BrainMuncher

It depends if they are using animation keyframes as triggers or if the animation is completely decoupled from the logic. Most games will do things like apply damage on a certain frame of the animation, so altering the speed of the animation will affect the timing of things. It could potentially mess things up pretty badly, for instance it's possible that increasing the animation speed could increase the amount of attacks you get per second, or do other unpredictable stuff. Then again it might not, it depends how they have it coded.

Playing on a hard difficulty setting is its own reward, if hard is what you like.

Sorry Ineth but I have to disagree with basically everything you just said. Yes modern monitors have more horizontal space than vertical, but that's because that extra horizontal space is needed to make a three-dimensional or isometric scene (be it a movie or a pre-rendered game world) immersive and pleasant to look at. I'm not sure why you find the narrow, wide shape more immersive and pleasant. That seems strange to me. It's fine that you do, but it's also entirely subjective. Movies started using cinemascope (2.4:1) in the 1950s. So while it's correct to say that it is modern because it is the predominant shape for movies today, it's not exactly new. Also these shapes aren't so much wide as they are short. The film itself is much closer to square or 4:3, and the top and bottom are cropped off to create the shortscreen look. Growing up in the 80s I've watched many TV shows and movies in 4:3 format. It was not, and is not painful at all. Perhaps the most "immersive" and "majestic" cinema format available today is imax, which is roughly 4:3. I think you can make a much better case for movies being short that video games. The view vector of a camera in a movie for the most part is parallel to the ground, basically the same as how a human head would be oriented when standing. So a lot of the time all you really lose when cropping the picture is excess sky and ground, and you focus the framing onto the important parts of the picture - usually the head and torso of the speaking actors. The situation in a top-down game is entirely different, and it makes much more sense from a functionality and usability perspective to have a squarer viewport. A prime example of this is the game Path of Exile. It is a game similar to diablo 2 (which was made when 4:3 was ubiquitous). They went with a bottom UI bar, and also a lower view angle than diablo. This combined with the wider, narrower shape of contemporary displays means that there is a severe visibility problem to the "south" (bottom of screen). So whenever you are required to go south, usability plummets - the view distance is reduced to only a fraction of what it is when going north or east/west. Functionally, the best place for the UI in that game would have been the top of the screen, but I guess they either didn't think of that, or didn't like the aesthetics. Most 3D games avoid this by rotating the camera to point in the direction you're going, but with a fixed top-down camera this isn't possible and creates weird asymmetries in usability. Again I disagree. One type of game where I would agree height is not very important is driving games, since tracks are usually more or less flat. However in most other types of games height is valuable, especially in top-down games, and especially those top-down games with a fixed camera. Well you are entitled to your opinion, however personally I don't find that the location of portraits affects my emotional connection with the characters in any way. I don't think it's fair to dismiss this as pure nostalgia. I believe their are valid usability arguments.

It would be fun to dig through his brainstorming file.

Haven't voted as I would like to play the game myself before forming an opinion. However if there were to be a penalty for getting knocked out perhaps it could be that you get a small amount of fatigue for each KO, say 10-15 fatigue. This would mean athletics would make you better able to deal with KOs. Maybe also make it so that if you are KO'd while suffering from critical fatigue you become maimed. Just an idea.

lol, the level of whining here is unbelievable. What do you think he was doing at that Q&A panel? I'll give you a hint: engaging with the community. TBH if I was Chris and I saw this thread, I wouldn't want to post here either.

Yep you should be fine. Windows (XP, Vista, 7, , Mac OS X (10.7.0) and Linux (Ubuntu 14.04, Mint 17) Minimum system requirements - Video Card: Model Shader 3 Compatible Video Card, 512 MB or better, Processor: 2.6 GHz Pentium IV or equivalent AMD Athlon processor, RAM: 4GB RAM, Hard Drive: 25 GB Hard Drive Space, Mouse, Keyboard. It says 2.6GHz, but it's talking about old Pentium 4. Core i5 will be much faster despite having lower clock speed.

I think the main quest at some point involves dealing with the hemorrhoids epidemic, that's why it's called Piles of Eternity.

Well that's unfortunate. I generally don't think of these games as real time with pause, even though everyone calls them that. I think of them as asynchronous turn based with fast. Turn on the right combination of auto-pause options and pressing space bar isn't something you do to pause the game, it's something you do to tell the game to resume playing out until something needs a new order. For this it's essential to have lots of auto-pause options. And queuing will help reduce the number of pauses that happen, making the game flow better. Not just in terms of what the game is doing, but also what your brain is doing. It's easier to focus on one guy at a time than to always have your attention divided between six. With queuing I can tell the wizard to throw a fireball, then buff the party, then attack someone. Without queuing, I would probably plan that sequence out in my head anyway, but I'd then have to mentally keep track of it myself, and remember where I'm up to the next time the wizard needs an order. Now if there are insufficient auto-pause options, you also have to actively monitor all party members to see when they finish their most recently assigned action, so you can manually pause to give them a new one, all while juggling six action queues in your head. It's not as bad as I probably make it sound, but these two things really improve the flow of combat by a huge amount, without actually changing any combat mechanics.

Don't be afraid ctn. The fear of a thing is usually worse than the thing itself.

I can't say this with 100% confidence since I haven't played the beta, but I believe you can queue actions NWN-style by holding down some key like ALT or SHIFT or something.

So you're saying Tim would donate a couple mil of his own money to extend the development by a year, but only if he was the project director? Pretty weird thing to say ruzen

I don't think I would have the patience for that, especially the solo one. The solo one would almost certainly require large helpings of cheese. Probably moldy cheese that leaves a bad taste in your mouth and makes your breath smell. I mean I saw a guy on youtube doing one of the IWD games solo on the hardest difficulty. There were a bunch of rats in a cellar that didn't fight back, and he would go to them, cast his 2-3 spells, then go back to the inn and rest. He only had to repeat that a million times to finally kill all the rats. I stopped watching before he'd killed them all, not my idea of fun.

Hopefully it's not too hard to add in. But please Obsidian, if you do add it, make it separate from the enemy cast auto-pause. And make it pause when a PC finishes casting a spell, or is interrupted when casting, or fails their casting for any other reason.

Surely you meant a pundemic. That's not my idea of ideal. I don't want to have to sit there mousing over 7000 NPCs trying to find the one quest-related guy I'm looking for. Even 50 cosmetic civilians on screen at once would probably cause some annoyance. I live in a city of over four million, and at most times of the day, in most places in the city, there really aren't that many people wandering/driving around. It's only at peak hours in a handful of the busiest spots that you get big mobs.

I thought it already was. Does this only auto-pause on enemy cast? Because I would not want to pause on enemy cast, but I would want to pause on PC cast.

Color Spray, Shield, Charm Person, Mage Armor, Sleep, Mirror Image, Horror, Power Word Sleep, Ghoul Touch, Invisibility All good ways for a mage to deal with a stray melee enemy.

No

So are you telling me that an NPC (enemy) barbarian with 20 CON will have the same HP as an enemy barb with 10 CON? Because that would be wierd. Or are you saying that they just don't use the class system at all for enemies and assign arbitrary stats manually for each enemy?

No I don't play the beta Mr. Grumpypants. Just looking at the wiki. And I'm assuming they use the class system to easily create NPCs, because why wouldn't they? Either way, the precise accuracy of those numbers is irrelevant to my point, which was about the relative effectiveness of the constitution multiplier.

So it sounds like half the wizard spells don't actually do anything at all. I can see how that could be a problem lol

Well now I'm really curious to find out what they do, if you can find out somehow. Maybe they just aren't implemented yet. On paper those wizard spells look devastating, a 10-15 second AoE paralyze from a level 2 spell isn't too shabby.

3) How are you penalized? Because you got less xp then the guy who exploited the game? You get exactly the amount of xp the game has been designed for you to get. So sarex I will turn your question around on you, not because I think it's a sensible question, but because I want to see what your answer is. If there is no combat XP, how are you penalized? Because you got less xp then the guy who did the quests? You get exactly the amount of xp the game has been designed for you to get.

I think as long as you occasionally level up and get more things to do more stuff then it doesn't really matter a whole lot how those level ups are handed out. More important is that they keep the same pace as the difficulty of the content. The way I see it quest-only XP was a good thing meant to make balancing of the critical path easier. I'm one of those completionists who must kill everything everywhere, which usually leave me over-leveled by the time I move forward - even with diminishing returns functions. I just want to be able to explore everything the game has to offer without making the game progressively easier the further I go. Quest-only XP does that. It also prevents people who don't want to conquer every last inch of the planet from finding themselves under-leveled. Keeps an appropriate challenge for two completely opposite play styles. It also means stealth and diplomacy approaches aren't actively discouraged by the system.

One potential thing that could be causing this is that constitution adds 3% more HP per point. This creates an unequal scaling where each point of CON is three times more effective for a barbarian than for a wizard in terms of raw HP gain. So a Wizard can't really compensate for low base HP by pumping CON, because it's so inefficient relative to other classes. At level 7: Wiz, 10 con: 300 hp Wiz, 20 con: 390 hp Barb, 10 con: 960 hp Barb, 20 con: 1248 hp Poor wiz isn't getting much bang for his attribute buck there