amarok

I have a quite simple feature request: I want to be able to sheathe my weapons. It´s kinda ridiculous always to run around with sword in hand, the inability to sheath my weapons in the IE games bothered me. Be et just some automatic animation or a player executed function.. it would be nice to have the weapons be drawn before battle and sheathed after it ends.

Well, its hard to determine what "broken" is. There's always something which could be better, bigger or more diversified, no matter how overall good or bad the original game is. Take the BGs and the 'Sword Coast Stratagems' mods. They alter enemy AI significantly and make it react to the players actions, which isn't done that extensively in the vanilla games. I wouldn't want to miss that anymore. For me, an unmodded BG2 would be quite a 'broken' expierience because of bland/too easy/exploitable enemy AI, although the vanilla version is by no means a bad game. With a big and dedicated community a mod-friendly game almost certainly will improve through modding over time, no matter how good the initial product already may be.

I dont want the frequent use of health- and temporary stat upgrade potions to have a too important role inside battles. The unlimited usabilty of health-, invulnerability-, giant strength- and mana potions is a thing i despise in many rpgs, as battles eventually degrade to a resource war, in which a high number of potions grants victory in most cases. So, please limit the use in P:E.. the IE games already did this in the way that swallowing a potions actually took time. I'd like to see at least something like that, or maybe using potions get's kind of a cooldown, which allows swallowing a potion only every few minutes and thus the player usually won't be able to use more than one or two potions in a battle. Along the way, i also would like to see these potions to be something much more valuable than usually. I want them to be rare and expensive, i want their use to be an actually strategic decision, which could turn the tide in desperate situation every now and then - not the all-time-solution to everything and all we see in many games. The fact that these things are cheap and lying around everywhere in high numbers just feels wrong to me, it should be something only master alchemists could create in small numbers, and available only in the chests of powerful enemies and expansive magic stores.

Mh, did you ever have the urge to visit a place in Athkatla which wasnt accessable? Thats a real question by the way. I did not, but i assume others could have had a problem with the design of the city.

Yeah, thats my whole point. And Athkatla did this really well, because on one side it felt like a huge, sprawling city and on the other hand i never had an urge to visit a place which didnt exist in it, although it only had seven rather small accessable districts. I seriously hope to see something similar in PE. A higher degree of exploration though could easily be implemented into this system. Just increase the number of accessable districts, dont show the location of the accessable areas from start on and add between the major, quest relevant ones some smaller, rather hidden districts which dont necessarily have to be visited for the completion of major quests and only can be found if, for example, the big temple district is left through a small sideway instead of the big main road.

One last attempt. medium sized mediaval city in real world: This place actually is quite a bit bigger in the real world than it is on this miniature painting. I live in this place and the old mediaval city core still is intact. Half of the whole skyrim world, including every skyrim city, would fit into this single medieval city. Its just a whole other dimension of size, even if its a fairly small place compared to modern cities. But we should stop that now, we wont be able to agree upon this thing.

You dont get it :/ Some 10 to 20 huts with a few not-moving people standing around and without any involving, dynamic quests can neither be a big city nor a small one. Not even a very, very, very small one. I cant get over the fact, and i think thats a totally understandable thing to criticize on games like Skyrim. The size is not a bad thing just because its small, its bad because it should not be small. A place which is called "major city" and is supposed to be the center of a kingdom or something like that, than this place has to be big to some extend. If its supposed to be a tiny remote mountain village than its perfectly ok. But places like Riften, Whitehall or the Imperial City (Oblivion) are not supposed to be tiny remote villages. Yet they are. Thats the point..

Or like eliminating weight limits for your inventory, which already is confirmed for PE (in some way). I dont like things like that.

Well, you have a point. The fact because i still want food in RPGs is some restriction they force upon you, if its done well. You cant stuff up your party with food and survive in a dark cave for months, resting and healing after every battle. Because you need to refill once a week or whatever. Just one automatically consumed "food"-resource which needs to be refilled in a store every one or two ingame weeks because of its weight/date of expiery and i am perfectly happy.

Its ok to see things different. But stop your polemic ****. I clearly can see the advantage of a seamless world, like Skyrim. But i also look at these two "major cities" and just cant accept the right one to actually be a city. Whats so wrong with that?

Open map exploration fallout/darklands style, so that 99% of the regions you travel through isnt modelled ingame and abstracted. This not only is a solution to logic problems alá BG1 there the locations are much to small, it also allows for far more encounter variation and skill use while overland travel (traveling through wood areas gives a 10% chance to be attacked by wild animals every ingame hour, woodman skill lowers the chance; slaver caravans are encountered in dangerous regions while traveling on roads, with low diplomacy/wrong race they will attack the player, with fitting race/good diplomacy they will trade etc)

Well, you really dont get my point. Certainly detailed working industry and other stuff isnt necessary for a game like PE. Its all about imagining all the other things between the actually depicted stuff in a game. My proposal is to leave some space for all the unimportant things in a game and not trying to incorporate them and fail. Maybe a better comparison to illustrate this would be Darklands VS Arcanum. In Darklands a city consisted of some text, images and a few isometric streets when fighing occured. Arcanum had fully pictured isometric cities. Still a city in Darklands felt big and real, in Arcanum they did not. Because Arcanum put all the important quest locations, shops, inns and stuff on one 0,5 square kilometers wide map and said: thats a whole city. Darklands only gave you the opportunity to visit RELEVANT locations and blended out the insignificant ones - and thats the way it works. A whole city on a 0,5 square kilometers map is not just not realistic, its simply game breaking for me, because no whole city ever would fit on 0,5 square kilometers and a am not able to forget about this fact while i walk through it. Its really strange for me that no one else sees a problem with this, i always thought other people would be bothered by this too.

Wow, the armor mechanics sound like really good stuff. A real difference between light and heavy armor aside from one being better than the other is a thing i always wished for in IE games.

I really would like to see a need for food in the game, but in some non intrusive way. Mostly because need for food forces the player to act like he would in a real world - concerning resting. A six man party which dives into a dungeon will have to take an amount of food with them, which probably wont last for weeks and thereby naturally limit the ability to rest and heal (being able to spam rest almost everywhere was one of the few things which i consider broken in the IE games). Long dungeons could provide the player with some amount of conserved food or a fast travel option out of the dungeon so he can refill without too much backtracking, but the party always would have to carefully consider the need to rest. The easiest way would be to implement two supply resources (food and water) which are consumed upon resting. Without sufficient food/water the party wont recover through resting and eventually lose hit points. A choosable amout of water can be refilled in wells or on river banks, food can be bought or produced through character skills ("hunting" skill grants the possibility to make food out of dead animals, "foraging" skill will lower the need for food when resting outside because the characters are able to find some fruits and mushrooms near the resting area). Are there any plans to add food to the game?

I really like the idea of a complex crafting system, but i also can see problems with crafted items rivaling the ones from loot/stores. I also dont think a story driven singleplayer game is the right setting for weapon/armor crafting skills.. you know, for crafting such things you need workshops, equipment, workers who do the diry works and TIME. A lot of time. Time which would be in conflict with the time needed to complete quests and do adventuring stuff, what the game essentially is about. To make a long story short, please dont add skills which let the players craft superior weapons. Skills for improving found weapons with some magical stuff, less time consuming things like alchemy/herbology to some extend is fine. Although i really would like to play a game where in a complex, involving and difficult way i can forge master swords, i dont think that PE is the game where this should be done in.