Malekith

Because for the other half of the backers Torment is the best IE game. Among the IE games Torment is the second most popular behind BG2. And even if i personaly love BG2 (behind Torment but i still love it), i have seen many posters here who didn't liked the rest of IE games and donated ONLY for the Torment part of the deal.

Think Fallout. you can bypass the final boss battle in three different ways. You can kill him, you can convinse him to suicide because you prove to him that his plan is flawed (but doing so requires 1. To pass various skill ckecks 2. To choose the correct dialogue options 3. To have proof of what you say, with said proof to be an item that you could had obtained in a completely separate area that again requires skill checks and it's completely optional. You cannot know that it's in any way importand and many players even if the obtained it they throw it away.) and you can also blow his whole base without even meeting him (but to do so requires a key that it was droped again in a completely separate area that the player may have not visited. And still requires the correct built to pass the skill check. I could argue that the combat path is the easier one and requires the least effort.

But then no one would see the point in reloading the game an x amount of time in order to figure out how to finish a very hard battle, if they can just click through some dialog and end up with the same result, that is just poor game design. I think you are wrong about that.Some people will enjoy the chalenge. And even the rest at some point in the second or third playthrough they will want to beat it at last. And you forget that the collapse/poison/whatever option won't be viable for all parties. In many cases you won't have the nessesery skills to avoid the combat.

Was waiting for someone to mention the items, yeah that would be a loss too but I still think that the xp should not be equal, also that would again be bribing the player, so we can't even expect that if we are to agree with Saywers philosophy. It's not bribing if it's equal to all options. Killing Firkraag via combat, poisoning his food, collapsing the cave etc. all should give the same XP as they are all ways to deal with the objective " stoping Firkraag". It doesn't matter that killing him in combat is more difficult (and more fun) than the other options. And killing him via poison should still net you the loot, though it should present some dialogue chalenge to convinse him to eat it. Collapsing the cave should not. Bribing is when the game has an option that is clearly superior to the others from a metagame point of view. Why should i stealth,bribe,poison etc if killing him gives more XP? That way even someone who don't enjoys combat he would be tempted to suffer through it because the devs bribed him with combat giving more benefits.

Again I will go back to Firkraag, you can let him live and that is the easier option, or you can (I'm gonna go full role playing mode here) kill him and stop him from committing any other evil acts. Another example is Dark Souls, do you think that people enjoy the multitude of death and repetitions they experience in the game because they like the fighting, no they enjoy the moments where they defeat the impossible boss, get a huge reward and make progress through the game, that is the same reason why people like impossible fights in IE games. Encourage the easy options, and the game will fail to reach IE standard let alone surpass it. As for Sawyer, why reward the player at all then, remove gold and xp altogether and just make checkpoints where the player gets levels and items. He will get to prove his philosophy with this game I guess, but I wish it was not so. I fell that if Obsidian fail in this game, that will be the end of any true IE successor. If BG2 gave you the option to colapse the cave traping Firkraag inside to stop him from committing any other evil acts, and gave you that 54000 XP just the same it would be a better game. Losing the red dragon scales and Carsomyr would be punishment enough. Plus you miss one of the cooler fights in the game.

I understand what you mean. I just disagree with many of your points.First of all, not all solutions will be viable for all the characters. If you bult your party so it can collapse the tunnel or sneak instead of fight you should be rewarded for that. Second, why should the harder path be rewarded more? From my point of view, if you face a dilema and your character's abilities open for you two paths to the objective, it's the easiest most efficient one that should be rewarded more. If you are idiot and go for the hard path you deserve to suffer. Third, and this is the words of Sawyer, gameplay should be fun in itself without the need from the dev to bribe you. If you enjoy combat over selecting a skill check, the act of combat should be reward enough for you without the need for Obsidian to pat you in the back and give you more XP.

Killing Firkraag was an objective in a quest and that was not my point, my point was that in P:E you could hire a dwarf to collapse the cave and kill him and that would give you the same xp as going in your self and pulling up you sleeves. Yes. How exactly is this bad? For me that would be a plus for the game.

You didn't have to kill Firkraag(the dragon in BG2), it was optional. As for the items, well that is the reason why we want to kill them, also that is purely a balancing issue. Not quest, objective. I believe most of the quests will have smaller objectives in them, most of them optional. Just imagine Windspear hills where the big quest would be to save the child, with killing Firkraag as a sub objective. But i could be wrong about that.

Reality?!? What? Anyways, those impossible fights are so sweet when you figure out how to win them, I would argue that they where a big (if not the biggest) part of the IE games. I still remember the Chimera fight at the ice temple in IWD2, or my first dragon in BG2. To tie in on this, why would you get the same amount of xp for doing something that is hard in this example a "hard fight" and for sneaking past the enemy. In my opinion that is just encouraging people to quit from those impossible fights, and go for an easier route. Two things. First, loot. Unique enemies will propably have unique/overpowered weapons. Second, the trully difficult enemies will propably be part of an objective, so they will give XP.

Then why not going into battle in her pajamas or even naked? Chainmail bikini is retarded period. Either the character is so superhero and above the rest of the world that he doesn't need any protection and he goes with his casual clothes, or he needs protection and wears armor.

Sure, but that doesn't mean the design should have weak points and be flawed on purpose. Unless if someone liked the IE systems precisly for the loopholes in the system. That is a valid opinion, but tough luck for you. Sawyer obviously wants his system to be solid, nonexploitable. If that is bad or good depends on the person. I don't care eitherway. I liked IE exploits, i would have liked it without exploits as well.

This is what most of us payed for. If they had promised a AAA cinematic game i wouldn't have donated a single $

But what I can't wrap my head around is, why remove/disable those kind of things, it's just taking away some of the freedom from the player. I mean no one is forcing you to play the game that way, but whit those changes they are forcing us in to their mold. I guess it's their game to make, but my opinion is that they really didn't like the mechanics of the IE games. The IE games were never meant to be played that way. That was no "freedom of the player", it was exploiting loopholes in the mechanics. Sawer designs a tighter system with no broken parts so the player cannot excpoit it. (not that it is sure he will succeed mind you, propably players would find other ways he didn't predict to break the game). But it is delusional to believe that the badly designed parts of the IE games were in fact consious desisions of the devs and were meant to be played that way. FFS, they are mostly the same devs!!!! If the didn't like the way their old games were played it means they never intended to be possible to play that way, and it was in fact mistaken in the design.

I don't know... I actualy like the highlighted parts.

Yes Viconia was my favourite NPC of all time But you could expand on her motives and also the influence she has on your journey. For example going on a specific quest because of what she needs and promises you. The only way i would like something like this is if the only way to romance her was for you to become more evil and no "turn her to the path of virtue" bull****. NPCs should have their own personalities and they are not only to make you feel good about yourself. If she is evil, she should stay evil and either you follow her to the dark path or you form a relationship that because of ideological diferences it goes nowhere and concludes in tragedy where she abandons you and she joins a diferent side. Maybe you are forced to kill her. But in Avellone i trust that he won' disapoint me in that front.

Farcry 3 and Outlast had nudity and managed to say under the rating. Hell, Farcry 3 had a nude sex scene so unless the actually show penetration there should be no reason to give them the A. That's why Bioware went with an anime style in DA2. They were planing ahead to make DA3 full hentai

An female elf criminal with extreme racism and hate towards humans. Torturer,child killer, slaver. And then have Avellone flesh her tragic past where her family was killed when she was young and she was taken as a slave, suffering inhuman conditions before she was raped, beaten within an inch of her life and was left for dead. And make the one who did these to her a friendly to the player NPC, where the player has interest to side with, and that he has an unblemished reputation among the citizens so killing him should give negative reputation among them. Similar, killing her should give negative reputation among the Orlan tribes that shelter her.

Game propably will play similar to the IE games. You will have 2 bars. Health and stamina. Let's say 100 HP, 100 ST. On a per encounter basis, ST is identical to IE health.It can even be healed or regenarated. Each hit does damage on both. Let's say 4:1 ratio. So when your character loses all his 100 stamina, he will have lost 25 health. When a character's stamina reaches 0, he drops unconsious. Think of it as dying in IE games. If all your characters fall unconsious, you lose. The difference is that when the battle ends, unconsious characters get up instead of you resurrecting them. Think of it as auto-resurection. Only now your character has 100 ST but only 75 health. There is no way to restore health. In the next battle you "die" again. When you come back you will have 100 ST, 40 HP. At some point, you will have 100 ST, but >25 HP. At that point, you need to find a place to rest or the next battle may be the last for that character. If health reaches 0, your character permadies if you play on expert or with permadeath enabled, or he becomes "maimed" if permadeath is disabled. Maimed will return the character with 1 point of health so he will drop in one hit in the battle until you go to rest. Rest is the only think that restores health, but you can rest only in special places.

A 2D, isometric, text heavy Obsidian game with IE gameplay. Dream game.

The longer the enviro artist one is open the less areas we get in the game. Depends on how Many areas are planned and other stuff. So, I don't really think that's as simple. Let's say the position doesn't fill for a month. That's one months worth of environment art that the game doesn't get whether that be props, inyeriors or areas. Or use the hipothetical artist's salary to pay another artist more in order to work additional hours, or delay the product one month etc. I don't say that don't finding soon is a good thing, but there are ways to deal with it.

What update was that?

To be honest i prefered PS:T music, but i undertand where you come from. IWD is my second favorite.

Who has the Arcanum license presently anyway? Heh...Maybe Kickstarters success shines some light on a sequel being funded? Ah well.. one can dream Don't hold your breath. Activision has it

NO! Let Fallout rot in hell Behtesda's incompetent hands for all i care. The first two are among my favorite games, but that is too much. Just have Tim Cain make a new Sci-Fi isometric turn based RPG in the same style as Fallout/Arcanum and we are set.