majestic

Reminds me of people telling me that they never watched The Addams Family because it was "just a Munsters clone" - not only did both TV shows start airing within a week the frigging Addams Family was based on a comic that premiered in '38. Geez.

It's been posted before, but no. In "true" turn based games that do not have concurrent action like the RtwP Infinity & Aurora Engine (well not counting The Witcher, obviously) games your characters cannot move while the enemy is making their turn. You might be able to dogde or otherwise block attacks, make saving throws and whatnot, but you cannot move or otherwise take action to prevent impending doom. It is possible with the Haste buff or the Boots of Speed to outrun AoE spell projectiles (Fireball, Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting and others) in all the IE games. Simultaneous movement lets you run out of the enemy's range and makes them follow you after engagement. It lets you heal your characters while the enemies pelt them with everything they got. It lets you quaff potions at the same time the enemy is trying to target you. The hit point to possible damage per round ratio is so skewed in favor of damage in Baldur's Gate 2 that without concurrent rounds the combat experience would end up being horribly frustrating and/or boring. Especially when you instantly fail the game the moment your main character goes down because that intelligence draining illithid you could easily outrun with concurrent action has a lucky roll streak and you die. Game over, reload. Could it work? Possibly, I mean it is possible to create a nigh-invulnerable juggernaut of doom within the game rules and unmodded combat it somewhat easy with a few choice exceptions. Metagaming on the other hand would just go from being a bonus for power gamers to necessity and it would suck the fun out of the entire experience for a lot of people. Otherwise Age of Decadence would have a lot more sales. That game really is designed to kill you in every way imaginable and making a successful combat oriented character is an art in itself, and a point of endless reloads to boot because combat difficulty has been tuned so it is hard for metagaming munchkins that know the ins and outs of the system to succeed. It's really awesome (also it has non-combat alternatives for pretty much everything, even if it might simply be to not do a sidequest) and I never regretted investing the 20 bucks the unfinished version costs but it will always be a niche product. Extremely niche, at that.

I still don't know if you're just an account made purely for satire and trolling or if you're genuinely giving lead a run for its money when it comes to density, but you're pretty entertaining, I'll give you that.

Whenever someone says that all I can think of is this. This is a serious game.

Woops. My bad, for some reason I mistook you for the original poster. Edited the post. ^^

Turn based games have their encounters tuned to be doable and DMs don't routinely design encounters to wipe the group. Well, unless you're the developers of Age of Decadence or your name is Gygax, in which case you would do exactly that, but the point still stands: If you simply would impose TB combat on BG2's cheeseball encounters you would end up with a game that is either unplayable, boring, or in some cases both. The same applies to PoE's encounter design, which is arguably not up to par with other RtwP games anyway. So, well, my answer to the question posed by this thread still is: No, not without a complete overhaul of the encounter design, and even then you'd have a chance it would turn out to be like Wasteland 2, a game which I liked but where the TB combat was a massive drag instead of interesting once you finished the first area or two.

The thought of taking BG2's encounters and putting them in a turn based game without concurrent combat rounds (which IE games basically are) is frightening. Enemy mage group just won the initiative roll? Yeah sorry, eat two or three Horrid Wiltings, not to mention the thought of Kangaxx winning initiative. Now that would be glorious. Some parts of the system would lend itself rather well to TB implementation, like engagement. The game would need a complete encounter design overhaul if it went turn based though, the current encounters are sometimes cumbersome enough with concurrent actions. Granted, one could argue that PoE needs an encounter design overhaul anyway, but that's not really point of this discussion. Yet.

As the epitome of the German computer gaming magazine proponents of the PC master race (sorry, I can never really resist taking a jab at the dolts working there), in the past PC Games generally defined flüssig - which means, among other things, fluid, liquid, flowing and and which in this case should be indeed contextually translated as smooth - as having a lower bound of 60fps, not 30fps and they routinely call bullcrap whenever someone says that 30fps is enough for a, well, flüssige gaming experience. As you already figured out the gist of the article is that you should be fine on Full HD with Ultra details if you have a quad core CPU clocking in at 3 GHz and a graphics card with at least 2GB provided you don't use the Hairworks feature, which, as they explicitely stated, kills game performance even with nVidia boards on their high-end system whenever the game shows a close-up of Geralt's head or more than a few monsters using Hairworks on screen.

There are some nice things on sale this weekend (especially Grim Fandango). I also upgraded my Wasteland 2 to Digital Deluxe, not because I'm that interested in the novellas but because the upgrade also contains The Bard's Tale and the upgrade on sale is actually cheaper than The Bard's Tale. \o/

Uh... no. Most, if not all, turn based systems in video/computer and tabletop role playing games feature an initiative check of some kind. The first turn goes to however wins initiative and not to the enemy per se. Some (like D&D) even have a surprise round if you catch enemies unaware after which normal initiative applies, potentially giving the heroes two rounds of combat where the enemy can't do anything at all.

You forgot to mention that Bioware secretly experiments on puppies and helps "big pharma" to enact their plan to reduce the world's population to less than a billion through evil affliction causing additives in vaccines. I mean, seriously, would they be called BIOware otherwise? Willful misinterpretation of lore: Bringing the world fun, games and crazy consipiracy theories since 5000 BC.

Turn on auto-pause after combat round and it'll even play like a turn based RPG, just with your and enemy turns happening at the same time. Which isn't unheard of in TB combat games. It just makes combat in KOTOR very tedious as it goes from queuing up flurry, critical strike or force lightning and watching into queuing up flurry, critical strike or force lightning and pressing space every 6 seconds. Bleh.

Yeah, don't you know, if you accidentally open the wrong door in the Water Temple with one of the small keys is really becomes an a-class pain in the butt to complete it. Not impossible, but really, really annyoing. Longest time I ever spent on a dungeon. Of course, the most time I spent getting into a dungeon was that bitchin' figure eight puzzle in the desert. But that's neither here not there.

For what its worth, my GOG KOTORs work just fine on Windows 7 except for the occasional bug where non-interactive dialogues or in-game cutscenes skip from the first line to the last immediately. Restarting the game fixes that for while but it never completely goes away. A friend of mine however had crashes with the GOG versions but none with his self patched retail versions (except for not being able to play any movies), so GOG did change something that might give people who otherwise have crashed and issues on the other versions a fighting chance. Unless of course you're trying to run the games on one of them Intel integrated HD series GPUs. In which case getting the games to work is nothing short of an uphill battle. One where you're outnumbered, outgunned and have to dodge a landslide on your way up. Good luck.

Sure Neverwinter's set in Faerûn, generally follows D&D's (Forgotten Realms) lore and implements the usual races and classes but the actual ruleset is more of a loose adaptation. Very loose. They kept some names and descriptions and had an action point system and... I think that was about it. Not sure how it is now I played it while it was in Beta and then never really looked back. The gameplay is also very DA2-ish just without any of the flash and style, animations were terrible and made the game feel somewhat unresponsive. The game is okayish to decent and it's free assuming you don't let it trick you into using the in-game market so if you're ever bored and have nothing else to do it might be worth checking out. I'm sure it has much more user created content now than it had back then and there's bound to be a decent module or two to find. The most awesome one I checked out was simply a chain of 50 rooms where each contained a single ogre, purely designed for maximum XP gain to grind away. It rocked the most played lists for a while. Yeah. I'm not kidding.

You pick it when leveling up your wizard or copy them from a grimoire, if it is available in one, I'm not really sure. I stopped bothering with copying spells after figuring out which ones work well and you can choose enough of the worthwhile ones to easily get you through the game. Ah, who am I kidding, spells come from the land where happy spells bunny hop across lush meadows and magic trees rise in the distance while the glaring rays of daylight wash over you.

I heard they made that bug a feature called peasant or ampersand or something*. See, because calling bugs with French terms kind of gives them this neat aura of legitimacy and us common people don't even know what it is about. Bloody France. * Disclaimer: I know it's called en passant.

The joke worked better in my head than it did on paper. Erm. Post.

Talking about races in the newer D&D books would probably take too long, but yes, there have been a host of weird changes, like making Gnomes fey creatures that at first weren't even among the playable races at a time when humanoid dragons were. In 4E, Halflings kind of became wandering folk - nomads. Quite the oppositve of what they were in other D&D editions. I don't know, maybe WotC worried that they were just a little too similar to Hobbits or whatever, really.

lol? what genre of fiction did poe create? With The Murders in the Rue Morgue he essentially created (modern) detective fiction and its associated tropes.

I don't know guys. I mean Poe helped creating entire genres of fiction, isn't it a little unfair to compare that to the guys writing at B... oh, wait. /thread Btw since nobody mentioned it yet and with all this talk about DA:I I think it is worth mentioning - EA essentially forces all their divisions to use the Frostbite engine for all their new products. The basic idea is that if everyone uses the same engine it is easier to transfer talent between games. Sound decision from a business and efficiency perspective. *shrug*

TL;DR: People who would get a cRPG following WotC's 4E or 5E D&D rules would be in for one hell of a rude awakening. 4E and upwards D&D rules are exceptionally streamlined and easy to use and have thrown a lot of the concepts of earlier editions out of the window. The contrast is quite stark, to say the least. Everything has been made a somewhat balanced mess of sameness which sometimes doesn't really make sense. In 4E for instance every class has at-will, encounter and daily (per extended rest actually) abilities selected from a certain somewhat smallish pool that is made even smaller by "specializing" your build by selecting one primary stat. That means your wizard will never run out of spells and always have something they can cast, even if it is just their at-will. Just so you get an idea what an at-will might be, for wizards, one of their at-will is magic missile. For rangers they get one that allows them to shoot their bow twice per standard action. Most races start with two at-wills, humans start with three as a racial bonus that is completely worthless because there really only are four at-wills for every class - and only two go by the same primary stat (e.g. Clerics can pick from two at-wills that add the STR modifier to the hit roll and 2 that add WIS to the roll) making the third a relative non-bonus. 5E is... even worse. 5E gives every class a distinct template where actual choices happen every few levels, well more or less. Most of the time you choose once at level three and are on a set path. Barbarians for instance can choose a primal path at level three which with subsequent level ups allows them to pick from a fixed list of abilities - if you're lucky, that is. Berserker Path barbarians never really choose anything for their class, they just get abilities on their chosen path. This removes the illusion of "choice" you get from 4E where you could in theory pick different abilities but can't unless you don't really want to hit enemies with them. What both editions do, and 5E even more so than 4E is that they make it impossible for you to mess up your character unless you really can't read and assign your abilitiy points in an inept way. The really fun part is that both editions were somewhat made with the idea of licensing them for computer games. 2E AD&D was fairly common, as was 3E. It's beyond hilarious that rules so obviously easy to adapt for cRPGs (much, much easier than AD&D or 3E ever were) never really got picked up for licensing. Time to rethink your licensing model there WotC.

But it's necessary in the fight against the Others. \o/

Stated twice already, but for the love of all that's good and right in the world let the Eclipse engine rest in whatever hell it has been banished to. I have no idea why but all Bioware developed 3D engines somehow only seemed to be able to handle four colours: brown, mud brown, dark sienna and black. There's a reason Hawke says "Kirkwall isn't brown enough for me" in jest at some point during Dragon Age 2 (yeah technically it's the same engine with some added bells and whistles but Kirkwall sure is a bit more vibrant than Ferelden).

Oh boy, there we go with the non sequitur.