Kjaamor

If PE doesn't have any skill/attribute based dialogue, and the PC is always the dedicated talker, then this sort of carries itself. However, if Charisma/Intelligence/Wisdom/Skills do have an impact, then I would like to see the option there to choose a 'talker' in order to not make the equivilant of Sorcerors/Bards/Wizards vastly more preferable for PCs than fighter/barbarian types. Personally, although I've never imagined PE to walk the Fallout/PS:T/Arcanum line, I would've liked a certain amount of customisable dialogue based upon stats if not skills, too. Baldur's Gate 2 did this fairly unintrusively, as I recall. At any rate, if PE does have dialogue affecting stats/skills, dedicated talkers would seem to be a fairly easy thing to code in, and contribute to the process of party balance rather than being a limiting factor in PC's class choice.

Well, even assuming that people aren't interested in action and drama, and would equally like or even prefer knocking on the doors of 100,000 houses to find the one that houses a particular quest, there is the factor of coding time to think about. Designing a city on that scale would take a huge amount of time and resources and when it was done it wouldn't leave a great deal to make the sort of IE games PE is modelling itself on. In terms of the manner of the argument, choosing examples of games that handled it better than others is the clearest and quickest way to illustrate the point. Besides which you repeatedly refer to the thread having people 'give up on realism'; the exact opposite of the OP (and others') point.

Personally, I found Vanilla ToEE to be the weakest of all the D&D proper games. The combat mechanics were generally good, but it had just two towns - a handful of townquests in each, and just one big dungeon that was cripplingly mundane if you were a good party. Level cap came flying long before the end to boot. I do enjoy Temple to an extent, and having played it first time around I recently bought it from GOG myself. I still think it falls some way short of the Icewind Dales and Neverwinter Nights, and is light-years behind the Baldur's Gates.

I agree with the OP's frustrations, and would suggest two points. a) No repositioning of units as a result of dialogue engagement. This should mean that my wizard doesn't get pulled into melee range to chat with an obvious assassin. Equally, if my thief loses stealth and is engaged in dialogue, the rest of my party shouldn't automatically teleport to protect him. 2) Please, please, please, please, PLEASE can we assign a designated 'talker' for the party. It seems like so many crpgs give us dialogue skills almost exclusively for back line troops and then force us to change formation for every interaction. If my party is addressed my smooth-talking Bard shouldn't become all coy when he's stood three foot behind my half-orc barbarian. The formation changes are just fiddly and in the context of dialogue engagement really offer very little. If they're a full screen behind then fair enough, but if we're addressed as a party then let us respond as a party.

I was thinking that I wasn't really bothered by how linear things were, because I thought that Baldur's Gate I+II were both quite linear. Then I remembered Icewind Dale. Quick shudder aside, I would like a game that is either largely non-linear (Fallout/Fallout 2) or semi-linear (Baldur's Gate/BG 2/Arcanum). It's worth being explicit that non-linearity in the purest sense can make it very easy to fall foul of level scaling, and false choices (see DA:O). Being able to go anywhere, but being met with the same level of challenge wherever you go, makes for a non-linear narrative at the expense of utterly linear gameplay. What would be nice, however, would be to have the fallout 1/2 'your ending describes your effect on each settlement' if we're going non-linear. Maybe even if we aren't.

For clarity, my understanding of the OP's sentiments is that the explorable content of any given city, town or even village, shouldn't attempt to represent the entirity of said city/town/village. In short, we should be able to explore the bits key to us, while non-key areas are left out of sight so the town doesn't appear tiny. Personally, I'm not terribly bothered by it, although I can see the logic of the OP's point. Given that some of the first RPGs I played had an active town population of around 10 people, and a visible global population of less than 100 people, I find it very easy to suspend my disbelief in this regard. Obviously the OP and others struggle rather more with this, and the OPs suggestion is a good way of getting around it. So in that sense, this idea has my (admittedly somewhat passive) support. What I am desperately against, however, is the expansion of playable areas to include the true scope and size of the mundane. I do not want a town of 10,000 explorable houses, each with four npcs inside. I don't even close to a hundredth of this. I do not want to search 100 houses to find the ten that have quests in and the one that has the swordsword +3 in the attic. The sense of exploration made the infinity engine games; the exploration of the world map, the exploration of dangerous areas, the discovery of key things within towns. But what the IE games were generally so good at was providing exploration without delving into workmanship. Carefully searching through difficult monsters in the sword coast was exciting, checking each of the unguarded 20 containers in the hub could be rewarding... ...routing through several thousand empty crates in Fallout 3/NV was a bloody chore. And the games punished you if you chose not to do it. Immersion is good, but the prime concern should always be gameplay. The likes of TES and the console Fallouts got, in my opinion, on the wrong side of this line. 100% immersive cities would be even further in the wrong direction. Unless I'm picking a suspect between the baker, the butcher and the carpenter, let's leave them out of sight.