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Very Good Ideas. I firmly believe that modding of Dungeon Siege 2 has only scratched the surface for various reasons. There's still enormous potential in modding the game and just look at what KillerGremal has been able to do with extending the flick functions.

I'm not really an advocate for inventory mods and I think they're superfluous in DS2 because of the town portal spell. Besides I've never really found an use for all the money I accumulate anyway once I've recruited all the available characters. The dropped loot is vastly superior to that found in the shops and the enchanting system underwhelming. I would like to see a proper crafting system in Dungeon Siege 2 where useful equipment could be made or enchanted.

I think what Hardless means is some more differences between races rather than 1 or 2 points difference in strength, intelligence or similar to really distinguish the races. As it stands now the race selection is purely cosmetic. Maybe if dwarves had a 10% strength bonus but 10% reduction in intelligence and speed, elves a 10% bonus in speed, intelligence and ranged abilities but 10% reduction in strength, etc. They could also have bonuses specific to their own race, which could be unlocked. Maybe like dryads could make plant like creatures fight for them, dwarves could find valuables randomly hidden in the ground, etc.

The effects in DS2 are nice but a bit limited and hard to extend. DS1 was better in this regard with the wide range of effects for weapons, armor and spells. Just look at how the spell system in DS2 has been reduced to just a few different spells with just different names for the same thing (lesser, normal, greater and master). The addition of curses, buffs and powers was great but I miss the variety of DS1 spells and their effects.

Sadly I'm not working on HD textures for the game, just resampling the existing ones to add enhanced detail and bloom. The game engine will support HD textures but consider that these will be about 20 times bigger than the current textures (4Mb compared to 256 bytes for 1 texture). There's so many textures in the game that I estimate a HD various of DS2 would be about 40GB in size. Plus just because the current game engine can display 1 or 2 HD textures, doesn't mean it could display about 10,000 such HD textures. I suspect memory issues would quickly surface, especially as the game engine is already prone to memory leaks. Plus to take advantage of HD textures, they would need to be redrawn from scratch and many of the textures in the game are quite complex to draw. For instance a common cobblestone path consists of about 12 or so different textures all arranged so they can fit together in different ways to create the path.

There's already grass available in the game but used sparingly in certain areas. Maybe the textures of these could be improved so they were more "life-like" but "putting it into the game" really means that it would have to be added to the maps by hand. This can be done but would be extremely tedious (I know as I have done these sorts of things). It's not simply a matter of "plonking them there", each instance needs to be rotated and quite possibly resized so it looks unique. Otherwise the result appears very artificial.

Backpacks would be a better idea than an inventory resize. As Darkelf said it would take a lot of nifty writing of skrit and components to make it work. But it would be very nice and I would use them in playing the game for sure.

Rather than a total shop rework, I would prefer a more cleverer shop rework like in Morrowind and Oblivion. Where doing tasks or quests for a shopkeeper would unlock certain items or effect their cost. This could also tie in with racial advantages mentioned earlier. Humans for instance could have a merchant skill than made shop's cost cheaper or made available rare items.

I've already ported the gargoyle and skeleton as heroes in DS2. The problem is that they lack the animations for dual wielding and throwing weapons. Also Snowfox's Goblin and Ghastley's Naja. Otherwise they work well. Witness's dark/light elves and Strider's Orc on the other hand work perfectly as they use farmgirl's animations from DS1 and can use the human female's animations from DS2.

If somebody was willing to make throwing and dual wielding animations for the Gargoyle, Skeleton, Goblin and Naja, then they could be released as playable heroes in DS2.

I think the work you've done with the Ancient Gifts mod was wonderful so a skill table for a Nature/Ranged character would be fantastic. Especially as 99% of rpgs have rangers very closely associated with nature. You need some incentive to forgo the attractions of specializing in one skill if you're going to dual class.

Something that would be nice is multiple hit weapons as seen in theresnothinglft's Sot3k weapon packs. I was able to port the weapons to DS2 but sadly not the multiple hit bonuses from weapons like polearms.

Further modding ideas are extending the Inn's character limits (only about 40 characters can be stored there?) and something that Darkelf suggested in another thread, a Pet Inn where pets could be stored (as if they're stored in the Inn they go towards the character limits).