Pillars of Eternity has lots of abilities, but will we truly need to use them?

[Night Stalker]

What I'm kind of worried about here is that Josh is designing a game with all of these active abilities for non-spellcasting classes, and when the game gets to beta-testing there'll be lots of complaints about all the "ability spam" in the game and how it's un-Infinity Engine-like (which is true!). Following that, those abilities will be made optional, basically existing in the game only for people who want to click an awesome button and see their characters do a cool animation once in a while.

 

Yeah, that's an extreme scenario, but I just don't know what Josh's intentions are here. On the one hand, he says that he's designing Fighters for "mostly passive use" but on the other hand, he IS giving them all these abilities, so, are they really necessary or are they just for show? I just don't know.

 

 

Personally I think you are reaching here. I cannot speak for anyone else, but I am personally delighted that non-spellcasters will have other things to do than auto attacking. Since most of the abilities are limited by encounter/day, and so will have to be rationed - so no I think it will devolve to "ability spam".

[FlintlockJazz]

From what I have heard as a demented imp on these forums, I recall reading somewhere that you can build most classes as either active use or passive use characters.  What I mean is that if you don't want to really focus on controlling the fighter in your party then as he levels up you pick the abilities that require little interaction from you, I'm guessing things like passive damage or armour boosts and the like, allowing you to focus instead on characters that you do want to focus on more, by taking more active use abilities for those characters, such as spamable abilities.  And you can mix and match on a character, so if you find yourself starting to get overwhelmed by the options you already have you can mix in some passive abilities for active use characters and stay at the level of interaction you find you can handle for that character.

 

This was stuff I read on these forums anyway, will have a look at the updates as I'm sure there was stuff on this in there and will link it if I find it.  If I'm right about this, then people complaining about too many abilities in testing will just get told to not swamp themselves with active abilities if they can't handle it.

[FlintlockJazz]

Aha, found a mention of it in update 50!

 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/456460

 

 

 

Traditional classes vary in how high- or low-maintenance they are based on their traditional counterparts.  E.g. fighters are generally lower maintenance than wizards.  However, the advancement system allows players to bend those roles, making higher-maintenance, active-use fighters or more passive wizards (for example).  Class balance is important to us, but we also want playing each class to feel distinctive and complementary to other classes.

 

I'm sure there was a better mention of it somewhere, that specifically mentioned making characters passive use and active use dependent on how much time you want to invest controlling them but there's over 70 updates and I'm but one imp, so it's taking time to find it!!

[anameforobsidian]

I would think that they would just work on AI rather than change the whole system, or maybe have an AI sheet with a bunch of options like DA.  It's not a perfect solution, but it does make it easier for those overwhelmed.

 

None of this is answering the real question that needs to be asked:  "will there be goodberries?"

[Tamerlane]

None of this is answering the real question that needs to be asked:  "will there be goodberries?"

You are a monster.

[Messier-31]

In anything but super-casual ****wit mode, yes you will.

 

Believe me that there are some abilities in games that I've never used despite a high difficulty.

 

Never used otherwise to this just one time, at bandit camp, simply out of curiosity, that is.

Edited January 31, 2014 by Messier-31

[Oneiromancer]

I hope PoE will have a lot of auto-attacks and modal abilities and very few active abilities, most of them being extremely impactful on the course of the battle but with long cooldowns (once/twice per encounter, once/twice per day for example).

 

While playing Dragon Age: Origins I found myself enjoying using the 2 handed warrior but I also rapidly found how dependant it was on spamming active abilities to keep up with other classes damage and how quickly going through the motions of spamming those abilities every single fight became extremely boring. I couldn't image a full party of four 2 handed weapons guys and I think having a party of 6 (?) skilspamming heroes could become pretty fast a micromanaging hell of spacebar spamming, queing up your "dps/actions rotation" to get the most out of your characters.

 

Or eventually you could also have the same problem a lot of MMOs have: having a preposterous number of skills of which a small number is used in a rotation while 9/10 are extremely situational to the point you even wonder if they are worth a keybind.

 

tl;dr

 

Few active abilties with more impact > a lot of active abilities with minor impact

This imo would resolve also the problem the OP raised as less, more impactful active skills also mean more oppurtinity to make them very distinct and useful.

[Nyhilla]

When thinking about the usefullness of the differents skills provided by the games, I always wondered why traps ever existed to begin with. I know that people talk about them, but I don't know anyone who really used them, if it was not for THIS particular fight or THIS one. Generally, traps are just leveled by players because it is also often linked to the disarm traps ability.

 

I know that this is not really relevant about this topic (or maybe it is), but if we are talking about the utility off skills in games, then, maybe some one can give me an answer.

 

Some people use them because of a roleplaying playtrhough, other just use them for one fight in the entire game because he only have that charachter available and he must use them, other don't use them at all, and some don't even know about their existence at all.

 

So, what's the point ? What's the hidden reason behind a skill, that can be sweet to the eyes, but with no real purpose ?

 

I see that my neighbor Oneiromancer was talking about Dragon Age Origins, and the two handed warrior, spamming his skills to be onward with the others characters. I think he has a point.

 

Having few abilities, be sure that those abilities are all usefull, everytime, or nearly, and not just totally useless given they are here for one or two encounter in the game and that most player just forgot about them when the time comes to use them.

 

And he's right to about Mmo, plenty of skills, 5 skills on let's say 20, who really have a purpose, and that are used very often, to not say always, and the 15 others are juste here because .. because and there is no real reason hiden behind their whole existence.

I remember playing wow as a rogue in Burning Crusade expension, while where in PvE at Black Temple, the major part of the damage done by the rogue was only due to the auto attacks + poisons, and that, even with 20 skills, only 4 of them + 2 x 1 min CD skills were usefull.

 

The point is that, will we go for and bunch of useless skills/abilities, or will we have a good portion of "auto attacks", combined with skills that cost enough to not be spammed and used wisely. Or something else.

[Pipyui]

I hope PoE will have a lot of auto-attacks and modal abilities and very few active abilities, most of them being extremely impactful on the course of the battle but with long cooldowns (once/twice per encounter, once/twice per day for example).

 

While playing Dragon Age: Origins I found myself enjoying using the 2 handed warrior but I also rapidly found how dependant it was on spamming active abilities to keep up with other classes damage and how quickly going through the motions of spamming those abilities every single fight became extremely boring. I couldn't image a full party of four 2 handed weapons guys and I think having a party of 6 (?) skilspamming heroes could become pretty fast a micromanaging hell of spacebar spamming, queing up your "dps/actions rotation" to get the most out of your characters.

 

Or eventually you could also have the same problem a lot of MMOs have: having a preposterous number of skills of which a small number is used in a rotation while 9/10 are extremely situational to the point you even wonder if they are worth a keybind.

 

Activated abilities in those games weren't a resource though as they will be in PoE.  In DAO and MMOs you just spam your most useful abilities because it costs you nothing, zippo, nada - and you can't count the cooldown to recast as a cost.  So your only useful skills were your most damaging, and then those you used to fill in the cooldown gaps, resulting in the ability spamming everyone so enjoys.

 

As many of the neater abilities will likely be per-rest resources, and all others will be per-encounter, I don't think there is much to fear in terms of spamming.  And it doesn't sound like PoE's classes will have so many abilites that you can entirely discount using some available to you once you've depleted (or are trying to ration) others (holy run-on sentence).  You don't have to regularly use all abilities available to you, I'd just be disappointed if some proved to be effectively useless in most practical scenarios.

 

I'm quite pleased with what I've seen thus far - enough abilities to provide variety in combat role and class build, but not so many as to produce ... "ability inflation" as it were.

Edited February 2, 2014 by Pipyui

[Bryy]

Boatloads of skills are nice. On paper.

 

Very hard to execute, though.

[Metabot]

While I like to have a multitude of spells and abilities in games. There were a lot of spells in the IE games that were totally useless. Infravision comes to mind. I can't think of a single use for it. Carrion Summons was also terrible when other summons at that level were far better.

 

That's the impression I got from Infinitron's post. There was useless stuff in the IE games and you didn't need it. Because it was either not needed (Infravision) or there was better stuff (eg. spells, abilities) that steered you away from that useless stuff. Given the choice of level 6 spells for your Mage - Invisible Stalker, Summon Nishruu, Conjure Air/Earth/Fire Elementals, Wyvern Call and Carrion Summons, you would never memorise and cast Carrion Summons.

 

Aren't all of those from D&D? Who cares if YOU didn't use them, someone might. Let's just have a few skills because not everyone will use all of them all of the time.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Aren't all of those from D&D? Who cares if YOU didn't use them, someone might. Let's just have a few skills because not everyone will use all of them all of the time.

 

 

You're a bit late to the party? What I originally wrote is not what Infinitron's original post or this thread is about.

[J.E. Sawyer]

I can say that class abilities are designed to be a) useful in general and b) varied in tactical propriety/efficiency.  The characters' class abilities are one big part of the party's capabilities.  In order for them to be useful, they need to be demanded (one way or another) by the enemies' capabilities.  I've tried to make a variety of counters available to different classes, and those counters can range from the broadly useful (low power general defensive increases) to more specific (paladins' ability to temporarily suspend negative status effects of all sorts) to powerful and narrowly-applied (e.g. priests' Prayer Against Fear, Prayer Against Infirmity, Prayer Against Restraint, etc.).

 

You are pretty unlikely to use all of your available abilities in any given fight, but over time you should feel like they all get good use in different circumstances.

 

Yeah, that's an extreme scenario, but I just don't know what Josh's intentions are here. On the one hand, he says that he's designing Fighters for "mostly passive use" but on the other hand, he IS giving them all these abilities, so, are they really necessary or are they just for show? I just don't know.

 

Fighters do have a lot of abilities (as many as other non-spellcaster classes), but the majority of them are passive or modal.  Abilities like Constant Recovery, Confident Aim, and Critical Defense are passive, but are important for how fighters work.  Players may be less aware of how important those elements are since they aren't directly selecting and using them in combat, but they are still doing the fighter a lot of good.  On the other hand, it is important to use a fighters' active and modal abilities shrewdly.  Using Defender mode in a situation where fighters are dealing with a small number of enemies is unnecessarily hampering their attack rate.  Using Knock Down on an enemy when the fighter is the only one who benefits from it is usually inefficient.  And using it on a target with a relatively high Fortitude defense is statistically a bad idea unless the target's Deflection is equally out of range.

[Enoch]

I'm far from a game design expert, but my suspicion is that, while balance and utility do present problems in putting together a game with lots of character abilities, the greater difficulty that this ability-profusion creates is in writing an enemy/ally AI to use and react to them.

[J.E. Sawyer]

Writing enemy AI to use abilities is somewhat involved but not crazy.  It's more important for enemies to use their abilities reliably and to pose a potent offensive threat than it is for them to be incredibly flexible on defense.  Ultimately, it's the player's job to be mentally flexible because that's "the fun".

[Clean&Clear]

I wonder if Normal difficulty for this game will have legitimate challenge or if it will be like most other games: almost no challenge at all.

I know it's not the original topic but I have the same concern. In modern games the "normal" difficulty is often almost an insult to a decent player, because the game is simply no challenge at all on this difficulty. In old IE games, even the normal difficulty provided a decent challenge for the first few playthroughs. I think the level of difficulty in PoE should be roughly the same. If someone feels it's too hard for him, he can always go for easy difficulty, but it would be a shame if fans of old IE games (which i guess are most of the backers) would be forced to play on hard even on the first playthrough because otherwise the game would not provide enough challenge. And on top of that, I think the nature of the game itself (lot of dialogue options, complex world and possibilities, character development etc.) aims more on "classic" players who like to be challanged, so there's no real reason for the game normal difficulty to be set for casual players.

[Sir Chaox]

If someone feels it's too hard for him, he can always go for easy difficulty, but it would be a shame if fans of old IE games (which i guess are most of the backers) would be forced to play on hard even on the first playthrough because otherwise the game would not provide enough challenge.

 

Just to be safe, I'll probably be playing on Hard anyways. I'd rather have a slightly (or even significantly) painful playthrough, difficulty-wise, than a cakewalk.

[Clean&Clear]

 

If someone feels it's too hard for him, he can always go for easy difficulty, but it would be a shame if fans of old IE games (which i guess are most of the backers) would be forced to play on hard even on the first playthrough because otherwise the game would not provide enough challenge.

 

Just to be safe, I'll probably be playing on Hard anyways. I'd rather have a slightly (or even significantly) painful playthrough, difficulty-wise, than a cakewalk.

 

Well yeah, I just had in mind the situation when normal would be too easy to even considerate playing it, but I trust the devs that my fears are exaggerated.

Edited February 4, 2014 by Clean&Clear

[J.E. Sawyer]

 

 

 

Our normal difficulty will not be tuned for casual players at all.  It will not be as hard as IWD2 but should be in the IWD/BG2 range.  Bumping it to Hard should put you into IWD2+ territory.

[Living One]

^However it's a bit hard to compare the difficulty of the IE games,considering how much a player could rest-abuse constantly or not.How many times(more or less) per dungeon-floor would you have to rest in those games to have a difficulty similar to PoE's?

[J.E. Sawyer]

The difficulty level issue is going to be less about how you manage your resources fight-to-fight and more about figuring out how to get through fights, period.  Some of the optional fights we have in right now can only be beaten by a few people on the team, and that's with a mostly-fresh party.

[Clean&Clear]

Thanks for the answers, sounds great!

[ItinerantNomad]

The difficulty level issue is going to be less about how you manage your resources fight-to-fight and more about figuring out how to get through fights, period.  Some of the optional fights we have in right now can only be beaten by a few people on the team, and that's with a mostly-fresh party.

 

did you mean can only beaten by a few people on the development team? i was a little unclear.

[Sherr]

The difficulty level issue is going to be less about how you manage your resources fight-to-fight and more about figuring out how to get through fights, period.  Some of the optional fights we have in right now can only be beaten by a few people on the team, and that's with a mostly-fresh party.

 

our problem is - will u save this level of challenge in release version? Because we all heard about different mods thats up game difficulty but thats not it. Many developers think of their gamers as pretty low skill players, so their games usually is park walk, especially close to the end.

[Lephys]

did you mean can only beaten by a few people on the development team? i was a little unclear.

I'm 99.9% certain that's what he means. The only other thing I can think of it meaning is "by certain people in the party," which makes very little sense, since you'd think the super-tough fights would require the most party cooperation, rather than being defeatable by just certain people within your party, alone.