Ffordesoon

Called it. PrimeJunta owes me... Ew. A testicle? Never mind. Seriously, this is good news. I do confess to being a bit confused when people were shocked and horrified that a beta of an Obsidian game had showstopping bugs, though. Made me wonder how many people here have bought and played Obsidian games on release. I was pleasantly surprised at how stable and together the game already feels, to be honest with you. But then, I was never expecting it to release in 2014, so.

I got a quest and wandered around town for a second, and then I decided to go off into the wilderness, where I was promptly murdered by a pack of lions. I love it.

It's funny to me that people are mentioning Wasteland 2 as an example of "doing it right." I was on the WL2 forums when the size of the beta was first announced, and there were a fair few people who had the exact same complaint that's being expressed here: "I want a beta, not a glorified demo!" And then a lot of them ended up playing the beta for ages. I actually like what Obsidian's doing here, mainly because it caters to my preferred beta playstyle. I don't have the stamina for long-haul testing, so what I do is test out everything I can for a few hours and then stop playing until release. Knowing that this will be a short beta is nice for me, because I'll be able to complete it without spoilng anything for myself.

Most classic Western RPGs have pretty lame or outright nonexistent openings, and even most modern console-focused WRPGs have **** openings. It's part of what makes the genre so difficult to demo. The best classic WRPG opening I can think of is probably Ultima IV's, where the fortune teller introduces the concept of the virtues. You're eased into the themes of the game without any time being wasted, and the text does a good job of sucking you in even before you're given the choices. PST's is definitely pretty good as well, though I would have to echo the complaint that the opening (and the rest of the game, really) is so thick with blocks of novelistic text that it can grow wearying quickly. The first important plot hook ("Find Pharod") is also delivered too early, it's too easy to miss Deionnara, Pharod himself should be introduced a fair bit earlier, and the weird stuff is thrown at you so early and so frequently that it becomes polarizing. The best modern WRPG opening I can think of is probably Fallout 3, actually. Say what you will about the rest of the game, but everything up to the first glimpse of the outside world flows like butter. The writing and VO aren't brilliant, but they get the point across. Players are introduced to all the concepts they'll need to understand the game without it feeling too overtly tutorial-y, and you leave Vault 101 with absolutely no doubt as to your high-level quest in the game. Not only that, but they do a good job of conveying how bittersweet it is for the player to leave the vault, there are some nice (if heavy-handed) C&C moments that reinforce the Fallout ethos, and the first moment you step out into daylight is, as someone else mentioned, a superb wow moment to cap the whole thing off. DA:O probably deserves a mention as well, but I haven't played all of the origins, and I understand they vary in quality. Also, it doesn't do that good a job of actually teaching the mechanics, which Fallout 3 did very well. Also, you kind of get the origin part of the opening and then the "You're a Grey Warden now!" part of the opening, which ends up almost feeling like two openings in a row, the second of which is a lot longer and more weirdly paced than the first. A good RPG opening, to my mind, is brief, enticing, and ends with a killer plot hook. Based on the videos, PoE's opening seems to fulfill all those criteria, which makes me excited.

Yes, I hope to see most of the pulsing icons from the original games. That's like the only bit of the demo that made me do a little frowny face. As clunky and weird as those UIs are in a lot of ways, the cursor icons are more or less unimpeachable.

Mass Effect is the odd one out there, surely? There are certainly plenty of dark things that happen in those games, but the world itself was hardly grimdark in atmosphere. I would think Mass Effect's world would be one of the better RPG settings to live in - hyperspace travel, new worlds full of boundless possibility, racism and sexism pretty well conquered, great health care, a more permissive attitude toward sexuality, Elcor Shakespeare... I mean, yeah, the Reapers are a thing, but they don't show up till the third game. If you were to live in the world of the first two games, though, you'd have a pretty sweet deal. Am I missing something? EDIT: Oh, and I should point out that if you're looking for a more lighthearted cRPG, Divinity: Original Sin fits the bill. It's the kind of game in which you can wear a bucket as a helmet and talk to a shell who wants to be thrown pack into the sea called Ishmashell.

It looks how I remember BG looking when I was twelve and every game looked amazing. But with PST's writing and IWD's atmosphere. And a much better UI than any of them. And there are scripted interaction things and pretty in-world animations and it moves way faster and the combat looks awesome and I am in romantic love with everyone who had any part in this and I wish I could spend another thousand dollars on it and oh my god oh my god OH MY GOD HAD I BUT WORLDS ENOUGH AND TIME TO PROPERLY CONVEY MY EXCITEMENT This is a knockout punch right in them warm and fuzzy nostalgi-feels, Obsidian. You know those "Grape Job!" stickers that you scratch and then it smells like grapes? You get two of those. Three! Christ, and I haven't even played the thing yet...!

Personally, I find this sort of backer entitlement a bit silly. I'd like to see gameplay, yes, but I kind of don't care if someone else sees it before me, especially when it means orders of magnitude more exposure for PoE than it would otherwise.

@OP: You made my brain sad.

The circle is essential for judging the range of the effect.

^This, especially now. I dunno if anyone's fired it up lately, but Wasteland 2's gotten really damn good, largely thanks to beta and Early Access feedback. And outside of the Codex forums, the beta wasn't recieved badly to begin with. Coverage on the pro blogs has been remarkably positive, and posts on the official forums have gone from an overall "meh" reaction to broadly positive over time. Posts I've seen elsewhere have been more or less positive. There have been outliers, of course, but I think the picture Sensuki paints is far bleaker than the reality. It's also worth noting that inXile is a far smaller company than Obsidian, with a looser structure and less resources. So there's that. FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm a mod on the WL2 forums, for those who don't know. Make of that what you will.

I just hate elves. Dwarves are awesome. Elves are lame There's not much more to it than that, for me.

I think it's important that the area the spell affects is crystal-clear, which wasn't true at all in the BG games, so in that sense, I prefer the circles, especially for AoE spells. At the same time, I obviously think the BG spells had more personality, and I'd like to see that here. The important thing is not to get so caught up in personality that it's hard to tell what's happening. I think the BG2EE pic is indicative of that problem. It's clear that many things are happening, but it isn't so clear where the effects are coming from and how they relate to one another. In addition, the "*quaffed a potion*" bit points out an obvious problem with BG's potion buffs, which is that they almost all had more or less the same animation (swirly lights around a single character, and maybe a colored glow afterward) despite doing vastly different things. When compared to, say, Chant or Armor Of Faith, the feedback is annoyingly indistinct.

No no, no no, no, no, nononono, no, NO, no, no, NO, no, nobody can do the SHIMMY like I do, nobody can do the SHAKE like I do, nobody can BOOGALOO like I do...

No.