Gonshu

For me the issue is not so much if corpses stay or not as much as if I can proper loot or not. Atm, looting is not implemented properly, but I am sure they will fix it.

I was very dissapointed in the regard of failing quests. Considering the fact that the only way of getting experience is by completing quests (which I like, though probably would do it based on objectives) you have to be super careful on what dou you consider as a failed quest (if there is any way to fail a quest at all!) The concrete example in the beta. In the cat and mouse quest, I talked to the mobs, then go in to the inn and decided to fight the thieves and kill them, then I go out and fight the mobs and kill them too. What is my surprise when I see the quest failing negating me the exp reward. In my opinion that was disappointing, cause I resolved the quest in one way (killing both parts). I think probably money reward has to be negated but not the exp reward, since the quest got to a conclussion. I think that making quests to fail or give different amount of experience depending on how you solve a quest, considering that it is the only way to get experience, is a design mistake that has to be addressed asap. (Sorry for being melodramatic, but I really think so). Either create other experience sources or make quests not being able to fail (just resolve them in different ways).

Yes, I agree with you, that's why I said he is not a bad guy, instead of he is a good guy. I meant that it was obvious he did not mean any harm and that he wanted to just get along. I loved these kind of moral decissions you had to take on the quests, and expect to see more of that!

I agree everything you say here, and I think it is sad. I dislike (and was surprised) by the fact that you cannot choose an attribute build to make your character a "fast attacker" character or a "heavy hitter" (in the meaning of high critic chance/damage). I would appreciate if they add these options to the attribute builds, and the fact that they don't exist is what is making perception, resolve and intelligence a bit underwelmed (ok, intelligence is useful for support classes). I really hope they see it and tweek resolve/perception to allow these kind of build. About the leveling up thing. It was one of the worst implemented things on the IE games. Yes, in both BG games leveling up was a bith meh, no choices, just click a button. You could argue you did the choice at the beggining when picking the class, but that makes leveling not fun and low customizable. ID1 was not much better, ID2 was fairly better. Fallout new vegas was much better. Atm, PE is between BG2 and ID2. I hope that classes get deeper and customization within the class richer, so levelling allow you to make meaningful choices so it is at least as important and fun as in Fallout new vegas.

So after playing the beta over and over I want to give my impression on the dialogues/story thus far. Thinking on how to distribute the things I want to comment I was not so sure of how to put it structured so I divided it on things I liked and things I disliked, so here I go: LIKE - Dialogue UI is familiar and intuitive. - Liked some of the moral choices you had to do, decide to help a thief to get rid of her followers, decide what to do with an ogre who is terrorizing a village, etc. - Loved interconections between quests, like the daughter quest with the ogre quest and the potion girl quest, that was nice! I like the idea than when in a bigger picture some quests outcomes might have changed if you did a quest earlier and viceversa (so the way you get to know things affect the result of others). - Bards explain history, nice! DISLIKE - Story was obvious. I knew the ogre was not a bad guy. I knew the chasers were mobsters. Everything was too obvious. Make things a bit harder to get and fool your players. For instance, in the cat and mouse quest you could have make some villagers say: "Did ya hear about dat murderer?" and stuff like that, in a bigger picture it could exist a quest to find the murderer, the trap is set, and some people will fall to it and some people don't. One of the moments I enjoyed more when playing Dragon Age 2 (and I did not like that game overall) was when the mother of the main character was murdered by a guy who I let live trusting he was not the city serial killer. Bad outcomes are a good experience (imo) and affect your gameplay after it (I did not trust anyone during the game after that) - Attributes as far as I've seen they make no difference. Make attributes to be valuable for dialogs. Not only for add up choices but also to remove and add information to dialogs. For instance, if someone tries to intimidate you and he succeeds because your might is low, remove ona dialog option (like trying to respond to the intimidation or starting a fight, you just ****ted on your pants!!), same for intelligence when there is a wit contest, etc. Also add information to what npc says on attribute checks: If you fail you just get: "It has always been like that" he says On a perception success: "It has always been like that" he says nerviously. On an intelligence or lore success: "I has always been like that" he lies I think you can get the idea, don't know how much effort it would take though (probably too much). - Dialogue outcome being too much black or white. Maybe it is because it is a beta and quests are really limited, but I expect that dialogues are more than get into a fight or avoid it. I also expect that quest decissions affect world around you and to have multiple effects. For instance, on the ogre quest, if you decide to let it live and you tell the truth (or fail lying) to the farmer I would appreciate that the armor seller stopped selling me because he is a really good friend of the farmer, and my reputation within the city drops. Also I would like that the outcome of not killing the ogre could vary between: the farmer attacks and I kill him, the farmer attacks me and I just reduce him, farmer decides to go kill the ogre himself, farmer lets it go. Probably I don't need that much interactions in every petty quest, but I would like that even some small quests can change things on the game. A comment apart of like and dislike, I don't know how are you going to build reputation system, but I would appreciate that it is build per npc, so within a city the blacksmith npc can love you and the major/ruler may hate you. Obviously some quests may affect the reputation on different group of npc differently. Example: you get rid of a thief who was stealing on the market surroundings: All market npcs +reputation, all rogue community -reputation. I think that is it.

I think the terrain to improve more is the combat system, aside of the huge amount of bugs there, I think what is happening is not clear, thus it drives to a bad experience. First, make circles around persons/monsters more visible and more distinguishible. Improve the information we see, at the moment you just see numbers around, but you don't know who's doing what. Movement has to be improved. Normal mode speed should be slower or slow mode should be faster. Improve AI of the rivals Make terrain elevations more clearer. That is a good place to start!

I feel like some classes have a very defined path and there is space for little costumization. Those being: Fighter, Monk, Barbarian, Ranger, Rogue, Paladin, Priest. Actually only Mages, Cipher, Chanter and Druids have some customization in the way of picking abilities (for druids and cipher probably would not be enough, but it is something). As a player who always has liked to make a Ranged weapon character I am very disappointed to see that I am forced to make a hunter (that's what a ranger is), the fact that there is only one ranged weapon class is also a disappointment, I expected that there were abilities to support ranged weaponry at least in the fighter, rogue, probably in the ciphe and hey, why not in barbarian? I dislike the fact that I have to pick an animal when what I want to do is an Archer, as the classes are at the moment, every ranger is a beastmaster, every fighter is a soldier, every barbarian is a berserker, every paladin is a knight, every rogue is an assasin, a priest is a cleric, every monk is ... mmmh a monk? So every class has 1 path to walk, and that's not nice. What would I do? Taking into account that you added some flavor to Paladins and Clerics, fact that I love, I would add that kind of flavor for every class (why you did not do it in the first place? I guess time), and make that flavor not only to decide your background but also decide with which abilities you start the game with (and thus deciding what type of character you will play). For instance in the paladin could be something like: Bleak walkers -> Damage abilities, Darkozzi paladini -> Support healing, Goldpact Knights -> Support defensive, Kind wayfarers -> Support offensive, Shield bearers -> Tank abilities. I don't know, I hope you get the idea. Same can be done to all other classes: Rogue (Assasin, Thieve, Smuggler, ...) Ranger (Hunter, Gunslinger, Archer,...) Fighter (Gladiator, Legionnaire, Archer,...) just have to make up names to make flavor more interesting and make packs of initial abilities (that is the hard part). Once created the character I would allow everyone to take and improve abilities of the other subclasses if they want, but the initial abilities are chosen your background, because if you were enlisted on the Bleak walkers they taught you on doing damage, not healing people, if you made a living being an assasin you know how to backstab, but maybe not how to throw sand to an enemy eyes (you did not need that). But of course, you can learn that during your adventure!

Honestly, BG2 wasn't a hard game (maybe it was average difficulty), but I could literally overrun any dungeon with my Kensai or Archer proper equipped alone in the hardest mode (even kill a dragon with only one character). IW2 was a more challenging game, where tactics were much more important, and where mistakes costed you a reload. I feel that is fine as much as I think that encounters should be posible to avoid for these players that prefer to play de diplomat or sneaky paths. Back to the difficulty matter, I just hope that the difficulty bar makes it's job on this matter. So if you pick easy, battles should be easy, and if you pick hard battles should be hard. The problem at the moment is more because of bugs and some flaws in the combat system: units moving too fast, some attacks doing far too much damage to be able to react, missinformation in the way that you don't see clearly what is happening. I found the combats completely bipolar in hard mode, they go really easy or really hard, once I got how combat works and found that positioning is the most important thing as combat is now, enemy aggro doesn't change as it should, so basically send in your buffed BB fighter and wait until everyone attacks him, then send your rogue and ranger (I am playing a ranger) to the back of the enemies, you don't even have to use any ability, sad. Also the fact that Wizard is plain overpowered makes it easier. Obviously this is an early stage beta so I expect things not to work as they should, I like the idea of making combat really tactical and I think they are in the right path even though they have to improve it a lot.

I would even extend that not only to animals but to other type of enemies aswell. I think aggresivity should be adequate to situation. For instance, I don't think a Lion or a Beetle would attack an human unless they feel treated, in the same way, I don't think a spirit would attack an human until it traspass/profane something. A bandit will probably not attack unless you refuse to give them what they want. etc. etc. Then ok, there are some that will attack you at first sight. It might an Orc or some auto agressive creature. But aswell some others depending on your character. For instance, imagine there is some kind of priest order who think Godlike are wicked, then if you have a Godlike in your party, maybe they should attack at sight. The same for nations at war, etc. I would also like some to be friendly (it suffices with geeting you or licking your face, imagine a Lion your druid's face, would be funny or helping you in a fight) I know it is complex, but I would like to have aggro defined for a bunch of parameters, depending on creature and situation and learning who are your friends and your enemies will be an exploration out of itself, and you might use it in your advantadge/disadvantadge.

First of all I want to aplogize in advance if something I write down is not clear enough, english it's not my native language and I can do some vocabulary/grammar mistakes. Second, this far I have only really played the ranger class, so I am not aware of all classes ingame posibilities. Have in mind I will be talking from that perspective, just consiering character creation. Third, there is a lack of tooltips everywhere during the creation, in the second step you are making choices on modifiers that you don't know what they do modify, so a tooltip would be helpful in these cases. That said, here I go: GENDER PICK Nothing odd about it. I LOVE the fact that there is an explanation of the role of each gender within the diffent cultures. RACE PICK Race modifies attributes and subrace adds up an ability. An odd thing I see here is that human subraces making no difference but background, making the only race where subraces have no effects. This raises for me the question: "Does subrace will change the interaction you will have with NPC during the game?" Then I would have treated godlike in a lot different way that they are treated. As I see it, Godlike are not a race on their own, they are other races persons which have been gifted on birth. In the creation you allow to pick in which race is based the character but it has no effect on anything. I think this in concept is really strange, so a Aumaua blessed by the moon god has lost his might? weird. It is also weird that all Godlike have the same modifications (this is also argable to all subraces) I am not going to enter in how would I fit it into the UI, but I would make the godlike race to modify attributes and add the ability depending on the race you pick. For instance (just a sample of what I have in mind): I pick a fire godlike which gives +1 to Might -1 to Constitution, plus the ability. Then I pick to be a Aumaua which gives me the +2 Might bonus. Ending up with a +3 Might and -1 Constitution To finish this section I want to congrat you for the Aumaua and Orlan work, the first I thought I was going to dislike them and after seing them I have to say I really like them, also good job making hobbits/gnomes more appealing. CLASS PICK Ok, I will sepparate the classes in 3 groups: Flavored, Single path and Customizable. Flavored: Paladin and Cleric You pick a flavor subclass that makes you feel better what kind of character you are creating. I don't know if the choice changes anything (not afaik) but at least you have a better defined of what your character is or his motivations. It would be nice that they add up an ability or something, but making flavor is good enough for me. Single path: Fighter, Barbarian, Monk, Ranger, Rogue As you can imagine what I said above raises me the question, why did not they do flavor with this class list. This classes have no customization, neither in abilities nor flavor. I don't know if there is a plan to add up subclasses. In my particular case I was VERY dissapointed on how the Ranger class is represented this far. In roleplaying I always made my main character an archer, and I really dislike that in the character creation I was pushed into a hunter/beastmaster, there is no other shooting based class and the only one that exists forces me into that :/ It comes a bunch of subclasses to my mind: Beast master, Archer, Gunslinger, to name some. The same can be done for the rest of the classes on this list, Fighter (Gladiator, Legionnaire, Guard), Barbarian (Launch random tribe names here), Monk (Rising sun, Palm strike, etc etc school) and Rogues (Assasin, Thief, Smuggler). Even if it is only for flavor it will be worth and please don't force rangers to pick a companion yes or yes, otherwise make it posible to build a ranged type out of the Fighter class. Customizable: Cipher, Wizard, Druid and Chanter This are customizable because are the only ones that allow you to pick abilities that customizes your character on the gameplay direction you want to give them, I would rather make to choose a subclass and set abilities based on the one you choose but you are more or less able to do that how the characters are created and you don't close the options for less roleplaying persons (you want to launch illusions and firebolts? got it!) ATTRIBUTES PICK I like the idea of being able to distribute an amount of points as you wish. This is very classical and it works perfectly, you can't create overpowered characters as with random re-dicing and it forces you to make hard choices. Or it would force you if all attributes where as much important. Sadly, as some people has already stated, Perception and Resolve are not as appealing as the rest What I would make:I would make perception to affect the critical hit chances and or damage, it completely fits with the description of the attribute and would open up a whole new range of choices between the classes, do I prefer a character that does more sustained damage or do I prefer a character tha can get a huge damage explosion. On Resolve I would make it to affect attack speed, I see someone with high resolve as someone vigorous, maybe they don't hit you as hard as someone with high might, but they hit and hit and hit, and their pace does not slow down because they are resolved! I hope you get the idea. Another approach would be to give resolve some sustainability modifier, maybe you can beat them down, but they will get on their feet again! The rest of them are appealing enough to not need a modification. Since I don't know how much they modify dialogues/situations I won't say anything, but I REALLY like the idea that every attribute has it's own dialogues and that they are not necessarily the best option (they can be even the worse sometimes) and also LIKE that sometimes some attribute checks are done when picking some dialogues. CULTURE PICK I LOVE this section, I love that you pick the region you are from (and that the lifestyle of that region affects your attributes) and also that you can pick the Background, don't know if it is only for flavor or it actually modifies anything withing the game, but I love it!!! Nothing bad to say about this section. APPEARANCE PICK Well, I think this section is very in early stage, I really hope that there are much more choice options than the current ones, specially portrait wise. I like that there are some basic portraits with modification and hope that in the future are enough options both in color, body parts and portraits to at least pick one you enjoy. VOICE PICK Same as above, hope to see more options! And that is all, these are my impressions on the character creation, hope it helps!!