Lephys

I agree that there's a good chance. Doesn't change the fact that you don't really know until you try it. Thus, you play with that build, and it works great. You don't know it's the best. You just know it's good. Anywho, if Fighter A does X damage when? What's his armor penetration? How does he handle magic? How much synergy is there with the other members of your party? A couple of numbers being big hardly makes something "the best build." I'm just saying... in this game, it probably won't be so simple.

Sorry. We were practicing being True Neutral, feeling absolutely no obligation to adhere to any particular topic.

True, but, I will say that, if the game allows you to steal stuff from them, I'd appreciate it if it were actually a matter of taking it from their stock without them seeing, than successfully completing a Pickpocket check to somehow procure that Greatsword they had in their pocket, along with the 100 other items. There are some improvements to the norm that can be made without foregoing abstraction for simulation.

I like to think any time they grow near, AC/DC's Thunderstruck can be heard.

The tattoo is just a blank, staring face (a la "O_O") with the words "ONE OF US" beneath it. Also, we believe that video game romance will unite humanity, so we go around making up romance dialogue options IRL. We... get arrested a lot... 8\

But he's the most magnificent director/writer/producer of all time! Just ask him!

I still think going full wands is more preposterous better.

Yeah, but how do you define "best"? How many other Fighters are in your party? How many characters are in your party, total? How do you even know something's the best build if you don't try out others to verify? You don't, really. You just know what you're using is working with how you're using it. Nothing against people who challenge themselves to find the optimal party setup and/or speedrun the game, but that's not really a challenge set forth by the game itself. The game is made to be played and enjoyed. In fact, I'd say the very nature of the game is to see what you can do with limited tools. That's kind of the whole point of the entire "eliminate crap builds/options" sentiment: you get a box of tools, and they're all good for SOMEthing. Can you pick one and figure out how to make do with it, regardless of whether or not it's the maximum allowed by the limitation? The game is constructed specifically to allow you to not really worry about the perfect build. Got low hitpoints? That's not necessarily bad, as long as you use them right. Got low armor? That's not necessarily bad. Low attack speed? Not necessarily bad. If people want to figure out what the maximum DPS is out of all weapon/class/build combos, then more power to them. But, the game doesn't really require any of that. Nor do you really gain much concrete benefit from doing so. It's like those games in which someone says "This build is terrible," or "this character sucks," then some other person comes along posting Youtube videos of them rocking the whole game with that character/build. Is it really objectively worse, or is it statistically unpopular to have to compensate, actively, for its shortcomings? "You can only take like 2 hits with this build, and you're dead. It's so much worse than other builds." Maybe someone is really good at making sure that character doesn't ever get hit twice. The build doesn't suck for them.

*shrug*. The Wolf Among Us is actually pretty awesome. It feels a lore more substantial than The Walking Dead, even (haven't played Season 2 yet, though). It's actually pretty well done. And it kinda fits more, because you're investigating, as the main character, rather than just playing through a plot that's occurring and pointing and clicking as you go -- it all adds up to the conclusion. Annnywho. Yeah, it usually was what you were going to pick anyway. But, sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes it didn't really matter what you picked, etc. I like the game, but I do have minor qualms about the way that was handled, in relation to the significance of your dialogue options. Not to mention that some people read faster than others. You can't truly know what to pick until you know what it is you can pick from, so you have to read them all, then process the best response, then go with it. There come times when it's a bit silly to do all that in 5 seconds. Not that I think there's some perfect equation for such a time limit or anything. *shrug*. That's just how I felt, playing it. Not to mention, if you have to sneeze when an important decision pops up. Seriously... that happened to me.

I think it will, too, simply because they'll have so many more viable paths to work with in their min-maxing quest.

No worries. And, I understand the way in which you hate it, and why. Very much so. But, personally, I hate how it's so often used in such a sucky way, because it doesn't have to be. And I know they aren't going to put it into PoE, but I do thoroughly enjoy properly done (non-invasive/game-changing) cooperative play, and feel that there are a tone of games in which it fits just fine, even if there are other (production-resource-related, especially) reasons not to do it. I miss sitting at an SNES and playing Secret of Mana with my friend, and I hate that developers, nowadays, apparently feel like absolutely no one in the world would ever want to do such a thing, and that certainly we'd rather fire up a deathmatch with our friend. Also, it just kinda sucks that, as humans, we tend to associate negative statistical occurrences with things themselves that aren't really at fault. Like "multiplayer," as per this thread, or "DLC," as all over the internet. It's kinda like... instead of saying "We've had a crappy mayor for 20 years now. We should really get someone in charge who is good!," just saying "DOWN WITH PEOPLE WHO HELP RUN CITIES!" Heh. People really hate that the mayor sucked, and that politics is a game. Not the very idea of someone actually being in charge of organization.

I hadn't thought of that. That's true. But then, it's only really a matter of simple convenience at that point. You could just write your bio on a little piece of paper, and leave it next to your computer (or in your laptop bag) for easy referencing. I mean, at that point, it's probably worth it to have a simple saved bit of text, in-game, for such a thing. However, it would almost be pointless to go into super-in-depth "We'll help you write a relevant/awesome biography at character creation!" systems if literally nothing in that biography was going to affect/interact-with the game world whatsoever. I mean, don't get me wrong, I think it's great what Osvir is thinking, here, but I'll take biographical details that actually impact my gameplay over ones I just get to pretend are relevant or "happened," anyday. In this game, it seems like we'll have some early game choices to essentially use references to the past in dialogue to dictate what it is that happened in our character's past, to sort of shape our character's bio. In this case, especially, I think detailed bio-writing tools would be hindered a lot more if you have to pick one of 5 options to some question/description of your past (I grew up on a farm, I was raised on the streets as an orphan, etc.) and none of them coincided with your custom-built biography. *shrug*. I'd love to see a game that helps you assemble a biography like that, then actually carries all those things through the whole game and provides reactivity and such. But, I'm not sure it would be feasible to have anything more than just an available history/lore reference for you to look at and comprise your own custom biography, manually. And, again, I'm not sure how feasible even that'll be once you start picking in-game biographical facets.

I will give you that much... it was quite un-optimized as of earlier this year. I've got a laptop that should be able to handle pretty much anything with ease, and no matter what I set it to, it... well, "struggled" isn't really the right word. But, it ran pretty jerkily. That was 2 weeks after the beta keys went out to direct backers, though. I haven't played it since, but I've followed the updates and seen a lot of the drastic improvements they've made. I'm sure it'll be quite nice come release time.

Yeah, you always see the two extremes, it seems: Either absolutely nothing happens, or the results of your actions are that the entire town metamorphosizes into something else. Depending on the scope of the quest/event (replace "town" with "NPC," etc.). It's just nice, regardless, when, if you take out some bandits that have been terrorizing the area, the local town actually shows some reaction to that, other than "a bunch of nameless people who have supposedly been killed by them are no longer being killed by them." Maybe a new shop person in town, or prices decrease, or you see people from that town in other towns, now that the roads are safer, etc. Just something beyond "Oh? Thanks for that. We'll just go on about our business, now." It's a little weird when you find out the local mine is haunted, and completely exorcise it of ghosts, and solve some mystery, and the only change is "Steve the NPC is found at the mine now, instead of at his shack. Oh, and now he says 'Thanks for fixing the mine!' when you talk to him, instead of complaining about not being able to work in the mine any more."

The thing is, you've got a whole party of 6 (if you want). I don't think the game's going to demand that each and every one of your party members is fully optimized according to class, just for you to be successful. If you want to play all the characters "against" their class roles, then yeah, you're probably going to have a rough time of things. However, you could probably easily do 1 or 2 quite differently and it wouldn't hurt anything much. You could have your Wizard run about on the frontlines, if you wanted. Just, your frontline would have to consist of more people than just your Wizard, whereas, in a lot of situations, maybe your Fighter could stand alone holding the ling (especially at choke points). You probably just hafta strike a balance between pure effectiveness and pure unique/specific build.

In general, yes, it would be prudent. You wouldn't want all non-humans to miss out on 70% of the game's content, while humans just get access to all of it for being human. However, you don't need to go so far as "for every single person who turns away a specific race, there should be some other person who specifically rewards that particular race in some way." That's what most people don't get when they think "balance" is bad. No, improper treatment of it is bad.

There could be honor in the sacrifice, depending on the circumstances. Voluntarily giving up the essence of your soul/memories in order to produce quality equipment for your co-villagers to stave off some onslaught would probably be seen as good, while someone kidnapping homeless folk and burning away their souls just so he can have pretty trophies for his wall would probably be seen as non-good. *shrug*

My only qualm with that is that there are, perhaps, many points at which it seems rather arbitrary for your response to be time-sensitive. "So, how are things going today?" *starts 7-second timer... player doesn't figure out what he wants to say in-time.* "Oh, EFF me? FINE! EFF YOU, TOO!" Of course, it makes a lot more sense in The Wolf Among Us, since, more often than not, you're short on time, in general, so the timing on each response is more indicative of "you only have so much time to actually talk to this person before they end this interview," etc.

Take a swimming pool, fill it halfway up, and it's pretty horrible. The thing is, the rating is on whether or not it accomplishes goals that its given state isn't even claiming to accomplish at the time. Thus, such a rating is practically useless. Now, sometimes an early build is complete enough to still accomplish some of the game's goals of enjoyable gameplay even without being fully complete, but that's more of a happy side-effect than a criterion.

Henceforth, the game's nickname shall be Reginald, u_u...

I like to immerse myself in video games but LARPing while playing video games may be going a little too far for me. That, and "my character grew up as a slave in a noble's house, but can never tell anyone about that, ever, OR do anything that ever has anything to do with that past, ever ever ever in the whole game" kind of puts a damper on the whole roleplaying thing. How do you play a role if you don't get to play that role?

The Last Confessor?

No you wouldn't. There is no requirement to scale or compensate for anything just because you allow a second human entity to input commands into the same game instance as the first. Besides, it's not like a 2nd player can do anything with that other party member that the first couldn't already do with pausing. Yes, Mass Effect 3 is a great example of something no one ever has to do simply to put multiplayer into agame. Thus, you don't want multiplayer support to influence the singleplayer game. I join you in disliking that, on principle. However, it doesn't have to do so, so unless you disagree with that, there's no reason to further point out how bad it is when it does do so. I don't know how to interpret such "yeah but" responses as anything but an argument, since they seem to serve no other purpose if you've already pointed out your dislike, and I haven't disagreed with it or contradicted it in any way.

@Curryinahurry: You're right about the sort of baked-in roles for classes. However, there's still a lot of flexibility. Namely, in the fact that you've got up to 6 different people in a party. What if you have 3 Fighters and 3 Wizards? Or, maybe every single person is a different class? The main thing that differentiates this game's build flexibility, methinks, is that the point-allocation isn't exactly the end-all-be-all of the build. A lot of your effectiveness comes from specifically how you use people, and it can shift around a lot in given situations. For example, the Fighter's defense-heavy abilities and traits are great for simply holding the line, but nothing says they couldn't also be used to send him in to priority-drop a single target. Sure, other classes can deal more damage more quickly, but maybe you've got situations in which they could not survive long enough to do so. You can still equip and design your Fighter for relatively high offense, and use him, in the heat of the moment, to make use of his low chance of getting hit to wade in to the giant troll with a heavy crossbow, or what have you, to take him down before he fells your Wizard or something. *shrug*. There are a lot of variables, so it's hard to make an example that covers all of them. But, my point is simply that there's a lot of flexibility out there, really. The best way of illustrating this would be to have each class do a solo run of the game, and compare how they were weren't able to adapt to situations. There are certain roles they pretty much won't be able to fill (like a Fighter being a pure support/buffer), but there's plenty of shifting to be done.

It seems to me like Obsidian's going to summon tyrannosaurs from an alternate dimension and ride them into battle against the Greek Gods, who are real and moved to Mars to live, and have been plotting mankind's demise ever since. This whole project has just been a cover for that, raising the funds to build the interdimensional portal generator. Behold, the power of speculation.