Quetzalcoatl

What consolization? From what I have seen, this game's stealth system is far more complex than that of the IE games. They could have simply had a dice roll determine whether you were invisible like in the old games, but instead they made a stealth system that takes into account how close you are to the enemy, how much you move and how many people are sneaking.

QA lead, eh. I didn't know you guys read these boards :DI hope you understand that my using word Bugsidian in some posts was not really what I think of you guys. I don't really think you guys are at NWN2 or Kotor 2 levels. It was more like how people talk about Obsidian in different places for light fun. This is a very transparent attempt at saving face.

It won't fix the inherent issues with such a simplistic armour system. Whether it's 10 DT Bypass (...why is this not just called Penetration?) or 5 DT Bypass, it still means that DT can be bypassed, in part or in full, whereas action speed will always help you kill things faster. Being able to kill things faster won't help you if your lack of protection has gotten you knocked out. I wouldn't call it simplistic - what other games have an armour system that asks you to make such a choice?

Oh? Care to point out where I said that? I'll wait. The only thought that he is going to put in to battle preparations is if he needs to reload the encounter or not. As I said, it restricts nothing just encourages metagaming and save scumming. (not that I'm against either of those things) Did you save scum if you didn't prepare the optimal spells in the Infinity Engine games?

Oh and the infinite stash is oh so realistic, please... Are we really going to talk about realism in high fantasy game? I thought you didn't like the stash because it's not realistic? Contradictory much? Anyway, the point of the weapon sets is to make the player put some thought into battle preparations. Unless you're one of those players that rested after every battle in the Infinity Engine games, you're gonna have to explain how this is a bad thing.

It's much more realistic for the enemies to patiently wait for the player while he rummages through all his baggage in search of that +3 Rapier of Poison in the middle of a deadly battle.

Wouldn't an elder lion be stronger? If they lived so long it means they were strong enough to survive fights with rival pack leaders. NO, it means they are old and weak now. Just like humans, lions also become weaker with old age. Humans don't constantly fight each other to the death. Lions do, so when one lives to achieve a reasonable age, it's an indication of how strong they are to have survived the constant struggle for leadership. Multiple packs of lions.

Wouldn't an elder lion be stronger? If they lived so long it means they were strong enough to survive fights with rival pack leaders.

There is a pretty big relation as a matter of fact, imagine exploring the maps in PoE and doing so for hours, all the while you are fighting trash mobs that are in your way. So after playing for hours you open up you char sheet and see 0 xp, 0 character progression. That would be pretty disheartening. So because you guys are scared to miss out on that precious xp, now we have to suffer for our playstyle. Sarex is correct. So much that Obsidian changed their stance on Quest only xp because they even admitted it was a problem and included other types of xp including kill xp in the form of bestiary pages. When you have dev's changing and overhauling the xp system a few months from release, you know there's a problem. I've shown that it's worse with the current bestiary kill xp than the full combat xp in the IE games, the PoE xp system encourages kill sprees even more and I've given reasons why in the beta feedback forum. It's pretty easy for you Luckmann to give an argument from your viewpoint, but if you actually played the beta when it first came out when it was Quest only xp, it was a problem that even some of the die hard Quest only xp fans admitted on this forum. So your complaint was that there was no kill xp and now that they added kill XP, your complaint is that it encourages you kill things for XP? Sounds like there's no pleasing certain people. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

I don't think you will be forced to use it, it's an option.

Wouldn't the entire party being allowed into stealth make it easier to perform combat-avoiding tasks? Why do you think this would be an obstacle?

So much drama. If you think this is drama, haha, wait for after release. You appear to be enjoying this 'drama'.

Because Sensuki had taught me IE combat with IWD, and I realized I had been doing it wrong. So I figured maybe I was mistaken about BG2 too, and wanted to give it a fresh try. Edit: The writing I was pretty sure about and didn't expect my opinion to change on that. However I thought that my views on the hard counters and save-or-die was due just to me playing it badly. Now I know that that's not the case. Obviously I'm not as good as you guys who have played it through a dozen times or more, but I'm no long floundering, and I am finding solutions to the fights rather than cheesing them. And it still requires metagame knowledge and trial-and-error. Unlike almost all of IWD, I may add. It is, of course, gratifying -- at a certain level -- to find that I was right all along. However, I would have preferred to be wrong, and not have spent a quite a lot of time on something I ultimately did not enjoy. Only thing wrong here is people like you steering development of PoE which is not supposed to be a successor to games you like but IE games which it seems are not your favorite.If I had control over the forums, I would present a questioner to anyone posting here with 40 questions about things from IE games and you needed to be correct in at least 90% of them. If you would ever be in the opportunity to become the leader of a totalitarian regime, you'd be great at it.

You still haven't explained what is supposed to be so groundbreaking about Wasteland 2. If 'FNV is nowhere near WL2', it shouldn't be difficult to. And the engine Wasteland 2 runs on is much worse than the Gamebryo engine. Wasteland 2's gameplay also has lots of issues - no formations, no options in combat besides attacking, skill use is clunky and slow. Didn't we off topic enough? I am sure there are better topic to continue these pointless discussions about personal taste. I'm sure there are, but since you're one who brought up this particular topic in the first place, I can only assume you're conceding defeat.

You still haven't explained what is supposed to be so groundbreaking about Wasteland 2. If 'FNV is nowhere near WL2', it shouldn't be difficult to. And the engine Wasteland 2 runs on is much worse than the Gamebryo engine. Wasteland 2's gameplay also has lots of issues - no formations, no options in combat besides attacking, skill use is clunky and slow.

If we are talking post-apocalyptic RPG's, New Vegas easily beats Wasteland 2. Neither game has fantastic combat and Fallout New Vegas does everything better, from exploration to writing to skills to choices and consequences. Even the combat can be argued to be better since it's over more quickly. You appear to be contradicting yourself.

How so? There is a huge gap in quality between Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin.

Are you really accusing Obsidian of deliberately pissing off their backers and customer base?we will see after release. Why? If they're doing as you say, that's already the case. Why would it only become apparent after release?

Are you really accusing Obsidian of deliberately pissing off their backers and customer base? Hmm, maybe you should play the game before throwing tantrums about how terrible the game is going to be and how Obsidian swindled the backers and lecturing others on how wrong their opinions are.

My apologies to the OP for the off-topic banter, but that's just crazy. I can think of a lot of situations where I want to keep some companions out of the combat or hold off their introduction, or simply delay when I want to start smacking the hell out of whomever I'm planning to backstab. In both the IE and in DA:O, I remember situations where I would sneak my rogue into position behind an enemy mage, and then - with all other characters - engaging and pulling the rest of the opponents in the enemy group. My rogue waited until all the beefy enemies had started attacking my group, at which point my rogue leapt out of the shadows and started picking off the mage or archers or whatnot. With combat forcing the entire group out of Stealth, the game becomes robbed of tactics like this, making it virtually impossible to "tactically deploy" with Stealth. It makes sense to me. Stealth isn't invisibility. It sounds like you can't stealth in plain sight once enemies have already been alerted to your presence. That's what invisibility would be for.

Rooms built into underground cave complexes tend to be soundproof. Animals having better hearing and other senses than humans is also not unheard of. Though I have you question how you can even claim to enjoy RPG's with such absurd standards for realism. The whole point of RPG's is abstracting reality to make it fun.

Then just turn it off and play the Baldur's Gate soundtrack in the background?

heh... how else would you represent a real time in your video game if not through visuals? telepathically? by sounds over black screen? smoke signals? As i said in the very post that you responded to... - "paying too much attention to pausing and the dry skills and mechanics... that dont visually translate into real time part of the gameplay at all." - "The new mechanics would actually fully blossom only with appropriate visual representation." - "All these new mechanics would play into such new physical moves and animations perfectly. But right now, they simply dont translate into the Real Time part of the "Real Time with Pause"." and also: - "However, due to incredible amount of work this kind of visual representation would require im thinking this is far from possible, especially at this stage of the game development." i think that covers all your subsequent comments too. You didn't address a single thing I wrote, you're just parroting your own arguments which I've already refuted. As I said, this is a game where dodging is passive and happens through your stats. You don't dodge manually (like you would in an action game). Therefore dodging has to be abstracted to an extent. Dragon Age: Origins did this as well and that was a triple-A game with a much bigger budget. Because it's turn-based. There is no concept of time. This is a real-time game, if dodging animations happened without the input of the player, this would hurt combat. Again, it's turn-based. And you realize Tim Cain is working on this game too? Though I fail to see what it has to do with anything since he's not an animator.

anyone remember NWN combat animations? wasn't that RTwP? The Neverwinter Nights games used fake animations. They weren't a reflection of what really happened.

That's something completely different. A dodging animation means all kinds of practical issues. Like dodging while you're attacked, dodging while you're casting, dodging different attacks at around the same time. This isn't a problem in action games where dodging happens manually, but it is in a game where dodging happens passively depending on your stats.