MReed

Except that "click and go" mod support would imply a very, very high level of mod support which the developers have repeatedly said isn't in the budget. To be exact, the level of support the developers have promised for mod support is: 1) They will design the game to expose as much of the internal data as possible in external assets that can be modified, but not to the extent that it effects the release timeline. 2) They will not deliberately obscure the formats of those external assets (e.g. encryption). 4) They may release documentation on any custom file formats that they have created (or modified from the "industry standard" for a generally used file type) post-release. 4) They may release documentation on the internal processes that they use to create these assets post release -- but this documentation will be in terms of the commercial grade tools that they use in-house, not necessarily the tools that modders are likely to have available. 5) It is possible, but very unlikely, that they will release in-house tools used to create external assets on an "as-is" basis post-release. The issue here is that many of their in-house tools are tied to specific commercial products, and they don't have licenses to distribute those commercial products. They will not redesign the tools to eliminate the dependencies (no resources). tl;dr: The developers have stated that they aren't going to go out of their way to make modding difficult -- but they aren't going to go out of their way to make it easy, either. Stream workshop integration would definitely qualify as making it "easy".

That's a pretty good example -- but I'd argue that there is a significant difference between boxing (and other, similarly violent sports) in that immediate death (excluding long term consequences) is very rare. That makes them more a matter of skill (avoiding / minimizing hits ~= AC) or absorbing / minimizing damage (~= DR), which fits in with my example. But the champion boxer isn't going to survive any more hits from a short sword than I would -- it would be harder to hit him, but that's not what hit points in AD&D represent. I'm not sure that's relevant -- I'm not disagreeing that damage is scaled with hit points (actually, damage increases significantly faster than hit points, because higher level characters are expected to avoid or mitigate more damage via extrinsic effects, such as armor or magic) -- my point is that someone who has been stabbed by a sword should be in deep trouble, regardless of their training or experience, but a game that acknowledges this simple reality isn't as very fun. Thankfully, I don't have to -- in PoE, Priests in this setting don't get their power from their deity, but rather from their belief in a deity. And, of course, in AD&D it doesn't work that way, so I don't have to explain it in that setting either. That still leaves the question of the "magic bedroll that heals all damage after 8 hours of sleep", but... I'm fairly confident that your arguing that endurance / health doesn't make the game more interesting -- adding an (weak, as it must be) in game explanation of why it works the way that it does isn't going to convince you otherwise.

Arguing about realism / in universe explanations in this context is.... Well, silly, in my mind. In 2ed AD&D, take a 10th level fighter (50 hp) and a 1st level fighter (5 hp), strip them of all equipment, and put them in a room where a single character attacks them repeatedly with a short sword (1d6 damage, so call it 3 damage on average). Both characters are free to move, but cannot escape the room nor attack their attacker. On average, the 10th level fighter will die after receiving 17 hits, but the 1st level fighter will die after only 2. What is in the in game lore explanation for this? The best that I've seen is "Well, high level characters are able to convert blows that would otherwise be lethal into glancing blows," which contradicts other game mechanics -- for this explanation to work the characters should either be granted intrinsic damage reduction and / or armor class as they level up, and they don't. The real explanation is clearly "If character's hit point totals were fixed at level 1 (barring extraordinary effects that improve CON), then either 1st level characters would be able to challenge and defeat all foes, 10th level characters would be completely level locked (if a 10th level character has DR 50/-, then he can defeat any number of foes that do 45-49 damage / hit, but has no chance against a foe that does 50-54 damage / hit, or 10th level characters will be completely at the mercy of the RNG (10th level character has intrinsic AC of -15, so foes only hit on a natural 20 -- at which point the character is likely dead). If you are willing to accept the hit point abstraction as "necessary to make a fun and interesting game", then I don't think that the endurance / health system that is used in this game is harder to accept (beyond simply being newer). Just my two cents.

I suspect that consumables are deliberately overpowered -- to encourage folks to use them, rather than hoard them, which is certainly a chronic problem that I (personally) have in all but a few RPGs. I don't think it is just me, either. On the AI front: In both the IE games and the Aurora (NWN) games, creatures can only use consumables if they are specifically scripted to do so -- and, even then, they aren't really using them. Instead, the script checks for the presence of an item in inventory (e.g. "minor_endurance_potion"), applies the appropriate effect ("minor_heal") and then deletes the item. This is a pain in the neck to implement, especially when you realize that neither of these games allow a script to call a different script (much less a function or the like), so if you have 100 AI scripts, your "use consumables" code has to be copied and pasted to each and every one. And if you change the effect that is associated with a consumable you have to update all the scripts... Don't forget, that items that are dropped when the enemy is killed aren't generated until the enemy is actually killed, and therefore aren't available to be consumed, so... I'd be surprised if this changes, but it would be a nice change. Obviously, items that cast spells should only be craftable if someone in the party can cast the spell in question -- but it seems reasonable that the crafter and the spellcaster might be different people. If it doesn't work this way then this should change. On the other hand, given a party of 6 and assuming a normal distribution, it would be rare to want to craft a scroll where nobody in the party has the ability to cast the spell, so maybe it does work this way, and it i just isn't obvious.

Refactoring is developer speak for "Take working code that is organized one way (that made sense at the time!) into a completely different structure, and hoping that the code is still called in the right sequence aftewords". A trivial example -- you have two blocks of code (called functions) as follows: StartHide() { ... } EndHide() { ... } IsHidden() { ... } You want to change this to: StartHIde(Player currPC) {.... } EndHide(Player currPC) { ... } IsHidden(Player currPC) { ... } Of course, now you have to update the UI code associated with the hide button to pass in the active player. And you need to modify the combat code to check to see if a particular player has done something that voids hiding, and (if so) pass in the player that should be unhidden. And you have to modify the rendering engine to pass in a player object each time it goes to render a player to see if that player should be hidden. And you need to modify the AI to check to see if all players in LOS are hidden (if not, it should attack the non-hidden characters). And... You get the picture. While I'm doing analogies, upgrading the graphics engine to a new major version is about as difficult as replacing the transmission on a car -- replacing one engine with another (Unity -> Frostbite) would be about the same as putting a 350 hp high performance engine in an econobox car: difficult enough that you have to wonder if you'd be better off starting from scratch.

Not to be a spoilsport, but the developers specifically asked that people not post videos of content that wouldn't appear naturally in the backer's beta: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69199-possible-spoilers-modding-thread-a-simple-mod-and-console-commands/

This is an odd request -- the reason that the "Get back up when endurance (= HP) hits zero" is that many players consistently reload the game immediately when someone dies. After all, there is no point in playing out a combat with a man down when you know you are going to have to replay it anyway. Any significant penalty will result in this group of players doing the exact same thing -- except that the game is /balanced/ with the assumption that hitting zero endurance is no big deal. And it is certainly out of scope to rebalance the entire game at this point, so... I suspect that this is something that could be modded in fairly easily, for those that really enjoy either quick loading the game or dealing with whatever consequences they feel are appropriate. I wouldn't expect Obsidian to make any changes in this game -- maybe in PoE 2.

I'm fairly confident that the reasoning was along the following lines: If healing is allowed via spells, then encounters will have to be balanced with the assumption that the player will have in-combat healing. Assuming that these spells are limited to one class, it would "imbalance" the classes (contradicting a design goal). Many IE players always reload from a save when someone dies rather than using resurrection magic, rendering these spells moot. This is especially true at low levels (where this game takes place), when a dead character means playing inventory tetris to get the body and equipment into inventory, walking back to the template, and paying the fee -- a big hassle compared to simply reloading the game. If players don't heal to 100% when combat ends then balancing the game becomes far more difficult -- some players will rest after every encounter (no matter how hard you make this) while others will only rest when seriously damaged. This variation in playstyles makes it harder to balance / day abilities and "rest spamming" is considered to be the "wrong way to play the game" by a number of people. By automatically healing everyone reduces this variation, simplifying balancing. From a lore point of view, the presence of resurrection magic introduces complexities that are almost invariably ignored in role-playing games. For example, it seems it would be more or less impossible to actually assassinate anyone with significant wealth -- given the presence of resurrection magic, you would expect most wills to reads "Anyone (other than my killer) who resurrects me gets 10% of my estate". Given that the primary "gimmick" (a thing that distinguishes it from all the other fantasy settings) is the importance of souls, this kind of issues would be more prominent than it is in other settings -- eliminating resurrection magic avoids the problem. Your mileage, of course, may vary, and I'm not in any way affiliated with Obisidan.

Dropping items on the ground is a non-trivial item to implement (you need an icon for the loot on the ground and some UI changes to provide a place to drag items to indicate that they should be dropped), and given the unlimited stash it makes sense to eliminate it. However, they really should include an option to destroy an item altogether -- that's less expensive to implement, and I suspect that it would satisfy 80-90% of the use cases for "dropping items on the ground". Even this is only required because "limited stash" is, as far as I know, still a gameplay option.

The lack of combat XP probably isn't a big issue in and of itself (but it doesn't help), but I suspect that the real problem is the fact that all (perhaps on quest) XP rewards scale with the size of the party. In the IE games, a solo player would get 6 times the XP / character vs. a party of 6 -- in PoE, the solo player will get more XP / character vs a party of 6, but far, far less than 6x. In the end game, this doesn't matter (assuming that there is enough XP for a party of 6 to hit the level cap) and it doesn't matter in the very early game (where there is simply little XP available), but there is a vast chunk of the game in the middle where the IE solo character would be playing at a much higher level than expected at that point in the game and is therefore able to collect loot / quests / whatever to enable victory in the end game. If nothing else, the risk of the player dying is much reduced during this period of time, an important consideration for ironman games. On the other hand, someone playing this way is supposedly looking for the ultimate challenge, and out-leveling the bulk of games content results in an easier game, so maybe this change makes sense.

I'm fairly confident that this is incorrect technically, but is correct functionally: The AI doesn't track who is engaged to whom -- it assumes that any target engaged in melee combat is both engaged by and is engaging its melee partner. It may, although I really doubt it, assume that a target is engaging / being engaged by all targets in melee range. On the other hand, the above assumption means that removing / limiting engagement will hand a massive advantage to the player, as the AI will play as if engagement is universal while the player will play based on what is currently implemented. Fixing this would indeed require a major overhaul of the AI.

Actually, while I don't mind, I can imagine at least three different reasons to be unhappy about downloading the basic version from one place and the extra's from elsewhere: 1) "Elsewhere" (the Obsidian store) almost certainly has a shorter life expectancy than the either GoG or Steam. Even if Obsidian is still around in 5 years, they may not be able to afford (or want to afford) to continue hosting content for a 5 year old game, especially if they turn out to abandon the franchise (for whatever reason) 2) You have to remember two different sets of login information -- one of which you may only use for this single title. 3) At least with Steam, it is possible that some of the content may be disabled or impaired by the patching process. This only applies to the content that effects the game itself, obviously. Not a big deal for me, but I'd certainly prefer to have a single source to download all of my content.

This would indeed help -- because it turns the engagement metric from something that penalizes both the player and the AI equally into something that (say, 85% of the time) only penalizes the AI. The remaining 15% of the time (when the player is fighting against humanoid fighters or monsters that the developers have classed as similar) the penalties that the player suffers will be no worse than they are today, and likely better (only some opponents will have engagement). So, yeah, the less important engagement is to the play of the game, the better it is.

I can't find either of these posts, but I remember two separate posts from developers stating: 1) Due to lack of resources, the AI for foes in PoE will be limited / primitive / not as complex that they hoped for -- this shouldn't be a shock, because you really can't start tuning the AI until the mechanics are all locked in, and the mechanics still aren't all locked in. 2) Also due to lack of resources, there will be no player accessible scripting language (even in non-user friendly form, such as the old IE games offered), for party members. I certainly accept these as true statements, in any case . My objective in pushing for the removal of engagement is based on the logic of "Once it is in a released game it will be far more difficult to remove or nerf in the expansion pack / sequel and it creates serious difficulties in writing a strong / complex / clever AI for foes or players". I'm quite certain that whether engagement is in the game or not the AI for PoE is going to be no better than what was offered in BG1 (for foes -- it will be inferior in what is offered to automate party members), or only slightly better than what is currently on offer in the Backer Beta.

If you did that, and the stealth mechanics that are currently in the game were used, then I'd have no objection -- assuming that the NPCs never detected your party, a human in the same position could not have responded better. This would be a difficult thing to pull off, so the easier combat (perhaps even trivial combat) would be appropriate compensation for the pre-combat work put in. Assuming that Obsidian came up with some amazingly good AI and innovative mechanics that eliminated all of the common exploits / loopholes that we are all familiar with from WRPGs, and somehow didn't manage to introduce any new ones, then yeah, the difficulty would be out of whack. But fixing that is trivial -- just lower the combat stats and abilities of the foes until the desired level of difficulty is reached. That's the whole problem with exploits / loopholes: if you try to increase the combat abilities of foes to compensate for their existence, the primary effect is to make using the exploits more necessary. Depending on what exploits are being discussed, you can eventually end up in a position where the game play is absolutely trivial (because the exploits / loopholes render the foes unable to damage the PCs, for example) if you use exploits, but absolutely impossible if you do not (because you've ramped up the damage for foes to the point where they always hit, and minimum damage is enough to one-shot-kill any player character), achieving zero percent customer satisfaction. Obviously, Obsidian isn't faced with that in regards to kiting (or any other mechanic, for that matter), but the presence of exploits / loopholes places an upper bound how difficult the game is. There is never any limit on how easy they can make the game, though.

Yeap, you are absolutely correct -- now why would Merdith, a human of presumably reasonable intelligence, allow you to position your units in ideal position to ambush his party before talking to him? You are absolutely correct that this sort of gameplay is so common in WRPGs that I doubt anyone doesn't do it 100% of the time without even thinking about -- but it doesn't change the fact that it is as much an exploit as casting cloudkill on dragons in BG2 from off the screen and waiting for them to die. Both would never work against a human opponent (playing the NPCs) after all. You are correct that the opponents (in a "fair" fight) are generally statistically stronger that the player -- another advantage given to the foes in RPGs of all flavors (even P&P) is that they can spend 100% of their resources on this single fight, while the player has to worry about conserving resources for the next fight / deal with diminished resources from the previous fight. After all, win or lose, the player's foes are only going to have to fight once... Moving from engagement to AI isn't all that surprising -- my major objection to engagement is that it makes it impossible to build an AI for foes much more complex than the current AI: "If all you have are melee attacks, move towards the closet target and attack. Continue to attack that target until it dies." Sensuki's major objection to engagement is that it makes this simple tactic the best tactic 95%+ of the time for the human player. I suppose you could say that engagement does do a good job at leveling the playing field between humans and the AI for NPCs: They both will follow the same, simplistic, strategy for melee combatants. I'm not sure I'd call that progress, though.

I think it would be necessary to also include a "combat arena" (as seen in most JRPGs). For those not familiar with JRPGs, this means that there is an "Overworld" UI where your party is represented by a single character, and "Combat mode" where your characters are represented as individuals, on a pre-set map that is related to the area of the overworld that you were in before, but not identical -- among WRPGs, the ancient Gold Box games worked in this way, for example. In addition to allowing a "tactics mode" prior to the start of combat (which could, and should, take into account individual character abilities to control what order in which actors are placed, how flexible their positioning is, and a variety of other factors) it would have the following benefits: 1) It would finally solve the pathfinding issue that has plagued 3rd person / party based WRPGs since they were first conceived of. 1a) It would allow more creativity on the part of (overworld) map designers -- today, map designers have to design to minimize pathfinding problems, after all. 2) It would make formations work as intended -- the starting locations (from which tactics could be used to further re-position) would be based on the per-selected formation. 3) It would provide a clear demarcation between "combat mode" and "non-combat mode" -- if you've ever played HOMM or the Kings Bounty games, did it even occur to you to try to "pre-buff" your units? 4) It creates the opportunity to create skills and abilities that are unique to fighters that aren't clear analogs to mage abilities -- a fighter could increase the flexibility of all party members in positioning, reduce options for the opponents, or even (although this stretches a bit) ensure that the combat arena obstacles are more favorable positioned for their party (v. the opponents). It is important to note what wouldn't change: 1) Combat could still be RTwP (just with a turn-based tactics before things get started) 2) The backgrounds (in both overworld and arena) could still be pre-rendered / handpained isometric artwork. 3) The dialog system could remain the same 4) Fleeing from combat would still be possible (if all of your characters are within X units of an edge of the arena, and no opponents are within Y distance, the party can flee -- this is, if I'm remembering correctly, how the gold box games implemented it) 5) The player could still split the party (to allow a stealthy character(s) to proceed the party) -- that isn't something that JRPGs support, but I don't see any obvious reason why it would be difficult or problematic.to do so (obviously, if the split party gets into combat, the only units available would be the one in the smaller party). An interesting concept that I'd be interested in seeing someone implement in the future -- a melding of WRPG and JRPG playstyles. Not something that I'd like to see for POE, or POE 2 even, but branching the franchise to implement something along these lines would be OK with me.

Who says you can't? So far Sensuki has proven you can kite just fine, and i don't expect Josh to be able to prevent it. Engagement only works if the opponent manages to come right beside you. Nothink stops you from having the character the AI is targeting running in circles, while the rest of the team shower them with arrows,summoning creatures and casting spells. Same deal with the "no pre-buffing" rule. Having buffs only in combat is irrelevant. Nothing stops me from engaging combat with my rogue while the rest of the party is far away, and once combat starts i have the rogue run away while the rest of the party buffs itself. How is that different from pre buffing? I could go on and on. Long story short, Obsidian should design the game so the most logical way to play it is fun, without care about those who will try to abuse the system because you know what? You can't do **** to stop them. Mechanics other than engagement prevent single character kiting (e.g. one character with a ranged attack getting unlimited attacks against one or more foes, by simply moving away / around the foes). You are correct that multi-character (far, far more common in the IE games than single character veresion) kiting is currently quite possible, and engagement can't address it, regardless of any changes made. That was Sensuki's point -- engagement doesn't help reduce kiting, and that's the whole justification for including it in the first place, so it should be removed.

Or have dialogue not pause the game, and characters in the background moving depending on your C&C in dialogue. If the NPCs can move and the PCs cannot (during dialog), then that's not fair -- and, in fact, this happens all the time. We call it a cutscene... It is certainly possible to have a UI that supports movement of both NPCs and players during dialog (for example, NWN 1&2), but using that functionality to setup an encounter will (as you pointed out) result in players hurrying through the conversation / aborting the conversation / ignoring the conversation, all of which are bad.

Interesting line of discussion, but... Taken too far it leads to another hated (well, at least in my opinion) mechanic: Encounters where "stupidity is the only option" for player placement (ex: the Gromier encounter near the beginning of BG2:TOB). This occurs any time the designer forces the player (and opponents) into a per-arranged formation prior to starting the encounter, most commonly via a cutscene. This also covers situations where enemies spawn in behind / around the party despite the fact that the areas in question have been previously cleared (barring special abilities, such as teleportation, which should be rare). In rare cases this make a small amount of sense -- if the character in the game would have no reason to expect an ambush, then forcing the characters to per-selected locations prevents the player from using meta-knowledge (based on reloading the game) to their advantage. That's a pretty rare circumstance, though. It would be interesting, though, to see the NPCs respond to the positioning of the player's characters, in real-time, prior to the player initiating dialog with Meredith. Perhaps this could be handled with several (3-4) pre-selected formations for the NPCs, and they switch between them based on the position of the PCs. What would be the exact criteria for switching to an alternate set of positions would be difficult to come up with, though -- simple proximity likely wouldn't be enough, as it would strongly favor ranged parties. But, yeah, I'd agree that any tactic that a human player could respond to effectively is a legitimate tactic if the AI can be designed to do the same The last part is the hard part, though.

First, a side note -- not all encounters support kiting to begin with (you need a fair amount of space to run around in). I should have been more clear in my original post -- there are 3 strategies that developers can take when faced with an exploit: 1) Remove / nerf the exploit -- this is almost always the first and preferred option. 2) Balance the game as if the exploit did not exist -- players who discover and use the exploit will have a much easier experience than the designers intended. 3) Balance the game under the assumption that the exploit will be used by players -- players who do not discover / choose not to use the exploit will have a much harder game than the designers intended. The Infinity Engine games use strategy #1 (via encounter design, fast foes, most foes have ranged attacks) and #2, which is fairly common -- there are a number of encounters that are meant to be very difficult which can be rendered trivial by use of kiting. Any "boss fight" where the opponent lacks a ranged attack falls into this category, for example. An example where the Infinity Engine games use strategy #3 is rest spam -- the encounters are balanced with the assumption that the player's characters will be fully healed with all resources available for all encounters. That doesn't mean that the game is impossible if you rest less frequently -- it just means that the difficulty level is increased. PoE attempts to remove / minimize both of these exploits -- kiting in the ways that we have discussed in this thread, and rest spamming by introducing camping supplies (to reduce the amount of resting) and adding stamina v. health (to force resting at more predictable intervals).

Kiting = "Moving one or more units that are of the same or nearly the same speed as their opponents continuously in such a way that foes are guaranteed to receive far more damage than they inflict." It is not kiting when you use units that are (by design) faster than the opponents forces in this way -- assuming that the game is properly balanced, these fast units should have disadvantages that make the "fast v. slow" question a controversial subject. If this isn't the case, then there is a balance issue, but preventing kiting won't really address the problem. Kiting against a human opponent may or may not be a legitimate tactic -- it is illegitimate if there is no units / combination of units of roughly similar cost that can counter it. Kiting against a computer opponent is almost never legitimate -- it is very hard (all but impossible) to design an AI that can properly address kiting on the part of the player. The vast majority of "solutions" (and I use that term very loosely) involve encounter design (surround the party -- no way to kite because there are foes in all directions!), monster design (give all foes the ability to teleport / move much faster than the player's units -- if the foes units can instantly get into melee range, then kiting is impossible!). Note that the intent of these "solutions" is to prevent kiting, not to allow it to occur in a balanced way. In PoE, the primary anti-kiting mechanisms currently being used is increased recovery time for ranged characters while moving and the time it takes for the ranged attack animination to play. Nominally, engagement is also part of the "anti-kiting" toolkit (once the foe catches up with the ranged character, engagement will ensure that the ranged character can't move away), but in practice the first two mechanisms satisfactorily address the problem, leaving engagement as "overkill". Some people consider kiting to be a proper tactic even against an AI foe that cannot deal with it properly, and that is certainly a legitimate opinion. However, if Obsidian includes kiting as a valid tactic in the game, then Obsidian will have to balance the encounters in the game under the assumption that 100% of the player base will be kiting (otherwise, the combat will be far, far, to easy for kiters). Doing this means that those opposed to kiting will be obliged to use it to complete the game, which will reduce their sanctification with the game. Since there appear to be more players opposed to kiting then in favor of it...

That a PotD playthrough would be +1 level for the majority of game (vs. a hard playthrough) sounds about right, and sounds reasonable to me (if you were much more advanced than that, then combat would become easier [v hard], kinda of defeating the purpose). But then again, I'm not particularly in favor of combat XP at all, much less playing in PotD... I suspect that ctn2003 would feel very differently.

Beastiry XP is capped (for each monster type), and the devs have stated that critical path quests only will be enough to max it out. Thus, in a path of the dammed playthrough will result in you capping out very quickly, and in any case you won't earn more XP than in a playthrough at a lower level.

Osvir: The concern being raised by ctn2003 is, I believe, "I don't get any [more] XP for my extra work in clearing combat encounters in a Path of the Dammed play-through, so why bother?"