Varana

Is there a list somewhere detailing who designed which inn?

What to do when hitting level cap: Go forward to finish the game, and optional content left out is done on the second playthrough. Also, "barely 50%" is typical internet hyperbole.

Except that it most probably isn't. Currently, the game doesn't need any networking capabilities. They would have to be added from scratch. Player input can only come from one source. Having two or more competing user input sources, complicates the issue substantially. Especially if it hasn't been taken into account from the beginning. Grafting it on later is even more prone to errors.

There is. It is in the nature of languages to evolve. As long as they're in use, they will change. So if you have any people speaking in your fantasy world, evolving languages, language relations, loanwords, and so on, help to make your fantasy world believable. Sure, you don't need to. That's what I meant earlier with my chainmail bikini analogy. You don't have to give a damn whether the armour of your heroes makes any sense. It will just look a bit ridiculous. The same for language - sure, the Galactic Standard is a common trope for authors who couldn't be bothered. But it detracts from the plausibility of your setting. Sure. For every thing, you can find a bad example. But the point that various people have been trying to point out to you is that that is not how it is done in PoE. Some examples (like duc) may look like that - because they are words that suffered the same fate in real life. (The duc comes from a pseudo-Romance language, where the word makes historical sense and has a complete etymology behind it - from the word for "to lead" (ducere), and so on.) That English borrowed that word, as well, is of secondary importance. It's not "let's take the word duke and invent a new one that looks suspiciously like it", but "how would people using a Romance-based language call their leader? well, something with duc-, obviously." If PoE looks like your sentence to you, that's unfortunate. It doesn't use language that way. Language is an interesting piece of lore. It is as much background lore as "in region X, they build their houses out of ice blocks". Or "the Rauatai are a seafaring nation". Or "which gods are revered by people Y". If done badly, like in your "example", it is, surprise, bad. If done right, it does require creative thinking and leads to interesting world-building.

Need a dictionary?

YES! Need romances so much >.< Voiced romances. Or better yet, partially voiced romances. You know, the not-dialogue parts.

Let me guess - you play a male Charname? IIRC, the problem with these messages is that they have a male and a female version (and the type of guest gets randomly put in), but these male/female versions of strings are printed according to Charname's gender.

Introducing a new and major issue into the world design with a blatantly cop-out non-explanation: "inter-species procreation is possible (thus defying the main definition of 'species'), but for some completely random reason, which you all totally don't need to know, children always have the race of one parent" - just to "fix" a quest that only you seem to have a major problem with, is anything but an "elegant fix".

Go for it. Maybe you won't think that it's the best thing since sliced bread*, but I'd say chances are that it'll turn out at least as "not bad". Preferably to watching Let's Plays, anyway. (Really, why is everyone so obsessed with Let's Play videos?) * Which is way overrated.

You do realise that it's not for the moment when you pick it up, but for the moment three hours later when you scroll through the stash at the merchant to decide what to sell and what not?

I did. And I hated the massively casualised RoA2: you could pick up an item in your inventory and draw it onto another character in your party to transfer it! In RoA1, you had to right click the item, choose "give to", and then pick the target character out of the list - you know, as real RPGs do it: maximal inconvenience for minimal effect. We're not talking about gameplay features here. We're talking about visual indicators of what quality an item is. Like, you know, displaying its name in a tool tip. Or having an icon of it showing whether it's an axe or a potion. Surely, that's dumbing down at its finest.

But it's all you need to know.

Am I the only one who wonders why Mr Sawyer's vacation or non-vacation schedule should be of any interest to the general public?

As I said - for making a weapon, yes. (Most of them. Bows and Crossbows, for instance, don't need an anvil.) But as you can't craft new weapons out of stuff in PoE, that doesn't really matter. Enchanting works purely from the inventory screen.

Really, you couldn't find more generic tropes if you tried. Just click through the links at TVTropes' Noble Savage entry, and you will stumble over lots of those themes, and with probably thousands of other works of all genres to use them.

I think Vampire in Welsh is Fampir. No V sound in the celtic based languages ... There is a V sound in Welsh, they just don't use that letter for it: It's written as F. An English F sound exists, as well, and is written as FF in Welsh. That's why you get spellings like Ffrainc. So while a vampire is actually written fampir in Welsh, it is still pronounced /'vam-/. (Wikipedia is a great dictionary for lots of obscure languages. (Sorry to the Welsh. :D)) Adding to what fgalkin said: The use of languages is really well done. A duc is a duc because the office or title comes from the Vailian influence, as shown by its Romance origin. Erls, however, are Germanic and show the Aedyran influence. You can actually draw conclusions about power structure, culture, and history just by looking at the names. I haven't seen something like that in any video game I can remember. And in very few if any Fantasy worlds, at all. In most fantasy settings, language use is comparable to the chainmail bikini. :D

That's also part of the thought behind real-life kings and emperors being deified. (So in a way, e.g. the Romans and Greeks did "create gods" - their very human and mortal rulers got themselves temples erected, sacrifices offered, prayers and priests.) The emperor is a person with capabilities coming close to superpowers - not necessarily personal, although there are stories that people believed that, as well -, far away, whose actions and decisions can nonetheless influence you directly, usually in a non-personal way, and completely unexpected. In many ways, the emperor's power over you resembles that of god. No one in their right mind thought that the emperor in Rome could actually benefit from the dove the priest burned at his temple as a sacrifice. But it was understood that that was the correct way to treat a being with such powers, so they did it. (There's a lot more going on in that relationship with deified rulers, but it's a very useful example to illustrate that the definition of what a "god" is can be very different across cultures.)

Durability: But if it's only "a very very minor penalty to weapons when they reached zero", why include that, at all? If you have such a thing as durability, you use it a) because it's supposed to matter in gameplay, and/or b) because of simulation. In both cases, you want significant consequences. In D:OS, only partially. Some crafting can only be done at specific places, some everywhere. Esp. improving gear, which comes closest to PoE's enchanting, can be done anywhere. Have an Essence of Flame and a Tormented Soul? Put it on your axe to make it better and hotter. D:OS's alchemy is completely done in that horrible, horrible inventory screen of theirs. Now, you can't actually craft weapons or armour in PoE, only improve them in rather arcane ways which sound awfully witchcrafty to me. (Or how am I supposed to imagine using some flowers, a sapphire, and a Vithrack brain* to make my sword sharper?). In this, it's much closer to D:OS's enchantment system than their crafting stuff. The major difference is in food - in D:OS you need a cooking station (can't roast your steak just on any of the many fires around or conjured up), in PoE you don't. I just fail to see how that makes it that much better. * Actual recipe may differ, don't remember.

You don't. What exactly constitutes "Low" and "High" Fantasy and how much of element X can be in there (or not) before it crosses the line is probably a topic for another 30 pages of forum thread.

In a forum dedicated to an IE revival game, you probably are.

Are you really just trying to reason with the Codex' most cherished pet belief that Fallout (the original one) > everything else > everything made by Bethesda? Good luck.

/game/items 1275 (Mahlstrom): Mit "Zersetzung" ist hier der Schadenstyp "Corrosion" gemeint; weiß grad nicht, wie die aktuelle deutsche Variante ist: "Stamped with an embossed sigil of a stormcloud, this scroll describes a spell by which the caster can create a damaging torrent of flame, ice, lightning, and corrosion."

But the "if they have no unique name, they can be ignored" school of thought is exactly what BG&Co. did - with some minor exceptions like some Nashkel miners (not even all of them, everyone with a name had a piece of specific dialogue, and they were very handily outnumbered by the very generic "Amnish Soldier"s). So yes, maybe a few more non-generic NPCs would've been nice. But in this regard, PoE follows the IE tradition quite religiously.

Voss: While the current crisis may be over by the time you get to Thaos, you don't really know that until the end. But allowing someone like Thaos to continue would be a bad idea anyway. At some point he basically boasts about the horrible things he did a thousand years back, leading to the conclusion that while his current soul-collecting may be over, he would do it again. And murder a few nations in between. Stopping Thaos as a motivation is decent, I think, esp. if you have reservations about the end justifying the means. He's basically a standard villain character. It is the personal connection that is sorely lacking.

Why should we use a PnP rule set for a CRPG, anyway? The setting - sure. Be it Faerûn or Eberron or, for that matter, Numenéra. But the rules? Taking that as a cue - "simple combat mechanics" are exactly the thing that is completely unnecessary for a CRPG. With a computer, you can create ridiculously complicated and computationally intensive rules and still have your combat resolution in a fraction of a PnP fight. You do not have, OTOH, any possibility of improvising. Anything that can happen in a CRPG has to be pre-planned and pre-programmed. Every social interaction or conflict has to be based on exact numbers and rules, while PnP rules can rely on the GM to a certain extent (and some do it more than others). They're completely different mediums, and too close adherence to PnP rules, IMHO, is actually detrimental to video games. But then, I didn't play much DnD where it seems to be more about the rules than about the setting, which seems odd to me. Rules are just a random way of conflict resolution; if they're not adequate, change them. What really matters to me, is setting.