Solviulnir the Soulbinder

Yeah, I'm f****** terrified of grass and leaves, I want PE to be a desert simulator. And don't even think of including clothes that are of green colour. Dude seriously, are you going to shat your pants seeing an isometric spider? This is beyond me. I'd be quite scared to touch a big, hairy, venomous, real spider... but even my younger sister laughs at spiders in skyrim, maybe because she realises that they're *virtual* i.e. *not*real* i.e. *harmless*! In fact, I've read somewhere that games actually helped many people get over their phobias. Including, inter alia, agoraphobia and arachnophobia. Grow up, man up.

One thing I hate about many villains up to date is that player character usually meets/sees them them within 5 minutes from the beginning of the game. I'd much rather prefer at least one key villain in PE to be kind of a more mysterious figure, power behind the throne, who is for the large part of the quest known only through his/her evil yet extremely intelligent deeds/actions. And he/she doesn't even need to be 10 feet high monster with Sarevok looks, it very well could be an ordinary looking person with an extraordinary (evil) mind. Villainy is not or should not imho be only about black armour, red glowing eyes or electronically modulated voice. Though, I'm sure, there's plenty of place in PE for this kind of evil as well. Which is also qood, I guess.

I like Grotesque's idea of race specific armours. It makes sense that an elf/human would not fit in dwarven armour, or the other way around BUT to make this kind of mechanic a bit more flexible (so as to avoid situations like the one with pink Krogan armour), maybe you could ask a blacksmith to scrap some parts (shoulder pads, breast plates etc.) of the armour that won't fit you to make either a new, larger or smaller armour or to upgrade/repair your current one.

You're on the right track good sir. That last one, with a proper texture would look cool. Have you tried texturing your meshes yet? Just keep it up and maybe one day you'll be another Steven Stahlberg

I'm all for hand drawn portraits rather than 3d renders or animated heads (a'la Starcraft). Pre drawn portraits have their pros and cons though. If one of the predefined character looks happens to suit your vision it's awesome, mainly because it it more expressive and coherent than those created with in-game face generators (like in Mass Effect). The down side is when you have too few pre drawn portraits to choose from and none of them is looking like you want it to look. It would be cool to have a hybrid system which would involve pre drawn portraits but allow, with the use of layers maybe, for the change of facial features or clothes/armour... Maybe something like the tools that police uses - you want your knight to have an eye-patch, click and you have it. That way we could have good looking painterly portraits and some flexibility in customizing them. Naesh's idea of having multiple portraits for poisoned or bleeding characters is cool. As is the one with the emotional statuses. Btw. couldn't help it (BGEE is still not here) and installed my BG1 couple of days ago. I took a stab at creating my own character portrait from a photoref. I sure hope PE will have an option to import character images. Her name's An Yi, she's a thief/assassin, former Zhentarim.

Hmm, "We"? May I ask what exactly is the point of having that possibility? Am I correct to think that what you are saying is "We" don't want any restrictions whatsoever, not even INT ones... *but* minimum STR would still be required to put on a specific piece of armour? Well, isn't that a restriction? 99yo wizard with high strength (brawny wizards, sexy) wearing full plate? Why would "we" want that? Technically speaking one can eat soup with a fork, that's certainly an option, but is it really useful? Another natural step after lifting all restrictions on armour/weapon use would be to make one - universal - character class, some kind of multiclass fighter/mage/assassin, who would be able to use any weapon or piece of armour. Don't get me wrong, there are some good points in what you're saying. It's just I don't quite agree that me or any average "keyboard warrior" would know how to correctly put on (not to mention walk in or use in any other way) a typical combat full plate armour or any other piece of medieval armour more complicated than a chainmail. You'd need to know how to use it, you'd need to know all the ins and outs just to walk with all that iron/steel on your body. One would need to *specialise*. Those were slightly less ergonomic than your typical IIIA combat vest. Take a look at EOD protective suits... and imagine a wizard wearing it on a battlefield. Restrictions, whether attribute or class related, are not always a bad thing. They help to maintain realism at a reasonable level at least. And prevent weird things from happening, like archers in full plates. While I'm not a huge fan of games which impose significant limitations on your character or have overcomplicated mechanics that take all the fun and balance away I'd still like PE to stay somewhat true to it's IE predecessors. Heh, guess I'm complaining too much. Thanks for the update.

Don't forget that there are many kinds of two handed swords and their use requires specific techniques... I don't think that wielding a typical zweihander would require a large dose of finesse from a person using it. I think it would most likely be a tall and strong fighter, wearing heavy armour (to make up for the lack of shield maybe), who most likely focuses on successfully landing as many devastating blows as possible in order to physically damage the opponents armour, or at least stun/immobilize him. Fighting with a nodachi on the other hand, would certainly involve a greater dose of finesse, fluence and speed - thus imposing some restrictions on the use of certain heavy armours. Person using such weapon would most likely focus on hitting vital organs, in order to quickly incapacitate the opponent, going for less protected parts of the his body (armour joints and gaps, arteries, neck, eyes, or cut off or knock a weapon off enemy's hands.) I think that this relationship/synergy i.e. between the weapon used and an appropriate armour best suited to use with it, would be nice to explore... But then again, maybe I'm entirely wrong... I'm not really an expert when it comes to mediaeval weaponry. edit: Very nice artworks in your portfolio Merlkir.

@temporalTemptation - while I can see your point and agree with you to some extent, imho there's really no need to get all scientific about skewed geography. Fantasy setting is not *only* about magic but about magic *as well*. When you look at PE map you can see a pretty vast scrap of land, a continent almost. There are many regions on Earth where (within the same country actually) you can have permanent snow cover in the mountains and sand dunes on the deserts near the sea or ocean. I agree though that such variety in geophysical conditions within an area of a couple of square miles/kilometres would be rather unnatural even in a fantasy world.

Geography in fantasy (!) games/books/movies can be all sorts of weird, what's important is to have a plausible story to back it up. It would be cool for example to have a river which flow is reversed by some kind of magical mishap. Variety is another issue... Looking at PE map, majority of the continent is covered by forests, but I'm still hoping to see a little bit of desert with one or two oases. In general though, I don't really care about realistic geography.

Am I the only one who doesn't mind playing IE games in their native resolutions? Ad rem: times change, in the present day games that have 7-10GB don't raise any eyebrows. Some of them pack more than 15GB... Hell, even patches today have greater volume than BG1 and BG2 taken together. Terabyte hard drives are nothing unusual and their capacity will grow every year. Having said that, and bearing in mind that the compression algorithms for both 2d images and 3d asset files are slightly more efficient than those used circa 10 years ago, I'd say that demanding from developers to create a *huge* game and fit it on one CD is... well... I'm cool with PE being distributed on 2 Blue-Rays. That way at least I'm sure that the developers aren't forced to cut any content from the game. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for space-efficient development and it would be awesome if Obsidian made PE as lightweight as Kkrieger for example. But let's face it, it will most probably not be a small game (which is good). As for future-proofing the game, I just hope that Obsidian's backup files of PE source code/assets are better secured in the future than those of Black Isle's for their BG games.

@ Luridis - yes, I think you're right. Sorry for the rant.

Kingdom of Heaven anyone?

There's really no point in arguing why Obsidian picked this engine and not the other. It's not like they're nooblet developers who decide on choosing their tools by a way of lottery. They are pros and i'm quite sure they put a lot of effort to select development environment that will suit their needs and deliver results that we will all be satisfied with. Besides, I heard somewhere that a true artist can make a masterpiece by painting with his finger dipped in ink. I'm sure that Obsidian, should they make such decision, could as well build PE with Quake 2 engine and it would still blast our asses off... As long as it ends up as a good and enjoyable game, who cares whether it's running on Source, Infinity or Unity?

Speaking of UI, I was wondering whether it would be possible for Obsidian to use BG like fonts, both in menus and in dialog windows... They added so much character to the game without compromising the legibility (maybe apart of being a tad too small for some of the players), unlike the generic sans-serif often used in NWN. Just a small detail but makes a whole lot of difference.

Anims for critical hits in Infinity Engine games were pretty rad. I 'm thinking of those where you could see the enemy's limbs separate and fly all over the screen in the crimson mist of blood and bone fragments. One of the cons however was that it was only one animation assigned to all types of enemies, so after some time it became a bit boring. To some degree it was hilarious (afaik even a critical hit delivered with bare hands could have this effect on the enemy) and maybe a bit too gory. I'm not sure how the folks at Obsidian are planning to design PE's game mechanics/combat system (which heavily influences in-game animations, I guess) and whether or not they're going to utilise the concept of critical hits, but it would be lovely to see some finesse and juiciness not only in Player Character animations but also in those of the enemies. I'm thinking mainly of realistic slashing/piercing etc damage anims, maybe non-dissapearing arrows sticking out of bodies or fully penetrating vs. ricochetting crossbow bolts and Arquebus balls. Animations from Fallout come to my mind, to look no further...