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Ineth

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Everything posted by Ineth

  1. Ineth
    Best. cRPG character sheet. Ever. And what we see in the screenshot is not even the "Detailed Stats" tab, just "Basic Stats"!!!
  2. Ineth
    Labeling today's white South Africans as "colonists" makes you come across as a racist. Just say'n.
  3. Ineth
    How long can the party go without resting? For comparison: In IWD my party had to rest like 3 times per dungeon to regain spells and health (yep, that entailed annoying backtracking). In IWD2 it was imo the perfect balance - regular resting was required to succeed, but I did not have to backtrack out of dungeons. In BG2, or at least in the later parts of the game, one could go without resting for a looooog time - and I usually waited until multiple NPCs complained about being fatigued - which kind of took the "edge" out of the resting mechanic. What resting balance are you targeting for PE?
  4. Ineth
    You sir cuddly-pink-hippo-thing, are a pun master Hm, I'm partial to the IWD games myself. If only they'd had a real party NPC system and some more mage-vs-mage action, I would rate them above BG2 without a second thought (although I do really like that game too)...
  5. Ineth
    Not if you install the 1pp mod (for BG/BG2/IWD/IWD2)... Among many other subtle-but-awesome graphics enhancements, it makes more gear items adapt to the character colors, even shields and quarterstaves! Seriously, everyone should install that mod when replaying the IE games nowadays, even if you want "pure unmodded gameplay" - the changes it makes are purely cosmetic (except for some tiny optional ones that you can skip during installation), but they definitely make those games look prettier and less outdated.
  6. Ineth
    Are you considering spells that interact with the environment? That's a great way to make some spells more "unique" and tactically interesting, imo. Like the Lightning Bolt spell in BG2, which produced a projectile that got reflected off of walls... (which is a lot of fun when you're in a small room or narrow tunnel! )
  7. Ineth
    +1 to what mstark said. The ground (grass/dirt texture) and rocks in that picture look like they could be from a screenshot of a real-time rendered 3D game. I thought one of the benefits of going pre-rendered, is so you can add more detail / "grittiness" / "irregularity" to the backgrounds than what would be possible in real-time 3D.
  8. Ineth
    Yeah, it sounds a little too similar to the Monk class.
  9. Ineth
    Example: <--> Yep, I think it's safe to say you'd notice.
  10. Ineth
    I can see your point with regard to weapons, but not with armor. In a BG-style portrait you will see the difference between a dress and a full plate armor, just as clearly as in an IWD-style portrait.
  11. Ineth
    +1 The BG1/2 portraits were okay too, but not nearly as cool as the IWD1/2 ones. I get that, but wouldn't it be possible to partially mitigate that by creating multiple variations of the same portrait with different weapons and other small differences? The artists will work digitally anyways, so if they use different layers etc. then shouldn't this be possible with minimal overhead? I've never seen this done in a game before, but I imagine it could be an effective way to increase the "coverage" of the shipped portraits (i.e. make them cover as many different character builds as possible), without making them less expressive.
  12. Ineth
    You would slay a cute little baby dragon? What kind of person are you?
  13. Ineth
    All bows in BG2 had a "minimum STR" requirement. For "Composite Bows" it was really high actually, so most non-warrior builds couldn't use them.
  14. Ineth
    Sort of agree, except that I don't see it as a problem so much as a challenge. It means that when playing IWD1 at Hard/Insane difficuly, you pretty much need to give every party member a viable ranged option in addition to melee proficiencies, in order to survive the first two chapters - which forces you to put more thought into the character builds (especially since ammunition of each type is limited and tends to get used up fast, so you need to diversify). The biggest difference between ranged and melee weapons in early IWD1, though, is actually in the hands of low-level enemies. I remember plowing through hordes of small skeletons in Chapter 2 - in melee fights they didn't present much of a challenge at all to my well-equipped front-line warriors, it was more "mopping up" than "tactical combat"... However if one of the little suckers had a bow, and was standing behind cover, he could actually kill one or two of my party member before I could even get to him, if I didn't use stealth (and my own ranged weapons) effectively. Ah, good times... Disagree. I think this perception arises because many players assign ranged weapons to their party as more of an afterthought - like giving a mage (who'll stand in the back anyways) one point of bow proficiency, and designating him as the party's archer without any further optimization. Well, the fact that such a combination won't get very many hits against high-level enemies is not intrinsic to the weapon, it's intrinsic to the wielder. If instead you take a Fighter and give him 5 proficiency points in bow, and equip him with the best magical bow and magical arrows you find, maybe also let him wear the "Bracers of Archery" etc., he will be able to hit stuff just fine all the way through ToB. That's the combination that you should compare to your melee fighters whom you equally optimized for melee weapons. It's true that the optimized ranged fighter will not nearly deal as much raw damage-over-time as the optimized melee fighter in ToB / late SoA. But that's okay, because the ability to attack from a distance presents other advantages and opportunities to balance this out. Bows may not be ideal for producing mass-carnage at those levels, but they can be great for disrupting enemy spellcasters, hunting down fleeing enemies, etc. So no, not "grossly underpowered" compared to melee weapons, just different. Disagree. There's no rule saying that every character skill in an RPG needs to have the same relative power at low and high levels. And there's no rule saying that every weapon needs to be (equally) optimized for raw damage-over-time. In fact, not designing the game using such rigid "equality" rules makes the game more interesting, by giving the players an incentive to diversify their character skills, take characters that complement each other into the party, and use the same characters differently at different levels. Since you can have 6 party members, each of whom can gain proficiency in multiple weapons in addition to many other class-specific combat skills, this really shouldn't pose a problem.
  15. Ineth
    Remember the messenger boys for some of the BG2 strongholds? They loved appearing just when my party was being ambushed by bandits/monsters in between areas, walking right into the battlefield... +1. Please don't make it as obtrusive as the BG2 thief stronghold (where you had to return on time every 5 days for the rest of the game), or anything like that. I want a cRPG, not a Sims clone...
  16. Ineth
    Books can use a lot more (continuous) text to describe a given situation, compared to a cRPG in which the writers have to stick to short dialogue lines and descriptive snippets. Thus book authors can much more easily rely on context/repetition/redundancy/annotation to get the intended meaning of sentences across. In a cRPG individual lines have to be much more self-explanatory, thus the aforementioned "gimmicks" come into use.
  17. Ineth
    The pic in the update is a downscaled version of the screenshot they took... Click it to open the original screenshot, in which the letters look much bigger. Those games were designed for 640x480 and 800x600 resolution (+ experimental support for 1024x768 in case of BG2 and IWD2). If you play them on your modern 2560x1440 monitor and use the fan-contributed widescreen mod/hack to force the use of the native screen resolution, you can't blame the game designers if things end up looking small... Personally I prefer to play those games at 800x600 or 1024x768 even today - it will look slightly blurry on modern flat-screen displays (because those have a fixed physical pixel size so resolution down-scaling has to be faked via resampling), but it's not that bad.
  18. Ineth
    Nah, the Infinity Engine simply didn't support it. PE on the other hand, being a new game developed in 2013, likely will.
  19. Ineth
    +1 for the clear visual distinction between things a character does, and things that happen to a character. BG2 was too inconsistent in this regard. +1 for having frequent NPC interjections like this, even for every-day decisions like resting at an inn. BG2 used this much too sparingly (mostly just in case of major plot junctions, like when you have to decide whether to take Bodhi's deal), which was a shame imo. +1 for consistent and simple friend/foe colors. In BG2 the font colors for names in the battle log seemed random/inconsistent (at least I never understood them). +1 for also mentioning the target of an action (Forton in this example). I actually think this should be done for spells, too (if they are cast at a specific target). Omitting this info makes the battle log much harder to follow, especially if lots of things are happening at once.
  20. Ineth
    That depends on how you read it. If you always diligently read everything word by word from left to right, top to bottom at an even pace - i.e. "read it like a book" as you say - then yeah, mixing italic and non-italic text in the same paragraph will be a slight distraction. However, if you (at least sometimes) prefer to quickly 'jump' between direct speech snippets, only quickly skimming over the descriptive text in-between, then the italics will make the experience much more comfortable.
  21. Ineth
    @mstark Yeah, that might work. However it looks a little weird to me to have some descriptive/narrative snippets in italics, but others not. Why not also make them italic if they appear in-line? This is how your example would look with this change: With the stench of spilled ale, rotting hay, and firewood assaulting your senses you approach the man standing behind the bar. Osmaer: The innkeeper digs inside a mug with a dirty rag before raising his thick eyebrows to your level. “Welcome! Welcome! Please, make yourself comfortable, traveler.” Osmaer: “Food's hot and my rooms keep cool. Holler whenever you need, I always got time to spare these days.” A strange silvery tooth appears behind his fat, shiny smile. Osmaer: “How can I help ya?” Thunder strikes in the distance as you consider your options. 1. “I have questions about the area.” 2. “I want to order food and drinks.” 3. “Let's see what rooms you have.” 4. “Goodbye.”
  22. Ineth
    That looks nice. However, how would you handle cases where narration and an NPCs speech is intermixed in the same line, like it was often done in PS:T (and I assume the Eternity writers might like to do as well)? Example from PST:
  23. Ineth
    Baldurscape Dale, Episode 1: Souls of Eternity
  24. Ineth
    Has it ever been proven that sans serif is more legible than serif? I thought all major studies that tried to find out, came back inconclusive.
  25. Ineth
    For me it was one of the first things I noticed. I hope that they still find a way to improve it... Even if they only want to draw a single shadow per character, it should always be drawn away from the strongest light source in the vacinity of the character. They can always keep static shadows as a fallback for older computers. Shadows are a part of what makes an environment look great.
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