Gallenger

They *sort* of fill the same role just in different ways. With the barb you're going to be straight up in the front most time doing melee DPS and using abilities and so forth throughout a battle, and managing your positioning. With Cipher you're going to start off encounters with a big spell or two, and then set yourself to auto attack bascially until you build enough points back up. So, it mainly comes down to what style of character you want. A guy you need to micro at least somewhat intensively, or a guy you need to micro hardly at all besides when you blow your spell wad.

Well there *are* still the guys outside to make more war paint later. Although it is clearly possible to just go in there and butcher every last person inside. Maybe it's just assumed by the people outside that everybody got *especially* excited and decided to all sacrifice themselves in interesting ways.

I just went in and chopped him up because a voice in my head told me it'd bless me when I tried to jump down this bottomless pit. Everybody was pretty understanding. I *tried* talking my away around that encounter but didn't find any non-murder killing way.

To be honest, most people don't buy games until they fall fairly significantly in price. For example, let's pretend I didn't kickstart this game and thus get myself a copy 2 1/2 years ago. Divinity is 4$ cheaper, the EE's are 24ish$ cheaper, and WL2 is 4ish dollars cheaper. However, all of the above games *have* gone through a steam-sale cycle and were fairly cheap during those times - which is, I assume, when most of the copies being sold happens. You get your hardcore fans, and your nearly hardcore fans opening weekend, and then a few months down the road you hit a summer sale, and the game sells like hot cakes. The only thing I'd really criticize Paradox for is the way the game is packaged on steam. The fact that the "base" game sells for 44ish$, but the royal edition for nearly 100$, would make me believe there is some sort of unholy DLC catastrophe going on behind those numbers, instead of you just missing out on some really cool books, the OST, and so forth. They should've made it: PE: Game Edition, PE: Scholar edition, and PE: Loremaster edition or something - I've already had to talk down a few friends who missed out on the KS who thought they were going to be stripped of major in game content somehow because of the price differential in editions.

You know, for the writing of the game, with a few exceptions obviously, the soundtrack was one of the few things that actually kept me up-beat! Most of the tracks aregreat to listen to. The moment I fired up the game for the first time, saw the title cards pass away, and then hit the main menu screen and that *damn* fine main theme started playing - it was a great moment - one I won't soon forget.

What Josh does, make games, is different from what Sarkeesian does, that is criticize them. There's no conflict of interest here, even if she is critical of his work. Perhaps he wanted to hear her perspective? There are limitless reasons. it's a bit off topic, but the *goal* of the Fem video series isn't to call out particular games so that we can all go have a game-burning party, it's merely to point out *how* games are approached in regards to their female characters. It doesn't necessarily mean you can be right or wrong in how you built the game, from what few videos of hers I've seen she rarely makes *concrete* suggestions for improvement beyond trying to go outside of well-used tropes for female characters (something I can find myself somewhat in agreement with in most contexts). For example, I could point out that the existence of guns in FPS games lends into the guns coming to represent the inflated male libido that those sorts of games often promote. I could furthermore point out time and again how blatantly phallic guns in video games tend to be, and where they tend to be positioned on the screen vis a vis the character model. Does that mean I hate the game? No. It just means I see lots of **** in my video games, and think it may have something to do with reinforcing fragile masculinity.

Well there was that famous D&D optimization board thread about turning mage into the "batman" by dropping evocation

RIP

On top of what everybody has already mentioned; The *intent* for class design was *really* solid in this game - there's almost no class I've messed with whose existence consists of purely auto-attacking for an entire encounter - which was by far the majority of instances in IE games. You've almost always got something you *could* or should be doing in combat outside of auto-attacking, and that livens things up quite a bit for me. It makes combat exactly what I want it to be. I also *really* appreciate the fast-forward function, I spent 63 hours on my first playthrough, but had they put me at BG1 speed, it'd have taken 80 lol.

I let the girl go with him and made like nothing happened. I got treated to town criers in defiance bay talking about how he and his whole entourage were brutally murdered

Well you don't "have" to kill the kiddo - plus the game basically stops you and says "hey, yo, there is totally a different way to do this, you really don't have to kill a kid - that'd be kinda messed up right?" but then you of course can do it anyways. Although this wouldn't be the first time a game has had children get in the way of a quest - in fallout one you *typically* have to murder a child to prevent him from being a witness to you killing a bunch of people, of course there was also a way out of that - you could talk to the kid over and over again and force him to walk out of visual range of your murders lol. You could also be mean to him and make him run away lol. Or you could just make Ian do it. As far as Obsidian goes - this is something I'm sure they were ready for/knew about in advance since they put children in the game at all to begin with.

Yeah I saw the same thing in the old version - I just assumed that camping didn't strip you of the ability at all, and that the ability simply remained until you were fatigued or rested in another inn.

You can also tell several areas were built with resting in mind - because you find some extra camping supplies in nice areas lol. Last night I was trolling around twitch and found a guy playing, his party was all in the red, they were out of spells, and he was out of camping supplies (hard mode)... He said "welp, I see a box over there, but it's guarded - I guess worst case I die, best case it has some camping supplies" after an extremely tense battle with some relatively easy enemies (Kobolds/Xaurips or however that's spelled) he found, that indeed, that container had in it, 1 camping supply lol. It really takes me back to the classic days of FPS gaming, where health packs and other pick ups were distributed ever-so carefully throughout levels, and were also a thing you had to kind of dread (since the devs wouldn't give you a ton of armor and health unless they were about to take it all away soon lol). I never felt particularly punished by the rest mechanics in this game. The simple fact is, when you don't need to worry about rest due to regenerating health and/or the existence of a mana pool, encounters are a *lot* easier to design, because you don't need to worry about grinding your players into the dust. There are plenty of classes in this game that don't worry about rest (canter and cipher), but the 3 most robust casting classes all have the rest limitation because their spells are simply so powerful in combat relative to the other abilities. The OP points to dragon age, but I should note that the optimal party in Dragon Age was to use all 3 mages (including the PC as a mage), because mages were by far and away the most powerful class in that game hands down - it was also entirely possible to solo the game on the highest difficulty as a mage with very little actual thought being given to anything lol. That was something that was purposefully avoided here in the interest of making the other 10 classes more fun/viable lol. A mage with the proper spell could also 1-2 shot the most powerful enemy in the game with Mana clash :/

Honestly I expected an almost completely different game - I purposefully didn't do that much reading about the game prior to release, excepting when they had stuff for backer types to vote on and talk about. That's not to say I'm at all unhappy with what I got - I was pleasantly surprised to be honest lol. I was expecting a game that was a sort of IWD/BG1 hybrid and I ended up getting FAR more story/plot and NPC interaction than I bargained for. I also got a game that was a lot more grim than I expected, but that's not a bad thing. The game also has so *much* stuff in it, I mean yeah, the game itself doesn't have 80 cities in it or anything, but there's a lot going on here from all the different classes, dialogue reactivity, the crafting system, etc, etc. I don't really know where I'd rank it amongst the IE games or even amongst games from Obsidian that I've played (I have a HUGE soft spot for kOTOR II, I don't really know why, but I love that game beyond all reason), but it's certainly damn good.

I could be wrong, but I think your likelihood of finding the switch is directly related to your mechanics skill - and you have to be in scout mode in order to find it to begin with. I may be wrong about the mechanics, and the non-influence of the perception stat, but you definitely have to be in scout mode lol.

A lot of people brought up my disposition - I was pretty shocked lol.

New Patch, time for iron man I think

The real joke is on the folks crying about bugs - because most of the games this game was based on still have bugs - either in the form of things which were stated as x in the manual, but work totally differently, or were simple oversights lol. Some of them still have bugs in the "enhanced" formats - some still have bugs even after several rounds of "fan" patching and modding. It's simply in the nature of games of this size to have a few issues that are either unrectifiable or pushed way down the list of things that need fixing. For me anyways, the crit path worked, which was better than some other major releases - Skyrim day one for example had a missing audio file on the crit path that prevented you from finishing the game until a patch that came out several days later lol. I think part of the reason people are so off the wall about this, is that so many folks came to the IE games *late* in their development life, so they were already more or less OK and most of the kinks had been worked out - so it created unrealistic expectations lol. 1. When I got BG2 in the mail, it didn't work at all, despite my PC being within the minimum specs, by a long shot. I had to wait a few weeks to get a CD from CNET to get the resultant patch. 2. NWN had *all* sorts of rule issues and so on in its early life 3. BG 1's manual was a lie in many respects 4. Arcanum is still not quite right lol. 5. KOTOR 1 frequently crashed on area transition *for years*. lol

Are you running really hot by chance? I remember WL2 had a similar issue for folks running on more marginal systems because the paper doll on the inventory screen increased resource usage substantially. Not saying that's the actual cause of your problem, but if you're desperate for a fix maybe something to look into.

I was over all fairly pleased with the keep - it's not like money *really* matters - unless you're going for the ultra-passive achievement. The only thing that bothers me at all is I'd like to be able to transfer stuff out of my stash and into containers in the keep, because I dream of loading my keep up with crap I'll probably forget about - like I used to do with the dresser drawers in an inn in Beregost . Once you really start hammering out side quests the keep becomes a lot more profitable because you'll be swimming in adventures of various sorts. It's just that when you first get it, if you play the "intended" route, you don't have a great lot of side-quests left to do for a little bit. I actually got some fairly decent items out of it too lol.

You may need to come back later - or have him kill it with fire before it kills him. OR maybe you could listen to this great song about playing low level wizard:

lol k1rage I had to do the same thing for a long time - I grew up in a super rural area so when I bought a game, I just had it as was, and I got a folks to send me CDs with the patches included :D

1 gig is what it's turning out for me - more time to read my Almanac! Btw the Almanac is a great read.

I was honestly expecting some sort of "join thaos" option at the end - a la joining the Master in fallout 1, since that is kind of an ending.

This reminds me of the time when we were all sitting around the table playing some good ol' fashioned D&D. The DM and the player got into an argument about some turn of events, and as so often happens, the player realized he was losing, so to save himself he uttered the words "that wouldn't happen in real life" and the entire room erupted in raucous laughter. 1. If you don't want to see NPC names before you know who they are, don't hold down tab. 2. Walk/Run serves no purpose what so ever - would you honestly *walk* places without x2 speed on? 3. Sheathing/unsheathing is a staple of games were you aren't so zoomed out - but in this case it doesn't really matter because you spend the majority of your time very far away, visually, from the character. It makes sense to put time and effort into the animations in KOTOR, NWN, Mass Effect, and etc, because you see your character so closely, not as much here - although I will note that you *could* use a system like Fallout 1-2, that is, keep your second weapon slot empty and switch back and forth. That's how we sheathed our weapons in 1998!