Tiwaz

Definitely what I want to see achievements as. I want the broken axe of my foe over my door to remind me how I did that. Or perhaps painting of a person dear to me on the wall etc. Basically stuff which makes stronghold living thing, showing where you have been what you have done... Just like we do with our homes. If we win some kind of competition, do we not display trophy in our house? Do we not put pictures of family to show? Well, broken axes and dented helmets of slain foes are less common, but generally such stuff has traditionally been displayed as well (such as capturing and keeping aquila of a legion, enemies often kept these as trophis so on occasion they were regained).

Let's see, we know how long the arrows are (one being drawn in very clear detail by Lurtz, we know how little we see poking from Boromir's chest after being hit. And we know where those arrows hit. Human chest does not have massive excess of space there to take arrows, your lungs make massive target which puts wind out of you extremely fast. He is not just "swinging", he is actually killing opponents who are NOT handicapped by having arrows poke through their vital parts. Ever heard of proving negative being impossible? Onus is on one making the positive claim, thus you. Your example of Y being completely different games (Splinter Cell is one example you dragged out) and nowhere near similar. While game which is closest to Y being Baldur's Gate series, which was successful and did not have any of the stuff you want. PE wants to gain same position as Baldur's Gate, as classic of one niche. You are not going to achieve same amount of success if you start to kick the original one in the nuts by trying to turn it into completely different style. It has been done before with games which had great audience and then are being "revived" in totally different way. It has ended up in flops. X-COM-series is prime example. Who are ordinary heroes who do ordinary things? Name few. Alas, success in action is dependant on character ability and NOT player skill. You may get bright idea of having thief backstab the big foe, but if character cannot deliver, then all player skill is for naught. You only guide the characters towards goals, it is their skills which define the outcome. Different systems are fun, in different games. If you want to revive the grandness of Baldur's Gate, you can't go look at Final Fantasy for hints. And you should pay more attention to people who actually practice stuff which has relation to what characters in RPG do, because RPG rules are meant as simplification of what actually takes place, as good P&P game masters know. It is not static standing and swinging but mobile melee simplified to couple die rolls and few stats. How you replace hitpoints with life while making everything in combat depend on variety of "dodge", "parry", "armour" and whatnot while maintaining the intuitiveness? It is not intuitive if you have to scroll 3-7 different variations of defense trying to figure out how you want to keep your characters from dying.

You clearly see how long those arrows are, we see one being drawn in fact. Their lenght is more than sufficient to have penetrated very deeply.

Multiple chest hits which clearly penetrate all the way to chest cavity, possibly to lungs... Normal person is busy choking to death in their own blood after one or two. Boromir took what... Half a dozen? Do YOU have any evidence that your view is supported by more than your own persona? My authority comes from looking at existing RPG-games on the market which are successful and actually sell. Your view is more along lines of niche indie games, which tend to never be financially profitable. I want to see more than one PE, but if sales tank then there won't be more than one. Tell me tales of ordinary people. Problem is that when people do extraordinary things, they are no longer considered ordinary people. Audie Murphy is not considered "ordinary guy" by many americans for example. Thinking "outside the box" is not necessarily somehow "better". Two completely different systems more often fail to compliment one another than compliment one another. Trying to stuff player skill as decisive part of RPG is horrible idea. The very name ROLEplaying game shows it. It is not about your abilities, but character's abilities. You just hint to character what they should try, and their skills define if they succeed. Have you heard of concept called FUN. That is the most important part of games, it has to be fun preferably for large audience. And again, RPG-battle is an abstraction to a point, not a goddamn simulator. Single skilled fighter can defend against multiple opponents by maneuvering in combat. Something we were practicing in Krav Maga. Keep moving, keep all opponents to the front. Keep moving, never get stuck with one etc. That is the kind of stuff that in RPG-battle is going on, abstracted by the die rolls and bonuses. You are free to show how often ill trained and equipped peasant is known to beat a fully armed and armoured knight in battle. Hit point as simplification is very necessary. More you add different values which affect to this and that, more convoluted and less intuitive you make the system. Counterintuitive is bad, it makes things unnecessarily difficult to judge and learn.

Problem with many economy systems is implementing it into single player game where all the nuances and so forth have to be designed as code and then written by some poor sobs. Just like idea of profession = income. Ok, character has profession X. Now how that works with the story is the question... Designing the game so that blacksmith can play it from beginning to end while using blacksmithing as his main source of income would be... Challenging. Unless you design game around that concept, but then you have problem that other professions would have to be involved. It gets very, very complicated very fast. I agree with earlier view that most important things for economic system are it's simplicity to understand and it being fun. I also disagree strongly on notion that it should be made impossible to become rich, even if it is through constant loot hoarding from dungeon to shop. If you want to get money that way, it should be open option. Saying "I do it but I do not want to be permitted to do so" is IMO wrong. Others might want to be able to play it that way, and it would be wrong towards them to deny it. I am good bit of completitionist, I admit. If it ain't nailed down, I grab it and keep it until I run out of space/weight and find something better (or decide to make extra trip to shop). In essence, question of having hoards of money should not be decided by game, but rather player. If you do not want to be filthy rich, don't amass wealth. For those who do not want to be rich, things like temple donations could be made to work as voluntary money sinks. They could provide some small benefits too, like blessing of that deity for a while, or people speaking your praise after you have handed over X amount of money.

Oh, and troll slaying in Moria... Yeah, that was definitely stuff everyone in Middle Earth would do easily. Or final stand of Boromir, getting so much arrows shot into him that he could pass for porcupine. Average consumer. Your view on what game should be like is closer to some kind of niche art movie, while I prefer considerably more entertaining style. Like it or not, money runs the world. While games which cater more to your desired style (based on what you have expressed to desire) have been there, but their economical success has repeatedly fallen flat. Like I said, people do not play games or watch movies to see same stuff they would do in real life. Oh, I am sorry if I did not manage to fulfill your high literary desires in short and simple explanation. I guess you missed part of BG2 as well, it was very much like Superboy Prime in storyflow wasn't it. Tales of ordinary folk living ordinary life do not sell. Everyone has one, so why the hell would they want to play/read about it? For some reason autobiography of someone who never did anything exceptional is rarely seen in bestseller lists. Again, it is limited by ability of character. You can choose to have character TRY something, but it does not necessarily work (die rolls). This is start contrast to Splinter Cell where doing something will always succeed if you do it the same way. So tell me, how can character be head and shoulders above others in skills and still get stabbed in ordinary fight by ordinary lvl1 grunt to death as easily as they could stab to death another lvl1 grunt? Either your feats etc are irrelevant, or they will place characters in completely different category compared to lowest level characters. History disagrees with you. Pitchfork armed peasantry were repeatedly slaughtered by numerically far inferior forces of knights during middle ages. Only when numbers get sufficiently lopsided can they replace skill and equipment. And again, this stray bullet is represented in always persistent possibility of critical and fumble in RPG-systems. Name system to replace hitpoints which is equally simple and instinctive to understand and use.

No, but I do like to have a more rounded character that has skills that make sense for him and the world. And you are assumign your "game of desire" would be sheer brilliance? Except they don't. That is only your own limited perception. Your character is skilled at the begining and he does become more powerfull - but the power is mostly shown/implemented in a different way. Not HP or damage buffs or high stat increases. But feats, options, skills and increases are small and rare. Because swords and arrows stop being a problem when you're a high level because..... why exactly? You are so badass arrows refuse to hit you? Because clearly, navy SEALS are so high level that entire armies pose no threat to them. And good job advocating encounter scaling b.t.w. Like it or not, it is there in the LOTR, it is about few exceptional individuals doing what hordes of averages cannot. Stories are always centered around few exceptional individuals, because watching Joe The Boring is... Boring. Now, my game of desire is game in spirit of BG2, and yes it would include becoming more powerful and dispatching opponents who would be challenge early on without bat of an eye later. Including killing dragons. Because that is what makes a great story, exceptional individuals doing exceptional things. Not wondering what shall be the going rate for turnips next season. Also, mixing games can be great or it can go horribly wrong. Trying to push player skill based system into role playing game is something which does not work well, because they are in a way mutually exclusive. RPG idea is to show what the character can do, not what player can do. Now, regardless of how you handle power increase, be it adding feats or whatever, it WILL lead to übercharacters unless you gimp them to remain total mooks in some way, like making them total glass cannons. As for swords and arrows no longer being an issue is more about who is wielding the sword and shooting arrows. Lowly peasant just does not have the training or equipment simply needs huge stroke of luck to score lethal hit on experienced and well equipped enemy. Hitpoints are one way to represent this abstraction, they do not need to be taken as gallons of blood which are spilled with every strike, but rather learned ability to roll with the blow, avoid hit from becoming fatal. In the end, we need abstraction of that kind somewhere, else the game system will become too heavy and convoluted to be comfortable. "Ok, so I can avoid all damage for this and if that fails then there is this amount of chance to avoid it from being crippling and that is my ability to avoid it being fatal. And then there is the armour which increases that and reduces this, but if I wear this other armour I get bonus here and negative there"

I'm talkign about PERSONAL power. Take LOTR movies as an example. Think Aragorn. Norman human being with normal human physical limiations. No lifting 10 tons or swinging super-sized swords. No punching dragons. For other types of power - like political power - that's something that would be interesting to see. RPG's and fantasy games are often so fixated on personal power and bigger NUMBERS instead of depth. Kinda an interesting train of thought. For a game ot be interesting, do you even need ever increasign power? Think Sam Fisher - he's no more durable or stronger at the end of hte game than he is at the begining. HE becomes more "skilled" as the player becomes more skilled (playing smart) and as he gets new gadgets that increase his options. LOTRO... So nothing special. You mean like Legolas and his little shield surfing, feat not seen repeated by any other character? Or him soloing one of those mumakils? I have a feeling you are one of those "I am so much better than the rest of you, my character is a barbarian, but I bring depth to character by not having any combat skills, instead handicapping myself with poorly suited musician skills to show his innate desire to be a bard"-people. No offense, everyone plays as they like, but your game of desire would never actually sell anything, resulting in PE being first and last of it's branch. People overall do not want to pay for a game where they can be average joe instead of being real life average joe. Sam Fisher is completely different type of game, it never HAS any increase in any statistic and instead purely relies on player skill. It is not RPG even in the most remote sense. PE is supposed to be RPG. Apples and oranges. Political power and so fort, sure they could be there. But making a niche indie game with idea "your characters suck as hard in the end as they suck in the start" is going to see Obsidian dumping PE after first game. Just not going to pay the cost to do more. Regarding idea on character power growth... As characters grow in power, why would they trouble themselves with problems clearly far beneath their abilities? That is why challenges over the game grow as well. Random highwaymen? Easily dispatched, too minor inconvenience to even mention in the game at that point.

No offense but... I do not want to think of NWN. I do not want to think of ANY of those 3d rendered games and hope that they have nothing to do with PE... 3D rendering just sterilizes the environment, due to need to get everything modelled in 3D. BG2 and other Infinity games worked for me much better, the environment looked real, not some general close approximation. This image is just what I want... So... Pretty. Makes oldish guy remember the days spent playing the infinity games... Thank god I heard about this project... Just had to put some money to it. Then rethought about it, decided to forget some stuff I might buy and upped my contribution to next level. My only fear is that they try to reinvent the UI too much. Infinity games had good UI for party based gameplay, have not seen anything like that ever since. Even if new games permit party control, they do it in so awkward way that you mostly just do not use them, instead letting them do whatever they are scripted to do. Maybe it's just me, but in Infinity it was exception that I did not order each party member separately, in later games it is the opposite way and exception was when I gave each one explicit orders. PS... Oh crap... You bloody bastards had to do that didn't you? Yes, looking at you developers guys... Had to add stronghold promise... And all that... There goes more money...

No, some of us just love the feel of old BG2 & Co. It was not about flashy graphics back then, it was about story that dragged you with it. Oh, and incredibly beautiful backgrounds, something I have for SO long hoped to see remade. Seen a lot of cRPG lately... Tried just about most of them. And they just do not get the same feel as BG2 did... From music to background. Making it all dynamic just restricts the art too much. So I would be quite fine with little less touch for characters in main screen and gorgeous background. Nearly shed a tear when saw that screencap of Temple entrance... It is something I have secretly longed for a good while. So please Obsidian, story and background first.