Gairnulf

You're right. Back on topic, I tested Sensuki's "no engagement" mod with Medreth's gang today, and kiting was totally possible. I had my main character run in circles with one of the coweled men, while my fighter was beating Medreth. Unfortunately I couldn't finish the battle, because at some point they all became friendly (green circles) so my healing magic that the priest used on the fighter accidentally healed them too Sensuki is right that with the current AI, unless the player kites, enemies behave the same, but I'm sure the current AI is to see much improvements. I'm not sure if Sensuki's point isn't that engagement is meant as an easy way to avoid, or mostly avoid coding tactical movement for enemies (which didn't exist in the IE games either, as he also points out), but if that's what he means, I'm not sure if I can agree with his suspicion, because PoE features a number of ways to break engagement and I doubt the team doesn't plan to implement the use of any of these by the AI.

Hasn't updated for me yet. Hopefully at some point today.

Gaider glued it with his... eh, what's the point Apparently he was asked this question on the forums or in an interview and weaseled an answer about how the beheading was an in-game animation while for lore purposes she was stabbed and left for dead. Not that this makes any more sense, but what do you expect from a lead writer lazy enough to approve a story where the main suspect in assassinating the pope is collectively dragged by his apprehendors to the position of a leader of the efforts to restore order after the assassination with the main argument for this being the same that makes him/her suspicious in the first place (the mark on the hand)

I don't find it so. Then again, I've only played for a little under 3 hours. I can get back to you when I hit 15 hours or so, if you'd like. Of course, if you want to believe in it, you can believe in it and its story and setting will not seem all that plagiarized or bland, or unconvincing. If you are having fun with it, who cares what anyone thinks really? Life is too short to spend time worrying about people's opinions on the way you choose to have fun

It's bad if you have set your expectations for an RPG. If you don't mind an interactive movie with flashy effects, cheesy dialogue and a forced story, where you have a minor role in selecting which lines would characters say and which not (but the general course of events remains the same), that's basically what DA has turned into. Plus horrible controls if you are playing with mouse and keyboard. Honestly what keeps me going is the exploration and the curiosity about which way the minor turns of the story will go. And the beautiful sights of course. Producing your own items just to admire their different looks is also fun. The Character face creator is so detailed, I think with minor modifications it could be used by police forces for id-ing suspects. Speaking of which, I made a Vladimir Klitschko look-alike rogue. I have a hunch, for now at least, it may be confirmed or disproved as I play, that it's pretty apparent how different parts of the team making the game were in different state of preparedness for making such a huge game, where very little is left to the player's imagination. The writers' team for example, I think was not prepared and delivered very mediocre story and unmemorable characters. Then again, based on what I've seen from them, and read about their work in past games, maybe they don't actually know better. On the other hand the monsters design, level design and art deserves admiration. Evidently, it's much easier to develop a craftsman's skill than find creative talent. I suspect what they are planning to do in another couple of years is, increase the playable areas to encompass the whole continent, and then use it as the world setting for a DA MMO. If by that time they are still in business of course. Even if this happens, this setting is dead IMO, and MMOs are where fantasy settings go to die. That being said, I'm aware of the differences between our game and DA:I, so no need to go into comparative analysis. This is why I am making a very narrow and specific comparison: look at what happens when enemies are not locked to you or you to them, and combat is fast, and it's "real" realtime.

I'm very curious to try them out then. My feeling is that a slowed down combat and a more convenient to follow combat log will make combat easier to read for mostly anyone, even without the cooldown halos over characters' heads. I'd be curious to try a game without them, as I suspect they are confusing me more than they are helping me.

Which is the assumption that's retarded exactly, and how do you know what I have an understanding of and what I don't have an understanding of? To be honest man, looking for a personal twist doesn't add much weight to your arguments, rather the contrary. Ok, what do I need to do to play it without engagement? Not sure I actually got the meaning of that. Yeah, the games are very different, but once you're in combat and kiting is possible, I don't think it would be much different which of the games kiting applies to. If I'm not locked to the enemy somehow, this results in kiting tactics being possible, in any game.

Normally, I wouldn't comment on another game in PoE's forums, but since this is the backer beta discussion, where people have most likely already bought/backed PoE, I guess I'm not really promoting a competing game Which leads me to the question of whether or not DA:I is an RPG at all which, based on my experience with the game so far, I seriously doubt. I'm about 10 hours into DA:I and I think its combat is pretty much what would hapen to PoE without the engagement system. By the time I line up my rouge behind an enemy, in order to get a flanking damage bonus, that enemy has preformed some animation and is either somewhere else, or turned in another direction. I've been cursing like a docker at this for the pas few hours. This had been avoided in the IE games by implementing cooldown timers which affected movement commands as well - once you've moved in and preformed some action you couldn't move out until a few seconds have passed. In PoE though, as well as in DA:I, issuing a move command means it's preformed immediately, cancelling actions, just as long as you're not knocked down, frozen, etc, in which case you have to wait for the effect to wear off. And in case you're wondering if Parthian tactics or kiting is a thing in DA:I, that's basically how I closed a rift guarded by about twice the amount of enemies my party's level would allow, and this while playing on hard difficulty. Attract one Lesser shade (lvl 11) away from the group, kill it, attract the next, etc. Lesser horrors I had to kill two by two, because they can teleport next to me as soon as they see me but that was about the only thing that didn't go exactly to plan. I wouldn't want enemies who can disengage at will without consequences in PoE. And I don't even want to start about what kind of fad Bioware pulled off, lying to PC players that PC DA:I would be adapted for mouse and keyboard. It's the exact opposite and battles are barely playable due to controls, even before we get to their dumbed down mechanics. So, beware of Bioware.

Don't get your hopes up too soon, they only said "we are shooting for Wednesday"

I'm sorry, but if the thing that makes someone not buy the game (or, on the other hand, TO buy the game) is whether or not it has moving immaculately-hand-crafted backgrounds or just static ones, I don't think they should be playing this game. That's kind of like saying "If the football players on the field all wear neon green jerseys, that'll get rid of a lot of people who don't like neon green."No one's gonna say "Wait, they put environment animations in? Well, I wasn't interested in that game at all, but NOW I'M STOKED! 8D!" Yeah, the argument's logic reminds me of "If I can't play poly-quasi-demi-backflip-sexual firedwarf, then I won't buy this game because I wouldn't be able to identify with my character".

Posing your question, what was the game impact, to myself, I find myself answering that for me Carry Weight was a limitation of a good kind, the kind that involves trading off one benefit for another. When my inventory is limited, I have better knowledge of ot because I can choose what to carry. At a relatively early point in BG for example, I stopped collecting studded leather armor and short bows from dead enemies, because they were cheap items and took up valuable slots. In PoE on the other hand, I don't have a limitation to my inventory space, so I can behave like a vacuum cleaner, which I find immersion-breaking. That's unless I establish house rules, which would still only affect the number of carried items, not their weight, because there is no weight property to speak of, plate armors and daggers weigh the same on Eora apparently. In the IE games, inventory slots were in effect empty space which you can monetize, and the goal is to monetize it optimally, by managing the inventory. That's being removed from PoE, and the inventory essentially becomes an equivalent of a Black hole. I don't see the fun in that, the challenge that was there is gone.

Although I like the idea, it carries balancing problems, for example, imagine how much more important would interrupts become if ypu can cancel 2/3rds of an attacks's damage. Also, if you are going for equal chance to interrupt every weapon's melee attack, then you'd need micro-animations for the now broken down "old" normal attacks which would all have to be of equal length. Also, you'd ideally need to arrange the order in which the micro attacks animations play so that all weapons have a shorter animation play before a longer one, etc, to put them on equal terms regarding interruption chance. And I don't even want to think how would all of this reflect in the combat log...

The more you wait the more expensive beta access becomes, in terms of value per day remaining until the game's release.

I could argue against this example, the start button and start bar were never removed, they just werent't the default serting. And having the Metro start screen instead of the start menu has its benefits, with very little in terms of drawbacks, once you get past the initial shock. Control schemes are not subject to fashion, because they the selves are a solution to a problem - provide the most efficient interface for the kind of gameplay you are offering. Control schemes should change with optimization, not fashion in mind. Having convenient and intuitive controls will always be in fashion. Also, are you sure that right click to move is a habit from "nowadays"? I think it dates back to at least Warcraft I Solid HUD, my thoughts, and words in other threads, exactly. And I should add, solid HUDs are good not only for preventing you from clicking in the space between elements, if it was just that, they could have solved it by having a solid HUD but with a transparent background. What I like about the solid HUD is that it establishes a clear boundary, between the part of the screen where the gameplay takes place, and the part of the screen where your tools/controls are. I don't gain much from having a few hundreds of square pixels more to see, but I gain much when my gameplay part of the screen has a simple and clear rectangular shape. This is great news IMO. Can you get me a source for it?

I decided the same, due to memory leaks crashing my game after advancing a little. I know I could still play at being QA, but that would feel like work, and I prefer to be paid for work, not pay in order to do work

I think what you are descirbing was first seen in Diablo's inventory, or Arcanum's for a more recent example. What struck me was when I read somewhere a developer actually admitting that they included personal inventories just to satisfy people who "wanted to have a feeling" their characters have personal inventories. Wtf, I wouldn't expect our intelligence to be underestimated in such a way, not from developers whose work on this project actually started with the backing by the same people who are now being "appeased". I mean, they should know their backers better than that. The problem apparently comes from the attempt to please both crowds who want mutually exclusive things.

You are making an impression on people. Don't pretend you don't like the publicity though

That was what I thought too, until I tested that belief The best way to understand how it works is to start up a game and look at combat carefully, or just watch a video and pause it often enough. You'll see that both enemy and party npcs execute actions asynchronously and the interval between actions is less than 6 seconds. Definetly no "fuses lit at the same time". Try selecting your party and ordering them to attack a creature. You will see they will all pause for about a second (needed for the pathfinding system to calculate the path to the target) and they will rush at the target (if melee characters) with one character beginning his animation before the other. I think animations are deliberately started at different times, so that your party doesn't look like a selected and collectovely ordered batch of Age of Empires soldiers for example. At the very least, the console should give you a hint that party members' actions occur in sequence. You can't have Khalid and Minsc preform hits at exactly the same time. There will always be a difference and the combat log will display one action after the other. It's ironic how long we have been playing the IE games without noticing such things. I also thought IE games' battles were based on 6 second "turns" until recently. In PoE on the other hand, actions begin immediately after the order is issued, and what causes desynchronisation between characters' melee attacks is the need for them to gang up on the enemy from different sides, so that they are all in melee range, and the fact that since two charcters can't occupy the same coordinates, one character will always have a little longer to travel if both are sent simultaneously to attack an enemy who resides in a third set of coordinates. This is what doesn't permit them to attack virtually simultaneously. Try this experiment in the beta: line up two archer party members so that they both have the same Medreth gang member within range and order them to attack. See if their animations won't play virtually simultaneously. Then try a similiar thing in an IE game. Or, with melee characters, put two or more characters around a neutral npc so that they are both/all in melee range, and then force-attack the npc. The synchronisation you'll see in PoE will be much better than in the IE game.

All the things you list would be remedied exactly in the way I propose. It's an information problem, slowing down the information flow would make it easier to cope with in realtime for the user/player. Ability timings are asynchronous in the IE games as well, they are just occuring at greater intervals and there are, in the IE games, more missed hits, and less spells and "pseudo-spells" (talents) being cast. This gives the illusion of things being slower paced (it is less frequent that something happens that attracts the player's attention), and more synchronized. In fact in the IE games during combat, 90% of the time a character is either hitting with a weapon (preforming the animation at least, whether he hits or no is another matter), or casting a spell, or moving. To prove what I'm saying, compare how often you pause during combat with a low level party in BG and with a higher level party in BGII - you will discover that the lower your THAC0, and the greater your (and the enemies') chance to score a hit, the more often you need to pause in order to keep up with the information flow. This is what is taken to an extreme in PoE, because the animations are too fast, and cooldowns are too short. I'm not much of a mathematician, but the shorter the interval between actions, the less mutually synchronized they appear, because per second, you see more unsynchronized actions, and the ratio between synchronized and unsynchronized is strongly in favor of desynchronized. Increase the cooldown times twofold, and suddenly this ratio will change, you will have less frequent action animations, but the differences in seconds between them will be shorter, because the "animation time-to-cooldown time" ratio is changed. This is how the IE games' illusion of synchronized actions will return.

On the topic, I think combat can be improved by "inflating" the casting/action preform times, under which I understand simultaneously increasing animation length (or if your prefer - decreasing animation speed) and increasing the 2/3 seconds for action preforming/casting, with both these increases being done in the same proportion, hence the "inflation". This will increase the pauses between various characters performing actions during a fight, and would make "combat speed" look very similiar to the IE games, the player will no longer suffer from information overflow during a battle, and the need to pause constantly will not be so acute. I'm sure the developers are already aware of what's wrong and we'll see improvements in the next beta build which should hopefully arrive on Wednesday or at the end of the week.

I don't expect it will be mandatory to watch I'm just thinking it will help sales and give fans a chance for a more direct contact with developers.

I'm afraid I do not have any helpful insight to give you. Thing is, I'm one of those weirdos that use the mouse as little as possible, because laziness. I use keys from 1 to 6 to select party members, use arrows (soon wasd) to move the screen and use spells shortcuts as much as possible (by the way, is it possible to select and navigate I - II - III spells with the keyboard?). So my cursor is always at the center of the screen, mostly selecting a unit to attack or talk to. Thus I do not care where or how far the hero spells, hero portraits, and general buttons are. I was already doing that in BG1. What I can only say about the HUD UI is that I like the old school skeuomorphism. I would not complain if they went more in that direction as I am not a big fan of the very thin window borders that look weird especially when the window content contains wood or parchment. PS: it would also be nice to have bigger icons in general. I'm a skeuomorphism fan as well. Talking about window borders, I think it looks really unneeded how the combat log's borders light up on hover. Wood doesn't light up when I hover my hand over it (unless I'm a Fallout ghoul), so why should the interface. How do you find the combat log btw?

That's nice, but I meant a rap battle as in a couple of guys exchanging insults. Monkey Island had this too actually.

Gotta love it when the guys who are to be moderating a forum take part in rap battles. Oh well...

I know what you mean, I'm replaying BG and I find myself clicking with the right sometimes. Don't worry, enough playig hours and the habit will return. There are other things worrying me inthe UX and I'm afraid they may not be recognized by enough people until after the game ships.