gkathellar

It's tabbed. I'm not a 2D artist so I didn't make proper tab art, but items would be sorted and tabbed by type. Tabs are great, but my experience has been that once inventory really starts to fill up, they eventually prove inadequate, because you're sorting through a hundred items or more (for reference, this is one of the virtues of limited, IE-and-NWN-style inventory - it forces you to get rid of things). I had this problem with DA:O, and that was with a list view. I think the issue will be aggravated if the default item view only shows an icon, and not the item's names.

Fair point. Yeah, that.

Looks good in general, although that gigantic group inventory could get a little disorienting when it starts to fill up. There's got to be some way to section it so it's not just an endless plateau.

YHBT. Honestly, as long as some villains yells, "Tremble as you die, ever pathetic, ever fools!" at me some time during the game, I'mma be good. Dat sneak attack Note this claim, in spite of not being a backer.

Your character does get faster/smarter/stronger/whatever. That's what your levels represent - you gain a level, your numbers go up. Attributes, on the other hand, are inherent traits, measures of potential. They shouldn't end up mattering a whole lot by mid-levels. This was the old-school approach to ability scores, and you just have to roll with it. Character customization was never one of the key features of IE games, and much more than they have at present would feel unwelcome (to me, anyway).

And your point is? Remember, PoE doesn't punish you for killing things (and there are RPGs that do punish you, e.g DX:HR). --- I still don't understand why so many people consider combat such a chore. (And if it's fun then why is it so necessary to get XP for it?) But it's even more puzzling that the same people apparently want to make the chore practically mandatory. Talk about being masochistic... Personally, I think combat is fun. In most games anyway. And when ti's not, XP tends to make it more irritating because you can't opt out. Combat against a well assorted and diversified group of adventurers (or something equivalent), with a top notch enemy AI and within a solid combat system is fun by itself even without xp or loot. Combat with lion after lion/beetle after beetle/trash mob after trash mob with no AI to speak of and a single auto-attack (or two, if we count the lions' slam-dunk), with no xp and no or minimal loot, not so much. And in the first case, it's more fun if there's a -ding- at the end for the level you just gained.

It actually wasn't for him, either. Drizzt could dual wield because drow in 1E AD&D were ambidextrous. It was only after he got super-popular that they added dual-wielding to all rangers in 2E, to allow for Drizzt clones. This is the entire reason people associate dual wielding with rangers. So what is Drizzt's actually "class"? Is he a fighter with a panther companion and a follower of Mielikki or is he actually a Ranger? Sorry, other than the IE games I never really had any other experience with DnD rule-sets. (Im not sure if R.A. Salvatore actually classified Drizzt as a ranger - I THINK he did, but honestly I cant remember) He's always officially been a ranger - because of that + his popularity, rangers in later editions got stuck with a lot of his baggage.

There basically is no tactical advantage associated with the paladin speed aura. It makes you a little faster when walking around town, wilderness trekking outside of combat, etc.

dat beard

It actually wasn't for him, either. Drizzt could dual wield because drow in 1E AD&D were ambidextrous. It was only after he got super-popular that they added dual-wielding to all rangers in 2E, to allow for Drizzt clones. This is the entire reason people associate dual wielding with rangers.

Emphasis mine. I have to say, this is a very compelling point. I hadn't thought about this, but it's true - right now, with the total absence of utility spells/powers/anything, you end up leveling up your fighting for not using your fighting. Are you sure that it did, overall? I, for one, doubt it. Much of the quest XP was given to each character independently of party size, wasn't it? And yet, in my experience, a BG2 party with 3 or 4 members levelled up much faster than a party with 6 members. It did for a party of 5-6, which was generally what the game was balanced against. Parties of smaller size got ahead of the leveling curve pretty quickly. While I do follow you, I feel compelled to point out (because I have a madness) that "action rpg" means something completely different than what you're referring to.

The second question is 50,000 times more important than the first. Josh, if you're reading this here's my question: Is discovery-xp or any non-quest related xp being considered? This. I'd also like to know about the possibility of Encounter XP. It's clear that PoE (and Sawyer, going by his forum posts) takes a ton of inspiration from tabletop gaming, where kill XP has increasingly become a thing of the past - but XP for winning combat encounters as a whole remains very common in combat-heavy tabletop games, seems to fit with PoE's On/Off combat system, and would reward players for overcoming tactical challenges, rather than caving faces in. The only danger I can see to it would be players kiting an encounter to pick individual opponents in a group off - but (a) I'm not sure how much that really matters, and (b) maybe some limited enemy ability to rebuild forces could counterbalance that.

All grinding is combat, but not all combat is grinding. You mean like how it is an essential part of the reward structure for completing a quest? Because what that tells me is that the game is about completing quests, that completing quests is The Game. As opposed to XP for a variety of things, encouraging me to be interested in a variety of things. Well, it is, but we're still in beta. This has very little to do with that, though. The combat right now is clumsy, but I can at least put up with it on the occasions that it's clearly leading me somewhere. Actual rewards would make it more bearable, though. Oh, and one other thing. If I did, would that be a problem? Would I be worthy of scorn*, because of pleasure derived from an intangible blinker saying, "you did it?" There are countless inherent aspects of the RPG experience one could criticize, reducing the whole thing down to some combination of chess, reading, and pong. Facing challenges that have been set forth by the game, and being rewarded such a way that you are prepared to face new, still greater challenges, is skinner box nonsense. It's also an essential part of why games that have progression are satisfying. Achievements are good for games, in that they encourage people to play. You can be more or less cynical about the way they do it, but at the end of the day, there's nothing wrong with it. And there's absolutely nothing that makes you superior to people who do care about them and do see them as a key motivation. *For the record, I do enjoy getting achievements, especially when getting them was challenging, although I don't feel their absence.

XP is a tool to control power progression of the player. If they can do that without kill XP then there's no reason to complicate matters. The main reason to complicate matters is gameplay: it can either be an unrewarding obstacle that I feel incentivized to avoid (like it is now), or something that I actually want to seek out because it's fun and rewarding and an active part of progression.

Which, at present, is not the case.

They're gone too. Don't you adam? Obsidian is evolving the system by taking things out. Less = More evolved By caricaturing things you disagree with, you do a disservice to your own position. I'mma just leave these here for you, and see myself out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_progress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest-scale_trends_in_evolution

Don't you judge me.

Sentiments like this are why I'm starting to feel that it would be better if there were a Ranger (cast strictly as an archery specialist) and a Beastmaster (pet user at any range). It's obviously not going to happen, but ... eh.

I appreciate the creativity but I doubt cast invisibility on your thief and sending them in a lawnmower pattern over every map is going to feel like a rewarding endeavour. I didn't say it was easy to figure out - just that there's got to be more than there is at present.

Here's the issue, though: for the ranger to be effective as a ranged fighter, it can't use its animal companion. So to enable that, the ranger needs to be effective enough as a ranged fighter that it can contribute to the party without its companion. But that brings us back to the old D&D 3.X druid problem - if the ranger is strong enough on its own, then adding the companion back into the mix makes it too strong. This is not an easy thing to balance, especially not in CRPGs, which lack the abstraction of tabletop games.

I don't ask for a grand ending - just a satisfying one. I want to see how the main cast feels, what their intentions are, where they're going. I want to know, at least in vague terms, what impact the story had on the world it's set in and the people who participated in it. That doesn't mean exclude ambiguity or even cliffhangers, nor does it require every question to be answered. But it does require the game to make me feel comfortable letting go of (at least for a while) all of the things I have come to care about while I played. With a good RPG, I feel connected to and part of the world, and it's dissatisfying to just get a sequel hook, a congratulations for killing the final boss (as if the point of all those hours of play was to gib some dude), and a couple of epilogues telling me what they should probably show. inorite? The interactivity and consequence thing doesn't really so much matter in my book. It's not like I'm against it, mind - I'd just rather have a less interactive, BETTER ending than a very interactive, worse ending. I know a lot of people really care about this, but I'm fine with the ending being limited in scope and type, as long as it's good. Catharsis? Melancholy? Elation? FEELS, man, I want dem feels. Yeah. You kill Sarevok, the game gives you a 20-second cinematic hinting at the larger futility of this adventure arc, and then ... FINAL SAVE derp.

Coming to that conclusion before you even see what the final base game is like seems a little ... spurious.

Right. As it is, the Ranger is less of an expert in ranged combat, and more of a Beastmaster who is forced to use their bow at melee range. I'm fine with having a Beastmaster class, but I'd like the Ranger to actually function like a ranged character.

Unless they were free and limited in number. Or is that unfeasible?

I don't know that the lack of resurrection, in particular, is good or bad. They want to build a world that sort of makes sense, and in fairness, the result is no different than a ton of other games where 0 HP = TKO. This particular thing, at least, is not a big deal (although some of the issues surrounding it are).