Gairnulf

UI is probably the easiest topic to start a conversation on - everybody is exposed to this part of the game's functionality and it requires relatively little time with the game for the user to have some impressions on it. I've been testing various classes lately and I've come to some conclusions about the balance between classes' combat capabilities (rather the lack of such balance), but I'm not done yet, and I suspect not many among the BB players have enough impressions of all classes to be able to form definitive opinions. From the little I've seen of the classes, I think they are totally out of balance between each other, and basically that classes balance is a fertile field for rants that few are aware of, probably because of the time investment it requires Not that in the IE games there was perfect balance, but in PoE there are extreme cases imo. I plan to make a thread about them soon, which apparently will not be the first one on the subject. I just wonder in the context of the time left before release, how much changes can be made to the classes, since these changes will also necessitate testing of the classes by the QA team within the campaign, not just by us within the BB. EDIT: Once I've played more with a wizard, I'll probably have some feedback on the Grimoire UI as well.

Link: http://www.readings.com.au/products/19066799/pillars-of-eternity-guidebook They state it will be available for download March 26th 2015.

I've seen the "for god's sake, they could do X or Y in the IE games, why don't they do it now?" argument so many times, and by coincidence I'm playing BGT for the first time (have only played Baldur's Gate II completely before that), which allows me to spot bad design decisions in BG which are the same as bad decisions made all the way up to DA:I. Things like anachronistic phrases or syntactical constructions used in dialogue (this might pass as ok for heroic/light fantasy, but I personally dislike it), or quest givers who give you a quest upon clicking on them, with no chance to opt out of the quest, or outright failing a quest upon talking to a quest giver if you don't meet a condition (possession of the item he asked you for), are all things present in BG, with the latter not even encountered in DA:I (which may actually be considered an improvement over BG) American English spoken by NPCs is another one of these features. Many people criticize DA:I for using American English, yet are never heard to criticize BG for the same reason. Of course, BG had many other accents in addition to American for its voiced characters, which is also the case with DA:I although the variety there seems to be smaller. Personally, American English doesn't bug me so much as the use of anachronistic language, which I haven't heard so far in the PoE BB. I'm really sick of npcs in DA:I speaking like they're in a business meeting. I've lost count how many times I've chosen "Thank you" from the dialogue wheel and heard my character say "I really appreciate it.", or the phrase I heard once "I look forward to working with you" These just sound very out of place. I'm glad PoE has good writing as far as vocabulary is concerned. Has anyone noticed problems in that regard?

Contrary to what some people point out as a reason why there wouldn't be pencil drawings in descriptions, they don't seem to take that long to make. I asked my girlfriend yesterday how much she thinks it would take to make one of those drawings. She has done some drawing in school and in university. Apparently people who study medicine often tend to have some amateur drawing skills. She said it depends on the drawing, but generally it wouldn't take her much to make sketches similar to those in the OP. The scale armor I've attached took her about 15 mins, but she said it was copying from another drawing, so it was easier. The antlered helm, our favorite piece of armor in the BB took her about an hour, most of it to get the skull right. So my guess is a couple of professionals would do an even better/quicker job at drawing pencil sketches for description windows.

You missed because it's burrowing and cannot be hit. You can blow per-rest spells because of that, the way it works needs to be tweaked - I would point that out in the Bugs forum. On second look, the beetle really isn't visible on the screenshot with the miss, so it was probably that.

And what about the miss with 93 attack roll? Has this ever happened to anyone against a stone beetle?

I've began a series playthroughs of the BB with different race/class builds to get a feel of the various classes, and while playing a barbarian I encountered the following issue. I haven't posted it as a bug because I'm not sure if it's something known or not, or is it something about the rules. There are two separate issues I found in the same battle: 1. I somehow missed a hit that had an attack roll of 93. What's even more strange is that next time I scored a (critical) hit with a final attack roll result of 97. 2. I tried to switch weapons between swings in order to try out the stiletto against the stone beetle. As you can see on the screenshot, my character swings with the stiletto as if it's a twohanded weapon, and the damage caused by him is of the "crushing" type. What's more, I think I had the recovery time of a stiletto for my attacks Now are these bugs or is there something I don't know?

Thanks a lot for helping me learn about this yt channel! Finally someone who has actually studied literature produces quality criticism of games. I don't know if you've seen this dev update yet, but it lifts the curtain on the setting and I'm very satisfied by what I see there: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61324-update-20-lore-tidbits-campaign-almanac-big-ol-stretch-goals-and-environment-screenshot/

The luring of melee enemies relies on them never reacquiring targets, which Josh says is a recognized problem. I think it's all down to how well the changes they make to targeting will be tested out. If loopholes in the logic remain, it will continue to be exploitable. Ideally, I would prefer to see personality types for various enenmies, where different classes of enenmies have different behavior in battle, which affects how/if they reacquire targets, will they switch between weapon sets (ranged/melee or melee/melee), preferred type of enemy (melee, ranged, caster etc). If a group of beetles has the same targeting logic as a group of mercenaries that's less interesting and more predictable. Of course I realize this is quite some more work. In my first post after the last delay was announced, I said I expect it will not be ready by early 2015 and will be delayed one more time. Based on what I see now, I'd say I'm ready to call it complete if a few serious problems are fixed, but I'm sure there are many more problems which I don't see.

I'm sure they will move the combat log down as well, so it doesn't stick out. It would be ideal if they would get rid of the 20px high empty space under the HUD altogether. This is something I was advocating in my first UI thread. Seeing a 20px high, shaded stripe of the screen underneath the HUD simply makes no sense, if you can instead move the HUD to the bottom and gain 20px of non-shaded space above the HUD. At the moment it's impossible to have less than one character selected at any one time. If this filtering is to work only while paused, and if selecting more than one character while paused will include that character's feed too, it might be easier for some players to follow individual sub-logs like that. Personally I'm used to scrolling through a big log, so I probably would't use such a feature. I'm not against removing color coding, only for less contrasting colors, to better direct the player's attention when he scans through the log. I initially considered suggesting icons to save space as well, but if an icon is going to be the same size as your capital letters, or slightly bigger, because otherwise you will have to increase line height, the icon will be very difficult to discern for the majority of people. Additionally, you would run into problems wih scaling the icons whenever the user scales the text size I think what we are talking about is a 10x10px icon at default text size, which is pretty small. What I'm suggesting - the first letter of the damage type name in barackets (or two letters, because some damage types begin with the same letter) is the same thing, only the icon is the abbreviation's letters instead of an actual picture.

I remember how the IE games' characters would stop and twitch in the middle of walking, and I knew that was when tehy were re-evaluating their path, but in combat the twitching was also resulting in changing targets sometimes. I never researched the IE games' mechanics in mich detail, but I guess that was the equivalent of what we'll get now in PoE, minus the twitching Anyway, since I had see this re-evaluation happen in the IE games, I was sure it's just a matter of time for something equivalent or better to be implemented into PoE. I'm not a professional programmer, but I know that if the AI is capable of moving around characters, and of knowing engagement radius, it would certainly be able to move around characters along their engagement radius, preventing engagement when it doesn't want to get in engagement.

Adding a loop for reevaluation of targeting preferences (implying there will be a number of such preferences) is what I expected would happen. To think of all the hundreds of kilobytes collectively written on how exploitable Engagement is, addressed in a couple of sentences...

Talking about high damage per hit, my girlfriend started a monk character yesterday, and these monks pop people like we pop baloons medreths gang exploded in a couple of touches

Ok, if you get curious enough to try it out, tell us about the result

Funny, today I was going to ask Sensuki or Bester if it's possible to bind the walk animation to the movement command instead of the running animation somewhere in the code.

I wouldn't say it's very chaotic for me by now either, but that's the result of both playing v.364 and of having around 40 hours total with the beta

Well, you can see he says:

One of the reasons I dislike the halos UI over the characters' heads is because I keep concentrated on them, hardly minding the battle. At least they can be turned off, and then you're in the situation you were in the IE games, where the cooldowns are invisible. However, unlike the IE games, PoE's cooldowns are relatively fast - 2-3 seconds I think. Probably it's this that makes battles seem too fast to you. Personally, I think the cooldowns can be cut down even further and the animations slowed down to compensate for that. I imagine it would bring a different feel to overall combat speed, and I've described it in previous threads, but there is no way to test my theory. The best advice I can give you is to pause often and put in the effort to read the log. Also, compare the little lines above the characters' heads which mark how much is left until the cooldown time passes and they can do another action.

Just letting you know, there is a thread about typos, and it's around the first few screens. I don't know why it hasn't been stickied yet.

As we've discussed before, that's something I agree on. At least we should get to rearrange these elements to our preferences. Actually, that's a good time to link to my old thread about the UI layout. Or at least stick to the color scheme of the IE games, which had far less different colors. I believe that's just a bug, not intended behaviour, so it should be reported, but I guess it's a known issue, being pretty obvious as it is. I haven't felt that lack of clutter really, because I've always played only with To Hit rolls displayed. Similiarly, I don't mind the grazes' clutter. More configuration options regarding the Combat Log should suit both kinds of players

The information flow of the combat log in the IE games was a lot smoother than it is in PoE, but I don't think this can be altered, because it comes down to cooldown times and how synchronised or rhytmic they are, which will vary from one battle to another. If they are very synchronized, we'll have bigger blocks of text appearing at once, then relatively little unitl the cooldowns pass, unless through our actions (giving orders to characters) we break this synchronization, which of course isn't something around which anyone will decide their particular decisions in combat I'm not sure, but I think cooldowns were longer in the IE games, and this allowed for a more rhytmic flow of new lines being outputted in the combat log. If the rest of my feedback gets added to the combat log though, I think this problem will not affect us all that much any more. Something I didn't mention in the OP and came to my mind today was that, based on self observation at least, people tend to read the combat log not only from left to right but also from top to bottom and occasionaly from right to left. The people who designed BGII's combat log were aware of that and they made it easy for the player to scan the log verticaly until they find the character they are interested in, then quickly check if his attack is successfull, and lastly, if needed see the details of this attack. Basically, the combat log should be organized as a table, only without the cells. As much as possible of the text after the character name should be identical (look how lines for all characters in BGII start with "Attack Roll", that's not redundat, but it's there to make the row more easily identifiable when scanning the log) before the unique parts start (the calculations), with the rightmost part containing the summary (hit, graze or miss). The designer should think of the combat lig as of a mini version of the whole screen - the areas where attention is directed are the extreme left and the extreme right. Just as interface elements are usually placed in one of those corners, so should the important parts of a combat log roll be concentrated in those two sides of a row.

It's not a fair example, because the load game function is essential to the game, whereas a cheating button is not. One has no other uses except for cheating, whereas the other one has other uses. This is the same debate as the one about the combat xp -- if the xp I'd get for killing the enemies along the way is added to the quest xp, I don't really care (yes, I may not be able to level up in the middle of a quest, and this could make it a bit tougher, or a bit less easy, but I'm ok with that). I'd prefer if instead of giving XP opening locks and disarming traps was slowly increasing the Mechanics skill. I've always liked this logic of the ES system, which is maybe the only thing I liked about it.

Strange, for me it wasn't big enough, but fortunately it's adjustable. The main problem with the combat log right now is that it doesn't use space economically, much like the description window, and in the space it uses, it doesn't organize typography in an easy-to-read-"diagonally" way Add to that the wrong choice of colors and font, and there is almost nothing that works well with it. My post about it is up: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69603-what-does-the-combat-log-lack/ Stability issues made me decide to wait for the next version of the BB when it was still in 333, and I'm on Windows, so I know how you feel. At least you can be sure they'll fix this eventually, they can't release an unstable game for one of the big operating systems.

For the time I've been visiting the forums frequently, I haven't seen many opinions on the Combat Log being stated, but those I've seen have always been negative. I myself also find the Combat Log difficult to read, and thought I should look into what makes it inferior to the one used in Baldur's Gate II, which is my usual point of reference. So, like I did with the item description window, let's see both versions side by side (attached pictures). To keep this post as short as possible (it still got very long in the end), just assume that everything I've written in a declarative way is an opinion, so where it says "you should do that" read "I think you this would result in better experience for the majority of players". This includes my notes on colors - I am aware color preferences are a proverbially subjective thing. Just take these as my opinions on the question, and see how you feel about it yourself in case you hadn't given it thought by now. I'll try to offer motivation for most of my suggestions. 1. Padding for the whole box should be decreased. Text should start a little more to the left and top, and the rows should reach the bottom. Shaded edges at the top and bottom of the log window should be removed. Motivation: More optimal use of screen space. 2. Line height and font size should both be reduced by a couple of pixels. Motivation: More optimal use of screen space. 3. Characters' names' colors should move to a more pastel gamma instead of directly copying the color values of "major clothing", which I think is the source currently. Colors which are too close to the Combat Log's background color should be overridden in the Combat Log, and lighter versions should be used in the Combat Log. The color for hit/miss/graze messages can remain the light green which it is currently, but again, it should move to a more lighter, "pastel" gamma. Motivation: Currently the contrast is either too sharp or barely existing. The best example is the row "Conan hits Wood Beetle...", where you have dark color which barely contrasts against the background, immediately followed by a light and saturated green. This causes eyestrain and gives the player "the worst of both worlds": the dark-red/brown seems too dark, and the green seems like it drills into your eyes. Additionally, check out how the most colorful part in BGII's combat log are the characters' names. This is done for a reason: makes it easier for the viewer's eyes to jump from action to action. This is why I think the green in PoE whould have to become more muted if it even is to stay green. How about something like #d2ded2 if you want to keep the green? In any case, I think the main body of text (which is the hit/graze/miss information) shouldn't be more prominent by the characters' names, and this should be achieved by toning down the color of this text, which consists the majority of text in the Combat Log, and certainly not by additional "spicing up" of the characters' names' colors. 4. Players should be given an option to display detailed information about To Hit rolls inside the Combat Log, not just as a tooltip. Motivation: First, I consider the tooltip approach inconvenient for many reasons, the two most prominent being: 1) it covers other rows of the combat log; 2) It requires the player to move his mouse, aim and point at a row, which is an additional action required by the user in order to be able to see information which he/she considers important. If this remains the only means to access this information, it is slowly discouraging the user from using the function. Before you ask - yes, people are that lazy , and this is why we have UI designers, to provide for lazy people and predict where a lazy person would expect elements to be, and how elements would function. Otherwise we would have the software engineers do the UI designs. Second, the former being said, I'm all for players who have disabled the option of seeing To Hit rolls in their log still have access to the tooltips, so please don't remove the tooltips... ...(Third) but the option to display To Hit rolls within the feed of the Combat Log must be included, not only because it's less effort for a player who is interested in every To Hit roll, but also because of a side-effect it has. This side-effect is that this option arranges the typography graphically on the screen, making it much easier for the player to reach the line he/she needs and then stay on that line. Notice how I've enabled the showing of To Hit rolls in the BGII screenshot and how every "row" is actually two rows: one is the To Hit roll, and another for the effect. For the brain this is the same as having a thicker line which contains two thinner lines within itself. I think it's the work of genius. Notice how the words "Hit" and "Miss" are easy to discern because they are in the end of lines, and they stick out because of the colon surrounded by spaces? Hell, just by looking at this I think "they really did make better games back in the day!". This leads me to suggestion 5. 5. Economize horizontal space by revising the length of strings outputted in the Combat Log. The Combat Log should be a log, a feed, not a narrative. What I mean: compare the lines "BB Wizard grazes Wood Beetle for 2 piercing damage" with "Kagain did 9 damage to Ogre Mage". Not only is the latter shorter, but I find it's also syntactically easier to comprehend, a simpler sentence, to put it simply Do use as simple sentences as possible in the Combat Log. If you want to attach the information about the graze/hit, you are either already doing this in the tooltip (for players who have "Show To Hit rolls" disabled), or you have already shown it on the previous line (for those who have that option enabled). If you want to give the information for the type of damage (shock, pierce, slash, crush), you can give it with the first letter in brackets after the number. So this example would look something like this for me: "BB Wizard- Attack Roll 26 + (36 - 31 = 5) = 31 : Graze" "BB Wizard did 2(p) damage to Wood Beetle" Potentially after "Wood Beetle" you could the calculation for that 2 damage in such a way: : (10.8 - 3.5) - 9% = 6.7(p) If you need any more arguments about why this is the better approach, look again at the two compared screenshots: notice how there is a relatively straight line between character names and their actions in the BGII example, and how jagged the same lines is in the PoE example. I don't know if the designer who made the Combat Log has ever played IE games, but take it from me: jagged vertical lines in combat logs are a bad thing And I haven't selected these examples manipulatively, PoE's combat log will always look more disorganized than BGII's, for the reasons I pointed out, and also because the strings "grazes", "interrupted", "hits", "critically hits" have wildly varying lengths between them, and they are what follows immediately after the characters' names, preceding and messing up other strings which are mostly of uniform length. Remove those words from the log, or put them at the back, and the log immediately becomes easier to read. 6. Another advantage - by using this method, you should be able to reduce the instances in which Combat Log actions wrap to a second line. This happens too often for my liking right now, and the result is that it makes text harder to follow. 7. Please take some time to experiment with a different and more suitable font for the Combat Log. Take a lesson from BGII again: see how their font has less serifs, is thicker (that's important), and how the size of small letters is closer to the size of big letters. This is also part of what makes it more readable. Take a look at my example in 5. I made it bold for the same reason. 8. I don't think indentation is needed in the Message Log or in the Combat Log when a long message wraps to a new line. It only makes it more complicated for me, and contributes to even more wrapping to new lines because every line after the first is additionally shorter, in the already too short (by default) combat log. This is all I can think of for now. I'm very happy to know that QA people from Obsidian are scanning the forum, thank you for this, it motivates me, and I hope others to contribute and generally attempt to help you make a better game, which is really the point of the whole backer beta.

I hope I hope it does, but I thought I should give my input, just so if it doesn't I'll know I've raised the question. In a few hours I'll be rolling a thread about the combat/message log, which I think could be greatly improved.