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Enoch

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Everything posted by Enoch

  1. Enoch
    Party is now level 7. Most recently, I've opened 2 secret caves in the far NW of the Cyseal map, and dealt with what's inside with very little difficulty. (I think. There wasn't much resembling a resolution with the rhyming wizard and his harem. I assume he does more than "have 5000+ gold to buy my crap with," so I don't think I've seen the last of him.) I think the orc beach that slaughtered me at level 3 is next. I do note some fatigue with the game every time I have to trudge back to town, remember which quest-givers to talk to, remember which merchants sell which kinds of spellbooks, briefly consider doing more crafting experimentation (apart from making more special arrows that I'll mostly forget to use, it doesn't seem worthwhile), and generally spend time trudging back and forth across Cyseal. So far, I've pushed through to get to more of the fun stuff, but I can see how this kind of tedium might eventually overcome my patience.
  2. Enoch
    Technically, every attorney in the room (private counsel, prosecution, public defender, whatever) is an "officer of the court." It's part of the oath you take when admitted to practice before a particular court. But that mostly means you're promising to uphold the honesty and dignity of the process, be nice to the judge, etc. True dat, but not in the sense of the inquisitorial system. I've sworn the same oath as judges do, but around here it's not a requirement to practice. Honestly, I don't really have the greatest sense of how litigation even works on the continental model. Probably the best way to answer Monte's accusation regarding the nature of American jurisprudence is this: in order to get an American law degree and a license to practice in an American state, I've read a reasonable number of opinions by English judges (including the one Nep linked above). The only time I read the work of continental judges was when I took a class on international trade law. (Presumably. We were reading WTO decisions; I'm assuming that at least a few of the authors were European.)
  3. Enoch
    Technically, every attorney in the room (private counsel, prosecution, public defender, whatever) is an "officer of the court." It's part of the oath you take when admitted to practice before a particular court. But that mostly means you're promising to uphold the honesty and dignity of the process, be nice to the judge, etc.
  4. Enoch
    The only U.S. state that explicitly based its legal system on the continental model is Louisiana. Apart from the core principles of separation of powers and a written constitution, the growth of statutory law in the U.S. wasn't an outright rejection of the English model or an adoption of the continental one, it was a slow evolution over time. Legislatures decided bit-by-bit that they didn't like how the common-law courts were handling things, and instead wrote statutes that they thought better reflected how the people wanted their state/nation to be governed. Eventually, it made sense for all these statutes to be tied together into a unified code on a particular subject. But courts still make rulings based on common-law precedents-- a fair amount of American contract law and property law, for example, still rests on principles that were first litigated in English courts.
  5. Enoch
    Just so it's all in the same place, Josh made a relevant comment on stat minimums in one of the response-to-gameplay-video threads: No real rationale, actually. They've just been set to those values for a while. I'll ask Roby to set the minimums lower for the backer beta. So it looks like we'll get a chance to playtest more-extremely-min-max'ed characters in the beta.
  6. Enoch
    It's been a while, but as I recall, Bloodlines was not an especially loot-heavy game. With only 1 character and with limited equipable slots, your progression was much more ability-dependant than it was equipment-dependant. I remember the best stuff being mostly available from merchants.
  7. Enoch
  8. Enoch
    The precise appearance of anthropomorphised embodiments of the concept of Death seems to me to be a culturally determined thing. I don't know if you can say much about what it "should" or "shouldn't" look like without a pretty strong background in the surrounding culture.
  9. Enoch
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFyY2mK8pxk
  10. Enoch
    25 minutes?! Cool, but I guess this is going to have to wait until I get home from work. (And put the baby to sleep!)
  11. Enoch
    Twitter and beat reporter blogs have made following a team through the offseason rather exhausting. You hear about it every time a player gets up limping or goes to the sidelines, and wait with baited breath until the coach's press conference to see how quickly you should be giving up hope for the season. I'd kinda prefer the moment-to-moment stress of being a sports fan be confined to when actual games are being played.
  12. Enoch
    Makes for a release much more contemporaneous with Pillars of Eternity, for those planning on playing both. Given the likely relative marketing budgets, that is probably less than ideal for Obsidian.
  13. Enoch
    Tree Planted in Memory of George Harrison Killed by Beetles
  14. Enoch
    Yeah, given the increasing marginal cost of investing in abilities, it seems that a 1-point investment in a school is a rather efficient way to use a scarce resource. I've noticed that you can "forget" spells from your slots-- is it possible to fill those spots with higher-minimum-character-level spells later on? I get that the "do X damage" type effects would be less effective, but do things like high level summons also scale to ability-point investment? Glass Cannon seems to be a slam-dunk for any non-tanky character, no? Or would a party with 3 Glass Cannons, plus 1 warrior and a few summons be too squishy?
  15. Enoch
    My group is now level 5, and I'm trying to decide a direction to go with my wizardy-type character. I started him as a Witch, but I was slow to grasp how the skillpoint level-up worked. I initially thought there was a level threshold that was preventing me from adding a 2nd point to any of his skills. By the time I figured out that it cost 2 skillpoints to increase a skill to level 2, I had already raised a lot of skills to level 1 (every spell school but Fire). I now have 2 skillpoints "saved" and have to decide where to put them. And this includes some consideration w/r/t whether I'm planning to keep Jahan around, long-term.
  16. Enoch
    Go West. (Not the beach, but west out the gate near the mortician's house). Because you level up very quickly in early game, just doing a couple of quests in a slightly easier area suddenly makes a big difference in your being able to deal with those things. This is not the case in the next area (Silverglen), where you can do things in almost any order. Indeed. Amazing how much of a difference fighting 3rd-level opponents makes versus fighting 7th-level opponents. It was pretty much a coin-flip to me in deciding whether to circle the city clockwise or counter-clockwise. By choosing the "wrong" direction, I found myself using environmental hazards to win a battle that I was otherwise not ready to face. That's fantastic. It might well be the most memorable experience I end up having in this game.
  17. Enoch
    I've now hit the "mostly done with Cyseal proper, but haven't yet found a place to go where I don't get my *** handed to me" stage of the game. Orcs on the beach to the SW stomped me, so I marked that with a "go back later." Then I went out the North gate, defeated some zombies, and started circling the city, clockwise, hugging the wall and later the cliffs. Ended up in a "withered garden" with a number of entertaining traps and some nice loot. (My first orange-tinted item!) The 3 Skeleton fighters there were, again, too much for me (I think I was level 4 by then, but only barely), but I successfully lured them into the room full of fireball traps, which took out 2 out of the 3. I teleported the 3rd onto an explosive mine. Whee! I left there, rather than try my hand at what looked like a boss battle up the stairs. Took several reloads and one resurrection scroll, but I then dealt with some wolves and a friendly talking dog north of there. The dog ran off, afterwards, though, and I'm not sure what to make of that. Went back to town instead of chasing him. I suppose I'll try the northwesterly area next.
  18. Enoch
    That's pretty much the whole appeal of the game.Unrestricted looting in Cyseal and figuring out crafting recipes with adventure game logic. Don't rush those things as there really isn't much to the game afterwards. I was just trying to figure out if there was a "mix these things" button in the interface that I couldn't find. I was trying to right-click -> Use when I should've apparently just been dragging and dropping.
  19. Enoch
    So, playing most of the week in 1-hour nightly increments, I think I've gotten all I can out of wandering through Cyseal. Probably wasn't wise of them to put so much uninterrupted looking-in-boxes and talking-to-folks content so early in the game. The writing is okay-ish, but all the barrel-searching gets tedious. They should've dropped a fight or two in there for variety's sake. Dumb questions: I have loads of crafting crap, and no clue how to use it. I'd like to try crushing stuff with my mortar and pestle, or hitting things with a hammer, but it won't let me use them on the inventory screen. I did find and anvil and such in town, and I think I figured out how to use them (at least enough to get an "insufficient Blacksmithing skill" message), but the recipes I'm finding seem to indicate that I can make things with just the stuff I'm carrying around. I've gathered the two henchmen in town, but I understand that there is a way to get more custom hirelings. Does that open up later, or am I missing something?
  20. Enoch
    I think most party combinations can work, but you're pretty light on folks who can do serious damage. The best melee damage-dealers have GM in a weapon skill, and GM in either Dual-wield or Two-handed. (If the Hunter class can GM or Master two-handed, I'd put points there before I would Bow or Dodge.) The best magical damage-dealers GM either Fire or Air, plus Magical Focus (although, for the most part, melee damage is more efficient). It'll be a very durable party, with the best damage sink (Defender) and the best damage-mitigation caster (Druid), but expect some fights to last a long time. I'll add that the benefit from GM'ing a skill is disproportionally large. A character with 3 GM skills is usually measurably more effective than one with 2 GM skills and Expert level in 3 others. (With a possible exception of utility casters, where access to particular spells like Burning Determination (fire), Purge (dark), and Identify (primordial) are sufficient to justify expert-level investment all on their own.)
  21. Enoch
    As somebody who is just exploring Cyseal for the first time, I could really do without the RPG ritual of looking inside every barrel, box, and woodpile to find inventory-filler. It'd be a lot more fun if all that was closed off and the minor loot provided in more sensible ways. Then I could focus on exploration and talking to the important NPCs (read: chickens). (Also, I really should've saved before trying my hand at grave-robbing.)
  22. Enoch
    Infuriating? Really? They have the exact same meaning in all instances. I always thought it was more of a country/regional difference (though most technical writing I've seen goes with dialog). Regardless, I've seen it both ways with many dictionaries using log instead of logue as an acceptable, and often American, alternate spelling. Like how we drop the U in a lot words that end in our (honour, valour, armour, colour) or switch theatre into theater, drop the double L in travel(l)ed and cancel(l)ed, and change some S's to Z's like criticize and patronize But I'm no English major or even that good with even the most basic English so please feel free to disregard or correct me The way I've always understood it is that "dialogue" is a conversation between two human beings, while "dialog" is something that pops up in a GUI to inform the user about system status.
  23. Enoch
    It's probably best not to plan on GM'ing more than 3 skills per character. You might get 4 skills there there around the very end and/or DLC content, but by then it doesn't make a whole lot of difference. My casters are pretty close to the endgame, and the Archmage has GM'ed Air, Dark, and Magical Focus, with Expert-level investment in Prime and a toe dipped into Water & Earth, while the Runepriest had GM Earth, Light, and Fire, plus some support-skill investment (armor proficiency; the spell-point boosting skill) I think hybrids are viable, but they're best when built as a roughly 80-20 Might-Magic split. E.g., get one spell school to Expert or Master for backup healing or to provide a utility spell the rest of the party lacks. The exception might be the Crusader, who works best as a Light magic caster who happens to wear heavy armor and who can be a okay-ish melee character when not healing/buffing. I jumped right into the higher difficulty, so I don't really know whether the lower one makes the game feel less grindy. It's a grindy game by any standard, but it was fairly rare that I found it tedious.
  24. Enoch
    I hear you regarding the melodrama, but it'd be pretty tough to get more "contrived" than the main plots to Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic were.
  25. Enoch
    One other addendum (post-edit-deadline on the above): This game's consistent use of the term "dialog" to mean "dialogue" is infuriating.
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