Enoch

My first reaction to this thread is that it would've worked better for me before my office was broken into its components and scattered throughout the house to make room for the nursery. Now, with the PC in the basement, there isn't much in the way of books down here. But there is a shelf of old RPG manuals over in the corner. Where the closest book is the 1st Ed. AD&D Monster Manual. Thus, I give you: Couldn't have turned out better. That said, I should probably move these books to somewhere less damp. Smells a bit musty.

Indeed. My wife and I are both "gamers" in that I play RPGs and strategy games on a PC, while she plays Hearts and Candy Crush on an ipad. (I have gotten her to participate in some pencil-and-paper RPG campaigns, but so far it hasn't translated to the electronic equivalent.)

Hurling fireballs at all doesn't make sense. It's magic-- real-world logic is not especially applicable. What you're calling "logic" is just cultural conditioning. You hear "wizard" and you think "Gandalf" (or similar).

In its present state, it would probably be clearer to call it "Power," which carries less association with purely physical strength.

The total number of attribute points given to player character and non-player characters is one of the most easily pushed difficulty-knobs developers have in games like this. It's something that Obsidz can and will be adjusting up until the moment of final publication. The BB PC and NPCs probably just reflect some adjustments of this that hadn't been made standard prior to its release.

Exactly. Capacity for success should depend on one's play throughout the game. Character creation choices are part of that, but they shouldn't be determinative in themselves. Doing something weird at character creation shouldn't make the game impossible (as was the case with Icewind Dale, which you could play for 20-ish hours before realizing that your party just wasn't going to cut it anymore and there was nothing you could do but start over and spend more time pressing "reroll").

Fun Fact: This is pretty much how the characters you're supposedly role-playing (and who can't Save & Reload) would think. They'll risk their neck to accomplish goals, not to earn imaginary points on a character sheet.

Again, this is only true if you assume that the skill checks you encounter will all be at the top-end of what is achievable based on your approximate party level. If all areas of the game have some low, some medium, and some high-threshold skill checks in a variety of skills, then a generalist who dabbles in 3 skills (and makes all the low-threshold checks for all 3 skills) is going to be just as advantaged as a specialist (who makes all the low, medium, and high-threshold checks in only 1 skill).

It is probably a tactical error to put the zoomed-in in-game model right in the player's face at the very start. It gives a rather poor first impression and is not representative of the visuals in the rest of the game.

I'm not sure this is going to happen in practice. I mean, if you're well into the game and suddenly decide you want to pick up a new skill, are you even going to be able to catch up to the skill levels required? Not to mention that the already invested points are somewhat wasted if you don't keep leveling the skill. Depends on how linear the overall game is and on how the skillcheck thresholds are set. If you need to be a bleeding-edge expert to accomplish anything, you may be right. But it makes for a better game if the skillchecks thresholds are more varied and allow generalists to get some benefits for their more moderate investment.

I'm not a great fan of players having to lock-in decisions like that at character generation. Flexibility is a plus-- if a player sees lots of opportunities to use Survival skills and would like to try them out, he or she should be able to sink some points there and see the desired result. Won't get as much out of it as the player who invested heavily from the start, but hopefully should see some benefits. That said, the actual interface for investing skillpoints was not very intuitive. It took me a while to figure out that 1 skill point does not always get me 1 level of proficiency in a skill. There are definitely opportunities to make this clearer to the player. (Or to re-structure the system to make the diminishing returns manifest more in the skill-check thresholds than in the player's skillpoint investment.)

The mouseover descriptive text for "Big Heads" in the options menu should be "Thanks, Josh" not "Thanks Josh" SRS BZNS.

Am I the only person who took a good 10 seconds to figure out what the heck "chargen" meant? Use real words, people!

I prefer the "hire some of the dudes hanging out in front of the Home Depot to pick it up for you" method.

haha, it was actually in the same area Sarevok took 1000 magic missles to the face then had Gorion-kebabs, you also ran from a wolf like a bitch, met Imoen and got propositioned by Xzar and Montaron....its the screen just outside of candlekeep That Diamond was indeed in the first wilderness area post-Candlekeep. The Ring of Wizardry (a far more essential find) was outside the Friendly Arm Inn.

This thread has gone exactly as I'd hoped when I saw the title. Lift with your knees, not with your back.

I'd be surprised if they offer one. For a heavily marketed major release, Demos probably deter more purchases than they attract. I, for one, tried the DA2 demo for about 15 minutes and concluded that I had very little interest in buying the game. That said, as you've mentioned a few times, everything works out better if you wait a few months after release to decide whether you want to purchase a game. A few months worth of reactions from PC players and fan-made gameplay videos are probably better than a demo for the purpose of making an informed purchase decision. after nwn, we started waiting til after first major patch to purchase pc games. we were kinda ambivalent 'bout me3 before its release, and then we got busy with work. eleven months passed between release o' me3 and our eventual purchase o' that game and we don't regret the delay. as you noted, we has beat that horse to death so we won't belabor yet again. nevertheless, we will observe that our expectations regarding price drop o' me3 after eleven months did not match reality. is not that we is poor, so pricing is rarely a major factor in our purchasing behaviors o' games, but am gonna admit we were wildly wrong regarding the price reduction o' me3 after eleven months. we had assumed that ~ one year o' wait would result in 50% savings. dunno why... that were how we recalls the price plummet o' typical pc game software. am thinking we ended up getting me3 at 80% o' original price, or maybe a tad more... 85% perhaps? in any event, we did not get the savings we expected even if we did get a better and more stable product. HA! Good Fun! I managed to get a decent discount on ME3, but the DLC never dropped in price by a single cent as far as I can tell.

I'd be surprised if they offer one. For a heavily marketed major release, Demos probably deter more purchases than they attract. I, for one, tried the DA2 demo for about 15 minutes and concluded that I had very little interest in buying the game. That said, as you've mentioned a few times, everything works out better if you wait a few months after release to decide whether you want to purchase a game. A few months worth of reactions from PC players and fan-made gameplay videos are probably better than a demo for the purpose of making an informed purchase decision.

Or it's the evil AI that humanity will someday create and that will assume time-travel powers after it enslaves humanity to eternally punish those who struggled against it.

For those who wish to skip to the best part:

Huh. So 2 more weeks to decide whether I should let all you punks see my real name among a list of hundreds of others.

Yeah, I don't really want to think about toilet training just yet. I'm hopeful that he'll take to it more ably than the average puppy, but puppies are born with far better ambulatory capabilities than are baby humans. We'll start worrying about toilets after he gets the whole "walking" thing down.

I should really be sleeping right now. The Boy is now a little over 5 months old and can go 6 or 7 hours between meals on a good night. He last took a bottle at 5PM, followed up by an ounce or so of practice spoon-feeding (oat cereal diluted in baby formula, just for fun and to get him used to the idea of utensil-based food delivery) around 6:30. He gets cranky if he's up much past 7PM, so we put him to bed around then. The wife went to bed a little after 9. She has claimed the first AM feeding (after which she'll head off for the "early shift" work, leaving me to get the youngin' dressed and drop him off at daycare). That leaves me with the middle-of-the-night feeding. That should be sometime between 11 and 12, but we'd prefer he wake up naturally and "ask" for it (i.e., cry), rather than have us wake him because it's "time." It's now around 11, and I'm sitting here in the basement, thinking that I really should've gone to bed when the wife did, but acknowledging that doing so now would be pointless, as junior is liable to rouse and start asking for food at any moment. At least tomorrow is Friday. @Monte, replace the cigars with the vomit of one's offspring and I'm with you. Never seen the appeal of bottled fragrances, to the extent that I've avoided women who use any noticeable amount of it.

Rough morning today. First, I made the idiotic decision to trust the weather forecast over my own two eyes when I set out to walk the youngin' to daycare. ("Huh, it kinda looks like it's about to rain, but the forecast said there was no chance of rain today, so I'm not going to bother going back inside to grab the umbrella.") Halfway through the walk, we're hiding under the awning of a carpet store, waiting for the worst to pass. Second, when I got to the daycare, I realized that, although I had remembered to bring the extra diapers and wipes they needed, I had forgotten to bring the kid's food. That meant I had to walk all the way home and back (it's a little over a mile each way) before getting on the subway to go to the office. The rain had stopped by then, which was appreciated, but the air was still too humid to dry my clothes much.

Indeed. Also, IWD2 was famously rushed. Interplay told Black Isle to crank out another IE game as quickly as they could to get some money coming in and forestall the slow implosion of IPLY's finances. It's not surprising that alternate alignment-based paths in the endgame didn't make it. Would've been nice, sure, but it's not something that is going to have much effect on sales in the early going.