Amentep

You mean that gibberish was an actual developed language? News to me. Yes it was. It also just goes to show a developed language used in a handful of case specific situations will often be indistinguishable by the untrained ear from having "Star Wars"-like dialogue featuring random grunts and clicks and whirrs.

It does seem that bartering should be more useful in terms of intelligence gathering (but IMO it should have a downside - the more you barter your way in and out of situations the more likely you're going to attract attention for people wanting your gold).

Certainly by small country you were talking of Liechtenstein, and not the seventh economy in the world? It was a joke for effect; sometimes I've ended up with so much money in RPGs I can't imagine there's any gold left in the world for anyone else to have a nugget, much less a gold coin for themselves!

The Party Has Killed Ago Nee, the Tax Collector The Party has gained 30000000 XP Reputation + 10

One of the reasons why everyone feels they have to carry every looted armor is because money tends to be scarce early on then by the end you've got enough money to buy a small country. Like Brazil. So honestly there's a couple of problems going on when this happens and not all of it is related directly to the inventory system itself (playing inventory Tetris is often just a symptom of trying to maximize the amount of money you can get so you buy that Silver Sword that allows you to beat the werewolves that you know about but can't beat because you need Silver weapons). So really the best inventory has to look at a number of different problems in the game and find a way to solve it that makes sense and doesn't annoy the player.

I couldn't shake the image of this Except with large, furry ears...

I always liked the loading screen tip that suggested the player take a break and get something to eat because they didn't want the player to die.

Megatherium!!!

I'd be up for a large race (avoiding ogre/giant stereotypes) myself. We usually see games go smaller rather than larger.

I'd love being able to get rumors on how to kill monsters that are wrong. "Yeah, my gramps tol' me when I wuz knee-high to an orlens that you could kill one of those darn insectoid critters with a pick-axe to the head..." [later] "Damnit man, I'm pickaxing this insectoid's head like a hen pecking for seed on a sunny day and IT DOES NOTHING!!!!"

Also lack of printing press makes cards difficult, at least in a collectable sense (as anyone who had cards would have presumably made the deck themselves). Dice games don't seem all that collectable. Marbles?

I'm not against typical gambling parlors, particularly if there's more utility to them than a place to lose money. I've never been crazy about the "walk up to random people and play minigames in the middle of the street" approach.

When I was a kid I pestered my older brothers to allow me to create a dungeon. It had an elephant in it. They didn't appreciate my level design. But it was only a game (and I spent a full day working on it! That was like months in kid-time! ) I said. They left the room. Sometimes it is nice to get some realism (but to be fair to my youthful self, I had thought the Monster Manual listed underground as a possible dwelling place for Elephants. Yes I knew elephants lived above ground in the real world even at that tender age, but how was I supposed to know D&D elephants weren't subterranean?) Given the limited budget and time, is a full language something I think is essential for the realism...I don't think so. But if it was something they could do easily and within the budget, its not something I'd be against.

Titan Quest's paperdoll, IIRC, was actually the figure you saw on screen too. A bit like how some of the IE games did it (IWD) but with greater detail on the character.

Yeah, I gather if I'd ever played Darklands, I'd have loved it.

I think "biamhac" comes from the sound people make when the soul sucking winds kills them...

in fact, I think it might create an immediate conflict between the priests and the chanters. Without the printing press, the major translation of thought was either oral traditions or copying books in an abbey somewhere by dedicated Monks (who would/could suppress things that didn't fit their dogma). There in essence becomes three ways to pass knowledge - knowledge through apprenticeship, rare knowledge from books and more common knowledge from shared stories. Chanters may have stories that don't align with what the priests want to portray for their religions. Some wizard knowledge may cross the chanters and the priests. Lots of room for conflict between some of these groups who would, without a printing press, control the flow of the world's information.

Only voice actor I think I'd ever really think "wow, cool to hear him again" would be Tony Jay, but alas he's no longer with us. Such a great voice and voice-over actor (pretty good in non-VO roles too, IMO).

But without alignment, why would you cast "Protection from Evil" or "Protection from Chaos"? I'll be honest we never cared much about alignment when we played D&D unless you were playing a Paladin or clearly doing Evil/Good while playing a Good/Evil character.

But I think that's the inherent problem - Tho Fan is a made up language and yet there were a lot of people who felt it was gibberish (and offensive at that). Now you may remove the offensive part without someone being able to connect the line to real world cultures (many people couldn't get past the fact that Jade Empire was a fantasy world, not actually China). But you still run into a lot of people who are going to see it as gibberish. I'd love it if they did it, I just don't think the cost vs the effect on the average user would end up being of any benefit.

Total baseless speculation, but... I suspect undead are in the game (based on the screenshot art of those statues). Given the souls coming back over time and that we know that some societies see awakened souls as a bad thing, I can imagine that the society might be split over whether the undead (souls that remain and animate dead bodies) are good or bad things. Thus we may get more undead like "Kresselack" or "Acaste" and less like "Skeleton #2 From the Left in the Skeleton Horde created for Shattering into Boney Bits".

Yeah, that's pretty much the kind of thing that got flung around when JE came out.

Baldur's Gate had reputation. It had alignment, too, but it wasn't an implementation that adjusted for actions. And neither of those things (reputation, alignment) had to do with character stats like charisma, so I don't know what HumanFlesh+5 is worried about. (BG had no faction reputation, but PS:T did--mostly mutually exclusive too. That was nice. I haven't played FO:NV so I wonder what the difference is compared to PS:T.) My experience with factions in FO:NV is that shooting people in the face is frowned upon* I suspect there will be global factions and things; I wonder if there will be local factions (and whether people will belong to multiple factions). *Oddly, Ceaser's Legion frowned upon this even when the CL guy I shot in the face told me to attack him if I didn't like what he was doing. Buncha hypocrites, if you ask me.

I've thought for some time it'd be neat to have an alchemist class who might be able to mix up a potion or two (but maybe you'd not really trust drinking it) but could also make up vials that could then be thrown in combat (explosive vials, knockout gas, smoke bomb, caustic liquids that burn skin, poisons that could be added to weapons - that type of stuff). Normal combat skills would favor thrown weapons (thus dovetailing into throwing vials and flasks with accuracy). But even skill based, it'd be nice if it looked at building around the idea that alchemists were looking for a way to turn lead into gold and were playing with some dangerous things, so I favor the idea.

They also received a lot of flak about it from people, despite the language having been created by a linguistic expert. Unfortunately I think its a "no win" scenario.