Lephys

I'm not worried about it. I'm simply observing that, if the glow only indicates a "new" lootable corpse, then the player would immediately know which corpses he had checked. In other words, if the area-loot displayed is from 1 corpse or 1,000 corpses, once you looked at that set of loot, then left, some number of corpses would cease glowing, so you'd know which ones you had checked and which ones you hadn't. You wouldn't have to wonder "wait... was THAT guy within 3M or not? I mean, he looks REALLY close, but...". However, if they glow until you take all their stuff, then anyone who doesn't take all their stuff would potentially run into a problem. Sure, it might be a 5 second problem, but it's the principle of the thing. "Could there be a system in which that problem doesn't even exist, and would that be an easy system to implement in place of this one?" is hardly a silly question, I don't think. If it was "I don't even care how complex it is or how long it takes, but MAKE THAT PROBLEM GO AWAY!", then that would be silly. 8P

No, not really. There are certain things that are not needed. That is objectively discernable. That doesn't automatically state that only things that are strictly necessary should be in the game. But, I will say that having to maneuver your way around to each and every corpse, or pixel-hunt for items that your characters can plainly see (which is an even better example) are not objectively useful. The latter isn't even supportive of the game's design. "Your character has night-vision and 93 Perception, but to you, the player, this ground is simply dark and doesn't appear to have an item lying upon it." That's just plain silly. If someone enjoys pixel-hunting, that's fine. But that makes it neither a useful nor a cohesive part of the design. I realize that if you remove ALL of it, bad things happen. There are some foods that we might eat too much of. If we remove ALL food from our diet, we die. There's an awful lot of room between removing ALL of something, and none of it. Also, I think you misunderstood me, since my example was for the player to not have to pixel-hunt, and instead, for the finding of arrows to be determined by character-attribute-related checks. I apologize if I was unclear.

Not to get nitpicky with words here, but I'm genuinely curious: If the "specific number" varies from invocation to invocation, then that means you can have your phrase counter reach, say, 5, and have Invocation A require that 5, while Invocation B only requires 3 (for example). So, when you say casting an Invocation "zeroes out" the phrase counter, does it actually set "Phrase_Counter = 0"? Or does it "spend" X number of phrase counter points? In other words, if you're phrase counter is 5, and you cast an Invocation that requires 3PP (phrase points, we'll call them), then do you have 2 left over, and after one more phrase round, are able to cast another 3PP Invocation?

That's a reasonable concern. However, to that I would say: A) All the containers are hand-placed, so they can just never place them like that, since they know their own design of their own game. B) All corpses have "you didn't loot this yet" indicators on them, so you're pretty much going to know which corpses you've check and which ones you haven't. UNLESS they glow as long as they have stuff on them? In which case, it could still be a problem.

I'm pretty sure they start at Level 1. The general idea I read about in some official post was that you would get to control all of your companion's leveling decisions. So, even if they join on at level 5, they start "at level 1" (I'm pretty sure), then you click "level up" and go through the UI 4 times until they're level 5, picking all the stuff as you see fit.

The update with the poll was misleading, I'll admit. But, at the same time, it didn't seem to very clearly say "Yeah, everyone is totally all going to get everything on day 1! 8D!". It just seemed like it could've meant that. So, it might've been prudent for some people to say "So wait a minute, you're saying that everyone's going to get all their physical goods on March 26th?". Instead, everyone just passively assumed everything, and now are all the more upset because of it. If people had expected things 2 weeks late, they wouldn't be so disappointed right now. And people are still just funneling all their disappointment and frustration at Obsidian like the company's one big robotic entity. Even now, instead of just saying "they should've been clearer in that update," people are still projecting this "Urgh, they suck so badly at doing things right!" attitude, which is really quite crappy towards a group of people whom we know to be legitimately trying in all this. At least give them credit where credit is due, and none where it isn't.

Josh wrote such a great concept, it became self-aware and lives on in the internet! O_O

I wouldn't even call it a coincidence. I think it's just an incidence. "This dog and this other dog are both dogs... coincidence?! O_O"

Sure, but who's going to spread your reputation if no one's left alive?

Everyone remain calm. He's just kidney would never do such a thing. u_u

I think I found a new hobby. "What about that place? *points to castle*" "What?! HEAVENS no! That place is still mostly intact! We're looking for RUINS here, mate. RUINS!"

I didn't know all that. I mean, I knew they were thinking about opening a rift in timespace and sending the goods straight through to all the international folks, instantly, but they just couldn't pencil that into their schedules around all their WoW raids. 8P

Turns out they were aliens disguised as humans. One of their temples is a huge spacecraft, and you have to use it to stop other aliens from invading the world, disguised as demons. Crap... spoiler alert! 8S

Can he at least choose the curses via wishes?

You aren't mistaken. That's absolutely correct. I apologize if I seemed to be disputing that fact. To clarify what I'm trying to get at regarding counters being hard or soft: You can have an immunity to Lightning Damage, and that's a "hard counter" in the sense that there's no way to deal lightning damage to the person wielding that immunity without stripping that immunity. There's one way to deal with that immunity, if you want it gone. BUT, there are still other ways in which to deal with that person. Namely, deal other types of damage to them, or bind/incapacitate them until that immunity wears off, etc. When you get something like Immunity to Physical Damage, or Immunity to Negative Effects, you're stripping an awful lot of options away from the player in dealing with that. Even though there are still things you could do, the remaining options tend to undermine the design of the system, which was rife with all those options for you to robustly affect combat factors. The only effective choice, at a certain point, becomes stripping that immunity away, which is usually the work of one or two abilities that do expressly that. So then, this hugely tactical system is reduced to, essentially, rock paper scissors. They cast Rock? You cast Paper, or you lose. Etc. So, yeah, in a sense, the hardness of a counter (in terms of not necessarily how you can directly undo it, but in what options remain for dealing with it as a factor between you and combat victory) is kind of a smooth slider. You can have immunity to all damage for 5 seconds, and that won't be as "hard" of a thing to counter, because the need to remove that immunity will not be high. But, if it were for a minute, then that spell is giving the immune person free reign to do whatever they please, unless you undo that immunity. Thus, it is the Rock, and you must use Paper, or just play "flee that guy" for the next minute. Etc. I simply believe that this hardness/softness needs to be taken into account when designing these abilities, as it pertains to maintaining tactical play with clever counters. The list of counter options should ideally remain tactically complex, rather than super simple. You would almost never want a truly "hard" counter, with only one solution. That's a Legend of Zelda boss fight. "Dodge it until it gets its giant hand stuck on the wall, then hit its hand until its head falls down and opens up, then hit its brain with bombs." Etc. That would be preposterous in such a design. But, there also really aren't any of those, I don't think, in BG2. But there are some that are still beyond the oversimplification of countering threshold. Indeed. Methinks duration is the main issue behind this whole "Oh noes! pre-buffing!" issue, too. It's not that applying beneficial effects before combat is bad. But, the more bonuses you can infuse yourself with for the next 5 combats while you don't worry about them anymore, the less reactive those factors become in combat. Fire attacks? Oh, we've had fire immunity for the last 3 hours. No worries. I'll just cast it again if it wears off before the next fight, ^_^

Basically, you can go into stealth, then sneak up to the thing you're trying to loot, as quickly as you can. As long as you get to it before your detection circles fill in (yellow for alerted, then red for detected), you are undetected. You can pretty much steal anything in Dyrford this way. Only thing I haven't been able to "steal"-loot is the little wine/beer rack in the kitchen of the Dracogen Inn. Too many people around. Seems like maybe your proximity and/or others' facings should affect your detection speed. I think your Stealth skill affects it. If you have 1 Stealth, your circles will fill very quickly. If you have 10, they'll fill more slowly. I think...

... Why oh why do people keep getting the word "area" confused with the word "auto"? I mean, I know they both start with "a", and they're both 4-letter words, but... "Area" looting merely comments on where you loot. It does not suggest, infer, or imply that your choice of what to loot will suddenly be gone. The only legitimate concern I've seen for area-looting, as it is in PoE right now, is the "I don't know who had which items" one. And it's a pretty minor one, but still legitimate. There isn't really any reason NOT to know who the items came from. You can access 3 close-together corpses from the same place without mashing all their loot into the same ambiguous "here's what you can take" window.

I think this is how Wasteland 2 did it. You area looted anything within like... 10 or 15 meters of your party (there was a bit circle indicator around you when you went to loot something), so that, basically, you didn't have to jog around to each thing you wanted to loot (it was just understood that you were rummaging through the area). BUT, you still individually looted each corpse/container. You could simply access all of them from one spot. That might be a better way to do it, if they want to do area loot. And, while I agree with Nonek that we're losing a lot of the little details, I've got to say that the act of walking from too-far-away-to-loot-a-corpse to within-looting-range-of-that-corpse, manually, isn't really something I'm that worried about. The game already puts other stuff behind-the-scenes (like the party pooping, or traveling between areas), so I don't mind something like that being represented in such a manner. When you get to a certain point, you start breaking weird boundaries. Like, "Oh, there were two corpses right there, and I thought I looted both of them, but I couldn't click on one of them" when your character would easily know which one he'd looted and which he hadn't, but you're controlling his brain without his eyes. Or, if there was limited ammo in the game for bows, and you could retrieve unbroken arrows. I'd much rather it be some kind of Search roll than my manually jogging around, pixel-hunting for the arrows. My manual control of someone with amazing vision becomes nonsensical when they'd just consider that one act -- retrieve all the arrows I can find in this 10-foot area. *shrug*. There are certain "details" that don't really need to be in the player's hands.

That's not true! The first building you come to in Dyrford Village is a mill! 6_u

It you want to get technical, the currency you use in the game is cp (copper pieces), if I'm not mistaken. You can find other currencies when looting things, but they all automagically become transmuted into copper pieces when you pick them up (which is kind of a bummer, because it just adds minor "different regions use different coins worth different amounts! 8D!" flavor, and requires that you do some math to determine how much cp you're actually going to be picking up...). Kinda wish you just had different currencies on you, like in New Vegas. You could always trade them without having to go convert them somewhere, but different ones would be worth more or less, depending on who you were trading to (like NCR dollars, etc.).

The multiplayer in that is SO FUN! Especially with a friend. I hate that they took it out of Unity (it only has some other co-op mode). But, yeah, Black Flag is super fun, but gets old pretty fast. You become easily the best ship in the sea after about 10 hours or so. I heard rumors Ubisoft's working on another pirate/ship game based on the ship gameplay from Black Flag, but that it won't be an Assassin's Creed game. That could be cool, if the ship gameplay was taken much further, 8P

I won't be happy until there are 7 million pixels-per-millimeter of screen. Only when I need bionic eyes to see even 1% of the detail will I be satisfied with my graphics. u_u... Love the screens, though, . In playing the beta, I just keep stopping and thinking "WOW, the environments are SO detailed!" It's really hard to believe it's all just 2D in a lot of places, just looking at it.

See, you guys should've rowed out to the ship in rafts, and transported all the goods in yourselves. That, or jedi-mind-tricked the unioners. Rookie mistake! (Anyone who isn't understanding of such problems is just living in a fantasy world where one person is in control of all things, instead of some things being out of your hands.) I understand non-US folks being disappointed, and yeah, it sucks to not get your stuff on release day, when you think that you could've gotten it on day 1 if you bought it on Amazon or something. Disappointment in what ultimately is occurring is one thing. But, it's silly to harbor a bunch of resentment about it. "Damn those US backers! Obsidian planned this all from the start!" No one maliciously decided they didn't care about Europe. They don't have the power to will everything to happen with their minds. They have to actually rely on material things, machines, and people of the world to get things done. So, I'm not going to suggest people from Europe should just be happy and enjoy the fact that they'll be getting things a bit late. But, stop trying to attribute it to a lack of caring on Obsidian's part. If they didn't care, you'd be getting your stuff next year, or maybe even not-at-all.

It's not earth-shattering, but, it seems you can click on any "neutral" space in the inventory pane in the trade UI, and drag-scroll the whole thing up or down. However, that should not occur when you click and drag an item. It would make sense for it to still scroll if you drag an item, say, from the top character's inventory down to the bottom character's (to scroll downward), but it's backwards, because it's scrolling as if you're physically dragging the part of the inventory pane that you clicked on. It really only makes it difficult to move things between characters' personal inventories while in the merchant trade UI, but it seems to be a bug nonetheless.

Recettear is, indeed, a fun little game. Especially for $5 that I got it for. I just wish it were slightly more involved (and better explained -- what the hell is a "Near Pin"?! And why do people keep randomly popping hearts out of their faces when I sell them things? etc.). As some kind of mere stronghold component or something, though, Recettear's level of merchant gameplay could be pretty fun.