jethro

In your previous post (#567) you feared that every fight would be the same instead of having some difficulty variation. Now you propose level scaling that would make each encounter the same difficulty! How does that fit together? Before you really try to sell us on level scaling: 1) Bethesdas Oblivion did that and it was very badly received by players. One of the most popular mods turned that "feature" off. 2) When Obsidian said they would use some minimal level scaling there was a huge ****storm. They had to emphasize that it would only be on the main quest and really really small to calm the player base.

As far as devs have said PE will not be a CoD type linear on-rails experience. If you go to areas above your level you should get a view of the grave stone picture quite easily. If you do more side quests or explore more you will have an easier time in later fights. Even if it was on rails there would be a lot of variation in player levels due to the amount of side quests they have done. So where is the hard mechanic here? You bring forth an analogy with real life. In real life most fights are horribly unbalanced (the street gang against its victim, the school bully against the small kid) and over in a second. That is reality but very boring to simulate in a game. Your other analogy to MMOs is a mystery to me: Balancing has taken place in RPGs since the beginning of time. Pen-and-Paper gamemasters do it with every enemy they put in front of you. cRPGs have gotten bad reviews because their balancing didn't work (Arcanum for example). Is it possible you project an uneasiness about linear games (DA:O? NWN?) into the balancing issue?

Sacred, would you avoid combat and instead sneak slowly around needing double the time? And miss out on the loot they have? You should take into account that to make sneaking fun the designers have to make it difficult as well. So since both methods give the same xp and both take time, the decision on your side is quite easy: You would sneak or fight depending on which is more fun. Or what you would see as appropriate. I'm not against sneaking (or other alternatives), I'm against combat not being rewarded in some tangible way. So loot is no tangible reward? The xp you get sooner or later for the objective is no tangible reward? I never said you are against sneaking or alternatives. I was only trying to refute your opinion that "no xp for combat would make you avoid combat". I'm asking you directly: Would you, Sacred, avoid combat if there is no xp for it and instead sneak? I'm guessing the answer is "no", and in that case your opinion above is wrong. Whether it is true for other people shouldn't concern you, right?

Sacred, would you avoid combat and instead sneak slowly around needing double the time? And miss out on the loot they have? You should take into account that to make sneaking fun the designers have to make it difficult as well. So since both methods give the same xp and both take time, the decision on your side is quite easy: You would sneak or fight depending on which is more fun. Or what you would see as appropriate.

Sorry for the rant. I don't think I misread your post that much but did heavily overdramatize. I try to rephrase more sanely and hopefully more clearly: I think yes, objectives shouldn't be automatically identical to quests as some might think. So just making an intelligent observation in a conversation or getting someone to reveal some bit of information could give xp as well. I hope this answers your question in the first paragraph There could also be xp to be had in a cave somewhere. Directly by freeing a child the orcs had locked away there or indirectly when you later find out that someone was looking for the ring. Maybe even for finding a hiding place. But what I don't understand is the view that exploring the cave would be useless if you don't get xp there. That you wouldn't go there just for curiosity, gold or items, or the satisfaction to have cleared the cave from unsavioury elements. That you additionally needed the xp as some sort of meta-pat on the back from the designers. Your words: "If there are no rewards like this in the envrionment, then there is little reason to try to explore". Simply not true for many players.

I answered to a post of yours where you argued that (and I rephrase here) you are not motivated to do something in the game (for example combat) if you don't immediately get an XP reward for it. I was pointing out that this is very similar to the motivation a farmer has or someone who is "meta-gaming". Now you can play any way you want, I don't mind where you get your motivation from. But the game should not have to be designed to take this "meta-gaming" into account, because giving xp for kills makes balancing the game more difficult. <-- Since you always ask for our hidden agendas, look here, this is it. I gather you think it is not more difficult to balance the game with kill xp, but I'm pretty sure it is. -What motivation do I have to be curious when there's no reason to be curious? Why would I bother doing anything other than going straight to the objective if I know that there's no point in exploring? Since curiosity IS a motivation (look it up in the dictionary) your sentence really doesn't make any sense. I am at a loss how to answer that question. Is xp the only motivation you accept. Doesn't anything else motivate you? Yes, role play servers didn't have much success in MMORPGs. Mostly because of immature players destroying the immersion for the ones trying to role-play. Not because no one wanted to do it. When you talk to a quest-giver in BG and say "You seem distressed. How can I help you?", you are role-playing. So don't act as if "role-playing" were something undesirable. I looked through previous pages of this thread (down to 14) and didn't find where you defined experience by solution. I assume solution-xp is meant as sort of finer-grained than objective-xp even though nobody really said how fine-grained objectives are. And with fine-grained you probably want to say that every single monster is a problem to be solved. Hence it gives xp. Am I right with that? Why should it be necessary to make each and every solution to a problem give different xp? I assumed you thought it a good idea to give more xp for a very ingenious or difficult solution. Most problems will have different solutions but no single solution that stands out as particular difficult. The diplomatic solution will be as easy to someone specializing in diplomacy as killing is to the fighting specialist. How can you say one of them should get more or less xp? And remember that the game balancing is easier when you get the same xp regardless of solution. And better balancing means better overall satisfaction of the players. You brought up the realism argument about killing 100 critters and it not improving you. I just showed you that your argument directly leads to use-based xp and not kill-xp or solution-based xp as you seem to think. Come on, make some effort to read what I am saying. Sure. Base class monster has a series of floats for each type of solution (combat, stealth, diplomacy) and a boolean hasRewardedXP. Inherited monsters initialize the values, and specialized or situational modifiers are added later by reading in modifiers added to the map. You sneak past the critter, it does xp * modifer and rewards you, sets the hasRewardedXP flag to true, which means it won't reward any further xp preventing you from going back and killing it. Done. You skipped over the difficult part I was interested in. Maybe my fault because I didn't pinpoint the exact problem. How does the program find out that you sneaked past this one critter? Two scenarios: A) There is a castle where you need to get to the throne room. At a narrow passage there is a group of enemies to stop you. You could (1) kill them, (2) sneak past them, (3) go through a hidden path that leads over their heads through a servant passage (no need to sneak) or (4) trick the butler into calling them to the west gallery. B) There is a desert area between two towns. On the road is a group of critters. You could (1) kill them, (2) sneak around them or just (3) simply walk around them. It could also happen that you just explored the area and by chance walked around them. Now an objective based xp system would probably give xp in case A once you arrived at the throne room. Same xp for every solution, easy to program, easy to balance the game. In case B you might get no xp at all or maybe xp for reaching the next town. Additionally you might get xp for killing the critters because you made the road safer. No problem programming any of this. Getting xp for the kill means there is an additional objective (clearing the road) for which only one solution exists (killing the critters). There might or might not be a quest for it. So how would your solution based xp system work in these cases? How do you get the xp for solutions A3 and A4. By crossing some line? Then you have this line as a special case to program. Also were do you put this line in an open area like the desert. Why would you get xp in case B3 even though you might not even know the critters are there? Or does sneaking while in sighting range of enemies give you the sneak xp for them? Then you need a special solution for cases A3 and A4 (where the problem is solved through intelligence, observation or exploration). When do you give the sneak XP? Probably when you turn off sneak mode again after being in sighting range of the enemies. Problem: You might not have sneaked passed them when you turn of sneak mode again. So you also have to check positional data to make sure you really are past them. But that isn't as easy anymore in case B, an open area. You could come from any direction, leave in any direction. How can you easily determine whether you really passed them? It might mean that people who sneak a lot will sometimes get xp before they even have decided if they want to avoid the monster (for example if touching the outer edge of a monster sight radius and exiting again) Before I list other possibilities it would be easier if you told me how you think it should be done in the above scenarios. At the moment I see your solution-based xp as workable (if I guessed right what you meant), with some edge-cases and more detail programming necessary to accomodate all solutions than an objective-based system. A few more quest bugs (which only would result in not getting xp for a specific solution, so no show stoppers), not as trivial as you seem to think. The (only) advantage is instant gratification (aka xp meta-gaming). See above. I don't see any difference between objective based and solution based xp in that regard. If you have to make sure that every playing style gets somewhat the same amount of xp (to make the game better balanced), then they do practiacally the same thing, only your solution is more programming work per quest, more complicated.

Thing is, my memory is so bad I even forgot the resolution of PS:T's main story even though I remember it as the best quest I ever witnessed. I don't even remember one side quest from all those classic games at all. So the only quest I can offer as outstanding to me is from recently playing Fallout 3. It is the Survival Guide Book quest. Because the dialog with the quest giver (don't remember her name) is really brim full with dark humor. It also shows that it isn't the quest mechanic itself that makes a quest memorable but mostly how it is presented.

Sorry for two replies to the same post, but I just stumbled on an interesting blog post by Nathanial Chapman of Obsidian on this site from two years ago. He talks about the worth of realism in game design: http://forums.obsidian.net/blog/5/entry-139-realism-vs-what-designers-care-about-verisimilitude-and-the-responsibility-of-expectations/

That would be one way to solve it. But it clashes with the feature Obsidian wants to put in of low charisma and low int dialog options. If you always took the highest stat of the group in talking you would never see those dialog options. But if they really implement separate skill points for fighting and social/stealth/crafting skills (like they said in the beginning), you could make sure that your PC has the social skills you want for him.

"if it is not completed within 24 hours, the game "responds" by doing x" This is actually how a game master I know often structures his PnP games. It makes sense there because you don't have dozens of smaller side quests in PnP. You might have a few simultaneous quests going but quite often the players then drop the more uninteresting ones or try to get things done in parallel if possible. What really never happens in PnP is that your party suddenly decides: We want to look what's behind that mountain. Or that they think it's a good idea to travel for 2 weeks to the next city because that side quest about delivering a package to Aunt Rosalie sounds like fun. But that's exactly what often happens when you play a cRPG. And this is why timers in cRPGs are not well liked.

Strange, so you fight without having fun just to get xp. Lets define "farming": Doing repetitive boring tasks to get something. Lets define "meta-gaming": Doing things you normally wouldn't do to get rewards outside of the game world(*). So it seems to me you want Obsidian to design its RPG for meta-game farming. I played all the infinity games and other RPGs and I had fun with the fights. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Trivial fights are boring everywhere, I played some in PnP as well. Hard fights are fun. Or tactical fights like ToEEs or the mage duels in BG2 or Torment where you had to peel of the protections spells were fun. If they were not I would have stopped playing or played on easy or god-mode. Naturally fighting is only one part of an RPG so there is a limit to how tactical you can make it without the player spending 95% of his time in fights. So fighting is a compromise. But fighting for xp is not the solution, really (*) I say xp is outside the game world because you get your advancement/level-up in any case if you play the game (which entails solving quests), just the exact moment you get some of the xp is different. So if you absolutely need an xp reward directly after the fight to do the fighting then your motivation is solely for the xp and not for the later level-up. Motivations to not use the direct route (which often is killing everyone): * Curiosity. Hey, what happens if I do the other thing? * Role play: My priest wouldn't do that * Fun: Hehe, I got a great idea that will make that sorceror look like an idiot By the way, nothing prevents Obsidian to grant more XP for exceptionally difficult solutions. This would still be an objective-based xp system. Wait, he isn't better if killing the 100 critters didn't push him over the level-boundary. Or do you think the PC sees a holy number before his eye that changed from 11583 to 11593 after he killed one critter? No, he seems to kill 100 critters and doesn't get better at all. Then he kills critter number 134 and WHAM, suddenly a level-up and he really is better. "What was so special about critter number 134?" he asks himself. He also wonders why his alchemy skil did improve as well, without him doing anything else but killing critters. What does that do to your suspension of disbelief? If you want a system were doing something improves that skill a small bit and only that skill, get a Bethesda game. Not that skill-use leveling is more fun to play (it isn't IMO) but it definitely is more realistic. How do you reward stealth? By giving 10 xp for every second you are in stealth or not seen by anyone? Oh wait, that is skill-use leveling like in Bethesdas RPGs (although I doubt they give xp for being just stealthed). No thank you. Everyone would just get stealthy, leave the computer for an hour and have a fully developed master thief. Got any better idea how to reward the stealth solution? If you don't have a *really* easy implementation idea let me give you one: Just use objective-based XP. It is really easy and solves the problem ;-)

This type of free roaming is the definition of an open world game. PE will be a story driven game and making this exploring possible will not be a design priority. Just keep that in mind when you expect a reward for that. But wait, you think you didn't get a reward? Lets look closely: * You already get the stuff you find there and maybe even a unique item. * You get the satisfaction of finding this hidden cave all by yourself and isn't that the purpose of "exploration"? * But it doesn't end there: You might have the chance to talk to them, they even might have a quest for you. Or you hear some rumor from them. * If not, the chances are really good that someone else had and still has a quest for you that involves this cave. When you talk to this person and he laments that some orcs stole his jeweled wedding ring you can smile knowingly, tell him how lucky he is and give him the ring. Oh, and get the xp. Why should exploring get an extra reward? I had so much fun exploring in Fallout 3, just getting into the role and scouting the area. xp is something a role player should have no knowledge about, it is just a mechanism to level up at appropriate moments. If you hunt for xp in a game you are not role playing any more, you are meta gaming. You have fallen into the instant gratification trap. The design goal of an RPG is to immerse you into the world, let you role play. If you want to meta-game most MMORPGs will accomodate you better. You say it yourself: "You miss out on any cool stuff that is around". Exactly, there is cool stuff there! What more reason do you need to look for it? By the way, I just realized that xp could be viewed as a sort of generic micro-achievement system.

I did like the crafting in Arcanum. It suited the steam-punk genre, the recipes were works-of-art themselves, there was a lot of variety and you could create special items not available anywhere else. You also had to choose disciplines, which afforded some planning and decisions from you. I also liked the Fallout 3 system because of the unique items. But there could be made an argument that it would have been the same if I just found the item instead of the recipe, especially since the ingredients were common/easy to get. But it also fitted nicely into the genre. I can't remember any fantasy RPG crafting system to have been really fun. For example the systems in NWN/NWN2 just led to minmaxing and overfull inventories. I had the impression that the fun I get out of crafting something did take away directly from the fun of loot. Also there were no hard decisions, you always had enough companions to be able to create everything. Crafting was sort of automatic, easy, trivial. So some thoughts on what would work (and I'm not arguing with realism in mind, just what would be fun to do and what not): 1) Crafting of consumables, like others already said. To make this workable money has to be really tight. You have an incentive to craft your arrows or anti-venom potions instead of just buying them. Simple arrows should be cheap but not effective, while effective arrows would be expensive even late in the game. 2) Crafting of unique items. And I don't think "Long Sword +2 +1d6 cold damage" is a unique item when there is a "Long Sword+2 1d6 fire damage" around. It should give a unique (but not essential or overpowered) ability to really make crafting exceptional and not just a loot substitute. One variant of this would be the item slot that only holds crafted items. For example it might be unusual to wear scarfs (or amulets, belts..., take your pick) in this part of the world. Or it might just be unusual for the magically enhanced scarfs (amulet,belt...) to be found in these parts. But through a quest you get the gratitude of a foreigner who is magic scarf crafter. He tells you the secret of how to do it and from then on you can craft something that is not usually found as loot. 3) I really think there should be specific recipes plus scarce raw materials and not just "you can craft anything if your skill is high enough". Recipes have the advantage that you have three times the fun: When you find the recipe ("Oh, I can craft THAT. Yipee"). When you find ingredients, especially the last ingredient ("surprise. Yipee"). And when you actually craft the item ("Got IT. Yipee"). The advantage is also that you get to see the item in the recipe when it still would be overpowered. But you get to hold it in your hands only later, when it isn't overpowered anymore, but still unique (uniqueness is the reason you still desire it then) 4) Recipe enhancement like in Fallout 3 might not be such a bad idea (i.e. finding the same recipe again enhances the recipe) for consumables. But instead of making the product better (which would make crafting non-optional or only effective if you find all recipes (which would lead to wiki-checking)) the number of ingredients should get lower. So if an arrows need 1 wood, 1 string and 4 feathers, improving it would remove the string (because you know now how to glue the feathers to the arrow instead of binding them). Next improvement would halve the feathers you need (because you don't waste half of them or you spread them out in a cross pattern).

This is already in the game. Restart the game. Select the same character build and just by doing the quests differently you will be presented with different items and maybe even see a different area. Select different companions this second time through and you already have your style of NewGame+. The advantage: Everyone is able to see the adittional stuff, not only the diablo players among us. I've heard nothing about souls transfering to parallel universes (where the previous character is not doing the quests already) AND at the same time doing time travel (to get back to a time where the story begins). No problem if this were an over-the-top silly RPG like South Park. The difference being that in PS:T time has progressed instead of being reset. Quests you have finished stay finished, people that know you still know you instead of feigning ignorance. Lets not forget that MMOs are not very convincing in portraying laws of physics ;-)

What do you think you were doing during your travel time? In the evening at the camp fire? When hunting for food? Or in the small to larger towns on the way (maybe with a shooting range or a library)? Or when you have to rest due to a sprained ankle or a flooded bridge? I think it is assumed in RPGs that you keep a part of your day for training your skills, no matter whether you are traveling or on a quest in some place. You could even say that in the heat of the battle aka quest you might have less time for training.

Does it? Is it really more fun to control your characters in speeches as opposed to them talking themselves? Remember that they having their own minds is one of the big selling points of PE: That you have "living" companions (as in Bladurs Gate1/2 and PS:T) instead of cardboard figures without personality (IWD). Now if you control them in speeches that would not break realism but immersion. The player would perceive the companions more under his control, less "living" . Ergo less fun on the whole. (Fun is actually a very nebulous and subjective concept that encompasses the whole game experience, one could argue that it is the only true measure). Not that you haven't got a point there: It would be a win in some situations to be able to let anyone speak for the group. But nobody defined "fun" just as having more control over everything. It is true for the fights (in this game as in many others, but not all, team-FPS are an exception), it is more complicated for the conversations. If your companions were generated by the player and without their own personality I would not argue against it. I don't have a problem with the realism argument as long as it takes into account that other considerations have a bigger weight (Granted the first sentence of my previous post was poorly worded, it was a "radical" reply to a "radical" viewpoint). There is no black and white here, a big win in realism or a win in a combination of factors could trump a small win in more important factors. I don't know if anyone cited realism as a reason against controlling other characters. But if I would value realism above all then you couldn't control your companions at all (not even in fights) because realistically you are only one person and not a group.

I select "Other" because I feel there is no possibility to extract a single feature that defines the greatness of this game. It was the scenario, the music, the dialog, the story... that made Arcanum more than the sum of its parts. I can't point to a single game mechanic.

Please no arguments about realism. A lot of design decisions are founded on gameplay and not realism. In practically all games, because fun play is more important than realism. In this game there are a few axioms that are already fixed: Your companions will have their own personality separate from you. It follows that they will not be completely under your control. Another axiom: There will be dialog choices for low charisma or low intelligence characters. It follows that not the most logical character will talk but either the one you select or simply the PC. And because of the first axiom this should be the PC. The reason that you control the PCs fighting is again simply for the "fun" aspect and has nothing to do with realism or story. Its a compromise because companions who do their own fighting are just boring to play in a party RPG. So the ability to save your game progress is somehow founded in the story? How does the story dictate that you can't shoot or look through a window? Why is there no concurrency of actions?

Didn't Obsidian tell us in one of the first kickstarter updates, that they were planning to have a separate progression in non-combat skills (for example social skills) and combat skills? I really hope they didn't drop that or just use it for stealth and lockpicking. So even if you are a fighter, you could give him excellent speech skills in exchange for lockpicking. But without compromising your combat skill advancement. Or a wizard that is very good at mechanically reciting spells, but a social disaster.

But he is. The player may move the whole party, but characters you find in the game (i.e. not created by you in the adventures guild) have their own personalities and voices. Apart from the lines that don't fit the character you have the problem that companion x might be scripted to intervene into your conversation. If you put companion x as speaker, he would interrupt himself. Sure, even that can be handled, but it gets more and more complicated. This is just the wrong RPG for this type of system.

Ideally the character should change from ranged weapon to melee weapon automatically. This is a nobrainer, not a tactically deep decision.

That was something that I really didn't like in NWN and NWN2. Many locations were full of narrow corridors leading to some quest objective. Ironically the outdoor locations were more constrained than the insides. Ultimately the world of NWN never really felt like a World. Obsidian, please, no corridors.

I don't really care if the music is live or sampled. But I hope for variety. A very uniform sound tapestry has its advantages (for example easy recognition and coherent feel) but ultimately gets old fast. Nearly off topic, the best music in an RPG goes to: the title music of Arcanum. Together with that wonderful intro movie with the zeppelin is something that is forever burned into my brain.

Something fresh and exiting sounds good. Not to say that something fresh and exiting with a shovel doesn't sound good as well ;-). But something not GTA sounds even better, we are on the same page here. Maybe just the "with visits from regular clients" in your first post was too much GTA or Sim City for me.

Ah right, monitor manufacturers are happy that consumers don't need to change their monitor and buy a new one, they prefer to ignore the replacement bussiness that might fill their pockets. For the average consumer not all is good though. If they fall for the "hype" they need a 4 times stronger graphics card. And the monitor and the card will drain more power naturally.