metiman

Jesus. You do at least realize that you are NOT going to get this from Obsidian, right? At least not in a non-publisher project promising a BG2/PS:T remake. It is just beyond absurd to expect it. The only thing you should, maybe not expect, but hope for is good AI. Hoping for an aggro mechanic is just very wishful thinking on your part. BTW, if you haven't yet tried an MMO let me be the first to tell you that you will absolutely love them and never want to even look at P:E when it is released. If you want aggro game mechanics I can't think of a worse place for you to be than on these forums. Just a friendly suggestion. No matter what you do you should start playing WoW ASAP.

I think most people voting for it are thinking of aggro in a much broader way. Basically anything that controls who the enemy attacks beyond just targeting the closest character. That doesn't mean they want any skills that directly alter "threat." At least, that's what I hope. Always the optimist. If they are voting that way then they deserve the clickfest popamole game that they are asking for. Engilsh words do have meaning. Aggro means only one thing and pretty much anyone who has even the vaguest idea of what it is about should be voting not just "no", but "hell no" unless they really do want PE to be an MMO. If Project Eternity did turn into an MMO, or even a single player version of an MMO like Bethesda's games, I do think that it would be so hilarious (in a dark sort of way) that it would almost be worth the result. Everyone who pledged at the higher tiers would be unable to sit down for weeks.

I can immediately see that the Shrek character represents the forces of good and the Caerdon character represents the forces of evil that are now destroying everything that was good about some of the older cRPGs. I hope you are happy with DA2, Caerdon. Because that's what you are begging for with posts like yours. Just remember that as you attempt to push games as far as you can stand into the anti-intellectual, popamole paradigm there are others with even less patience for standing around thinking and they will always prevail. Always. Less intellectually oriented games, all other things being equal, will always be cheaper and easier to make and will always be crowd pleasers. That's all a publisher ever needs to know. Once you venture down that road at all there is no escape from your destination, which is a game with breathtaking graphics which even a monkey could play. While I do appreciate that you are some kind of super-genius with an IQ of 210 who can think as fast as a computer, what about the rest of the 99.9999999999999999999% with average intellects who cannot think as fast as a 5 Ghz quad core CPU? I guess they should start their own kickstarter? The idea of real time combat without built in pause mechanics being tactical is ridiculous. If you love popamole combat and can't get enough of clicking pixels to death with your mouse, at least be honest enough to admit it. Or go play against an excellent chess player, but limit your turns to no more than 1 second and allow them to take as much time as they need to make a move. Come back and report the results Mr. I-am-as-fast-a-thinker-as-a-computer. There can be no debate about whether turn-based is a more strategic style of gameplay. It is that pretty much by definition. You can argue all you want about whether it is a fun style of gameplay, but it is clearly more strategic unless you are just fighting without thinking. Oh yeah. And if the developers ever have any question about how the combat in this game should work, just look to the fantasy cRPG with the greatest combat system ever: ToEE. Look no further than Tim Cain. In that sense it's really not that complicated. Once you have replicated that, then we can talk about improvements.

Is it wrong for me to wish those 17 people who voted to put the most ludicrous of all MMO combat mechanics into a BG2/PS:T remake a slow painful death?

Personally I just thought the combat mechanics of AP were truly awful. That alone killed the game for me. Combine that with that ridiculous action game inspired dialogue system and the game was begging for a quick burial. No amount of MCA quality dialogue could even remotely overcome those problems for me. I'll never know just how good the story was because I can't stand playing the game for more than 5 minutes. Honestly, I found even Dragon Age to have more enjoyable combat. At least while you were still fighting other humans before you left the starting town. To me, AP should be a reminder of how important it is to get actual player feedback. And lots of it.

Just as long as those "companions" are prepared for their delicate necks to meet the brutal steel spikes of my flail or the cold steel edge of my sword.

Giant intelligent insect-like races would say the same thing about you, puny human.

Well certainly the kind of change that Bioware made was bad and yet they probably had the same motivation that Obsidian now has. To improve things. Dragon age was advertised as the spiritual successor to BG2. Perhaps they sincerely wanted to make something like that, but partly due to their mostly nextgen player base and partly due to simple errors in logic they ended up destroying everything about BG2 and even NWN that was of any value at all. Instead of making things better they made them much, much worse and at great expense. They could have just made BG3 using the old Infinity Engine and saved a whole lot of money and earned the respect and gratitude of everyone who enjoyed that wonderful game. Gaider could have done it. Instead they tried to improve things. I think the lesson that can be learned form Bioware and Dragon Age is not so much that change is bad, although many kinds of changes clearly are, but that change is dangerous. And the more perfect the system you try to improve upon the more dangerous it is to attempt it. Yes, yes. Your syllogism should be: Bioware changed their games (which used to be good). Those changed games were bad. Therefore changing their games was bad. But you changed the conclusion to "All change is bad" which clearly doesn't follow. Looks like Merin finally gets her beloved strawman served on a silver platter. Of course I'm only saying that because I haven't seen anyone argue that "All change is bad." Perhaps you can point to an example that I missed. It is important to learn from others' mistakes so that you do not repeat them. Bioware was in a similar situation to the one that Obsidian is in now. They chose to fill their BG2 sequel-in-spirit with NextGen mechanics which presumably all sounded great at the time. Ushering in the modern age. Progress! Hurrah! But that isn't what happened, is it? It's just a lesson. Nothing more. It certainly doesn't prove that Obsidian cannot somehow succeed where hundreds of other highly intelligent people have before always failed. Maybe they'll finally pull of a cooldown system that really works for once. It's highly unlikely, especially without an extremely insightful analysis of what went wrong with all of the other attempts, but it's not impossible. Nevetheless, by replacing sleep with a short, convenient timer or just an instant recharge button they would be fundamentally changing the dynamics of the entire game. If that isn't a risky thing to do then I do not know what is.

Are you wishing to imply the problem with DA2 is a lack of tedium? I believe so. The lack of a particular kind of tedium that cannot be removed without also removing most of the fun of the game. Dragon Age specializes in a kind of pointless tedium and it probably came about due to precisely the kind of logic that Josh has been using. Everything has a price and the price of attempting to remove the tedium from every single aspect of the game, no matter how crucial to the operation of the mechanics, leads to not 1% of the game being tedious, but all of the game being tedious. I think 1% is better than 100%. So it's not so much the 1% tedium that I like. It's the fact that that 1% is protecting me from the 99% if I tried to eliminate it.

You haven't wandered into Congress, but you have wandered into an active war zone. Are you unsure of whose side you are on? Of your forum faction? Perhaps I can be of some service in this regard. Just list the cRPGs that you love and the cRPGs that you hate. Although, no matter what, you are in the pro-cooldown faction. On your side are the Dragon Age and MMO lovers among others. That's the lawful evil faction in case you were wondering.

How would you determine it, ledroc? Would you go aggro on the guy with the highest hitpoints and the best armor while seeing 3 powerful spellcasters behind him with almost no hitpoints and no armor? That fighter is going to hit you no matter what you do, but you are not going to be able to damage him all that much compared to what you can do to the casters: kill some outright and interrupt at least some of their devastating spells. I've never understood strategies that don't go for the casters first. And, yes, that is what Sword Coast Strategems does. If paying attention to "aggro" mechanics were smarter those BG2 mods would have options for that. They don't because aggro mechanics are for foes with an IQ of like 3. Well except that it wouldn't work on them either.

First of all I more or less agree with what you say here. By exploit I mean leveraging implementation details and/or bugs to get out of some battle without fighting much at all. The fake talk strategy is a perfect example: attacking a foe while he is still talking to you and hasn't gone hostile yet. I had a rule that I wouldn't start fighting until the enemy had actually gone hostile. I certainly don't think that's the only way to play or that another style is cheating. I just found gameplay more fun that way. Feebleminding Firkraag isn't an exploit. It's cheese. It takes away the entire point of the battle if you succeed. You may as well just hit CTRL-Y if you're going to do that. Now, you might argue that a spell like that shouldn't be in the game, but I would argue that there is nothing wrong with the spell. The problem is with players who seem to want to intentionally ruin the game for themselves by using easy or unfair tactics. I think Feeblemind is one of the things that makes a game like BG2 so interesting. Yes, you can make your game less fun briefly until you just reload (gasp!) and try it again a different way that turns out to be more enjoyable. Bioware could have simply made Firkraag immune to feeblemind, but I would see that as cheating. If I play fair then so should monsters. That's not to say that monsters shouldn't have resistances that humans don't have. It's just that adding a resistance just because it weakens a tough monster does not seem like a sufficiently good reason to me. A lot of players also refused to use Web + Cloud Kill especially from a long distance away for similar reasons. It's cheesy and often not a particularly fun way to end a battle. I did use Web + Cloudkill sparingly because I sometimes thought it was fun and fun is the whole point. The way I see it, options are good. More options are better. Preventing the player from being stupid should not be part of game design. Giving him options to be smart should be.

That's just bad AI. It has nothing to do with aggro. Play BG2 with the SCS mod and you'll find that every enemy makes an instant beeline for your spellcasters just like you would. Let's see...devestating incapacitating spells that can completely turn the tide of combat and very few hit points and no armor? What's not to like about such a target? Maybe dumb foes can do nearest first, but everyone else should be smart.

How would a thief help with crowd control? When I think of crowd control I think of spells like hold person or AoE spells like Slow or Web. I suppose a poisoned weapon could do something like that, but I'm not sure what else a poor thief is supposed to do against a crowd.

As far as distracting an enemy, fine. Give some penalty to concentration. But that doesn't become the kind of "aggro" control that taunt is attempting to be. A distraction doesn't mean the monster is going to chase him all over the room while the rest of the party pelts him with arrows. If you want to get the monster to chase some character around the room who happens to be wearing boots of speed or some equivalent thief skill then just do it. Very bad AI will certainly help in that regard.

Except what makes you think CrocodileMan even feels rage? And what makes you think that being attacked in a battle (a very surprising event indeed) is going to enrage it. The immunities to taunt are perhaps a start. I'd make pretty much every non-human creature in the game immune to it. And any human with an Intelligence above 12 as well. I guess the real target is human enemies with low intelligence. That at least starts to be plausible. I vaguely remember some spell that was supposed to represent having a girl laughing at you. I can't remember what the effect was supposed to be. You obviously wouldn't expect other species to understand the meaning of the convulsions we call laughter. Or at least I hope you wouldn't. The same with any sort of mechanism for attempting to mock other species. It just aint gonna work.

World of EternityCraft?

Well at least admit that an aggro based combat model is an MMO combat mechanic if you do put up a poll about it.

Did you also do the fake-talk strategy to kill Firkraag? Ever try to Feebleminding him? It works sometimes, but it makes the combat afterwards suck and ruins the whole point of the challenging fight. I guess you would do it and then talk about how badly designed the game was to let you. How about using a protection from magic scroll against Kangaxx? Boooring. These strategies work, but no one is forcing you to use them. There were all kinds of exploits in BG2. Did you just use them all to try to make it through the game as quickly as possible? Because that's how the game was designed? I would hope that you would try to play in a way that was most enjoyable for you. If you actually like trudging back and forth between dungeons and camp for more arrows then great. Otherwise I would think that trying 'suboptimal' strategies instead would be more fun.

Which bounce off CrocodileMan's armor and he continues to ignore you while he beats down whoever he is beating down and allows you to be completely useless. What is taunting supposed to actually achieve anyway? Whatever it is it would probably be better to just do it automagically instead of using some nonsensical excuse that turns every monster into some immature human who loses all control of bodily functions due to some weird sort of code that we call "taunting". If there is a dumber mechanic in RPGs I don't know what it is. And I still don't see how it actually hurts the attacking monster. Oh, wait. He's supposed to then chase you around and completely ignore everyone else? Totally implausible.

"Taunt" is vague. What would you actually be doing to "annoy" the ogre. The whole idea is anthropocentric. Why assume ogres would even get annoyed?. You're projecting human emotions on an entirely different species. Will a python get angry if you laugh at it? What about a croc or squirrel or cat? It's just silly against nonhumans. In many cases either the foe is going to be intelligent enough to attack strategically regardless of trying to tease him while he is in a fight for his life with someone else (kind of silly thing to do anyway if you think about it) or so unintelligent that the "taunt" is just some meaningless action that the creature neither understands nor cares about. You can tease a caged dog by tempting it with a steak and then pulling it back when he goes for it, but that's not going to work to if he is chasing a rabbit or fighting another dog. And the taunt mechanic doesn't even have the equivalent of a steak. In fact it doesn't really have any narrative justification at all.

I was just thinking what an interesting companion a ghost character like Deionarra would make. Or how about a vampiric mist? Maybe an Owlbear or some kind of birdman. Human companions are boring.

The fighter-as-tank is another of my pet peeves. Are the enemies really that stupid? Why go after the most heavily armored character with the most hit points when standing right behind him are a whole bunch of weaker, lightly armored, easy to kill characters? Of course not all foes will be that intelligent and perceptive. Clearly an ochre jelly isn't going to have that kind of reasoning ability and would just use a nearest-first strategy. It doesn't even have eyes.

I hate the whole idea of taunts. What a silly game mechanic that is. As if all of your foes only do things for emotional reasons. Maybe they want to kill you for logical reasons. Or just because they are hungry. Maybe they could care less about your teasing (which a nonhuman isn't going to understand anyway) and are smart enough to go after whichever characters have the lowest hit points and highest armor class. That's the kind of game I want to play where at least most of the enemies are reasonably smart and can sense which characters are the most vulnerable and then go after them. The rest is just silliness. At the very least I'd restrict taunts from only working against other humans. The idea behind a backstab, or think of it as a neckstab if you want, is that it's a surprise attack and the effectively invisible and silent thief has plenty of time to jam his dagger or short sword into wherever he likes. The victim isn't defending himself at all against the attack. That can make a big difference. Of course you might get into the silliness of the whole hiding in shadows and moving silently thing. Unless it's a very dark room with lots of background noise from like machines or something that isn't very realistic. I think all of this implausible stuff was an attempt to make a class whose original function was mostly to disarm traps and maybe find secret doors into something other than dead weight the rest of the time. There were a lot of traps in early D&D. The Tomb of Horrors was everyone's darling back in the day. I still love those illustrations (would be nice to get that guy for PE), but it had a lot of deadly traps. So you pretty much had to drag along a thief who was otherwise not good for much. Except maybe backstabbing on rare occasion. Aside from disarming traps I think the main role of the thief should be a covert assassin. Poisoned weapons and maybe a single very high damage attack every so often with whatever narrative justification.

David said more or less the same thing about Chris basically having the overall story written right from the start. All the other writers just fleshed out his ideas. So most of the ideas were Chris's, but quite a bit of the actual dialogue in many areas was written by Colin and David. Clearly Maldonado and McComb have some writing talent and deserve some credit for the greatness of PS:T.