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At the very least, it's a much worse crime against the very foundations of the genre as it is to take stats away from the implementation of physical skills (i.e. combat) - as most mainstream RPGs tend to do these days - than it is to rely on the player's own intelligence to get him or her through important dialogue scenes etc.

Well that's most likely true.

But in KotC 2:
1) these skills won't be very important and
2) a character focusing on them wouldn't be as good in combat as the others.

See, if there's no non-combat gameplay then non-combat skills won't be missed much. That's the reason the missing skills don't matter much in KotC.
Otoh non-combat gameplay can be interesting. Example from Drakensang TRoT: Potions. You won't find many of those, actually you'll find very few, and if you'd buy them... they are very expensive. But there is a wilderness skill (to find the ingredients) and a plant harvesting skill plus an alchemy skill to brew potions. So you can use non-combat skills to gain an advantage in combat (having potions) or to make some easy coins (you won't be spammed with gold, and saving dukats so that you can afford this dwarven 2handed hammer might take quite some time). Also the crafting skills were really useful, because you had hardly any loot (at least not weapons) from enemies, so if you wanted good weapons asap, you needed someone with smithing and bowcraft etc.

Generally I liked the game (Drakensang TRoT) better than the first one, although walking speed was still too slow (but can be set manually by manipulating the savegames , which are sqlite dbs actually which strikes me as quite an efficient method for savegames, quick and reliable). Another improvement the game could very much use would be a possibility to zoom out into a fixed iso view a la Dragon Age (but unlike DA zoomed out enough to see what's going on).

On an unrelated note: read here what BlueSalamander and other devs picked as their favorite RPG of the past decade.

Brothersoft has listed KotC on its website and given it an Editor's Pick award.
The link is http://games.brothersoft.com/knights-of-the-chalice.html.

Somehow I missed this when it came up in February: RPGWatch gave third place to Knights of the Chalice in its Game of the Year Awards 2009 for Best RPG.

The link is http://www.rpgwatch.com/show/article?ar ... ref=2&id=1. Dragon Age: Origins was given the first place, followed by Risen in second place and KotC third.

Users voted 47.5% in favour of Dragon Age: Origins, 16.4% in favour of Risen, 8.8% in favour of KotC, 5.6% in favour of Drakensang, 5% for A Farewell to Dragons, 3.5% for King's Bounty Armored Princess, 3.1% for Divinity 2 Ego Draconis, 3% for Torchlight, 2.4% for Neverwinter Nights 2 Mysteries of Westgate and 1.8% for Avernum 6.

Bah! And you did not even have a main stream gaming media cheerleading you, or the huge marketing machine of a publisher like EA.

KotC for game of the year, hands down.

By the way, I'm sure you've seen the direction DA2 is going in. Was going to rant about it in the other forum section, but why bother.

We need KotC2 more than ever! Party-based tactical combat, yes!

Harumph!

I'm sure you've seen the direction DA2 is going in

Yeah, they are going to remove the action queue to make combat actions more immediate, and the player character will have a pre-defined name and history.

We need KotC2 more than ever! Party-based tactical combat, yes!

I'm working on it, but it will take a long time, it's a big challenge.

RPGCodex humbly decided to review KoTC.

I'm working on it, but it will take a long time, it's a big challenge.

In the meantime, how about making an expansion for KotC1?

RPGCodex humbly decided to review KoTC.

Great, it's a very in-depth review, thank you for the link!

how about making an expansion for KotC1?

You mean a new adventure from level 1 to 20, with a bunch of new monsters? It's not a bad idea, but it would also take a great deal of time and I wouldn't be able to work on KotC 2 at the same time. Better stay focused.

I still think going the Vogel-way would serve you better. Release games regularly once or twice a year, and improve the engine/art assets step by step. It's more important to stay in people's minds thru regular releases than to strive for something that will take years and might or might not come to fruition. Plus, you will make money as you go.
Another idea, since they make this open source, could be to use the ToEE recreation project as a base to save time and go from there.

Here's a PC World review: http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,201637/description.html

KotC is also mentioned by PC World there (together with Eschalon 2 and Avadon Black Fortress):
http://www.pcworld.com/article/240863/classic_games_in_the_making_oldschool_rpgs_are_new_again.html