Racker

It's something I would like to see. I remember playing through Neverwinter Nights 2 with the nastiest, most insanely evil character I could muster, but at the end of the game I had still managed to win the favor of the king and the city and was granted my own castle. And many of the characters in the game had to make some pretty wacky decisions for that to happen. What I'm saying is that I hope P:E has some actual paths for evil characters to take rather than just shoehorning them down the same paths as good characters, like so many RPGs in the past have done.

Druids are one of those classes that have always been sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place, as far as balance is concerned. That is to say, when a developer gives them offensive spells that are too powerful, they are accused of stepping on the toes of wizards, and if they are given too powerful healing/buff spells they are accused of turkin' da jerbs of clerics. But I suppose that in a primarily single-player game like P:E, that wouldn't be so much of a problem. I remember in the original Everquest, they were positioned sort of like a reverse necromancer, as far as gameplay was concerned (not lore-wise). In the sense that both classes had a lot of snare and DoT spells, but necros had a lot of debuffs and lifetaps where the druids had buffs and heals.

The process of finding gems and such to use in crafting has always seemed a bit too 'grindy' for me. With some rare exceptions, I think that powerful magic items are something that should be found, not made by a blacksmith in a farming town. I'm not entirely against the idea though. I would prefer something where you have the ability to make high quality non-magical items and then have them enchanted by magical characters or items you find.

Well I hope at least some of IWD2's focus will be brought into PE. I know it's probably just me, but I've never liked it in games where you're supposed to be going off to stop the planet from exploding or whatever, and then you stop for two weeks to help some farmer find his dog or something. It just kind of takes the air out of the adventure's tires for me. I like IWD2's approach to side quests; where you're going into some cavern or some such for a particular reason (to find a way past a blocked path, for instance) and some side characters give you things to do while you're in there. As opposed to just going off in a completely perpendicular direction to do something completely unrelated.

I disliked the Ice Palace a lot also. Aside from the weird puzzles that kind of came out of nowhere, the whole place was just kind of boring to look at, and was mostly just the same room of polar bear/barbarian/summoner groups of bad guys over and over. Incidentally I didn't dislike the forest at all, in fact I enjoyed it. But I figured out quite early that I could use my barbarian's high wilderness knowledge skill to guide me through it. Honestly I enjoyed IWD2 more than Baldur's Gate. It was faster paced and felt more like exploring, whereas a large part of BG felt more like wandering back and forth through the woods between Friendly Arms Inn and Neskell.

In Neverwinter Nights 2, if I remember correctly, the characters would just kind of squat down for a few moments while resting outside or in a dungeon or something. It was less disruptive to the 'flow' than the resting in BG and IWD2, which I recently played, where the screen would fade out and a line of text would tell you that you'd been asleep for two days or whatever. But what constitutes a good resting system is determined by the combat mechanics of the game, so it's difficult to say I'd really favor anything at this point in development.