MunoValente

Old guy claims things were better when he was younger, that never happens. Also debugging a complex RPG in 2015 is apparently roughly the same thing as debugging Pac-man.

This article might be trying to speak for all players, but it clearly doesn't. The critical and financial success of Bethesda's games clearly shows that the market and the critical community is perfectly fine with the release and patch model, at least with large rpgs. Players will gladly continue to put up with with being testers if it means getting their games 6 months or a year sooner and honestly having 500,000 or 5 million people playing your game will find issues a hell of lot faster than 20 professional QA people, so you probably end up with a polished product much sooner as well. If particular player doesn't like this model they can always wait a year or so to buy the game and probably save money as well.

If this game was only early access quality basically ever single game in the genre is. Release and fix has been the standard for years now with complex RPGs, nobody should be remotely surprised at this point and relative to other similar games I found this one quite polished at release, was able to complete the game at release with no problems and I've never had a quest bug out and I've never had the game crash completely. The idea that is was anywhere near unplayable seems way off base to me. If this game was early access quality, what was New Vegas or Skyrim?

Perhaps they could add "even faster mode" for scouting for secrets or traveling through already clear/safe areas.

Hunting bows seem like good interrupt weapons, they have fast speed/average interrupt and with a ranger you can also add stunning shots to that as well. With ranged attackers though I'd probably just skip weapon specialization though and take marksman instead. Peasant might be a good tank specialization. Hatchet for defense, spear for accuracy and for some of the interesting uniques like Cladhaliath or Danulya. I had Durance take it once so he could his staff better.

Yes this is the best auto-pause option and one of the only ones I use, along with enemy and trap spotted, low health and knocked out. One more I would like added is pause after gunfire, given how slow gun reloads are, especially if I have character with guns in three inventory slots and want to switch after each shot or simply switch from gun to melee after the initial volley; pausing after sword or hunting bow attacks I'm not so interested in.

XCOM did pretty well on the consoles, but it's control scheme and pacing was designed with consoles in mind. Just a straight port of Wasteland 2 to consoles would probably be a pretty dreadful, hard to control experience, but a lot of that is it's encounter design and general interface design, something more streamlined like Shadowrun: Dragonfall I think could port pretty well consoles and still be a very good game. A real time with pause game like Pillars would a trainwreck on consoles.

I left it running when I left the house for about 7 hours the other day and about six days had passed when I came back.

I've completed all of them both times I've played all the way through. Most of them have pretty obvious triggers, so you can switch your characters in and out fairly often. I'm still a little unclear on all of Durance', GM's and Aloth's triggers, but the rest are very straightforward I think, mostly to go and explore to place X or talk to some person.

Arcanum's combat didn't turn out so well.

I don't know if BG2 had it or not, but I'd really like an unequip all button.

Isn't there only really one plot critical NPC and the game ends abruptly if you kill them?

Sure, but they are badly implemented and badly documented. It would really help if the queue was visible, so you know where you're at in the queue, can edit the queue as need, and to simply make sure the right commands are entered in the right order.

You could always give them armor or cast defensive spells on them or raise their constitution, maybe even use a potion. The bad AI is what allows you to make your backrow people super squishy, min-maxing them as much as possible, if the back row characters were more vulnerable there would need to be more thought put into how you build, equip and play them to keep them safe. In the current system, I've pretty much given everyone in my group spirit slaying weapons, because they are the one enemy type that is kind of dangerous due to their ability to teleport. As for another topic here, I would like a better and more visible queuing system, but don't really care about scripting my companions.

The after action auto-pause is the closest thing this game has to turn based and it's something I always have on. For my wizard or priest where I'm regularly inputting commands it lets me do it paused every time without pausing manually, but with my fighter, chanter or paladin I just sort of let do their thing most of time, instead of being forced to tell them to do their basic fight commands most rounds.

If it was turn based the make up the encounters would have have to changed dramatically. A mob fight against xaurips or wolves would be dreadfully boring turn based. I think this goes along with the exploration component of the game, they want to have maps full of enemies while you explore, but for the fights to be over quickly against weaker enemies so you can contribute to explore more. I think in Wasteland 2 for example most the turn based fights hurt the pace of the game and made exploring certain areas really tedious. So while the combat may have been better turn based the game overall might not have been.

Better enemy AI is definitely more important at the moment, the weak AI undermines a lot of the combat for more experienced players. I think making the queuing of actions more intuitive and obvious would help as well, as is I think a lot of players probably don't even know it's possible. If you're worried about your character sitting around doing nothing after an action, the action complete auto-pause is one of the better auto-pause options.

I think I did once or twice the first time played, but since then I just give everyone a couple of points of athletics and it basically never comes up anymore.

Aren't we more likely to see a Pathfinder game from them than a D&D game at this point?

I think the level 9 wizard already has something like this in a way and the start of the game Arcane Assault fills the niche. The problem is the huge cap between level 9 and after Arcane Assault becomes weak and/or boring. Maybe around level 5 or 6 they could add a talent that lets you choose a single low level spell to make per encounter, call it Spell Mastery: X or something and make the lore that the Wizard knows that one specific spell really well (Aloth probably knew Fan of Flames really well my first time through), maybe even have it cost a use of Arcane Assault or replace Arcane Assault. Or they could just make Arcane Assault more interesting and upgradable like Holy Radiance and Interdiction. The Druid I think is similar to the Wizard in this regard, where the per rest limitations wouldn't be as bad if the shape change ability was better and more customizable and upgradable. More specialized Wizard classes I think would good for the expansion no matter what else they do with the Wizard.

All spells shouldn't be per encounter, but there should some that are per encounter earlier than level 9. I don't know if it would be possible but making lower level spells 1 per encounter, with additional uses per rest might be a good balance. If not changing how spells work, more Arcane Assault, Grimoire Slam type abilities might be useful or perhaps upgrade talents for Arcane Assault.

When I feel like experimenting with a building a new character a lot of the time I'll just hire adventurers and mess around with them for a while, they aren't very expensive.