Sensuki

Yes. If they overrided your actions, you could trigger them to cancel unit actions such as spells, and they would also trigger and cancel your own actions if enemies triggered them (which would be annoying). If they did not override your actions, you could just move in the middle of a unit animation and avoid them completely That's why they're independent of it in the first place.

No, I am testing for the difficulty that I will play the game at. The problems exist when there are many enemies in melee at once. If you only aggro one unit at a time like you did in your video, then there's not a problem. Pathfinding in games generally uses A* which is an extension of Dijkstra's Algorithm. The problem with pathfinding in combat in PE is that there are never automatic re-checks for first shortest path, once a unit determines their target there is never correction of the best path, if you run around a bend, that unit will follow you all the way around the bend, rather than determining that the shortest way to you is to go the other direction. Units in the IE games had way better auto correction than that. The game only seems to recheck the shortest path on certain conditions. Josh has repeatedly stated that they are designing the game for Hard difficulty at a base. Hard is the default design level difficulty and then they tune the game down for normal and easy and up for Path of the Damned rather than the other way around. There are multiple quotes here and on SA where he says that. This is because it's apparently easier to dial stuff down than it is to dial them up (which often ends badly).

Pillars of Eternity's pathfinding in combat is much worse than the Infinity Engine games IMO, especially with the ring-around-the-rosey stuff. In tight spaces in PE, units get stuck because they are too big and the pathfinding code doesn't facilitate movement through spaces smaller than the character's selection circle. I've never really had a problem with units getting stuck in the IE games, although it requires a little bit of manual control sometimes to get it right. Sometimes units will get stuck on the edge of another unit and just stand there, and you just have to give them a little bit of help, because for some reason they can't see that there's free space. Obviously it's not as good as Starcraft's pathfinding The good thing about the IE game combat is you can MOVE IN MELEE, and if there's not enough room, you can shuffle your units to the left and right to facilitate the room for another of your melee units You can't do that in PE without suffering disengagement attacks. Another reason why the Engagement system is retarded.

The engine is the single worst thing about it for me. I won't play games that I get bad FPS in, so I don't play Neverwinter Nights 2. It ran okayish on my 2007 computer (AMD64 4600+) with the AMD64.exe of it, but on all my Intel CPUs afterwards I only get 20-30 FPS. No thanks.

Yeah George Ziets and Eric Fenstermaker did a lot of or most of Act 2 IIRC?

It is LOTR inspired. I remember Josh saying that Ferret's description of the Shadow King in the documentation or whatever was "like Sauron".

I think they did enable it by default in BG:EE yeah. The pathfinding in BG1 isn't very good but it's vastly improved in IWD:HoW and BG2. PE is actually having more problems with 'narrow' areas even though they are wider. PE creatures are MUCH wider than the IE games and this is causing pathfinding and collision issues in tight spaces.

HAHAHAH Man, hahahaha oh dear. No wonder it was bad then. With 40K path search nodes, pathfinding is about 85% right in BG2, the only places where it stuffs up is in tightly confined pathways like walking down a set of stairs, and then characters get blocked and turn around and look for another way, although you just have to manually correct that. Otherwise there really isn't much else wrong with it. If you go to a part of the map and click it, and that place isn't blocked by like a door, they'll usually get there on the first go. It only stuffs up with unit collision sometimes - and as you can see, PE is REALLY struggling with collision ATM. The reason it wasn't 40K by default is because the games were designed to run on bad computers, I think BG1 ran on a 100MHz CPU ? ... so yeah all the CPU intensive stuff was off by default, just had to enable in the config.

There might be things that were bad or not optimal, but the fact is that most of them are worse in Pillars of Eternity. Change Path Search Nodes to 40,000 and it's mostly fine. Particularly in BG2. Did you ever do that? Yes, although we had to request them for Pillars of Eternity, as this is a common UI improvement. The IE Item description page UI was still better, and more uniform with the rest of the UI. Wasn't too bad with bottomless bag of holding [use mods]. I find PE inventory more clunky to use. Use mods. It fixes this issue. PE will be more linear than BG1. PE's wilderness areas are worse than BG1. I will be touching on why in my Codex Preview. I didn't think the 3E Implementation of IWD2 was very good. Some people prefer stand still combat. -It would have been nice for clearer UI feedback when it came to spellcasting and what area it would affect (but on the other hand, surprises are cool)the pre-cast AoE for PE is a good idea, although a range finder would also be handy. -Level 1 and 2 are far too RNG gods-dependent, which is the price to pay for turning D&D into a computer gameNo they're not - if you build your character properly. Fighter with 18/xx STR, Specialization and a weapon he's specialized in has 14 THAC0 at level 1 - the content at level 1-2 is pretty easy with that. You can also cast spells like Bless to make it better. -High level fights can become a bit dull and repetitive at times, not to mention too long in durationI disagree, although I have a feeling a lot of that comes to how effective your character builds are -It would have been cool if combat in IE had been terrain dependent, with elevation taken into account, etcNot in the IE style. -The fog of war and several weird abuses relating to that was not good (I'd like to see a CRPG with a line of sight system á la CoH2)PE is no better / worse. FoW is currently not implemented properly, although at least enemies don't stand in cloudkills to die in PE. -The variety of weapons and items vis-à-vis class and alignment was far too small and punishing in the non-EE versionsThis is a matter of preference, but I do like that PE opens this up too. -There should have been more ability checks, class checks, race checks, etc, for role-playing reasonsI think PE will have less class checks but more attribute, race and skill checks. -Overall, the IE games didn't give enough sense of being lived in (Ultima VII did that much better, for instance)Neither does PE ? -Multiclassing could have been improvedPE has no multi-classing or cross-class stuff at all ]-As always, when certain classes went past level 9 or so, the character building ceased to be fun and eventful enough -Thieves were in some respects a broken class (of course, disregarding IWD2 with 3.0 D&DWhat? In the AD&D games you actually started getting HLA options past this point. Thief skills capped out at a certain point though. I could go on and on and on for pages. There are oodles of stuff that were bad in the IE games, but they were certainly brilliant, anyways. For PoE, I simply presumed that the seasoned Obsids would take the best stuff from the IE games and then create something even better. ] But in most gameplay cases, they haven't. No, let's have a look at the actual wording. We have had a lock on new features since the beginning of last week and we have been focusing on bug fixes last week and this week. Any requested new feature gets placed on a list that we will evaluate in a couple of weeks.

There might be things that were bad or not optimal, but the fact is that most of them are worse in Pillars of Eternity.

It really depends which game you are talking about. Most of the things that I think are bad about the Infinity Engine games don't have too much to do with the actual gameplay itself, because the gameplay is quite good. And by gameplay I don't mean character systems. Some people often confuse those together (like Shevek does). Most of PE's improvements on the IE games have been non-gameplay related, or related to dialogue or graphics. Josh's reputation & disposition system is really nice. PE checks attributes and skills more often than the IE games. There's more 'life' in the areas due to 2D and 3D animations. The journal system is a bit better and the extra pages like the glossary are a good idea, it could still use a bit of improvement I think although it's not something I've looked into. The Character Art is quite good, as far as 'art style' goes I don't prefer it one way or the other but it is technically superior to the IE games in most ways (the IE games had a different model for warrior, priest, thief and mage which helped to distinguish characters a bit more, and it was way easier to tell the difference between male and female models - which I prefer). You can finely resize the height of the dialogue window (and log) rather than being locked at two sizes. I have little doubt that the Stronghold will be pretty awesome too, probably better than any of the BG2 Strongholds. The IE games still beat PE in many areas outside of gameplay too though: UI uniformity, area map, inventory, HUD, control uniformity, character movement, pathfinding (currently anyway), AI, art 'quality', smoothness, Spell FX (while not better quality they are infinitely more practical, and they have different casting FX for different spells and way more per-unit FX and no overuse of AoE stuff on the screen), much of the modelling in the environment art is superior to the PE modelling - in IWD, IWD2 and BG2. I've yet to see any of the PE modelling top some of the nicest interiors that IWD or BG2 had. IE games had better music as well. I admire the fact that they are trying to improve on the IE game formula, but they're failing in their attempts in most of the gameplay related areas specifically.

One Handed Style confirmed working, the chance is a random 20% and it stacks with the Fighter's Confident Aim ability as well, which is quite nice for 1H Fighters.

This is Medreth and his Cowled group. Four of them are equipped with a Hood item, however only one of them drops one. They should all drop one as per promised WYSIWYG loot system.

It was your choice to read the discussion, if you are not interested in it then go read something else. You will also not dictate to me when and how I give feedback on the game. Every post about the issue (for or against) has been helpful IMO and it is raising more and more awareness.

Arguing about things is often quite healthy. Arguing with other backers has only helped me strengthen my argument. My activism has influenced change before, and it is likely that it will do so again - provided that I give good constructive criticism with detailed examples, which is what I intend to do. Unless a staffer comes in and bans me out of annoyance, I am going to keep doing it all the way through. Josh was talking about other things (not Melee Engagement), I sent him some quickfire/budding thoughts on some of the systems and he gave some pretty good answers. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but he did have a few good points - and demonstrated that he does have a bit of a plan to reign in the weapon balancing and things like that. I didn't talk about that because I know that it would have been suicide on the issue to not come in with a very solid argument.

Sorry I missed this post previously. You have neglected to mention that I have offered a solution to the issue of melee stickiness, it just doesn't involve a Melee Engagement system. That's the only difference really. You like the idea of an arbitrary automatic system. I want a system that uses passive, modal and active abilities to facilitate it and doesn't 'break the rules' of real-time - I want something that actually works as demonstrated by other real-time games that aren't NWNs. The press and the general public would not tear it apart - if anything they would be more annoyed by the Engagement system because it is goes against how people normally play isometric RT games, and honestly who cares about them. Infinity Engine players are a large portion of the backers. If the game is good, people will buy it and enjoy it. Games are ****ing compromised all the time because they are dumbed down for the press and the masses. I've seen quite a few people (inc YunikoYokai5 and one of the press guys) try and retreat from melee, their character gets killed and they have no idea why.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69133-sensuki-vs-medreth-youtube-series/page-5?do=findComment&comment=1532583 Read this thread, start from that post and work your way down, you'll probably catch a fair few of my points from there. Then there's also a bunch of posts further back in this one.

Looks like the PE team decided to keep playing through this week

They won't switch targets if engaged, but I have seen some templates for other types of targeting in the code, so it's possible that if engaged by two characters and condition is met that they change targets, but they won't move to attack another one and suffer a disengagement attack.

Paradox don't have a say. You keep mentioning them for some reason. I don't think the current solution is perfect either (and I liked attributes affecting interrupt like you did). No, just Melee Engagement as it makes combat feel nothing like the Infinity Engine games and reduces tactical depth. The previous skill system should be brought back because the current one is terrible, as well. I made a post the other day about some other stuff I thought was causing some issues but Josh had some fairly good answers for them so I won't be pursuing most of those ideas anymore. I don't think there is a good answer to Melee Engagement at all. This is pretty much recovery time paused while moving again - people said "don't remove it, it prevents kiting!", well surprise - the game plays much better with it removed, and it will be the same here too. Reducing monster movement speed and reducing/balancing per-hit damage and class endurance values will probably alleviate some of that, as then it will be less important to perfectly micro your party all the time. There's also several cheap tactics you can use with certain classes to make combat a laugh. Casting Withdraw on the Fighter after he has aggro'd everyone is one, as he won't take any damage and you can finish enemies off without having to heal the Fighter.

Hahaha man, you'll never get over the fact that the attribute system changed will you.

I'm going to make a video where I kill Korgrak with just disengagement attacks, just haven't got around doing it yet though as today I focused on looking for bugs.

It wasn't my idea, that's what the Infinity Engine games had ^_^

Do you think this is broken?

Now it's happening on my BB Priest who has an Arquebus equipped and she's looping the Arbalest animation, almost as if there's some object ownership crossover between the BB Rogue and BB Priest, since they are getting looping animations from eachothers weapons.