Bavarian

Playing on hard. Just fought him yesterday for the first time and it was touch and go. I had cleared the spiders VERY easily so wasn't expecting him to put up such a fight and took it way too lightly. I'm running double priest and had only one priest, Aloth (wizard) and Ender (fighter) by the end. Priest was just dumping heals, fighter kept him stuck, and wizard popped off as many damage spells as possible. When he dropped I was thrilled. When I do another run through, I'll concentrate on burning down the elementals, keeping distance with the rest of the party and using as many stun, interupt, self shields, elemental resistances, food, and potions as possible going full bore right from the get go. Certainly not a fight to hold back on!

Sweet! Hope they make many, many millions and fund more of these games for decades.

Oh come on. They only have so many resources. You have to figure they contract an outside company to finish the physical goods as soon as they know how many they need for X amount of money. Then all effort goes into making the game. No company they contract will want to do a few CE's here and there. Once they're gone, they're gone. I missed out too and would love it if they opened up another pledge where if they got so many commitments on a number of orders, they'd do a second run of CE's. But whatever, I'll live.

Can't wait! I'll be closing the office for a few days and stocking up on snacks.

18 hours in. Nowhere close to leaving the starting area. Love it so far. It kind of caught me off guard. I really didn't expect it to be as good as it is. There's a few little UI irritations but my goodness, it's fun! I think it's got me even more hyped for PoE, which I wouldn't think possible.

Ridiculous statement.

No, I agree with you. What I've seen so far looks great! However, there are a few games out there (my reference above to path of exile and a few other aRPGs come to mind) that have SO much going on with spell effects that it becomes hard to even see your character. At that point you start losing information visually as it all becomes a light show blur. And I would prefer weapon glow effects to be there in battle, not in cut scenes hanging on your back.

Seems like a difficult/fine line issue. I'm all for subtle effects but not at the cost of information about what is happening with my character or the environment. How could you improve the spell effects of the BG2 screenshots with cloudkill/stinking cloud? I assume by making the cloud effects less pronounced, but you still want to know they are there and where their borders extend. I think it would be fantastic to have a tooltip (on a toggle would be fine) on your UI character pop up telling you exactly what X spell effect is doing to your PC. I haven't really looked into this stuff until I started reading this thread. Are UI tooltips like this already in the works? What I don't want is something like I experienced with the other PoE (Path of Exile) where my screen will light up my house when running with a party due to all the massive spell effects. You just can't tell what the hell is happening half the time. Don't go too subtle though. Spells SHOULD look impressive and give information at a glance.

I'm not fond of the overly done armor and weapons. I instantly think WoW, which is fine for their style, but not here. And I understand you're not saying they should go to the WoW style but that just pops into my head as the other option. The style here looks great IMO.

Disagree. I know I'm not alone in thinking the romance options in the BG series were just distractions to the actual game. I didn't straight up dis-like them, but they just seemed like silly additions. I'd MUCH rather have the resources spent on a deep dungeon with tons of lore and items to find as my character progresses.

Human to start with more the likely. The typical old man wizard seething with power is just about always the first character to suck me in.

Thanks for the post C2B! I can't get enough info to satisfy me.

Can't wait to play my favorite character - a cryptic, old man wizard that looks like a strong wind could blow over... but is seething with magical power and everybody knows it. The art work is turning out great. Every update I see makes me add to the number of days I'm taking out of the office upon release.

I just hope the negatives balance the positives. I want a reason for my wizard to wear cloth armor and not just make one big hodge podge jack of all trades and master of them all too type of character. Boring. Difficult, game altering choices are a GOOD thing and add a ton of replayability.