Ineth

Every class can be soloed in BG2, but none of them without resorting to cheese tactics. The game simply wasn't designed for it; it was designed for a well-rounded party that includes warriors, rogues, arcane spellcasters, and divide spellcasters. The usefulness/power of each class in BG2 should be measured by how much it contributed to the success of such a party. And warriors contributed a lot.

No one cares about the AD&D system at it's core. This is about the IE games, and the IE games made fighters plenty useful in the end. Exactly. I wonder if the people who keep claiming that fighters are intrinsically underpowered in AD&D based games, have ever played BG2 and looked at the kill stats of their party members at the end of each chapter. At least in my experience, the main melee fighter would consistently get by far the most kills throughout all stages of the game. Whereas wizards found increasingly powerful spells (and got more spell levels and spells per day) as the game progressed, warriors found increasingly powerful weapons and armor which they could use very effectively.

Yep, cheapest card from high-end series is an excellent choice if you mostly want to play games like PE (or most GOG games, or Indie games, or similar). Such a card will usually have all newest "feature capabilities", so you won't any time soon run into situations where a game you'd like to play needs an OpenGL/DirectX/ShaderModel version (or extension) that your card doesn't support. What it will usually lack compared to its (much!) more expensive sibling cards from the same series, is their sheer amount of processing power and graphics memory. But you only need a lot of that, if you want to play demanding 3D triple-A games at big resolutions and highest graphics settings.

Doesn't the "pick your character's profession" thing that was shown in the PE gameplay video/interview, sort of provide this? Sure, it's no substitute for a well-rounded backstory, but it did include interesting things like "slave".

It was certainly disappointing that in the Baldur's Gate games, "Infravision" did not affect the combat mechanics / character skills at all, and was only implemented as a small cosmetic effect on the graphics rendering on dark maps. Especially since it was presented to the player as if it was an important skill for characters to have - race descriptions during character creation talked about, items provided it as a bonus, and I think there even was a spell for it. I hope that in PE, "see in darkness" type abilities will either have a meaningful effect on the game mechanics, or not exist at all.

Well, my point was that developing for multiple platforms concurrently, will probably end up costing less development time/effort overall than dealing with platforms sequentially. Fair enough. I guess I read too much into Bryy's "And demanding a port? In two weeks?" - combined with the fact that some PC game developers really do proceed like I described, even to the point of designing their whole code around the DirectX and win32 APIs and assuming a Windows-like filesystem and using Windows-only audio/gfx effects libraries etc., and then at the end just hire a third-party company to "port" it to Mac & Linux. You're right that the beta delay is not proof of such practices; it may well just be that unexpected problems turned up on (some configurations of) those platforms during playtesting, which need to be ironed out. Let's hope it doesn't take too long.

Well, that's the problem: PC game developers still seem to approach "Mac and Linux support" as more of an afterthought. As in: "We'll develop it for Windows just like we always did, and then when it's almost done we'll start to think about porting concerns". And when that time comes, it usually turns out that Windows-specific assumptions were made along the way, and porting requires redesigning part of the code. With the result that it has sort of become industry standard to delay the Mac & Linux releases for a few weeks after the Windows one. I would wager that game developers could save themselves quite a bit of development cost (and customer disappointment) if instead, they'd consistently develop with cross-platformness in mind from the start (and briefly test their work-in progress on all platforms at each development milestone). But I guess they're still adapting to the increasingly multi-platform world that PC gaming is becoming. In time, they will surely learn... In time...

Why should we consider balancing problems less noteworthy than technical bugs?

The Baldur's Gate games didn't force you to make such decisions (except in the early parts of each game), but Icewind Dale 1 did. When you come to Kuldahar near the beginning, you'll see lots of powerful enchanted items in the blacksmith's shop but you can't afford a single one of them. So you leave and follow the main story line, and by the time you come back to Kuldahar later you can maybe afford one of those items. And so on. By the end of the game (not counting expansion), you can own maybe 3 or 4 of them, but you have to choose which.

Amaunator confirmed.

Every game in the world has mod support, whether the developers want it or not... Worst case scenario, we'll have to wait a few months for the hardcore hex editor using modders to apply their black magic and reverse-engineer the data and script formats etc., before the normal modders can come in and create stuff... But I don't think Obsidian will make it that difficult.

That would be unfortunate.

No one will be able to tell the difference between a paint-over done at 720p, and a paint-over done at 1440p and then down-sampled using Photoshop. On the other hand if they just stick the 1440p one on a texture and let OpenGL/DirectX down-sample on the fly, that may be different matter...

@Frenetic Pony I guess it wouldn't look as smooth/detailed as pre-rendered environment shadows though. But yeah, it's a little disappointing that shadows of walls and trees etc. won't change with the time of day or with other possible dynamic light sources (like when standing in a dark hallway, and opening a door to a brightly lit room).

I find it interesting that the two Amauna portraits that have been published so far, show a very different number of teeth: Humans, and most other real-life species, have very little variation in teeth numbers, don't they?

That's a matter of context. In PST, which was the only Infinity Engine game that made extensive use of non-combat skill checks, not playing a main character with those attributes meant missing out on most of the game (and experiencing much more difficulty with the rest of it). So yeah, you pretty much had to, even though the game mechanics theoretically allowed different builds. I hope it won't be like that in PoE. I think it would be fun to play a grumpy, ignorant, socially incompetent "hero" who would utterly fail at adventuring if it weren't for the loyal, diplomatically skilled NPC friend at his side who possesses the wisdom to step up and handle those tasks for the party. But I never tried, because games that have the concept of a single PC tend to rail-road them into the "born leader" stereotype. Well, what percentage of the total amount of game dialog to you expect to be about the PC's personal story? Even in PST it was actually a small percentage, if you take into account the vast amount of side quests and generic interactions. When necessary for story purposes, letting important NPCs bypass the party's speaker and address the PC directly is fine imo. But that doesn't mean the PC should have to handle all the day-to-day diplomacy (and other non-combat skill checks) as well.

I can think of a few things: survival liberty justice (the real kind, i.e. the one which governs the interactions of human beings, not genders or other abstract categories) love bacon

I don't like the idea of being forced to always play an eloquent/charismatic/leader-type main character. NPCs should be allowed to fill that role as well. Why not allow players to designate a speaker for the party who will handle (most) conversations? The simplest way to do this would be to simply consider the character in "slot 1" of the party formation the speaker, but even better would be to give it a separate UI function so it would be independent of the combat formation.

Yes, this is a big part. I don't think anybody suggests a conspiracy with malicious intent among those who uphold the status quo. But regardless of the intent, the resulting system is unjust and wasteful. I have no trouble believing that the small proportion of women in, say, senior management positions, is largely due to tendency of employers to hire people from their own peer group for such jobs. But I believe "Social Justice" activists are making a mistake when they then jump to the conclusion that this discrimination happens evenly along gender lines, leading them to massively overestimate the benefit that average men gain from this employer behavior, and underestimate the amount of new injustice added by the quotas they demand. The demand for legally mandated quotas is based on the assumption that the peer group from which the employer prefers to fill senior positions is defined by gender: ingroup: the ~50% of the population that happens to be male outgroup: the ~50% of the population that happens to be female When it is in fact much more plausible to assume that the line is drawn like this: ingroup: the ~0.001% of the population that went to the same elite universities, frequents the same private clubs and events, has the same business connections, etc. as the employer outgroup: ~100% of all women and men Sure, the ingroup may consist mostly of men, but that is of no benefit to men as a whole, and not something that men as a whole should "pay" for But unfortunately, 'class-think' clouds the judgement of "Social Justice" activists - everything is immediately treated as a property of (or an effect on) a gender/racial/social 'class' as a whole, with little to no thought on whether such a generalization is at all justified in the case at hand. (It almost never is.)

Keep in mind that going down that road inevitably leads to space zombies.

I don't think it's reasonable to use speculation/fantasizing on likely common intentions as the basis for drawing up a moral line along gender boundaries à la "if women do it praise them, if men do it condemn them". Individuals have intentions, not groups. Personally, I think that the whole idea of trying to forbid "discrimination" in the realm of private interaction is unrealistic and incompatible with the idea of individual liberty. When people choose to associate with others in exclusive spheres, I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt, because (regardless of who they are) they may have valid reasons to do so. And even if I found their reasons stupid, it wouldn't give me the right to try and stop them. So I guess my opinion on the topic of "safe spaces" can be summed up like this: Some people want to interact in private spaces from which I am excluded? Well, good for them. I'm not in the business of forcing people to interact with me. People want gaming companies to give moral and infrastructural support to some of those private clubs? I don't care about that either, as long as developer updates and other services provided by the company remain available in the public space (and thus to me). Will the existence of such exclusive spaces help to solve inherent problems in the larger community such as sexism / trolling / world hunger? I have no idea. If people are convinced it it will help, let them go ahead and try it out.

+1 I don't buy the whole idea of "group guilt" and "group responsibility" among conceptual groups of people who have nothing to do with each other but just happen to share some identifying characteristic. Too much Marxist class theory still floating around in the heads of "progressive" liberals; they transferred it from social classes onto genders etc. but that doesn't make it any less irrational and morally dubious.

That comment was directed at the whole "I never actually felt the need for an X myself, but if 'that other group' gets an X, then I must suddenly demand one as well in the name of pedantic 'equality'!" attitude which I read out of your post. Did I misinterpret?

It's not the same thing at all. There is a huge bloody difference between creating safe spaces for people that receive rape & death threats as well as heaps of general abuse... and making a special club for bigots. While Nonek's demand comes across as sulky and childish to me, the sweeping generalizations and exaggerations in your reply perplex me even more. First of all, since when is this thread about "rape & death threats" ? Just throwing in some verbal bombs to try and "spice up" your argument, huh? Secondly, don't you see any hypocrisy with instantly pigeon-holing the idea of exclusive men's clubs as "clubs for bigots" while at the very same time promoting the idea of exclusive women's clubs? Women can can legitimately choose to interact with other women, but men choosing to interact with other men is per definition bigotry? That doesn't sound like a morally consistent world view to me.