J.E. Sawyer

No, it's all in real-time. You can go straight from shooting to striking/grappling and back again. The camera adapts to you striking if you continue a chain, so you gradually gain a more "sideline" view of what's going on.

Much like many melee games with action elements, there is a soft-targeting cone (no hard lock) in front of Mike. When you perform your attacks, there is a slight amount of distance and heading adjustment done by Mike and the target to make sure the attacks and hit reactions line up properly. The soft-targeting is pretty generous, but you do have to be close to the target to pull off the attack.

Since there are some new shots out of MT engaged in hand-to-hand, I asked if I could REVEAL the mysteries of our primary CQC art. It's American Kenpo, which was selected for a few reasons. Its strikes read very well, are quite varied, and lend themselves well to performing chains. We also do have grappling moves for MT, but they are quickly resolved and there is no actual ground fighting involved. Preemptively, I would like to state that I know a lot of people would like to see Krav Maga/BJJ/Muay Thai/Savate/Hapkido/Wing Chun/Gunsen fighting, but this was the way we chose to go. Arts like Krav Maga work very well for Jason Bourne, but that's his thing, and specific to the tone of "his kind" of action. The action in Alpha Protocol is a little flashier/stylish, and American Kenpo works well for how we want CQC to fit into our combat (more seamless and less set-piecey, like Bourne Conspiracy). *barricades dojo against hordes of martial arts "enthusiasts"*

Myron's gross. Peace.

Anthony Davis just put in a new party conversation UI that puts an icon on characters that have different options to select, so it will be easy to tell.

To be honest, I think low-value DR is really overrated. Especially on the characters likely to wear those armors, shaving off a point or two here and there is a drop in the bucket. I do really like the idea of armor that has variable DR based on damage type. So, within a tier (light/medium/heavy), the different armor types protect against the different damage types at different levels. If one value is always "weak", it means there's a tactical option for negating the armor's major advantage (i.e., equipping a weapon of a different damage type). It's something I am experimenting with in the NWN2 engine for The Black Hound and it works pretty well. In a tabletop game in college, I had an armor-as-DR system that required bookkeeping. Armor had an "Armor Rating" that was like armor hit points, but it also correlated to a "Protective Value", which was a number of dice that were rolled to subtract from inflicted damage. Higher ARs tended to correlate not only to higher die faces (d4 to d6 to d8) but also to an increased number of dice. More dice = better normalization = generally superior. Damage that was absorbed came straight out of the Armor Rating, which would eventually lower the Protective Value, making the armor worse at protecting. So, the better armor was at protecting, it degenerated at a proportionally faster rate. There were two other wild cards in that system: armor bludgeoning and armor piercing weapons. AB weapons did worse damage than standard weapons, but did double damage to the armor. So if armor absorbed 5 points of damage, it actually would take 10. This made weapons like maces and flails very dangerous in protracted battles. AP weapons treated the AR of a target as though it were half its current value. This lowered the PV dramatically. However, any damage absorbed by the armor was similarly cut in half and rounded down. Crossbows and military hammers were excellent weapons against plate armor, but if the armor was too good, the AP weapons would barely make any headway over the course of a battle. Because of the nature of the system, the heavily armored characters had a regular money sink and were strongly encouraged to head back to civilization at more-or-less regular intervals. And it produced interesting combat scenarios as well. Lightly armored characters occasionally had the advantage, but when it came time to slug things out, the heavily armored characters typically emerged victorious. By the way, the popular Iron Heroes rules has armor as DR and uses the following die ranges: Padded, 1/magic Leather, 1d2/magic Studded, 1d3/magic Scale, 1d4/magic Chainmail, 1d5/magic Banded Mail, 1d6/magic Full Plate, 1d8/magic

USA Men's Team Sabre is in the gold match against France which should be happening in the next hour or so. Pretty sweet.

I'm kind of disappointed with what I'm seeing in the beta. I really think they could have changed a lot more and still kept the core 3.5 mechanics. Rangers still have their nonsensical combat styles, the weapon list is effectively unchanged (read: totally without any apparent design goal), etc. Armor does look like it's balanced a bit better, but the fundamental system is still terrible/heavy armor feats are still worthless unless your Dex is in the toilet. Light armor still rules supreme if your Dex is high. Power attack continues its reign as the most no-thought "take this if you want to do a lot of melee damage" feat. Some of the ideas are cool, but the execution still needs some work. Barbarians have Renewed Vigor as a Rage Power option. It heals 8 + Con modifier in hit points as a standard action and has 6th level as a prereq. What 6th+ level barbarian is going to spend a standard action to heal 8 + Con points of damage? Then there's the Overhand Chop chain, which attends to the neglected, under-represented melee characters in D&D games that use two-handed weapons and try, in vain, to do high amounts of damage.

Darklands was probably as close as you'll get, Tigranes.

Finding a practical martial art that also reads well can be difficult; many of the most effective martial arts for one-on-one defense have relatively subtle movements. We found an art that is visually very satisfying and also practical, and our very experienced consultant was also used extensively for mocap. I think people will be happy with the look and feel of our CQC moves. That said, I don't think there are a lot of serious martial artists who would ever recommend using hand-to-hand attacks against someone with a firearm unless there were literally no other option. As designers, given the choice between making an action-spy RPG with effectively no mid-combat hand-to-hand (because it isn't realistic) or having hand-to-hand that stretches the plausible, I think it's wise that we went with the latter. Mike isn't doing Guile's Flash Kick or anything like that, but he can (and does) engage armed enemies at close range with real-world hand-to-hand attacks.

I didn't realize this was a Schwarze Auge game. I'll try to check it out tonight.

Interplay managed all the core BIS/BioWare websites and message boards prior to NWN going to Infogrames/Atari.

It's true that, by the simple nature of allocated time, a game that splits focus between multiple types of gameplay will have a lot of difficulty matching a game dedicated to a single (or at least fewer) types of gameplay. But you can still use a focused subset of features. For example, I think Oblivion's stealth was pretty enjoyable. It was honestly the first time in ages that I've enjoyed using stealth in an RPG. Their stealth mechanics were nowhere near as robust as those in Splinter Cell or Thief, but they were still satisfying.

Honestly, I think it's really sad that RPGs essentially get a pass on having fundamentally junk core gameplay. And yes, I do consider combat to be a core gameplay element of most RPGs. Even in Fallout, combat was one of the core elements.

If you don't like the core gameplay, why do you play the game?

I think that's a good mechanic, and it seems similar to how Darklands worked, but the problem is that the frequency of opportunities to use a skill can become problematic. That and players wind up going to "just use" a skill for the sake of advancing it. It's not a big issue in tabletop because the GM can just tell the player to stop meta-gaming. I really am a fan of quest-based XP (only) and standard leveling.

I also like the idea of learn-by-doing systems; they just always seem to fall apart in CRPGs. I had a tabletop game in college that used a learn-by-doing system. It worked very well, but I was always there to adjudicate how it worked/didn't work. As far as the "number of classes" -- I think people get too hung up on this and on "number of" other things. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I don't think there are magic numbers for these things.

It's unlikely that any developer could legally make a Pathfinder game since Pathfinder itself is a d20 product. The d20/OGL license specifically restricts electronic d20 rights. It's likely that any licensing would have to go through WotC, not Paizo.

That museum shot (second pic) is so hot. Museum pic. So hot.

Practically speaking, it is more computationally expensive for an AI to find an open location occupied by an acceptable ratio of friends/foes than it is for them to target different individuals and make similar sorts of checks. The difference is between an (effectively) infinite number of points in space and a limited number defined by perceived enemies. So really, it's always going to be more practical to target enemies than points in space, though they could prioritize based on finding a "perfect ratio" and it's possible that they could do it at the end of their casting phase. As for the GUI option, I think that's less important. If you're activating it through the GUI, the targeting is under human control. Humans can do a pretty good job of prediction and can abstract open space in a way that the game simply cannot. Players can occasionally hit friends or miss foes, but the spell usually goes off in the way they need it to.

There's an anecdote on the director's commentary for The Mission where Roland Joff

They can call them "gambits" instead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_XII#Battle_system

It's actually pretty difficult to incorporate hand-to-hand combat into a game with combat that focuses primarily on modern gunplay. The system needs to be simple enough to use and very effective when applied -- otherwise there's not much point to having it there and most players simply won't invest in it/use it. We tried a few different basic systems and martial arts styles before settling on something we thought fundamentally "felt good". And that's very important for a melee combat system: it's more important to get the feel right first, then tune as needed for things like advancement systems and other elements of gameplay.

I worked on AP too, but only on a very small subsystem (CQC).

It's the truth.