Hormalakh

While a grid setup makes sense - I use a pseudo-grid for SC2 - some players are accustomed to having WASD for camera control. I've been playing a lot of Natural Selection 2 (team-based FPS/RTS) lately, and holy **** does making the jump from soldier to commander ever get disorienting for that very reason. Going from running on ceilings with WASD to having those keys as your construction hotkeys leads to a lot of accidental units, buildings, and upgrades. I don't think that we'll be having a lot of camera control in this game, though, since everything is pre-rendered 2D. Maybe moving the map around, but that could be handled with the arrow keys.

Interesting approach which I kind of like. Baldur's Gate 2 had something like this. The biggest problem I had then was the huge amount of actions certain party members (mages, clerics, paladins, druids) had, and the relative lack of actions others (fighters, thieves, barbarians) had in combat. Hotkeys are useful outside of combat, but in a real-time game they are most useful inside combat. Being able to play more complex actions using hotkeys and without having to pause would be quite satisfying.

How do those of you who want XP for killing monsters play any other games that include monsters and killing them while giving no "experience" for it (like Action games)? Do you still try to fight your way through the enemies, or try to avoid all of them? What do you find enjoyable in those gaming situations, since experience isn't your reward? What about when you level cap in RPG games that give you XP for killing enemies? What do you do then? Do you go around avoiding every single enemy in your path or do you kill those that require it? Are you a stealthy sneak, a blood-ravenous barbarian, or a discerning executioner of those that demand death? Are these games any less fun for you when you don't receive XP?

Yes I very much like this idea. There's really no reason for hotkeys to match the first letter of the action especially since keyboard users use much more muscle memory than actual brain power to find the key they wish to press. It might have a slightly higher learning curve (if that), but the advantages are worth it. I will just say this though, having a customizable menu would be better, but the most important thing is to actually have hot keys that are useful and intuitive. Without hotkeys implementation, standard grid doesn't much matter.

If I worked at Bethesda and read these comments I would probably drink myself to a severe depression...clearly some gamers absolutely HATE the devs over there in Maryland.

Welcome to the boards. Don't let the angry hordes beat you down, they're mostly harmless.

If the story is good in P:E, and they keep making games in the universe, I would like to see a game sometime in the future with some sort of LAN/MP play. The game mechanics would probably be different and it wouldn't be a classic cRPG, but it might be fun. Some sort of Action RPG style whatever. But that would probably be several games down the line.

Different kind of Greek PsychoBlonde :D

I'm really thinking that having ingredients able to create more than one possible thing for party-crafting is a huge MUST. I keep hearing the same notion that carrying ingredients in your inventory and only being able to make one thing from it is really annoying and I agree. I think Obsidian should keep that in mind when considering party-crafting. I personally do like party-crafting or personal crafting especially for the ammunition because it's nice to know that you're never too far away from creating something useful. The one example I truly enjoyed is Arcanum's technologically-based crafting. I think that there are aspects to that that I found extremely satisfying. It was less crafting and more technological "spellcasting" using ingredients. I really loved that aspect of it. Instead of using mana to cast fireball, you'd have to gather the ingredients to make an explosive grenade that you then threw. It was fun.

Man someone should definitely do this mod when the game comes out. And it should be released in Movem...I mean November.

I'm just so happy that the guys who made all these games are working together on this one. It's like you couldn't possibly get a better group of people to do this. Every game mentioned has basically been "made" by these superstars.

Contemporary, yes, but working in Heisterbach Abbey, near Westphalia, some distance from Occitània. His work is the only known extant source of that quote. Regardless of the authenticity of the quote, the crusaders made no distinction between Catholic and Cathar in Béziers. Hey Josh, Is this what you concentrated in during college when you were studying history?

Mary Sue characters suck. I'm glad we both agree on this point.

Arcanum did SUCH an awesome job with this! Taking an event that actually happened and mythologizing it.

I can see your concern with players making characters with ridiculous backstories, etc. but I would argue that that's just what a few players will do. Just because a few players create Mary Sue characters doesn't mean that we should lock out characters from a starting age. I guess people could make stories about how their character killed the greatest wizard of all time right when they were born but are still unexperienced as a wizard (see Harry Potter). It either makes for an interesting story or it doesn't. That isn't for you to decide, it's for the player to decide. Edit: Either you like the story that that player has created with his character, or you say that the story is riddled with Mary Sue characters and makes for a weak story. But limiting creativity from players by just forcing everyone to be a certain age, doesn't equate to a role-playing game for me. In regards to skills relating to levels or age, I would still have to argue that it would be more prudent to look at any skills, experience or level strictly from an adventuring perspective. A baker might be a great baker when he has pots and pans and cooking oil, but an experienced adventurer-cook is more of a survivalist, cooking things he can find out in the forest and knowing which mushrooms are poisonous and which aren't. Similarly, regardless of how many years you've been living, if you have no experience adventuring and surviving out in the dangerous world all by your lonesome, you aren't an experienced adventurer. Looking at everything from a survivalist/adventurer perspective allows you to still have extremely detailed backstories for your characters, who have just -until now- never adventured outside of their communities.

From what I understand, the PE world is much bigger than what we're being introduced to in this game. Thus, there might be more "monsters" in the universe than what we see in this first game. Secondly, this isn't supposed to be an Earth repliac, so having fantastical creatures wouldn't be a bad thing. The only monster I know we will have are biamhacs, the spirit winds. I do like having different parts of the world being culturally different. We might just not be introduced to everything here in the first game, though.

There was a mod I think in BG2 where the bandits would see you and then run away saying something like "Omg it's the Bhaalchild! Run away!" At that point, I'd cut down the ones I could catch. I was an evil assassin the last time I played, so it made sense

Honestly, this is the correct forum for this, from what I understand. The actual changes that players want to see either go in the "Gameplay and Mechanics" forum or the "Engine and Widgets" forum. Mods know best, though, and I could be wrong. Nothing wrong with a little bit of R&R for the devs though when they come to the forums. I'd hope that they find our antics just as humorous as we find it here on the boards.

"Magic always has a price, deary." -Rumpel from Once Upon a Time

This mod would not/could not work without a huge head size mod. Since the models are goign to actually be 3D models, it would be really easy to do this I would imagine. Make the heads ridiculously huge so you can see the staches! I like this idea very much.

Any non-RPGs that have a completely different crafting mechanism that we can look at? Let's see if we can think of some crazy wacky ideas, but those that are extremely fun to play. I want FUN FUN FUN with crafting

Yeah... it's just clunky. I love playing BG/BG2 without pause and it feels so much more satisfying. Warcraft 3 is a better example, because you have "heroes." It would feel so awesome having my 6 party members actually fighting off hordes of enemies like you would in an RTS game. Actual hordes. Like 100s of goblins. And destroying 20 or 30 at a time with a well placed trap (spider-mine trap) from my rogue. Oh so satisfying. And you don't have to worry about experience imbalance because kills won't give exp

Experience and levels are really just an abstraction and don't really correlate to "realism." The way I see it is to think of it as "experience adventuring." Levels are even more of an abstraction. There is nothing in real life that equates to levels (except the floors in a building). Remember that while the devs have said they take verisimilitude into account, they only implement things that the player would find fun.

Hey dude. I've got your character portrait for you and his name. Ron Swanson.

Very cool! Thanks sir!