Zwiebelchen

We have a bunch of people saying "yeah, AoE increase doesn't really seem that valuable", mostly because the marginal increase can be a liability. Allowing you to scale it down solves the liability problem, but also means that in those circumstances, you get literally no benefit from it at all. I still really don't get why this is such a spot of resistance when making the margins safe doesn't remove friendly fire, it makes INT valuable all the time instead of sometimes being a liability, and it doesn't require adding a UI layer on top of the system just to regulate AoE sizes. The problem with having a two-layer circle with friendly fire on the inside and non-friendly-fire on the outside is that it is easily exploitable to totally remove friendly-fire completely, which is a major balancing issue, as it removes the risk-vs-reward from AoE spells: Imagine a situation where your frontline fighter is surrounded by a pack of enemies (which happens frequently). In the IE games, you had two options now: 1) you could throw a fireball directly on top of your frontline fighter, damaging all of the enemies, but hitting your fighter aswell (high risk vs. high reward) 2) you could throw a fireball at the far distance behind the frontline fighter, effectively only damaging enemies on this side of the character, but keeping your fighter safe. (low risk vs. low reward) This is a strategic decision that is heavily dependant on your playstyle. It also feels very balanced, as (with fireball being a very powerful spell) neither of the two choices is clearly the "better" or even "optimal" solution. In both situations, you can make use of your fireball spell, but it isn't a no-brainer choice and requires thinking ahead. Now, let's view the same situation with both scaling AoE and two-radius AoE: Scalable AoE: You still have the same two choices as in the IE games and need to decide strategically. However, the increased AoE size of the fireball still has the strategical advantage of being allowed to hit more enemies aswell. Two radius AoE: As the outer radius of your fireball has friendly fire disabled, you can always manage to throw in a fireball in a way that it damages all enemies surrounding your frontline fighter without damaging him. The two possible tactical options (sacrifice life of my fighter for massive AoE damage or do much less damage and keep my fighter up?) disappear completely, as now, there is a clear "best case" scenario that is low risk vs. high reward. In conclusion, scaling AoE via mousewheel is not only better from an RP perspective (and imho more intuitive), but also keeps an important balancing aspect of AoE damage spells intact: that I need to decide if its worth the risk of hitting a player character. A two-radius AoE removes that risk completely, sacrificing tactical fidelity in the game for a clear best-choice-scenario. Remember that flexibility is always a pro, especially in a game that has an ironman mode. Just because an adjustable AoE size might not be useful in 100% of the cases, it does not mean that the opportunity to scale freely is worthless in those situations. Flexibility opens up tactical opportunities. Wether you take advantage of them or not doesn't matter. Just having those options is worth it. A swiss army knife comes with all kind of tools you may or may not use at all. You might end up only using the knife most of the time. But eventually, you will come into a situation where you need the corkscrew. And then you are extremely happy that you have it.

No ragdoll physics? That means a lot less hilarious videos on youtube of bombing corpsepiles.

I think having stamina and health as resources the way they are would be okay - if we get a way to heal health damage or prevent excessive health damage, like the bandage mechanic on resting I suggested. Combine that with a rule that makes health drop to 1 as soon as the character falls in battle and reduce the rate at which health damage is dealt to the character and the system would probably work exactly like it was intended in the first place: A resource based health system that allows mistakes in battles (characters can go unconscious) without trivializing health (auto regen after combat like in Dragon Age) and allowing permanent character death. Jagged Alliance 2 also had a very interesting health mechanic that is very similar to how it works in PoE, just with a few perks like stamina and health combined in one bar: - Characters have an ordinary health bar - taking damage causes the bar to shrink (yellow indicates health lost) and causes stats to drop at the same time - using bandages and medikits turned the yellow parts of the health bar into orange, indicating that damage has been bandaged; stat losses get recovered (partly, but that could and should be simplified) - any further damage subtracts only from the red parts of the bar, causing the same stamina/stat drop as if the character had health equal to the amount of current health + bandaged health - if there is only very few "true red" health left, the character goes unconscious and will die if not treated (losing the remaining health over time) - using a medikit now, again, heals all yellow parts of the health and turns them orange, "stabilizing" the character, so that it doesn't lose health anymore - orange health can be turned into red health again by waiting several ingame hours/days (there was a fast-forward function in that game) or bringing the character to the hospital - as the healing took from some hours up to an entire week depending on the damage, there is no "group resting", but you actually have to leave that character behind until it is healed enough to fight again. The last two points wouldn't make sense for PoE, obviously, as the reason they worked so well in JA2 was, that the entire game was heavily time-based and you couldn't just fast-forward the time too much to wait for all the wounds to be healed, or you'd have lost all your towns by then.

Signed. Having both health and stamina as resources is a good idea and I see why they added it (make death irreversible for lore and narrative reasons, but allow players to make mistakes in combat that cause a character to drop), but the system itself is broken in that it punishes the player for playing strategical. Something has to be changed about it, in the way it is implemented currently, it's just not fun.

In resource-based healing mechanics, like it was in the IE games (healing spells healing a set amount of points and with limited use per day), this problem wasn't existing, because the game didn't care about who you put your heals onto. You could burn all your heals on one character or you could spread them out evenly, depending on who took damage over the last battles. This means that only the amount of total party damage mattered in terms of health resources. Your resources allowed you to accumulate up to X amount of total party damage before you had to rest. In PoE, the design is totally reversed: only individual character damage matters. The game doesn't differentiate if only one character is wounded or all. Rest and all characters get topped. But this also completely destroys tanking-based combat mechanics. The idea behind tank-based combat is, that one character soaks up all party damage. Mostly a character with high armor rating and health. As the amount of health resources to draw from are almost evenly spread out over all character and can not be transferred or focused (like it would with a healing mechanic), you are often forced to rest just because the game decided you've fought enough battles, no matter how easy they were. Or you just move on and let weaker characters soak up damage until all characters are heavily damaged before doing the ultimate rest. Imho, this is a total immersion breaker. When thinking about this, there's actually another way to fix this issue: Limited health recovery on rests. Let's say that when resting, you are allowed to use a limited amount of healing tokens (depending on the inn quality and the quality of the camping supplies). Each token (let's just call them bandages) heals X health. You can distribute those bandages freely between all characters, depending on who took the most damage or who is most critical for your further gameplay. So if, for example, your tank and your mage took severe damage during the last battle, but you only have resting supplies to heal one character back to full, obviously, you can use your supplies on the tank and leave the mage wounded and go on adventuring with that penalty. So what would a change like this do? 1) A resource-based healing mechanic on rests allows you to play more tactically and makes resting less "overpowered". 2) It makes the "meatshield" tactics more viable, while still allowing for parties without a healer to succeed in the game 3) It removes the incentive for players to "tactically sacrifice" the health of other characters in order to prevent resting 4) It allows for some interesting balancing opportunities, like having different tiers of camping supplies, for example a camping supply item that only recovers spells used, but doesn't award any healing (and takes less ingame-time for resting) With the current mechanics, there is a clear advantage in stacking tanks in heavy armor. A party that consists of mostly fighters will be able to adventure much longer before having to rest than a party that only has one tank (because there's more than one character that can soak up individual damage in a rotation, not just one, but both get healed equally at each rest). If the idea of the stamina/health system was to allow unusual party compositions, then PoE clearly failed with that mechanic. Yes, you don't need a healer anymore if you want fewer resting, but instead, you just stack up on tanks.

That basicly, again, forces meta on top of you. You can't know what's behind the next corner unless told so by NPCs. Also, higher difficulty levels are a thing. Ok I seriously start to question the skill level of people here on the forum. You can usually clear every map in the beta with one rest on easy, normal and hard. If you for example kill the stone beetles bevor the wood beetles than the problem is the player not the system. Their are so many people here asking for changes because they dont want to think or adapt. Rest spamming like in any IE title removed so much tactic from the game because their was zero resource management involved. You cant rest spam in PoE so adapt and learn. The thing is: as long as there isn't a mechanic punishing you for rest-spamming, there is always zero resource management involved. As long as I can freely walk back to the last inn to rest, it's the same as in IE games, just much more annoying. And seriously, it's not about the actual encounter difficulty, because clearly, that is going to change until release depending on the beta input. It's imho just a flaw in mechanics that stamina is a completely disposable resource and that there is almost no real incentive to artifically heal stamina through spells unless you want to prevent the character from dropping to the ground. You can grind your way through weak enemies all day long in the IE games - and that makes sense, imho, if you have the power. In PoE, all it takes are some lucky hits and you have to rest again, no matter how easy it was to kill the enemies. You just accumulate that health damage over time even if it basicly were just some minor scratches. A non-linear dependency shifts the weight of required recovery from trivial encounters to critical encounters. A hard battle will have a much larger impact on your health than a group of goblins. Currently, it doesn't matter if you fight trash or story encounters; get hit too often and you have to rest, no matter how easy the fights were. And that is imho just not good game design in terms of pacing.

And fighter would be nearly immortal with their constant stamina recovery. Numbers have to be balanced, definitely. It's just the overall concept I'm talking about. Fighter stamina recovery could always be nerfed to accomodate such a change in rules.

That basicly, again, forces meta on top of you. You can't know what's behind the next corner unless told so by NPCs. Also, higher difficulty levels are a thing. ... which would kind of be understandable, considering that's the point of heavy armor, not? I agree that it might not be the "one fix to rule them all", but it would at least reduce the frustration when fighting a group of weak enemies having RNGesus crits.

There's many discussions currently about how the stamina/health system basicly enforces rest-spamming, as stamina is more or less a disposable resource that is going to get meta-gamed hard, in order to not lose the actually important resource that is health. Some people argue that the system basicly makes you decide to sacrifice your characters tactically (by dropping stamina to zero) in order to not get them actually killed (dropping health to zero). Also, as it is most likely your tank that is going to accumulate health damage while all other characters will probably not suffer any damage, this makes rest spamming even worse. So in order to fix these problems, let us collect a number of user oppinions on how the system could be tweaked in order to work properly, without removing the system completely, which is clearly not an option considering how it is and was intended to be a core feature of the game to prevent degenerative gameplay and considering how it's probably too late to apply changes at core game design level. When posting, try to keep your ideas short and to the point. Anything that is too complicated probably won't be of any value anyway, as the system must be easily understandable for every new player. So here's my ideas: - remove the linear dependency of health to stamina and instead, make it based on the current stamina of the character --> while the character is above 75% stamina, he loses no health at all when being hit --> if the character is between 50% and 75% stamina, he loses health at an 8 to 1 ratio. --> if the character is between 25% and 50% stamina, he loses health at a 4 to 1 ratio (current ratio). --> if the character is below 25% stamina, he loses health at a 2 to 1 ratio. - losing all stamina and dropping on the ground will result in health being reduced to 1, no matter where it was before. So what does this do? 1) it makes stamina regeneration and stamina healing spells much more useful 2) trivial encounters won't be as annoying anymore 3) it makes more sense from a lore perspective (light wounds heal faster than strong wounds) 4) Heavily wounded characters are not per se useless in combat anymore, as they won't get further health damage unless dropping stamina too far again in the next battle ... there's more "RNG protection" for heavily wounded characters 5) Overall less RNG. Imho, this would be a quick and easy fix that can be done by just shifting some numbers around. There's still be some meta, like stacking stamina on characters and kiting to avoid dropping stamina below the 50% margin, but hey, that's better than the current frustrating meta of having to rest almost every second battle.

I remember watching an anime series as a kid about a girl that could transform into a pig to gain magical powers. I forgot what this series was called, unfortunately. I also forgot what this implies about my sexuality. But the girl was hot... I think. EDIT: Found it! The series is called "Super pig".

Well it depends. Certainly, the voice acting for Irenicus in the german version is totally different to the original; while in the original, he was speaking very monotone and cold (which is very in-character, considering his soul and feelings were stripped off from him), the german voiceacting is a lot more emotional and angry, but somehow this fits almost as good as the original voice-acting. I loved the voice. It sounded intimidating as hell, especially when he started shouting or cursing. There's no doubt about the localization of Minsc, either. Perfectly executed! And I just recently found out that the voice actress of Jaheira is also the german voice of Angelina Jolie. I can't agree about Imoen, though. I felt her german voice was A LOT better than the original. She sounded like an actual adventurer in the german version, not like a spoiled school child that she was in the original. After playing BG:EE, I finally understood why everyone was hating Imoen so much. Her original voice was ... punishment.

I agree. Let's also hope that PoE will attract attention from the modding community. It's essential for a game like this to allow the user base to generate mods and fixes. I don't think I would have enjoyed replaying BG2 as much without the BG2 Fixpack. The BG2 Mods are awesome, and were needed so badly regarding combat. But people not only have to take off their nostalgia goggles like Sensuki or how this guy is called wears them; they also have to accept: You don´t sell games because they have an awesome AI. You sell them despite of having a terrible AI. I mean, since 1996 AI in games made literally zero progress. NPC-enemies are still as stupid as they were in the early ninetees. Sometimes it seems different cause they are more heavily scripted. But that´s it. Sad reality is, a clever AI is nothing that promotes a game in the current market situation. There has been a lot of progress in terms of AI since 1996. You just have to look at real-time strategy games, not RPGs. Starcraft II has probably the best AI I've ever seen. And that is for a game that is literally all about the multiplayer or the (almost completely hard-scripted) campaign. I still wonder why they even bothered to throw that much time and resources into developing a great player vs. cpu AI if 95% of the players never actually have to deal with it.

But that's because people have a really twisted expectation of what "Beta" means nowadays with all the betas being more a less a quick cashgrab that display a finished game to artifically create good reputation. For me, the backer beta is exactly what a beta looked like 15 years ago, when game developement was a lot more honest than nowadays. There wasn't any core features missing, everything worked at least to a major degrees. The existance of severe and gamebreaking bugs is totally normal for an early beta version. A lot of people seem to have a misconception about bugs and how to fix them. Most of large-scale gamebreaking bugs actually have only a very small cause. Only in very few cases, a large-scale effect is caused by large-scale mistakes. Besides, all the bugs are easily reproducable. And reproducable bugs can literally be fixed in a couple of minutes. I remember back when I started modding in Warcraft III and scriped an aggro system very similar to World of Warcraft's aggro mechanics. It seemed to be totally broken, with basicly nothing working at all, no matter what I tried. I searched for weeks and couldn't find the culprit and couldn't even find any logical dependencies and reproduction methods. I suspected a fundamental flaw in my system design and was almost about to start writing from scratch out of my frustration. Then, suddenly, when I was scrolling through all the function names to have an API to work with for my remake, I quite literally stumbled over the reason for this bug: I just commented out a line that offsets an incremential integer by one. Why I did this out in the first place is still beyond me. But this single commented-out line caused all internal IDs to be 1 value off, causing all objects to have the wrong references. I removed the commenting and everything worked perfectly fine from this day on. As you can see, the smallest of mistakes can have a huge impact on complex systems like battle mechanics. It's not like it's a lot of work to fix such problems, it's only a lot of work to actually find the problem. This can be alleviated by giving detailed instructions on how to reproduce the bug at any given time. After all, it's easy to find the pin in the haystack if you have a magnet. Long story short: All bugs I've seen from the backer beta can easily be reproduced and thus, can be fixed in no time. There seem to be almost no bugs that have no clear immediate effect (like memory leaks) ... and those are the really painful bugs. So I'm positive the game release date promise is possible to achieve. Do we get major changes to some flawed mechanics like weak pathfinding? Probably not. But we won't get a game with gamebreaking bugs, that I am sure of.

I want to give you in advance my thank you for the great german translation you guys have done and will do! As Gronkh, a popular german Let's Player started a series about the backer beta, I finally got to see the awesome job you did in this regard. Aside from some minor formatting issues (sometimes, the greyed out text appears as white and the opposite and some speech markers are wrong) and the usual english fragments, the localization looks great! Only issue so far is that NPCs seem to have no localized names yet (you only see the variable names where the name of the NPC should be displayed). If you guys can manage to hire great voiceactors for the spoken lines aswell, like Rainer Schmitt who did a phenomenal job on Irenicus in the german localization of BG2 or Ben Hecker, who did Minsc, I am a happy camper! Maybe other germans lurking these forums are interested; this is the Let's Play I was talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMG_pyodOPw

So umm... something like this? (man it was hard to find an example that fits the PoE art style!) ... I'd love that. But it's imho a low priority thing.

I guess the problem isn't even the animations. It's the sound effects. Basicly, weapon swings and hits lack a destinct feeling of weight. It sounds like the characters are wielding pillows. :/

I know this isn't a gamebreaking issue. It's totally not! But look at the clever decisions Obsidian made to make the most out of their limited budget so far: 1) instead of fully rendered backgrounds, use pre-rendered 2D backgrounds to give the game a much higher graphical fidelity 2) instead of using 3D videos for scripted events, they went for drawn 2D images that tell the story like a comic book 3) instead of adding a large amount of NPCs (and thus, even more written dialogue), they implemented the adventurer's hall to satisfy players who want to play with a certain party composition All those things are neat little tricks that allow to game to "compete" with other modern games and hide the obvious disadvantages of the low game budget. The game, when released, will obviously be judged by a jury that is used to triple-A games. And while they might go easy on some things knowing the kickstarter background of the game, the first impression still matters. Now they don't see the beautifully prerendered backgrounds right away. They start with a close-up on the characters. And they will immediately notice the weaknesses there - and that definitely will have an impact on all further judgement (again, because the first impression matters). Of course, gameplay trumps optics. Minecraft has proven this. But the thing with minecraft is: the graphics are heavily stylized. You don't care about the pixel look of Minecraft because everything is in style. There is no high res background, no high res character model, everything is blocky. Heck, even the sun and animals are just huge blocks. PoE has a style goal that (from my understanding) relies on the intimacy of drawings. You see that in the intermissions, you see that in the use of portraits, you see that in the background and even the UI is drawn. The 3D models on character creation feel out of place in that style. A consistency of style is actually more important than the pure graphical fidelity. WoW is amazing at this. Every single object, every character, every monster in the game looks like it was made by the same designer, despite thousands of people working on this. And while the graphics are really aged, it still looks great because of that consistency. Look at Mass-Effect. Notice how every single vehicle, machine or spaceship has those giant blue lensflare effects? That, again, is consistency of style. You see a single screenshot of whatever is in the game and you instantly know "this is Mass effect". That is the power of style consistency. I don't know; maybe I'm exagerating this. Maybe it doesn't matter. I don't care that much about the optics of the character creation, but I really wish for this game to be successful outside of the core indie game audience. Yes, the game is primarily for the backers. But the real success of the game is determined by how much the game appeals to customers that are only tangentially interested in this game. You know, those people that played triple-A games like Dragon Age and just wished it would be more tactical. Players that played games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown and just wished the characters would be less interchangable. It's those people that will bring in the extra cash that Obsidian desperately needs to give us more quality content. I think we can all agree on that we want the developers to generate a lot of profit out of this game. Profit that can flow directly into the sequel, addons or content updates. Maybe we can get full voice over at some place? Getting good critics of the press is essential for success. Great screenshots are the best advertisement for a new game, especially, if the reviews point out fantastic gameplay.

That works for D3 because there is no character customization whatsoever -- no races, subraces / cultures and only 5 classes. So they only needed 10 generic full body sketches. PoE would need 132 just to cover male and female versions of each race / class combination. 352 if you take subraces into consideration, which for some races (like the Godlike) would definitely be needed. It's just the background of the equipment window. If you keep it sketchy, only black and sepia colors (that go with the wooden look of the UI), who is going to tell the difference between the subraces anyway? Most of them just differ in terms of skin color. Imho, a generic sketch for each of the primary races in a male and female variant (and each of the godlikes) would be totally sufficient. That makes it (5 races + 4x5 godlikes) x 2 = 50 sketches. Considering we get hundreds of sketches in the scripted intermissions, that shouldn't really be a problem. And I bet people wouldn't even care if the background sketch for the godlike would be the same no matter what race the godlike is based on. Classes don't really need to be differentiated. Just have the sketch in generic farmer clothes. So basicly how your character would look without armor equipped. That also makes a lot of sense, imho, as you actually drag and drop your equipment on the icon slots attached to the background image.

I know they look good from above. I can also see why the exxagerated features actually make them look *better* ingame than they would look with realistic proportions. However, when viewing the character from the front, it looks horribly comic-esque and imho something should be done about that. The character creation is an important aspect (for some people, it's the only aspect) of cRPGs. And keep in my the first impression of a game matters. Showing off graphical flaws right at the beginning is not going to do the game any favor - especially if it isn't actually needed to show the character up-close (they could just re-arrange the character creation UI and make the preview window show the character in ingame perspective).

... or they just use a generic full body sketch for each race/sex combination as the background and the portrait. Like in the example below. Heck, they wouldn't even need to create those anymore. I'm 100% sure that for every race/sex combination a proper concept art exists. http://d3cauldron.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Diablo-3-Beta-Screens-6.jpg 2D beats 3D almost always, unless you have the budget to do 3D right.

This, 100%. It's the basic principle of good design: if you can't do it properly, don't do it at all. That's why we have the scripted 2D-image events and not cutscenes. We don't need 3D character customization aside from the colors. You won't see those things ingame anyway, with helmets on. It's perfectly fine to only have one generic haircut per race, as long as you play in birdseye view. Nobody cares if the portrait doesn't match the haircut of the 3D model if the head is only 30 pixels wide ingame. I know I didn't care in the IE games at all. Show the portrait only on character creation and only show the 3D model when you pick hair colors. At ingame scale. Kind of like it was in the IE games. The inventory image of the character could be replaced by a full-body portrait (like in IWD where you had a full body portrait in the character screen and the cropped head-only portrait for the UI) or just removed completely. Why do we even need a preview if we can see how our character looks ingame? I feel that the focus on larger-scale customizable 3D models is just a waste of resources for a game that has an isometric camera anyway.

After watching some videos on the backer Beta, I feel that the problem has only gotten worse, now that I've seen more of the character creation. The proportions of the characters are horrible. The heads are way too big for their bodies, the legs are too short, some textures aren't only blurry, they are basicly non-existant, especially for the feet. The character models imho need a severe makeover; I really hope they are going to do something about this for the final release.

Is it just me or does anyone feel that the art style is really inconsistent? Yes, I know that a lot of them might not be finalized yet (check out the last two pictures of the third row... I think the left one there is the finalized version and the right one is the unfinished version), but still, we have at least 3 totally different art styles here: 1) sketchy, comic-style like the one on the top left corner. 2) A little bit blurry photo-esque-paintovers like the one on the top-right (I guess those are the backer portraits) 3) crisp, stylized photo-esque-paintovers (second row, second from the right). I feel that the third type looks the best. I love the second from the right in row 2 and row 3 a lot. Those are my favorites so far, aside from the fire & death godlikes that look totally badass. I mean ... I don't really care about the portraits really, as I am going to use my own anyway, but shouldn't the art style look a little bit more consistent in terms of portraits? Especially if you decide to use the story companions... I hope at least those have a consistent art style.

How to reproduce an error is the most important thing when reporting bugs. I absolutely hated it when people just told me that "this spell was not working" in my mods. What exactly wasn't working? What happened when you tried to cast it? What were you doing when the error occured? To fix a bug in a large scale coding structure like a game is extremely complicated when you get no information on how to reproduce the bug. Because then you try it out in your test build and everything is working fine and you wonder what the report was actually about (because the ability only didn't work when combined with a certain talent, etc.)..

I guess it shouldn't be a big problem to have character cast a dynamic shadow over light sources. After all, light sources ARE 3-dimensional objects according to the tech demo.