PrimeHydra

Preetty sure frap was being sarcastic against the OE stalwarts who shoot down any post questioning their designs.

Sexaholics Anonymous? Hey, at least I googled it before asking

Thanks for sharing. Source?

This is the real root of all otherwise baffling decisions, including the absolute need to avoid the Spectre of Quest Staggering. Although a backer (I'm not) might say "balancing Baldur's Gate 2 wasn't easy either. So?" Baldur's Gate 2 had much more people working on it and it still failed in that balancing (similarly as all IE games failed), why they want to do things differently this time. I thought balance in Baldur's Gate 2 was fine. Then again, I don't metagame very hard. I believe that if OE genuinely felt combat XP made the game better, they would include it. They don't seem to feel that way. They don't spend their resources on this beautiful IE successor with meticulously-designed assets and complex mechanics, and then say, "combat XP is tricky to balance so it's outside the scope of what you can expect." Elerond, I'm not sure what your goal is with digging up links to every Obsidian response to this issue and insisting that they can never go wrong. Just...cut it out. Dragon Age: Origins is a better example of poor balancing. Encounters ranged from way too easy to nearly impossible for your party's current level.

I'm doing it anyways. At least open a separate tab!

But as I said and tried to show that they didn't had decide that point when they launched their kickstarter campaign, and not even that point of time when campaign ended and as we have seen experience system is still not carved in stone. But they gave us their design goals which they aim to achieve with system that they will design with money they got, and as I already said I think that they have achieved quite well. I'm just saying, a link on their front page reading "How our vision differs (and hopefully improves upon) the Infinity Engine games", or similar would have been great. There it could have read "currently, killing enemies does not reward experience as it did in the IE games. We feel that blah blah blah." Again, not all of us have been following the project since its Kickstarter days. I'm certainly not saying the game (or their achievement of design goals) is a failure. And anyway, I don't want to belabor this further. My original point with this line of discussion is that the folks who were surprised/disappointed when winning (tought) fights yielded no experience, had a valid response.

Elerond: I realize that Obsidian have expounded on these points in various posts, articles, and interviews that can be dug up from around these forums and around the web. What I meant was that unless you discovered and read this fine print, the lack of combat XP came as a bit of a shock. Not every backer is a devout follower/consumer of all information OE releases. I'm pretty sure I just Googled "modern Baldur's Gate", found the Pillars of Eternity webpage, and was like "sign me up!" I didn't follow the kickstarter campaign or subscribe to its email updates. Significant design changes like this need to be made clear on the product front page. Say, a link that says "How we are changing and improving on the IE formula". It's a moot point now--it just would have been nice, at the time, to expect this change and understand why it was there.

Was it your idea? Then they should have given you credit, or at least acknowledged that it had been suggested before. I wasn't there for that conversation, and I'm sorry people trolled you. I can only say you are not alone in that experience. If I had my druthers, we'd have good ol' combat XP like in the IE games. But (surprisingly to me) a lot of people don't want it in the game. (I don't get it, either, but if that's what they want, then it's OK for OE to provide a compromise that gives each group of supporters some concessions.) Until I learned about the (your) bestiary unlock idea, I didn't think a compromise was even possible. It can be made to work reasonably well, provided that - the amount of experience granted by bestiary unlocks is sufficiently motivating - the bestiaries are revealed gradually enough that we don't quickly cap out on this reward - the bestiaries themselves provide interesting/useful information, so that we get not only an XP reward but a tactical/lore reward - the player is notified when an individual tier in a bestiary unlocks, so that after winning a tough fight they receive, if not an immediate XP reward, a promise that they are getting closer to a sizable chunk of experience. Something like "Spider Bestiary Updated". When the final tier is revealed, they should see "Spider Bestiary Unlocked (10,000 XP or whatever)" If the fanbase were overwhelmingly in favor of combat XP, I might be more stubborn on this point. The fact that a compromise is even possible was news to me.

Yes, now I have committed myself to fixing all my bugs today, which I will regret Now I feel bad--I always do more damage to my codebase after about 6pm. Take your time, guys, we just wanted to know the status. Sleep is undervalued in software development!

Thank you! (See, was that so hard? ) Looking forward to the new patch!

At least we don't see dev posts like, "Thank you for your passion around this issue! We will share MOAR information when we have it. Good day!"

But you know very well that some people here would find it equally 'offending' if they did send such short updates. I'm sure we'd be getting angry posts all the same. "The ONLY reason you exist is because we funded your project. TWO DAYS of silence and THIS is what we get? A tiny, one-liner message? I paid to get actual feedback, not updates so succinct they could fit in a tweet *outraged* " -- Bottom line is, they can never do enough for some people. A blurb every few days is perfectly reasonable. People demanding more than what's reasonable will always exist; they doesn't negate the argument. OE have not been horrible in this regard, but it seems like 1% more effort on their part (read: status update every few days) would go a long way. It's really not asking much. You're right, some people will still not be satisfied. But the hell with them

Clever. PoE looks to me to be a perfectly good spiritual successor to the game. It doesn't to some folks, often based on very narrow definitions of what a spiritual successor *must* be to them personally. Why should Obsidian come out with such a statement? Because some backers think that lack of combat XP means it can't be a tribute to the IE games? I'm a backer. I think it is. Frankly, this proposal is simply baiting Obsidian and they'll likely simply ignore it. They should. I agree that it's silly to disqualify the game as a "spiritual successor" on this basis. Hell, they called Dragon Age: Origins a spiritual successor of Baldur's Gate. PoE is much more so. Beyond that hyperbole, the backslash against cutting combat XP is completely understandable. In the IE games, this mechanic was central to progression and to combat reward. So when the Icewind Dale fans go "WTF", their nostalgia and expectations should not be dismissed as silly or irrelevant. Theirs was my own initial reaction. In fact, I was surprised that so many folks did not want experience from combat, given the game's heritage. Nobody ever complained about it in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. But reading these forums, it's clear that a lot of people like Obsidian's decision. That's why I'm agreeable to a compromise. The bestiary unlocks are good enough for me--certainly preferable to a weird option that makes full clears obligatory to match a default quest-only progression. I wouldn't use such a toggle unless it provided extra experience, but then that's unfair to quest-XP fans. It would have been nice if they'd made this design decision (and its motivation) clearer--at least as clear as the IE nostalgia bait on the project's homepage.

Nope, just a bad pun. I never claimed to have a mature sense of humor.

My other PoE. (Or as I like to call it, Path of Exile: Forsaken Masturbators. For if you are in sexile, you are by definition a forsaken...never mind.) Currently playing a Reave tank Ranger with 75% block, 40% dodge, and just over 50% Evade (need much more!), She is impossible to hit in melee but high spell damage just wipes her out. Can't get enough of the new crafting masters--mods rule! A great way to fill in the gaps left by random drops. Finally unlocked the map artisan! I prefer PoE to Diablo 3, but to be fair I haven't tried the expansion + patch for D3. As long as D3 remains "freespec" without any sense of permanence, it will always look like the shallower game to me. PS - I bought a bear pet. It lives in my hideout and my wife loves it. They need more "cute" pets.

I wasn't there for that conversation, and Josh didn't reference it in his post, so, sorry if I missed it. Bestiary kill XP is better than nothing, and I was thrilled that: a) they offered an idea that goes partway toward my wishes while respecting the other side and b) they are actually reading this thread. I'm not going to flame OE for not going far enough toward what I want. If more people were willing to compromise on things they feel passionately about, we might have a functional government.

Isn't that the same with loot, though: If you don't explore the whole map, you might miss some containers/stashes. And with quests: If you don't explore the whole map, you might miss that one blue-circled NPC in the middle of the wilderness who has a mini-quest. (In BG1, each wilderness map had at least 1 local mini-quest like for example "Rescue my child from the wolves in those ruins over there!".) For some gamers, exploration is a gratifying part of the cRPG "experience". The rest can choose to skip it, but they will miss out on stuff -- no matter whether or not there is combat XP. Yeah, that's true. But it's less of a missed opportunity in that case. Experience is the most significant reward an RPG can dole out. At any rate, don't get me wrong--I'd rather have combat XP than none whatsoever. The Bestiary XP sounded like a cool idea, so I was offering a concession to the no-kill-XP side. I certainly don't want to argue against my own playing of devil's advocate. The edge case of "unexplored missed opportunities" is far outweighed by the constant stream of unavoidable encounters in most of these games--which is why, at least for me, combat XP worked fine. I just want us all to get along. To that end, here is a kitty:

Yes, mutonizer, I realize I don't have to do it. I'm talking about "have to" from a min/max perspective. There is a sense of missed opportunity for not having killed said monsters. Not sure why you're so bitter on this point--I want a fun Pillars of Eternity as much as you do. Chill out.

Why do you do it then? Nobody's forcing you and the game certainly doesn't either. Just wondering really... I would do it to make sure I've grabbed all possible XP from the map. I'm throwing a bone to those against combat XP, because they are right in this regard: It is weird to have to go far out of your way (read: outside of any interesting context, unlocking the final fog of war in the upper-right corner) just to ensure you don't miss experience points.

That's cool, options are great. That said, And you'll be progressing mostly in one thing: combat. So..what's the point again? I'm with you, but if they design their quests well, most will have multiple solutions. There is already a system of reputation and attributes in place. If this is leveraged properly, and quest dialogues fleshed out appropriately, you'll be able to: - Talk the badass down rather than clean his clock - Use your reputation to hire a hitman to do your dirty work - Sneak around the mook guarding the second level to the dungeon The question is, will they take the time to create problems that truly have multiple solutions rather than throw a bunch of monsters in our path? Time will tell. But I liked the ogre quest in this regard.

Are you sure that it did, overall? I, for one, doubt it. Much of the quest XP was given to each character independently of party size, wasn't it? And yet, in my experience, a BG2 party with 3 or 4 members levelled up much faster than a party with 6 members. I've never played BG proper, I've always done the trilogy so perhaps this may be different from someone else's experience. Without factoring in mod added enemies, you gain much more XP per enemy killed in BG2 than BG. The quest XP is a bigger chunk for 6 person parties, but combat will definitely dominate parties of 4 or less. In both games, combat XP will likely be making up the majority of XP. Personally, I like having XP awarded in lump sums for completing objectives because I don't feel like I'm playing the game wrong for trying to find other ways of progressing other than combat. I will concede that it's annoying to scour every corner of a map that holds no remaining interest other than the possibility of a few XP vessels in monster form. I'm not sure how experience division works in PoE, but they could split it among your party to create the same balance of "fewer and higher level" vs. "many and lower level".

Are you sure that it did, overall? I, for one, doubt it. Much of the quest XP was given to each character independently of party size, wasn't it? And yet, in my experience, a BG2 party with 3 or 4 members levelled up much faster than a party with 6 members. I don't have the numbers, so I may be wrong technically, I just remember that at major plot points nearly everyone in my six-player party leveled up. I didn't play much with fewer chars in my party, so I can't speak to the incentive of going that route purely for greedier combat rewards. It just felt like when we completed a major quest, it was like, "OK here's the real money XP". But taking down a lich still felt plenty rewarding thanks to the (less) sizable chunk of experience.

I seem to recall high Perception scores mean more/quicker bestiary unlocks. Maybe your rogue can sneak around and observe the lions, Disney Nature style! But maybe you have to kill the monster, and with combat currently being unescapable (correct me if I'm wrong), then...yeah, you're gonna have to fight some, son. I doubt these unlocks would be so crucial to progression that they'll feel mandatory. Instead they should provide a healthy bonus for those interested in doing more than the bare minimum of combat.

My goal isn't to discourage killing/combat overall, but to avoid the emphasis of combat solutions as the de facto best way to resolve quests (unless the quest is fundamentally about killing someone/thing, of course) and to avoid the player feeling compelled to kill everything they come across. I think it will be good for the game if a player can ask themselves, "Am I losing out by not completing this area with combat?" and sometimes answer, "Nah." Quest only XP accomplishes this, but obviously a lot of people want to gain XP from fighting. Short of having a separate mode where you get combat XP from everything and all of the quest XP is rebalanced around that, bestiary unlocking XP is the best solution I've come up with to accomplish both goals. Having quest XP dwarf kill XP by orders of magnitude worked well in Baldur's Gate 2, I will say. But since you have this nice bestiary feature and can tie it in with an XP reward...maybe that will suffice. Certainly much better than nothing!

If bestiary entries unlock at the right pace, more combat (than Planescape) would indeed be welcome. But the frequency of fights in the current beta far outpaces the rewards. I hope we get to test a bestiary-XP system to see if it feels right.