Homo_erectus

I can't believe how many people are hating on the music in Arcanum. It's one of only a few game soundtracks that I actually hunted down. I listen to it regularly. Ben Houge is a great composer.

Just give me enough inventory capacity that I can carry everything I need. And don't flood me with useless crap items that exist only to be sold for a few coppers. If I wanted to play an inventory management game with a side of adventure I'd play Diablo, or Torchlight, or Borderlands. Also, expanding bag space or carrying capacity is not character development. Don't artificially limit it and then slowly dole it out over the course of the game. I don't care about the details of how it works. Just make it a) not annoying b) not take a ton of time If you can go so far as to make it easy and enjoyable to use then good. But shoot for not @*ing annoying as a starting point since annoying seems to be the industry standard.

I can't think of a single rpg where the outcome of combat is entirely dependent on player skill. I think of player skill as meaning hand eye coordination, strategy, understanding of game play mechanics. There are a lot of action rpgs where the balance of success is weighted toward player skill with timing, coordination, understanding game mechanics and recognizing enemy actions. RPGs like the ones PE is supposed to be inspired by rely very little on the players physical abilities (hand eye coordination, timing to a lesser degree) for character success. Instead, the players contribution toward character success is in strategy, understanding mechanics and using the tools the characters have creatively. I'll use lock picking as an example. I prefer systems where the character must have skill in lock picking to unlock something. But, I also like there to be wiggle room, so if the characters lock pick skill is a bit low for a specific lock, and the player understands that DEX helps with lock picking and a second character in the party can temporarily boost the lock pickers DEX, that little boost can be the difference between opening the lock and not being able to. For straight combat, it's the same. The characters skill should be the ultimate determinant of success but the player contributes to that success by understanding the game mechanics and using the characters resources intelligently and creatively.

Ah I see. I've played Fallout, Fallout 2 and Arcanum each a few times. I admit I bought TOEE the day it came out but I've only put maybe 20 hours into it. I also enjoyed Lionheart a great deal although in the end I found it disappointing as the story moved further and further into the background and the game turned into a very bad diablo clone. Man the music was FANTASTIC though. I just missed the others. I *love* isometric rpgs and I'm a huge fan of Troika, Black Isle and Obsidian. I even enjoyed DS3 ) Still, I'm not looking for a carbon copy of these games, more a modern game with the sensibilities of those older games. I'm sorely disappointed that they are going with a class based system though. And with the prevalence of "phat loot" style gear in modern games, I worry that it might slip in, as I fear classes are a concession to the more modern audience. I guess we all have favorite elements of these games and I bet none of us enjoy exactly the same elements. I love the character building, role playing and stories that these games offer. I honestly find the combat to be fairly dull quite often though. It's usually too hard in the beginning and too easy in the end. Things like epic items are a big part of that, which is why I would prefer not to see them. Also, though, epic is relative. If almost all the weapons in the game just do damage and don't modify character stats or have effects, a weapon that adds a few hit points and offers a really occasional proc is comparatively epic and I wouldn't have a problem with that sort of "epic".

*Sigh* So they are making it safe for the "Creatively and cognitively challenged".. I can't beleive they'd settle for that after MCA's wonderful blog-post: http://forums.obsidi...l-set-symphony/ but oh well, One can only hope that multi-classing will be intelligently designed. You've summed up my feelings exactly.

So, really, you don't want items consistent with the precursor games that allegedly inspire P:E? Inspiration can be as much a cause to do things differently as to do things similarly. I certainly hope Obsidian is going to inspect the mechanics and development decisions of their inspiration games and then apply the things they've learned over the years and not just blindly ape those games. I don't want gear progression to be the entire, or major, focus of character development. Gear should be secondary. It's a means to an end. Yet in many current games gear progression is practically the only meaningful way to develop your characters. It's the end itself. The games listed as inspiration all had strong character development at their core. Gear was important but not the focus of the games. I'm most familiar with Arcanum and while it had unique weapons character development didn't primarily revolve around gathering "epic" loot.

I think "epic" items are stupid and I would prefer not to see them in the game unless they play a direct role in the core story, are only usable for a limited time or in limited circumstances, or have some sort of seriously negative consequence to use so you only can use them very rarely. Gear based "progression" is fun when the game is built entirely around it but those types of games typically give you little to no freedom to develop your characters the way you want to. I would much prefer that character progression through stats and abilities is the core of progression and gear progression is very simple, non-epic, and exists merely to support the character. I really don't want to see "epic" weapons with spinning doodads and dripping particle effects and pulsing neon crap all over it.

Skill tree's are particularly annoying. The reasons why have been covered by other posters. Honestly, I think a system like Arcanum's would be great. I'm sure a lot of people here have played it but for those that haven't, there are four areas you can spend points to develop your character, base stats (STR, INT, etc including health and mana) , skills (physical stuff like fighting, lock picking, bartering, etc), technology and magic. Of those, technology and magic are mutually exclusive. Within the skills, tech and magic sections there are like 20 choices at the lowest level and each one can be upgraded which offers new skills. The practical outcome of this system is that you can make any type of character you want, except a magic using technologist (which is a core conceit of the game world). This system lets you build a unique character as you play. You don't pick a class when you create your character, you chose your base stats and character history. Ultimately I want the character system to give me the freedom to explore and discover how I want to play my characters as I go through the game. I do not want to have to pick between a limited number of predefined classes which forces me to play the game the way the class designer intended it be played.

I really do not want to see prebuilt classes in this game. Give me the tools, and freedom, to build each character I play in a unique way that fits my play style or the concept for that character that I have when I start the game. I play RPGs for the characters that I make not for the characters that some (talented and good looking I'm sure) game designer came up with. Giving us the tools to develop our characters the way we each individually like them to be gives everyone the opportunity to make themselves happy.

I'm hoping Mature means dealing with emotions, interactions with others, and death in a mature and realistic way. It shouldn't be bombastic contrived circumstances, just realistic relationships with family members, neighbors, strangers, etc. You know, the sort of stuff you'd find in a book or movie that was written by a person who's lived some life and has some empathy, understanding and insight into the "human condition".

I am not a fan of prebuilt classes. They are generally dull and are rarely what I actually want to play. I would prefer a system where I have the option of doing whatever I want but only have the ability to specialize in a few areas. So I have to make choices that specialize my character but have enough options to choose from that I can really make a unique character each time I play the game. Arcanum is a good example of a character builder I enjoyed a lot. There's a basic choice, magic or technology, that you can't cross over but you then have *everything* to chose among within either technology or magic. But your points are so limited that each one is an important choice. I don't care if this freedom allows me to totally break the game because "balance", that mythical beast, doesn't matter in a single player game. A lot of modern rpgs have action game feeling. You have 4 or 5 abilities that only the one class has. It feels like you're playing a character some other person created. I want to be able to build my character by choosing the skills and abilities that suit my idea of *my* character.

Thanks! I totally did exactly the same thing!

I just tested this and it is not doing this on my machine. I did notice that I turned this off from the main menu and then started a new game and it was turned on so I had to disable it again. There is absolutely no auto-camera movement once this is disabled correctly.

This is the internet. There would be a whole crowd of them )

You can turn that off in the options, camera auto-orient.

For better or worse the xbox 360 controller is essentially the reference controller for all windows games these days. The bright side is that it's a great controller and you can buy one for like 35 bucks, which is relatively inexpensive. I completely agree with you on the camera angle. I'd like it to be totally free, but I'd be happy with at least being able to get it a LOT closer to the ground and a LOT farther away from the character. Also it'd be nice to be able to zoom the camera arbitrary in and out rather than just having the two distance presets.

The demo was fun! It controlled very well with an xbox 360 controller. I didn't even try the KB+M as I am not interested in playing this game with those input devices. I had two issues. First, I want the camera to be totally free. It is really annoying that it can't go down below a certain point and that point is really far up! I really don't care if the camera occasionally collides with the ground or other objects. Please, please, please allow the camera to have a wider range of movement. Secondly, the game would only display "letter boxed" on my CRT no matter which resolution I chose. This may be a bug with the newest nvidia driver but if it isn't this get's a huge WTF. The game doesn't appear to be scaling to 4:3 format at all and forcing letter boxing is pretty half-assed. I'd like to see more advanced video options, either in game or in an .ini file. Since the game seems to have pretty low requirements and ran basically flawlessly I'd like to be able to crank up texture filtering, etc. Also being able to turn off the bloom / hdr would be nice since I think it looks like you are simulating the effect of having cataracts. All in all, I am very excited about playing the game next week. This is the first obsidian game I have pre-ordered and the demo got me really excited!