Larger party limit and Improved Map UI

asterlacnala

Hello! I love what Beamdog has been doing with the IE games, but had a few requests. (I'm sorry I won't get to play IWD2EE, I prefer 3rd edition to 2nd!)

I did have a few feature requests, though, that would drastically improve my experience and I think would improve that of others.

First, would be nice if, on BG:EE there was a way to see travel times on the World Map. I recently gave the EET a try (the 2.5 update broke it) and the map included with that has travel times to each section, not just major settlements. This was great for a roleplayer like me - I try to only sleep at night, so arriving at a map at 8am after a 24 hour journey means some way or another I have to break versimilitude. (Seriously, I run Skyrim with food/water/sleep requirement mods, economy nerfing mods, and even learning spells requires hours of study. If I could get all that in BG I would...)

Second, it always annoys me that if I have 6 people and pick up someone new, I immediately had to kick someone from my party. Like, "Sorry, Neera, I want you along, but Branwen here needs revenge on Tranzig. I'll find you at the Friendly Arm Inn after we kill him and I give her the boot." I realize there was a time crunch before launch and the problem goes deep into the engine and all the scripts, but GemRB has included it in their engine now and it is apparently largely functional. Is this something that could eventually be worked on as part of an engine update? (Honestly, I want that more than a "Loot All" button.)

Thanks for the awesome game!

Keneth

Although parties with more than 6 members are feasible from a technical standpoint, allowing that by default would wreak havoc on game balance, even more than they've already done. I wouldn't mind this being externalized for modders to play with, but several parts of the GUI would likely need to be remade to support it properly.

As for travel times, BG:EE already shows them, as it always has, although it looks as though they're only shown for named areas now. It would be an easy enough thing to mod (adding names to all areas), though I agree that it would be better for the devs to address this.

ThacoBell

@Keneth Screw game balance, I want moar npcs. People won't be forced to use any more NPCs. 4 person runs are already very popular, as are solo runs. Its not like upping the limit would change that.

Keneth

Even with a 20 year old game, no serious developer can afford to say "screw game balance". The vanilla game has to be somewhat balanced and challenging for the average player. That's why we have mods that cater to our extraordinary needs. And like I said, I'm always up for having more parts of the engine externalized so that we can mod them more easily.

ThacoBell

Keneth said:

Even with a 20 year old game, no serious developer can afford to say "screw game balance". The vanilla game has to be somewhat balanced and challenging for the average player. That's why we have mods that cater to our extraordinary needs. And like I said, I'm always up for having more parts of the engine externalized so that we can mod them more easily.

You can seriously look at a fighter and a wizard, and tell me that the game is balanced?

asterlacnala

Even if you want to keep the limit at 6 by default, you could make an option in the settings to allow people to change it; this means it is balanced by default but people who want to increase it can still choose to do so.

sarevok57

unfortunately i think it is nay impossible to increase the part limit above six, from what i heard it is a hardcoded feature and it has been a nightmare to implement for modders ( although i believe i recall someone was able to do it and they had a mammoth party of characters but it was causing some severe game bugs)

but with your first point of travel times between areas this was actually originally implemented in previous versions, and if i recall i remember putting this in the feature request thingy for the 2.5 update, and their excuse was for taking it out because it was interfering with ipad users or some such? im a little fuzzy on the details but basically that is the reason why its not in the game anymore, i also recall talking to the feature request person for an alternative for this, but again this was sometime last year and i dont remember if we figured something out or not

so we can hope perhaps that when BG/BG2 is out of beta we can have our travel between areas time back, because that is one feature that i missed

asterlacnala

Given that Beamdog has the source for the engine and can legally modify it, the hardcoded stuff is exactly what we should be requesting from them; stuff that isn't hardcoded could be done by modders. Beamdog is really the only group in a position to implement changes that require engine modifications. (Well, or GemRB, if they ever decide to make their engine compatible with EE resources.)

My understanding was that the hardcoded part was less a factor as going through and changing a vast array of scripts that explicitly called on Player1-6, and they simply didn't have time to implement all those changes before release. However, now that the game is past release and getting a functional product out the door is done, it seems to me that there should now be room to go back and implement things that were just not feasible before.

As an example: just on this forum the first pinned thread of "Things that can't be done" include time constraints as a limitation but explicitly links to a thread for post-release DLC requests. One of the things done was introduce a shaman that has class features that had to be added to the engine - wasn't originally hardcoded.