Endrosz

Chapter 1: Fresh off the bus boat Party composition. I spent an evening thinking about it. Must have: 1 fighter, 1 cleric, 1 thief (some good treasure and quest options are sealed off without a thief, the knock spell doesn't replace them entirely, also TRADITION!), 2 mages. That leaves one spot open. My first choice was another cleric, so they can heal each other in dire situations, and have more resilience in the no-rest and limited-rest areas, even started the game with 2 clerics. But as the memories started rolling back, I remembered that in high level play, a second cleric doesn't bring that much to the table besides Heal (they don't have access to Hold Monster). And there are a lot of good martial weapons in all of the games, which the cleric can't use, doesn't get multiple attacks, not eligible for +4 HP Con bonus, etc... I'll have to do with one cleric, two cleric is for multi/dual-classed parties. So I restarted with a second fighter. Initially, I wanted a paladin as the second fighter. Then I realized that PoR only offers the 4 base classes. No paladin. The immunity to fear and brave aura is their main feature, immunity to disease is good sometimes, and lay on hands gives an option to revive a fallen, but not dead cleric. Same with the cleric spells later, not really powerful, but nice to have as a backup. Bummer. As I started rolling, I thought I could assign the rolled numbers, as in other games, like ToEE recently. No-pe. You get fighters with high Int and Cha, and mages with 18/percentage Str. Hmm, I don't have the patience to get the rolls that way, look at all these failed creations... In tabletop, most GMs do allow you to assign rolls to attributes. Otherwise the player will beg and whine to re-roll anyway, because the result doesn't even resemble what he wanted to play. There is a Modify Character option in the character menu which allows one to set attributes and HP as long as the character is fresh, so I used that exchange attribute values. Hooray for in-game cheating features, they have uses for honest players, too! Without further ado, here's the party. Alma, which means Apple in Hungarian is the leader of the group. She's grown up in a borderland village, and learned fighting from his soldier father. Reliable and loyal, though a bit picky on morality issues, also the effect of her much-admired father. Wanted to be a paladin, but no order would take her. She has 18s where it matters, and a solid 17 for Str. I favored Con and Dex over Str because there are several options to raise Str drastically (both items and spells), but very few options to raise Dex or Con (Ioun stone). Her basic HP roll without the Con bonus is 6, not the best, but acceptable. Barack, meaning Peach* is looking all peachy. She's a cheerful, naive girl, who thinks that adventuring is like telling tales and dreaming, but a bit more real. Try nightmares, Peach, and you're closer to what's in store for you and your companions. She has only 17 in Dex, but 16 in Wisdom, which gives a +2 mental defense bonus against Hold Person, Fear, Confusion, and other nasty anti-fighter measures. Also, I thought it would be good to have some variety, and not just the same bonuses everywhere. Her first hit die is a perfect 10, good start. * Yes, in Hungarian, Barack Obama literally means Peach Obama. The pronunciation is different, but the spelling is the same. Szilva, meaning Plum is the grim party-pooper cleric of the party. He has "Preaching Mode: On" all the time, even when he's treating people in their death throes. He's got the best set of rolls I could find, and only needs a 16 in Con, so I could afford a 16 Cha on him. There are so many suckers out there falling for sect-building preachers, that's what his Cha actually represents. You might notice he has 577 XP, unlike the others, there's a story about that, coming soon. Eper, which translates into Strawberry, is an honest man. It's all lies and accusations, don't believe a word they say about me! He has the honest profession of locksmith, only he's a... traveling locksmith. Yes, he wants to see the world. That's why he came to Phlan and carries a big sword; the world is a dangerous place, who can deny that? Citrom, who might be known as Lemon in other places, is a laidback goth girl who's in love with spellcasting itself. Look at this, I can use Sleep to create living statues! For her, casting a spell is a chance to create True Art . Not concerned with having proper girly looks, she's been working out for years, mostly to protect herself from guys who think that a goth girl is all emo and vulnerable. Not Lemon, she can kick your ass even after she runs out of spells. And finally, we have Narancs, or maybe he's Orange in a parallel universe? It's a mystery why his hair is all white at the tender age of 28. Maybe he has planar heritage, but with a lesser manifestation than tiefling horns and such? Poor luck all the same, the ladies think he's a freak and avoid him, the guys think he's cursed and do the same. That gave him a strong motivation to learn serious magicks, Friends being the first spell he learned. He's a good guy, really, wouldn't really hurt someone, but having a bit o' fun with magical help is no deadly sin, right? Yeah, I wasn't very heavy on roleplaying. I need more than what a Gold Box game offers to immerse myself.

Thanks, I got my 5 flowers likes, so I'm putting up Ch1 tonight. Drowsy Emperor: I had a hunch that there will be a few people who didn't play these oldies because they started with other RPGs and can't stomach them, but have a faint interest to know them. For a quick comparison: These games have little in the way of 'quests' outside of the main path, and little choice and consequence, although there is some. They don't compare favorably to the Baldur's Gate saga that way. The encounters and the challenges, however, are surpassing BG1 (definitely), and are comparable to BG2, though not as varied (there is no stealth/trap setting, for example). I think the best parallel you can draw is with Icewind Dale: lots of big battles, sometimes a bit of story (maybe more than IWD), occasionally a choice. Keyrock: I first played these games, up until Secret of the Silver Blades, on my C-64. But I finished the saga on PC, with nice VGA graphics. I don't remember this bug -- what platform? BruceVC: I have a special surprise for you, Bruce! As I was reading bits here and there on these games, I discovered an interesting tidbit about Treasures of the Savage Frontier: You need to play this game, Bruce! It's where it all started, man! :D ... No, you don't need to play it. It was an uninspired game, and all the innovations (not just romance, but weather effects on the overland map, etc.) couldn't save it from being bad. Leferd: It's a very different engine, it has a different story and encounters, it uses 3ed rules, it's buggy -- why should I play it as a replacement? I can't import characters from there. BTW, there is an NWN module remake of Pool of Radiance. Now this is a faithful adaptation, and I might play this one day. But not now, the challenge is the old GB games.

Pool of Radiance, the first of the SSI's licensed ADnD games, was the game which turned me into a RP-gamer in real life. I was 15 when I started playing it, in 1990, and it was my second foray into the world of big RPGs after Bard's Tale 3. Some months after getting into PoR, I spotted a hand-written poster while walking in the city which advertised a "game of fantasy", where "you're the hero" or somesuch, played in the library on weekends. I NEED TO BE THERE. My father, who was a rather hardheaded religious bigot, bless his soul, wouldn't hear about it, going on the "it has magic, that's from the devil!" drivel that needs no introduction to the US readers among you. But my paternal grandma, who was a serious authority in the family, supported my intent, which was enough to get me the permission to go. And thusly started my 20 year stint with tabletop roleplaying games: got into ADnD as many others of my generation, abandoned it in the early '90s for Shadowrun and Earthdawn, I came to love Mage: The Ascension from the World of Darkness, and later developed a taste for freeform roleplaying after trying out Amber. After spending more than a decade with rulebooks, I ditched them, and in my final RPG campaign, about 4 years ago, I used a very simple homegrown system to focus on the storytelling and cut down on time spent with combat. Tabletop roleplaying stopped because my close group of friends, we got too old and tired to submerge ourselves in it, but cRPGs are still a big part of my life. I'm mostly an old-school gamer in my tastes, but not really a nostalgia gamer. Master of Orion 2 is the only old game that I regularly play, which I consider "good as it is", though still far from flawless. The reason I don't have rose-tinted glasses is because I have a strongly critical mind (math does that to you, and I was a regular at math competitions, best place was national 7th), and I found many faults with the old games back when I played them for the first time. A good example of this is Master of Magic: the premise of the game is fantastic, there are a lot of great ideas in there, but on the whole, the game is a huge mess which does little to reward strategic skill, yet still requires copious amounts of micromanagement. My memories of the oldies are far from spotless. Pool or Radiance was the first of the many Gold Box games, and I played them all: Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Blades, Pools of Darkness -- The subjects of this Let's Play, tied to the Moonsea region of the Forgotten Realms. The first and the last one, the two Pools games are great, Curse has good encounter design and tough challenges but is weak on story and setting, Secret is horribad is every aspect (and it takes you away from the Moonsea setting, teleporting you to the far north, to a place which no one cares about). Champions of Krynn, Death Knights of Krynn, Dark Queen of Krynn -- Dragonlance saga. The three moons' phases affecting mage spells was a cool addition to standard ADnD rules, plus some other stuff that set it apart like the Krynn-specific subraces. Decent efforts all-around. Gateway to the Savage Frontier, Treasures of the Savage Frontier -- FR/Sword Coast saga. Outsourced, entirely bland and forgettable. Countdown to Doomsday, Matrix Cubed -- The Buck Rogers saga. This is a future Earth sci-fi setting with ADnD-inspired rules, similar to D20 Star Wars. It has spaceship combat, gameplay is strongly skill-based (there are no spells), and the missions are mostly interesting and detailed. You get to visit the planets in the solar system, and each of those has its own lore, sci-fi fauna and in some cases, even harmful environmental effects. Also, space pirates! Everything is better with pirates. Very enjoyable packages, I replayed these once. Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace -- Another outsourced and hastily scraped together game when the GB engine was getting obsolete. Borders on unplayable, lots of bugs, features missing. Over the years, I sometimes considered replaying the Gold Box classics, or maybe just the best of them, but in the end, they were just not good enough. I would much rather replay Mask of the Betrayer, for example, or Fallout 2. When I stepped in the disengagement attacks debate with a post, I needed a Gold Box screenie to show disengagement attacks happening. I couldn't find a proper one with Google, so I installed Pool of Radiance and took the shot myself. At that point, the temptation to replay came up again. Okay, so the games in themselves are not that appealing, but what if I poured on some additional challenge? After a while, I came up with a few self-imposed limitations and started that long forgotten, ancient ritual of (re-re-re-re-)rolling my characters. So this is a continuous Let's Play of the 4 games in the Pools saga, listed above, with the following additional limitations: 1. No dual-classing. In a high-level campaign like Pools of Darkness, dual-classing makes the game too easy. No multi-classing either, but that's not a real limitation. Since PoD is an epic level game, going to level 40, and unlike the IE games, it implements non-human multi-class level limits, multi-classed characters are out. Under the standard ADnD rules, an elven fighter/mage cannot level beyond 7/11, and that's that. 2. I will keep the Hit Point rolls on level-ups, and never reload to get better rolls. This will have a huge impact in the long run. I know what awaits me at the end of the road, where I'll have to fight Minions of Bane, Pets of Kalistes, drow spellcasters, dragons, and the rest of the merry band of baddies, more than two dozen at a time. I'm a bit unsure at the moment whether I'll be able to finish with the backline having around 50 hit points, I reckon, and the tanks around 100? Unlike in DnD3+, hit die rolls and Con bonuses stop at level 9/10, you a get flat 3/2/1 increase... But I'll do my best, I need this additional pressure to get motivated to play Gold Box again. I will not limit myself on combat reloads. Mass battles are one of the iconic features of the Gold Box games, and very soon I'll be drowning in masses of level-draining wights and disintegrating beholders and Hold Person-casting clerics. No, thank you, just getting through Pools of Darkness with limited characters will be enough. I have already finished Pool of Radiance and the first dungeon of Curse of the Azure Bonds, and got a bunch of screenies ready for write-up. The rest of the Let's Play won't feature long rants about me, just the games. Is there interest in this? I'm going to play through them anyway, but I'll only write details if there are enough readers. 5 will suffice to stroke my ego. Please either throw a like on this post or write a post in the thread if you're interested. Thanks!

I can't really answer your question. For the game where I was a beta tester, it was people who had an interest in the game -- not necessarily big.

This is the conundrum of community management -- there are a lot of voices, but those are not entirely representative. It takes effort to uncover those unsaid opinions. One of the things developers can do to solve this conundrum is to bring in fresh focus groups during development, every week or two. People who have never played the game before, and their minds are not tainted by locked judgments. You'll get a much better spread of data that way than if you just listen to the beta testers. I learned this while I was a beta tester on a game.

at the expense of their backers? Of course it's not my place to judge so I'll confine myself to a mere observation: it doesn't really sound like a fair deal. Especially considering the sub-par results we've seen so far. This is a much discussed aspect of crowdfunding. It's still open to interpretation whether the makers of a crowdfunded product are "slaves" to the will of the crowd, or did they receive a kind of grandma's gift to chase a shared dream with great personal freedom? Those are the two ends of the spectrum. --- I also want to reinforce Shevek on one point: Forum consensus is nowhere near representative. About 90%** of the people who play a game will never, ever visit the game's forum, blog, Facebook page etc. But their opinion is no less valuable than those who write 10 posts/day. They are still players. And in this day of overwhelming social media connections it might sound unbelievable, but it's actually very hard to get a representative opinion because of this. There are many, many people who simply buy, install and play. The game doesn't become a part of the daily routine. The people who do engage in discussion are usually the hardcore ones, who play a lot, replay it again and again, and they tend to have a skewed vision of what the game is. Go into this forum's member list, and start checking out the ones who are backers. You will find a lot of people who didn't even visit these boards since the crowdfunding period. Yet their ""casual"" -- double quote on purpose -- opinion of the game is no less valuable than yours or mine. ** I'm pulling this data from a PAX panel done by community managers of various popular games, like League of Legends. It was an eye-opening session, to say the least.

You missed the recent 70% GoG sale of Don't Starve and its expansion (yes, it's that popular that it got an expansion). Great variety of gameplay, full of mysteries, stylish.

Quote: "The other found an early ending and decided to wrap his story up there." (emphasis from me) I think at that time you'll have all the information about what is the "true path" solution. In most games, when you're around two-thirds into the game, you already have an idea about what needs to be done in the end, you just need to jump through half a dozen hoops to finally get there.

The term "ninja update" describes changes that are not mentioned in the patch notes. The term is used industry-wide, there are many, many ninja updates, trust me. It's a regular event when GW2 gets updated, for example. Quote from the Urban Dictionary:

Same here. If we have specific loot tables (as opposed to the global loot tables of hack and slash games) that respect the enemy type**, I'm happy and don't want any more "realism". The Gold Box ADnD games also used this equipped-dropped system, and yes, it created unnecessary clutter. This feature didn't make them better, but slightly worse. I'm not really against having such a system in place, but spending work hours to add it to the game? No. ** A memory: In the early days of Diablo 2, a single goblin ("fallen", whatever) I killed on harder difficulty dropped 2 full plate armors as loot. Now there's some deep pockets! It was incredibly wrong, but also very funny, it made me smile. Edit: Fresh screen from Pool of Radiance, loot from a band of kobolds. No, this doesn't make me feel rewarded. But if there's any useful loot amongst the pile, then it's much harder to notice. Leaving behind valuable loot because of this was a real problem in these games.

There will be a great rush of new players, who didn't back PoE and/or followed its development. They will bring a lot of senseless complaining with them, but also a lot of heartfelt thank-yous and some new perspectives on 3000-post-old discussions. Myself, I was part of the Kickstarter wave that came to frequent these boards, although I didn't register until Avellone's Arcanum sufferthrough started (I'm sorely disappointed that it just kind of stopped...). And I stayed because this place is a whole lot better than many other forums, blogs, mailing lists, whatevers that I've been member of. So there will be a storm we need to weather, but it's nothing new. Gromnir, the one who's been around since the Black Isle days, has seen a dozen such storms come and go.

Watching this romance play out made me so... horny. Would love Iron Bull long time. Although I suspect some special problems could arise, such as... "Dear, would you please roll away a bit? It's getting cramped on my side of the bed. ... Awww, my eye! Pay attention, you stupid cow!"

You're both right, in a sense. Motoko doesn't care about her body the way most normal women do. Her old body, the one she cared about, is gone with the wind, as we learn in one of the Stand Alone Complex episodes. Which means that she has no qualms about taking her clothes or suit off, or even walking around naked. But at the same time, she would never care to put on a dress to titillate onlookers like she does in the gameplay demo, unless her current mission is infiltration via seduction (which does happen at least once in the series). In another SAC episode, there is a scene where she sleeps with a boy -- sleep here is literal, she doesn't have sex with him, just shares a bed and answers his awkward boyish questions about sexuality and whatnot with total openness. Again, because she doesn't really care. I can't imagine any other woman doing what she does there.

In turn-based, preventing kiting is easy, there are a number of options. Strategy games usually employ the "zone of control", for example, to prevent fast units running around enemy units. The Gold Box games, the first of which came out almost a decade before Baldur's Gate, had melee disengagement attacks. They were ADnD games, and they used disengagement attacks. The idea that you need to prevent kiting and this particular method is not new, it's old. In fact, when I first played Baldur's Gate, the bastard child of an RTS engine and a turn-based RPG, the whole kiting thing was one of the first things that popped out as 'really lame and cheesy', compared to the turn-based ADnD adaptations, which I was used to (now who's the grognard? ). But! Preventing kiting in a real-time game is much more complicated. Disengagement attacks don't feel "natural" like they do in turn-based. And most other methods feel forced, too, like MReed illustrated. So you're mostly right, I just wanted to explain that having disengagement attacks is an old and proven idea in ADnD games. Just not in IE games, and PoE is supposed to be IE-like.

You could assign hotkeys to anything that appeared on the radial menu, like taking a 5-foot step, full attack, charge, casting a certain spell or drinking a healing potion by hovering over the option and pressing the desired hotkey. Simple, efficient. That means that I used the radial menu only for non-common commands, which was fine. Most of the commands you give is some kind of move or attack, and you can cover those with about 6 hotkeys. I think many who played ToEE didn't know about this feature, and using the radial menu to do everything -- yes, that's painful. With the easily configured hotkeys -- a comfortable experience. I wouldn't say that the radial menu was good, just that there was a way to circumvent it. As to the topic, I'm not sure how the OP was reminded of ToEE. Two hours of PoE gameplay I watched recently, and it definitely reminded me of an Infinity Engine game.

This is a mainly a Unity problem, Unity games have ridicolously large asset sizes. Borderlands 2 with all DLCs, 100+ hours of high-quality, varied 3D = 13 gigs. Wasteland 2 with much crappier quality, less variety = 22+ Gigs. Same with other Unity games, this is not WL2's fault. However, patches can be incremental, which means you don't need a full copy of the files you modify, just the modified/expanded parts and offsets where you apply those. If Wasteland 2 DOESN'T do incremental patches, then my already low opinion of their programming team -- which was formed during the Kickstarter, when it turned out that their lead programmer, Alvarado, had no idea about how to do internationalization properly, via open source turnkey solutions, and didn't even know the term and its usual abbreviation 'i18n' -- will dive into a new low. This is WL2's fault, if it is indeed a full-size replacement patch they put out. Note: it is ironic how PoE's size will not be as bloated as WL2's because they mainly use pre-rendered 2D art, which can be easily compressed with a high ratio non-realtime, before packaging. It will look better AND take up less space.

An impressive gameplay demo for a forthcoming Mordheim adaptation. I must say that Mordheim is one of the better games of Games Workshop, and the adaptation also includes some nice improvements. I really dig what they did with movement, evolving the new X-Com's already slick system further. It's still a purely turn-based game, but it looks and almost plays like a third-person action game. Well done, looking forward to playing the finished version, but nooooo, I'm not buying into Early Access, not even for this.

You made a basic mistake: you've read the chat, and taken it at least semi-serious. I call public chats "animal pens". It gives you a good idea about how to engage the creatures inside, and what weight you should give to the noises they make.

I also would really like to see a Tim Cain game. IMO he's the most diverse and imaginative designer in the entire cRPG industry, who is well-read in fantasy, sci-fi, and all kinds of different systems. He developed a good taste and a penchant for weird. strange, original and engaging settings/stories. For example, in this GDC presentation about the making of Fallout, he explains that the Brotherhood of Steel was inspired by a sci-fi classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz, the combat was heavily influenced by X-Com, the moral choices by Ultima, and so on.

I watched the entire stream live, eagerly curious, and I don't even remember that there was a combat music. I could say then that it's boring and nondescript, but it certainly didn't annoy me at all. Besides the main menu music, nothing stuck in my mind music-wise.

FInished playing Stacking today. This Double Fine game is even better than I expected. One of the most creative and fun games I ever played, a well-executed spin on the adventure genre. No grinding, no useless minigames or platforming segments, no pixel hunting, no lengthy backtracking. Just pure puzzle-solving (with built-in hints via both dialog and a hint system), and having random fun with the quirky abilites of the dolls. BTW: Stacking > Broken Age. Which is ironic, because Stacking wasn't crowdfunded with great promises, it's just a game that is completely finished and polished. The game uses classical music to great effect. Why don't more game companies do this? Classical music is free, and covers a great variety of themes, from marching tunes through majestic choirs to somber lullabies. I recommend Stacking to anyone who likes adventure or puzzle games, or games with humor. Also: it's a great family game, no adult content or copious violence, play it together with your SO, younger siblings or kids!

Yes. Also, the technology tier of the processor nowadays has a much bigger impact on performance than speed, and in some ways it's more important than the number of cores (not all applications make good use of multiple cores, it varies greatly). If you have a Core2Duo or later tech tier processor, YOU'RE GOOD TO GO FOR PILLARS OF ETERNITY, regardless of speed, number of processors, L2 cache memory etc. Core2Duo, the second generation of dual-core processors was a vast upgrade over the previous Pentium D tier. I personally experienced that difference in Guild Wars 2 when I upgraded from a Pentium D 2.8 GHz processor to a Core2Duo 2.2 GHz during the beta. Same amount of cores, slower core freqency, higher tech tier = amazing improvement in performance.

This War of Mine, a non-zombie wartime survival game focusing on realistic depiction of civilian suffering is now available on GoG and Steam. I'll let the highest rated Steam user review talk about the game experience:

I found the intended entertainment by Mr. Jesse Cox rather boring, occasionally annoying. I found the unintended entertainment by Mr. Jesse Cox -- his blunders and failure to understand not just the combat, but other, much simpler gameplay systems -- completely hilarious. Would watch again, at least he doesn't try to appeal to 10 year olds with hissy fits and constant swearing like PewDiePie.