Ineth

Well state-funded media tends to be even more unreliable and unfair when it comes to reporting news. So if you know of a better way to fund news production than by selling it, do tell.

I would have expected them to focus on fighting anti-semitism, rather than shilling for shady radfems. But it seems that NGOs with human rights portfolios always sooner or later get taken over and abused by progressive leftists for their political (rather than humanist) 'struggle'.

I could get behind a system where you would have to gain a trading guild's favour and trust before being shown their non-mundane items. If competing guilds / trading rosters were mutually exclusive in who they like, there would even be an interesting roleplaying element to it...

This was never the case in the IE games. Killing innocents was a pretty non-lucrativbe business, except for BG2 where it would lead to many waves of City Guards and Mages that could be harvested for XP and scrolls. And when there was a violent and a non-violent solution to a quest, the non-violent one usually gave more XP.

This one is quite funny, as if they're competing for an Olympic synchronised adventuring trophy... Though I don't think the solution of the Infinity Engine games (waiting a random amount of time before starting to move) is great, either. The problem is that when you want your character to run a zig zag route or "circle" or whatever, each time you give a new movement command in order to change direction, the character will stop and stand still for a while, which is both annoying and can be a disadvantage when trying to outrun enemies.

How come "Easy" instead of "Normal" is selected by default in the difficulty window, when starting a new game? Kinda defies the name "Normal", doesn't it...

But why is it inherently "bad" if men and women, on average, end up in different career paths? I really don't understand the modern/progressive left-wing mindset here. classical liberals: "Each of you may choose what to do with your own life. Period. If someone doesn't like the statistical outcome, they can try to peacefully persuade you to choose differently, but coercion and top-down 'social planning' are impermissible." progressive 'liberals': "Each of you may choose what to do with your own life, but don't you dare make life choices which, when summed up over the population as a whole, result in a different statistical distribution than we social planners have wisely deemed the correct one!" socialists: "A central bureaucracy needs to choose your career path and life plan for you. For the greater good. Don't like it? You will after you return from the gulag re-education camp!" conservatives: "Murica, **** yeah!!! Sorry, what was the question again?" At least the socialist ideology, while immoral, is internally consistent. The progressive not-so-liberal left manages to make theirs both immoral and internally inconsistent at the same time.

Shun the Nonbeliever!!!

Yay, finally Linux support! This info really shouldn't be hidden inside a post though, there should be an announcement thread with "Linux" in the title so that Linux backers will notice it, since I suspect many have stopped following the backer betas closely because they couldn't play them anyway.

...Or cast Web at the tight entrance corridor, have someone with good saving throws (and the Ring of Free Action) run into the room to aggro all the trolls and priests and run back - and when they start piling up in the corridor, bombard them with all you've got: I mean, why else would that corridor be there?

They don't just seem identical when the next map has the remains of the skeleton I killed in the previous one. Didn't think of using wilderness lore though, even if I have it on one character. It's a skill I actually need to actively use? Lol, I'd give it a go but already cheated my way through. there is typical 3 paths leading out from most maps. some exits will send you backwards. is simple breadcrumbs solution. use fallen skeletons garbage gear to mark which entrances/exists is dead ends and which is not, and have one other bit o' dropped gear to identify if you is on map 1-4 (or whatever) o' the identical seeming maps. is plenty o' dead skeletons for just such a purpose. is annoying and a bit time consuming, but is not complex or difficult. am suspecting folks get frustrated and quit before trying to figure out the puzzle. If I remember correctly, you can also use map notes (on the map screen) instead of dropping trash. But yeah, it was a pretty annoying puzzle because it was so long and repetitive.

Just make characters reliably attack the nearest enemy with the weapon they're currently holding, when they haven't been given a manual order. That's all that's needed really. "Smart" AI that starts randomly spamming spells that I've carefully memorized and am saving for a specific purpose? No thanks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aposematism So it's actually a defense mechanism? Who knows, maybe from their perspective it is... From my perspective, it's a warning sign that says "Poisonous. Do not engage."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aposematism

It looks like they did exactly what I warned against all along: Throwing together a bunch of lazily-brainstormed autopause options, without even trying to understand how and why players would actually use use auto-pause. A good auto-pause system would have required them to go about it systematically: I.e. carefully think about the kind of play-styles that benefit from auto-pause, and then for each of those identified play-styles make sure that all required auto-pause options are available and implemented in the most useful way.

By making the borders around UI blocks automatically adapt to the length of the block automatically adapt to what's on the other side of the border (another UI block, or the viewport edge). To implement this they would either have to draw a small number of stretchable or seamlessly tileable border elements and dynamically replicate them all over (less work for designers, more work for devs) or simply draw all possible border combinations for the possible block configurations (more work for designers, less work for devs). It would require them to put a little thought into it in advance, and the designers and devs would have to be able to work together, but it's not rocket science. In fact it's not unlike the kind of work webdesigners often do.

Fair enough. Though I think it only works well there because of the floaty-ness, since it allows the game scene to stretch to the full screen width, despite the portraits there.

Back then we were used to it, and we didn't know anything better. (Like people in the 19th century considered traveling by horse-drawn carriage on bumpy roads a super convenient and luxurious mode of transportation, yet nowadays few people would want to give up their car to go back to that.) Try to rewatch one of those 4:3 shows today, on a modern widescreen monitor - it feels as if you're looking at the scene from the outside through a frame that is artificially blocking your peripheral vision and preventing you from getting a full view. But PoE is not a top-down game, it's an isometric one - and with a much lower camera angle than the Infinity Engines games btw. (at least in outdoors areas). This means that the vertical dimension is much more condensed than the horizontal one, so you need more horizontal space than vertical to show the same amount of content in each direction. And that does not yet account for the fact that you'll want to show more horizontal than vertical content in one scene because that's how human eyes are aligned and are optimized at seeing at a glance without having to move.

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. That's why modern cinema productions tend to use super-wide aspect ratios (even wider than the 16:9 of modern computer screens). Go and rent a straight-to-TV movie or series from the 80's or 90's some time (when they used 4:3), and watch it on a modern device - it's almost painful to watch. Otoh watching a movie that is too wide for the 16:9 monitor, is not grating in the same way. The same applies to games - the actual game world scene needs much more width than height in order to look majestic and pleasant. A side bar takes away from that. A bottom bar doesn't. In other words: No, a vertical side bar would not make more sense than the current layout. The whole "Prefer to take away horizontal space because there's more of it!" argument that has been repeatedly brought up on the forums, is based on the fallacious assumption that both dimensions are equally valuable for the actual game world scene. They're not. Not to mention that in a party-based game, having the portraits next to each other looks much better than having them underneath each other. More like a "group photo", rather than 6 separate ones. It makes them "come alive" much more, and makes it easier to emotionally connect with them on a role-playing level. And makes it more convenient to interact with the portraits using the mouse, for selecting characters or issuing actions. An L or U-shape layout would only be catering to BG/BG2 nostalgia, it would not be functionally or aesthetically superior to a bottom bar. (That's not to say that the current layout is great - as others have already pointed out, the central "buttons" block takes up far too much space considering its relative uselessness, and the combat log is too small and too side-lined. But all of that could be fixed within the confines of a bottom bar layout.)

In case of BG:EE and BG2:EE that may be true, but IWD:EE is definitely an improvement over the original game, and well worth the purchase - especially for the: 1) BG2 engine features Since the EE engine is based on BG2:ToB, it brings the BG2-only and ToB-only engine features to all the games. For BG2 that's obviously no improvement, and in BG1 you could already get those features by installing BGT or Tutu - but for IWD, the EE is the only way to get a stable game with those features. They include: extra classes (Barbarians, Monks, Sorcerers, Wild Mages) support for class kits support for dual-wielding more fine-grained proficiency system support for more spell effects (which in the original IWD couldn't even be added by mods, due to engine limitations) 2) Mod availability There are countless mods for the original BG2 out there; When BG2:EE was releases, it broke compatibility with a good number of them, so it was actually a "downgrade" in terms of mod availability. By now many of those mods have been ported to work with EE too, but still, its value in this area is ambivalent. Not so in the case of IWD. For the original game there were only ever around 6 mods in popular use afaik, and 4 of them are no longer needed with IWD:EE because it already contains the improvements they added. More importantly though, many BG2 and BG2:EE mods are now also available to IWD:EE players - some worked without change, others were ported by their authors because it was easy to do so (unlike porting to the original IWD which was too different engine-wise). And last but not least, it seems the EE release sparked a new wave of modding activity, with a bunch of new mods already released specifically for IWD:EE and more in progress. Altogether, around 30 mods are currently known to work with IWD:EE (plus probably several more BG2 mods that just haven't been confirmed to work yet), ranging from extra kits and bonus merchants to extensive game rule changes. Needless to say, this does wonders for the game's replayability! 3) UI enhancements The scalable UI, scalable font size, and zoom support are a real blessing when playing on a modern PC screen - the Widescreen mod for the original games seems like a poor crutch in comparison. And then there are little UI improvements/modernizations all over, like a green outline around scrolls (both in the inventory and in stores) which indicates that the currently selected character could learn that spell (i.e. doesn't have it in their spellbook yet): And of course the (optional) quick-loot bar: That sort of thing. For BG(2):EE these minor enhancments may not be enough to justify the purchase, but in case of IWD:EE they're the icing on the (already very tasty) cake.

Sigh. 1) Exorbitantly high prize. 2) Regional prizing. (Even on GOG which is against that sort of thing, and only does it when publishers stubbornly demand it.) 3) A bajillion different "editions" released simultaneously. (a.k.a. day-one DLC by a new name.) 4) DRM in the Steam version. So much for the "Crowd funding lets us do things differently than greedy-evil-big-publisher controlled projects!" platform the kickstarter ran on, and all the assurances that Paradox coming on board wouldn't change that.

How would that even work?

*looks at calendar* Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

*looks at calendar* Are we there yet?

Glad to see they seem to have found a consistent style for portraits now. The stylistic inconsistency of the first batch had me worried a little. But how will I know whether I've experienced the full story line?