aeonsim

They also have a flat 10 for all attributes for all of them (So Bear, Lion, Wolf, Stag, ... all exactly the same base attributes) which seems wrong. Surely A bear should have much higher might + con, a wolf high Might + Dex, antelope high Resolve and Perception and so on. Secondly the companion bonuses only seems to start at level 5 (+1.5 DR, and a couple of other small bonuses). Finally the Bear is supposed to have a high DR yet it's not even listed on the character sheet so I've no idea if it's even true, while the Antelope at least gets it's +7 to Defences listed. Also to make them more interesting it'd be nice to see a modified version of the shared endurance system return for example they share the first 60% of their endurance. Thus if we have a Ranger with an effective endurance of 100, and a Bear with endurance 100 the first 60 Damage they take comes out of the combined pool. After that the damage comes out of who ever is actively being hurt so if the Bear is up front taking the damage at 65 damage there endurance drops to 35 but the rangers stays at 40. If the Ranger is then healed for 40 endurance the healing first fills up the Companion till it reaches the threshold and then is fills up the shared pool so in this case their endurances are healed to 75 (40-5 for the Bear, + 35 to the shared). This would provide the shared health benefit that was mechanically interesting but at the same time stop the Ranger or Companion from being KO'd by the KO of it's companion though, they'rd still be significantly weakened by it. Secondly the Companion lost debuf should change to something closer to the barbarians rage as the Ranger/companion goes wild about it's wounded companion. So change it to something like 1.4x Damage, Acc -5 and 0.8x Deflection...

Ironskin gives +20? DR for a certain number of hits.

Even with a word filter I'm pretty sure this game isn't going to be suitable for children they've pretty much said they are aiming for a mature audience and even in the beta one of the 4 quests is pretty nasty. The noble impregnating his own niece and dragging her off to have the child in secret, combined with her trying to escape suggests she wasn't willing. Combine that with her being caught by a cult from which several members suicide or are murdered to brainwash her into murdering her uncle and possibly as much of his family as possible. With most of this explained in detail in the quest and the 3 common options to resolve it being, kill her, free her to kill her uncle or free her and inform the uncle so he can properly imprison her to prevent it, with the 4th option being dependent on some other factors which I've not fully tracked the implications of yet. But does that really sound like a story suitable for children? Considering it's only a minor story in the game and the devs have said that one advantage of the kick starter was that it would allow them to tell stories and touch on topics that publishers wouldn't let them because it'd pick up an M or R rating.

For a Wizard: Blast - AoE standard ranged attack! Penetrating Blast - Now with added armour penetration Weapon Focus Noble - Accuracy bonus for two of the 3 Implements allowing you to swap between all three basic damage types Pierce/Slash/Crush Extra Spell Slots Or the Elemental Talents if you want to build an elementally themed wizard (role play mainly) as +20% damage to one of the magical damage types Fire/Lightning/Corrode/Cold is certainly not useless, however it's probably not the best build for a wizard.

They make decent tanks, the fact that there auras are combat only and thus stop them charging forward immediately only matters if your idea of how to play is to charge you melee characters straight at an enemy. If you prefer to position the party (in stealth if you want) then trigger combat with a spell or ranged weapon it has little or no impact, they'll be active by the time the enemies reach you, the biggest down side is that opening attack will miss the benefit of the aura. In general they have been all round defences than any of the other classes, giving you better over all defences against all attack types (though individual party members may be better at a single defence), and if you want to you can build them so they have the highest deflection defence of all the characters (Good against nearly all weapons and some spells).

In 435 bringing back a complete egg adds a a large number of potions and additional components to her stock. You can see the shop stock at 56:10 in the following video.

Bazy stop and focus on the first part even with out boosted perception or resolve or the shield, just the acane veil + hardening at level 4 vs one of the best humanoid enemies on difficulties lower than PoD. The Hardened Veil gives a 30% chance of being missed, and reduces the chance of taking full or greater damage from 80% to 36%. 50Acc vs 19 Def adjustment -31. 1-19 = Graze 20 - 70 = Hit 71-101 = Critical hit 50ACC vs 64 Def adjustment +14 1-30 = Miss 31-64 = Graze 65+ = Hit Lots of the enemies are worse at hitting than that so against the smaller spiders and wolves the chance of full damage reduces to 15-20% with a 45-50% chance they will miss. That's fairly impressive, sure I'd kind of like it to be a bit better but it's still reasonably effective. As an instant oh s***t ability that's fairly decent, sure you can still be targeted by other attacks and things like flanking will shift things by 10% but it shoudl give you enough time to do something else, be it run away or cast a different spell to booster the defences further.

and let the render spend 15-20mins per area to get really high quality areas. Or days in some cases. We render on two machines that spin all of the time. Sean can chime in on how long it takes to render a scene like Dyrford Village, but I think it's several hours now. It used to take over a day before we optimized it. Thanks Adam and Sean Thats a decent amount of render time, do your render machines use a professional GPU to accelerate the renders or is this solely CPU based rendering? Definately doesn't sound like something that could be render in real time at 60fps on most desktop or laptop computers.

The 2D use also probably lowers the system requirements as well, and give all players the same level of visual quality if they can run the game. Those are pretty significant advantages and the result is that people with built in Intel graphics seem to be able to run the game fine. Something I'd doubt if these levels were all full 3d and being rendered on the owners machine. Also I'm not entirely sure if they've done this but with prerendered 2d you can put in huge amounts of detail, high quality textures and models and let the render spend 15-20mins per area to get really high quality areas. Maybe one of the artists could answer this but how long does it take to render one of these levels and what spec computer system are you using to do so?

Early game I think it'll be a useful ability (lvl's 2-4 or so) after that it becomes less so, though as mentioned hardened veil will give it a decent boost. Also if you build a mage with Perception or Resolve your looking at upto 20 additional points of deflection. Just testing it out in the Beta now a pretty average Wizard (high Int, 15 resolve/perception) at level 4 had a Def of 29 with the highest BB companion having Def of 43. With Veil and Hardened Veil that jumped to 74, with out a shield which is decent, considering the average kith enemy has an accuracy of ~50 around the Village and enemies like the spiders and wolves are lower in the 30-40's. That effectively gives you a 24 Point advantage against Medreths group thus: Miss = 1-40 Graze = 41-75 Hit = 75-100 Crit = Not possible against deflection That's a 40% chance of a miss, 35% of a graze (half damage) and just a 25% chance of a hit, and you can't be critically hit. Add in a small shield and that becomes a 15% chance of being hit which should give you a reasonable amount of time to cast some other spells to help or for someone else to come and help. Add in a Bracers/Ring of deflection with another +10 and it's a 5% chance to hit, or you could have put the 10 points that went into Perception and Resolve into something else. Against the spiders and other basic enemies it's a 34-40 point advantage which changes the hit tables to the following: 1-50 = Miss, 50% 51-85 = Graze 35% 86-101 = Hit 15%, with a small shield 5% chance of a hit If you set a hatchet and a large shield in your second weapon set then when attacked trigger Veil + Weapon switch then you actually can't be Hit, by anything weaker than a Stone Beetle or Bear in the Beta. Against Acc 50, Wizard (I18/R15/P15) 29 Def vs Hardened Veil +45 & Hatchet + Large Shield +30 for a total of 104, advantage of 54. 1-70 = Miss 71-101 = Graze While if your wizard has no resolve/perception bonus the effect is: 1-60 = Miss 61-95 = Graze 96-101 = Hit, 1 in 20 hits will do fill damage. You can still be hit by other non deflection based attacks but it's not terrible. A little bit higher so you didn't need to use the large shield would be nice.

I think they've got to send a copy to Paradox for localisation QA, which they'll then check. If they're happy with it then they need to get the initial DVD mastered (or pen drive if they're using that instead) and check that that's alright then mass produce the DVDs, manuals and other bits that they need to put in the box, assembly the box and start shipping them to various stores and backers. For the backers they've a pile of other stuff they need to ship as well. You'll also note that Adam mentioned last week that they'rd been busy generating builds (probably for Paradox, with different fixes in them). Then some one mentioned JS is supposed to be in Europe some point soon. All that suggests to me that they've either sent paradox a gold master or possibly several Release Candidates in towards a final Gold master build for the DVDs. From the games I've previously followed the development of generally if your producing physical copies and have a specified release date where your likely supposed to have those physical in store on that date you need 1-2 months at least to get it all done... Trying to do it a week or two before the release date would be insane.

The options are already there you simply choose which one you want as combat starts (press S or D). D (fast) is very useful for exploring rapidly while in scouting mode outside of combat.

Yeah, that fight becomes quickly impossible if you don't kill the Preacher asap. The preacher has Beloved of Spirits, which stacks each time it goes off. I had to reload that fight 20 times trying to kill that preacher in PoD. Also not 100% certain, but I think that the ancient spirits continues to work even if the chanter is defeated in the fight. The cipher enemy in that fight kept regenerating health after I killed the chanter, but no one else seemed to. Are you sure the Cipher didn't have the leeching shield spell (psychovampiric something)? Psychovampric shield is only supposed to steal enemies Resolve/Intellect and give you an amount of Deflection as a bonus for a short time period, it doesn't heal them.

Ops didn't notice that, my bad. You could be getting a lot of Crits off her Cipher abilities which target will, it often tends to be a much weaker defence for the various creatures in the game than Deflection.

There are/were handgun/pistol style blunderbuss so maybe it's supposed to be one of them, have a look at wikipedia for more info. For example:

Sneak attacks count as Critical hits and she'll be getting sneak attacks when ever the target is has pretty much any other negative effect on them, which is rather often.

The max Def build is rather nice the following shows what attack roll is needed to hit you at level 4-6 if your using it for different accuracies. For Deflection attacks from creatures with ACC below 50 your pretty much immune. If the roll is above the red line they can't hit you.

It doesn't actually work perfectly against a wider range of creatures, and it's required a very very specific build with every thing put into defence, as a result the attack speed is very low and the damage isn't great though that could be improved by customising the weapons . All the examples shown where there are all misses is against enemies with ACC of 50 or less while there are others even on normal and easy who have accuracy of 54, 66, 75, 85 which will still hit and hit hard . The build is giving near immunity up to ACC of ~50 on Easy-Hard this includes all spiders (apart from Queen), Medreth's party (but not the other groups of humans). Creatures that can still hit are wood beetles (51, so maybe not or very rarely), Stone Beetles 62, Adra Beetle ~71, Elder Wolves (possibly) 54, Bears 73, Elder Bears 85, Korgrak 84 and probably most of the spell casting enemies and Elder Lions. It's a pretty nice build for solo play though I'd want to probably switch the weapon to a Spear (for decent dmg + the ACC bonus) or Mace (decent dmg + Penetration) with Accuracy 2, Damaging and some secondary damage types to speed up the damage being dealt. On PoD the build loses it's advantage as all the enemies have ACC of over 50 (usually they get +15ACC).

One of the nice things about the IE games is when you gained a level is was a big change and made a significant difference allowing new tactics and abilities, further more by the time you gained the next level you had had plenty of time to full explore these abilities/spells and learned how to incorporate them into your tactics. Thus each level was a major event that could drastically change your options something I find tends to be missing in games with faster levelling, as if your going to spread a 40 hour game out over 30+ levels each has be less impact full unless things are going to good like insane at the end. Here we'll probably be be spending a 40+ hour game over 12 levels so each level is going to be a major change.

I agree. Can't even see one spell animation complete without several pauses. From the side it looks like the guy's playing a game that severly stutters, lol. This should have been a turn based game...sigh. I guess if I ever try it out it'll be on the easiest mode cuz I want the game to be closer to IE games, meaning - much less pausing. Or try playing with the combat in slow mode, that makes things easier but i often forget to use it. If you've looked at the second video with the melee party I use it a bit and there is a lot less pausing.

Oh? I certainly appear to be seeing the Def bonus at least...

So I've been trying to see exactly what the difference is for each difficulty level, to get a better idea of what is happening in the game. So as the devs described it going from Easy > Normal > Hard has little effect on the enemy stats. If we take for an example a wood beetle at all these difficult levels they have a Deflection of 33 and Accuracy of 51. However the number of enemies changes from level to level. So if we look at the area south of the road at Dyrford Crossing before it curves up this is what happens: Easy: 1 Stone Beetle (SB), 4 Wood Beetles (WB) Normal: 3 SB, 4 WB Hard: 1 Adra Beetle (AB), 2 SB, 4 WB Now if we change to Path of the Damned the numbers increase again, but also the stats increase the wood beetles which were 33DEF, 51ACC -> 48DEF, 66ACC for a 45% increase in DEF & 30% increase in ACC. Secondly the numbers change again: PoD: 1 AB, 3 SB, 4 WB It seem they get the max number of each enemy type that has been present in the previous difficulties, the result is each enemy is harder to hit, finds it easier to hit you and there are slightly more of them . For the various enemies I've looked at the range of Def increases is 20-50% and the ACC improvement in the range of 25-40% Other examples: Inside the Caves all Spiders up to Korgraks area: Easy, 7 total: 1 Ivory Spinner (IS), 1 Ivory Spinner Spiderling (ISS), 3 WidowMakers (WM), 2 WidowMaker Spiderlings (WMS) Normal, 22 total: 6 IS, 3 ISL, 4 WM, 9 WMS Hard, 29 total: 8 IS, 6 ISL, 6 WM, 9 WMS PoD, 31 total: 8 IS, 6 ISL, 8 MW, 9 WMS With each individual having about 40% more Def and ACC Krograk: Easy: Krograk Normal: Krograk, 3 Bears (B) Hard: Krograk, 2 Elder Bears (EB) PoD: Krograk, 2 EB, 3 B With each individual gaining about 30% additional Def and ACC, the elder Bears end up going from 87 ACC to 106 ACC. Anyway it makes for a very substantial increase in difficulty going from Hard to PoD, as well as a more interesting difficulty scale rather than just having all the enemies attribute adjusted by 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0x for Easy, Normal, Hard and PoD. In general as you increase the difficulty you need to use new tactics as the number and types of enemies change, while once you get to PoD you've got that plus all the enemies get stronger so you've got to change the tactics and play much more efficiently to survive the stronger enemies. Also strategically you've got less resting resources so you'll need to make more efficient use of all your abilities, and consumables or spend a a lot of time running back to town.

The following video shows it at 2:14 when the Cowled Dwarf casts Blessing.

Right had a go with a melee focused party this time using: PC Paladin BB Fighter Monk Barbarian Chanter Ranger It's interesting how it changes things some fights become a lot easier the beetles and the party fights aren't even a challenge, while the Ogre & bears are a lot harder. With this sort of party you don't need to rest as much as well. Surprisingly the lack of healing (no priest) wasn't much of an issue between the Chanters constant endurance and the larger amounts of endurance/health the classes have and there better defences you don't need to heal anywhere near as much. Apart from the Ogre all the other fights are much easier and quicker. This ones in 1080P, and there are links to jump to each of the fights in the description of the video.

You can always use enchantment to increase the Hatchets damage (though you can do that for everything else). For a maxed out Deflection Paladin the biggest issue is going to be the reduction in accuracy that results from using the shield. In general I'm not sure the Hatchet makes much sense for a Paladin it's a ~10% increase in defence (at low levels, where def is ~50) in exchange for about 20-30% less damage per hit compared to a sword (later it's approaches a 5% increase in def as def approaches 100). For a Rogue, Cipher, Wizard though the hatchet does make sense with there lower base defence it ends up being a near even exchange 20-25% better defence for 20-30% damage. It's more complex than that because of all the different weapon types and some of the other bonuses like Armour penetration but it's still a fairly close trade off. For a Paladin it would probably be better to consider something like a Spear, Rapier or Dagger for there accuracy bonus to offset the shields accuracy penalty, or maybe a Mace or Stiletto for there armour penetration.