Nerei

Actually it's much more stupid, nobody who expects a fight will carry his weapons on the back, sword fighers in all cultures figured out independently that the quickest way to draw a sword is from the hip opposite to your sword arm. And no, ninja neither carried their swords on the back, nor did they use that theater-stagehand outfit as an uniform. I did not mean for them to carry say daggers on their backs I totally agree that would be pretty silly. What I mean is that if you want to have weapons sheathed (be it on the hip, back or whatever), include a scabbard. Larger weapons could be excluded from this as drawing say a 150-180cm long zweihänder would be hard no matter where you carry them. Most illustrations of those that I have seen have them carried say over the shoulder (maybe wrapped in cloth to protect the blade?)

I definitely prefer the BG style character portraits. Not that there is anything wrong with the NWN2 style, I just do not like it as much. Also I'm not sure how they would add NWN2 style portraits to the game without making a character models with a lot more detail than would is really needed for an IE style game. which would be a fair amount of work just for the portraits Finally consider that the 3000$ kickstarter pledge included: That really rules out NWN2 style generated portraits

I like how people bring up some bad examples of scaling enemies and from that concludes that everything has to be like that. That is a funny, and extremely flawed logic. It is a bit like saying Lee Harvey Oswald was the man that shot Kennedy, by extension any other man must also shoot a president. It's stupid, crazy and flawed, but it is the same logic. All it means is that a scaling system should not be like that, and I agree that Oblivion and DA2 had a horrible scaling system. However ruling all scaling out based on those is not possible. If you want to argue that there has never been a good scaling system that is another argument and can be more valid.

I have not read all the posts in this thread so sorry if I repeat something already said I would prefer not having a level-cap, I really find it strange how a character suddenly stops advancing in levels. In relation to balance: If it is easier to balance around a levelcap or not is quite hard to say. In a linear game it is yes, but without scaling enemies I would love to see how anyone would balance anything if I can do 50 side-quests and gain a few levels that way. If you have a really low levelcap it makes it somewhat easier yes as it restrict the players options quite a bit. However in the end balance would come down to how much xp I can gain before a boss fight. What some levelcap that might be 10 levels above my current level means absolutely nothing. Take Baldurs Gate, the levelcap there is what ensures Sarevok is Difficult and to a lesser extend bosses like Davaeorn (cloakwood mines boss) due to him being fairly late in the game, Mulahey, the very plot boss in the Nashkel mines is not affected at all by it! The only way a levelcap can balance anything is if you hit it fast so the designers know what level you will be for half the game (to some extend Kotor did this). Also with regard to grinding I would also say it means little. Again take baldurs gate as an example, you effectively still have to grind your way to the highest level to fight Sarevok. if it is easy or not to get to cap is another story but what it comes down to is how many sidequests the designers expects you to do (or monsters you kill) before you get to the boss. The problem with JRPG's is not the effectively unlimited level range, but that they expect you to be a certain level before a boss. Again with Baldurs Gate the designers could have assumed you did quests until you where lvl 5 before you cleared the Nashkel mines. That has nothing to do with caps, it is all about design choices. Having a softcap, either where the character outlevels just about all opponents and stops gaining xp (e.g. only xp from challenging opponents) or simply does everything there is to do is fine, but artifically stopping progression in an established system just appears wrong to me.

Would really depend on what they do with it, if it is something they can do fairly easily and it actually has an impact it would be great. However if it just becomes a cheap gimmick with a high cost in programming, I would probably pass on it for something that gives more for the money. Oh and if they are going to include it, also include scabbards, unlike dragon age where they just have exposed weapons on their backs. To me that is just as stupid as running around with a weapon in your hand

I would not mind having orcs added to the game, they can add something. I am not sure what they could/should be like, it would really depend on the setting as a whole and I do not feel I have enough information about that to start playing race designer. I would really hope that if they add them though they become more than evil low level enemy worth roughly 65xp, that would be a near complete waste of them and they might as well be replaced with brigands. Playable or not, evil or not, I do not mind either way if it is done well. So yes to orcs as a well defined races with their own culture, no to orcs as cheap enemies.

1. I personally dislike beastmen, furries or whatever you want to call them. It is not something I would play but I can accept that others want it. 2. Is a staff a valid weapon? Yes it is. Is it as good as a Zweihänder? Most definitely not. Your advantage for your martial artist is that he has training, he know his weapon. He know how to use it. There is kind of a reason that most medieval armies used swords, spears halberds etc and not just a long piece of wood. 3. Magical flaming sword vs nonmagical one? Magical one wins. Magical dagger vs nonmagical Halberd? there you might have an advantage with the halberd. There might also be specific types of magical weapons might not work but as a whole magical >>> non-magical. If magical items are not better, why are they there? Why would anyone make them if they as a whole does not give you a noticeable advantage? Honestly your guy with a dagger in leather vs a guy effectively in gothic plate with unrestricted movement and a magical sword should be killed 95%+ of the time 4. Not sure it should be an outright advantage to alcohols and drugs, but you could make some sort of stat modifications. Many drugs can make you a lot more tolerant towards pain which could be simulated with an increase to constitution (or similar stat). They could also make you more agressive which could be a strength modifier. Naturally this would have to be balanced in some way, alcohol would affect motor skills and arguably also intelligence (at least by far the majority of dead drunk people I have seen was like that ) There is plenty of possibilities and I really like the way it was done in the fallout games.

If I where to pick a single option I would go with the impact of race, it was really nice that the game recognized that and an orc was not the same as an elf, something I think many games fail at. If PE would also add backgrounds and treat them to some extend like that it would be great. The dialogue comes in as a close second, there where a lot of options and they where fairly diverse. I also hope the game will add some sort of skill system similar to what arcanum had. Given that there are classes in PE and not in arcanum it cannot be identical naturally, but some sort of non-combat or crafting skill would be great

I agree with Humanoid on this, on paper it is a great idea, but the execution is extremely tricky and if done wrong will do more damage than good from a storytelling perspective. It can still be a great way to establish the setting as a whole though. As for the duration I would say it should probably take more than 5-10 minutes and be tied properly into the game. Having it as a throwaway zone will just make it feel detached from the rest of the game. For learning the basic mechanics of the game I would say having a completely separate tutorial level as characters saying "to move click the left mouse button" is fairly immersion breaking and you can go into more detail than would be practical in the actual game.

Do you have any idea how that would've messed up the whole story? Do you even begin to understand what the consequences for killing Meredith there and then would yield, not only for the main character but the developer team that has to create a whole new path for the story that goes in a completely different direction than what they originally intended. There is no way in hell you can justify that much extra work with such an insignificant grievance. Besides, from the character point of view attacking Meredith there would make no sense at all; Hawke wants to stay alive and wouldn't risk everything he's worked so hard for on a random impulse of utter stupidity. If you want a structured and comprehensive storyline, you're going to have to place restrictions to what the player can do in the shoes of the main character. You're a character in a fantasy world, not an omnipotent god who can kill anyone he likes and get away with it, and that should be represented in how the game handles things. Since crime/punishment as a random activity is so goddamn difficult to script and requires such a ridiculous amount of work hours, I'd rather the effort would be better focused on somewhere else. Don't let us kill friendly NPCs except in scripted situations. A well structured story is more important than the ability to kill anyone; a DM that lets you kill a story essential NPC on a random whim is just a bad DM, especially if he's trying to tell a story. No, no, no, no and NO. The DM that cannot ADAPT from that situation is the bad DM. A major part of the appeal of PnP gaming is the dynamic story that you can affect (unless you use it as a tabletop wargame). One of the fastest way to get people to lose interest in a plot as a DM is to let the players feel that they have no choice in the story. That no matter what they do they will go from A to B to C to D. You may effectively force them to go to D anyway, but if you give them the impression that they have to go that route in that order, they either lose interest or start to deliberately mess up your story. The good DM makes them WANT to go to D, he does not force them and makes them take the route they want. Also ultimately if the players does not want to go to D, the DM will just have to make them go to E, the place they apparently want to go to. There is naturally limitations on a crpg that does not apply to PnP, for one I can invent a basic story in 30 minutes (and adapt it along the way) that would take a dev team months to get into their game. Sorry for that rant, but really in a story driven campaign only a (really) bad DM will railroad the players. Especially to the point that DA2 does it. Killing Meredith is an extreme case as it would force a complete shift in the story and a very expensive one at that given how much additional voice acting it would call for and I can fully accept them not wanting to invest that ammount of money in what would give a fairly limited payoff. That however is the limitation of the media of gaming and something you have to work around. Simply brute forcing your way through and ignoring it is a horrible solution. Take some of the ultima games for an extreme case of the other direction. You could kill Lord British in that game! It very much made the game unwinnable, but it could be very satisfying to do. Most of those games still had very good plots, in some cases I will say the plot in the ultima games beat anything Bioware has thrown at us at least since Kotor. If we want the game to hold our hand like DA2 does, why play a game at all? Books are ultimate a better storytelling media then assuming you can use your imagination a bit to make up voices etc, which in this game you will have to do anyway. I personally played through DA2 once and I uninstalled it right after that and never plan to install it again mainly due to it being an extreme case of bad plot railroading. So yes, I agree that Bioware from an economic perspective Bioware should not make Meredith killable right away, it would be too expensive to be justifiable. However they should not throw obnoxious characters with plot armour in our face in the first place and just have them walk away, that is just horrible design. The thing at blame in DA2 is the horrible design of the plot.

Forgotten realms use the drow quite extensively, probably a bit too much too (we can probably blame R. A. Salvatore for it). Just look at D&D Neverwinter, they got all the really standard D&D races: dwarf, elf, human and half-elf as well as drow and thiefling, but no Gnomes or halflings. I guess it is about the rule of cool. That said though I do not mind having them, it can add diversity to the world and it could make for a fairly different playthough if done right. I just hope they would not just carbon copy them from D&D and actually make it so that it feels like you're playing one and not just an elf where you picked a slightly different colour from the list of skintones.

I really do not mind having cheats in a game, the can allow for funny situations, testing of alternate scenarios and in the end it affect none but the player itself. I really dislike the idea of someone else dictating how I should play a game. If it is resources/time that prevents them from adding it I can completely accept it, but some moral crusade by the devs or other players is something I really hate. If they add a multiplayer mode naturally it should not be possible there, or if they do have a toggle or something.

Personally I would prefer a system like that from Arcanum or to a slightly lesser extend the IE games. I can also accept a simple list and encumbrance. I think the main problem with the IE style is that it does not take the size of an item into account. it considers the weight of an item sure so a suit of plate armour is way heavier than a ring, but they take up the same amount of "space" so ignoring weight you can carry X suits of plate or X rings, which is silly. Yes I know about gembags etc. but for that case just replace the ring with a loaf of bread or daggers. I "really" hope they consider the system carefully if they go with an ultima style system, especially if we also get commodities like food etc. That could be a nightmare to organise and half the time items disappeared or took eons to find unless I organised it carefully. A simple solution for it could be a "view as list" option which would actually be nice for all systems as it makes finding things faster. No matter what though I hope the system will be easy and fast to use, I really do not feel like using 5 minutes sorting my inventory, if I get that kind of urge I might as well go play with Excel

Personally if I want different colour hair on a portrait I normally just run it though PS. That is probably also the way we should expect to do such things. That said it definitely should be possible to create portraits where you can control tints and facial hair simply with layers and tint control like there are in programs like PS. it would probably not be too hard either to write such code (depending on the image file naturally) if the portraits are made to support it from the start. If it is simply about layer number it should also be possible to make custom material to work with it. Personally I would not mind it but it is not really all that high on my list of priorities either In the end it would be all about value you get for the money put into it and a simple import option will probably give you almost as much for much less

Like EA? That was also what I was going to suggest More seriously though I also hope there will be some sort of option for being less than the paragon of virtue and good, if done right it can make for an interesting alternative and will give the game more replay value.

I do not really have any particular subrace I want to see in-game. I do want them to be consistant with anything they introduce though. I remember playing drow in both IWD 2 and NWN 2 and except for a few lines it felt like playing any other character and after having read quite a bit of R. A. Salvatore that really irritated me. So I guess what I want is something that can be added properly without Obsidian having to burn too much cash on it.

For me it would really depend on how it is done. Some scaling can be done without it being noticeable and immersion breaking. Random encounter tables could probably change a bit depending on character levels or some ingame explanation could be used. Also it could be limited a so a given area would be say lvl 5-8 and the npcs would scale with that level range, that way areas could be dynamic without it being too noticeable and extreme. If they add it though I just hope it will not be like Oblivion where normal animals disappeared as the player levelled and bandits went from wearing leather to ebony and daedric armour.

I really dislike having artificial restrictions like making a character essential. I can to some extend see the point with plot critical characters as that helps keep the game flowing, but honestly if a player wants to mess up their game they should. If anything just notify them that they have just broken the main storyline and thus cannot complete the game so they do not discover it after having played another 15 hours. Then there's the bad examples of essential characters, dragon age 2 has already been brought up so I will take Fallout 3 instead. There they had made every single child essential. It does not make it better that the probably most offensive character in the game is MacCready, the child mayor of Little lamplight. Personally I did not even know children was essential, neither had I planned in any way to find out, until he provoked me to the point where I wanted to melt his face off with my flamer. I so prefer the solution in the previous fallout games that solved the problem of child killing with the childkiller perk and the connected mechanics. In the end they could just bring Biff the understudy back if they need a stand-in for a plot-essential characters

Probably the best way to solve this would be to simply give xp for successful skill usage (whatever you want to call non-combat solutions), so convincing them to fight each other or running away or similar would give xp (maybe depending upon your skill etc) and just killing them would give roughly the same (again depending on skill/level or whatever would be appropriate). The same method could be applied to things like a rogue style character lockpicking, sneaking or disabling traps, again assuming that the challenge is not trivial. Really the main problem with xp for killing the aforementioned group of monsters would be if it was the only way to get xp other than questing, which I would say is fairly valid as it, as mentioned, turns being the kill-crazy psychopath into the "best" way to play the game. If there is an alternative it should help somewhat. Making both options perfectly even would probably not be possible, but atleast they could get close for most situations.

Considering there is no "partly" option or similar I will have to go with against. I honestly believe that if I was to run into a random group of orcs, ogres or whatever somewhere far from anywhere killing them would net some xp. Also as has already been pointed out making killing monsters not net anything in terms of xp, will make combat alot less attractive and much more of a pain, especially if all I can get in terms of drops from said orcs is 5 coppers and a rusty sword. "damn now I have to waste time killing these guys" is not really something you want players to say in your game unless you're making something like a stealth game. I can fully accept having commoners found in cities and npc's tied to a quest not net anything for killing. Things like killing guards related to a quest being worth very little compared to the quest xp is also okay, them not being worth anything though again means that unless their drops are good it again turns into a "combat is a nuisance" scenario which is just about the worst you can do if you want combat to have value. I absolutely prefer mechanics where butchering a village is not something that will net you a ton of xp and make you the best swordsman in the world, having quests where you get a bonus for not killing anyone but you can would also be a great mechanic to have. However if we go with the extremes I prefer that to quest xp only as that makes combat nothing but a dodge the trash pack game or gold farming and I really hope combat will have some importance in this game.