Zombra

Well, after release your opinion won't be as valuable as there will be actual reviews to fulfill my curiosity. Hell, by that time I'll be playing the game and judging for myself. This is your opportunity to weigh in on the "state of the game" now - it's valuable information for people like me who haven't been following the various controversies. It might also give any devs reading a good 'thumbnail' of what's important in the players' minds right now. Some prefer to just wait and take whatever they get - others prefer to have a conversation about it while there's still time to change a few things. Personally, I'm interested in your opinion. You sure you don't want to share?

Howdy! Returning forum member here. I haven't followed the game much at all over the last year, aside from skimming a few of the updates. So, I'd like to know how the game is shaping up, from your perspective. (Whether you are just some guy on a forum, a backer, a moderator, or even one of the devs!) Please post five things you are excited about/looking forward to in P of E, and five things you're not excited about/wish would be done differently/disappointed were cut/etc. You must post five of each or you're a bad person. Critics must post five things that don't look bad along with their complaints, and supporters must post five things that don't seem perfect along with their praise. Please keep each "bullet point" to about thirty words or less in your list. You may elaborate with longer footnotes at the end of your post. Also feel free to include links to pertinent threads that go into detail on a given subject. Please also limit your observations to the game itself, not stuff like you hate Steam or you shouldn't have to pay shipping for your collector's box or you don't like the projected release date. For this thread, we are only interested in opinions about the actual game. I'll give some of mine as examples ... bear in mind that I'm ill-informed, so ... Zombra's Pros Class balance looks incredible. Controlling a party with such diverse abilities and different strengths and weaknesses looks fascinating. All the stronghold stuff looks very well thought out and fun. The conversation "reputation" system looks exciting; it looks like I can establish a very distinct personality for my PC. Bottomless inventory. Seriously, this is huge. In the Infinity games, I tended to get kind of sick of all the combat. PoE looks like it will be far more engaging. Zombra's Cons The world is an original setting, but they apparently passed up the chance to have truly exotic or "fantastic" PC races and cultures. I remember reading that every class type uses magical soul powers. Sometimes I prefer characters who hate magic and refuse to use it. The whole soul thing in general. It's the lynchpin of this new setting, but will I think it's cool or silly? Strong character and combat systems are great, but they mean nothing if the activities in the game are boring. I don't really know how I'll be spending my time once I'm actually playing. Last time I saw the UI, it looked pretty dated and ugly. I'm worried that there will be lots of mouse clicking and not enough keyboard shortcuts. Now yours! Begin!

Yeah, in general I thought the trailer looked good. That's why this animation thing really cried out to be fixed.

The first thing I noticed in yesterday's trailer was that the PC party jogs along together in perfect lockstep, robot military style. "Left, right, left, right." It drives me crazy. Please figure out how to start movement on a random frame of the animation for each character so they don't look eerily synchronized like this. It seems like this would be so easy to fix and look so much better. Thank you.

You know what game's camera really sucks? Chess. That top down stuff is so 15th century. Now that we have the technology, we need to remake it with a tiny camera implanted in each side's queen (the only really important piece) and play with Oculus Rift to get the first person chess experience. Ideally, the rules should also incorporate real-time and cover mechanics. Yep, that would be objectively better than chess as is.

Wow! This all sounds really, really fun! Looking forward to the game more than ever!

Hm. Too bad, I liked the way durability was described. Nothing would break, just a penalty to use until you did something to keep your equipment working. Also, I'm always sad when skills are removed from a system, especially noncombat skills. I respect the decision made here, though.

Yep. I signed in just to weigh in on this. It also relates to the larger issues of faction and reputation, which apparently are important systems in P:E. Please make communication realism a priority for these systems. For every action that affects these systems, I want the game to ask itself, "HOW does word spread about this? Does it spread at all?" Also, just because one guard has heard of me, that doesn't mean that every single guard everywhere has heard of me. Let there be people who don't know my reputation, even if it isn't a secret.

I've always thought dwarves were ugly and boring, but I would almost be tempted to play one if I could make one without a beard. That model looks great.

Depends on the game. Your first-person shooter examples are well taken - and I don't think anyone would try to make the case that keyboard only is superior for those games - because screen location is EVERYTHING in those games. However, not all games are first-person shooters. Apples and oranges. The ONLY thing critical about selecting a screen location in Project Eternity will be in target selection. It's not a twitch game, where you have to click fast on the enemy to shoot him with an arrow. You just have to tell the game "I want character #4 to shoot an arrow at Target B." It's the game that makes the "to hit" roll, and player precision is (or should be) totally unnecessary. This is the kind of communication that can easily be done with a mouse, to be sure ... but I maintain that it can be done more efficiently with a keyboard.

What people are arguing for is the contextual cursor. Hover the mouse over a chest and the cursor changes to a lockpick. Highlight and click, that simple. I'm not a big fan of context cursors, but I could go along with that ... as long as there was no other way to interact with a chest.

More important? I disagree. But I do agree that mouse controls are equally important. Many PC users are married to the mouse just like I'm married to the keyboard. That's not unreasonable at all. Yeah. Nothing wrong with clicking, but a bunch of nested menus is bad design. Again: minimum user input for maximum results.

Good posts Hormalakh! I actually agree with Sacred_Path about potions, not as a UI issue, but as a game design issue. If potion spamming is indeed the format the game uses, then yes, a hotkey to use them is ideal. Potion spamming however makes for thoughtless, garbage gameplay in my opinion. Actually I don't think we need to worry about that, though; as I recall, one of the devs mentioned in an interview that healing is hard to come by. Hopefully we can count on player wounds to be a bigger deal than, say, in Diablo. Anyway, just to get back to basic principles of UI design, the thing to strive for is a minimum amount of input to achieve maximum results. And remember, "Just one mouse click" is not the smallest amount of user effort. For people who can freakin type, it takes far more time and effort to drag a mouse cursor to a particular pixel grouping on a screen than it does to push a key. In my case, I would rather press like 5 keys in succession than navigate to a single onscreen button and click it. (Of course, a single keypress is even better.) Modifiers like alt and shift are fine too. For me, using the mouse as the primary input device always makes me feel like I'm playing "Connect the Dots", with all the sophistication and maturity that that implies. And just in case anyone is considering wheel menus ... they are great ... for Xbox games.

All I will say is this: all else being equal, it would be weird if a lightly armored guy was as survivable as a heavily armored guy. I expect tradeoffs for heavy armor, such as mobility, but sheer tough-to-killness should always go to the guy who invests in the maximum amount of metal between him and swords.

I like ammo management. I don't like multiple kinds of ammo. I only have a few +2 arrows, should I equip them in case the next fight is hard? Should I use my +1 arrows - I have more of them? Or should I use cheap default arrows? What about special use ammo like fire bolts? Poison bolts? Suddenly different kinds of ammo are taking up 6 of my inventory slots and I never know which ones to use. So I am for one type of ammo per weapon type (arrows, bullets, bolts, whatever), with enchantments and so forth going on the weapons themselves.

Please make sure there are hotkeys for everything. OK, maybe the design will necessitate having to use the mouse once in a while, but whenever possible, have there be a keypress for it too. Obviously, using a mouse for everything should and probably already will be doable as well, but for those of us who know how to use a keyboard, it's fantastic to have that choice. Thanks for reading!

I love making characters and building parties, but weirdly I'm going to vote "no" on this option. Single-character games have their place in the world. Look at Fallout vs. Fallout Tactics for example. With its great character building depth, Fallout was excellent. Apply the same system x6 in Fallout Tactics and it turns into a huge mess. Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale are a good counterexample, because they have the opposite problem: character development is relatively shallow. I never came close to finishing BG because my one character was boring like any other D&D character. Icewind Dale on the other hand I loved to death, playing it and its sequel through to the end, because building a custom party of shallow characters, complete with imported portraits, was a blast. I guess the bottom line is that you should either have deep character building or you can have multiple PCs, but not both. Based on what I have seen so far of P:E's intended design, I'm hoping that the character building will be super deep and meaningful. As for throwing in multi-character as an "option" not intended to actually be played ... eh. The dev team has better things to do; wait for the inevitable mod.

The main thing I want from the player housing is a true sense of it being a "home base". I'm sure there will be many adventures where the party gets trapped in a series of unfamiliar caverns or journeys to far-off lands, but when they are near their city of origin, it should feel very natural to go home between quests. My house should quickly become the most familiar place in the game. As others have said, a building with a crafting station is nice, but not enough. Messages and quest rewards should be sent there. NPCs (both friendly and otherwise) should come looking for me there. Special dialogues should happen there. Companions that get separated from the group should find their way back there. Maybe I should get a "well rested" xp bonus for sleeping there. Perhaps I can only "level up" by training there! Whether upgradeable or not, I really don't care. The important thing is enticing me to return there, again and again, for good reasons. A "one-stop" town/utility place is cool, but again, not enough.

Well, it depends on the game setting. I think that ninjas fighting knights fighting kung-fu monks fighting motorcycle gangs fighting vikings fighting pirates is a little silly. I hope the game world is written so that I can take it a little more seriously. As for character classes, I would much rather see a few classes with a ton of options. Why not have Fighters able to fight with two swords? Why not have Rogues able to use smoke bombs? (We know there are single shot firearms in the world, so flash powder and smoke bombs do make sense.) You can call these guys Samurai and Ninja if you want; the game doesn't need to make whole new classes for them. Anyway, in Wizardry, all a Samurai was was a fighter who could use a little arcane magic, and a Lord was a fighter who could use a little divine magic. We already know that magic will be common in the P:E world, so "spellswords" and the like are pretty much a certainty.

this is why I don't think they should be the norm. Occasionally having timed quests is cool. Having one after another feels like you are being forced though. It's a case of bad quest design more than bad mechanics imo. Yes. I completely agree that an entire design predicated on forcing the player relentlessly down the rails is an awful idea. In fact it is just as bad as a design that lets a character sit on his ass for 20 years without any consequences.

@Stun: Sorry I haven't been to the thread in a while. You make some good points and others have made some good counterarguments. Let me approach your objections from another angle. I don't have a problem with realism, but it's definitely not my agenda. Gameplay to me is more important than anything. Urgency and consequences are a part of good gameplay, in my opinion. You talk about player agency, which I respect, but there are times when game rules should trump player agency. Mario certainly doesn't want to be killed when struck by a Koopa shell, yet if we give him the option to simply ignore them, then suddenly Koopa shells lose their "bite". There's no real point in Koopas even existing at that point. (Ever play a platformer or shooter in God Mode? Spoiler: it's extremely boring.) The same thing applies to RPG quests. When the world tells you that something bad is going to happen, but nothing bad ever happens unless the player deliberately chooses it, then all threats in the game world are actually meaningless. When the player knows this, interest is lost. Compare the childhood game of "Cowboys & Indians" to competitive paintball. In one game, you never get shot unless you want to; you can always just yell, "You missed me!" This is an extreme version of the "player agency" that you advocate, and it leads to meaninglessness. In the other game, there are paint marks on your helmet - you can't deny that you've been shot. You don't have the option to ignore the consequences of your poor play. The winners of a paintball match "really" won with tactics and skill - they weren't just the most stubborn guys, yelling "You missed!" until the other team finally went home. The point is that giving the player the blatant choice to win or lose (sometimes known as the "I Win Button") does not always make the most compelling game. Making a player actually try to achieve something makes the achievement more meaningful, more "real". Consequences that the player can't ignore are more satisfying to circumvent. Although I am not an advocate of straight up quest timers, it is more thrilling to disarm a bomb that will go off in 30 seconds, rather than one that's just sitting there forever. --------------------- On an related note, I just want to mention that I like failing quests sometimes. I don't need to "beat" every single quest in the game, or achieve the optimum outcome to every scenario. Hello? Replay value? In good RPGs, whether on the computer or on the tabletop, failing a skill roll doesn't just mean you need to reload or give up. It opens up more interesting story or challenges. Failed to pick the lock? Now you have to find another way into the castle. Failed to fast talk the guard? Now you're under arrest and you have to escape from prison or plead your case to the Consluate. Failed to rescue the princess? Now the Elf King is dying of grief ... how can you save him?

Yeah. Again, I advocate a strong, focused design, and not something that tries to please everyone. It's good, even necessary, for some things to be "obligatory" in any design; otherwise it just turns into a big "whatever". Whatevers don't challenge me, entice me, or hold my interest. Anything that tries to please everyone is automatically displeasing to me. I just wanted to get the word out and hopefully the devs will see that a significant portion of the forumgoers here are insulted by games that try to dress up fake conflicts, and threaten consequences that never happen. Wow. I'm sorry, you've had horrible DMs.

That would add a lot of burden on Obsidian to create extra content and test. For many quests, they would have to write an "failed due to timeout" result path in addition to all the other result paths. Like the "can't we have both RTwP and fully turn based modes?" I think that would risk falling into the trying to please everybody and ending up pleasing no one trap. Agree. Throwing in extra optional modes in a half-assed attempt to please everyone is always a bad idea. It's better to have one mode, one coherent game design.

All I really care about is the ability for my character's personality and decisions to have an impact on the story. I want to be able to play through once as a front-door berserker, and again as a subtle, overcomplicated mercenary, and yet another as a pacifistic do-gooder, and have each experience be radically different based on the differences in character. F:NV indulged me beautifully. I couldn't really do it in Baldur's Gate though. In recent years I have developed a new approach to RPGs. Back in the day, I was a completionist. I did everything, I explored every corner, I made sure to solve every quest. Now, I am a hard core role-player. I make a character and stick to that character come Hell or high water. If I'm playing a spy, then no, she's not going to be interested in helping an old man get his sword back from the tomb of his long dead brother. If I'm playing a Conan pastiche, I'm unlikely to undertake a diplomatic mission to bring peace between the orks and the horse people. Walking away from stuff the character wouldn't do is wonderfully liberating, and obviously is great for a game's replay value.

Don't get mad ... but it would be okay with me if some of the combat encounters scaled based on your party size. *runs away*