Lephys

And stating "some people like beards" is not the same thing as saying "everyone likes beards." Besides, we're talking about fictional "people" here. Dwarves, as a non-human race, do not exist. Thus, Dwarves might find bearded women attractive. Thus, the simple fact that you don't, or even the possibility that ALL humans don't, doesn't mean they can't have beards because they've gotta look like what real-life human players would want to bang. That's kind of the whole point. If you make lizard people, they probably aren't attractive. Should we give them smooth skin that's peach-colored, instead of scales, so that they'll be attractive? Nope. Also, I've never met a murderer, so I'll just assume no one wants to murder anyone. Thanks for the lesson in logic! 8D!

Why not just a "you automatically heal back to full after each combat encounter" mod? Seems to cut out the middle man. And, while I understand that desire, I just think it leads to bad places. I mean, how 'bout just a "teleport anywhere" mod, so we're never confined by some plotline cave collapse or something? Or a "bring all the companions instead of just 6 with you" mod, so we're not constrained by silly limitations. *shrug*. I just think limitations are in for a reason, and some of these sentiments come across as "limitations are bad." Every time a limitation is being discussed, someone just comes in with "Luckily, someone'll mod around this."

IT's A DRAGON! That's like saying 'You should totally warn people that necromancer has undead followers!, 'you should totally warn people a giant will do massive damage' or 'you should totally warn people a banana is yellow!' Okay, clearly a misunderstanding here. Totally valid, because, in just text, the meaning could go either way. All I meant was "you, the player, should know that, because it's a dragon." Not "You should have that information because the game forcibly crammed it into your head somewhere." I'm 99.9% sure you read it as the 2nd one. And yeah, if I meant that, I'd be crazy. Granted, even if a dragon wasn't such a common creature in games and lore, something like that should still come up in the game world, because it should be common enough knowledge. Some town got attacked by a dragon, and it burned to the ground. Clearly fire is involved when dragons are. Someone doesn't have to explain that to you or anything, and you don't really have to go out of your way to learn it. Anywho, I also just wanted to point out that Josh kind of hit another nail on the head regarding suckerpunches: the ability to react to it in a significant way. If it's just "Oh, you weren't prepared enough to prevent this all together, so it's happened, and that's that... you're all dead," that just sucks. Because, what are you going to do? Try again. Or never play the game again. One or the other. But, if it's "Okay, this is really, really bad at the moment, but you can probably slowly climb your way out of this metaphorical pit and salvage the situation if you're clever and adaptive, even if you didn't know about this before," then it's STILL not easy. The creature's still a menace, and there's still a chance you'll become horribly dead-ed. It's just not "rock beats your scissors, RESTART!"

Nah, it was intentional exaggerative sarcasm, to make the point. I fear you've misinterpreted my exaggeration. The point is, what are you really losing if the game gets "dumbed down" or "caters to noobs"? Are you sure mine was the only exaggeration here? Will it really be THAT bad if the game never forces you to control your party in a bunch of crazily narrow passageways? Methinks not. I understand that you had no problem with that, and feel people should be capable of adapting to it. But, that's really the same argument that could be made with a lot of stuff. "In Battlefield 4, you should just learn to fly jets with your keyboard and mouse, instead of a joystick!" It's almost that level of thinking, because, it's not like some places in PoE aren't still going to give you less room to move around in, and require noobs to adapt or suffer. They're just raising the floor a bit, is all, not eliminating tactical space management from the game.

The hard-counter? Prisms. "Ha-HAH! Which laser dot shall your cat-arang track, NOW, fiend?! *smirk*" Or, instead of tanglefoot bags, you just have bags full of catnip that you peg people with, converting the cat-arang's single-hit damage to a damage-over-time attack.

I missed that, too! It's EXCELLENT! *has an excite*

DA2 almost did this, in the form of enemies drinking potions, and random groups of 15 enemies spawning out of the ceiling itself once you killed enough of the previous wave, or downed a powerful enough foe, etc. I gotta say, the whole spells idea is quite creative, and technically interesting in isolation, but enemies getting to essentially reload quicksaves or alter time to that extent is going to be 99% annoying and 1% cool.

If it makes sense for the environment then ok, sure, no problemo. But if you're actually designing every part of the game to cater to people who aren't savvy enough to split their party up at times, I'm disappointed. Because if constrictively-narrow passageways are out, then the game is devoid of tactics, and splitting your party up and/or scouting with your Rogue yields absolutely no significant benefits anymore, and also is impossible. *nod*

Welp... thanks to Volourn, the sheer existence of subjectivity has been called into question. I'm honestly not sure what to say. "Dude, flies eat poop, therefore poop is delicious! It's not like it can JUST be delicious to flies but be disgusting to other creatures/people. u_u"

Yeah, I don't think it's a gimmick, or doesn't mean anything. It's a funding goal. I think some people are assuming that all the stretch goals aren't basically just "here's what we can and will do if we reach this money amount." And with this one, they specifically stated, in that quote in the OP, that they will use every dollar between 3.5mil and 4-mil to enhance the game. Sure, the goal was set at 4mil. That's like saying "We figure that, to improve all the things we'd like by a significant notch, we'll need $500,000 more. So, from this point on, money goes toward raising the ceiling for existing game components, rather than adding new ones, and if we hit 4mil, we'll have raised the ceiling on pretty much everything across the board." That's all it is. Were there 20 weapon types? Now there are more than that! Maybe there'll be more quests in each area, and/or more involved quests, etc. That sort of thing. Every area of the project gets a bonus, pretty much, is what it means. At 4 million. Instead of saying "New goal is 3.6mil, and we'll improve some stuff! At 3.7mil, we'll improve MORE stuff!" and so on, they just went ahead and set it at 4mil. It's not really necessary to pretend it's a meaningless or nonsensical goal, just because it's not some very specific, tangible thing. How can you measure any of the stretch goals, for that matter? How do you know there wasn't already going to be a stronghold in the game, and they just CLAIMED there wasn't so you'd give them more money in order to "guarantee" its existence? You don't. We just have to take their word for it that they actually spent that extra money, in the budget, on paying people and using resources to implement a stronghold. OR paranoidly be super suspicious of them. Heh... Come to think of it... how do we know Obsidian didn't just have 5 million dollars lying around with which to make a game, and they just launched a Kickstarter project in order to get as much money as they could up-front? o_o!!!

So as long as the platemail bikinis cover the entire arse, we're golden? Got it. (I jest... Your point is good, )

I think it'd be interesting to see places (at least in natural corridors) where the passage narrows a good bit, even if the overall passage is generally a bit more party-accommodating. Of course, in man-made corridors, you already have chokepoints in the form of doors and such. But, I think chokepoints/bottlenecks can be nice, because, depending on your foe, they can be a blessing or a curse. However, it's definitely a lot nicer in a game like this to have generally broader passageways, even if realism might beg a higher frequency of narrower (one-by-one or two-by-two) ones.

Hey guys! I just heard that pink pokemon are apparently a lot tastier than sapient marshmallows! 8D! ... ... wait a minute... an epiphany is forming. Give me a few days for it to finish.

The obvious solution here is a 15-level, boring, Mega-Romance.

Fluff, I think what Tamerlane is saying to you is that the only thing having a non-finite "stash" is taking away is the necessity to decide what to take and what to leave whenever you come upon more loot than you can carry in a given outing (within the confines of the limited portion of the inventory system). Which, yes, it does. But, that's not the sole purpose of an inventory. In PoE, that limited inventory still exists, for each and every character. If Bob the Bard (I know there aren't bards... I just like alliteration in my example characters, is all) isn't carrying another Potion of Protection (okay, I like it in all my example names), he isn't going to be using one anytime soon. Those 1,000 such potions in your Infinite Stash don't mean much if you can't use them. Also, I'd just like to point out that the "if there's so much loot that we can't carry everything we come across with a finite inventory, then the game must be Skyrim" is false; all it takes is ONE extra, weighty/large/valuable item in each trip between loot-removal locations (merchants, or a physical stash at your stronghold or in town or something) to warrant not much more than an extra trip to come back and pick that up, solely because you couldn't carry it at the time. Just because there may only be a few things of value you'd need to come back for, instead of 1,000, doesn't mean the extra trip is any more fun or engaging or purposeful. Or there's the oft-used alternative: Encumbrance. "We won't stop you from taking that last shield you found. We're just going to make it REALLLLLY annoying to actually get anywhere afterwards." Which is also the opposite of fun (and pretty much doesn't significantly affect any aspect of gameplay at all, because you could always just chunk something back down when you enter combat so you're not slowed during combat, OR simply wait 'til you've cleared out the whole area before looting everything and trudging sluggishly back home.) Honestly, the most significant aspect of inventory limitation is that you can't access more than a certain amount of stuff at a time. That being said, I would actually recommend that they change it so that the Stash is only accessible in town, instead of also at all rest spots. I mean, I don't know exactly how spaced out/numerous rest spots will be, but they've gotta exist frequently enough for you to not die between them (for good design, anyway). So, the whole "you can't access this" penalty of the stash is a bit diminished if you can simply hike 3 minutes back to a campsite and just swap out anything you'd like to. Or, however far away it is, if there are 5 campsites throughout a 2-hour leg of dungeoneering, then you get 5 opportunities to access your stash (for example). That's the point I'm trying to make. The general frequency with which it will be accessible does quite diminish the whole point of its inaccessibility, methinks. But, who knows. The devs know all about the game's design, and I don't. I'm sure they're thinking about that. They didn't just draw this decision out of a hat, and are somehow forced to roll with it now and never tweak it. The fact remains that having 5 valuable things in every cave (example), and arbitrarily being forced to choose only 4 of them (does that enchanted shield disintegrate the second I leave the cave? Even though this cave is like 5 hours from my stronghold and I could just come right back, or send riders on horseback to retrieve it?) isn't fun. And the process of manually returning to make the trip isn't fun, either. In certain situations, yeah, it makes total sense and is significant to gameplay. If you sneak through a merchant's camp and steal some stuff while you're there, but can only carry so much, then you'd have to choose what to take, because, by the time you come back, they'd probably have broken camp and taken the rest of the stuff with them. But, if you slaughter everyone that would move any of the stuff, then you should be able to take whatever you want at that point. There's no point in being required to unimpededly return and collect the remainder of valuable goods in a second trip, as the only outcome is "you return and collect the rest of the goods."

Much truth! You could've just had her taunt a dragon, then barely escape its flamey breath by hiding behind a narrow column. That would've resulted in side burns.

... I see what you did there... ... "plane"... "high"...

Low level combat in D&D can feel that way. Early BG combat seemed like long intervals spent waiting for something to hit. One of the many reasons I somewhat despise round-based combat (in a cRPG -- in PnP, it's perfectly applicable). Even more so because the actions and the movement are completely out of sync. You can jog around for 3 whole seconds and re-position, but that fireball you targeted 2 seconds ago is going to hit where you targeted it 2 seconds ago. It's a little weird. It's like turn-based combat, with real-time movement. Almost... *shrug*. Some kind of round cooldown/metronome indicator would've been really nice. "Oh, actions are about to occur? Better select/target all my abilities NOW, instead of 2.5 seconds ago."

TBH, the beholder encounter sounds like a suckerpunch if for no other reason than you are forced to basically stumble into them by intended game-loadery. If it were a PnP campaign, you wouldn't be confronted with an "area transition," past which you couldn't see and couldn't scout with only one person. The DM wouldn't be all "No, your WHOLE party must RUSH into the next room, immediately, and cannot react to anything until they're standing in the presence of beholders, and have blatantly been spotted!" Sucker-punchery is much more about the execution, as someone already pointed out, than it is about some raw difficulty/treacherousness of a given creature or encounter. Meta-gaming (trial-and-error via saving/reloading) can be a way to figure out how to handle an encounter, but it should never be the way to do it. That goes for "you can technically, optionally, be forewarned about the presence and nature of these creatures if you happen to go talk to Bill the InfoSmith before you actually make your way to the creatures, even though he's not someone you just like run past on the way to them." As someone else pointed out, there are a lot of subtle ways to foreshadow things, without someone even just telling you about them: If something uses petrification, you can have broken bits of "statue-people" around, and or whole forms. Clues, if you will. You don't need to always know ahead of time exactly when and where you're going to face something deadly, but you need to either be able to find out general info about said deadly things (so that clues can allow you to ready yourself to some degree for what leaps upon you), and/or be able to adapt on the fly to a significant enough degree to take the fight from "This is REAL bad!" to "Okay, this is slightly less bad, and possibly manageable, though still really, really tricky, thanks to my usage of knowledge and skill as the player of this game." It's not really a specific recipe. You don't need to know that a dragon specifically has a fire breath attack, with a range of X feet, that deals X damage to everyone in the arc. You should know enough to think "okay, this thing's probably going to have some really damaging breath attack that's going to easily hit a lot of people, and I'm going to need to be ready to figure out how that works and avoid it or mitigate it somehow." Caution handles that. Not-being cautious and getting roasted isn't a suckerpunch. Basically, voluntary caution on the player's part should always have its place. Anything that completely screws you over (even if only in a way), and that only hindsight will allow you to affect in any significant way, is pretty crappy.

I understand that. It's not like I expect anyone to not be humanly impacted by a trend in the industry. However, in the end, it really doesn't produce any positive benefit at all to simply decide to associate the sheer label of "DLC" with "bad." The next time an awesome developer puts out totally legit additional content, distributes it digitally, and charges money for it, you've instantly got an unnecessary bias towards it, even though it's the thing you don't dislike and that you WANT all those other companies to do. That, and like with the "purposely cutting content to later release as DLC" thing... it kinda makes you painfully skeptical about this, even when it's legit. I mean, how does the company prove to you that this extra stuff they're releasing was never ever going to be in the original game, ever, and that it wasn't just intentionally held back? Don't get me wrong... I know sometimes it's blatantly obvious it was part of the original plan, and was purposefully held back on and released like a week later. But, when the opposite happens, how do they prove they DIDN'T think of this 5 months ago, and just intentionally didn't spend an extra month putting it into the game in the first place, JUST because they planned, from the get-go, to milk it for DLC munnies? It's just really a bad mindset to have that doesn't do anyone any good. There's a really fine line between "I should be wary of DLC" and "DLC is pretty much just cheap, money-grubbing stuff now." Be wary of it, by all means. But the difference is always thinking "this could be good and legit; I don't automatically hate this particular item, yet, just because it's DLC." The assumption never really accomplishes anything but hurting yourself. Because, if you simply judge on a case-by-case basis, you still avoid the crap DLC, but you don't end up negatively judging the devs who are doing things properly, and being all paranoid that they could've put something into the original game, or they just want extra money and it's probably not good quality (based on the actions and decisions of completely different developers/publishers). It's not so much that such assumptions are that bad or destructive. It's just that they really don't do anything beneficial, at all. So, I simply encourage people to walk the fine line, instead of taking the easy/tempting route of just associating something like DLC with badness, just because it's happened before many times.

You could say that interest in them so far has been... dwarfed... by the interest in the other races?

Know what weapon ghost bakers prefer? ... ... ... The boo-meringue!

It would be very interesting if the death of a main character actually still allowed for their soul to affect the ongoing story in a different (even if less significant) fashion. Basically, if it brought something to the table other than just-plain failure and the lack of a useful party member. Especially considering the soul lore.

Personally, I don't prefer the "overlay new quests and content directly into the midst of the original campaign" approach. It's not necessarily horrible or anything. But, if I had to choose, I'd go with the separattion/distinction between the spans of time during which each segment of the story is taking place. Even if lots of the places and people overlap, and the original campaign decisions end up affecting the state of the world in the expansion, etc. I just like it when it's clear-cut what has happened (or potentially happened) already, and what hasn't. I think it's a lot easier to make a cohesive and polished story that way.

Ahhh, Sanitarium... That game gave me nightmares, 'cause I played it when I was like 13.