Gennadios

Same. I can't re-enter the castle from any entrance after leaving the big double doors in the courtyard. Thankfully I can world map out and the rest of the game works, but all castle entrances are unusable.

NO! I like turn based systems, but I hate hybrid combat with a passion. The best one I've seen was X-Com: Apocalypse, and even then it was just "good enough." If the devs already committed to a real-time system with tactical pause, I'd rather they put all their effort into it.

^Therein lies the problem. The developers were so focused on the "story" aspect of the game that they forgot to add some interactivity. It definitely didn't help that the storyline itself was so offensive and so lacking in sympathetic characters that it didn't really have all that many positive qualities left to lean on. Where the recent BioWare games fail is that they put too much stock in cinematic experiences and full voice overs. A team that doesn't commit to having every single line of dialog voice acted can do a whole lot more. Good writers are cheaper and produce alot more lines than good voice actors. I see no issue with just putting letters/treasure maps on every single main quest critical NPC so that if the player feels the need to kill them for whatever reason, there will always be a clue as to the next destination on the body.

I beg to differ. A berserker pounding a squaddie into the pavement or any Chrissalid attack is a save-or-die spell right there, a touch spell. About the only thing you can do is hope against hope that your squaddie will go into trauma mode instead of outright dying. In impossible Ironman there is literally no way to survive their melee without both Carapace and Titan armor equipped, and the squaddie being an assault with the resist criticals perk, because at that range every attack is a critical. The thing about Ironman modes or higher difficulties of any kind is that they drag out all of a game's balance and cheap enemy issues squirming out into the light for all to see. If the game isn't tightly balanced in such a way that the player always felt in control and could identify what went wrong specifically, it just makes the developers look bad.

Out of curiosity, have you played Dragon Age: Origins? I have a hard time believing any player familiar with DA would choose NWN2 as the worst example for over-padded death march quest chains. OT: I don't agree with the thesis of the OP QFG had advancement by skill use mechanics and the combat mechanics were action, not roll based. A player with good reflexes could literally take on hordes of goblins without taking damage. The stamina/rest mechanics were put in place to limit players on how many mobs they could fight in any given day, not to prevent rest scumming.

Depends on how it's done, any of those options is viable. I agree with the scale encounters, not mobs thread, however. I would rather not see bandits spawning with +3 vorpal weaponry, but after a certain point bandits and most wildlife should know enough to stay away from the party and leave them the targets of more specialized, better trained assassins and mercenaries instead of just way over-equipped bandits. If story encounters are scaled, I'd prefer they kept the power level of the bosses and named NPCs constant and just throw in more/better trash mobs as a scaling mechanic.

I agree with all the pros, can't give preference to any one. My only issue was the combat system and the jagged, stilted movement and animation. In this case won't be a problem as the maps will be pre-rendered instead of tile based. Also, for the good of all that is holy, no real-time/turn based hybrid mechanics. Stick to one system and make it good. Only game where I tolerated it was X-Com: Apocalypse, and even that may have just been the rose-tinted glasses.

My first response was "This is NOT a MMO!" I suppose having instead of indivually looting all one loot and you select which PC's to get what (or you just keep it on the ground if it's junk) would be nice though... I wasn't really thinking greed/need rolls for every individual item, the only game I can think of to describe what I'm thinking is Hinterlands from Tilted Mill, where you can put unused items into a community chests and individual townsfolk claim it based on their skills and professions. Except every item that drops in an encounter gets put into a pool and you have to compete with other NPCs for them through some kind of bartering/favor sharing means at the end of it.

A loot sharing/claiming interface would be dandy. At the end of every encounter a window pops up with all dropped items, NPCs lay claim on the one they want, and if the player would really rather have it they need to barter away unclaimed items of greater value to try and get it for themselves. Kind of like drafting players in fantasy football. EDIT: OOh, and a charisma modifier to make attaining the items you want easier, to give that trash stat some regular purpose.

Potions in Skyrim suck due to power creep. By level 20, it takes 10 of those minor healing potions to refill you from critical health, and the lower level poisons just aren't useful enough to even make a dent in higher level enemies to be viable. I only found them useful in the 2E games because level scaling was alot more subtle. Potions of heroism were game changers at the lower levels, but still helped at max. To make potions less of a waste, I'd like the following tier calculation: {Base stat % + number based on tier of the potion} On healing potions for example, the + small number will make minor healing potions fully viable to lower levels, but the 30-50% base health increase will still keep them marginally useful at higher levels to top a character off during a lull in the fighting even if the base number of healing is too low to bother with. Also, power progression will need to be kept in check, preferebly at 2E levels. This godawful fixation on 60 levels and massive stat number growth popularized by JRPGs and MMOs has to go.

I've stopped following P&P after 3E, so I have no clue what they're doing now, I have my ideas but I just don't know if it's done yet. People mention front-loading the first class and having different progressions for the second, and I like that idea. Dual-classing may be better if it mostly adds flavor to the primary Examples I'm thinking: Barbarian/Warrior dualing into Mage/Druid-> wider range of Rage skills (blood rage, animal rage, etc)/Self-targeted regen, healing, and defense spells such as bark skin, enchants that allow dispel on melee or ranged attack, ignore armor bonus vorpal style enchants, etc Rogue into Mage -> Invisibility/mirror image/haste Monk into Mage -> all thouse wonderful touch skills Actually, to back up a bit, I realize that this can simply be accomplished by giving different spells different armor and held weapon allowances, having passive offensive spells castable with armor up to plate and while holding a greatsword/sword & shield/bow, passive defense castable with armor up to hide and having the shield hand free/crossbow, and the OP ranged death skills on the usual unarmored archetype and only with weapons that can be comfortably held in one hand.

"It does not matter to M'aiq how strong or smart one is. It only matters what one can do." I hope for a more Fallout inspired stat system than a D&D style one. D&D only really worked with random stat rolls which simply don't work in a crpg, when the point-buy system was introduced, min/maxing made it pretty easy to game. You could create a character archetype and decide on any long term class/dual class progress and kind of work from there. Individual stats had a direct class correlation and it was just useless to dump certain stat points into some classes. Fallout made each stat useful enough for any archetype, but it also wasn't a class-based game, so I don't really know how to reconcile the two. All I can think of is having skill/spell trees for every class that uses various secondary stats, meaning that neglecting secondary stats can lock classes out of some upgrade paths.

Hello, first time poster, I read the last batch of PE project updates and IWD II was mentioned quite a bit in them, for whatever reason I'd like to complain about my biggest disappointment in that game. It's pretty minor but the fact that I still remember it after all these years is kind of telling. In one of the extremely early combats the party takes down a Warg and gets a collar, memory tells me it was called the Flea ridden collar, but I can't find the item in the database on GameBanshee. Anyway, the item allowed you to turn your hands into claws for a small amount of damage that was still superior to that of a level 1 monk and 3-4 attacks per round as I recall. From a purely roleplaying perspective, the item was amazing, nothing beats a Wolverine monk that could turn his hands into beastial claws. The problem is, the item was a one-off enchantment, and the damage and number of attacks was quickly surpassed by my monk as he leveled up. I'd blame the game being saddled with the D&D ruleset, and as I recall one of the Obsidian people did mention semi-recently that using pen and paper rulesets for PC games has become more of a hinderance. So anyway, I love the idea of these kinds of flavor items, but they should be used to augment existing stats and not overwrite them completely, which would serve to give them more longevity, I would have loved to have used that collar on my monk all the way through to the endgame.