Pshaw

Personally I love when a game goes back to an older display type. Wether it's pixelated, 2D animated, cell shaded 3D, isometric and so on. I feel like at some point developers felt like a game couldn't be a game without cutting edge graphics and games started to suffer for it. Consistantly every year it's games with intentionally stylized or throwback graphics that tend to be the ones I enjoy the most. This isn't to say I don't enjoy games with great graphics but I'm still playing FTL, mark of the ninja and bastion but not skyrim, farcry, or metro last light. I'm glad they've got a simple art direction and running with it. It means they can focus more of their developement time on gameplay which is what really makes a game worth playing.

Usually I go tank, healer, support, 2 dps and 1 mix of healer/support or support/dps depending on if more healing is needed or not. Generally I like my character to fill in the role of whatever is missing from NPCs I like. So if there are no tanks I like I will most likely make a tank. The adventures hall will help a bit but most likely I'll only use 1 AH character at a time and only if the NPCs bug the crap out of me in some way. I usually go mage the first time through though.

Depends on the topics. I'll give books on magic, demons, other planes or really interesting figures a shot. If they're entertaining I'll continue to read them, if not I'll start ignoring them. Also I find that if they're too frequent it interrupts the pacing of the game. Personally I felt DA:O had journal updates far too often so while I was interested in reading about some things I didn't want to stop every 15 minutes or so take a break and read all the lore they were tossing my way. Also I think it's generally better to work interesting bits of lore and history into the gameplay rather than just tossing a book your way and saying 'hey here is a book read this.' An example I enjoyed from Skyrim was with Potema. She was a significant historical figure from the past that you may or may not have cared about but you eventually get a quest (or simply stumble into a cave) where a cult is trying to resurrect her. They make it all sound very dire and that much doom and gloom would be the result of her returning which made me wonder who the heck she was which lead to me reading all the volumes of the wolf queen I stumbled across. Her history wasn't forced fed to you through a lengthy and cheesy exposition but it was hinted at and if you were interested there was a way to delve further into that lore.

Justin Sweet is one my favorite artists so I must prefer the icewind sale style. I enjoy the slightly more painterly and low contrast look of them. While I did enjoy the BG2 portaits everybody looked overly shiney, almost plastic, and there was just too much detail. I like to let my mind sort of fill in the gaps in a player portrait so it can look a bit more like the person I evisioned in my head so things need to be little vauge for me to do that. Still I imagine they'll allow custom portaits so I think people will get whatever they like best in the end anyway as well import our favorites.

I imagine they'll email people redemption codes for steam and good old games.

After playing Shadowrun Returns I'd like to see transitory companions become more previlant. It made sense that sometimes the people you're paired up with don't want to go into every risky situation that you want to get into. They joined with you for a reason and beyond that they'd rather go their own way or just stay safe. While I wouldn't want this to override the traditional party structure as I like getting to know my companions and keep them with me throughout the game I do feel that it adds a touch of realism and a bit of variety.

I prefer the novel style in the body text. For the choices themselves I think *'s or ()'s work better to delinate between an action and converstation pieces. Italics also work.

Plenty of great posts here already sum up my thoughts on going too far in deplorible acts does nothing to add to the maturity of the game so I won't really elaborate on that. I will say that I would like evil to be somewhat faction oriented. If I'm off being a complete asshat in a town that another one has a long standing grudge against I'd like to see my reputation lead to me being reviled in the former and respected in the latter. I really liked how individual towns in Fallout 2 had their own reputations and I'd like to see a system like that only taken a bit further so there was a bit of interaction between your reputations in towns rather than having them be on an island so to speak. This shouldn't be limited to evil of course.

I'm not a huge fan of mods for the IE games. The ones I download are mostly bug fixes more than new content. I think the most important thing for the longevity of the game is writting good enough that you want to experience it again, characters interesting enough for you to want to experience again and again, content that is mutually exclusive forcing you to do multipul playthroughs to exepeince everything, and finally a good combat system that doesn't feel tedious once you've hit the 40 hour mark or feel entirely outdated in 2 years.

Most of these franchises have a likeable NPC or 2 but planescape had the highest percentage of likeable NPCs. What makes them good though? I'd say it's depth combination of depth, realism, familarity, and nostalgia. Nostalgia wise some characters I like from older games probably aren't as well written as them seem when I'm looking back. I'm not going to go back and check because I've already got a huge backlog of games and if they are written poorly I don't want to disillusion myself. For familarity when I look at the cast members I like from ME I find myself pretty much liking almost the entire crew from the first game but only 1-2 from the second and third game so I'm not sure if they're better or more believeable or if it's just because they've been around longer so I'm sort of attached to them. Familarity also plays into cliche's a bit as well. There are sometimes I see a character and I hate them/love them right away because I recognize the type of character they are and know from past experience that it's the sort of thing I dig or they drive me up the wall. Of course depth and realism is usually just up the quality of the writters. Do these characters have more than 1 side to their personality? Are their motivations, recations, opinions, ect all believable, at least within the setting? Do they have a decent amount of converstions, banter, and so forth so we can get to know them? The more of these a character has the more I tend to like them as a character even if I don't like them personally.

For me I like magic to have rules that define it. As much as I understand why D&D magic is the way it is I much prefer something with narrower scope. If anybody is familiar at all with Brandon Sanderson's books he has a great talent for building interesting magic systems with strict rules as to what you can and cannot do with magic. I prefer this vastly over the MAGIC CAN DO ANYTHING ways of D&D or the completely amorphous magic of say Lord of the Rings where people say Gandalf is a wizard but damned if I ever see him do anything magical. Also I think it's important that the presence of magic inform the culture of the world somewhat. Here you have people that have access to extraordinary powers that most people simply do not have. Why wouldn't they be kings ruling over lesser folk? Perhaps they would be treated like slaves much like channelers (Damane) are treated in Seanchan in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. In the end I think the worst thing you can do in a fantasy setting is treat magic/mages like it's a day job.

Seems to me that the only thing they've really been overhauling from the original IE games are the systems, combat, leveling, health/mana, and so on. Which is exactly what I wanted when backing the game since these are the things that bore the life out of my whenever I try to replay them. They were amazing at the time, I can't even imaginge the hours I've clocked in BG2, but they haven't aged well and they need to be updated which is what obsidian is bringing us. Same feel to the world and characters with (hopefully) better gameplay.

You know I kind of felt that there was no way the Wasteland 2 was going to be hitting its goal of Q4 2013, it seemed like they still had a lot left to do. Then yesterday-ish they sent out a backer update with their progress and they're looking to go to beta at the start of October and still plan on launching this year. So it can be hard to gauge these things from the outside since we really can only know as much as they tell us. I think PE will probably be a little late, maybe as much as 3-4 months, but I don't think we've got a double fine adventure type situation going on here.

@Bos_hybrid http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/64084-romance-marriage-pregnancy-and-having-children/page-10?do=findComment&comment=1354005 I listed a handful of games with romance "choices" which is what you were stressing. I wasn't aware that they all had to have homosexual romance options or romance options for a PC of a different gender in order to be considered a valid choice. Of course nobody is going to emulate biowares style 100%. I will say this though, in terms of being inclusive towards providing romance options for female players and homosexual players Bioware is doing the best job out there in the industry. You can hate how they implement it all you want but at least they're trying. Even if it's not your cup of tea I know plenty of female gamers and gay gamers who happened to really like these inclusions. So why they might not make the game better for you or have been a selling point for you but I personally know people who felt they were improvements and were a driving factor behind their purchase. As far as romance not being common in games you're correct. At least in terms of having a choice in your romance option. There are romance subplots and motivations in just about every damn game out there. Only it's not a choice it's just being built into the narrative. Heck even written into the overall plot of a game these romances can come out trashy and they are 100% forced down your throat as you have zero choices about how to proceed in the game. Are the Bioware choices really worse than that? At least if I have no interest in Leliana's back story or feelings I can just let her stew in camp and never say a word to her. Getting back to romances choices being uncommon in games they're uncommon because having choices in games themselves is pretty uncommon. Heck RPGs are the kings of choice in video games and we get tons of them every year with no choices to be made beyond how we gear up a character. But choices are getting more common because people do like them. Open world is getting more common for the same reason. Players want more control over the world they're playing in and over there character. Because of this people also want choices in terms of romance. It seems to me that lots of anti-romancers would say we need the freedom to kill everybody we want including children and loot their corpses but start including choices for love or sex and whoa better put the brakes on cause we've gone too far. In the end I like choice and a game world that reacts to player choices. I like a character that I can customize in both looks, and abilities. I like no linear progression and multiple paths to victory. I like a more open gaming experience and yeah sometimes that includes the choice to have my PC romance somebody in the game. I don't know why we're drawing some arbitrary line on expanding those choices when it comes to love, sex, romance, relationships or whatever the heck you want to call it.

As a few others have said I already envision experience as a staircase. That's what the experience represents. The trails and tribulations of trying to improve your skills through active use then suddenly you have your eureka moment when you gain a level. All those magic missiles you've cast have given you enough insight to figure out how to create a fireball instead. The other way I envision what you're talking about is that some levels you'd get no benefit at all, no stats, no new spells. So level 1 you start off, level 2 nothing, level 3 you get stat points, skills, and new skills. I personally hate this sort of system so I wouldn't want to see it implemented at all. The idea of gaining a level with no reward whatsoever makes me wonder what the point of the level was in the first place, you might as well have just doubled the experience gauge instead.

This is just completely false. While I admit that many of these games are japanese RPGs there are at least dozens of legitimate games (not purely dating sims or porn games) that have multipul romance choices. I certainly wouldn't say they're well done but they exist. I mean the fable games for instance let you marry, have sex with, and raise children with pretty much whomever you damn well please. Off the top of my head I can think of Fable, Skyrim, Fallout, Witcher, Baldurs Gate, Record of Agarest War, Persona, Fire Emblem, Thousand Arms, Azure Dreams, FFVII, and so on and that's by no means any sort of exhaustive list. Not all of these are good romances, in truth most of them are pretty awful and there are even a few that you could argue aren't 'romances' at all, but saying that Bioware is the only developer making games with romance choices is pure hyperbole. I think something else that needs to be taken into account is that the idea of romance/sex in video games is still a bit taboo here in the USA. Just look at the media attention surrounding Mass Effect or the Hot Coffee mod. But we're getting past that and they're becoming a bit more common place in RPGs, mostly due to biowares efforts. So I see them being included more and more often rather than less often in the future. It won't happen over night and it's sure to meet with plenty of resistance as these topics have clearly shown but in the end I think video games are going for more choices and more freedom in every aspect they can. Which will include more freedom in the area of romance.

I remember liking Gaelan Bayle from BG2, cooooo~ Farnham from Diablo 1 was always one of my favorite people to come talk to once I got back to town. In general terms I really like having converstations with alien (meaning foriegn) entities. Anything thinks on a completely different level or in a totally different way that the PC is always fun. Which is one of the reasons Torment was so amazing for me. I just loved talking to all the random NPCs because so many of them were so interesting because they were so different. It's why I also really liked talking with Legion, Sovereign (both not minor, I know) and to a lesser extent the rogue AI on the citadel in ME. Give me AI, demons, elementals, angels, actual aliens or whatever else because to me I tend to find them to generally be the most interesting converstationalists.

I guess it's a really a question of if it can be done well. I'd prefer a strong narritive over a blank page for me to fill out my characters past if it meant that my past had no effect on a single thing in the game. I don't think I'd want an exhaustive series of choices but some things I would like to have a choice over such as religion, upbringing, prior knowledge specilzations. I'd like to see it done in the way you can answer questions to determine your class in the elderscrolls games.

I'm all for sub-classes but I'm tempted to say save it for an expansion. We've already got a ton of classes to choose from and I'd rather they work on each one of those classes feeling unique rather than try and add specilzations right now. If they find they have time and they've got ideas for specialzations that aren't limiting then I'm all for it, for every class. I personally like the idea of unlocking specilizations though strictly through the DA:O method. I felt learning them through NPCs was a bit too simplistic as was purchasing a training manual. Some of the other ways to unlock it, like the bloodmage, seemed fitting and I would like to see specilaztions unlocked through how you play rather than what you pick at the character creation screen.

If they choose to add romances (which I'm for) I'd only want them to add children if it made sense in terms of the time the adventure is supposedly taking place over. I honestly don't believe that PE will take place over an amount of time long enough to make having a child a worthwhile addition to the game. If there is some sort of epilogue sequence that would like to site that the player had a kid with so-and-so then by all means include such a thing. Beyond that though I can't really imagine a good way to include having a child in any reasonable way that wouldn't be some silly managament minigame forced into the game. As for child killing I don't really mind it. Give it consquences and there's no reason to not include it. Fallout had child killing and certain party members like Sulik wouldn't join you if you were a child killer.

I really like little job mini-games in some games. In others it's just a boring feature added for the sake of having more features or a way to grab extra cash. So while I do like jobs I feel like they probably won't be a good fit in PE and should probably be left out. The last thing I'd want is Fable like wood chopping and real estate management.

It depends on the gameplay. I will pretty much always do my first playthrough on normal or a step above normal with some additional tweaking in options to get things how I like them. After the first or second playthrough I start looking towards the more challenging difficulties. But if the gameplay is just tedious I won't bother with harder difficulties. There have been more than a few games I've played in the past where the harder settings made the boring parts of the game take longer and if that is ever the case I'm not interested in increasing the difficulty. Sadly I find the combat in many RPGs to be only mildly interesting most of the time and if increasing the difficulty just means I'll be making combats take even longer in order to get the parts of the game (story and choices) I enjoy most then I'll be just leaving it on normal.

First time through I tend to a bit of a mixed character. I'll do 'evil' choices when dealing with situations where I think a harsher punishment (usually death) is more deserved than simply letting them go or turning them in to the authorities. I also tend to deal with shifty or annoying characters in 'evil' ways because I like to cheat cheaters and annoying characters have just earned my digital-ire. Beyond that I tend to do the 'good' choices. My second playthrough I tend to do straight up evil though I'm never a **** to my party members. After that I usually just ping-pong back and forth between good then evil.

I'm pretty comfortible with the idea of limited money. I hate reaching the end of a game with obscene amounts of cash and nothing to really spend it on. Also I've found that games where money is hard to come by stealth, pick pocket, and lockpicking all tend to to get a nice bit of use outside of dungeons which I always welcome. I also enjoy games where you can kill shop keepers in order to get access to goods you can't afford so I'd hope for something like that as well. Provided of course that killing a shop keeper had suitible amount of risk involved to balance it out.

I like the idea of gathering your party before going to the next area. I just think that the distance the entire party should be from the exit should be fairly large when out of combat. When in combat though I think everybody should need to stick close together before you make a break for it. The only time I really like the whole 1 person needs to hit the exit and that's it thing is when you aren't in full control of your party like the fallout games. If Sulik and Vic had their way I'd never make it to vault city.