Tamerlane
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Posts posted by Tamerlane
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We've got a crowdfunded project with many many rpg veterans chipping in. I'm ready for some innovation and experiments. Here are some features of my imaginary, perfect 'Project Eternity', add your own below!
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Resting
Spells/abilities regenerate instead of becoming unavailable after use until the party rests. The party acts at 100% efficiency when well rested, but gradually becomes more vulnerable and loses effectiveness in all skills when tired. Spells not only cost mana, but tire casters independently. The same holds true for physical skills without consuming mana. The party can rest anywhere to regain up to e.g. 50% efficiency, but can only recuperate to 100% in designated resting areas.
I really like this. Gives some sense of urgency when you're in a dungeon, and gives value to designated resting areas (no more trips to that one unused tomb, Mr. The Nameless One). And I always hated the "rest to recover all your spells", thing, too.
One thing you didn't mention? Ambushes. I... really don't know how I feel about ambushes while resting. Are you really adding "tactical choice to your decisions" when it can all be avoided with a hit of "F9"?
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No guiding hand
An immersion breaker in modern games is the relentless pace. Not in Project Eternity. Here it is important to pay attention to the dialogue. Little is gained by following quest markers or checking objectives. Facts are recorded, but the player jots down his/her own conclusions in the journal next to them, and chooses his/her plan of action. The minimap is not a substitute for looking at where you are going, players need to familiarize themselves with the game world. Help is readily available by talking to people, but the right questions need to be asked. Superior solutions to quests apparent only with understanding and immersion are available next to regular endings.
Rather importantly, people have to give good directions, here. You ever play a modern Elder Scrolls game with the magic arrow turned off? It's miserable. You never know where anything is, because the developers assumed that you would have the arrow on, so nobody gives directions. Nobody says "follow the dirt trail by the red house just east of town" because for most players, that's totally irrelevant.
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Combat
The trade-off for tactical mastery in turn based combat is the static feel. Especially during unchallenging encounters, parties approach each other, find the right distance, stop, and lose health until one dies.
Not in Project Eternity. To start with, enemies have hit boxes which can be individually targeted.
Moreover, terrain, obstacles, distance, position and stance are integrated as tactical elements. Attacks and spells can knock targets around.
More action oriented players such as myself appreciate timed active actions (block, parry, riposte/counter, chain...), although these are optional in the game menu.
Both classic rpg lovers and action oriented gamers appreciate differentiated combat stages, where party characters dynamically adjust their standard attack according to distance. Long range, mid range, and melee. A melee character needs to consider how to approach through a debuff focused mid range without penalty (by fog, evasion, cover, long range stun/knockdown...), thus making the "approach and hack" tactic less feasible.
Different armors equal different strengths and weaknesses. Weapon changes during combat are quick and necessary. Semi-scripted melee and spell combos bring joy to all (thief hamstrings an opponent from behind, fighter bashes his head in)
For me, there are two important things in the combat.
First is that mages and non-mages have some semblance of parity. No stubbed-toe-insta-gib level 1 mages, no god-tier level 20s.
Second: let warriors control space. Let them punish runby attempts and kite-micro. Attacks of opportunity, sure, but more than that. An attack of opportunity might take out 10% of a guy's health as he runs past you to gut your mages. Give defenders ways to tie up opponents who try to ignore them. Give them ways to punish.
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Romance
During the last years games have opened up a lot in this respect. We saw more LBGT friendly interaction, and a lot more skin. Since all bases are covered in Project Eternity, a large cast of characters is needed. Most characters are regular boring heterosexuals, not that much interested in sex in any case, because immersion doesn't permit otherwise.
A true romance (and with good reason not everyone wants to go there) seeps out of the confines of dialogue. Combat changes, as do expectations from partner and party. Interaction is more frequent and natural. A darker side of romance is the power to influence/manipulate/control one's partner, and some evil bastards take advantage of that.
Something similar to the Practical Incarnation/Deionarra thang would be really neat, whether you get to do it, you can have it done to you, or you can see one companion do it to another.
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Leveling
A Fallout approach is chosen in lieu of fixed classes. It's possible to pick up formerly unknown skills during the story which are not included in a skill tree/pool, and different types of equipment have unique actions.
Whatever stat system they do use, I'd really like it if the stats were actually representative of something. It's common in JRPGs and even many WRPGs for your warrior to have 200 strength and 20 intelligence while your mage has 200 intelligence and 20 strength. Does that mean that the warrior is ten times stronger than the mage? Is the mage ten times smarter than the warrior? No, of course not, because those numbers don't actually reflect the characters' strength and intelligence. They're just there to slightly increase their damage multipliers and give the player a sense of progress. And I hate that.
Just... y'know, not too restrictive. I loved SPECIAL, but that hard cap of 10 was painful. Taking a naturally strong character, putting him in strength-enhancing power armour, and giving him strength-enhancing drugs should make you feel like a walking POWERTHIRST commercial, not someone stuck at the same arbitrary cap you were at before.
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Resting
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The charcter I roleplay as.
The underpants gnome. But still brothels and protitutes with bikinis are immersion breaking
Ah yes, the nebulous immersion.
The reason why nudity is "meh" for me is that rarely I do I find it actually adds anything to my game experience. Prostitutes don't walk just walk around naked, so seeing them not naked seems perfectly fine.
I think excessive blood/gore is also distracting, but if a game involves combat and I am hitting them with a sharp swing on an object, having blood makes more sense than not having blood.
Hah. Now I want the game to have one and only one brothel, and set it in an area so cold that everyone is waiting around in heavy coats all the time.
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Aye, true. But I figure that that would be more of a peasant weapon, like medieval serfs defending their lands with sickles and pitchforks, or something used mainly for relatively open "common" areas. A tall, thick shield and long spear would be the dwarven equivalent to horses and plate mail.Why aren't traditional dwarves all about spear-and-shield phalanxes to control their tight corridors?
Actually, I think if your society is subterranean, that the first weapon you'd invent would be the military pick.
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Baldurs Gate did again a fine job. This is not Bioware....I thought BG2 did romances pretty well, keeping them going beyond sex, and being able to screw them up, each one being completely different, etc. The relationship with Fall From Grace in PST was good too. I don't like the idea of having romances end abruptly and never being able to revisit them though. Missing a single dialogue option ending the tree and missing out on it. My friend did that in DA:O missing out on the Morrigan romance because he said the wrong thing once.
Also, pet peeve of mine: choosing the right dialogue options to get laid. A female wouldn't be attracted as much to what you say as what you do and what you are. In a realistic situation, if you're trying to decide on what the right answer is, you'd probably have no chance anyway.
Maybe just leave the romance thing out?
Of course you can get "laid" with the right answers in real life^^
And omg its still a game you can not be as real as possible. If I just hear they never get animals right....
You can also do that with all the wrong answers if you are the right type of dude, and all the right answers won't help you if you aren't. But that's beyond the scope of this forum so I'm not debating this here.
Just stating that the romance thing in RPG games ends up being a little juvenile most of the time.
Why not trust them a little bit instead of trying to tell them what "tropes" (what terrible fad at the moment) they should avoid.
But... Baldur's Gate was Bioware?
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Y'know what I never understood? Why the guys that lived in caves were the axe guys.
An axe is a woodcutting tool, first and foremost. If your society spends all of its time underground - presumably you'll have to send some people out to gather wood, but most of them are underground - the axe is going to be a pretty niche item. Why aren't traditional dwarves all about spear-and-shield phalanxes to control their tight corridors?
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One I don't see mention and that really annoys me is wolves. Why does every fantasy RPG have zillions of wolves. Many of them running around alone and attacking armoured adults for no reason. Wolves run in packs normally. Wolves do not go out of their way to attack people. Sheep yes and maybe a stray child but a party of adults? Please Obsidian some more interesting monsters than wolves. I am sick of them.
This is... kind of a "thing" with me. Animals in games. They never do it right. Ever. Maybe hunting games? I dunno. Let's not talk about them.
Bears are extremely cautious creatures. If you ever end up in a fight with a bear, it's probably because it either feels like it's defending something (typically its cubs, in which case it will probably fight only long enough for its cubs to get away) or a food source (stay away from dead animals in the wild, yo). The other major cause for attacks? It's starving to death. It's probably a year-old black bear (which may or may not actually be black), a relatively small, inexperienced creature that can't hold territory and gets chased away from easy food by older, bigger bears, not the giant death-machine brown bear (which may or may not actually be brown). In which case, it's probably not going to fight to the death, and will run away as soon as you do any significant damage (or shoot some fire its way, because holy **** would bears ever be terrified of mages).
Far more likely, the bear will just avoid you. Like, 99% of the time. Especially if you're in a group. A hungry bear might go for a lone human or even a group of two, but six people walking and clanking along? That's about the most terrifying thing he'd ever encounter. Hell, most of the time, you don't even know the bear was ever there, because it smelled/heard/saw you first and got itself the hell away from you. Not that bears and wolves and what-not are common creatures to begin with; they're few in number and highly territorial, and you're far more likely to encounter... well, pretty much any other animal than a bear when you're just walking through the woods.
Of course, I'm not asking for a realistic simulation of animal behaviour. That'd be crazy. I'd rather you just... y'know, avoid the issue entirely. Don't fill up the woods with wolves and grizzlies. You have total power to put in whatever bizarre and awesome creature you want, so why would you waste that potential with real-looking creatures if they're just going to be mindlessly aggressive sword-bait?
And if you have to put an animal attack in, make it a moose. A cow with calves or a bull during rut. Those things scare me way more than bears.
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Whatever system it is...
... just make sure I'm not fatigued if I travel to a location 24 hours away. I think it's assumed that my party would rest at some point along the way, yeah?
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My concern is not so much how the inventory is managed, but in keeping down the amount of stuff lootable to keep that inventory management in the background as much as possible. While I very much like ME2/3's essentially non-existent inventory, that's probably not suitable for this particular instance - but I don't want to see mundane crafting materials (e.g. spools of twine, non-magical hides, iron buckles) for instance, let alone outright vendor trash like in the Gamebryo games. I'd also prefer no alchemy, if not altogether as in no potions at all, then at least no player-brewable ones from gathered ingredients. Handwave stuff like medical/first-aid supplies away as an assumed persistent 'kit' instead of having multiple consumable ones. If you have to have food, abstract it has having X days of rations instead of having actual food items. Leave quest items out of the inventory altogether.
More contentiously perhaps, and as mentioned in some other thread here, I'd also be keen to experiment whether armour could be something that's implemented not as loot but as, say, a character enhancement you buy from the smithy. It'd be something that exists on the character sheet but not in the inventory menu. You could upgrade it, buy a new set, or otherwise change it, but "piece of armor" would never be a thing you could carry.
But as for the inventory management, then yeah, I'm happy enough with a party-based pool of general stuff. Anything to keep the complexity of it down.
That would keep me from wondering how the hell my orc squeezed in to the armour I plundered from the corpse of an elf.
I likes it.
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Hmm. Perhaps some people should join forces-like?Short version: Visceris was an eclectic, but fundamentally nice, guy who hung out in the Obsidian forums, and before that, the Black Isle forums - about a decade, really. He was telling us in his last years about his determination to change his life for the better, and seemed to be working hard to take those steps, but his health struck him down with an untimely death. He was a staple that pretty much any BIS/Obs forumer at the period knew, and it would be nice to commemorate him in some small way.
If we can't do anything else due to $, I'll make my Kickstarter pledge in his name - that is, I'll ask Obsidian to put Visceris in the credits instead of mine.
Never knew the guy, but I'd be down for joining in on some manner of let's-get-a-thousand-bucks-together-and-make-this-character scheme.
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Y'know, I really liked KotOR 2's bashing system. Aye, you can break open the chest, but you might destroy the contents.
'Course, that didn't work so well for door locks.
*nongenderspecific brofist*I would rather have barrels, especially smug looking ones.
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My biggest concern is avoiding Bioware style morality choices, where you're usually presented with save the orphanage vs. slaughter kittens type choices.
Give us a bit of grayness please.
Also like others in the thread I'd want it to be an "invisible" system.
BTW, Tamerlane what's your avatar? I recognize it but I can't place it.
Francisco Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son". Signature is also a Goya painting, albeit a bit less famous.
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Becasue when I loot a character and take everything they own then I should take everything they own.
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Who loots underwear?
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Everyone in the Dragon Age universe go whatever way you need because of how awesome the protagonist is. The choices you make in character creation are BioWare's Awesome Butten
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My greatest fear of a class-less system is when it trancends 'Be Anything' (which is awesome) and becomes 'Be Everything Because You're Awesome' like in Skyrim (which proves that game balance in single-player games is important).
While I share your distaste for the jack-of-all always being the best, I think that that largely stems from The Elder Scrolls being solo affairs. The renaissance hero is ideal in an Elder Scrolls game because you need all those things to be fully effective but you can't rely on anyone but yourself for them. In a party-based game, you're probably going to get a lot more mileage out of a bunch of min/maxed characters than six magethiefwarriors.
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Hey, I get to quote Dak'kon: "Balance in all things."
For me, the important part is that mages not be useless "I cast light!... and then get gibbed by a coyote..." waifs for their first however many levels, and warriors not be useless piles of metal that get destroyed by summoned creatures (or even transformed mages), debuffs that they're powerless to fight, and nuke spells. Mages should be competent in the early goings (or if you prefer, early-game fighters should be as weak as early-game mages), and shouldn't be walking gods by the end.
So, uh... I guess that puts me in the "nay" category on the vancian magic thing. If we're voting on that.
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Six is ideal for me, though down to four is alright. Really, so long as I have an actual, in-game reason for party limits and am not just fighting at half strength for no discernible reason (aside from game balance/ease-of-management), I'm cool with whatever.
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Crates?
Hrmph.
I suppose there can be crates. But only if they are fewer in number than the clearly superior barrel, crate, and/or cask.
Crates should be fewer in number than crates.
Mind: blown.
Consarnit.
That was supposed to be keg.
Now my shame is immortalized in quote form.
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No romances please. I've never, ever, seen them done well in a video game. They usually come across as shallow, gimmicky, cheesy, or all three.
Yeah, better safe than sorry I think. I actually think some (especially older) JRPGs have done romance decently, however. Like JRPGs in general they were highly scripted, but effective ones were developed slowly and generally told by the small things with an element of real, albeit sometimes somewhat childish, humanity. Lots of room was left for the imagination of the player. I don't think I've ever felt emotionally invested in a WRPG romance and often it's just the opposite--I'm frequently annoyed and distracted by them.
Eh. While it's often done wrong, I'm plenty willing to trust Obsidian to handle the "romance" angle.
It's a pretty major part of human existence and something that naturally happens when you have a set group of people undergoing adversity together; I wouldn't want to see it gone simply because "a lot of developers" do it poorly. A lot of developers do basic plot and character development poorly; that doesn't mean Obsidian should abandon those, too. This isn't me going "Every RPG must have a romance subplot also I'm a dinosaur roar," just... well, "small groups of people from all different backgrounds going through incredible hardship together for extended periods of time" is something I've got a lot of first-hand experience with. And here in the real world, that leads to whole lot of tent sharing on those long, cold nights.
No comment on whether or not I am indeed a dinosaur, roar.
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Crates?
Hrmph.
I suppose there can be crates. But only if they are fewer in number than the clearly superior barrel, crate, and/or cask.
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Aside from "no good/evil slider" - and seriously, please, no good/evil slider - there are two big things for me.
One is not punishing middle-ground. KotOR: Playing a "grey" Jedi? Lower stats, equipment limitations, only meet Visas when you get to a certain light/dark level. Dragon Age 2: get rewarded for either angering a character or making them your friend, but if you do a bit of both, they... might leave half-way through? What? This isn't about not making actions have consequences, this is about not punishing nuance and character development.
The second is that whatever system is in place should not be easily "gameable". About to do something that Party Member X disagrees with? Leave X behind for a bit, do your dirty business, then re-add them to avoid all consequences. Never sat right with me.
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The typical videogame romance has turned a lot of people off the concept entirely. I think this is a shame, since romance and sexuality are a very fundamental part of human psychology and are virtually omnipresent themes. A heavily story and character driven game without it would seem sort of strange to me. But it's totally understandable why some people are put off. In the past, romance sub plots have been...uneven, at best. (Sorry Bioware)
Not every character should be romanceable. A romance should only occur if it actually adds to the story or character arc, not for the sake of having a romance option. And it should occur as naturally as possible. NPCs shouldn't fall in love with you because you did their major side quest and complimented them/agreed with them in every dialogue that was utterly isolated from the rest of the narrative. A character shouldn't be able to romance an NPC simply because that NPC is their favorite among the romance options. Base it on chemistry, and make it emerge from gameplay. Consistently make a certain sort of decision or consistently choose a certain sort of dialogue, and people will be interested or turned off accordingly. As if they had their own personalities and opinions or something. And as the OP says: SEX IS NOT THE APOTHEOSIS OF A RELATIONSHIP. It's an important step...but far from the most important one. Tons of stuff happens after that.
I'm with this guy/gal. It gets done so clumsily so often that people are naturally apprehensive, but it can be very conspicuous in its absence.
Whatever y'all do, I trust y'all will do it well.
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We're just happy that this exists, trust me.
Now the question is how much dirty, dirty money I give.
Please include women with shirts on.
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
Well, that sort of thing works a lot better if you have two people. One to distract, and one utterly unremarkable-looking person to steal while they are distracted. Sleight of hand is a lot harder when everyone's eyes are on you.