PrimeHydra

We can already steel **** right out from under people's noses, in their homes and shops! I'm not huge on thieving mechanics, but then I like to roleplay good guy Gregs. I only picked pockets in BG2 of really annoying, arrogant richie-riches who were just begging for it when they insulted my party. But then they turn red and I have to kill them, which makes me kinda sad. How would one implement pickpocketing without making us resort to murder when it fails? Maybe just a simple skill check, where it either works or it doesn't, but you never actually piss the target off...

This happened to me as well. As soon as I moved the stone and entered the area, we were in combat mode with no opportunity to sneak around first. Maybe moving the stone raised a ruckus?

Leveling up just prior to talking to Medreth, as a result of finishing dialog with him, locks out my wizard's spells once combat starts. In the tooltips for his spells I see "Grimoire Cooldown Active". Sure enough the little cooldown bar over his head prevents me from casting anything until the recovery time finishes. Leveling him up does not reset the cooldown. You have to wait till it expires. To reproduce this, load this savegame and talk to Medreth, completing the quest to level up the BB Wizard. Try casting a spell as soon as combat starts. Nope, gotta wait for the cooldown! BB Priest can immediately cast spells after leveling, so I assume this isn't by design.

Also: When attempting to switch back to PoE after alt+tabbing out during a full-screen-mode game load, the app may not respond for a few minutes. Eventually the screen does come back, but it appears to the user as though they've broken it It would be great if there were some way to make full-screen mode play as well with task switching as windowed mode does.

Even without having played the video or mod, this suggestion makes perfect sense. I see no reason why movement should pause action recovery time. Especially once shift+click action queues are implemented. Cast a spell, then queue up a move and another spell. This will reward player skill in factoring recovery time into the queued repositioning. Sounds like a great way to make chaotic combat more tactical!

The latest update promises "additional character progression options". I'm willing to see whether these go far enough to mitigate the empty feeling of winning tough battles without gaining experience. For me, this would mean: Level design that gives players options in dealing with "trash mobs". At minimum we have two: Fight, or sneak past. The overland areas honor this pretty well, but underground--in the Skaen temple, for instance--there is little option but to engage. When I entered the Skaen temple after moving the stone blocking it, combat mode activated as soon as I entered the room. (Maybe this is by design as moving the stone probably raised a racket.) When you make promises like "experience will not be contingent on body count", you need to have really compelling alternative solutions. This means the ability to talk your way out of encounters, as well as a stealth system that really feels like a first-class citizen. Sneaking past enemies needs to feel like you're getting away with something, not skipping content. An experience system that rewards exploration. Since you now have the option of slipping past (or talking down) the enemies blocking the dungeon entrance, you should get XP for entering the dungeon; it's proof that you solved the problem (getting past the guardians) without caring how you solved it. And to reward exploration, the gain should not be contingent on having spoken with some "quest giver" first. Objective-experience (read: Quest XP on the installment plan). Currently this works well: We get XP for discovering the ogre's cave, another chunk for dealing with the ogre (whether killing him or convincing him to leave), and a final boon when returning victorious to the farmer. This keeps us motivated without longing for the ordeal to be over so we can finally reap a some reward. There are others (bestiary XP is a nice plus IMO), but these are the major factors. I believe that PoE can be as fun and rewarding as any IE game, without universal kill XP--if they design the levels, non-combat systems, and quests very thoughtfully.

Care to elaborate?

PoE is about as far from EA crap as you can get. No worries, laddie

Awesome!!

Due to the longish load times in the beta, I've played with switching tasks (Alt + Tab out) while waiting for a game to load. I notice that when the game is full-screen, this seems to suspend the process of the game loading. I then wait while the game loads where it left off before I switched out. To work around this, I find myself going Alt+Enter to Windowed mode, where the game seems to process correctly in the background while I'm doing other stuff. Other times, I've switched back to PoE while loading a game (full screen) to find the screen completely black, or frozen on "Game paused" with my character's portraits offscreen. But the HDD light on my machine is unlit, and I can press Esc and hear the sound of the game's Options dialog being brought up. It's as though the game loaded but the screen isn't being redrawn, or a black overlay from the load screen remains in place. I can switch to Windowed mode (Alt + Enter) to restore the graphics.

To re-iterate a couple of points from siril_dana in the Fist Impressions Thread: This was such a nice touch in the IE games.

Is there any reason character damage is not shown in the inventory screen, while other combat-relevant stats like Accuracy Damage Threshold are? It's hard to tell at a glance whether switching out my weapon had a beneficial effect. Instead I have to go into the character screen, page over to the character whose weapon I am experimenting with, and scroll down to the damage. The info is there, it just needs to be on the inventory screen as well.

In build 301, responsiveness in combat remains frustratingly inconsistent. I often have to give commands two or three times before the character "hears me". The little "pending action" icon (small circle above model's head) does not always show my chosen action; sometimes it just shows a generic attack icon for an attack ability. While "Expert mode" fans may like this, some of us would prefer UI consistency. For instance, Knockdown will show in this circle nearly without fail, but not Flames of Devotion. I get that these are bugs, but consider this feedback...I see an awesome combat system beneath these glitches, and I want to try it!

Clicking the combat log entry for "Bestiary information unlocked: Wurm" seems like it should bring up the Bestiary entry on Wurms. Would be a nice way to immediately view information on your newfound foes.

29 is old? LOL

Also, BEARS.

I noticed the spiders summoned with the figurine will vanish once combat is over, then when you encounter another mob elsewhere in the map, they re-appear and rush to the scene. Not sure if that's by design. Are they per-encounter, per-rest, or....?

The crafting dialog could use a filter to show only recipes for which you have the ingredients. Being able to scroll through recipes with the arrow keys would also be nice!

Would love to be able to set movement waypoints via Shift+Click, like in the IE games. This is great for skirting hazards, setting up sneak attacks, scouring an area for hidden items, and compensating for the inevitable shortcomings of pathfinding algorithms. Queuing spells and abilities via Shift+Click would also be cool, and could make battles less micromanagement-intensive. But please, movement waypoints at the very least!

Great point, hadn't even thought about that. I think auto-avoiding traps would kind of defeat their purpose. As long as we can auto-pause on trap detected, making us go around them manually fits their design. In many cases (at least in the IE games), the traps span the whole hallway or or on a chest, so you can't really skirt them anyway. So with auto-walkaround, your team stands at the edge of the trap, stuck in the hallway, unless you override the behavior. Messing with a toggle could get annoying--turn it on for the traps you can walk around, turn it off whenever you find one that blocks your path. No thanks... Moreover, traps should make you be careful. You're tiptoeing around a hazard; this is not something that should be on auto-pilot (IMO). While I get the appeal of this feature, I think the game is better off without it.

Exactly, which is why it's frustrating to read posts that read, to paraphrase: "Here are more idiotic opinions that run counter to my own. I'll quote them and then tell each poster why they, and not the game, are at fault." it doesn't make for very constructive discussion. It's true--a lot of the more hostile responses to threads like this conveniently (and sadly) ignore the fact that we all want the same thing: An awesome Pillars of Eternity. Nobody here wants a dumbed-down game lacking in either tactics or strategy. I wish people would quit accusing other beta backers--other people who paid money to support a hardcore, retro-style CRPG--of being n00bs. It's obnoxious and incorrect. On that note, the complaint was never that pre-buffs "make me think too hard about tactics/strategy." That's not the issue. The issue is that a lot of prebuffing in this game's ancestors was tedious. It wasn't fun. Shift+clicking to queue up Chaotic Commands on each individual in a six-person party because you know there are Umber Hulks over the next hill (because they killed you all last time in a frenzy of Confusion charms) is just annoying. A better implementation of this strategy would have been a Mind Shield 10' Radius spell. The strategy comes in choosing the spell as part of your loadout before heading to Umber Hulk country. The tactics are employed when your wizard casts Mind Shield 10' Radius instead of Fireball or any number of other actions upon enemy sighted. "Prebuffing", as understood by myself and most of the other "no thanks" users, is the tedious, mechanical, and repetitive process of applying "mandatory" buffs before jumping into the fray. That's what we don't like. We're just as big combat tactic geeks as the ones who like casting a bunch of beneficial spells before the enemy notices them. PS: OP, you should add a poll to this thread, it would be interesting to see the results.

Good riddance, pre-buffing. If an encounter is so unbalanced that I have to reload my game, cast a bunch of buffs and then march straight into the fog-of-war area where I died last time for not having pre-buffed...that's a design flaw. I've been enjoying not needing to worry about whether I should cast a bunch of Protection from Evil or Chaotic Commands on everybody before wandering through a dungeon. Having said that, most of the buffs are annoyingly short-lived. Maybe my toon just doesn't have enough Resolve, though.

MOAR!!!

I really like your per-encounter idea, Indria. I just don't know how they'd implement it successfully. What constitutes sneaking past a mob? Being in stealth mode with all of them onscreen? Fair enough...you sneak past, you gain some XP. But what about on your way back? They're still there--do you now have to sneak past them again, or fight them? In a real choose-your-own-adventure, you'd slip through once and then they'd be gone. In game terms they'd disappear from the map. Otherwise you've not really brought closure to that encounter. It's a puzzle...

I'm not as aghast as some at the inclusion of trap-disarm and lock-pick XP. Obsidian are trying to solve a problem: Mitigate the drought of reward between quests. This is a real issue. I felt keenly while playing the backer beta. There are a lot of encounters, a lot of time spent away from quest givers (aka experience dispensers) with no progress to show for it. A combination of exploration, trap, and lockpick XP will at least give us something for our troubles, some cookie crumbs to encourage us while we work toward the jumbo chocolate chip that is our current quest. Those little rewards sound hokey in concept, but in practice they're better than waiting to arrive to in town, collapse across the finish line, then get a massive XP chunk. That might work in pen-and-paper scenarios, where imagination and camaraderie overshadow content and reward, but it's too punitive for computer games. The IE titles solved this by awarding experience for combat. Obsidian can't do this due to expectations set forth in kickstarter: So, how do you sprinkle experience into your game without reneging on this promise? Well, what are the options? Exploration, traps, and locks are obvious choices. There are probably others as well, like crafting something you haven't made before. Design is a series of tradeoffs. There is a cost to decoupling combat from experience. It doesn't come for free. You have to provide another source of incremental progress to the player. If you don't, well, you've sacrificed fun for RPG purity. Is that really worth it? Player reaction and Metacritic will answer for you. We should be less concerned with what is the "right RPG thing to do", the "purest and most consistent design", and more with what will make PoE a more engaging experience. I agree that a quest-only experience system is more consistent than one which rewards the player for little things, too. But it's dry, and it's dull. I'm glad Obsidian realized this.