Lephys

... "at all," you say? How so?

In the amount of time it took to type that response, you could have simply pointed out to him what you believe he failed to comprehend. Seems a bit more constructive than using a small paragraph just to describe precisely how inadequate you believe his comprehension skills to be. *shrug*

Well, for what it's worth, the Bethesda engine (Fallout 3/NV, Oblivion, Skyrim) HATES the PS3. I think it was bad on 360, also, compared to PC. But, those games in particular were horrible on PS3. Dunno why.

So is holding a sword out at neck height as they neglectfully run into it. Or shoulder-checking them. It's a tad more efficient, too. It's a little silly, to be honest, for a game to say "Oh no! A guy's trying to charge your Mage! All hope is lost! Wait! Unless you can utilize the forces of the arcane to somehow conjure up some horrific status ailment upon that person!" Now, if he slices your Fighter's Achilles tendon, then charges your Mage... then yeah, it's up to you, Mage. But, there should be plenty of easier ways to stop someone who hasn't deliberately disabled some of your other party members in some fashion. A capable swordsman shouldn't have to resort to a foot chase just because someone doesn't want to stop and fight him.

Yeah, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. If the rain isn't baked into the environment, then it shouldn't be too crazy just to have it sometimes rain, and sometimes stop raining/not-be-raining in any given area. I know it's not the utmost priority or anything, but something that simple (just "sometimes it rains") would be a lot of bang for your buck, methinks.

Yeah, you wouldn't want those horses to be too stable Lephys? Is that you? Crap! My doppleganger! Just stop it! What did those dopples ever do to you?! T_T Splendid idea! That otter help things a bit. 8D

I really think that's an excellent strategy. It may have changed significantly enough by the time you get to it that things are a lot more bearable, maybe even a wee bit enjoyable, that were once grief-inducing. But, even if that's the final state, if you were to keep trying it every couple weeks, and the changes made were getting there, but weren't un-frustrating enough, you might kind of hit your frustration threshold and just say "to hell with it," and, at the very least, miss out on the enjoyment of the game prior to securing a bunch of mods/cheats that you felt you needed. Again, if you just plain can't stand it when it's done, then, by all means, cheat away. . And yeah, normally it'd be a "then don't buy it!" thing, but... well, when you funded it 2 years ago, it's a little different. 8P

Cannot a game be based upon more than a single thing?

I can't even take two weeks off in a whole year, ever, much less just for a game's release. 8P /jelous

. I'm dead serious, though. It just seems like "I'll just use unlimited resting" and other such things are just chipping away at the frustration, rather than cutting off its head. 8P

I guess that's where we disagree. Inherently having to do that isn't part of the fun, for me. Being able to do that? Very fun. I always play the mage, in whatever even remotely has something resembling a mage. So, it gets a little dumb when game after game hands you a nuke, but requires you to encase all your friends in lead and/or forcibly hold all the enemies in stasis for a while at a distance just to get to use the nuke without leveling a nearby city and/or killing your whole party. I'd rather just not have a nuke. Now, status changing things, I'm fine with. "Oh no, my enemies can't see because of all this fog, but neither can my friendlies!". But with "I'm gonna blow up that 10x10 space," it seems a bit short-sighted to have to have everyone work together to summon Captain Planet just to get one person's ability to be feasible to use, ever. It's not the end of the world. It's just observation.

For what it's worth, I'd give the finalized game's combat a chance before you resort to fully cheat-codin' your way through. I understand your situation, and I understand using some aid (mods, cheats, what have you) to circumvent extreme frustration, if need be, to get to experience the rest of the game. But, I'm with Quadrone, in that it does seem like you might be throwing your hands up at some aspects of the game just a bit prematurely. That's all.

Being able to kill things faster won't help you if your lack of protection has gotten you knocked out. I wouldn't call it simplistic - what other games have an armour system that asks you to make such a choice? This. Also, two factors are involved with the actual speed with which you kill something: frequency, and actual damage dealt. Attack speed is only one of those two things. If you do 1 damage every second, that doesn't help you actually kill anything any faster than dealing 10 damage every 5 seconds. As PJ said, they just need to do their damage-tuning pass on things. I second the "why isn't this just called Penetration" question, though. I mean, why not just call damage "Health/Endurance Depletion", or call healing "damage reversal"?

Why not just a skip-combat mod, then? God-mode plus instakill = what's the point in combat actually having to take place at that point? You can't die, they can't not-die... might as well skip to corpses lying around, and throw in auto-loot while you're at it. Story Mode, it could be called. Someone might be able to make that.

There's the problem right there. You're assuming I'm characterizing the way AoE spells work in the BB. I am not. I'm simply commenting on the general design of AoE spells in this entire genre of games, as it pertains to useful "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts" for PoE to follow. Specifying a certain way it should work is not the same thing as claiming it works nothing like that. So, no, I don't think you understood me "perfectly" well. Which is why I said so. That is not an insult. Just a matter-of-fact observation. I say that because text can take on almost any tone, depending on who's reading it, etc. Since this is simply a discussion of friendly-fire, and not limited to spells, I'll bring up traps, as well. I think, if this isn't already in, manually-sprung traps would be awesome, too. Maybe you plant some kind of mine or net trap or what-have-you, but it doesn't simply go off when stepped upon. So that, when some foes happen to cluster up around that, you could trip it to maximize the effectiveness of the trap. This adds a second element to the effective use of traps, beyond mere placement. I guess that's my point about AoE spells. There doesn't really seem to be a reason you shouldn't have some capability at your disposal to take advantage of the timing of spell releases/hits. As this has always been a troublesome thing in these games. "I want to hit 5 people with a fireball, but I can't very well predict exactly where they're going to step. But, by the time I see that they're grouping where I could effectively strike them, it'll take me too long to actually cast the spell." Thus, that's great that there are oodles of ways in which to hold foes in place while you get a casting off. But, there really should be some degree of opportunity for actually effectively casting an AoE spell on a bunch of foes without relying on something else forcing the spell to actually be greatly effective. If that happens in the BB, then splendid. If not, then I posit that it should. Also, I'm more referring to the circle-target AoEs. Which could, effectively, strike up to 7+ foes with ease, but it's extremely difficult in almost any game to ever actually do that without A) hitting lots of friendlies, or B) using other spells/abilities every single to to actually facilitate the proper placement of the enemies at the time the spell is actually released.

Might as well just cut out the middle man and use a mod that prevents anyone from ever collapsing or dying, ever.

That, and I don't think some people realize that the backer beta does not constitute the entirety of content/"stuff" that Obsidian has completed. There's plenty we're not seeing because it's not in the backer beta. I get the feeling some are thinking "How are they going to go from the backer beta to a finished game in TWO MONTHS?!" Sure, some of the systems might not be perfect before release, but I'm not really worried about content until I have reason to be. And system tweaking is a lot easier than content production. "Oops, attack speed for this list of abilities needs to be slower. These abilities' damage needs to change. This one needs an extra effect. There need to be fewer spiders here..." etc. It's not really earth-shattering workloads.

Judging from the incomplete game, yes, the complete game definitely looks lacking.

Inquisition has weather, but if it's raining somewhere, it's just raining there forever. The weather is eternal in Thedas, apparently.

Kinda seems like the whole idea behind a Barbarian ferociously tearing across the battlefield is that foes would find themselves unable to properly engage him in any meaningful way (kind of like a cavalry charge against footmen... kind of). Seems like Wild Sprint should completely ignore engagement. There should be some guaranteed damage or something, because you're just plowing through foes, so that the trade-off becomes "You're going to take some punishment in the process, but you can basically get yourself to wherever you want on the battlefield very quickly, without all the punishement you wouldn've taken had you just tried jogging there like a normal, non-barabaric person." *shrug*

Dangit, guys! We did it wrong! During the Kickstarter campaign... we shouldn't have been donating money. We should've just donated time! o_o Or DeLoreans.

I think that might actually have been the... case. 6_u

If x86 is your problem you could always "upgrade" to XP 64-bit edition. *snicker snicker*... (Don't do it... IT'S A TRAP!)

They could adjust that ambient volume in the mixing, sure... ORRRR they could edit the lore such that all crickets in the realm are the size of Great Danes. u_u Totally an option.

Just change the wood to a rich mahogany. Darker wood... problem solved.