Kore

Yeah, you know what, I think I will. The biggest problem I have with RPGs is that I spend too long "learning" the game before I dive in, so If I go ahead with a disposable character I can just create a generic fighter and have fun until I die and then I can do something more creative when I understand more about the game.

I would want it only on the hardest difficulty option. I can play BG on insane mode standing on my head just by playing the encounters I know I can do. Even if I try to play against enemies that I'm unsure of some are way too hard and some are still too easy. If I'm playing on insane mode I want every fight to be just on the edge of my ability so that it's a real challenge. Level scaling works perfectly for that. Other than that I'm not too keen on it, but wouldn't mind it for some crit path encounters. No one wants to be stuck on Brynnlaw at level 8, not having realised that they have to fight Irenicus soon.

Is that fact, or speculation? If it's a fact, it's disappointing. Not what i'd classify as really huge, simply a big village or small town. Indeed. Athkatla is 8.5 maps (city gates doesn't really count) on the surface alone. Add to that the temple sewers level 1, temple sewers level 2, slums sewers, beholder lair 1, beholder lair 2, graveyard crypts, planar sphere 1, planar sphere 2, circus tent, Châteaux Irenicus as well as numerous lerge buildings with insides and you have something that is at least twice the size of a 5 map Defiance Bay. I'd hope that these cities also include these additional maps.

I disagree with this. You don't always start the game on the difficulty level that best suits you. Recently, while playing Diablo 3 I found the difficulty I started on too easy so I wanted to increase the difficulty, but it turned out that I couldn't because they had this restriction. Admittedly Diablo is never going to be the most difficult game, but it would be nice to make it non trivial.

Im a bit late to the party, but I thought I'd my thoughts here. For most difficulty settings I'm somewhere in the middle ground on this discussion and I think I'm happy with what Sawyer has suggested so far. However, thinking about the insane difficulties I actually think that level scaling here would be worthwhile. I can play Baldur's Gate on insane difficulty on my head no problem, even playing IWD on Heart of Fury with a level 1 party is only super challenging for the first few fights. Insane should be challenging for every minor goblin fight, regardless of my level, so in this instance alone I think that level scaling is definitely a good thing.

I suppose. That is, if a game HAS to have Boss fights in the first place. It doesn't though, except for maybe the obligatory Big-Bad-Guy(s) at the end. And a good RPG doesn't even need that. I'd argue that the best way do things is sorta like how BG1 handled it. It had "bosses", but only because they were the last thing you faced in any given dungeon and the plotline named them as such. But that's it. The most memorable fights (and often times the toughest) in Bg1 were the enemy party battles. I'm hoping PoE goes that route instead of how Dragon Age 1 does it.... where a boss is a BOSS, with a big cinematic introduction and a giant orange health bar to advertise the fact this this enemy is a super-special-BOSS and therefore, get ready for a specifically designed 10 minute battle of attrition. I agree, the best fights in BG were the memorable ones and the most memorable ones were the enemy party fights. It's been too long since I played DA:O, but I more recently played DA2 and my biggest criticism of the combat in that game was that fights were too similar. Oh look another pack of bandits conveniently my level and not discernibly different from the other 10 bands I fought on the way here. The bosses were again very similar to these fights so ultimately there were few memorable or challenging fights. My hope of PoE is that fights are varied, that there are some fights that challenge me and some that are memorable. Whether these are bosses or not isn't important to me; bosses are a plot device, not a combat type.

What I really want are noob friendly, intuitive mod development tools and ways of easily sharing them on the site. Mods are now a massive part of the BG community, but writing them requires skills that most players don't have, or even if it is relatively easy it's not intuitive to get into. I would be very surprised if mods didn't become a big part of Eternity, so it would be great to embrace them from the word go. As a by product of this we would get all the wilderness areas and companions that a lot of people are craving due to mod authors creating them themselves. Sure a lot will be rubbish, but look at Gavin, Solaufein or a lot of other characters, they have become canon in a lot of mod users minds. For every crap mod there will be a great one, and the easier it is to make mods the more we will have to choose from. TL;DR I would do bad things to innocents for proper mod tool kit (It's worth pointing the NWN one was ok, but not intuitive to use)

Some just seem to act as though there shouldn't even ever be a reason TO reload in the first place. As if, ideally, no misfortune would ever occur, for any reason. Like "Oh, that person got hit... can't believe the devs would punish me by making me deal with less-than-full HP for the rest of the battle! RELOAD!". Or "Oh no, I got poisoned? Why should I have to deal with that status effect? AT LEAST I CAN RELOAD, even though I shouldn't have to. Negative things are BAD!"I don't see what makes any negative affects/results being in the game a good/okay thing if something like maiming is bad. SOMEthing has to happen when you hit 0HP. The realistic basis would be death. But, it's a game, so maybe that's too extreme, especially considering the amount of time and effort that went into writing all that character's reactivity and content for the entire narrative. So, cool, we abstractly assume that, so long as anyone was still alive to kill the remainder of the hostile entities, they gave basic enough medical attention to the "downed" people to at least stabilize them. Maiming. But wait, maiming is bad, too? Then what should happen when you hit 0HP? Nothing?That's what I don't get, Kore. What you said makes perfect sense. It's one thing to simply desire to reload and do better at that combat, almost as if it's a puzzle. Or for whatever reason, really. But, to act as though the very idea of some kind of negative factor to deal with for allowing a character to hit 0HP (something that's actively preventable) is astonishing or unacceptable... that boggles my mind. Sorry I didn't mean to argue that either maiming or perms death was bad. It was late last night so I didn't phrase it very eloquently. I was arguing against the concept that reloading is a bad thing. Reloading is good IMO. If I were to choose between perms death and maiming I would choose death because as I said I like to know that I successfully won that battle. Maiming allows weak willed me to go "oh well that's good enough I guess" and just accept the poorer result. I don't always have enough will power to force myself to reload if the consequence for failure is so low. I just reread what I said about permadeath last night and it doesn't really make sense so ignore that

I reload after a character dies because I haven't done the combat as well as I could have. I enjoy the challenge of developing my tactics until I get the goal that I'm aiming for. Personally if I never had to reload I'd be pretty pissed and for most of my playthroughs I don't want to be able to win every fight first time because that would be too easy, so maiming doesn't really interest me. I also don't want the consequences of failure being permanently gimping my party, so permadeath isn't something I'm interested in, unless I can reload.

It isn't in the poll, but I like it when magic mechanics are explained. I think the best example is The Force in Star Wars. The Force is governed by three umbrella schools and any force power is just the wielder using it slightly differently. There aren't specific spells, only ways that the user can think of for using the power, but due to their nature and teaching they manifest in similar ways.

i don't think that it would be that easy. for the infinity engine it was enough to just paint the areas and use a variety of color filters (lighting, collision, etc). PE uses different render outputs to determine such things, possibly a z-depth for lighting and real 3d collision boxes, walkmeshes and so on. if you want to create custom areas you have to build and render those within a 3d application. at least with the use of blender there's a powerful and free option available. That's a very good point. It does seem reasonable to my laymans perspective for Obsidian to produce a tileset of shape and textures though. Sure it's potentially not perfect, but it's better than nothing. Even if that isn't possible, judging by the number of recruitable characters available in the vanilla game, simple mods should easy to jump into as a complete noob so that characters can be created. They're going to the first mods I look for.

That's true, I don't know how much designing characters costs. Anywho, my main point is that I'd like the number of characters prioritised higher than currently seems to be the case. Overall I'm still very happy with what I've heard from Eternity so far, I don't want to be misunderstood about that

I agree. Also, on the subject of it costing time and money and at the risk of sounding rude and bad mannered, they did get 4 times their goal during the kick starter. If I am to class this game a success on the level of BG or other IE games it needs to have significant amounts of replayability, for me at least. NPCs are a big part of this and part of the thrill of replaying the game is working out who I want to take with me. If the pool is too small that become severely stunted after the first playthrough. I also agree with your point about the adventurers hall. Personally I would rather have more characters than extra levels of a mega dungeon if a choice has to be made. Edit: You know what, even if money is a problem, I'd happily throw a quid or two into a separate kickstarter to fund additional characters.

Obsidian would be missing a trick if they didn't make the mod tools simple enough for a modding noob to pick up and become comfortable enough with the basics to create a basic mod within an afternoon.

My biggest worry from this is the following: While the principle sounds great, I'm slightly worried that this will lead to fights being too similar. If every fight can be beaten using the same tactics then I'm not compelled to change my tactics for each encounter. This means fights can get repetitive and dull. I personally have no problem with reloading, at least it means I have to regularly rethink my tactics. I'm sure it could be done well so that this isn't a problem, but I'm still worried by it.

Narlen Darkwalk from the Thieves Guild in BG1 was tremendous. I love the unique way that he had for talking, and the writing he had wasn't too shabby. He was just fun, it made his quest chain twice as fun to do.

I'll be playing on hard mode, but I won't be too upset if I decide that I'd rather tune the difficulty down mid game. I enjoy the tactical challenge, but if it's distracting m from the story or tempting me to cheese I'll dial it down a bit; in my mind future playthroughs are for hard modes. I was considering expert mode, but I think that I'll simply turn off the various options that I don't want on instead. Thanks Prometheus for that quote.

I'd like the flexibility to choose whether a key is a global bind or bound only when a certain character is selected. I agree that what you're asking for is important.

Absolutely

I also think we should have super restrictive DRM, always online requirement and automatically posting our gameplay to facebook. On a serious note, I'm not sure what you thought I was referring to

I have to echo that I really appreciate the great variety of quests that are available straight out of the gates in BG2, it makes the game much more replayable. One thing that I hate about DAO is that it funnels you into the same lengthy quest/dungeon early on so that early replayability becomes a trudge rather than enjoyable. It's so dull having to earn my right to become a Grey Warden every sodding time. BG2 is actually guilty of this to some extent too as Chateaux Irenicus is a lengthy dungeon. I appreciate the fact that areas like the Air Plane are optional, but it still makes replays a bit of a slog. Personally I would make the mandatory portion of Chateaux Irenicus shorter and the optional portion longer. Note that I consider items that are powerful for a long while in the game like Helm of Balduran and Metaspell Amulet to be mandatory. I can't bring myself to skip them, but I can skip less powerful items like Sword of Chaos. That said, I appreciate that there can only be a limited number of quests in a game and one thing I dislike about BG2 is the lack of quests in the Underdark. I actually dislike that chapter of the game when I replay it because I always have to replay the same quest chain, the drow city stuff, every time. I'd rather have some of the early quest effort repurposed for this section and the mandatory quest chain in the Drow city reduced with exploration increased.

One thing I never really made use of in IE games, but made great use of in MMOs, was keybinding specific abilities. The problem I find with binding abilities in Baldur's Gate is that the effect of each key changes depending on which character is selected at that point in time. This prevents me from developing muscle memory as I can't depend on xyz happening when I hit specific keys. This makes it inefficient for me to use them since I have to check what the effect is before I hit it which means I might as well just click the ability instead. What I'd like in PE is the ability to hard bind a key/slot to always use the same ability for a specific character when pressed, regardless of which character is currently selected. For example I would like to have the ability to make the right most slot always show the icon for Magic Missile to be cast by Edwin and for it to always cast it when I hit the corresponding key. This means that if I want Edwin to cast Magic Missile that it only requires one key press and one click to achieve; rather than having to select Edwin, select the spell (this might take as many as three clicks itself) and then select the target I only have to hit the key and then select the target. This will make the most often used abilities more efficient to cast.

I like all of the changes that you suggest there. You make a good point about inefficiency in the UI, but since PE is based around a pause function I find that time moving the cursor isn't as big a factor as viewable battlefield especially considering that I actually usually select my party members by clicking on their sprite in the battlefield rather than their portrait. Viewable battle field is important because if I have to scroll the screen to view my party member my cursor will usually be 75-100% of the screen away anyway. One thing that comes to mind from this is that it would be great to hard bind keys and slots to certain abilities for a specific party member regardless of which character is selected. I'd like to always select "charge" for <tank name> if I hit 1, "magic missle" for <mage name> if I hit 2, etc.

Edit: Oh, Josh addressed these pretty much as I posted them. Awesome. I really appreciate the desire to keep it "authentic" IE style. It looks fantastic. One point I want to make though is that generally in a top down game I want my viewable game area to be as square as possible. Because of this, the area at the bottom of the screen is more valuable than the side of the screen. It would therefore be more logical to put as many UI elements on the side bar instead of at the bottom. I would move the portraits and options tabs to the right hand side and shrink the height of the bottom bar to achieve this. I also think that Zed below has some very good points and I agree with all of them.

Hell no. I loved Jaheria! She can boss me around all day