Quetzalcoatl

Frankly, I don't consider PoE to be real time either. It is not Diablo, agreed, and most of us will press space to pause all the time anyway. I don't think it's the point. I have no idea how this follows from what I said. It literally has nothing to do with what I said, or what's being discussed - who said anything about Diablo? Like I said, PoE is a game with real-time combat. Yes, you can pause, but nothing happens unless you stop pausing. Responsiveness is important for a real-time game. If characters start arbitrarily changing their movement speeds, this would seriously mess up combat or other portions of the game that involve movement, like stealth. I also have to disagree with T:ToN's movement animations looking better. While the characters adjusting their movement speed dynamically does look incredibly impressive, I find the walking/running animations themselves to look inferior to PoE's. They look a bit floaty and inaccurate, as if the characters are gliding or slightly hovering over the ground. Though I suppose that would be pretty normal in the Numenera setting.

Charisma check succeeded.

I want an apology.

That is objectively not true. Make a melee character in the IE games, and dump strength. See how much of a difference it makes. You won't be able to wear any heavy armor. You'll miss nearly every melee attack you make. You won't be able to carry basically anything even remotely heavy, and you'll do almost no damage since you will have damage penalties and won't be able to use any heavy weapons. The attributes in the IE games have about the impact of attributes in poe. If you insist that I'm incorrect; I could literally do the math comparing a melee character with 4 STR in an IE game vs. a melee user with 4 MIG in poe. Most of the attributes in the IE games were useless for most classes, and most of the attributes didn't raise anything most of the time until you went really high or really low. CON, STR, and DEX were useful for everyone, and the other attributes that did matter had great impact. Your point about most attributes not raising anything unless high or low is not true. Then I'm going to assume you never actually played the IE games. Or would you like to tell me how great that 15 str fighter was, or how useful it was to have 14 dex? Because those stats didn't raise a single thing (apart from carry weight) at those levels, despite being well over the minimum. That is objectively not true. Make a melee character in the IE games, and dump strength. See how much of a difference it makes. You won't be able to wear any heavy armor. You'll miss nearly every melee attack you make. You won't be able to carry basically anything even remotely heavy, and you'll do almost no damage since you will have damage penalties and won't be able to use any heavy weapons. The attributes in the IE games have about the impact of attributes in poe. If you insist that I'm incorrect; I could literally do the math comparing a melee character with 4 STR in an IE game vs. a melee user with 4 MIG in poe. Most of the attributes in the IE games were useless for most classes, and most of the attributes didn't raise anything most of the time until you went really high or really low. CON, STR, and DEX were useful for everyone, and the other attributes that did matter had great impact. Your point about most attributes not raising anything unless high or low is not true. STR, CON, DEX: These are half the attributes; any modifier from them is important for any class. INT and WIS: These are the attributes you are referring to. They are less than half; far from most. CHA: This attribute is weird. It matters for Paladins and Bards no matter what (Sorcerers too in IWD2). Yet it is usually very important for 1 npc, and meaningless to the others. How important this attribute is varies greatly depending on the size of your party. Str was useful but not important to pure spellcasters. Int was important for any spellcaster as you needed at least Int 9 (or was it 11) to use scrolls. High wisdom gave any class a bonus to saves. Charisma was good for certain quests and vendor prices. No, Bards didn't need Charisma. They also used Intelligence to scribe spells and for determining how many they can have per level. (only in IWD2 Bards, Paladins and Sorcerers got a real benefit from having high Charisma). Wisdom didn't give any bonuses to saves in the IE games. Wizards also didn't need INT, you could cast level 9 spells with the class minimum (think about that for a second, wizards didn't need INT). Neither did clerics and druids need WIS, it gave a few bonus spells, but it didn't improve their spells. Charisma is useless, no way around it.

That is objectively not true. Make a melee character in the IE games, and dump strength. See how much of a difference it makes. You won't be able to wear any heavy armor. You'll miss nearly every melee attack you make. You won't be able to carry basically anything even remotely heavy, and you'll do almost no damage since you will have damage penalties and won't be able to use any heavy weapons. The attributes in the IE games have about the impact of attributes in poe. If you insist that I'm incorrect; I could literally do the math comparing a melee character with 4 STR in an IE game vs. a melee user with 4 MIG in poe. Most of the attributes in the IE games were useless for most classes, and most of the attributes didn't raise anything most of the time until you went really high or really low.

Torment isn't a real-time game. Adjusting movement speed that way in PoE could become quite problematic for combat, stealth and other aspects of gameplay. I also don't see what's supposed to be significant about a non-gamer not liking this game.

If your barometer for interesting and memorable companions is Minsc, then you might want to play another game. Might I suggest the recently released Dragon Age: Inquisition? As stated before, Obsidian companions have plenty of memorable voice sets. Start up MoTB and bring up the order menu to check them all out.

I don't think they have any other summons in their arsenal, so I wouldn't get your hopes up. Chanters and to a lesser extent Druids have a lot of summoning spells.

http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Essential_Phantom This game has a different conception of magic than D&D, by the way.

Maybe those enemies sent their equipment to their own stashes right before they died.

The PoE Wizard has spells that confuse and terrify the enemy too. Although I'm not sure what 'terrified' does in this game. Is it anything like the fear/panic effect in the IE games? Why would you waste a spell slot for that? You could just finish off the panicked enemies with ranged weapons.

That's because Baldur's Gate had a lot of one-dimensional companions. They needed those voice bites to be catchy and funny (in a very over the top way), because there wasn't much under the surface. I'm not sure what games you played, but Kotor 2 and MotB had precisely what you talked about. And did it much better than the BG games, if you ask me.

So scripting is your main problem? You've been outsourcing things in the past, it'd cost you a 3-4k bucks to get a programmer from Europe to code things for a whole month, and with your solid framework he'd finish all those spells (and other interesting ones) in much less time than that. Is it the particles? It takes 3 hours for a professional to make a good particle effect or you could reuse another one. I just don't see the problem. You can see why it feels weird that you're not implementing all those things. I doubt it's this simple, otherwise we'd be drowning in quality RPG's to play.

Uh guys? I think he's talking about the casting times for one tier of spells, not all the spells in the game.

You realize this game has a stealth system as well, one that is far superior to that of the IE games? Yes, I have been playing the beta and using the stealth system. (And, I agree that in some ways it's better but, if you recall, stealth and invisibility allowed you do things in the IE games that the stealth system in PoE does not allow you do - so to say it's far superior is a a bit of stretch). In any case, I was responding to a post that said that preparing for a battle is the same as metagaming. My point was that if you have stealth (as you do in both the IE games and PoE) then you are not metagaming, you are using knowledge that you gained by scouting to get ready for the battle. You should read my earlier post. You couldn't use stealth to scout in the IE games on a consistent basis because dungeons were filled with traps, and you couldn't detect them while being stealthed. Therefore, stealthing through a dungeon did effectively require meta-game knowledge. Not only does PoE fix this issue, but you can stealth through with the entire party. You could use it without metagaming if you understood how it worked. When you are stealthed, you hear a sound that indicates that you are breaking stealth. You can: 1. detect traps (important that this is first) 2. Enter stealth and move forward - there are no traps close to you because you've already looked in step 1). 3. Detect traps while stealthed - you will break stealth but not immediately. 4. Repeat from step 2 Try it, it works. It's certainly easier to use the mage spell, but you can use stealth if you don't have a mage in your party. I have no idea what you're really describing, but it sounds extremely tedious and it also sounds like it relies on abusing a glitch or technical oddity (stealth not breaking immediately). Why would I want to subject myself to that when PoE offers a very simple and sensible solution? Besides, your scenario ignores one very obvious fact - what if there are enemies around? And if detecting traps while stealthed was indeed possible, then quite a few people apparently missed the memo: http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/17951/detect-traps-hide-in-shadows

You should read my earlier post. You couldn't use stealth to scout in the IE games on a consistent basis because dungeons were filled with traps, and you couldn't detect them while being stealthed. Therefore, stealthing through a dungeon did effectively require meta-game knowledge. Not only does PoE fix this issue, but you can stealth through with the entire party. Call me crazy, but I don't think thieves should need the help of another class to be useful at the one thing they're supposed to be good at: thieving (considering they weren't all that great in combat). You're misinterpreting what I posted - deliberately, I have to assume, since it's fairly obvious what I mean. Once you were stealthed in the IE games, you could walk up right to an enemy and remain stealthed. You were effectively invisible. The enemy could detect you if your skill was too low, but that depended on a dice roll, not on the fact that you were standing right in front of them. You can't do this in PoE. You have to move around the enemy carefully and anticipate their movement and react to it. You're free to prefer the former, but the latter strikes me as a better game mechanic.

You realize this game has a stealth system as well, one that is far superior to that of the IE games? what? how? I'll repeat what I said in an earlier post: There's also the fact that stealth in this game doubles as a trap detection mode. In the IE games I found stealth to be mostly useless because you couldn't detect traps while being stealthed and most dungeons were filled with traps. Thankfully, Pillars remedies that problem. And there's also the fact that you can stealth through with an entire party, at added difficulty - naturally. For a future PoE sequel, I'd like to see the stealth system take things like footstep noises for different surfaces and illumination/dynamic lighting into account. Those things are already in the game, they just don't affect the stealth at the moment.

You realize this game has a stealth system as well, one that is far superior to that of the IE games?

When you make a claim like 'a child could do it better in a day than these so-called professionals have in two years', it helps to back it up with actual evidence in the form of videos and such.

You say a skill and then proceed to give Mechanics a combat-oriented benefit to make it useful. That's fine, of course, but you appear to be contradicting yourself. A trapsetter can only set up one trap at a time. Therefore having multiple trapsetters allows for setting up more traps at the same time. Though I'm not sure if that particular benefit makes it worth it to take Mechanics for multiple characters.

Rounds weren't synchronized in the IE games. Even if you ordered everyone to attack at the same time, they would still attack at different times, because they would be standing at different positions, and the enemies would also be standing at different positions, and they would move around. Their next rounds would then all start at different times. The reason why there is a difference in perception is because this game makes its 'combat rounds' visible with the bars ticking down above their heads. The IE games also used cosmetic attacks, so it always looked like all the classes were roughly equally busy with attacking despite not all of them having the same attacks per round.

So explain to me how it's tactical and strategic to use knockdown against multiple enemies in melee engagement with your fighter to retreat? Perhaps you could for once give an explanation instead of your usual stupid comments. You might want to look at what you wrote, which is what I was replying to: If your point was that there are no choices to be made, you chose a rather bizarre and schrizophrenic way of putting it, since this post seems to indicate the opposite.

The druid and chanter have about a dozen summoning spells between them, and I believe the wizard has at least one summon spell. Any character can use figurines to summon stuff. That's because the stealth in this game functions as actual stealth, dependent on factors like enemy proximity and how long you're in the enemy's line of sight. It's not the 'turn invisible (even right in front of an enemy)' mode from the IE games which wasn't a good implementation of stealth at all. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any invisibility spells, you're right about that. This strikes me as a touch dramatic.

http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Malignant_Cloud

It must be pretty controversial for you to keep debating the point despite not having come up with a single coherent argument yet.