ComMcNeil

yeah, of course there are and I pretty much dont care HOW they break it up, as long as they do it :D

why would it be not locked? the backgrounds are prerendered art assets... so I guess you will not be able to change your camera view... or do you mean locked in the sense of not-scrollable? ok that would be stupid ^^

I think that stamina should not regenerate completly on its own in combat, you should either use a spell/potion or maybe an ability (for a fighter perhaps) that gives back some stamina, but other than that it should not regerate. Out of combat, it may very well regenerate on its own. Yeah, it is like a regenerative health mechanic in other games, but I believe that it may very well make the combat much more balanced. You could tweak the system, lets say, like, if you have sustained damage to you health, you only regenerate a portion of your stamina. Example, you have 30 stamina and 10 health - after the first combat you took 4 health damage, and now you cannot regain 30 stamina but only 18. So if you go into the battle without proper treatment of the wounds, you are not at full capacity. It may then not sound like much of a difference to the earlier systems, but the main difference is, easy encounters (which do not damage your health) do not really drain your resources - that may be a good, or a bad thing.

but combat can have loot rewards, monetary rewards or generally different story development. If you talk your way through a quest, the quest giver may react differently if you leave someone alive rather than killing him - or other stuff may be blocked out then

The (old) D&D approach of memorizing spells was not so much not cool, but it was easily abusable. In a P&P rpg, you have a basic "Ironman" scenario - something happens and thats it, you cannot (normally) change that. You come into a fight and have no combat spells prepared? Too bad... But in addition to not having the correct spells prepared, you also only had a limited amount of them per day - and this was even more problematic, as you could run out and basically become dead weight during any additional fight for that day. In a computer game, many of these problems can be worked around. Not having the correct spell? Load your autosave, change spells, rest and done. Run out of cool spells for the day? rest and your good. I personally find this design to be bad, because it encourages players to abuse the system and balancing is really really difficult as a mage who has all spells at the beginning of an encounter (or the correct ones) has a great advantage to any mage who may have already spent good spells or not having prepared them. So from a design standpoint, we need a system that gives a mage the possibility to be "strong enough" at the beginning of an encounter, without having to rest every 5 minutes, but should force him to choose which style of magic he wants to use. I guess a "spells as abilites" route would be better, but maybe give the mage the possibility to change his abilites at a point, maybe in town for a price or something - so you have the chance to change spells you dont like later down the line. (or go the D&D 4e route, where you can "retrain" some single aspect of your char, every time you level up)

I personally would be totally fine with that - the system in the watchers keep with the portals to the surface on every level was also fine. I would even be ok with having an exit only every 2 levels (if this is made clear by the game beforehand)

Absolutely right! Some people here, on Obsidian forums, complained something like "Oh, those banters, I hate them! I kicked Imoen cause she participated in a lot of NPC talks. From my point of view - the more banters, that more NPC-initiated dialogue we have, the better I agree and I think that was one thing that made BG2 really stand out amongs other RPGs. Even mass effect, which is arguably a very character and dialogue driven RPG, does not have this direct interaction with the party members, as BG2 did.

Nope, it doesn't have to mean that. 15 rather small dungeon levels could be much less than 3 very large levels. So the actual size/length of the whole dungeon is not really dependant on the number of levels. Well we are all referring to it as a "mega" dungeon so I suspect they will be rather large levels.....which is a good thing in my books. Give me levels that take two hours to explore....not all combat but a balance of all things. although I share the same enthusiasm, imagine having a 30 hour optional piece of content here...thats a hell of a lot more gametime than many other games have in their entirety. you just NEED to break up this huge piece of content into chucks that may be "consumed" in seperate sittings and you cannot simply lock players in to such a huge dungeon

Historically, plate-mail had several layers: a hell of padding, chain and then the plate on the exterior. After the padding, potentially, leather and chain, there would be absolutely no reason why the plate would need to fit breasts as they -- for the overwhelmingly vast majority of instances -- wouldn't make a difference. I think the bigger question is, had anyone EVER though of the problem of breast size inside full plate armor? I mean, has a woman ever worn a plate mail in the middle ages? I dont think armor smiths really considered that, so I dont think they made plate mail that was comfortable to wear for females. And of course you are right, you had several layers of clothing under the plate, so most likely your breasts were already "pressed flat" - which I think would be quite uncomfortable in general, nevermind the plate

Agreed, but afaik there were games, that disabled the QA cheats in the game release later on. Most devs dont bother with that but it seems some do for whatever reason. To all nay-sayers: If people WANT TO cheat, they will find a way...either via hex editing, save game manipulating or other stuff...it does not affect you what others do with their own saves.

I find this is not a good comparison, although your point is a good one. In the underdark, you were basically chasing irenicus, that was a very strong linear tie to the story of the game, you had some sense of urgency there but most importantly: you still had time to rest and sell stuff, you even had the drow city which was more of a sanctuary than the rest of the underdark (although nowhere near as safe as athkatla) My point is, even though you were trapped, you had more or less the possibility to replenish your resources. If this would be implemented in some way to the megadungeon, that may be OK. But still you would need points of escape, as there are surely people that do not want to play this dungeon the whole way through (or may not be able to, due to balancing). So you need to break it up. Very true

I sympathize with OP on that one, had thoughs about this myself I imagined the Mega Dungeon would be like the Watchers Keep in BG2:ToB. It had 5 levels with an own theme on each level, which were quite expansive, yielded nice rewards and took some time to explore. Personally, I think the design descision behind this dungeon was similar than the watchers keep, and I also think Obsidian did not really hope for more than 5-6 levels of this. (at first) But now the dungeon is 15 levels deep and I would find it pretty lame if they just cut the individual size of each level in order to have more of them - but I also dont think that is what they had in mind. So I guess they would LIKE to make a really big dungeon, but I am just not sure they can do it and keep in interesting for 15 levels. On the other hand - Baldurs gate 2 was also developed in about 18 months (if I can trust the Wikipedia on this), so I GUESS its possible to create that stuff in a reasonable amount of time, if enough people are involved...and you should be able to involve enough people with 4 million dollars... Still, I am worried about the fact that they want to deliver upon their promises, but it becomes quantity above quality, which would be a real shame... (goes for the whole project, not just the megadungeon)

Basically, this stuff here is a pretty pointless discussion. I did not see the things on the stream but I can imagine pretty well what was said. I guess some of these were not appropriate...but as seen in this thread, if someone defends obsidian against such comments - he is accused of white knighting. So...what should you do, ignore that stuff? I dont think that makes it better, just being OK with random people harassing the **** out of others can not be the answer. Therefore, it doenst matter WHAT you do or say, someone will tell you that you should not do it - so the whole discussion about this harassing stuff is simply useless