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Waterd

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Everything posted by Waterd

  1. Why get good at multitasking when i can just pause several times per second? the moment you claim that you can replace pauses with skill is the moment you accept pausing every fraction of a second is useful. Wether I made a suboptimal choice the last time or was an optimal choice the moment i issued the order, but not 3 seconds later (but didn´t realize of that until 0.5 seconds ago), doesn´t change the fact that pausing the game didn´t give me an advantage. I agree with you there!. I would claim some ¨questionable¨ rpgs do it though, Battle for wesnoth and Fire emblem, I would say. In the world of tabletop RPG many do, Mansion of madness, mice and mystics and Descent, to name a few. Again, I thought Pillars of eternity would be like another CRPG, but again, if you see the first post, several comments of sawyer make me thinks his intention is different. Again I may be wrong, and then my point is moot. But if i´m wrong why he cares about balancing options so much? why restrict rest to difficulty? the only answer I can think off is that he wants to make such a game.
  2. It doesn´t mattter how often people pause, what matters is much is optimal for people to pause. IWD2 is not a challenging game but for different reasons Kiting almost op all melee opponents are almost a joke, because of it. , and even there you have infinite rests, which makes casters op since you can prebuff /presummon with half your spells for it and the other half to blast everything with the highest level spells, making 95% trivial. Summons are so OP that basically have an inbuilt taunt and don´t bring HOF because HOF only makes the game take longer to do things, but you must essentially use the EXACT same tactics than without hof. Sorry if i dont believe your promise, I played IWD2 enough to know and watched enough videos of people playing and talked with enough people to know. If you are denying this i don´t have much to talk, despite the 6 second per round. Once you have 6 characters and several summons, what´s relevant its by how many seconds the state of the game change. Since every change of state of the game may mean that you should change your characters actions, the action of any character allied or enemy means that is optimal to reanalyze the situation, since that is so, the best way to do it is to pause. That leads to an optimal pause of everytime somebody acts, since there is going to be at least 2 or 3 characters that act in that second, is optimal to pause every 0.3/0.5 second.
  3. I agree, there is a cap on how often pausing improves performance. The point i make is that in these systems in general (And for what i saw of beta videos of combat), that point is at around 0.3/0.5 seconds of action per pause. Well if we base that in Icewind dale 2 for example, I would say that Yes, pausing that often is useful.
  4. A game is a system of rules with a goal, which have challenges, where a toy is an object we can play and experiment, have no inherent goals, or challenges, despite the player can make their won there is nothing wrong with either designing a game or toy. I just want to be clear what is the design goal of PoE. If it´s a game, then RTwP as implemented now , i think it´s bad design because most people will find it unfun. if its a toy, RTwP is ok. Sawyer design comments make me think he want to design a game. If he wants to design a toy, that is all fine ,and my mistake, it would be good to know so i can move on. I´m not interested in a Toy, im not saying there is anything inherently wrong with it. Yeah, do not bother, because it´s irrelevant.
  5. Using real life free time as a ingame resource is an idea that if proposed in game design would be laughable. Imagine that when you sit playing starcraft you start with a number of minerals equal to the total amount of your real life wealth, or when you play Counterstrike your total health is equal to your fitness determined by how tired you are in real life. Or in the game the number of times you can rest is equal to the number of candy you have in a jar, and you have to eat a candy every time you rest. Not only those numbers are ridiculously high and will probably make the game broken in many senses, the idea of using a subjective real life resources as a ingame resource to determine the resources available to solve the problem is just a terrible design idea. In great part because now the designer is unaware about the resources available for the problem and thus his ability to design the problem get nullified. Are you really proposing add a real life resource to be used as one of the resources available to solve the problem?
  6. To be more clear, RtwP is probably still a game, my comment is that it would be unfun. I said it becomes a toy the moment you use the mentality described by matt ¨just don´t do unfun things¨ Then it becomes a toy, IF the designer , designs the system with that mentality THEN it becomes just the designing of a toy. RTwP isn´t , by default a toy, it can, as I say well be a game. Just as currently designed, a terrible unfun game, since I think it´s annoying to pause 2 to 3 times per second.
  7. To me a game to be played is a problem to be solved. That is what is fun about games, having said that i like theme and story in my games, despite i can enjoy poker or chess just fine.
  8. You correctly post what i said How from that you conclude that im stating the difference between RTwP and TB is from a toy to a game, i have no idea. That would be true if pausing would be a limited resource, since it´s not, you can pause every one tenth of a second (or whatever is physically possible to do) and would not change anything. Well I want to know people that find fun pausing 3 times per second, but ok.
  9. I never stated that the difference between RTwP and TB is that of a toy vs game. I don´t know where you get that, I wont even answer the rest of the post since it´s just a strawman.
  10. The fact that you are willing to play suboptimal because it´s unfun to do otherwise, is ok, and may be that is the standard, however that is irrelevant to the point. There are a significant part of the population that will only try to play optimally. The fact that they are putting restrictions to resting seems to be acknowledging that part of the population. The moment you accept players will not do unfun things and thus is ok to let optimal play be unfun, is the moment where you have no reason to design a game. Why create rests limit? if people are resting too much and causing unfun gameplay they can rest less. Why balance spells? the moment a player is finding an op spell, he should use it less. Everytime the player finds something that reduces the fun of his experience, he should do it less or avoid it. The problem with that mentality is that the job of the designer is nullified and now the designer is presenting you a toy in which you make the rules. Clearly many RPG players have been ok for that for a long time. And this mentality has been creeping into single player video games. Strangely enough has been mostly eliminated in the last years from board games, how both have gone different directions is interesting. Multiplayer video games that tried this mentallity failed catastrophically of course, the fact that some designers even tried it´s just sad. Now, what im saying, is that´s ok to create toys, to design toys, systems without rules where the uses are expected to create it´s own rules. But some people do not want toys, want Games, we want the rules carefully designed for a player that will do whatever is needed, inside the created system of rules, to accomplish the goal. Now is the job of the designer to construct the best system of rules, in which players trying to optimize their play will have the most fun. That is the job of a good GAME designer. Designers of multiplayer games know this very well, since board games are mostly inherently multiplayer, they also mostly understand this concept. However it seems singleplayer video game designers, are slowly getting into the habit of designing systems of rules that can´t hold being fun once the player try to play optimally. Again, if Pillar of eternity intends to be a toy, and not a game, thus not a carefully designed system of rules where players try to optimize their play towards a goal. That is fine, i will just walk away. The reason, as I said i got interested in the game, was that Ive been reading sawyer, and it seems that he wants to create a game this time. It would be enough to read from him that Im wrong on that regard. If he really wants to design a game this time, I wonder how he intends to address this topic. If his answer is ¨oh if it´s not fun just don´t do it¨ then clearly I was wrong with the intended design goal of pillars of eternity and just just walk away.
  11. Since Time is not a limited resource in the game, I don´t see how is not optimal, you may be ¨wasting time¨ but wasting a not limited resource do not change the value of a move. Thus it doesn´t change if the move is optimal or not.
  12. Clearly I don´t write the post for people that do not read the thread to reply, plz if you are not willing to read the posts and do questions that are already answered in the posts, do not reply
  13. Well that´s why I ignored pillars of eternity until recently. Because IE games don´t try to be that. However Sawyer comments have made me thing that he actually want to attract players that look for that kind of experience. The new resting system is key, but he is talking about how he wants to make decisions relevant and important. All that talking about decisions, and the resting system makes me think he wants to cater to this kind of public too. You can have both btw, thats why you add options and sliders and what not. For example just an idea of the top of my head, you could design a mode where, you can´t pause in combat, but it pauses auto at the beginning and everytime a character is ready, but you can only assign orders to that character.
  14. No there isn´t a difference. Using outside software or tools, is clearly outside the scope of the game, as it would be hacking the game, or playing a fighting game and punching the guy in the face. However in this case PAUSING is an INGAME action, supported and expected by the software and not just a convenience tool (like it would be save/load or pausing in some real time games) Even in competitive turn based games like magic the gathering, poker and chess, using outside software is considered cheating and will get you banned if detected. Having said that, one problem that have most single player turn based games is the lack of time limit to do your move, which means yes, you have to arbitrary set the amount of time you have each turn and playing a self made game.
  15. I´ve been ignoring Pillars of eternity development becase Rtwp is instant no-no for me. However I´ve been casually reading design decisions on the game and the way sawyer approaches game design problem and really it seems there are not just decent ideas, but really great ideas that RPG design have been needing imo. CRPG mostly have a lot of non decision, things you do, but there is no really decision in the process, because either the cost is of doing something that reaps a benefit is Zero (resting is a classic example, exploring is another). This is why i consider most CRPG to be mostly toys. However, how resting is going to be managed, shows to me that it´s clear that a game, where actions are only follow up of decisions, is an intended goal. In that regard I feel that if i´m right, and if Pillars of eternity tries to be a game, where actions are consequences of decisions,I wonder how Rtwp fits. I don´t know how exploration works in the game to comment on another potential action without decision. The problem of Rtwp is that the optimal play, the optimal decision is to pause every 0.5 second, since around every 0.5s the state of the game change, and thus we should stop and reanalyze the situation. If that is so Rtwp becomes slower than Turn based games, and terribly annoying and unsatisfying. I know there is no turning back from RtwP but what is thought or planned for this problem? I hope it´s not the classic unsatisfying answer of ¨if you don´t like playing like that, then don´t play like that¨ the job of the player is to maximize his winning chances, and using every resource at it´s disposal to get that goal, restricting yourself in an arbitrary way during the game is just being a bad player. The designer should present the Problem, and the resources the player has to solve that problem. The player then tries to find the best way to use those resources to solve the problem. The moment you don´t try to maximize your resource usage, you are not longer playing the designed game, but a selfmade game.
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