marelooke

Usability problems, like? And what would you consider a game with a good UI then, and why? Starcraft and Starcraft 2 both have quite good UIs, but I can found some nit picking even them. But they are good because their UI don't usually cause you make wrong command or hide information from you. And it has very good keyboard shortcuts. Morrowind also has good UI, as you can arrange hud element as you want and decide what hud elements you want to see on the screen. And it also has quite good shortcuts. Angry Birds has excelent gameplay UI as it gives you all information what you need and ability to zoom to see whole level and back to slingshot, although its menus are annoying. There is probly games even better ui, but I don't remember them as they weren't as good games and they don't even have UI problems that would irritate me so much that they would make me remember the game. I never played any Startcrafts (please don't hit me! ) nor Morrowind so yeah, damn You bring up several good points though. Arguably resolutions above 1024x768 were unsupported in BG2 so the UI didn't handle them well, the general idea of the UI I liked though and I'm sure it can be adjusted to work with bigger resultions. Moving the bars to a corner and having them only take up as much space as needed and having the character screen etc scale instead of being a fixed size would already go a long way to solving that problem. Tbh, this never bothered me (wizard dude here ), unless you are talking about the mechanic of spell memorization but that's more a limitation of the game system than the UI imo. The inventory is a difficult problem imo and I really don't have any immediate suggestions in that respect, I could give quite a few examples with an inventory much worse than the IE games though I guess skyUI (UI mod for Skyrim) isn't too bad, but it of course focused on having only one character.

Cool, I hadn't seen that, thanks! Never considered it an "important feature of the IE games" as it was only added in Throne of Bhaal as far as I'm aware.

Now on to something that might be sort of controversial: what's your opinion on a shortcut (or some other way) to highlight interactible objects in the world (the way it was introduced for BG2 with Throne of Bhaal is imo a good example). I'm going to assume at least some people would be against it as they argue it would make things too obvious, an argument I can't say is without merit. So aside from the obvious convenience factor allow me to illustrate where I'm coming from: What do you see in the room I'm in? I'll tell you what I see: a pedestal with a book, three candles, a (friendly) zombie and floating blue orbs. After reading that book I went all over that dungeon floor multiple times looking for the pentagrams mentioned in the book (note that this screenshot was taken after I solved the puzzle, there's no blue orbs there beforehand). I spent *hours* on that "riddle" until I gave up and went to my good friend Google for help. My good friend Google told me them blasted pentagrams were right in the room with the book. Well, fml. Yes, I'm one of them in case you're wondering wtf is wrong with my eyes. There's quite a few of us too (~10% of male population does count as "quite a few", right?). Now the example is sort of badly chosen as it's not something you could make stand out in the way I proposed earlier without ruining the puzzle, it would require a different design entirely. But it serves to illustrate the general issue, I hope. But I have the same problem in The Witcher 2 with finding loot in grass for example a problem I commonly have in a load of other games as well (Skyrim is one that comes to mind) to varying degrees depending on the environment. And often companies are nice enough to make life difficult for us seemingly on purpose (a boss in SWTOR requires matching of blue/purple and red/orange two nicely problematic combinations, Sartharion in World of Warcraft used to spawn red void zones on a reddish/brown background etc etc, well at least Blizzard was nice enough to eventually fix the boss). I'm sure there's other, maybe better, ways to deal with this, personally I like this feature as it just makes life easier and gets rid of something that can be a really big pain in the neck in one fell swoop. It also doesn't discriminate, it will work for someone with perfect colour vision, no colour vision as well as limited colour vision (in varying degrees) equally well. Anyway, discuss I guess. I just wanted to bring it up now

Usability problems, like? And what would you consider a game with a good UI then, and why?

They're pretty cheap on GOG. It's perfectly possible to play BG2 before BG1 (I did so), you'll miss some stuff (references to the first game) obviously, but most everything you really need to know you'll find out in BG2 (this will obviously spoil some of the BG1 story) and most returning companions will tell you enough about BG1 to get you up to speed about their background as well. Personally I massively prefer BG2 over BG1, better storytelling, better combat (due to higher level and early combat being mostly "get hit by fire arrow" -> die -> reload -> "fire arrow misses" -> "yay" -> repeat in BG1) and much better party interaction. I also never really got into IWD, due to various reasons I guess, lack of party interaction and focus on powergaming mostly. Combat is definitely harder though as it seems to be tuned towards people powergaming their party rather than taking a random bunch of rabble on a tour. I should however note that I never finished IWD (neither 1 or 2) though I started on them multiple times.

Oh dear, why did I click this thread I was not gonna spend anymore on KS campaigns for at least a while. DAMN YOU!

Looks like a fun game, thanks for making me aware of it! (and I'm sure *they* will thank you for making me aware of it as well, hehe )

Bedankt, done Hope the pace of pledges picks up near the end, needs to reach 800k! Alas, not looking like it's gonna happen right now, I'd be glad to be proven wrong though

Well, yes, they should, but I'd prefer not to have to redo everything because the default setup is ugly. Besides, bindings != layout and UI. I was just addressing op regarding the mouse buttons, but i hear ya about the layout and UI. If you ask me a good UI should be intuitive and the old IE games UI were anything but, so I hope we see some improvements. I thought the BG UI was very intuitive and extremely easy to use, everything was accessible with rather easy to remember shortcuts too and there were no fancy UI tricks like that horrible radial menu in NWN. Shortcuts generally did what you expected of them and you were able to jump between different screens without having to first close the previous one (which gets really annoying fast if you have to do it often, which you usually do in RPGs). Once you'd played for a little bit you could do just about anything except moving around and selecting targets without using your mouse (anything in the actual game world, that is, guess a shortcut for "loot all" would've been nice). The fact that screens were full screen also made finding information easy as everything is in exactly the same spot each time (granted, this is most likely harder to pull off given that today's screen resolutions are a *lot* more diverse than they were back then, but hey, one can dream). Being fullscreen also allows to pretty much display everything you want on that screen in one go as tabs and scrollbars are, imho, to be avoided as much as possible (it's pretty much impossible to do without them, but less is definitely more here)

I'm sort of amazed nobody brought this game up (or pretty much any "real" game armors): Would you guys consider this a good middle ground between realism and a fantasy feel? Personally I've always liked the plate armours in DA:O I felt that to the layman's eye (like...mine) they had a pretty realistic feel.

Seems the expansion is live, how is it? More of the same or is there some actual improvement?

Link to De Standaard just goes to the homepage for me fwiw. Apparently there's people that find this news depressing, heh...

I apologize in advance for being lazy but I'll refer to a post I made on the Steam forums when this very question came up. Of all those *definitely* get the unofficial Skyrim patch (and the hi-res textures one too if you use those).

Would that be due to the way the story is told then? Because that I can imagine, I've started a lot of playthroughs in DAO, but only finished one and this one was near completion when I abandoned it (few companion quests to go and then Landsmeet). The extreme railroading gets really annoying after one playthrough (oh, the Fade, again, yay). But I find DA2's combat so terribly boring (and immersion breaking tbh, constantly spawning enemies etc) that I never managed to get anywhere in my second playthrough even though the storyline at least was better told than in DAO (and I won't be picking up DA3 unless it gets raving reviews of people who's opinion I actually trust). I'd have greatly preferred they had taken DA:O and improved on its weak points instead of taking Mass Effect and cramming Dragon Age in it. Anyway, probably going play some Divine Divinity followed by some DA:O.

For some reason I decided to pick up my unfinished second DA:O playthrough that I abandoned somewhere in 2011 (according to savegame date). Damn, I wish BioWare had gone further down this path instead of the action rpg crap that was DA2. My two major gripes were/are the number of party members (4 is too few imo) and the lack of real sidequests. Ok, make that 3 if you count the bugs (I had 8 CTDs during a 2 hour session...)

My (paper) Latin-Dutch dictionary disagrees and this online one seems to agree with my paper one Numen: divine will, divinity Era: Lady, lady of the house, mistress, woman in relation to her servants Aera: era/epoch Aer, aeris: air (as in the element of air), also used for the atmosphere "Will of the divine lady" or something along those lines would be my guess. NOTE: I've studied a few years of Latin but most of that knowledge has rather faded so I am by no means an "expert"

There is another option: make essential characters so much more powerful than the player that messing with them equals death. I know attacking the first bartender you came across in BG was a very bad idea (iirc he used Time Stop, among other spells that weren't even obtainable by the player in the game). And I'm pretty sure that messing with Elminster (if it was possible, it never occurred to me to try) wasn't a very good idea either.

If that is their revenge I say: BRING IT ON! Can't wait for the dancing weresheep! Agreed, that was a bit too cliché to my liking, I like to pretend it happened differently... Also the ending was pretty railroaded even if you got cold feet there was only one option, while understandable from a continuity point of view it was still a bit of a bummer (forum doesn't seem to support spoiler tags so I'll leave it at that) It was also pretty funny how he stuck around in your head even if you didn't set him free

Yeah, I'm getting the itch to play an old-school-ish RPG, but I'm not feeling particularly inspired by any of the options in front of me. (Or, at least, I am sufficiently deterred by the prospect of getting them running, patched, and sufficiently modded.) When is Wasteland 2 supposed to be hitting the streets? (I didn't back it, so I'm not getting the updates, but the cash I threw at Eternity was apparently enough to merit a free copy.) I think the estimate from InXile was October this year. Oh dear, the estimate for Divinity: Original Sin is also October... I better save up my holidays, buy a bigger fridge, set up a food delivery line etc

Lol no, I'll just be expecting an $18 more awesome game

Noticed the guy was wearing a Queen cap <3 Also ! (I really hope they manage to keep the name )

Any characters I am stuck with tbh. That was my main gripe with NWN2, you're stuck with your party, I *really* don't want to take people that I don't like and that don't like me to go and fight the final baddy. It makes not sense at all. I mean, I really don't want a haughty insane pyromaniac around, don't bloody force her on me. There's a lot of characters I'm not too fond of,but very often it's either just my personal opinion (I can't stand zealots) or they were badly or inconsistently written. Or just too bland. There is however one character who's guts I really really hate: Anders, overdoing the overdone tormented mage by massively overdoing it, and then some (did I mention they overdid it, a lot?). If anyone can think of a character I find more annoying than him I'll buy you a virtual beer (before anyone brings it up: no, I don't think Anomen is more annoying [well, he's annoying in a different way], Anomen is actually very very well written).

Private servers. Quite a few of the major MMOs have been/are pirated. Because sooner or later it's going to break and detect a legitimate buyer as a pirate. DRM doesn't bother pirates in the slightest, it only bothers actual customers. You should ask CD Project Red about that, they have some experience in that area... (which is what caused their change in stance towards DRM and gave rise to GOG). I used to be in that position, alas BioWare is well past two missteps by now.

Hmm, I backed after the KS was over (because I only heard of it that late... ), during the "extension period", wouldn't that be a legally dubious situation as well then?

Scrum is a development methodology based around short iterations (sprints). One of the hallmarks of scrum are short (~15min) daily meetings with the team where everybody gives a short status update (what have you done yesterday, what are you going to do today and what problems are there, if any), this meeting is often just called "scrum" or "daily scrum". There's a lot more to it if you're interested.