metiman

I'm beginnning to think that it doesn't matter what Josh or Tim actually say. Seems like many people would rather just believe in the kind of system they want as almost like an article of faith. Perhaps it's like religion or just intellectual hedonism. Many people choose to believe that x is true simply because it makes them happy to believe that x is true. I'll never understand that sort of thinking. I like to at least try to discover what is actually true, outside of my wishes and desires. As far as I can tell you guys are basically designing your own system here. While interesting, it has little to do with whatever system Obsidian is actually planning.

Yeah. Matt is great. I also think Sawyer does a surprisingly good job at these sort of 'live' interviews. He seems very sincere. His laugh when asked if he was familiar with the codex was classic.

Yes. I am advocating that Obsidian pander to another group in a sense. Advocating, not in the sense that I necessarily think it is in their best interest. Frankly I don't. I think they should maintain their artistic integrity and make whatever game they want to make. Advocating only in the sense that there is a certain subset of players, those with tastes similar to my own, who either will not pledge or will pledge at just the minimum level if combat is cooldown based. Now of course we now know that they are planning to make combat cooldown based. So it is something of a moot point. I do not believe that Obsidian made this choice because they are pandering, although clearly at the very least such a system will have better commercial potential once the kickstarter is over and they go to retail sales. They will probably make a lot more money on a system that younger players and modern game players are used to and seem to enjoy. The geezer gamer category is not exactly ripe with profit potential. Hell, most people my age that I actually know do indeed think of computer games as a juvenile kid thing. Games for Old People? Not a huge demand for that I think. Normally their game system is at least somewhat dictated by a publisher. I think they want to experiment. To 'innovate'. To try to achieve the best combat system ever made. One that will please both younger gamers who may have never played the IE games as well as older gamers who have. I've also heard that Sawyer is an admirer of the 4th Edition ruleset. This system really is quite a bit like that. Except without the "daily" spell categories that would just seem tedious and pointless to players who favor more modern game systems. Someone who doesn't like either memorization or a cooldown system could be in either or any of the categories. If pressed I would say traditionalist because, certainly at this point, cooldowns, or more to the point quick spell resets, are THE issue. Personally I don't really have a horse in the Vancian vs Mana/Fatigue race. I have greatly enjoyed games with either sort of system. Arx Fatalis was one of my favorite games of all time and that used a mana pool + glyphs + mouse gesture trace system which I thought was just wonderful. I would love to see such a system in this game. Although I thought Arkane was a bit stingy with their mana allocations, making fighters and thieves relatively more attractive. I also quite like some of the fatigue based mechanics I have heard proposed on this forum. A nice variation on mana based resource management. I have never played a game that used such a magic/combat system, but it seems like it could make an excellent system. I didn't feel that any of these systems was designed so as to be more accessible to younger or more casual players as the Obsidian system clearly seems designed for. Its design goals appear to be to remove the 'tedium' of resting and the 'limitation' of combat being more difficult the first time you fight a battle without scouting it first because you don't always have an ideal spell selection. It also appears to be more action focused than the older systems that I enjoyed. "If it's not fun, get rid of it" seems to be a design goal. One that I regard as awfully simplistic. Although apparently FedEx quests are still in even though few players regard those as a great deal of fun. Do I think it's impossible for Tim Cain to design a modern combat/magic system that is mainly cooldown based and yet still fun to play? No. I think Mr. ToEE is a game design god and perhaps he can pull off what no one has before. I do think it's like trying to run a race with your leg in a cast though, but I guess time will tell. I'm not willing to gamble on such an experiment personally, but I will try it when it is released, and if I like it I'll certainly buy myself a copy.

I don't think resting is going to have any significant place in this game.

He was referring to spellhold and pocketplane. Are there any DA mods that give you a larger variety of monsters, gets rid of them just warping in out of nowhere, and gets rid of the cooldowns and any other MMO style combat mechanics? I looked for stuff like that when I first tried DA, but couldn't find anything.

Yeah, but I don't think they've bothered to mod Dragon Age have they? That was the last so called "spiritual successor" to BG2.

MC, you are most definitely drunk.

This is pretty much what iit sounded like to me. It is the 4E system modified somewhat. So encounter (recharge) and daily (no recharge until rest) powers. What powers fall under what depends on your level. I do not believe there will be at-will (spammaable) powers but we shall see. I do not believe there will be "soulpower" or mana. Nothing in the video suggested that. The grimoire probably refers to prepared spells. Swapping your spells results in a long cooldown. They should have left that for rest. Now they just have to figure out how to control rest spam. While that is an interesting interpretation he did not actually mention anything about the daily category in his update. Not saying it's impossible that it exists, but just because 4th Edition DnD has it doesn't mean Josh and Tim want it. Tim stated that he felt Wizards and Clerics were at a tactical disadvantage due to having to rest to use their abilities continuously. Fighters and thieves don't have to. So leaving out the daily spell category from 4th edition is not illogical.

But Tim actually said that there are only two kinds of mage spells: (1) low level and (or level 0 in your interpretation) and (2) Grimoire. He didn't actually mention anything about a third category.

What do you mean by "refining" your mana into the grimoire? And let's leave naked logic out of this. It's not about what is logical. There have been lots of logical and interesting magic systems proposed on the forums. It's about what system they actually plan to use in the game.

What are you basing that on? Certainly nothing that Tim actually said in his update. He hasn't actually mentioned any grimoire spells that were too high level to be reset with the by-level reset mechanic. I do like your narrative interpretation of the by-level cooldown period as "charging your grimoire", although technically you'd only be charging that level of spells. Not the whole grimoire.

I don't think so -- it would be really weird for anyone who played the Infinity Engine games to refer to using low level spells in combat as "rest". I spoke of this in more detail in the dedicated thread, but I believe that there is an additional limitation (e.g. something like mana) on high-level spells which requires resting after a while. That is, once you run out, you can still use the basic spells, but you can't cast from the grimoire. I agree that it is a weird use of the word "rest", but it didn't sound like a prepared speech. So you wouldn't expect every term he uses to be well thought out. Well it is possible that there is a mana pool, but he didn't mention it which is kind of weird considering how important that would be to the whole cooldown and magic topic. If there were a mana pool that would significantly affect these spell mechanics. Depending on how quickly you regenerate mana (if at all) it could trivialize all of this spell reset stuff. Let's say you had a mana pool that allowed you to cast just 5-10 high level spells before being drained and that it needed 8 hours of sleep to be reset. That would actually be pretty similar to a BG2 sorcerer. That would be awesome actually. But what purpose would the by-level reset mechanic he describes serve in that case? If you had a large enough mana pool it might allow you to cast higher level spells in the cast-cooldown-cast pattern for a while until your mana ran out and then you really did have to leave the dungeon and rest. I suppose that's possible. Although it still wouldn't make me happy if there is so much mana that you could make it through an entire dungeon before having to rest and refill it. Obviously once you start adding in magic system elements that were not mentioned you quickly end up in a la la land of speculation.

Non grimoire spells? You mean like cleric spells? He says that all (mage) spells that are not "low level" are grimoire spells. Even if Clerics have 8 hour spell resets, it still leaves the problem of the mage spell system. Who knows what the deity-based cleric spell system is going to look like, but he did say that he and Josh considered all spell casters to be unfairly hindered by spell limits and that they wanted to remove those limits. Maybe for clerics spammable first and second level spells will be sufficient, but it does sound as if, for mages at least, grimoire spells = high level spells = reset by level at every cooldown period during combat.

The feeling is mutual. Name a single decent game that used cooldowns.

Oh I see. His use of the term "rest". I agree that is a bit confusing, but by "rest" he seems to just mean a short pause. As opposed to the lower level spells that you can just spam forever. He says that after you use a certain number of spells in a particular level you are locked out of that spell level for a certain number of 'rounds'. So let's say you sling a bunch of third level fireballs until the page for your third level spells greys out. You then switch to a different level for a while and after maybe a IE turn (10 rounds) your third level spells un-grey again. Again, this is in contrast to the maybe first and second level spells which are considered the equivalent of a fighter swinging his sword. By "rest" I don't think he is talking about 8 hours of sleep or anything because that would contradict the rest of what he says.

I'm not sure any faction was arguing in favour of cooldowns. In fact, most people were against it... I'm pretty sure in his view, if you don't think cooldowns are an immediate failure for the game then you are the reason for the devolution of gaming. Pretty much. One of the reasons. Although publisher pandering is even more important.

Huh? What are you on about? Romances really weren't in my criterium. My criterium was more or less whether you like modern games like the Dragon Age series, the Mass Effect series, Skyrim, Oblivion, Diablo 3... Stuff like that. Those games that embrace the newer game mechanics and tendencies. Although clearlly New Biowarians don't exactly seem to hate romances. I don't have a bone to pick with romances at the moment. In fact I could care less whether the game has them or not. I'd rather have the game story read like a romance novel than konstant kooldown kombat.

Where does Cain say that you have to rest to renew the grimoires? Cain seems to say that such resets will be short enough that they will probably happen during any long battle. Also, by "rest" are you referring to something like a brief pause or to actual sleep? It doesn't look like sleep is going to do a whole lot in this game and sleep certainly doesn't seem to be connected with magic at all.

You mean like weaker spells to avoid making the mages like gods? As far as the grimoires go, I don't think they are the problem anyway. The problem is the by-level spell resets to avoid the whole resting thing. I think the devs are going to be surprised at how badly that messes up the game when they start doing their playtesting. This isn't the first time such systems have been tried and it won't be the first time such systems have failed.

You are entitled to your opinion, but why not wait and see? The project is still in early its stages. We don't know how the system actually works in practice. It doesn't seem to me like the cooldowns in PE will work in the same way they work in most MMO's. I'm not the biggest fan of cooldowns myself, but I'll withold judgement and wait for further clarification. Cain just clarified that stuff. Basically it's in-combat, by-level spell resets, the spell suite concept that Sawyer mentioned previously with like a 3 round cooldown for switching between them, and unlmited low level (probably 1st and 2nd) spells. If you don't have time to watch the video I transcribed the important spell related stuff further up in the thread.

I honestly don't understand how Tim Cain could go from something like ToEE to kooldown kombat. ToEE was utter cRPG combat perfection and will probably never be equaled let alone exceeded by anyone, and here we have the lead designer from ToEE committed to doing cooldowns. I will always consider Tim Cain to be a game design god, but this is depressing.

He does actually say that you only have to wait a few rounds between switching grimoires. By a few he may not actually mean 3, but that's my interpretation. The major problem I see with the magic system isn't so much the unlimited "low level" spells, which I interpret to be typical 1st and 2nd level spells but not 3rd level. That just makes wizards way more powerful than BG2 wizards which were already incredibly powerful. It's not the grimoire cooldown either. Actually, aside for my hatred of any kind of cooldown mechanism just as a kind of blind prejudice based on my experiences playing games that had it, I don't think the grimoire cooldown is itself really a problem at all either. Presumably that's an answer to the criticism of Vancian systems that you can't be perfectly prepared for every encounter on your first playthrough. Not a problem that I thought needed solving, but I don't see having your entire spell book available for every battle as a major problem. Again, wizards were already overpowered in BG2 and it was still fun to play them and fight them. I didn't think wizards needed any more power so as to make the melee classes a complete joke, but they could still be fun to play if the encounters are designed properly and there is good AI and the enemy mages are just as overpowered as your mages. The real problem is the by-level, in-combat spell resets in which you can reset more or less all of your spells before a long combat encounter is even over. I'd be against by-encounter spell resets as well because it doesn't allow for multiple encounter attrition, but at least that doesn't allow you to get back all your spells while you are still fighitng like the Wish spell and Infinite Spells exploits in BG2. I never used Infinite Spells exploits. To me such things ruin the fun of the game. Off course, if there were an option to shut this stuff off...but that hasn't been mentioned. I'm not even sure how it would work. Just turning off the cooldowns or reducing their timers to zero would not fix the problem. I guess the by-level cooldowns could be made longer. Like 8 or 24 hours long or something like that. Or at least long enough for several long battles.

I decided to make a transcript of the relevant sections: [starts at around 6:25] More specifically on cooldowns: [starts at around 7:55]

You know I used to be a Biowarian myself. I was a huge fan of Bioware and David Gaider before they made Dragon Age and Mass Effect. If you want to interpret using up all of your spells and having to sleep as a kind of cooldown, fine, but there is a big difference between finding a safe spot to sleep and sleeping for 8 hours and just having to wait a few rounds before you get all of your spells back. You can argue that it's just a quantitative difference and not a qualitative one, but it's undeniably a huge difference in play style.

I approve of this topic.