Gairnulf

You guys are more patient than me. I have 7 hours in the game and turned the music off at no more than the 3rd hour but that was only because of the battle music. It's distracting me, I don't know really why. The rest of the music is top notch so far, and I say this as someone who is quite specific about thematic and historically correct music, up to the point that I've researched playlists of original period music for playing different states and during different time periods in Europa Universalis IV On the other hand, I could listen to this during battle at least one day before I get fed up (I know because I have): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CVVSJKod-I

I've been replaying BGTutu through the past month but had dropped it until today. I checked how the combat works now, interesting how I've played this since 2000 (I started from BG2) and haven't paid attention to this specific thing. From what I observed, sometimes two of my characters swing simultaneously, other times it's like they wait for each other, but I guess the latter is an illusion. However I don't think I saw my characters swing simultaneously with an enemy. Actually what you mention about recovery time is another major difference between PoE and BG - in BG there is no recovery time, is there? Also, agreed on the combat log not being very conveniently positioned - there was a reason BG's combat log was in the center - the player's sight is mostly in the center of the screen because that's where his characters usually are during combat, and having the combat to the right of the action doesn't make as much sense as having it directly under where the action takes place. Ok, what I call animation speed is the amount of time it takes for a character to swing, or to fire their weapon, or to move from point A to point B. My definition of user interface is pretty much the same - the instruments for inputting information into a system by its user and the instruments that display the outputs. In the context of a game like ours, I mean all that's displayed on the screen during playing and is reactive to user input. So basically we mean the same thing. The reason I count a change in character animations' speed as a change to the UI is because it doesn't affect the rules, just the speed at which the player receives output. Reducing walking and action speed means that both player and AIs execute their actions slower, which gives the user enough time to understand what's happening and what's about to happen. In my view this doesn't impact combat itself, just makes it easier for the player to read what's happening in the game (hence the categorization as interface change). I hope it's more clear now

Can't wait to see the new build! I was thinking to start a thread to ask this, but I guess it's better to do it here - in what aspect of the game would you prefer to point volunteering betatesters? What part of the game should I concentrate on testing, to be of most help to you?

I had numerous problems with characters trying to find their distance from a beetle in order to attack it around these stones. Pathfinding problems of the "taking the long way" kind.

I encountered it too. The Sitting Boar.

You forget that movement was completely real time. Also no, it's not misleading to call it RtwP since things happened in real time rather than turns. Rounds are NOT turns. In turn based system each unit has it's own segment of action; while RtwP games like the IE games everyone moved/acted at the same time. I watched a short video of combat and you're right. So it's real-time within the confines of a six-second round, meaning the turns are displayed simultaneously, but you can't preform more than one action in a round unless you have more than one attack per round, and as for movement, there is a set distance you can traverse per round. I was wrong in my wording but I think there is no problem with the differentiation I'm making, right? Even in the so-called real-time within a round, characters' actions are calculated in succession, determined by initiative rolls, per the AD&D rules. Otherwise, how would we resolve a conflict where two characters hit each other 'simultaneously' and one of them has to be killed, but the other one has to take damage. I think this goes back to the programmers' rule of thumb that there is no such thing as real time, ever It's just the processor switching between tasks very fast.

How so? I consider animation speeds to be just animation speeds, unrelated to the game's rules/game mechanics. If they are scaled across the board it's not a change to the rules/game mechanics (I use those two terms interchangeably, don't know if that's correct but bear with me), but a change in the speed with which the player receives visual feedback from the screen, that's why I count it as a UI change. You are welcome to prove me wrong in my reasoning. No need to get emotional. I'm not sure what you mean under "real-time with pause", "half-real time" and "take responsibility". I guess we understand different things under "mechanics improvements". As I've explained I consider changing animation speeds to be a UI change. Now these changes count as rules/game mechanics changes for me. I'm sure there is what to suggest here, but I haven't enough experience with the game to propose anything conrete, as I can see you aren't doing either.

I was of the exact same opinion before trying out the game for a few hours and getting the impression it's still playable, albeit without BG style rounds. I would be the last to say BG's round system was bad, on the contrary, it made combat very cohesive and easy to follow. Combined with the little pendulum clock for the rounds and the combat log, it is probably the most convenient realtime/turn-based compromise I have seen. However, I'm trying to put myself in the dev's shoes and imagine scrapping the current system, then introducing the BG style rounds system, in terms of hours of work lost, and new hours of work spent, because this is inevitably a factor. In fact, the two things we are comparing are not that different from each other - just imagine BG with rounds that last a 10th of a second instead of lasting 6 seconds. This is what we have right now If you look at how talent/spell effects are wearing off, it's shown in 10th-of-a-second steps. BTW just before writing this, I encountered an effect which I'm not sure a bug or not, but got me petrified (clicked on a trapped container) with the effect duration counter going up instead of down and shown in a 0.1234s style. That's including milliseconds which IMO is insane This kind of contradicts the previous paragraph, but I thought of it later: The chief difference between IE games' "real time with pause" and PoE's "real time with pause" is pointed out by Sensuki here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69192-poll-should-the-invisible-combat-round-of-ie-games-return/?do=findComment&comment=1530109 In light of this explanation, I think it's a bit misleading to call IE's system "real time with pause" in fact. I wouldn't count out the possibility that the term was used more or less as a marketing trick to attract audience which considers pure turn-based to be too dull and static. The "real-time" part of the IE games' system is contained in the automatic progression of turns and default actions being chosen by the AI if the player has not taken any action when it was one of his characters' turn, in order to keep the illusion of "real-time". It's basically that in the IE games all characters' actions (player controlled and enemy) were queued one after another, and each took their "turn" in what was actually pseudo-realtime. In PoE instead of one queue for all characters, each character has his own queue of actions, independent of the others. The overall feeling of complexity comes more from this fact, than from the animations'/cooldowns' speeds as such being too high. I wish we could have a developer explain this difference better. I think separate queues are more fun (personal opinion) because separate queues provide for an innumerably larger possible branches of actions that the characters can take, and directions in which the battle can go. In other (more nerdy) words, separate queues increase uncertainty in battle in a good way. The current combat speed and the chaos it causes unless you pause very strongly reminds me of Arcanum's "real-time" system, with the exceptions that 1) you couldn't pause in Arcanum's real time combat, and 2) you could switch to "turn based" or to "fast turn based" from the options and put a stop to the insanity Actually once I got very fast firing weapons, I switched to real-time and abused my huge line of sight (due to my high Perception) by force-attacking enemies from afar and killing them with my fast-firing weapon before they could close in. It was kind of open to abuse that way. With Tim Cain being lead programmer on PoE I guess it's no surprise it reminds me of Arcanum

I'll try to keep this as brief as possible, and if I seem to go into too much details at times, it is because I have the maybe-too-ambitious goal to help the developers not just with suggestions for a current problem, but to propose them a better general approach to a more abstract problem. Ok, with that said, my main argument is that the problems we are all having with combat right now (v333) are due not to deficiencies in the game mechanics/ruleset, but to deficiencies in the User Interface. PoE is to use a "real time with pause" system for combat1. The main problem with this system is the risk to overload the player with information2, which breaks his Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action loop and prevents him from choosing the optimum set of actions for his current situation. Time pressure isn't an intended feature of the combat mechanics of the game3. Currently this is exactly what happens, the player is overloaded with information when playing out battles in realtime, which practically forces him to use the Slow time feature (press the S button at any time to toggle it on/off), and to pause the game manually at regular intervals and/or to use the autopause options. The problem I see (there may be more) with this playing style being forced onto the player (because of a UI deficiency), is that while it makes combat playable, the player receives only a piecemeal experience of it, and misses out the dynamics and the emotional impact provided by the beautiful graphics and by the sound effects4. I see two main changes that could be made to remedy this problem (with the piecemeal experience of combat), and they are basically pointed at preventing the information overload, thus restoring a functioning OODA loop with a humanly-feasable realtime combat speed. Firstly, I propose that the animation speeds are cut to about half when in combat, how much precisely is a matter of trial and error, with the resulting about x2 increase in action cooldown periods across the board, for all weapons, spells and talents5. Second, the current halos above character heads provide a sort of a meter for the action cooldown of characters (the little horizontal lines), but I'm pretty sure these meters, although identical across characters, don't progress with the same speed for each character. This radically reduces their usability while the player is in paused mode, because he can't get an idea of how fast the lines are shortening for everyone. And if he unpauses in order to get an idea of who will be the next character to initiate action, it often may be too late for him to react. Additionally, trying to visually compare the length of lines is inconvenient, even if they were moving with the same speed. The solution here is simply to provide a form of unambiguous visual feedback of which will be the next character who will be able to take action. This would give us a combat system which we may call "desynchronised turn-based" Off the top of my head, there are three ways in which this may happen. First, make all the cooldown indicators grow shorter with the same amount per second, but increase the on-screen length of the indicators. Then getting a hint of which character's "turn" would come first would be as simple as finding out who has the shortest line. Alternatively, you can make it so that when in paused mode, the section of the cooldown indicator that will shorten will blink. Then when paused, the player will check which of the characters has all his remaining cooldown indicator blinking, and know that this is the character who will next be able to preform an action. The third approach is I think the best - simply have the game make the calculation for the player and write the order somewhere in the halo. I've provided a modified screenshot illustrating that. One problem that always exists with this solution is that if one of the AI characters, or the player suddenly decides to change the action he was about to take when his turn comes, this may require a re-calculation of the whole queue and changing the numbers accordingly, which the player still has to keep an eye out for. A more radical solution to the problem would have been to provide all the information needed by the player, for any hovered character, in the center bottom of the screen instead of in a halo, doing away with the frankly redundant set of buttons there. I may make the argument for such a change in a future post6. Thank you and let me know what you think. ___________ 1 - Personally, I would have preferred a full turn-based system, but I guess it's unrealistic to ask for such a change at this point as this would require reworking much of the combat part of the ruleset, introducing action points in some form, etc. 2 - In Information Theory they would call this "Denial of information through oversaturation of the channel", but I won't go into that here. 3 - After all, the audience's expectations are for an IE games successor, not a Diablo clone 4 - In my opinion this way much of the artists' and designers' work's effect is lost, and this emotional impact is one of the main goals of a game designer - I'm oversimplifying, but you generally prefer people to associate playing your game with tense tactical combat, not with spending 90% of their time in combat in paused mode, sifting through spells and talents and squinting at the action cooldown indicators (the little horizontal lines). 5 - Unrelated to combat, I think the default animation for characters should be walking, not running, as in BG/IWD. Movement speed of the characters on screen should then be slightly adjusted if needed, but I think it's about right as it is. I also join in Sensuki's request that movement animations be desynchronized to prevent the party look like marching soldiers. 6 - I've worked as a QA on software with a halo-based UI though, so I may be biased here, but my impression was that a UI relying on halos has something inherently wrong and providing sufficient information without cluttering the screen is an unwinnable fight.

Yeah in v301 they made it way easier. I personally preferred the difficulty level in v278 to v301 and v333, although none are perfect, and each difficulty level had OP stuff - Poison, Deep Wounds, Petrify, that Cystal Shard thing etcThe main thing is that they balance spells, talents, weapons etc. and that the interface is refined, so that the difficulty in combat comes from the enemies's tactics and AI vs the player's tactics and intelligence, and not from having to deal with poor interface design decisions. Once thathas been achieved, anyone can set the difficulty for themselves.

I killed off Medreth's gang today, from my second attempt ever. Playing on Normal difficulty, my character is a human rogue (meadowlands I think the culture's name was), dual wielding daggers. I ganged up on Medreth first, then let the Fighter keep the monk, ranger and the third thug engaged, while I was using the BB Rogue and my own character to kill the Boar (which I realize was a mistake) with the wizard and priest flinging offensive spells and buffs. Eventually I lost the BB Rogue and the BB Priest had to get into the melee as a result. By that time there was just one of the BB Fighter's dance partners left, along with the woman with the arquebus who was shooting at my PC. So I finished her off with the PC and mage, and then everyone ganged up on the last remaining thug. I hadn't yet watched any of Sensuki's videos so it didn't occur to me to use any of the tactics and tricks he shows there. I went with my habits dating from BG - kill the most advanced enemy first, and from DAO - put emphasis on rogues's sneak attacks while the tank tries to tie down as many enemies as possible. I've since cleared the woods before going back to the village to rest my party in the inn, and have the ruined statue and the cave dungeon left to explore. Strange, that contrary to what people say I find it easier to play v. 333. It's not like I have much experience, I only made two attempts at the beetles in v278 and hadn't played since. I use the slow time feature a lot though, and during the battle with Medreth the combat log was great help for explaining what's going on in the whole chaos. I came up with an idea of how to make combat easier to control without drastic changes to the combat system, just to the UI, but I'll explain that at length tomorrow.

This is the the tone and the level of verbosity I expected at the beginning. Thanks a lot for that. From a sincere fan and a backer. I'm writing from mobile, so it's a bit hard for me to go back and check who it was, but somebody quoted me with the argument that I don't know what I should expect from a betatest release. To explain them what I expect in broad terms - I expect to encounter issues that require a beta-test in order to be discovered. As a beta tester, I expect to be sent to look for the unknown unknows, whether that be done at a feature-level ("try all types of weapon and shield combination that you can, so we can see if something breaks") or at a higher level ("just go through this portion of the game in as many different ways you can come up with"). That is the kind of question I would expect the developers would need my help answering, and when I am instead supposed to report glaring bugs, like when the build is full of memory leaks, or when the combat mechanics are barely useable, I start to feel confused as to what have I been given. Is it a 'beta', is it an early alpha build, and what am I even supposed to do with it? Why was it given to me, do they really need me to tell them things this obvious? What I tested in early october was too unfinished to be called a beta in my opinion. I'll check out the latest build, but looking at the list of known issues, I'm still not very enthusiastic. Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me to see a third delay, past 'early 2015'. Lastly, I can't help but wonder at the reasoning applied by people who take the effort to inform us of their joy of the fact the game is delayed, qualifying it as 'good news' and whatnot. What exactly is 'good news'? That the developer's timeline has proven to be inaccurate? That that's happened for a second time? That development costs are turning out to be higher? Do you think the developer would want these former facts to be true? Do you think the developer is very happy over them? By this counter-logic, the more times the game is being delayed, the happier we should get, up to a point where we don't actually need the game, and we are getting all the fun from its being delayed. This makes no sense to me. Not my business of course, not like I'm asking for an answer, just wondering at how can someone be happy by something not going to plan and pretending that in this happyness they are expressing their support. My own support is there, in the money I paid, in the time I'll put in testing the beta build, if I consider it worth my time testing, because mind you, the ability for testing is something we've paid for with money, regardless of whether or not we'll pay with the invested time to use that ability. And criticism. That's support as well. I would think these things are objectivelly more valuable support than declaring how happy someone is over not getting what they expected.

Thanks, and I believe your decision was right. Trying to rephrase my argument less emotionally - I think postponing for a second time is an obvious indicator that something itsn't going as planned. I (personally) would have felt more reassured from an announcement that admitted this, and this one's wording gave me a feeling of insincerity. I'm not saying anything groundbraking when I remind you that the game will be held up to very high standards, and there is no way a player should be looking at something, be that in early 2015 or later, and thinking "How come they didn't notice that?!". I'll be very interested in trying out later versions of the beta. For me at least, the one we currently have is at a too early stage and I gave up trying to play it after 2-3 hours or so.

I am glad of the fact the game is being delayed. I am very unhappy of the fact that my suspicions about the state of the game, based on what I saw in the beta, were correct. I feel sorry I spent the extra money on the beta access in the first place. The lesson I take is to be more confident about the accuracy of my first impressions. I suspect they have made the decision about the new delay first and foremost as a result of the disappointed reactions that came from the beta in the state in which it was released. I assume this pushed them to the conclusion that simply polishing the beta won't suffice, and I dread to think all they plan to do up to release is plug the holes in the beta and nothing more. Personally, I find the official announcement's wording unsettling and lacking confidence. My read is as follows: (Reiterate the company line we've already said in every possible interview and presentation, we fear they might start losing confidence after we announce a second delay, after we claimed we were releasing it this year after our first delay) (We gave them the beta to test their reaction - hmm, apparently no way to release the game in this state without them noticing. Oh man I hope we didn't set too high expectations for this...) (We are behind schedule with a part of the development cycle that's obligatory - testing and bugfixing, but let's look for the regular cliche where we promise them that our catching up to "Gold" state will give them more than they would have gotten from a release made at "Gold" state.) (We need to communicate that the game we will release will be better than we had originally planned, thanks to the delay, and that's why we're taking the extra time - certainly not because we're behind schedule, no way) I may be too pessimistic here. I sure hope I turn out to have been such.

I share Zekul's preference for less involved fights most of the time with a few tougher ones here and there, and KaineParker's opinion the game currently overloads you with information. I also think that no matter what you call the battle system, information must be managed properly, otherwise the task becomes hard inan artificial way, i.e. not because it requires analysis and an inventive approach tomsolving a problem, but because you struggle to cope with all the informarion that's being poured onto you. With a rounds-based system like in the IE games, all you needed to concentrate your attention on was the character whose turn it is. In rhe BB of PoE (I emphasize it's the BB because I see this as a problem with the beta that should bensolved in the final release) you have to monitor the "cooldown period" of your six characters plus however many enemies you are fighting. I think this is simply impractical. Not a challenging game, but an inconveniently designed fighhting system.

Cool analogy. But yeah, it's Arcanum all over again. Only in Arcanum you had two types of optional turn-based systems, and here it's slamming the spacebar. I liked the options for autopause we had in BGII, and I think not all of them have been replicated here. If they would be, I think we could have a real pseudo-turn based mode.

Hello, community I think it's customary for new forum members to start a thread to introduce themselves. I'm a 30 y.o. guy, who has played IE games since Baldur's Gate II, then backtracked to BGI, and got a bit of experience with Icewind Dale. I anticipated NwN, and was mostly disappointed by it, enjoyed Arcanum enormously, and stood in awe of Fallout 2 when I discovered it for myself, about 10 years after it had been released. Needless to say, the mentioned games have been central points in developing my perception of what constitutes a good cRPG game, so when I recently heard about PoE (it's funny how it coincides with passcode from "Dr. Strangelove"), conceived by people who had worked on all those games that had had such an impact on me, I knew I had to take part in this. It's lucky that Kickstarter allows the playerbase to feel so much more involved in a the making of a favourite game, and of making a game a favourite game, than the regular means of distribution can allow them to feel. I'm proud to say I'm a backer, and an optimist about the franchise's development. I've played the beta for only a couple of hours, but I'll share my impressions in a separate thread. This is just to say hi, and I'm happy to be here, and especially to be around the developers of the games I spent much of my teenage years with Back then, communication with developers wasn't as easy as it is nowadays.