Kjaamor

Meh. I'm off to the pub. Might have a look tomorrow morning.

Well, firstly my stance is based upon a decent documentation within the game system itself (something the IE games were great for) which makes the manual an optional extra rather than a necessity. In terms of character creation, I tend towards the two extremes. On one hand, I shall probably make (as I did with Arcanum) many, many characters before starting the game. On the other, as I do with most rpgs, I shall probably dust off the avatar Kjaamor; a neutral good, chatty, dual wielding melee dps type. I have very little willpower in this regard, of course. If you gave me the P:E manual today, I would probably read it several times a day and plan out several parties - provided that it was, as you say, a non-digital manual.

Very little, tbh. The more I discover in the act of actually playing the game the more enjoyment I get from it. ...of course, that doesn't mean that I'm going to stop checking the updates forum on a near daily basis.

I shall politely, if incredulously, disagree with your first paragraph in its entirety. The second again refers to your personal choice, although in the context of the discussion I'd again point you back to part 3 of my "Yes, but..."

4:12

Yes, but: 1. BG Enhanced Edition is rather the opposite and might be better named BG Unbalanced Edition. In the original, Bastard Swords came under the 'Large Swords' group rather than their own distinctive group. 2. Does a longsword wielding fighter do more damage than a bastard sword fighter over the course of the game? That depends upon the route you take through it. If you optimise your path to chase the best longswords in the quickest time possible, then longswords will do more damage. If you don't, then it's less clear. If you give a companion that first longsword +1 and don't fight greywolf then you'll probably do rather more damage with bastard swords. Also, is it more or less beneficial to use bastard swords at the start of the game when things are toughest, iron weapons break and most mobs drop them? 3. While you are of course encouraged to play BG however you wish (and on subsequent playthroughs I have played in the same way) to approach BG by first searching through a guide to see what and where all the best weapons are, which party is best and what PC will give you the most power is, irrespective of your preference, not how the game was intended to be played. Exploration, choice and consequence are key themes of Baldur's Gate, and considering how much every RPG fan and developer seems to praise them we seem to get extremely miffed at imbalance as we're doing our perfect playthrough thanks to gamefaqs. Most of the best weapons in BG will pass unnoticed unless your character is both an avid explorer and a complete psychopath; striding out into the wilderness to threaten other adventurers.

It's also worth remembering, though, that BG1 had a build in method of preventing save-scumming itself: If you were in a wilderness/combat area, and you reloaded, certain low exp enemies would respawn. It doesn't sound too brutal, until you realise those enemies can be - and in my experience frequently were - Hobgoblin Elite and Kobold Elites with bows and +1 arrows. If it was anyone but your tank leading the way, one volley usually meant death for at least one character. Which meant you had to reload, only now there are TWO groups of Elite Archer mobs in the way. Honestly, one of the hardest battles I had in BG the first time around was getting my battered party out of the Sirine area through those mobs (the Tank started the battle with next to no hp). I think I got to the maps edge with two members dead (2000gp to raise and whatever loot you lose carrying their equipment). BG used to literally give me nightmares about stuff like that.

I had very similar experiences with Tarnash and many of BG 1's baddies, but most of them were, to be fair, beatable with precious few saves+reloads once you knew how to approach them (as I'm sure you do now). For example, Tarnash is laughable if you form a tight group just behind the wall to the stairs of the Friendly Arm (from the point where someone on the stairs can't see down) and draw Tarnash with one character into your group of three in melee (Even if you're going to drop Xzar and Monty right after the fight - which I think most parties are). Even if you've already dual-classed Imoen someone is bound to get a hit and interrupt Mirror Image. With Mirror Image Tarnash gets most of the rest of his spells interrupted. The point is that I (and I'm sure Lephys, too) had to reload that several times first time around, but these days almost never have to.

The truth is that if everyone is special then no-one is. Some builds will be better. You will look them up and probably use them. The end.

Personally, I thought the IWD intros were conceptually fine, but somewhat grating in reality. Part of that is the voice actor's voice, I think, although the actual content plays no small part. Generally, though, I'm hoping that P:E doesn't have the rigid chapterised form of IWD, and therefore doesn't need such an extended opening narrative and can instead just be 'You're here, now get on with not getting killed".

Dear Player, Your wizard has four hit points and an armour class of 6. The Gibberling does 1-6 damage per hit. Your spells are on cooldown. All my love, Baldur's Gate 1

Red Mage x 4.

Personally I hope that we see a lot of portraits of both genders with hair covering their ears, or hoods/helmets so that the portraits aren't purely limited along race lines. While I prefer the BG approach to portraits for NPCs, I think for PC's the more vague IWD versions are better. Neither is going to particularly dominate my experience of P:E.

It's possible that your memory may be playing tricks on you, or else you played a different version of BGI to me, but in the BG I played all companions levelled in the background with your party. Generally this made no difference, except to make the thieves Safana, Coran and particularly Alora practically useless because by the time you reached them most of their thieving points had already been mispent by the AI.

An awesome, if impractical to implement, extension of this would be to provide exp based upon the manner in which the quest was completed related to alignment/allegiance. I.e., if you have an Orlan supporting npc and an Orlan hating npc, and solve a quest in a pro-Orlan manner, then he first character receives 1000xp, while the second receives only 500xp. Realistically, in terms of stopping people from levelling at once, I maintain that the most elegant solution is simply different class exp tables.

Whilst the means to achieving the end don't particularly matter to me, the characters starting with different base XPs isn't a particularly elegant solution because it either fades and disappears with age (in increasing exp) or exp for quests doesn't increase and you allow a huge disparity of levels between parties for the endgame. I wouldn't suggest that is a particularly good idea either. No-one is suggesting that arbitrary exp requirements from a seperate game be blindly carried over into another without any concern for their impact upon balance. In Fallout 2, some quests gave 10,000 exp, some 100exp. That exp comes from quests rather than kills makes absolutely no difference to the "just a little more to get that little bit of xp".

This isn't a particularly long one, because the title really says it all. In BG, classes had different experience requirements for each level. This meant that those level ups were generally spread around and didn't all occur at the same time. By contrast, in NVN2, experience demands were standardised, and everyone levelled at the same time. Given that levelling up is one of the major gameplay rewards of rpgs, I always felt that the BG system was more rewarding and offered more of a "I'll just play one more hour..." encouragement to keep playing. I understand that exp will be quest driven rather than kill driven (for which I'm glad), but I still feel it would offer more incentive to keep going if party levelling was staggered. Thoughts?

Always preferred Isometric to rotatable camera for the simple reason that isometric games were designed for you to be able to see what was going on. On NWN and DS you spent half your life adjusting the camera to get a view of what was going on, and enemies could still sneak up through your camera blind-spots. To a certain extent, though, I agree with the OP. P:E isn't going to sell loads, because it uses an antiquitated graphical system. I would just point out that P:E is a cult game, responding to the needs of a small (although not inconsiderable, as the backing shows) market. It is not battling with the AAA titles for lowest common denominator fans, which, aside from the isometric camera, is the other reason I'm so intrigued by it.

The DA:O system was rather more ridiculous than it first appeared, and you would be surprised to see just how seperate the graphical combat and stat combat were. When things are running smoothly, it looks like they're joined very nicely, but if you stick the graphics up and watch what happens, you'll see the two seperate entirely. When I did the final level, I was "battling" enemies that I was unable to select because they were already dead. The statistic battle was still going on, but the graphical representation had become utterly irrelevant, and was purely a distraction. Finishing off Ogres and (to a lesser extent) Dragons was less of an issue.

I'm not sure that reactive combat animations are possible in a system that is not turn-based and acts in its own free time. Reactive animations really either demand structured rounds (NWN), or wrestling the combat from the player for the sake of graphics (DA:O). I'd sooner have my character blandly swinging his sword as long as those hits/misses arrive in the stats at the same time they arrive in the animations.

I was speaking rather more of popular media created around my lifetime than literary works from the lifetime of humanity. Even within that scope, of course, there are obvious exceptions on both sides.

I can't; I'm allergic! Well, alright; I'm not that allergic! This never got old for me. EVAR.

Aside from the blue genital simulation aspect of it, I use the thing as a potential extreme of my many issues with the sandbox genre. Just because something can be done does not mean that it is worth doing in a game. To me, all games should essentially come down to 'Here is the task, here are your tools, use these tools to the best of your ability to complete the task'. I'd sooner the task was the complex part and the tools limited, but these days, in the world of Farcry and the new GTAs, there seems to be an expectation for as many tools as possible but whether by direct causation the tasks seem to become simple and repetitive (to allow for this?). Games that offer me the opportunity to do mundane crap that I not only could do in real life but actively choose not to (There will never be a greater culprit for this than the Sims) are worse still. Anyway, that venting slid slightly outside of the point, as I'm sure no-one is asking for those levels of sandboxing any more than I am asking for a game that is railroadingly linear.

I have a fairly high threshold for player limitation, I think, provided that the game offers me choice within those limitations (keep me busy with which road I take to Mordor and I'll not complain that I couldn't take an eagle), and as long as the limitations do not cause characters to behave out of character (the easiest way to do this in an rpg, is to limit the character). There are always going to be limitations, unless you go absolute Dr Manhatten sandbox, but I'm not sure that would be very fun to play. The worst example of player limitation, since it fails horribly on both counts, was good old Dirge of Cerebus, a "game" so horrible that even my jrpg softened heart couldn't bear to play past the 1st hour. Justified completely by this Let's Play, which contains strong language and is my favourite thing on the internet.

I'm not really sure about the use of Bard-type characters (constant party buff) in single-player rpgs. At a risk of coining the most absurd sentence of all time, there's something vaguely binary about their usefulness. Other party members you swap in or swap out, but Bards and their ilk always seem to sit in either the 'Not as useful as a full character' (2E) or 'More useful than a full character' (3E) camps. I'm sure there are a number of very logical reasons why the above either isn't true or is true for all classes, but Bards have always felt that way to me (and I'm not even particularly powergamey).