illathid

I think the ship system is a decent enough base. The biggest problem is that there is a very clear optimal set of decisions, and it's the same for almost every encounter. Adding some non-standard events that break up the optimal path would help it a lot.

Pretty sure they'd need to charge way more than $25 to be worth the investment of making a full isometric RTWP ship combat system. If you're into that kinda thing you should check out Battlefleet: Gothic Armada.

Number of maps is a poor metric for measuring content size of an RPG expansion/DLC. Number of quests, lines of dialogue, etc. would all be much more accurate.

I could very well be wrong too. Maybe Shadenaut will help remove the fog of confusion from this discussion.

PoE is more wizard centric than any IE game ever was. Developer(s) found one mechanic to rule them all (similar to cooldowns in other modern RPGs) that is good enough at applying spell effects, and used it to apply all other effects in the game, by using same resource mechanic for everyone too. That level of uniformity is not terrible for pnp games where you need to play fast and all you can do is roll dice, but in a computer game that means that yes, classes mechanically behave the same. Uh right. You actually played Eternity at some point? You realize it is perfectly viable to beat it with no wizard at all? Good luck beating BG2 on any real difficulty level without a wizard. But Eternity, way more wizard focused. Yeah. To be fair, I believe Shadenaut is saying that PoE is more wizard focus because it made all classes play like wizards do in BG2. Fighters cast knockdown, basically. I don't agree with this sentiment, but we should at least argue against what he's actually claiming.

if anything i want to make taller probably would be elves. obsidian version of elves are shorter than human. not sure why dwarves aren't taller. if not mistaken dragon age elves are short and slaves too. Dragon age elves are indeed short. I always like to make characters look like myself (tall n slim), but my favorite games always make elves too short (small n slim) or the humans too jacked/wide (tall n broad-ish). Life is hard. obsidian: we need change for the sake of change :D Elves are shorter than humans in Baldur's Gate and D&D too. It's more likely they copied that then trying to be different.

Fair enough. But not to be to picky what counts as passive and which are active? For instance Paladins have that all-defence-buff-on-kill ability. Does that stack with other all-defence buffs like in Pillars, or is it an active enough ability that it doesn't. Is such an ability active or passive? Sure it activates on kill but it's latent and permanent like a passive. I would guess it doesn't Not to mention priests all protection spell, which might stack with similar buffs despite its activeness. IIRC anything on the right side of the level up screen is a passive, anything on the left is active.

Then Buggers would still stand out. They are an insect Hive-mind with no concept of the individual. The Hanar work similarly, they ahd to learn how to interact with the other races. This isn't even bringing up the Great Old Ones from Lovecraft's stories. That's missing the point. Yes, the buggers are an insect hive-mind with no concept of the individual, but they're were still invented by a human and filtered through human experience. So their depiction isn't of a hive-mind, but what a human thinks it might like to be in a hive-mind.

Yeah well, that's true of all invented beings, ever. The Hanar, Buggers from "Ender's Game", Starro from the DC universe, the Angels from "Out of the Silent Planet", etc. There are quite a few non-humanoid races out there. I believe they're talking about mental, rather than physical characteristics. So Hanar are just very polite humans in a squid costume, Buggers are telepathic humans in bug costumes, etc. EDIT: The philosopher Thomas Nagel actually wrote about this idea in his paper "What is it like to be a bat?"

My best friend just played BG2 for the first time this spring. He had played Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and other newer RPGs, but not any of the IE games. According to him, while there are parts of the game that feel very dated and unfun, it easily the best RPG he ever played. So I don't think it's nostalgia alone that cement's BG2's place in gaming history, rather we should praise it for the things it did well and seek learn from the mistakes that it made. In this respect I think Deadfire did a good job, although it likely could do better.

I'd buy it!

It always pains me a lot to see how little attention game devs give to their dialog tools. Just look at the dialog editor in the GECK of Fallout 3, etc... Seriously, seeing this garbage software makes it clear why Bethesda dialog is so god damn awful. Using this is worse than writing dialog in notepad or heck, excel. Josh responded to a post on Twitter about dialogue tools that claims most of the industry uses excel for dialogue. Which is a bit depressing. I'm not a big studio guy, but we certainly did use Excel in our project - however, in this case, it was mostly to export lines for translators outside the studio. It's not quite errorproof, but it's still a fast and accessible way to import/export huge dialogue databases without having to copy things by hand. As for Excel being used to construct actual dialogue trees, I'm kind of surprised to hear that it's the preferred method. For instance, I'm pretty sure Unity has a boatload of dialogue creation plugins. Yeah, I've used excel extensively in different projects, but even then it was hard to manage different dialogue trees. I can't imagine trying to do it in an AAA game.

It always pains me a lot to see how little attention game devs give to their dialog tools. Just look at the dialog editor in the GECK of Fallout 3, etc... Seriously, seeing this garbage software makes it clear why Bethesda dialog is so god damn awful. Using this is worse than writing dialog in notepad or heck, excel. Josh responded to a post on Twitter about dialogue tools that claims most of the industry uses excel for dialogue. Which is a bit depressing.

I named my Galleon Abydon's Hammer, as I'm still a bit salty I didn't get it back.

Dang, I never got the flag.