Fearabbit

And how, exactly, does stabbing beetles make you better at lockpicking? You're just regurgitating arguments that have been shot down in every other thread on this same subject. At least think through your own reasoning before posting stuff, dude. This is rich. You're using an argument that applies to ALL XP systems to denigrate kill xp. That's idiotic because this game uses an XP system, so you're basically saying this game makes no sense according to you. And this is why we can't have nice discussions on this board. Sergio, do you not realize that it was you who made the pointless argument about how XP systems don't make sense? It's right there in the quote! You: "It does not make sense to improve Axe skill with XP from a stealth-only quest." Him: "Yeah but it also doesn't make sense if you improve Lockpicking with XP from killing monsters." You: "But that applies to all XP systems. Lol, that is so rich and idiotic." ...?! As for the poll, I'd like to see more objectives that give XP. Yes I want exploration XP when I find a special location, no I don't want to get XP for every single lock I pick. I would also like the XP to be awarded for completing parts of a quest. I want a bunch of XP for getting to the dungeon. Then a bunch of XP once I get to the chamber where the final boss is. Hopefully it'll be enough to level up before the fight. Then after killing the final boss and getting back to the guy who gave me the quest, I want the rest of the XP. Other than that I'm happy with the system. ALSO can we please drop the "fun" argument? Because both sides use it the same way anyway. Pro Kill XP: "Anyone who fights against monsters just for the XP even though he isn't having fun has a personality disorder and that's not the game's problem." Pro Objective XP: "Anyone who complains about having no incentive for combat without XP anymore is clearly missing the point, which is that combat is fun." This is going in circles.

Quoting myself: In essence, I agree with you, and I think this needs to be changed.

This thread has like 5 people who agree with you, I think. I'm talking about the thousands of backers and, later, buyers of this game. It's hard to tell what the majority likes, but it's a very bad idea to extrapolate from the desires of the hardcore nostalgia crowd. I'm using this term a lot so let me just say that I don't think it's bad - nostalgia's great. But sometimes it can stand in the way of innovation. I remember that when Oblivion was announced, people (including me) were upset that it did away with the hit-or-miss combat system of Morrowind. In the end, it was a good decision that the majority of players approved of. I still tried to mod it back in, but for the majority of players not having it was the better solution. Now to your counter-arguments. 1) That's like saying that a class that encompasses all other classes is the most strategic one because it can do everything. I mean yeah, if you have to decide whether to play a rogue ability or a mage ability that certainly is some strategy going on, but we can agree that it's bad gameplay design right? Limiting players in their options is a fundamental part of pushing them to their personal limit. Having to make do with what's available is what makes encounters intense and requires actual tactical decisions. And this is so obvious that I'm really beginning to think you're just arguing for the sake of it. (The chess comparison doesn't work at all by the way. What I'm saying is that winning chess is a lot harder and requires more thought and tactical prowess if you only play with 5 chess pieces instead of 16, and that choosing which 5 pieces to take is a more tactical decision than simply playing with all of them.) 2) Except that you know exactly where all the junk is, and managing it is as easy as opening the stash. In BG, you had to distribute the items on six different inventories and had to remember where they are or go through them all, which was super annoying. Also your point about less inventories only makes sense if they were kept separate, but since they are displayed at the same time this argument just doesn't work. You effectively have one inventory and one bag of holding. It's way less micro-management, sorry. And this is possible exactly because the individual inventories are smaller. 3) Oh come on, "every possible trash loot"? Don't turn this into that kind of discussion where everything is taken to the extreme. No, people won't care about every freaking possible trash loot, but they'll care enough to walk back and forth a couple of times, and this is what people do in these games, and they don't like it. This is what Obsidian repeatedly heard as criticism and it's called degenerative gameplay and Josh Sawyer talks about that all the time. Yes, some people don't care about it. You apparently don't. It's a big enough issue for Obsidian to care about it, though. There's really no point in arguing about this. The majority of people have a problem with degenerative gameplay. And Obsidian deserves high praise for finding a solution that gets rid of that without dumbing down the game. They could have said "screw tactics, lets give them an unlimited inventory". They didn't do that. 4) I have no sympathy for RPG veterans who refuse to learn about new systems, sorry. And like I said before, this one is not as complicated as you make it out to be. You've watched a couple of Twitch streams where people played the game blindly for the first time without knowing getting an introduction to the different mechanics. Of course they were confused. Watch them play the game for the second time and I bet they suddenly use the stash inventory with ease. Also no. Managing six inventories that are so big you need to show them seperately is not intuitive for newbies. You don't remember it now, but when you first played the IE games you had some trouble with that as well. I know I did when I came back to them a couple of months ago. Managing one encumbrance inventory is intuitive, but it's still annoying enough that I don't like the system in games like Skyrim or Fallout 3.

No, I did not ignore your points. I answered them by giving my reasons for why the stash system is better. And also, other people already countered them. But anyway: You say the encumbrance inventory is strategic, well I disagree because you can prepare for many different situations with it, while you have to choose which items to keep in your active inventory with the stash system. You say that the strategic part comes from deciding which items to take with you, the valuable ones or the useful ones - as has been said before by others, almost nobody does that. Most people take the useful stuff, then come back when every enemy is dead and loot all the valuable stuff. People are greedy like that. You say returning to sell loot was a good feeling - yes, but this feeling is still there. It's not a point for one or the other system. You say it's fun going back and forth to sell all the loot there is. Sorry but no, nobody thinks that is fun. Sometimes you have to accept that you're in the minority, and this kind of gameplay is a huge problem for most players, it's not popular and one of the main reasons the new system was put into action. Summary for encumbrance inventory: - Less strategic - More annoying micro-managing - Going back and forth to sell all the loot + Nostalgia

It's a good system and people will get used to it. The backer beta might not give it the introduction it requires, because it assumes that the backers are familiar with the updates where its functionality is described. But it's really easy. You have an unlimited inventory that you can access in safe places like towns (and possibly campfires). But you can't access it while adventuring, which means that you can't be prepared for all possible situations. This is what makes this inventory strategic. You have three free slots - do you fill them with traps, with potions or with a mix of both? Encumbrance adds nothing to this system. It's less tactical because it (unrealistically) allows you to be prepared for many situations, since the inventory is bigger. At some point it makes you micro-manage your inventory which absolutely isn't fun. All that an encumbrance system has going for it is nostalgia. I agree that subcategories would be good for when you access the stash.

I have to admit, that would be nice. I've always preferred the way games like Fallout New Vegas and Arcanum handled companions, where you can tell them how to act in general, and then they just do their thing. For important battles it's still vital to do micro-managing, of course. But I don't want to do that for every encounter. But I realize that this opinion is highly unpopular, and a decent AI might be too difficult to implement.

I hope nobody minds if I bump this because I think this topic is important in general, and also because it took me a while to write that post up there. It might be good to try and keep all Character creation stuff in one thread. Right now it's spread out, people start their own general threads about various impressions... it's kinda confusing I believe.

The male Nature Godlike is simply gorgeous. I wish every portrait was done in that style. I like all the different art styles (with one or two exceptions), but I really hate that they're inconsistent... and if I could choose they'd all look like the male Nature Godlike. By the way... don't know about you but I think it's important to have the same amount of portraits for each ethnicity as well as gender... which is kind of a problem. Let's say each race has two distinct looking ethnicities, while Godlike have 4 ethnicities... that's 14 ethnicities. Two genders makes 28 different character types even if we ignore classes, demeanors and looks. I'd say four different portraits for each of these is minimum, which would put us at 112 portraits. 112 portraits just so that when you play a darkskinned human, you still have trouble choosing a good-looking portrait because there are only four of them.

I'm not in the beta, but looking at the videos I noticed the following things. If this will change anyway, then ignore this post, but otherwise... Order of menus: It's confusing. It seems that when you select a race and click "Next", you can select the subrace. However, you don't have to click "Next" - it's possible to click on the next menu point in the bar at the top. It is not obvious that this way you're actually skipping the subrace menu. If you do the latter, the subrace menu does not come up until after you've selected your attributes - at least that's what it looked like in the videos, it was one of the submenus somewhere in "Culture" or "Appearance". Problem 1: This is confusing as hell and simply bad UI design. You want it to be clear where certain menus appear and clicking "next" should lead to the next menu in the top bar, not to a hidden menu. Problem 2: Don't have us select stat-changing stuff after selecting the attributes! That's such a bad design decision! It's confusing and makes me go back and forth, especially since the attribute screen does not show us the base numbers, but shows us the sum of the base and all modifiers (you only see the base once you select the attribute and look in the description - not intuitive and a bad place for an important number). Gender -> Race -> Subrace -> Appearance -> Class - Subclass -> Culture -> Attributes -> Portrait -> Voice. It needs to be clear when you select a certain feature, and all stat-changing features need to come before the attributes. Yes, that messes with your nice little UI where the attributes are at the center. But it's also the intuitive way to do this. (Note that I put Appearance before Class because then you have ALL the menus that make up your overall appearance in direct order. You could put Portrait and Voice there as well, I guess, but personally I like to decide these two things last, so I don't know. What's important is that attributes need to come last. The Attributes screen and the Skills screen: "But there is no Skills screen". Yeah, exactly. That's my first point - your descriptions for classes talk a lot about the different skills and how they're affected, but you never see them in the UI. Even if I can't add points into them, I still want to see an overview of the various modifiers to them! Okay, moving on - don't make me put 57 points into my attributes. For crying out loud, distribute the points so that each attribute has a base value of 9 or 10, then let me distribute the rest of the points and customize the attribute values. And like I said before, show me the base numbers for the attributes without modifiers somewhere. Not in the description, but in the main UI. I want to have a grey "10" next to a grey "+2" and then a big fat "12" as the actual value. Something like that. Otherwise it's confusing and might lead to me distributing the points differently than I wanted, especially if I haven't decided which culture and subrace I want to have yet. Final character overview: Something like that would be nice. A screen where I can see my attributes, my skills, my race and subrace, my class and subclass, my background and my character, with the detailed descriptions as pop-up windows. Actually I'm not sure why the whole character gen isn't designed like that, I believe there would be enough space. And it would solve the first problem I mention above, eliminating the need to go back and forth and having everything there at a glance. Intense Flames: +10000% Fire Damage Doesn't have anything to do with chargen, but: This does not make any sense! First of all, the number is so big that using percentage here only confuses players. When I see a number like that, I instantly divide by 100 and say "okay so it's actually +100 Fire Damage, got it". Or wait - is it? Or is it "100x Fire Damage"? Percentage of what? If you add 10000% to any value, then that value itself becomes meaningless - "100 times X plus X" is almost equal to "100 times X". So just make it easier to read and say "100x Fire Damage" or something. And one last thing... I hope the Class selection won't stay like that. It's nobody's fault that there are 11 classes, but this screen looks like 5 classes are missing from it. At least center the lowest class button, and use more vertical space. In its current state it looks like there are 5 hidden classes waiting to be unlocked because there is exactly space for 5 additional classes and oh my God there are five hidden classes that weren't in the Kickstarter but were included anyway because you love us so much aren't there? You cunning rascals. We love you too. <3

And you're apparently a troll... deal with it, the BG portraits aren't as popular as you think. Remember the Dungeons & Dragons movie? That's basically what BG's portraits look like to me. I prefer normal portraits like the ones from PoE. I'm not happy with the lack of consistency, but the fact that I can choose between several portraits that look good enough is a big step forward. In BG1 I really couldn't choose a portrait, mostly because almost all characters had ridiculous earrings and goatees and smug grins.

Well what did you guys expect?! There were three posters in the teaser, and one explicitly said "Adventure Card Game". Another said "Roleplaying Game". The only news here is that the card game will be for tablets and will be the first game of the franchise. I'm neither interested in card games nor tablet games, so this will not be for me. But I'm still interested in the Pathfinder cRPG. To the people concerned about the pulpy high-fantasy setting: Let me just remind you that KotOR was awesome.

I'm gonna go with Perception and Resolve for my first character, I believe. I want a witty leader and that seems to be the way to go. But I wouldn't worry about it too much. It seems like they actually made sure that each attribute gets some action outside of combat, so it's gonna be great fun to toy around with different builds and see what options become available. I'll definitely avoid trying to get all possible options for one character. It's more interesting to have weaknesses as well. In role-playing games the numbers are a part of the process. They are what you use to define what your character is, what they are capable of. They're the limiter that says, "Your character is this" and not, "Whatever I want it to be at any given time." A Charisma score exists in lower, moderate or high portions to define certain forms of social capability, while a Strength or Constitution score can enhance such concepts. You may be a big brute, but that's pure intimidation, but a charismatic, well toned (Str) and healthy (Con) character is going to have visual aspects to back up their social abilities. Not that one needs such things, you can be a smooth talker, but otherwise overweight and wimpy. The numbers are an intricate part of role-playing, they are your character - they're a portion of what makes that character, 'them' and not 'you' . . .you are capable of all manner of things, but, in a role-playing game, you're trying to apply what you know within the limitations of who your character is and what they're capable of. Hence the numbers helping define who they are, and what they're capable of. Sure, you can write up a background, but if the numbers don't support that background it's faulty - the numbers, in this sense, matter more than what you imagine, because they're giving you context for what is possible to imagine, keeping the game fair and assisting in the endevour that keeps characters from devolving into, "I'm an immortal and invulnderable half demon, half angel, half vampire, half werewolf pirate ninja demon slayer king paladin blackguard!" Your point? Karkarov said every character is a role-playing character, no matter how high/low the attributes are. Your post does not address that at all. (It reads as if Karkarov had said "attributes don't make a character, your ability to roleplay does", which he didn't say.)

You don't need to tell me that, I just said I understand what you mean. The fact remains that it was very clear from the beginning that there would be portraits. And if you expected anything else, you didn't pay attention. Obsidian didn't just say "like old school RPGs but better", they explained in detail what they were planning to do, and that detailed plan was what resonated with so many people here. Part of that was having portraits for the party. (BTW I didn't like the character creation screen in Divinity Original Sin either.)

Sorry, but no. I can understand your point of view but don't call it a "letdown". That implies that you had different expectations before, but there was no reason whatsoever to assume that PoE wouldn't have painted portraits. It was part of the pitch, it's what makes it a spiritual successor to the IE games. So complaining about that really is NOT valid at all - unless you're actually let down by the poor quality of the portraits, which doesn't seem to be the case (and it'd be strange too, because they're beautiful). I started with different games than most people here. I came to know IE games very late, which is why I'm much less nostalgic about them. I actually started with NWN first and it was weird to me to have to choose a portrait that didn't look like the character I had in mind and ALSO didn't look like the shoddy 3D model I saw earlier during customization. So I can understand where you're coming from, but this game is supposed to be a modern IE game, and for that you need to have this feature. By the way, modding communities can do wonders for stuff like that. I bet we'll see some amazing custom portraits soon after release (shortly after the initial wave of old IE game portraits).

Regarding the character models: I don't understand why they don't at least use higher-res textures for the menus. Usually artists start with high-res versions of their textures anyway and downscale later... and the way textures work nowadays, with mip-maps and all that, it's actually not a performance issue at all, even if the player character had a high-res texture in the game itself. But it's really not a big issue for me. It's more important that there are some cool hairstyles available, and that the armor looks good from a distance.

That's not true, people are not always the same as they were when they were children when they grow up, for a number of reasons. He made references to the TV show Prince of Bel Air, and you apparently didn't get them. ("at the playground was where I spent most of my days [...] then a couple of guys who were up to no good started making trouble in my neighborhood") Other than that, I actually get pretty annoyed by over-the-top effects in RPGs. I wouldn't like it if a simple knockdown had a fire effect for no reason. I haven't seen the video (trying to avoid spoilers), but maybe he had enchanted items that caused the fire effect?

I don't know. It seems unlikely. It doesn't make sense for PoE's world to suddenly turn into steampunk, because the scientific research is actually more focused on magic and its possibilities. And unlike Arcanum, PoE has no problem with mixing technology and magic, so even if we do see advanced technology, it will be most likely fueled by magic in some way, and the end result won't look like steampunk but like very high fantasy stuff. I hope you understand my point - in a world where magic is prevalent and important, we can't assume that technology will become as important as it is in our own world. Heck, we might even see a decline in technology as magical research develops better and more effective means of killing somebody, powering something etc. That's my guess at least. Who knows. Other than that, yeah it'd be great to see a new trilogy set in the same world but after some time has passed. I'm not sure if the game will be successful enough for that though, and whether Obsidian is interested in turning it into a large franchise.

Prince of Wales, I understood what you meant. Didn't think it came off as romanticizing rape in any way. Your main point was that people get horny and sex is part of everyone's life. But anyway... I think your comparison is off. (Or actually, NWN_babaYaga's comparison. But he's completely wrong anyway.) There aren't really any real world adventurers like the ones in fantasy stories. Fantasy stories have always been influenced by epic poems and the like. It just doesn't work to say "an adventurer is like a crusader". An adventurer is like a Greek hero, if anything. And yes, they thought about romance all the time! Ulysses wanted to get back to his wife. Perseus romanced Andromeda. Orpheus went to the underworld to save Eurydice. And so on and so on. But this romance was also part of their main storyline. Anyway. Don't compare adventurers to crusaders, it won't work.

I don't think that's true. I mean, it wasn't make-believe when I rose to the top of the Thieves Guild, or when I brought the Dark Brotherhood back to former glory. Those were, in my opinion, excellent storylines with interesting characters. In general I think that the quests in Skyrim were quite good - although the main quest really was too short and the civil war didn't really happen. There were lots of features like marriage that are just there, and you can use them or leave them. If you don't like "make-believe", you can ignore them and still have a game full of amazing quests to choose from. Then again I don't have a problem with "empty" choices. I think it's actually important to include different flavors without forcing a consequence down the player's throat.

I respect the OP's opinion and everything, but I really can't stand it if people call their opinion an "open letter". That just sounds like you think your opinion is more important than those from the rest of us. Why? Because calling it a "letter" evokes certain social norms - if you get a letter, you have to read it, you have to respond to it, you cannot simply discard it. Someone penned this letter very carefully, you have to respect that. It has an air of importance. So basically, of all the forum posts, this is the one that developers have to respond to, because it's a "letter". It's a rhetorical device, and I really don't like it. You're no better than us, and your opinion isn't even more sophisticated. Get off your high horse and start writing posts and vitriolic rage comments like the rest of us again. P.S. Also the correct use of "open letters" is when you have rallied a couple of people to your cause. An open letter is actually more like a petition, but less "professional". For example, organizations like WWF or PETA could write open letters in the name of all their members and sympathizers. (Yeah that's actually all I have to say about this topic.) (No actually, one more thing: Start using the Edit button!)

In addition to the ones mentioned: - Underrail - Blackguards 2 - Witchmarsh First one is inspired by Fallout and has interesting gameplay mechanics, but is quite hardcore. Blackguards 2 still lets you play a bunch of criminals saving the world with cool tactical combat, we'll see. Witchmarsh... looks beautiful. A 2D sidescrolling RPG set in rural America of the 1920s inspired by the Cthulhu stuff.

Now I'm curious - what do you mean by that? Which characters are modeled after Ravel, and what makes them tick? I must confess that I never played PS:T long enough to encounter her. I've been meaning to give it a try but all this talk about how characters with high Wisdom and Intelligence are the only way to go kind of made me lose interest. (If someone tells you that there's so much to explore if you follow a very specific way of playing a game, you can become downright paranoid about missing vital information and find yourself stop playing. It's really a curse.)

I don't think it's a problem. If a woman is armed and attacking you, there's really no societal issue here. There are some good fantasy settings where men and women are equal and it works fine. For example, my favorite author Steven Brust* does a fine job of creating a world where a woman is just as likely to be a badass warrior (or sorcerer, or assassin) as a man. It often strikes me as so strange to see these arguments where people formulate these hypothetical questions "what if there were women and you had to fight them" etc, and then come to the conclusion that the inequality we see in games, books and films is justified in some way. No, it isn't. If the world is done right, if these women aren't victimized, then it will simply not be a problem. *) Read him. Now. Vlad Taltos series. So good.

Clarification: nobody thinks your friend is racist because she prefers white men. But your post didn't read "I just prefer white men so that didn't work for me", it read "but he was BLACK so guess I'm skipping that huh". You can try and sugarcoat it now, but that is just an offensive statement. And don't forget the context: it's apparently mysogynistic to include only a black man as a romance. Mysogynistic! It shows contempt for women that this character was made black! Think about that for a second. The implication here is that your friend demands that her preferences be catered to (white beefcake, not whiny emo or black guy) and that all women think like that and it's mysogynistic if you don't comply. She ignores the fact that there are black women who play games and do want a black romance option. She ignores that some women like softies. She thinks that she is the typical woman and calls a writer mysogynistic because he didn't cater to her preferences. That's what makes her sound like a horrible person. But like I said, the numbers do support her main argument. And I agree that there are way too many romance options for guys - it's such obvious wish fulfillment and it's distracting. (And yet none of them were cool nerdy girls with pixie haircuts who like comics and indie music. Misandrist?)

I'll give her that the numbers support her main argument, which is that there are too few romancable guys in games when compared to romancable women. But yeah, your friend sounds like a racist and a horrible person in general. I mean, she things James Vega is hot? What the hell. (And your whole argument that white women prefer white men kind of rests on the assumption that all women who play this game are white.) Also I hated every romance option in Mass Effect as a man playing a male Shepard. I want a hot black chick! I want a badass Turian! I want a female version of whatever that assassin dude was! :'( (Well no, actually I don't care about romance, but the point is that women at least had a much broader spectrum to work with.)