ComMcNeil

I can not remember that any IE games had such mundane fetch quests, so I dont think they will start now with implementing them

If all of these things are seperate rooms, it could be relatively easy to get the art for this, either a room is empty (or inaccessable even) or the room has bookshelves in it... @topic: I would also like to see basically Stronghold (so, base of some kind) which can be upgraded in whatever form through quests, but ONLY quests (or objectives, missions whatever). What I dont want to see is upgrading based off of money, like in skyrim for example - its just boring, too simple and somewhat lazy...

the health mechanic wasnt that big of a deal there, simply put, you had HP, damage would subtract from that and as long as you were not bandaged after taking a hit, you bled and took more damage. And as the devs already said they want to do a 2 value system, I guess simple HP are out of the question (for now) - but I guess a wound mechanic would make sense, so if you took HP damage and not only stamina damage, you may start bleeding, so you need to be bandaged. In comparison to JA2 though, I dont think its going to work so well in PE, as you will get damaged a lot more in PE, because you are always in an infight scenario, at least with some of your characters, while in JA2 or other tactical games, you were in cover and ofter not even hit if played correctly.

i was disappointed countless times by developers who made REALLY great promised, their ideas sounded amazing but the final product was for wahtever reason only mediocre... Granted, none of these projects were done via a Kickstarter but to remain sceptical in todays gaming business should not be belittled as having no faith in developers

can you give examples? I personally find the whole Bhaal Child story extremly interesting and dont think it was poorly written

Just an idea, but what about if the game lets you only rest so often? (in the dungeon itelf at least) As an example, you can only rest if you either had a few (successful) encounters already or if you completed a quest objective. That is something I guess dungeon masters in PnP like to pull, as they say you cannot sleep again just 2 hours after you already slept for 8 hours. Still its an arbitrary limitation and may be counter intuitive.

I think we need to define if we want to have stats being able to increase on its own or not. The old D&D way which was used in IE games certainly was intruiging in that way, that you were really lucky to find stuff that increased your stats, may it be temporary or permanently. In such a system, stat requirements also make sense in my opinion, but they should be reasonable. I would like the old style of AD&D for stats, but please drop the STR nonsense at 18 (18/01 - 18/00) and dont even think of implementing something like that again. So in short, primary stats should not change that much over the course of your career, maybe slightly due to special training, major quest rewards, temporary stat boosts or item enhancements. Advancement should take place in secondary stats, be it professions, skills, "feats" or the like

that is a good point actually - I always found the XP rewards in BG2 for specific tasks a little...unbalancing so to speak. Why does a rogue get XP for every damn lock or trap, why does a mage get XP for every spell he puts in his spellbook...it may be realistic in case of the rogue, but its just not "fair" for the other classes. I guess it derives from the PnP roots. Also, I also do not know any game that (consistently) rewarded actions that made your combat easier in some way by using your chars skills. I guess it all comes down to, each encounter should challange multiple attributes of your character/party, so either the normal combat should match up against your combat stats of course, the diplomatic action should only be available if your social stats are high enough, same goes for intimidation (if available), and so on. In an optimal world, each encounter has some form of at least 1 alternative way of overcoming it, that makes sense for this specific encounter and avoids fighting, but yields pretty much the same reward. oh, combat can be generally fun in a game, but specific fights may be tedious and boring, it all comes down to design and how this is executed. I would say, the combat in BG2 was very good most of the time, no doubt. But there were still encounters that were boring, mainly the random encounters on the overland map during travel. They did (at the later stages of the game) not yield a big challange, the rewards were absolutely pointless at that time and they were not even avoidable. Combat needs at least one of this points to be true...

Which in real life would GET WORSE not better in a matter of minutes. actually this is a good point, from the realistic route of course - in combat, adrenaline may still the pain, but after the adrenaline is out of your system, you feel every bit of the wounds you are caused... question now is, do they want to go they complete realistic route, or just say, stamina is the immediate exhaustion, nothing more

Thats debateable. Maybe someone LIKES to play a character that does not go the diplomatic route - should he be constantly punished? I mean it also depends on how you define punishment. If you only mean he spends more time in combat than anyone else, therefore "losing" playtime, that would be somewhat ok. On the other hand, I get where the people are coming from that direction, that combat will become a waste of time. If you are constantly jumped by random encounters, or random wild beasts combat can get tedious. But having a small reward (i.e. EXP) offsets this tedious task a little. I guarantee that the combat in the IE games would be less enjoyable if you did not get any XP for it.

i need to pick this up again you see, many RPGs, or games in general, as you said, do not even hint at rape, most likely because of the reason you have just given. But violence, death, torture, dismemberment and that stuff is totally ok in most games today, noone (outside of germany) gives any crap about a head being chopped off. Given that murder is in most if not all contries of the wolrd, the worst crime to commit, I find that pretty silly...

Although the idea sounds great and all, as long as there is no specific example how this would be translated into the game, I remain sceptical. Many devs praised their upcoming game to have "choices" on how to tackle encounters, that each way was equal and so on. But I can not recall one single game that lived really up to this promise, and personally I dont think it is even possible.

pretty good sum up, I have to say. I agree, having a dungeon level with a lot of individual monsters that then need to become challanges may be a bit to much. I guess the witcher route then would be better, having only main encounters be objective based. Personally, I think that sneaking past an encounter should not yield experience in general, especially not if its a "filler battle" inside a dungeon that does not have any purpose - so you are right, the right balance is very hard to find. Maybe a mixture, like in BG or witcher is still the way to go for this game, so taht combat stays rewarding, but someone still has the incentive to resolve problems non-violently...maybe the rewards for such actions should simply be dialogue, alternative items or other stuff, maybe even make it known beforehand, example: you get the quest to bring person X to justice, and return his head to a guardsman, reward 300 gold. If you find said person you could offer him a deal to let him live, if he gives you 300gold. The person denies saying he only has 100g, but a magic dagger. You now could choose between those 2 rewards basically, but experience should be the same in both cases. I guess its the old BG design.. ^^

ok, that is really interesting. I first thought, this was more a system like in the Star wars P&P, which was based upon D&D/D20 ruleset. There you also hat hitpoints and wound points, former being the ability to dodge, latter being physical woulds. If party members first go unconcious when their stamina is empty, I think most if not all monsters or enemies should then focus to the ones that are left standing, even monster that feed upon the party members in some way. At least normally - there may be predator type monsters that try to down a char relativly fast and if he is unconcious, grab him and run away. This may as well be tied into a sub-quest, or just a general mechanic for fights: characters are practically dead if they fall down...may be a bad suprise for some players :D

I think an objective based XP system allows for far more flexibility in encounter design that XP reward for killing things could. As already stated, every "overcome" encounter can yield XP, how you overcome it should not matter. Deus Ex:HR had such problems, as that non-lethal was always yielding more experience as lethal combat, practically pushing the player in the direction of non-lethal combat, as it was more rewarding (and often not harder) Personally I would like to see a game that does this correct, but I understand that the concept, especially for people that like the old IE games so much, may be strange and not applicable.

I am pretty sure, the romances stopped in the underdark and went on when you were out of there. I may be mistaken about the place, but there were definately points in the game, that halted progress in the character dialoges.

but it is a counter intuitive system, and a very arbitrary one as well. Especially at low levels, AD&D was really crappy for mages...either you spent one of your 3 magic missle uses (if you even have 3x magic missle and not 1 identify and 1 shield or sth), or you basically stand around and wait that your fighters can deal with the enemies. It surely got better with higher level, but starting with a mage, alone was not that easy in comparison to a fighter. Also, you did not have "a big variety to choose from to cast", you had a big variety to prepare. Prepared a spell that turns out useless for some reason and you could stick with it and lose a spell slot, our you could reload and take something more useful...

developing the game should be priority number one

i think they are too intertwined to make 2 threads about this...basically, having exits in the dungeon that stay accessable, is directly related to having points-of-no-return. If you can always backtrack to an exit, there is no point-of-no-return, if you cant, you have one. It doesnt matter if the exits are at every level, at every other level or whatever, as long as you can go up in the dungeon to the previous level and leave via the exit there, there is no difference. I think points of no return should be small pockets of challanges where you go in, and need to do whatever it is that you need to do without a leave/rest and get a reward afterwards, but not entire dungeon levels (multiple even)

I never played DA2, so I have no personal opinion, but the majority you hear on the internet is, that the game is not that great ME3 in the other hand simply had a stupid ending, the rest of the game was very good, in my opinion and in the opinion of many critics as well. @main topic: BG or BG2 including the addons are one of my most favorite games ever and I completed BG2 quite a few times.

but the possibility to reload takes the challenge out of this I feel, as you can just reload if you fail a fight, change up your spells and all is fine.. You can do that anyway, and if not you've hit a dead end in the game and that's bad for the player and the designers! Ability systems bear the hazard of miss-skilling. Next everyone wants the possibility of reskilling, and what's that again? By the way, wasn't there a stretch-goal with some kind of ironman mode?! I bet there will be a game mode with no reloading allowed yeah I know about ironman mode - and that may be a whole magnitude more difficult than a normal game. I remember saving and reloading quite often in BG/BG2 when fights went badly, at least for the earlier playthroughs of mine. Later, I tried to play the game a little more realistic, by not buffing myself up before combat even starts, and such stuff, but this was all self imposed. I personally do not think that a dead end scenario is possible in such a game, or at least the designers should do everything they can to prevent that. Basically, do not force players into situations they may get stuck in, without a way back out. I also think the design should be in that way, that a character skill should not be important to your progress in the story, meaning that a mage may choose between invisibility and fireball, but neither of these spells should ever be required to have to overcome a challange. It may be difficult to balance, sure, but that would be the preferred design (in my opinion of course)

You are wrong. Romance doesn't develop only one NPC - it has a potential to develop all NPCs as the interaction between NPCs will change. And btw. Romance in this situation greatly increases replayability of this game and it increases it more drastically than low-int dialogues. Oh I am wrong am I because you state it as so? Didn't realise we could just declare it as so. YOU are wrong. Stat based dialogue increases replayability and RP by a vastly greater degree, and its one of the reasons people are against VO since it prevents the resctivity of things like stat driven dialogue and they want it back. Removing it in favour of romance defeats the purpose of not having VOs and shows where your priorities lie. I find the VO in the infinity engine games were done pretty good. Only major story dialogues were fully voiced, minor dialogues were only voiced for the first sentence(s) or not at all. It helped give soul to the character, but was not restrictive for the dialogue choices...I find that a pretty good design choice

A place where most adventurers do not come out alive again does not literally have to be a trap - they are just overwhelmed by the dangers and foes that are present in the dungeon I mean, having exits does not mean you can escape every obstacle or encounter just by walking out the door

why isnt there a place for some cheesy stuff as well? I personally dont think the jaheira romance was that obnoxious or poorly written - it may be cheesy that you help her over the loss of her dead husband and fall in love in the process, but I dont think that is a poor idea per se...

but the possibility to reload takes the challenge out of this I feel, as you can just reload if you fail a fight, change up your spells and all is fine..