Fenixp

AndreaColombo: Process for repositioning: a) Evaluate the situation. Is your character engaged by an opponent with low damage output? Just move him, doesn't really matter. Is your character engaged by an opponent with significant damage output? Proceed to b. b) Check talents and positioning. Does the engaged character have an ability which will allow for him to freely disengage and is also applicable on this particular enemy type? Good, use it. Is that not the case? Check other nearby characters which are not tied up or have ranged abilities which might accomplish this effect. If you desperately need a character to disengage, use more than a single disengagement ability from more than a single character. c) If disengagement was successful, move your character to safety or more advantageous position. If not, go back to b and/or weep. Edit: Every time I needed a character to reposition, I always found a way to do it, all that was required of me was not to waste all disabing per encounter attacks at the start of a combat.

I'll just take this one bit over here because it perfectly illustrates my point. You said it yourself - you can't just turn around and leave, leaving meele engagement needs to be a deliberate action which is either timed correctly or for which you have created an opportunity. To me, that is what meele engagement system is supposed to simulate - the skill needed to avoid an attack and escape the engagement. There are several talents for every class which allow for disabling a target and there are several talents which allow for breaking the engagement straight away. Breaking the engagement is an action which requires skill and planning to pull off. But yes, you are correct, of course - everything I say in my posts in my opinion and my position, I didn't really think that needs pointing out. Also, thank you for explaining details of Infinity Engine combat. I was always under the impression that the game was strictly divided into turns - as in, all characters do their per turn action at once and then a new turn begins as opposed to all characters executing their turns independently of each other. I won't of course take your word for it and do some of my own research, but I guess you spent more time with it than I did. Naturally, this won't make me love Infinity Engine combat, I still feel it's quite clunky, slow and am not its biggest fan. And naturally, even if that were the case and combat was strictly divided into turns, Infinity Engine combat is a real time with pause system, there's not even a real argument there - I was exaggerating because it never felt like a good RTwP system to me. I'll start off with a little anectode: Currently, I am replaying the original Baldur's Gate. I really just want to replay Pillars again, but I decided to wait until patch 3.99 is out (the one in which Obsidian resolves the bugs introduced in 3.02 (that's the patch in which Obsidian resolves the crippling bug introduced in hotfix for patch 3.0)) Anyway, Baldur's Gate. My current party composition is my female Cleric Cler (original, eh?), Khalid, Jaheira and Imoen. My Jaheira was severely hurt and I wanted to retreat to Bereghost (spelling?), but encountered a brown bear on my way. Since I sport a lvl2 party, a bear is no joke, and the arsehole instantly homed in on Jaheira. This was undesirable and so, before he approached, I hid her behind Cler and Khalid. The bear was really determined tho, and started running in circles after Jaheira, completely ignoring incoming attacks. As far as I'm concerned, he should absolutely be penalized for ignoring my fighters and just casually walking around them in close proximity while they are swinging their swords in his general direction. Anyway, I absolutely consider what you say about real-time with pause gameplay, I just disagree with it, clearly. You keep making the argument that real time with pause combat is centred about situational action and reaction, and I absolutely agree with that. The kicker is, that's no different in Pillars of Eternity, you just need to react differently to different actions, that's all. Actually, the system allows for mere change in your positioning to be a powerful reaction. It doesn't reduce tactical decisionmaking or anything of the sort - in fact I find myself thinking of my next step a lot more in Pillars with engagement system than I ever did in Infinity Engine games, and that's purely because an enemy character standing next to my character already is an action which requires my attention and my reaction and when I opt to select a character and send this character next to enemy character, the same applies - this was my action, and it's up to the enemy to react. It doesn't restrict your possibilities, it just makes positioning a lot more important and act of repositioning to be a part of your overal tactical considerations as opposed to a thing you just do.

If you want proper management of per rest resources, do not rest spam. The game actively discourages you from doing so and if you're half competent at it you can finish it by properly managing your resources as opposed to rest spamming, so just don't if you don't like it. And yes, I do feel silly for repeatedly saying "Do not do things you do not wish to do", it always felt quite natural to me. As for financial management, yeah, you are sort of swimming in money for most of the game - now this is not an excuse, but it's pretty much the same in most other RPGs. I genuinely do not know of a satisfactory solution, perhaps save for exchange system implemented in PoE. (Path of Exile. Confusing, eh?)

Sensuki, I do believe you are associating engagement to issues which aren't actually a problem of engagement at all. All right, let's put kiting aside for the moment, as 4ward correctly pointed out, it's very much an issue of "Don't want it - don't use it." I didn't really want to elaborate too much originally, but I guess I will now, and I'm sure I'll bring entirely new arguments to a discussion which totally has not been exhausted to death even during the game's beta. So let's begin * Fenixp's theme song plays * * It's not actually my theme song at all I want my own theme song * Do we need more Infinity Engine combat? So, I touched upon this point a few posts back. I liked Infinity Engine games. I never was their biggest fan, aside from Planescape Torment, but I played them for many an hour anyway. And, quite frankly, their implementation of real time with pause combat always felt clunky to me. That's mostly caused by it not actually being a real time with pause system at all - it's more of a simultaneous turn system, but I digress, let's just stop at "Not a huge fan of how IE games handled things". And Pillars of Eternity, while inspired by IE games, was never supposed to be their replica, which gave me a lot of hope when it comes to combat system improvements. I was originally just hoping for an order queue, which we did not get (God damnit, Obsidian), but what we did get impressed me regardless - it's a combat system which puts a lot more focus on pre-fight planning and positioning. Yea, yea, you can't use buff spells before combat, but that just makes priest's abilities more important after the combat starts and makes you improvise more, which is another thing I loved - you criticize the game for limiting your improvisation, whereas I found it made me improvise a lot more than IE games ever did, due to, amongst other things, *drumroll* engagements. In IE games, once an enemy got close to my caster, I pretty much had the automatic reaction of clicking away from the enemy 'cause ... Well, that's what you do when somebody gets in melee range, you run away. I could literally show them my back and they would just shrug and start following me around. When an enemy gets in meele range with my wizard now, I immediately pause and start thinking "What is the best way to defuse this situation with minimal amount of wasted resources?" I found engagement system lead to a huge amount of situations I was unfamiliar with while playing Infinity Engine games - and that I really appreciate, I got fed up with their combat quite some time ago. And yeah, you are absolutely correct, this makes movement around the battlefield more difficult - but from where I stand, that just makes combat different, not necessarily worse, and introduces situations which I never encountered in Infinity Engine games, while removing some approaches which worked there. I'm having a hard time seeing how this is a downgrade - if anything, it's up to your taste and expectations of combat system. I feel like Pillars evokes Infinity Engine games too much and the biggest downside of that is that people have expectations based on Infinity Engine games, which may easily undermine interesting mechanics not because they're bad or dysfunctional, but quite simply because they're not Infinity Engine mechanics. But it's tots not realistic! Yeah, it's extra attacks while a character is doing something else. I'm not sure if this is due to me increasingly liking board games, but I vastly prefer an interesting abstract mechanic to a realistic one. Now I'm not saying the current implementation is perfect - Obsidian has already decided to make pre-combat positioning important, so let's take it to another level. Let's do a Dragon Age and have front and back to a selection circle. Let's give characters a cone in which they may engage instead of a circle. And let's make disengagement attacks more destructive, but give them a cooldown period. And let's have every hit to the back of a character force him to disengage all enemies. I mean, there's a lot you can do with this, and my suggestions might be as broken as Obsidian's ideas - but the basis of the mechanic is sound and makes this particular real time with pause RPG play differently to a lot of other real time with pause RPGs. If I just wanted to play more Baldur's Gate, I would do just that. It feels unnatural Well, turning your back on guy with a sword also feels unnatural, yet people have no trouble doing this :-P Nah, disengagement mechanics themselves felt perfectly natural the moment I understood how exactly do they work. The main issue here is that the game makes a rather poor job of explaining them properly. We need an arena-based tutorial in which tutor would go "We're fighting now. Do try to leave" and the game would go *SMACK* as you did and people would suddenly understand. The real reason as to why people don't pick up on it organically is quite simply based on the fact that most real time with pause games tend to ape Baldur's Gate and people are not used to this approach and due to lack of animation on disengagement, which would make it a lot more readable. Yeah, sure, NWN had its attacks of opportunity, but they never felt nearly as dangerous. Engagements are the root of all evil I do believe you attribute a lot of issues actually related to poor AI and encounter design to engagement mechanics. AI which actually cooperated on disabling a tank would go a long way in alleviating this. Encounter design which would put you in positions unfamiliar to you would also help tremendously - White March actually did a lot of work in this area. Engagement mechanic in itself is fine, what's the main issue with it right now is that instead of making enemies smarter, Obsidian has decided to make them more numerous, which is not the greatest way of solving this issue - nonetheless, the constant zerg rush is again another thing somewhat differentiating Pillars of Eternity, so who am I to complain. * That was a damn fine theme song. And I still don't want to play Awesomenauts. Hm. *

Giant rabbits are why animal whisperer skill exists. When creating your characters, you're thinking "Animal Whisperer? That's worthless!" and then you meet these guys.

Yeah, I figured you're probably somewhere at the beginning. Above all, you need to make sure to specialize (every character should take 3-4 skills) and that your statistics don't actually influence your skills at all (aside from charisma increasing leadership radius). You should keep your skills at roughly the same levels (there's no need to overly invest in weapons skill), and to me it always paid off to have a character with high charisma and leadership to globally increase chances to hit. Always sit on a bunch of skill points to be able to adjust to checks you can't quite make. And yeah, the NPCs you find are supposed to be way above your level at that point, especially Angela. Oh and explosives automatically 'unlock' most doors and chests, at risk that they'll destroy something. Still, I'm afraid that at this point, you can either go trough AG center without being able to loot the locked containers there and return later on (you can freely do so) or reroll your party to better suit your playstyle now that you know more about the game.

Seriously tho, when all is said and done, Infinity Engine games worked just fine without engagement system. Those games had their annoyances which engagement system fixed for me, but they were perfectly playable even without it. There is no reason to add anything resembling engagement into them. However, during my life, I have spent hundreds of hours playing games running under Infinity Engine and while I kind of enjoyed their combat, I am very glad to see an attempt at something which works slightly differently. There's already 5 games using pretty much exactly the same combat system, we don't really need a sixth one, and engagement mechanics come with their own challenges which I greatly enjoy overcoming - even movement around the battlefield is not guaranteed any longer and needs to be calculated and weighted. When a character is running out of endurance, you can't just run away and know that AI will get stuck on another melee character along the way - even that situation presents you with a little puzzle to solve. Engagement mechanics are quite simply a different approach to combat, and I'm not going to complain about a game presenting me with new situations.

I didn't, but enemies just turning around and leaving in the middle of an engagement were extremely impolite.

Sensuki: As opposed to a turn-based game, in which they're fine for reasons? :-P Nah, the idea is sound, regardless of whether you like the execution or not, and it's an elegant attempt to fix problems I've had with IE combat (always hated kiting - and yes, you can sort of kite in Pillars as well, but it's a lot more difficult). It's also a nice attempt to replace some aggro mechanics. As it stands, the system needs work, but thanks to its existence I've already enjoyed combat in Pillars of Eternity a lot more than in Infinity Engine games. Now I would never want to belittle the immense amount of experimentation and research you have put into how engagement works in Pillars, but I do believe dropping it would be a mistake and take away some of the game's individuality.

When you're participating in a discussion, it's a common courtesy to at least post basic explanation of your position, no matter how much does your universal truth divert from an opposing position. That's why they're called "discussion boards" as opposed to a "chat room". Yes, people of opposite positions to that of yours do tend to post their positions on discussion boards. When you invite hostility into a discussion, by retorting "lol, no" for instance, you are opening floodgates to a heated discussion. How exactly do you imagine a discussion, you post and everybody else responds with "You are correct, thank you for showing me error of my ways"? Anyway, I apologize for derailing. This community is kind of awesome for the most part, I just can't help myself at times.

Nah, world design in New Vegas was rather poor, the whole game was built around its writing - and isometric games tend to flow a lot faster than first person games with a lot of exploration. Oh it's still in the game. Might have been toned down, and outdoorsman skill helps avoid random encounters at least, but it is quite frustrating to be given a supposedly urgent quest but being unable to finish it because those bandints are using much more powerful bullets than your bullets and have much more hardy internal organs than your internal organs. It's an unfortunate part of "Oldschool design" - altho Witcher 3 does the same crap, it's even more extreme there, so I guess it did not die off with age. Edit: Dem grammars.

The game has been designed in such a way that by creating a character you want to play, you must inevitably cut yourself from some dialogue options. And the game counts on this being the case - often enough, when an important enough reply is tied to a stat check, there are multiple replies checking against multiple stats to give a wide variety of characters chance of passing this particular check, often with the same outcome. I do not believe that completely separating character traits and personality would really be a good solution, since personality is largely based on your traits and the game already reflects your personality trough reputations (you can be aggressive, stoic, diplomatic, that kind of thing)

GhostOfAnakin: Which map are you talking about? What's your party composition? What exactly is the issue, I mean, in which area are you having issues - combat? Unlocking stuff? Can't uncover mines? Feel free to reply over here I suppose.

I guess it might be a safeguard so player can't save himself into a corner - situation in which, upon loading the game, one of his characters would die. It sort of seems too specific to be a bug. Altho it would make a lot more sense for player to appear in front of the spiked room. Of course, it might very well be an extremely bizarre bug.

I really like the idea of engagement system, however it was far too powerful on release and might as well not be there now. I wonder where will Obsidian take it with more patching - to be honest, I kind of preferred it when it was more powerful, but AI could just not deal with that properly. I would like an AI which realizes it is engaged and use synergies to break the engagement, but... Well, AI was never strong suit of Pillars of Eternity.

Are you blaming Bethesda for players roleplaying a Paladin? I... Huh. I mean... Huh. And you are very hung up on the idea of having imaginary classes belonging to imaginary factions in imaginary world of a largely imaginary game and then tell us we're crazy for making up imaginary stories :-P Well you clearly understand game development :-P Go ahead then, do what you just said you'll do, I mean it's the best way for you to understand how incredibly difficult is it to design a game with sufficiently big and varied world, sufficient amount of mechanics, stories, lore and quests to catch player imagination in such a way that they decide to make up their own stories in the world. I'm willing to explain why do TES games work and just how much thought went into their design, but I sort of feel like it would be wasted effort on you - still, if you are interested, I will always be glad to write a small paper on "Why do Elder Scrolls games function?"

Agreed, I like PoE a good deal more - well aside from Planescape. While I love rtwp combat, I always found the implementation found in IE games to be incredibly clunky, as far as I'm concerned, they would have been better off featuring a full turn-based system. PoE is actually a game designed for PC with combat that goes with it - no need for turn-based mechanic, everything is cooldown-based which lends it a lot more flexibility, it paces itself a lot better and I love how fast it is when compared to IE games. It's a system which is actually built from ground up for a game featuring rtwp combat and it shows. All I'm missing (a lot) are order queues. Aside from that, I found writing in PoE to be a crapload better than in BG and IWD games, I love the story and find the companions a lot more relatable. Well eh... That's how I finished entire original Baldur's Gate, entire Planescape Torment and most of Baldur's Gate 2. Icewind Dale games had a lot better encounter design, gotta hand that to them.

It'll only get worse GhostofAnakin, especially now since mr. Abrams ... Let's say didn't really help the franchise to proceed in the right direction. I do love how Star Trek Online prefers to continue along the "ruined", old continuity than to adapt the new one. Star Trek Online also seems to be the best shot at getting some cool Star Trek content past few years - not that I would be playing it, far too onliny for my tastes. It's a shame, I like the concepts it presents.

So anyway... I'm playing a fire godlike rogue focused on avoiding as much combat as possible, but uh... I can see some issues with stealth. See, her head is on fire. Now I'm no racist, I don't judge, if you want your head to be on fire it's absolutely your business. Thing is, fire tends to be relatively visible and I don't think putting a piece of cloth on the fire would bode too well. Just saying. I guess there could be a lore explanation, like ability of fire godlike to control the fire - still, it seems quite strange.

Awww, you got me really hyped thinking Underrail got released, but it didn't. I am not happy. Anyway, yeah, not true scotsman would dislike Age of Decadence, surely! Seriously, I do like the game a lot, but it has a very big share of quite objective issues. Its non-combat 'mechanics' lack direly needed predictability, they're inconsistent and it's pretty much impossible to play the game without a good deal of savescumming. It is a good RPG, but I can definitely see why would some people absolutely hate it.

So um, Pillars of Eternity soundtrack is up on Spotify. Since I posted this topic about a month earlier, it's totally thanks to me. I would thank Obsidian, but since putting a soundtrack on Spotify is clearly an original idea, I will demand royalties of some sort. So thank you in advance, Obsidian, you guys are best.

Even when a project starts development, most larger companies already have budget for it and some form of projected income. Without knowing this information, we can't possibly know whether this project has been successful or not - all we can do is guess and compare it to other projects. That other projects are more successful does not make a project unsuccessful - it just makes it less successful than project it is being compared to, which doesn't really say much.

Really? Point out where does it say in any of the definitions you have cited that the role "must be there", whatever that means. Roleplaying is a fairly self-explanatory word - it means "to play a role". The role, of course, doesn't need to be "there", the need for the role to be "there" is just your personal preference. I for one like classless systems. Sue me, I guess? I mean the entire argument is terribly silly, made even sillier by your slightly insane claims of "Games are using classless systems because of money!" which doesn't even make any sense. Eh... At this point I feel like I'm just keeping a pointless thread alive, so I suppose I'll just let it die and shut up.

Njall, I'm actually not necessarily arguing against Dungeons and Dragons being clearer when you understand it - of course it is, it's a system designed for pen and paper play so everything needs to be relatively easy to calculate. I'm talking about position of a person unfamiliar with either of the two systems getting into Pillars of Eternity along with Baldur's Gate. PoE gives you a ton of easily digestible information right there on the statistics screen, whereas Infinity Engine games sort of require you to know DnD ruleset and then to find out eccentricities introduced by weird implementation of turn based combat Bioware opted for.

Gairnulf, have you considered the possibility that perhaps statistics in Dungeons and Dragons games seem a lot more clear to you quite simply because you are a lot more familiar with the system? I have none of that knowledge and while I understand basic concepts, statistics felt a lot more organic and easier to understand in PoE than in IE games.