forfs

Oops, seems like I lost connection before posting... Well, my point was more about skills acquired than experience, but okay, I accept these answers. I still think it would be better to change this lore, as IMHO a race that spends 130 years on idle chatter with friends is not likely to give birth to any adventurous types. Yes they have 10 times as much time in life but it doesn't mean that each seconds lasts 10 times as short for them, therefore it takes very lazy person to waste THAT much time.

That's 8 year gap not 110... And even relatively speaking your 12 year old zulus are still 60% as old as 20 men from Oxford. Here we are talking about someone who is 6.5 times as old, that would be comparing your 12 year old to 78 year old, or 20 year old to 3 year old. This just does not compute. What about elves that are not part of court? Does their food fall from the sky or do they hunt it?

I think that is actually implied in Forgotten Realms lore about Drows. They are said to be masters at the art of love but come on! They can't possibly suck day and night for 130 years...

In at least few of the systems I know of the age of an adult elf is around 130 years, and that's often the age of newly created character. Is there an explanation on how does elven ranger live 130 years and have no skills whatsoever above those of 20 year old human ranger? I mean.. if you start learning your trade at your "teenage" years of say 80, that's 50 years of shooting bows and tracking animals. Then when those two ranges are in the same party they level up at the same pace meaning they can become twice as proficient in bow in the same timespan of 2 months or so. Moreover there are stats for mental abilities, so you can't say all elves are retarded, when they can have both stupid warriors and smart and powerful wizards and clerics. I just can't wrap my head around the idea of starting at age of 130 in this "tabula rasa" state. Wouldn't it be more logical lore-wise to say elves are adults at 20 and just live much longer? Why the idea of 130 year old jack of no trades?

Arcanum seems like a great game, unfortunately for me it's broken because of music... It seems incredible, but I installed my copy of Arcanum about 5 times, and never got to play it longer than 5 hours with the longest play session lasting about an hour before I fall asleep. Nothing in this world has been able to bore me as much as Arcanum music, and mind you I had to read 200 page book on machining during my studies. I tried muting it and playing another music with another program in the background, but it doesn't work for me, music doesn't change with combat etc...

I wouldn't consider your examples easter eggs. You could learn of both of those encounters from NPCs. BG1 had many more easter eggs (or things that I would consider easter eggs), and I didn't really care for them. Whether you're aiming for humor or secret encounters you can make those without silly references to real world.

Current image of dragon is very recent and may even be partly inspired by dinosaurs, but originally dragons were serpents. The fire "evolved" from a forked tongue that was over time depicted bigger and bigger until it didn't even resemble tongue. And given that dragons I don't think they should resemble any particular creature extinct or extant. They are what they are, dragons.

You actually can disable them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PztO-OvzRyg your move, cat lovers...

Dog is man's best friend, but what if I play a female elf? Can I then become crazy cat lady and unleash upon the world the terrible power of purring and sleeping and being lazy? The reason cats haven't been done in games before is because they are insubordinate brats. I'd like to see a cat that listens to commands. When the revolution finally comes dog army will crush disorganized cat forces! Until that time let the cat people watch funny pictures of their cats, while we, dog people, train our pets in art of war

Drawbacks so that having pet does not always equal having more power. What I had in mind for example: Pets take up party spot or you have to share experience with them, or when they die you loose hitpoints etc.

I'm all for pet's if it makes sense, e.g. it it's ranger's pet or mage's familiar. And it should have some drawbacks too, it's not pokemon game. Yeah Lim Lim was fine, partly because it was useless, no mechanics involved, just increased depth of the game.

Level scaling may even be necessary if player has a lot of freedom in terms of the quests order. Take DA:O for example (and possibly KOTOR games?). If the level was fixed, there would be no point in allowing player to choose, when there is clearly one and only one correct order of doing quests. Having said that, IF P:E is going for more linear storyline I would prefer fixed levels. A wizard that you fight at levels 5-7? Make him level 8 and let player deal with it. You could always use difficulty slider to affect A.I. I'm always wary when developers try to optimize the gameplay to every style (rushing vs exploring). Clearly on of the most important factors distinguishing games from books is inability to lose at reading, while you can lose at game. Why take that away? Yes it can force you to do some side quests that you didn't plan on doing, but on the other hand it increases replay value. When you explored every nook and cranny and you still want to play again you set yourself an artificial challenges (What's the lowest level/party size I can beat this guy with?). With scaling you don't have that or it's diminished by the knowledge that the game will bent over backwards to let you win. What would be the joy of playing your first solo character in BG, if the game scaled to your level? I will probably never forget the wonderful feeling when I defeated Firkraag with my solo 15lvl sorcerer wielding only wooden staff +0. Or when I cleared whole map in act 1 Gothic 2 and still saved points for mage skills... Ahh happy days To sum up: Games without level scaling have - historically - provided me with more fun than the games with it, and therefore by induction I would opt for no level scaling in PE.

I have never played ToEE, but I recently bought it on GoG sale. Any non-spoiler tips before I start? (like e.g for Torment I would give "keep the bronze sphere" and for BG2 "don't take portal over ship" )

Ewww! I don't understand you Jaheira lovers... She never really attracted me, but I suppose it could have something to do with voice actress. Maybe in English version she is the hottest one, but in my language Viconia was always clear choice. I had ear boner every time she opened her perfect evil mouth

^This. Hell, if I find out that, say, Physical KS backer has some benefit over any other kind of backer I will download crack and unlock it. This would be truly terrible policy to provide different experience in a single player game depending on how much money you paid for the same freaking game. And I don't want the game to tell me what kind of person I am based on how much money I spent on a video game.

I like both. Sometimes I want to play story-heavy linear games, sometimes I prefer more non-linear. For me they just serve different purposes and can be equally enjoyable. That is not to say that joining those worlds can't be done. It's difficult, but I don't see why it would be impossible in principle. Many promised that, and someone will eventually nail it. CDP comes to mind - they are promising just that (open world + story driven gameplay) in the new Witcher game, and IMHO they are one of the few that could actually do it right.

I already posted those in another topic, but I really like the idea behind some of them:

Well, the reason everyone is so hyped about P:E and T:ToN is because there weren't that many good games in the genre lately... If you don't mind a little hack&slash I would recommend Bastion (in case you are one of those two people who haven't played it yet) it has good gameplay and story.

While we are on the subject of books did you guys read Ursula Le Guin's books? I always thought her Earthsea series heavily influenced the whole immortality and fortress of regret themes of Torment...

I would call it something like Game: The Game or The RPG or just RPG just to piss off the reviewers.

Well you can edit global variables in shadowkeeper and there is one at the very bottom that's called YESLICK. For me it has value -1, and he didn't ever join my party. You can experiment with that I guess. Also remember you can hold Ctrl+T to speed up the time. EDIT: theres also a global variable FLOODED, for me it has value 2.

I oppose porting P:E to consoles for several reasons, three come to mind right now: 1) Games for consoles are generally made to be played on the TV with player sitting on a couch 2+ meters away. This already excludes walls of text. Either dialogues will be fully voiced or it will be in big bold letters with max 2 lines of text. Both of this options mean that there will be much less text: you can't expect player to scroll trough BG2-sized dialogue in a box that contains a maximum of say ~60 words at a time you can't expect developer to pay most of their money to voice actors - see Skyrim and compare it with Morrowind for amount of text 2) Because console is a bigger market, games that are not PC exclusive will *eventually* be developed for consoles first and then ported to PC. What that means you can see comparing DA:O with DA2. The first one was a promising start to potentially great series of RPGs (and dumbed down version of it on consoles), the other was an aRPG. 3) The IE-like games simply will not port well to console. You need to either sacrifice PC or console version or develop two versions which is more expensive Because of all these problems I wouldn't support it if I knew it would be ported to console. Don't get me wrong, some of such games are great (Bastion comes to mind), but I certainly would not preorder or kickstart it. Would definitely wait for a review.

Probably one of the most impressive moments in Oblivion for me was when during a search for missing painter you enter a painted world trough a magic portrait. This quest just made my day, and it was one of the things that have kept me playing this game for longer that I would have otherwise. For that reason I support different planes, although BG1 for example didn't have any, neither did Morrowind, and I still consider both of them to be better than Oblivion.