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Nathaniel Chapman

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Posts posted by Nathaniel Chapman

    GameBanshee preview and interview

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    1. Character customization is not class customization. Yes you can upgrade various abilities, and yes everything can be maxed out. That is not customization. All 4 characters at max abilities and levels will have exactly the same abilities as everyone else who maxed out their characters. That is not customization.

     

    2. This is an action based game that is supposed to have an in depth story. Hack and Slack games are 20 or so hours long, but usually have re-runs at higher difficulties for replay value. True RPGs are 40+ hours. This is a hack-n-slash RPG hybrid and only 15-20 hours.

     

    I don't want to get involved in the argument, but I just wanted to bring up a couple of points on these specifically:

    1. You can not purchase every Proficiency or Talent. By the time you reach max level you'll only be able to buy about 1/2 the talents and 1/3 the proficiencies. You'll have to try out the other combinations on future playthroughs. That also excludes the customization you get based on the loot you pick up, and there are a *lot* of different stats you can find on gear. I feel pretty strongly that our level of customization meets or exceeds other games in the genre.
    2. I would say that 15-20 hours is a conservative estimate. We have had developers (who know the game!) take longer than that to complete the game. Again, time estimates are just that, estimates. I wouldn't get too worked up over it.

    GameBanshee preview and interview

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    Was it a newer build?

     

    Also could they play it now on higher difficulty?

     

    Yes, and I believe they could choose higher than standard difficulty, though the build they played was just inherently harder than the build you guys have seen publicly. I didn't really hear any complaints that the game was too easy :shifty:

     

    One guy tried to play on hardcore mode and got wrecked. :)

     

    That sounds good.

     

    Though, is the mode actually titled "Hardcore?" I didn't mind it on New Vegas where it meant additional game mechanics but if you use it here this could sound a little too "elitist".

     

    It's hardcore. It's tuned to be REALLY hard. It kind of is elitist :)

    Blocking\countering\parrying?

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    The game has active block - you need to hold down a trigger to block :) Blocking is omni-directional, and your character even animates to intercept attacks coming from different directions, which looks pretty cool.

     

    You can also dodge, which you do by moving the Left Stick while blocking. Dodging moves you around and takes longer than blocking, so it's a bit harder to counterattack after a dodge. But dodging gives you a brief moment of invulnerability.

     

    thanks a lot for the reply, mr. developer :)

     

    good news. but now it makes me ask more questions :)

     

     

    1) can one block in all stances or only with the shield stance?

     

    2) is there an advantage to blocking with a certain stance rather than with the other?

     

    3) do enemies block?

     

    4) if enemies block, how does the player get through the block?

     

    5) when u block , are u immune to damage completely or are u just taking less damage from attacks?

     

    6) if when u block u are immuned to damage completely from all directions than is that like an invulnerability button that only prevents you from moving around (then u roll)?

     

    Selected answers :(

     

    1) All stances.

    2) Depends on your gear.

    5) You take no damage, but incur a cost to your focus. When you block with no/insufficient focus, you begin to take some damage (but the amount is reduced vs. not blocking).

    6) Nope. It's more tactical than that. There are some advantages to blocking, but it's not just full invulnerability.

    Blocking\countering\parrying?

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    The game has active block - you need to hold down a trigger to block >_< Blocking is omni-directional, and your character even animates to intercept attacks coming from different directions, which looks pretty cool.

     

    You can also dodge, which you do by moving the Left Stick while blocking. Dodging moves you around and takes longer than blocking, so it's a bit harder to counterattack after a dodge. But dodging gives you a brief moment of invulnerability.

    Same stance moves again and again?

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    Hi.. I saw some videos of DS3 and i saw mostly Lucas i repeating the same 3-move combo repetitively. Can we have upgraded moves and more variety and different skills to play with?

     

    One thing i hate about Sacred 2 is the repetitive moves again and again throughout the game.. it's so boring. I like to play with lots of different types of skills and moves so that some moves and skills are good against different types of enemies.

     

    I also like upgradeable stances/moves/skills through skill tiers so that it's rewarding and the game won't be boring that you will be looking at the same moves over and over again throughout so many difficulties of the game.

     

    Thanks for reading!

     

    Not to slam the demo-er - I believe it was their first time playing - but the variety is absolutely there, you just gotta use it :sorcerer: As you get more familiar with the stances and special abilities you will want to mix them up more. Plus the abilities can all be customized so there's a lot of nerdly RPG variety on top of the standard Action-ey stuff.

    New gameplay vid

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    You're sort of right, and sort of wrong. You do pick your character at the beginning of the game, but only two of the possible characters to choose from have been revealed.

     

    Which is what I said in my post before that post. :sorcerer:

     

    Also thanks for posting again. I always love when developers take interest in the community. Stuff like this gets me always pumped for a game and shows dedication!

     

    (I so hope you guys do team produced music again for DS3. It was awesome in SOZ/F:NV)

     

    Sorry - it sounded like their was some confusion a to whether or not you were forced to play as Lucas. You are not forced to play him - you can choose to instead play as Anjali or one of the other guys we haven't revealed yet.

     

    And thanks for the kind words re: dev music. I actually played on a couple of the f:nv tracks while working on DS3, so I'm glad people enjoyed them!

    New gameplay vid

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    Everything I've read thus says that you have to work with three ai characters...yet in every vid I've seen only two characters at most at work. So is that bs or what?

     

    The last two aren't revelead yet.

     

     

    I realize this, so are you suggesting that this is simply demo footage in the sense that this is not representitive of the actual gameplay but of just how the game will look? That in the footage current there are supposed to be two other people there that Obsidian has cloaked in a veil of pre-marketing adjustment?

     

    Yeah, but you won't have all party members from the beginning. So its at least somewhat representative of the early game.

     

    You're sort of right, and sort of wrong. You do pick your character at the beginning of the game, but only two of the possible characters to choose from have been revealed.

    Is this for real?

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    I can't really say much about co-op right now, but what I can say is that there's definitely some mis-interpretation going on about what the multiplayer is and isn't.

     

    Personally (and this is my "gamer", not "game developer" opinion), I think that if you're looking for a fun, co-op ARPG to play with friends/family DSIII will satisfy that craving.

    New gameplay vid

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    Some quick comments:

     

    • The build shown in the video is months old, so while it's the latest thing you guys have seen, and we're glad you get to finally see the game in real action, there's definitely a LOT of stuff in there that we already fixed and improved.
       
    • Difficulty was tuned way down in that build, so that can explain the sense that the player wasn't in danger - they weren't supposed to be. Since then we've done a lot of work to improve AI, including increasing the frequency of their attacks when there are fewer guys around. We've also implemented some difficulty settings so you can scale the difficulty from baby-time up to pretty darn hard.
       
    • And, when you're actually playing the game as opposed to watching it, the attacks feel plenty fast since you have to react quite quickly in order to effectively block or dodge them. So we've found in playtesting that we've sometimes had to increase the attack cooldowns from what "looks" right so that the game plays well, which is ultimately what's most important.
       
    • Most of the HUD/UI shown has been massively revamped and improved. UI has been one of the major focuses of the past few months (since the build that you guys are seeing is several months old, of course, that isn't included in the video).
       
    • I wouldn't judge our AI by Alpha Protocol's - the people, code, goals and design are all quite different and I think, for what the game is intended to be, the AI works quite well.

    Dungeon Siege 3 at New York Comic Con

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    Aside from work needed to be done on animation interpolation and possibly slightly higher res textures for the ground/walls etc. it seems that from that point of view there's not much to be said, the game looks good.

     

    So, fully aware that you probably can't answer to most of the questions I'll ask you, here's my take on the presentation:

    1) The enemies look pretty slow and easy to kill for the most part. Was the difficulty toned down for the demo or can we expect a similar level of difficulty for the final game?

    2) It's pretty clear that in the demo some unconnected areas were basically stringed together with the Causeway. But how will that work in the final game? Will it link locations on a linear path like that or will it be usable as a more general-purpose fast travel system?

    3) You seem to be utilizing the same 'health orbs' system that Diablo 3 (and a great deal of action games) utilizes. Does that mean that there won't be potions in the game?

    4) Will environment be more open in the final game? Or will the game be this linear?

    5) Do you have all the stances from the beginning or can you unlock more of them as you progress through the game?

    6) Are all the characters pre-set? From how you make it sounds, if you select, say, Anjali, you'd probably end up encountering Lukas (or is it Lucas? eh, whatever) in that dungeon, or at least, you could encounter him and make him one of your companions.

    7) When can we expect the console versions to be shown? Quite frankly, while I like what has been shown of the engine a lot, the real test will be to see the framerate this smooth on consoles.

     

    1) Abilities were overtuned and enemies undertuned for the demo. So, the real game will be tougher. Actually in our current build it's pretty much impossible to get past the first couple of fights in the game... but that's a bug.

    2) It will be a bit more general purpose than in the demo.

    3) We're not using potion chugging as the primary health recovery mechanic, no.

    4) The game will be more open than that presentation.

    5) In the current development build, you have all stances from the beginning. Because they are used tactically, and important to having a well-rounded combat experience, they're likely to stay unlocked at the beginning.

    6) Can't answer this yet.

    7) The framerate should be industry standard on consoles, and we are working very hard to ensure that it is consistently running at framerate. The game will likely run faster on most gaming PCs, so that's a definite advantage for PC players.

    My concerns on DS3

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    Haha. Yes, I meant damage dealing. Unless you want to optimize your character for dying as quickly as possible.

     

    Though, we have tried to encourage some builds that are a little more reckless about being hit, but that's the exception, not the rule.

     

    Wouldn't stark naked be best for optimising damage in which case there's no gear management. Of course you could mean damage dealing as opposed to damage absorption :lol:

     

     

    Snipped

     

    Finally, remember that we're still an RPG, so you'll be managing your gear selection, optimizing for the most damage possible, dealing with your focus/energy (resources you spend to use abilities) so there's a lot to keep you engaged outside of the core action combat.

    There better be secret passages!

    in Dungeon Siege III: General Discussion

    Posted

    The only reason would be uninspired world builders and/or too strictly hierarchical personnel management. As an example: Piranha Bytes (admittedly a much smaller team) seems to leave their world builders/designers with fairly free hands in regards to what they are allowed to build and implement. Therefore their worlds are chock-full of cool details, hidden loot, special encounters, secret passages, easter eggs, you name it. All this on top of already supremely well designed game worlds.

     

    We don't know anything about Obsidian when it comes to this so it'll be interesting to see what they have done with Dungeon Siege 3 (and, first, Fallout: New Vegas).

     

    There are at least three additional factors besides the two you mention (which I partly agree with); technology, tools and time. Maybe I should start calling them the three T's!

     

    What do I mean? Most of the things you are talking about are not things that designers always think of in their first pass on a level. You try to get the big brushstrokes in, and as you are working away at those, or playtesting them, thoughts like these occur to you - "Man, a secret door would be really cool here", or, "I should turn that bookshelf that an artist put in here into an examinable lore object", or ,"Hmm, this would be a great place for a special ambush encounter". A surprising amount of this stuff just isn't even something that designers consider in their first pass on an area. It's like writing - your first draft usually doesn't have the same level of detail and polish when it comes to individual sentence structure - you're more trying to get the big ideas down and organized, and you go back and clean up the details later.

     

    How does this relate to tech, tools and time?

     

    In some engines, iterating on content is slower or faster than others due to the pipelines and processes used. So, if you want to make a change, it might take you 5 seconds, 5 minutes, an hour, to a full day depending on how you have to implement and test your change based on your tech and tools. This is especially relevant if you're trying to get an area feeling just right - imagine if, when writing a document, you had to wait for 5 minutes every time you made a change before you could read it again!

     

    Also, in some engines, making changes to a level is more or less risky based on how the engine handles memory management/visibility and how much leeway designers have to add or remove sections of levels without dramatically affecting the performance of levels. So, imagine if half the time you edited a document, you had to make sure your word count per line remained under a certain amount, or your word count per page, or your average word length... or else when you tried to read the document it would crash. Obviously making changes would be much more difficult, because they would have to adhere to a very strict set of rules in order to function.

     

    Finally, obviously, time is the ultimate variable in all of these cases. The more of it you have, the more you're able to playtest and identify things that will flesh out your levels. Additionally, the more time you have the more you're able to buy your way out of disadvantages that you may have due to tech or tools.

     

    Obviously this kind of thinking is part of what has gone into Onyx and is why we love working with an engine that's designed to make our type of games. But I want to say that it's a little premature to blame the area designers in any case where you play a game and it doesn't have that attention to detail. You'd be surprised how much of an effect these very non-design driven factors play in the quality of area design.

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