain dumb. If you don't want your fighters to be underpowered, give them combat bonuses instead of artificially limiting the weapon selection for other classes. It's a no-brainer. Same goes for artificial class restrictions.

Well, realism is kind of stretchy. If you're talking about animations that make sense, rather than swinging every weapon like a club, I am all for it. But I prefer flashy combat to realistic one, frankly, be it cinema or video games. Historical fencing simply lacks the entertaining value of jedi fights or witcher combos. Well, I understand the sentiment, but what if a fighter fights against multiple opponents? Are the others going to be waiting their turn to clash swords with him? Are they going to hammer him in the back? Either way realism is officially done for the moment they start doing it. The idea is nice, but the cost of its implementation is a bit overwhelming for an isometric RPG.

Taking into account that all special abilities in PE are coming from souls, which I presume from the very little information we know about different classes, saying that cypher manipulates souls doesn't mean much. I believe the key concept is that cyphers are able to manipulate the souls of other living beings. This makes them more akin to psyonics (i.e. messing with other's heads), which sets them apart from other classes. I might be completely wrong, of course. As for time-shifty rogues, I think such feat are more suitable for spell-heavier classes, while rogues should do something along the lines of moving so fast, that your spell missiles can't home in on them or you're unable to hit them with a sword, because they are so bloody dodgy. The effect is largely the same, but their kind of special abilities is more about hypertrophied normal ones and not entirely outlandish. You know, something more from the badass normal category. Decado from Gemmell's Drenai saga comes to mind. He is just a warrior for the most part, but he is moving extremely fast. So fast that in a duel with a mind-reading spellsword Decado wins simply because his opponent doesn't have enough time to react, even though he knows what is going to happen in advance.

I think it's a great idea for an action-adventure. Having a depleting resource, that allows your character to avoid attacks by blocking, parrying, dodging even though you haven't reacted appropriately. After the resource is gone every hit you miss actually connects and does grievous damage, impairing combat effectiveness and leading to long-term negative effects. I am not sure that it's going to work so good in an isometric RPG due to the character size and fixed camera, which effectively bring your ability to deliver combat eye candy to zero. Same goes for seeing whether your characters actually grip the sword by the pommel or not. I don't mean to be rude but just want to say "Lies!". What is it with people and the isometric view? "No! It is isometric so it is inferior graphically!!!" or something? Not exactly what I meant, but yes, isometric is inferior if you want to show off combat animations. To make people drool over such things you really need full 3D and large scale character models, otherwise player will have to enjoy your cool battle animations under a microscope. Not a wise way to spend your limited budget, if you ask me.

I think pets are a great idea. There are so many games out there, where the pets have been thoroughly explored, where they have been made valuable companions, which are not in any way inferior to other party members. Those pets have a lot of depth of character to them and really shine on numerous dialogue and character situations. For instance, the mabari hound from DAO, which had numerous interesting things to add to the gameplay outside of camp dialogue. Dogmeat, the traditional companion from Fallout series, which lead to more reloads than all raiders, slavers, and super mutants combined. How about ranger's pets from DnD? Or the fabled Necromancer's pet skeletons in Diablo 2? These were truly the stuff of legends! So I say, let's totally have pets in PE, because it worked well so many times, that it could go wrong just this once, right? P.S. Just to make it clear, I was being sarcastic. I think pets in RPGs are even worse than sex-centred romances. It's like the western fanservice equivalent of huge boobs in jRPGs.

So I am not the only one who got this irresistible urge to donate $10,000 for something I have no knowledge about except that it's somehow connected to the end of the Mayan b'ak'tun, alleged end of the world, and ill-fated Black Isle Studios? Good thing I don't get such urges every time someone proclaims that the world is going to end, otherwise I would have been be a very poor person.

Frankly, at first I though it was a joke. I even laughed before I read the terms. Then I laughed some more and quite a bit harder. Probably, the so-called Black Isle should have gone KS to hire a good marketing department, who would have told them that this idea would never work.

I think it's a great idea for an action-adventure. Having a depleting resource, that allows your character to avoid attacks by blocking, parrying, dodging even though you haven't reacted appropriately. After the resource is gone every hit you miss actually connects and does grievous damage, impairing combat effectiveness and leading to long-term negative effects. I am not sure that it's going to work so good in an isometric RPG due to the character size and fixed camera, which effectively bring your ability to deliver combat eye candy to zero. Same goes for seeing whether your characters actually grip the sword by the pommel or not.

NWN updater? This was sarcasm, right? Because the damn thing never worked for me once. I had to go through patching manually every time if I wanted to make sure I end up with a working game. I even have a dedicated folder for NWN2 with all the necessary updates in the right order and the custom patcher.

Maybe add the option of scrolling through spells? It was quite a chore in BG2 and IWD to select the necessary spell for a high level caster.

Well, TES I and II went right over my head, since I was an RTS fan at the time. Morrowind quests were so bloody good that I never payed much attention to anything else, while Oblivion never really challenged me difficulty-wise. Maybe that's because I never bothered to change the settings. And Skyrim really felt punishing for every point in any skill not directly related to combat that you pick up along the way. Normal enemies were fine, but God help if you you stumble across a dragon or a dragon priest and try to impress them with your really advanced alchemy and restoration techniques.

When I think about scaling, TES is what comes to mind first. Because quite often they did it wrong. Especially in Skyrim. I think there should only be upscaling. In other words, there should be no way whatsoever for the player to access dedicated end game content at early levels.