J.E. Sawyer

It's consistent across all attack types to make them easier to balance and to prevent kiting and similar move/attack microing that was rampant in IE games.

Casters can make their Recovery Time shorter by wearing lighter armor and through the use of Deleterious Alacrity of Motion, which is their personal "attack faster, suffer continuous Stamina damage for the duration" spell (3rd level).

Heraldry in the Eastern Reach is at least superficially similar to medieval/early modern European heraldry. Divisions of field and devices are largely used in the same way. Our colors do not follow the traditional rules of tincture and or/argent (represented as yellow and white) are not intended to be metals. Aedyran/Dyrwoodan/Vailian heraldry does not use Euro-style furs (other than sable) but does use patterns (e.g. chequy) and counter-charging. The standard vert, azure, gules, etc. are used in addition to uncommon (in Europe) colors and stains like sanguine and bleu celeste (the latter is particularly common in Dyrwoodan heraldry). Because of their relative simplicity and uniformity, Eastern Reach arms could be reproduced from text or black and white drawings with a high degree of fidelity -- like Euro arms. Unlike Euro heraldry, Eastern Reach heraldry is attached to the family name. Individual family members use their own distinguishing devices as a badge overlaid on a shield, hung on their armor, or worn on a cloak. Here is a fun activity for those who like heraldry: create the arms of the following families that are the traditional erls of the Dyrwood (hopefully I didn't mess anything up in translation): Ethgowr, Erls of Baelreach - Party per fess embattled vert and argent, two estoiles or. Ungradr, Erls of Coldwater - Chequy bleu celeste and argent, a falcon perched gules. Gathbin, Erls of Yenwood - Party per fess dancetty gules and bleu celeste, an oak tree eradicated counter-charged. Manhem, Erls of Helsgate - Party per chevron sable and gules, a dragon rampant sinister counter-charged.

The upper left is the Dyrwood (the star represents Glanfathan culture), upper right is Eir Glanfath (though they don't typically display it heater shield-style), lower left is Aedyr, lower right is the Vailian Republics (the five stars represent the cuiteti beli/great cities). You can create a Vailian with light skin or a Dyrwoodan/Aerydan with dark skin. Colonization has been happening for several centuries now, so there has been enough time for small numbers of ethnically-different families to find new homes in other lands.

If a side quest isn't fun, we will cut it. If a side quest is generally fun but can't have time allocated to improving it, we will probably keep it. Size of the world and quantity of quests are important elements of the IE games. Our quests don't all have to be masterpieces to be included, but they do have to be enjoyable on their own.

Our animations are animated at 30fps, so that's the framerate I'm referring to. A 30 frame anim for us takes ~1 second to complete.

I was referring to when your character is attacking your enemy with auto-swing attacks, like in all IE games and all NWN games. @teknoman2 i am aware of this Now let me give you a more specific example. Let's say for the sake of this conversation that your character is carrying a Greatsword which is really slow and requires 4 seconds recovery between each swing. This is how the battle will go: 1. Your character swings at the enemy 2. Your character is now recovering for 4 seconds 3. But after only 2 seconds you pause the game, and make your character attack a different enemy. 4. After un-pause your character will move towards the second enemy. 5. When he reaches him, your character will now have to wait 2 more seconds before he can swing at the new enemy, as the recovery time has not yet finished. Now what I want to know is the following: If during point 4. i stop my character midway. Make him stand still for 2-5 seconds and not attack anyone. Then proceed to order him, once again, to move towards the designated target and attack him. Will he now be able to swing as soon as he comes in contact or will he still need to wait 2 seconds for the swing recovery time. The reason i am asking this, is because i wish to know whether or not we can time the next swing so that you could potentially interrupt the caster's casting immediately after you get close. Anyway, listen, it doesn't matter. Only Sawyer knows the answer to the question, and if he doesn't answer then there's no point in talking about it. If your Recovery Time has elapsed, selecting an action to perform will result in the character performing that action as soon as they are in range. Of course, most melee attacks + Recovery Times are 2 seconds before armor Speed Factor is added in. Most spells take 3 seconds to cast and 3 seconds to recover, so 6 seconds total. A caster who begins casting within range of an auto-attacking melee opponent is likely to be attacked once or twice before their spell completes. Wands, rods, and sceptres have a high attack rate but a relatively low Interrupt. Wizards have a spell specifically for interrupting casters called Thrust of the Tattered Veils. It does virtually no damage but has a high Interrupt and casts very quickly.

It's based off of the overall action time + recovery time, but the recovery time is the first thing modified so we can maintain the animation speed. If an attack takes 30 frames and the recovery takes 30 frames, a 20% slowdown will make the recovery 42 frames (30+12 from a total anim time of 60 frames increased by 20%).

Barring the use of abilities or spells, no class attacks inherently faster than another. Weapons have different attack speeds (and reload speeds, for crossbows and firearms) based on their animations. Following their attack (or spell cast or item use), every character processes a proportional recovery time before they perform their next attack or action (movement simply pauses recovery time). Heavier armor increases the recovery time. Spells and abilities that speed up attacks/actions will reduce recovery times until there is no pause between attacks (this is pretty rare and I don't think it's actually possible with current bonuses). After that point, the attacks themselves speed up. So if you had three characters with sabres run up to attack a target, assuming they all arrived at the same time, they would all attack simultaneously. One of the attackers wears no armor, one is in mail, and one is in plate armor. Assuming no other modifiers, the one wearing no armor will execute their next attack first, followed by the one in mail, who is in turn followed by the one in plate. If the unarmored character moves during their recovery, their recovery would be paused for the duration of their movement, meaning it's entirely possible that if they hop over to someone nearby, their next attack would wind up following the other two characters who have a statistically slower recovery. Both rangers and monks have abilities that can speed up their attacks. For rangers, it's a mode they enter that lowers their Accuracy as well. For monks, it's a short-duration boost that costs them Wounds (their power resource).

Yes. The game doesn't structurally require you to take on additional party members to complete it. On a related topic, I keep seeing people say there isn't healing and there aren't healing potions in PoE. This isn't true. There are no abilities or items that heal Health. However, there are plenty of abilities and several items that heal Stamina. Fighters have a slow Stamina regeneration effect during combat, spellcasters have a variety of Stamina recovery spells/powers, and there are consumables that can recover Stamina. Health is the resource that only comes back with rest and rest always replenishes all Health.

Yes. I don't think we've ever said anything like "We will make our male and female armor sets look identical." It is not historically accurate for plate and scale armor to have visibly larger chest areas just as it is unrealistic for a full mail hauberk to have a narrower waist (good luck putting it on). Especially with our armor types that have high metal (or leather) content, the cloth areas are very small which means that the player-tintable areas are very small. It is easy to confuse characters if they don't have some distinguishing features. That said, I do believe that there is value in turning the dial to 11 with simulative/historical stuff if you do it consistently. PoE makes a lot of concessions for gameplay concerns in the rules, in the UI, and in how the outfits, armor, and weapons are designed. They aren't capital-W Warhammer-style, but our warhammer heads are larger than is realistic, our great sword blades are extra thick to help distinguish them from estocs, our pikes are shorter than historical pikes because full-length pikes get weird with character positioning and attacks, etc.

Xaurips live life on the edge, literally and figuratively.

Our "high fantasy" armor is more like Elmore/Parkinson stuff (well, not like their women, who often wore little of anything). Mostly realistic, but with some features exaggerated. Due to the size of characters, we have to exaggerate some elements or they just disappear. E.g. the scales on the scale armor are pretty large and the same is true for the rings on our mail. We tried doing strictly realistic proportions at first and it didn't read well at all. The sizes we use now look a little oversized in inventory but read nicely in the game world. We were consciously trying to capture a late 80s-late 90s AD&D aesthetic with a lot of the pieces.

It does.

It doesn't get crowded. The icons fill in from left to right, starting above the left-most portrait (in this case, Eder).

Horizontal above the portrait row.

The abilities pop up above the portrait row, so you select the character, move up to select the ability, and then target it (if it needs to be targeted).

Because of the changes to resting, the crafting UI is launched from the inventory panel. You can't craft during combat, but otherwise there are no restrictions on when you can do it.

Action bars are now character-specific. In the IE games, group and individual actions tended to share the same "line" of space, so regardless of who was selected or how many characters were selected, a decent chunk of the UI was always taken up by space reserved for those icons. In PoE, all actions that can be performed concurrently by any number of characters have been moved to the center cluster (e.g. attack, cancel, scout, etc.). So when you have multiple characters selected (typically while mass moving/exploring), you don't see an action bar. As soon as you select an individual character, you will see their specific list of abilities, spells, etc. Revisions to the UI were done with independent clusters of elements because it was way faster and easier to iterate in that way instead of always going back to modify backing panels. The portrait borders are thin but they aren't "wireframes" unless "wireframe" just means narrow. They're all textured and have decorative elements that overlap into the portrait space. That said, now that we're happy with the general layout of elements, Kaz will be building (optional) solid backing panels to frame all of the components. The backing panels will form a solid block across the bottom of the screen. You also have the option of collapsing the central button cluster and the dialogue/combat log window so you're just left with portraits (ToEE-style). In that mode, you can still activate/access all of the hidden actions with hotkeys. All portraits have health bars. Monks, ciphers, and chanters have an extra bottom element to their portrait frames to show their class-specific resources (wounds, focus, and phrases). Stamina loss is displayed as red fill. We will likely also include numbers for Stamina/Health display (it's pretty straightforward to implement that). It's not awkward at all to click on the portrait and move up to select an ability (since you're often going to be moving up to target the ability you just selected anyway).

I'm not opposed to letting happy accidents blossom into features or elements of areas/quests, but I am opposed to ad hoc development unless it's the stated point of the project. There are a lot of different ways to build things. If you build without a plan, it's going to take a lot of time. You may certainly wind up with more wild and cool results, but there's a very real cost to building that way. I've seen designers burn themselves out (to the point where they quit the industry) to develop something with the scripting equivalent of spit and glue only to see it ultimately fail -- fail in achieving the vision they had and fail to produce an enjoyable experience for the player. I've seen a few games that could have been better if they were a little less polished, but I've seen far, far more that could have benefited from cut features and cut content. That comes down to two things: 1) planning in the first place 2) well-ordered triage and culling as the project comes to a close. If you plan, the number of "casualties" is lower. If the number of casualties is lower, the cuts are easier to make and have a much better impact on the quality of the game.

We don't have random encounters on rest. Resting always takes 8 hours and will restore characters to full Health, remove Maimed and other long-term afflictions, and restore all per-rest abilities/item charges.

No, you can't break down existing enchantments. All enchanting is done using three ingredients: a critter part, a plant/herb, and a gem. The counts of each ingredient may vary, but there are always three ingredients. Additionally, there may be a copper cost that's subtracted directly from your total wealth.

It's been a long time since we've talked about our resting system and it's changed in the past few months. It's largely the same overall, but key mechanics have changed in important ways. * The Stamina/Health mechanics still work as they have previously. The one exception is how Maimed works on non-Expert settings. Maimed is now only a stop-gap before death. I.e., even on ordinary difficulty settings, any character can die if they are currently Maimed and lose their remaining Health. As before, Maimed characters have terrible penalties to their Accuracy and all defenses but move at full speed. Using a Maimed character in combat is asking for them to get killed. The reason for this change was to prevent the use of Maimed characters as immortal trap-sniffers or recipients of an enemy's hard first volley. * We still restrict where you can rest (as in the IE games), but resting does not have to be performed at very specific spots in the world (there are still a few camps where you can rest anytime, for free). Instead, each time the party rests in the middle of nowhere, they consume 1 unit of Camp Supplies. Based on your difficulty settings, the party can carry a maximum number of Camp Supplies (currently ranging from 6 to 2). The supplies are a single item type and can be purchased from vendors (also rarely can be found in the world). The supplies represent a party count, like wealth, and are represented by a number in the inventory and on the rest button in the main UI. To rest, all you need to do is press the rest button. The game checks to make sure it's okay to camp in that location at that time and will give you the option to access your Stash or go directly into rest. * You can also rest at inns and your house (once you acquire it). Based on the room you select at the inn, you will gain temporary bonuses that generally correlate to the expense of the room. I.e., more expensive rooms grant larger or more bonuses. These bonuses last for a specific number of rests following your stay at the inn. Only a single resting bonus can be active at a time, so you can't just chain-sleep for a collection of bonuses. If you sleep at your house, you select from the bonuses you've unlocked from your upgrades. These tend to be less varied than those found at inns and you have to pay for the upgrades upfront, but after that it's effectively a free bonus of one specific type that lasts for a number of rests.

A wizard's grimoire goes in a special slot that only wizards have. They carry it in their off hand if they don't have anything in that hand. Otherwise, it only appears during spellcasting.

This is really interesting. Does this apply to armor as well? Yes.