Amentep

Based on the last bit of the footage...I'm thinking its neither. EDIT: IT could be part of a social connection thing, but that seems odd. Just not sure.

This would be ok if you only have one choice to make across the board; like, giving a little expletive-riddled speech motivates the Fighter, but doesn't do anything for the Mage. Choice and consequence. A bad example would be giving you the choice to treat every character in the way that goes over best with them; taking aside the Fighter, then talking to the Mage. That's the "choose the most comforting dialogue option" minigame I resent. If Charisma is given a meaningful role in character development by being the "party" stat, ok. That could easily unbalance Charisma though, unless a) stat points are really scarce or b) your followers are pretty incompetent (Fallout 1&2). I think we're roughly in agreement here; when I say charismatic I'm not really looking at charisma as a stat, per se, but some representation ones personal magnetism crossed with leadership (I'd actually prefer a combination of stats creating a composite charisma stat under tight upper/bottom limit - like an asymptote line - so that there are effect min/max to how effective any individual can be than a personal stat that one could up to infinity and allow you to convince 5 gods to join your party to slay some goblins.)

I've always thought it would be great if letting characters get hurt/injured in combat too much affected their morale eventually leading them to leave. Or forcing them to march when tired. Anything that forces me to powergame my relationships is bad. Letting character X dying two times or your own character dying two times resulting in X leaving - that would be ok. It simply forces me to play in a competent manner. What's bad is companions leaving because they feel "left out", or because you don't have enough "influence" on them (you didn't choose the comforting dialogue option q_q). I think whether characters feel left out or poorly influenced should be a relationship of what the NPC wants vs what the player gives mitigated by player "charisma" (however that is defined). A soldier may expect gruffer treatment from a leader than, say, a mage who has spent most of their time locked in study. But also a charismatic leader should be able to convince his party to double march to the next location without complaint. There also should be logical arguments that could be made (if the player decided) to override objections. DAO does this a little with the persuade option, but honestly everytime Morrigan complained about helping some group I wanted the option to say "Hi Morrigan, helping the Mage's circle/Arl/dwarves/dalish/riders of rohan/whatever gives me an army of mages/arl's men/dwarves/dalish/etc at my command so by helping them a little I'm helping myself a whole lot, kthnxbai."

I'd be interested in this if EA/Bioware realeased an edition of the game collecting all the DLC in a way that didn't require it to be downloaded as MASS EFFECT 1 was done. But since I have no way to download such a thing to my 360, I only get as much "closure" as the shipped game allows...

I thought the first 90% of Mass Effect 3 was fantastic, the last 10% was a straight up slap in the face. What bothered me about Dragon Age 2 wasn't so much the change in direction or obvious consolization of the game or the ho-hum story and characters, it was the plain as day corner cutting/rush job/lack of effort evident (lather, rinse, repeat combat, shameless dungeon recycling). I can live with a game being uninspired and subpar when the developer put forth the effort and did their best, just failed. What makes my blood boil is when a developer quite obviously slapped something together as fast as possible and rushed it out the door for cash grab purposes. I dunno, to me MASS EFFECT 1 is heroic space opera; MASS EFFECT 2 and 3 try to bring a dose of "realism" to the proceedings that really make it more of a war story and its that which I don't think I ever really appreciated (because, really I wanted heroic space opera). The idea that you're playing a "war story" as opposed to "heroic action" is REALLY felt in the end of ME3, IMO. It'd probably wouldn't have been as pilloried had it been published as a side story (for a series I think that can be a strength - side games can experiment and be their own little things without impacting the main story). That said, I didn't mind the reuse of assets to be honest because the game was fun to play. But then I have a high tolerance for that sort of thing. Game wasn't perfect and yeah the assets shouldn't have been reused as much (but hey, even DAO reused assets, so...)...and yet I still enjoyed playing it for what it was (rather than what I might think DA2 should have been). ...And I had to restart DAO because I screwed up the character I was making (I was trying to re-do the Dwarven Noble save I lost when my 360 died years ago when I first was playing DAO (lost the save right around time to hit the last battle) and realized I'd messed up several early moments). So I went with an elf mage since I felt I might get bored early on if I had the same character doing mostly the same things.

I'm playing Dragon Age: Origins again. Plan on then playing DA2. And yeah I'll probably get and play DA3 pretty soon after it is released. I liked DAO and DA2 despite they're flaws; was more disappointed with ME3 to be honest (but ME2 pretty much set up what ME3 would be like; I think it kind of went off the rails there to be honest (and I still enjoyed the game despite not liking specific elements of it (hows that for nested parentheses?)))

Once it all goes download only, that'll be me out of gaming. Unless I move to a new house, at least. Thankfully it seems that's not the model the PS4s going with (for now).

I dunno, so long as you aren't too much of a stickler for the designs to incorporate "real" animals there are plenty of mythological creatures that are fire based like dragons or phoenixes. Then there's always the salamander as I said. yeah hadn't really thought magical fire animals.

Not a fan of it; seems that most people who buy a product would just be encouraged to move it out of its original packaging than quit buying the product. Also I'm not a fan of using the legal system to try to effectively ban legal things.

I never really did the Arcanum diplomacy character (I never liked enough of the companions to try to get large groups of them haranguing the countryside). EDIT: Remembered what thread I was posting in.

As an incorrigible and inveterate game re-starter, I can already see that I'm going to have a lot of trouble nailing down who I want to "be" for my first play through. Meaning a lot of "Oh let me try THIS combination..." moments leading to beginning over to see how the new idea works every hour or so...

Kinda like us humans. The pros/cons does seem a good bit like humans...

Can't they be both?

I'll gravitate out of gaming if I have to be constantly online to play a game.

I'd have played it. Even with the understanding that some things don't fit the "film" lore (ie acid blood not being a big, big issue), I'd not have a problem with it as long as it made sense in the game, understanding that what works in one media doesn't always work in another.

I liked the one hairset in NWN2 that had squid tentacles coming from the hair of the water-touched Genesai female and always used that when picking that type of character. Does kind of fall down with fire, unless they're going to be based on themophiles (which would look fairly creepy).

With a fedora hat on and whip at his side. Indiana Urquhart?

The thief's shoes gain sneak xp The diplomat's hat gets diplomacy xp. or something.

Weapons proficiencies say you're good with any long sword; weapon familiarity says that experience with a particular longsword has made you better at using that particular sword. You know its balance, its heft. It has become a third arm for your character. If it were implemented I'd think that not using the weapon should eventually end the "familiarity" status - if you give the weapon to Forton and then after many encounters you pick it up, it shouldn't feel familiar as it did. I recently had to get a loaner car while mine was in the shop (I've been driving mine for a very long time) and I was totally messed up when it came to where anything in the new car was. And then I drove it for awhile and when I got my car back I kept trying to grab the windshield wipers in the wrong place and stuff. Because I'd begun to be accustomed to the other car. The thing I like about this idea is that it gives a way to keep magical loot special without necessarily having the player level-up to get some benefit from their actions. So it could be cool.

You know the debate about co-op has drifted into the Twilight Zone, when someone arguing against the idea admits to liking it because he got to hang out with friends while playing the game. Just in case you haven't yet worked it out Sherlock, this is precisely why people are hoping for it to eventually be in PE. Not entirely sure why you feel the need to be insulting; I'm pretty sure that I made my point rather clear but since you seem to misunderstand: I enjoyed hanging out with my friends. I would have enjoyed hanging out with my friends whether we played BG2 or not; in fact enjoying hanging out with my friends was not enhanced at all by playing BG2. There wasn't fun for me in waiting for everyone to buy from a vender, wade through long dialogue sequences and other sundry things that made playing BG2 in multiplayer tedious when playing it in single player wasn't. Ergo, to my mind the multiplayer aspect of BG2 was poor; had it been good I'd have enjoyed the experience of playing the game as well as hanging out with my friends. By your logic, as long as you enjoy hanging out with your friends any game has excellent multiplayer.

Except the game has no way of knowing what your intentions are; if you say "I won't do this [lie]" and then do this, what is the fundamental difference between that and telling the truth from the perspective of the game? What is the difference between saying "I will do this!" and then not doing it and lying? (Note I do not think that "bluff" and "lie" are synonymous, and I'm not convinced that you'd need a bluff check for something that is within the realm of normal believability.)

The problem - as I see it - is that this breaks down when you go to "sneaking past" people multiple times and also the problem of getting double XP (sneak past then return and kill for more xp). The former and latter can be fixed situationally; you could give each "entity" an XP pool that can only be taken once, for example. But it seems that Obsidian wants to fix it at the upper level of their design. Whether it'll work or not will remain to be seen. I'm pretty certain their intent is not to alter balance so that fighting is undesirable (or unviable).

Josh answered a question from someone about not liking IE combat and he basically said that if you didn't like that combat you probably wouldn't like PE (as I recall). So I think there's still a lot of combat focus. But at this point I think we're stuck with wait and see in terms of finding more details to determine whether the system is going to work or not for combat focus.

Razsius, I do want to say that I appreciate your posts on the topic; even if we don't agree on them. Isn't that true of the kill XP system for any path that doesn't include killing? One thing you can't do in the IE games is have stealth be anything but combat support (ie it can't be its own end to solving quests) because unless you kill it you don't get XP. But you need XP to be more stealthy so unless you kill you can't stealth later in the game. And thus the conundrum - how to not invalidate different playstyles. And yet if the quest is "Kill the village", your objectives could be "Kill the militia", "Kill the town elder", "kill all adults", "kill all children". The game no longer cares how you do it (so you could poison the town well or turn the militia commander against the town elder, etc). But for the person who goes in fighting - under your scenario they'd still get Objective XP for everything but "kill all children". (Note this could be where the quest objectives could be better defined than "kill"; what if you take the child to an orphanage several miles away - technically the town is still cleared if the objectives are fixed as such). To be fair, someone who wanted to play the IE games as a diplomat or as a stealth character (some thing that was more viable in Fallout, for example, prior to BG1 coming out) kill XP did eliminate their preferred playstyle. But if objective XP does end up making fighting a less desirable path like you fear than I'd say its failed its goal - which is to make fighting, stealth and diplomacy all viable - in a general sense (but not in a specific sense that this is always the case, only that at the top level that it is).

To be fair, I'm not complaining about this system anymore than I'd be complaining about a standard XP system. But given that I've seen threads against kill XP crop up in conversations about other RPGs in development, I'm pretty sure you're wrong.