Lioness

I am playing a new tactical RPG, which isn't released yet (Blackguards) and the pathfinding had me screaming at my screen. AI enemies and own characters (unless micromanaged) don't have such simple rules as 'avoid known traps', 'avoid triggering attack of opportunity' and 'avoid walking into frigging bonfires and sinkholes' in their path-finding algorithm. Caveat game is in Beta, but the point still sloppy programming hasn't automagically disappeared because technology has evolved. Not necessarily blaming programmers' skills, it is more likely the down-prioritizing of additional iterations on the pathfinding / AI code.

Josh mentioned in an interview (I believe the PC world one) that guns were Wizard killers, since their Arcane Veil cant protect them from bullets. I think it is a very situational weapon, hugely powerful in the first round, but also hugely noisy and takes ages to reload. I guess having characters firing a salvo in the first round then discarding the gun is the way to go... if I chose to go down that path. I really don't mind guns and magic co-existing, Arcanum has been mentioned, but Final Fantasy and Shadowrun do it well too. And in all these setting, the guns were quite a bit more powerful than muskets. Wizardry did it too, although in Wiz 8, they did ok with tech/fantasy mix except when it came to the energy weapons in the end game.

Something I miss is having control of bigger groups. PE's, IE style 6 character party is nice. 3 or 4 has been the limit in recent games, that I have played. To my limited knowledge Dungeon Siege is the only game where 8 characters were availabIe... and that's a so log time ago. Otherwise a pet peeve of mine is animals in RPGs systematically fighting to the death of the last member in a pack. Heck to be realistic even a group of person's wouldn't necessarily fight to the last one,... the remaining would beg/plea/surrender when the majority of their group is cut down with little effort. Fighting mobs and NPCs in RPGs often feels like fighting Monty Python's Black Knight.

There is an option to save anywhere yet discourage save scumming: saving the random seed or a bunch of pre-generated pseudo-random numbers when game is saved. In that way one can save anywhere including just before opening a chest with 'randomly' determined contents... that chest will have the same content no matter how many times one saves/reloads. It is of course possible to get a different drop from chest by reloading, doing some random stuff, then opening the chest again,... but that's ok, the goal being to discourage save scumming not preventing it. This also assumes save scumming is a problem at all... if someone wan't to open a chest 1337 times to get that 0.1% artifact drop, how is that spoiling your fun ?