Amentep

I see the former as a skill and the later as a player choices.

Generally speaking, my character's skill should dictate the success (or lack thereof) of my choices, and if my choices haven't led the character to be able to succeed in the skill then hopefully I'm smart enough to have a different plan. Too often - using lockpicking as an example - games err on the side of creating a puzzle for the player that high skill only makes easier to solve but players still have to use their manual dexterity with the mouse/keyboard to solve. But sometimes this utterly fails (Mass Effect where it was tedious but relatively easy to bypass most puzzles on skill alone) or annoying where even with a high skill it wasn't terribly fun to deal with (Elder Scroll games). IMO and YMMV.

eh...any project that starts as an "old school" game is going to have a breaking point where fans see it as "old school in name only". I think that goes with the territory. While I may not care if the game is OSINO, I understand why others who backed this for their specific love of particular games in the pitch may not like certain things they feel don't meet their Old School thresh-hold. I'm passionate about games...kinda hard to fault others who are passionate about games.

Not to promote a negative stereotype of women being stupid or something, but... I love how her face is so derp, her sword is missing and the horse looks like "OH GOD PLEASE GET THIS IDIOT OFF ME." That statue's hysterical, gender be damned. This is, I believe, the Joan of Arc Statue in Washington DC. The sword has been replaced now, as I understand it. Her expression is probably done this way to indicate that she was on a divine mission (thus looking heavenward heading to battle). That said, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that while Joan had a sword with her, she usually actually carried the standard into battle...

I thought Arcanum did this right, giving the bonus/penalty for gender but then allowing you to choose a background that would essentially negate it if you chose to, thus allowing you to create characters the way you wanted to in a more fleshed out manner. i have no problem with choosing who my character is having some "effect" to reactions - whether its race or gender - personally. I think so long as the "penalty" in society isn't a permanent barrier (ie the man in the fiercely matriarchal society or the woman in the fiercely patriarchal society can still prove themselves based on their skills). I think it would be frustrating for a player if the effect to gender was to cut off content unless there was additional content they could only access based on their character. Which I think is really the problem having more and more content to address every possible character combo.

I dunno, BG NPCs didn't drop everything they never carried. Beating off a BG bandit didn't lead them to drop their pants for example. Wait, that doesn't sound right... Seriously though, I would like the humanoids to have lootable weapons / armor, but I'm not sure that I'd be overly upset if they didn't either.

I'll wait and see how it is implemented before making any real opions. Shevek - as I recall Wizards had more spell slots; rest spamming was a way to maximize your spell power. I can't say I used it - too often I needed rest in areas with random encounters - but given all the other metagaming people did with IE games...

No, it's not, i said it myself and never argued otherwise. You could easily pile up a cooldown system on top of a Vancian one(or variations, like the already mentioned Chaos Chronicles). Still, I strongly disagree with the idea that every character should have something special to do every single round, for the reasons I already pointed. It made Dragon Age painful to play without AI assist. Beside, I'm not sure why playing a specific class as main character should be that relevant, in a game where you manage a whole party in any case. Yeah, yeah, i know, they said that they plan to make the solo way viable, but that could mean a lot, not necessarily that a solo player can beat any fight. And let's face it: only sociopaths or people who's going for the fifth playthrough will go for solo in a game like this. Just so I understand your position better. You dont feel a caster should be able to cast every round, right? Does that extend to all classes? Should a healer be only able to heal every few rounds? Should an archer only be able to fire arrows every few rounds? Whats going on during the "down time"? Even in a Vancian system there's only so many rounds the caster will be casting. Also the comparison to cool downs would be "an archer can fire every round but can only fire a Rain of Arrows once every X amount of time" not to just firing arrows. I've never seen cooldowns used where the player didn't have some option for a regular attack with cooldowns only being on special versions of that attack.* That said I'm not a proponent of cooldowns *This may be due to limited personal experience, however.

So far I've liked them all. Dead Money was...interesting. I'm not sure I'd have liked all of the game to be like that, and I may not replay it often in the future, but it was worth doing.

It doesn't matter to me - I'll be fine either way. But I'm with Gurkog; I prefer when the joinable NPC isn't an extra arm of the PC (unless I'm making the whole party). That said from an RP perspective you could argue that the PC gaining control of an NPCs development is just the influence of the PC on the NPC as they work together in the context of the party. In that sense, if you have an NPC who you picked up because of their "thiefy" skills, it'd be a bit of a disappointment for the character to then not be able to develop along a "thiefly" line which might happen if a pre-planned level path for a character (I had something like this happen in DA:O I believe where I used a thief mostly with bow and arrow and auto-leveled until I realized the character was putting all their points in blade skills (or was it the other way around?)).

I need to go back and finish the remainder the main story again and Lonesome Road.

To be fair, Japanese companies are still making Wizardry games (for consoles). Wizardry Bōkyaku no Isan was put out in 2010 for the DS; Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls released to Japan and NA via PSN in 2009. Still doesn't translate to this non-Wizardry like game being appealing to Asian countries (but maybe room to wonder if there's still a market for a new Wizardry game - totally different issue!) It's a bit unfair to say "Japanese companies are still making Wizardry games". Those games, albeit with the title on the box, has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with what we associate with the Wizardry series. I don't disagree that the Japanese Wizardry's do not carry the story of the original series. That said, the last of the Japanese Wizardry's I played (Tales of the Forsaken Land) probably had more gameplay* in common with the early games than Wiz8 did (my perspective on the core Wizardry Games is the first two or three games and Wiz8) even if the story wasn't related to the Sir-Tech one. YMMV, of course. My point was if we class "Wizardry" as a western style game then games of Wizardry's type - including games directly based on the original Wizardry - are still being made in Japan. But this doesn't translate into a "Japan will embrace an IE style game" argument. *By this I mean, opponents grouped on a static screen, not moving in a 3D environment ala Wiz8 and only the original Wizardry races.

I don't see why anyone would care about something like this, or if a developer (or even if Obsidian as a company) backed her Kickstarter. Obsidian as a company are apparently backing a card game that is made with stick figure drawings - OMZG! P:E is going to use STICK FIGURES IN THEIR GAME!!!!!

I don't know if anyone is working on it - but even with the flaws I see in Wiz8 I'd love another proper Wizardry game. Still total side issue to popularizing this style of game that isn't wizardry like at all.

To be fair, Japanese companies are still making Wizardry games (for consoles). Wizardry Bōkyaku no Isan was put out in 2010 for the DS; Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls released to Japan and NA via PSN in 2009. Still doesn't translate to this non-Wizardry like game being appealing to Asian countries (but maybe room to wonder if there's still a market for a new Wizardry game - totally different issue!)

I find Achievement / Trophy from XB360 / PS3 as apples to the oranges of the situational perks created in Fallout where doing certain things you get the perk that may have an in-game effect. Since I like the backgrounds of Arcanum and Fallout, I like the perks / traits /whatevers

Right now, I'm a bit biased because I've never actually enjoyed the mounts in games that have them. The ability to fight mounted is usually not well implemented (at least in the games I've played). That said, if the developers had a way to do it that'd be fun - I'd have no problem with it. But certainly not a priority for me.

You know its silly - and I'll say I can't defend it at all there was a lot of silly in DA2. The above "We'll attack the city to get in!" moment, the false dichotomy in leadership leading to the end where you just ramrod through everyone, some of the cameos, some of the companions, opponents dropping from the sky. And yet I still enjoyed playing it. It is a total guilty pleasure game for me.

To be fair, it actually is expensive (~$30,000 for a regular film) to strike a print of a film. If a film opens in 300 theaters world-wide and you are using film prints, you've just added $9 million to the cost of the film (without even counting shipping - film cans are heavy and usually come in 3-4 cans, dependent on the length of the film) before getting to the theaters. If you subtitle a film you're adding the expense of a new print and someone to subtitle the film too. There is a student film theater at my old university and sometimes they'd want to do a revival, but they could only afford to do revival showings of films that wouldn't need a new film print struck (due to the price added to the rental fees).

As someone who has always played both PC and Console games...I don't get achievements. A game being good will be encouragement for me to replay it, not trying to complete an artificial list of "things to do" by finding 1000 McGuffins in the Secret Dungeon.

Generally I support the idea that anything the PC can do an NPC should be able to do (and vice versa).

I'm in that category actually, I never played the original. However I've heard a lot of good things about it, I like what I've read about it and when Wasteland 2 came up on Kickstarter I was happy to support it. Compared to that, I played all of the IE games.

Not even as a food source for the flesh devouring blob when its iron rations have gone stale and its only half-way through a dungeon?

I'm terrible at mildly complicated strategy games - might be why I don't respond well to games that make me pre-plan for too many things. Give me a few resources to manage and I'm okay but too many and I just start having no fun trying to keep up with everything.