khalil

You're forgetting about removal spells. This dynamic is what made BG2 spellcasting memorable to this day. So you've spent 10 spells making your fighter invulnerable? Breach......and they're gone. I could name off several other spells which achieved similar or even identical results. All of those spells per day wasted because some AI wizard was prepared for the eventuality of facing a magical opponent. If you've ever played BG with Sword Coast Strategems (I or II), then you know this scenario very very well. Since many spells will be at will or per encounter, I think it is valuable to allow their duration to be "indefinate until rest" accord a level/ability cap on how many can be maintained and a concentration check to sustain effects on damage. It permitts the best of everything. Mages get their spells, players have less hassle, powerful spells are still balanced, counter-spell intrigue is possible, and non-magical characters have a method for breaking persisted effects by wailing on a wizard. I hated that part of bg2. Every two bit wizard had stoneskin, and then he had a spell that blocked my removal spells, and then he had a third spell to protect that! In the end I usually gave up and had my fighters wail on the wizard until his stoneskin failed.

Sometimes achievements can add to a game. Example: The Part Where He Kills You in Portal 2, or that one in The Stanley Parable that required breaking into the source code before people figured out how to get it.

Edit, sorry noticed josh's speach. Ignore my doubts then. I got the idea because I heard lots of talking about combat, and several people talking about icewind dale. I played icewind dale for exactly five minutes before deleting it.

It is, but it's a bit of a waste when I could fight monsters and get XP for doing so. You'll never get XP for killing monsters, only for for completing objectives. Granted, more often than not I expect it will imply killing monsters on the way. But for the times where you will have a choice, resolving a quest with diplomacy will still be interesting. This is the best news I've heard all day. I hate getting gyped out of XP for completing an objective in a weird way.

It is, but it's a bit of a waste when I could fight monsters and get XP for doing so. 'Good combat' and 'successor to IE games' feels rather contradictory. Good combat was not their strong points. Fights in BG2 were 25% casting fireballs at offscreen monsters, 25% trying to dispel a wizard's spells that prevent you from dispelling his protection spells, 25% savescuming, and 25% casting an absurdly large amount of protection spells on yourself.

Sigh. It's not that I hated BG, but I certainly didn't like it that much. It just felt so generic and bland. The only way I could have ended up more pessimistic about this is if you said they wanted to to be a successor to Icewind Dale. (When I want a plotless game about killing things for no reason, I play TF2.)

I'll be honest, if your change was implemented I'd still go around talking to everyone. The only difference would be that now each quest outside those five I'm stuck with would have an extra step nailed onto the start: go back to the questgiver to 'get' the quest. This kind of artificial limitation harms immersion and makes gameplay far more tedious. As far as new quests appearing in old areas, I think it depends on how it's implemented. Bad: Sure, in the real world Farmer Joe back in Tutorialville might not loose his cow until I'm entering the final dungeon. This means that he will have to deal with losing his cow, as it makes no in character sense to leave the final dungeon right before I fight the incarnation of all worldly evils so I can return to Tutorialville and do some manual labor. This content will be ignored by everyone who isn't using a walkthrough to get 100% completion. Good: If the mage wars begin in act 2 and the entire world is consumed via thaumic fire, the smoldering remains of Tutorialville can and probably should have some guy starving to death who needs your help to get food. This not appearing until later makes logical sense (as the problem didn't appear until later), and adds immersion. tl;dr: It's okay for new quests to appear in old areas because of story reasons. It's not okay for new quests to appear in old areas because the designers thought act 3 needed more sidequests.

I think they are trying to avoid scenarios that involve only one path for success. There is also stealth, a valid path that is neither combat nor diplomacy. Outside of those 3 major options, perhaps specific cases allow you to use particular skills or spells to get by without combat. I am certain all quests will be solvable through combat in some way... Not sure if the other paths will always be viable but an alternative should exist. Sigh. I hate games where stealth/diplomacy is a waste and only works half the time whereas shooting people has a 100% success rate. Look at the trial in NWN2. If you're a fighter, than you just go straight to trial by combat. If you're a rogue who invested points in social skills, then you spend a lot of time faffing about before you end up in the trial by combat anyway, even though the fighter got to skip the stuff he sucked at. Well there are certain advantages to using stealth prior to combat (scouting, backstabbing/flanking opponents, or simply circumventing them altogether if you can). Diplomacy might give you an advantage (gain allies or avoid combat altogether). But at the end of the day, fighting will solve most situations in a typical RPG quest, so it makes sense to make it the lowest common denominator a majority of the time. It isn't exactly a good thing if stealth or diplomacy always gives you a 100% chance to complete a quest. Player skill gets taken into account during stealth, so if you are not careful in your movements, it might be your own fault you fail. And I know they are trying to avoid "one button win" scenarios with diplomacy, though maybe a few of those will still be in the game when it makes sense. I sort of remember the trial example you are referring to, but I don't remember the outcomes. From how you describe it, I am sure they will be avoiding such scenarios in this game, though logical outcomes should always trump player desire; sometimes a fight will break out, no matter how skilled you are at sweet talking or sneaking. It all depends on the context of the situation. The outcomes of that arc were: You fail the trial in under five seconds, and end up having to do trial by combat instead. This is the option for combat monsters. You win the trial after large amounts of investigation and debate, and end up having to do trial by combat instead. This is the option for wizards who put cross-class ranks in diplomacy because they expected better of the man who wrote Planescape: Torment.

I think they are trying to avoid scenarios that involve only one path for success. There is also stealth, a valid path that is neither combat nor diplomacy. Outside of those 3 major options, perhaps specific cases allow you to use particular skills or spells to get by without combat. I am certain all quests will be solvable through combat in some way... Not sure if the other paths will always be viable but an alternative should exist. Sigh. I hate games where stealth/diplomacy is a waste and only works half the time whereas shooting people has a 100% success rate. Look at the trial in NWN2. If you're a fighter, than you just go straight to trial by combat. If you're a rogue who invested points in social skills, then you spend a lot of time faffing about before you end up in the trial by combat anyway, even though the fighter got to skip the stuff he sucked at.

It's already been stated that not all problems in PoE can be solved with diplomacy. This worries me, as I've played a large amount of games where diplomacy is a token decoration, whereas every problem can be solved by stabbing things until they stop moving. Is there any chance of problems that can only be solved with diplomacy, or will everything be possible to solve via knives?