Sylvanpyxie

I disagree. Holy Radiance is definitely better than Lay on Hands in a large scale AoE fight, where you need the entire party healed, but Lay on Hands has it's place as a single target heal for when the Front Liners have taken a lot of damage. It allows you to save your Priest spells for later encounters, meaning you can progress further before needing to rest for spells. Liberating Exhortation is good for the same thing - If a Front Liner gets stuck with poison or a similar DoT effect, it can be used to delay the damage until the end of the fight without wasting any Priest spells. It can also be used to temporarily remove crippling effects which will be extremely useful in certain fights. I've really enjoyed playing Paladin and I've found all their abilities to be quite useful.

I am eager to see more portraits in general. Specifically I cannot wait to see how all the different Godlike heads are represented, since their head selection is so varied.

Priest spells. I love Priest spells. Your party is poisoned? Suppress Afflictions. You're facing a Spider Queen and all her Spiderlings? Blessing, that's right, sexy defenses. Want to kill that Ogre super fast? You need yourself some Dire Blessing. Want that Ogre to stop killing you super fast? Might I suggest Despondent Blows, madam? Yes. I love Priest spells, even if I feel some of them might be a tad imbalanced.

You like the Earth and Death, yes? Could it be the problem you have with the Moon and Fire Godlike is that their mutation is less physical? I mean, Earth and Death both have very physical appearances... Moss/Horns and giant bone-like growths. Moon and Fire on the other hand are much more.... Ethereal, probably due to the nature of Moonlight and Fire. If they had a more tangible appearance do you think you'd like them better?

It may be that I simply haven't progressed towards harder fights yet... But I cleared out half of Dyrwood Crossing without resting. From the Wolf Pack along the southern border, up towards the Wurms and back down into Dyrwood Cave. I then cleared out 2 packs of spiders and the Spider Queen before finally resting up for the Ogre fight. Admittedly this was all on Normal, maybe when I crank myself up to Hard I'll find that I need to rest a lot more, but I'm currently having no major rest requirements. It could be I just got lucky in fights or maybe having the best weapons for the enemies in question helped me kill them a lot faster than normal. I don't know, but I am personally not having the issues that you keep talking about. (This was all with blessedly few bugs, I might add)

I also had a few issues with the Fighter when I first started testing. May I ask, are you keeping his passive modes active? is he receiving buffs from the BB Priest? and are you using the Priest's debuff abilities to lower the enemy damage? I've found that, using my Priest the best I can, I can keep my Fighter auto attacking on the front lines with little to no problems while my damage dealers mob up the more dangerous mobs. Personally, I like the fact that Melee classes appear to have more active abilities available, it makes them far less boring to me. But I've found that their active abilities are hardly essential to the everyday fights, in fact the only time I've ever had to use my Fighter's active abilities is against the Ogre and Spider Queen, so far.

I've experienced item loss on loading a save game. Loading into the upstairs of the Inn. Loading into Dyrford Crossing. Loading from Dyrford Crossing. I also lost a weapon when I ended combat with the Ogre. The pole arm I had been using disappeared the moment my paladin disengaged from combat. Also, the most annoying for me so far, I've had BB Wizard's grimoire disappear mere moments after starting a new game. I still don't know what triggers that one.

I admit, I struggled a bit with the combat when I first started playing the beta, but now that I've gotten the hang of the combat system I'm not having much trouble at all. I squish through Beetles and Lions with barely a break in my stride now. I dunno if it's just because I'm using the weapon types efficiently or what, but the only trouble I have now are related to game-play bugs. I'm actually planning to turn up the difficulty to hard later today.. Sure, I have the occasional fight where enemies get a load of lucky critical strikes, but I just don't see how you could be struggling quite as much as you say. Everyone's experience is different, but I really don't see much of a problem with the trash mobs.

Godlike. Are. Awesome.

New Godlike active racial - Unleash a swarm of bees from your head to damage nearby enemies.

Cast the invocation "If their Bones Sleep Still Under that Hill, None Can Say" while in a battle with Beetles. It summoned a whopping 9 skeletons instead of just 3 and shortly after the game crashed. I am unsure as to how or why it happened.

Yes, the recent history of romances certainly does not inspire.

That's fair enough, but the entire "opposites attract" troupe is something I disagree with in certain video games. The environment that classic adventurers are in wouldn't exactly foster such a relationship. Player Characters are often dealing with major political story lines and life or death scenarios, if they are in disagreement with their party is it a much larger issue. Minor disagreements certainly wouldn't be a problem, but when you have a party full of religious fanatics and decide that you're going to defile a sacred temple to one of their Gods then poop will hit the fan. For the record, I have no problem with approaching romance from a different angle. There are just some things that I personally don't think will work in the environment of a Player Character.

Don't get me wrong, I understand wanting to shake things up a bit because the current format of romances doesn't really work. But... NPCs are supposed to be their own person. Is it really such a problem that they might not like you?

I'll probably be playing Paladin or Rogue on my first game. Then I'll pick up a party depending on the companions Obsidian have put into the game. I like a little bit of diversity among the personalities so I'll pick up a couple of friendlies and a few headstrong rivals for my character to butt heads with. I might use the Adventurer's Hall thingy at some point, build a more personal party. But it will take a lot of runs before I do that.

No, Jade Empire certainly doesn't make an effort to shaft Non-Romancers. However, having played the game as a Male and Female character, it certainly does feel the need to constantly remind you that romance is certainly an option if you want it. Don't get me wrong, I love Jade Empire and I love its characters. I'm not even particularly against the idea of romance in video games, but it can be so overbearing sometimes that I just begin to feel so.... Violated.

There's that game again... Are they though? This is an actual question... I understand that romances these days tend to consist of romantic dialogue, something that no Non-Romancer should be interested in certainly, but how much content do they get in comparison? Look at Jacob Taylor in Mass Effect 2. I haven't particularly taken the time to count the lines, but the amount of dialogue a Player receives for simply romancing him is un-freaking-believable. It is almost double the dialogue content than you get if you remain strictly friends with him. The same can be said of Subject Zero, Jack, from the same game. Do you know how much dialogue you get with Alistair in Dragon Age Origins if you romance him? Almost double. The only game Bioware haven't effectively shafted a Non-Romancing Player Character, to my personal knowledge, is in Hordes of the Underdark. And before anyone jumps on the Bioware Bile Band-Wagon. Obsidian also did this in Neverwinter Nights 2, the Original Campaign AND Mask of the Betrayer, though it was definitely to a far lesser degree than Bioware. Yes, it's purely "romantic" dialogue and it's perfectly optional. But "optional" doesn't necessarily make it okay. /Opinions.

Playing as a Female Character through the Baldur's Gate franchise offered me a single option for romantic pursuit - Anomen. Anomen. I'm going to let that sink in for a moment... The fact that the single character available for a Female Player Character in arguably one of the "Best Examples of Video Game Romance" is Anomen. Anomen... The living embodiment of an arrogant white knight cliché. If you think that Anomen is somehow better than any of the Bioware characters that came after, I'm going to have to laugh at you until my sides split open and my body explodes from the strain. Don't get me wrong here, Anomen is a very well written character. However, there is not a thing in the world that could convince me his existence is anything more than placation for Female Players. He is literally where Bioware's idiotic standard of romance started. He was the very first fan service romance they wrote. I'm not a lover of Bioware romances, but this idea that Baldur's Gate was the best they ever offered us is quite simply drivel to me. /Opinions.

Bards. Bars. Brothels. Bare-knuckle boxing.

Look, I love both ends of the Light/Dark spectrum as much as the next girl. Whether it's Happiness and Rainbows with a Sprinkling of Unicorn Tears or Personal, Global and Universal Damnation of Everything I Ever Loved. I love it all, but... Realistically speaking? Some stories don't work with a "Happy Ending" vibe. Just like other stories don't really mesh with the whole "World of Eternal Darkness and Desolation" thing that Neverwinter Nights 2 had going on... Endings can't just be plucked from thin air on a whim, they need to work... They need to fit. I was trying to replay Dragon Age Origins recently and one thing I notice through-out the entire game is the amount of emphasis on a Grey Warden's responsibilities during a Blight. The sacrifices they have to make. Almost all major NPCs at least off-handedly mention it; Duncan, Alistair, First Enchanter Irving, the Couslands and their men, Leliana... Heck, Wynne goes on about it almost non-stop, you practically have to gag her to make her stop preaching on about Warden sacrifice and the greater good. Well, you know what Wynne? I'm at the Lands Meet and I made exactly zero sacrifices up until this point. All my problems had solutions that ended in immediate happiness and rainbows so I don't know what you're going on abou- I HAVE TO DO WHAT?! Well, okay... Yeah, I-... I guess that's a right proper sacrifice isn't it? So, this is what all that foreshadowing was building up to? Well, I'm sorry it's come to this. Alistair, you're going to have to take one for the team...... JOKE! Magic fixes everything with an epic loophole out of the blue. And I do mean out of the blue. Because there has been no indication that such a loophole exists. No off-handed comments, no sly remarks, no background rumours or codex entries. Not a single thing in the game that somehow turns this Magical Loophole into a viable ending. So my Warden's "responsibility", my Warden's "great sacrifice" to end the Blight? That didn't happen. Thanks to magic, Anithae Amell got her happy ending. (At least for the immediate future) Speaking quite frankly, it irritated the **** out of me.... Not because it was a happy ending, but because it completely disregarded everything you had been told through-out the game and randomly dropped a solution into your lap from bloody nowhere. You cannot completely disregard the story that has been told just so you can shoe-horn a fan service ending into it, whether it's for blissful happiness or crushing despair. An ending can't just be created for the sake of it, it has to shift and change, it needs to evolve from the story. I have faith in the writers and I don't need them to create the ideal Happy/Sad endings, especially not at the expense of coherent story telling. I just want them to craft endings that make sense, endings that best suit their story. Edits: because spelling is hard at 1am. Who knew?

Dragon's Eye: "Oh, I see you just killed a pack of 8 million Yuan-ti, I suppose you want to rest now.... " Me: "Yes, that would be great thanks, I'll set myself up in this corner and just save befo-" Dragon's Eye: "Oh no, I can't let you do that. You'll need to go back upstairs." Me: ".....What?" Dragon's Eye: "Yes, back up the stairs and half way through the previous floor." Me: "But, I don't understand... This is a perfectly fine pla-" Dragon's Eye: "Oh no, it's much too dangerous. You'll have to go back to those adventurers, they'll make sure you're safe." Me: "Those adventurers that nearly got me killed earlier...?" Dragon's Eye: "Yes, those adventurers." Me: "I don't understand, I've been resting just fine the entire game, why can't I ju-" Dragon's Eye: "NO! IT'S TOO DANGEROUS, I CAN'T LET YOU." Me: "But, I've been protecting myself just fine. Look, I still have some summoning spells lef-" Dragon's Eye: "NO, I CAN'T HEAR YOUR LOGIC. LA LA LA LA." Me: "FOR CHRIST SAKE, WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?!" Dragon's Eye: "You can shout all you like, you still have to go back upstairs." Me: "Sigh.... Fine, I'll go back upstairs." Twenty Minutes Later. Dragon's Eye: "Oh wow, you don't have any arrows left... That's gotta suck."

Environments are stunning. Genuinely stunning.

I.... I don't know. Neverwinter Nights had some god awful followers in their original campaigns, but then they also had expansions like Hordes of the Underdark and Mask of the Betrayer, which introduced better writing and far more interesting character designs. Mask of the Betrayer probably has one of my favourite cast of characters to date... All incredibly unique with fantastic dialogue to boot... But then, Planescape has an incredible cast of unique characters and fantastic dialogue as well.... I don-... just... *Falls over*

For me, Icewind Dale falls short on a lot of things, but I genuinely believe it's the IE Game with the greatest atmosphere and the deepest sense of feeling. Planescape has good atmosphere, but I can never decide if I'm just feeling overwhelmed by the unique setting of the game. Baldur's Gate has great story, but in all honesty the overall feel of the game felt incredibly samey... 'Course, that's just me.

While I'm not against it, I firmly believe that New Game+ should not "unlock" any particular extras, neither in terms of story or gear. It's all well and good to have the experience of your previous character carry over, but if I've played through a game that has only half the available content and then have to replay it in order to get the full story telling experience... Well, I'm going to be very, very, unhappy.