Sensuki

I didn't like it, but it's probably better than Pillars of Eternity at the moment. At least it required me to do some things after the opening even if those things involved Warrior: KNOCKDOWN! TAUNT! KNOCKDOWN! TAUNT! KNOCKDOWN! TAUNT! and stuff like that ~_~. Unfortunately the game was designed around pretty repetitive actions. I generally knew what my next five queues in the action queue were going to be lol ... that's pretty banal to me. Aarklash Legacy would be better if enemies didn't have so much HP bloat.

Except the Melee Engagement system is flawed and horrible. It's not going to work, and it makes melee far too passive. Like I said, enemies won't act like the player, once they have determined their targets they will most likely not randomly move around and attack different people, as long as you position your tank(s) properly to begin with then you should be fine. Otherwise with passive/active sticky abilities there will be ways of mitigating that problem. It likely won't make a lick of a difference in how you play if you prefer passively standing there auto attacking.

Actually yeah, it is random It's not deterministic if ((float)hitValue <= CharacterStats.GrazeThreshhold) { damage.OriginalHitType = HitType.GRAZE; float num3 = this.GetBonusGrazeToHitPercent(); float num4 = Random.Range(0f, 0.999f); if (num4 >= num3) { num3 = this.BonusGrazeToMissPercent; if (damage.DefendedBy == CharacterStats.DefenseType.Deflect || damage.DefendedBy == CharacterStats.DefenseType.Reflex) { num3 += this.DeflectReflexGrazeToMissPercent; } else { if (damage.DefendedBy == CharacterStats.DefenseType.Fortitude || damage.DefendedBy == CharacterStats.DefenseType.Will) { num3 += this.FortitudeWillGrazeToMissPercent; } } if (num4 >= num3) { damage.IsGraze = true; } else { damage.IsMiss = true; } } }

You might be talking about a combination of both really. Games can be difficult and fun, games can be difficult and frustrating, games can be easy and fun and games can be easy and frustrating.

It might be RNG based as you say, I'm not sure actually. I'll have to check the source code. I'm fairly sure it's deterministic though, and not RNG based. If it works the way I think it does, it doesn't increase your critical chance or anything, and it becomes redundant when ACC-DEF gets high. It's a great windfall against enemies with higher defenses though.

It would be nice if it was more exciting and the games had better AI, but it's way more enjoyable gameplay than what Pillars of Eternity has with the Melee Engagement system. To make it look more exciting I'd probably have to install the Sword Coast Stratagems or the Tactics mod, or bump the game difficulty up to insane where monsters do double damage or whatever. Or make worse characters. One of the things about the IE game difficulty is it had to accomodate for a wide range of character builds. Pillars of Eternity has made things at least a little bit more even keel I think, so technically they have more opportunity here to produce better gameplay than the IE games did. Like I said, I want to encounters on Hard to be designed around the use of tactical retreating. They have some good headroom here to do some really interesting stuff if they design stickiness around the use of status-effect abilities, that's how other (good) real-time games handle that kind of stuff. Karkarov said that even World of Warcraft did that back in the Burning Crusade days. That's the kind of stuff I want to see, not bloody automatic free attacks just because you moved one pixel in the game.

You're talking more about class design there, that's not really related to what I'm talking about. I too like that classes are more active and there's more stuff to do, but I hate that combat just descends into action, new action, action, new action and you don't have to move your characters around or really react to anything the enemies do after the initial combat movements. That's boring - and that's more how the bad RTwP RPGs play. The best RTwP games are the Infinity Engine games and 7.62mm High Caliber. Aarklash Legacy attempts some interesting things but the game is ruined by the fact that characters only have four abilities and in each encounter you basically spam those abilities when they come off cooldown over and over and it becomes a repetitive HP bloat slog, but the tactical movement in it is great. All the others - NWNs, KotORs, Dragon Age have notoriously bad combat IMO. This is an Infinity Engine successor, not a successor to those games. Most games these days are either Action or Turn-based, there's very few RTwP and I think that's because the combat was so bad in the 3D Bioware and Obsidian titles that used them, that people find action combat more fun. It's a shame that that has happened and for once it would be nice if a game actually got it right again.

No it doesn't :/ You can see that in my videos in this thread, neither Yxunomei or Belhifet is helpless when I micro a character off them, they procede to mince the health from my other characters. In Pillars of Eternity this is even more of a big deal because Health isn't (at least wasn't) recoverable, so any damage taken is a strategical resource cost for the party. Your party can remain functional for longer if you spread the damage around. I think they should remove the health healing talents, tbh.

Well some of the problems at the moment are that many encounters require lots of per-rest ability use to beat. In the IE games you could auto attack your way through the majority of dungeons, and you had healing potions and all sorts of strategical resources at your disposal. Longer encounters won't be a problem if the per hit damage isn't as high. In the IE games you didn't need to spam several spells in a row in all fights, usually only the big battles. Pillars of Eternity has this weird mix of higher activity, limited per-rest resources and limited resting. I don't think the designers have found the best mix of lethality, activity and resources to produce the smoothest gameplay yet. In v278 adventuring day was a real concern because a few fights would have you out of health in about 5 minutes of gameplay. That wasn't very fun. The changes to the health system have made it a bit better, but there's still a long way to go wrangling it all together to get the right mix. For many classes it's not much of an issue - Ciphers, Monks, Rogues, Chanters etc all have resources independent of per-rest, but if you're using a Priest, Druid or Wizard then over the course of adventuring day you're gonna run out of spells pretty quickly just like in BG1 and early IWD.

Yeah there is (in the IE games) because enemies are actively responding to you, whereas if you cloudkill spam from off screen, they just stand there and die.

^ No thanks. Those systems are designed for when you are queueing up the same rudimentary actions over and over again. The combat in Pillars of Eternity should be more reactional. Currently there's a few factors limiting that.

There were people that said the last attribute system was fine, or that recovery time should be paused while moving too. Personally I think movement speed, per-hit damage and melee engagement are probably the biggest three issues at the moment. I'm not sure about action speed, I think that's worth leaving until later on to be looked at. Like I said before, it's not difficult at all really (barring a few OP/broken enemies) but it's pretty boring IMO.

Yeah I'm not a fan of the fancy frames either, they're basically a waste of pixels.

Cloudkill and Web spamming is rotten if you combine it with rest spamming, because those are per-rest abilities and you can only do so many of them per day. It's a pretty cheap way of winning though because it doesn't require you to do anything, you cast a spell, sit and wait for the enemies to die from DoT and that's it. I would call that cheap, boring and cowardly gameplay. The Infinity Engine was produced from an isometric RTS engine and tactical movement is part of the heart and soul of the gameplay of the Infinity Engine games, whether that was intentional or not and whether you like it or not (it's clear that it's a not). I believe the designers ended up leveraging it with their encounter design. Blocking a Yuan-Ti with a 6 Strength rogue is unrealistic, but combat is an abstraction, it's not supposed to be realistic. In isometric titles (RT or TB) with collision systems - that is a part of the gameplay. Simulationist arguments as to why that should not be possible are not valid. Unit blocking is also a valid tactic in turn-based. In Expeditions:Conquistador and the Banner saga, when some of my melee units get low I retreat them behind healthy characters and try and block the path to those enemies. The only difference is that it's not in real time so it happens once at a time. It is a part of the gameplay of all games with this perspective where you can control multiple units and there is collision, and in pretty much all cases (particularly multiplayer) it is considered a skillful action.

You won't need a tutorial, if you've seen the E3 Preview of the intro of the game it basically is a tutorial area.

Well I play Core Rules with crap loads of mods, I haven't played vanilla BG2 without mods since probably 2004 or something. I do remember being able to autopilot it pretty easily on the easier difficulties though, which I think is what I did in my first playthrough when it came out. That's bull**** man, and that's only because you think being able to move in melee is wrong/abuse. It's not. I also wasn't talking about rest-spamming, I was talking about abusing mass webs/cloudkills and **** for cheap wins.

Have you actually played an Infinity Engine game recently? The sole reason why I went back and played Icewind Dale because I wanted to A/B compare how the games felt. I played PE for 2 months, then went back and played IWD. Was very interesting coming from PE back to IWD, I didn't even realize all of the extra micro-actions the IE games required until I did. Most of the trash mob encounters don't require much other than auto attacks, but the setpiece encounters are very fun to play. Icewind Dale 1 and 2 generally did a better job at the lower level fights with 'trash enemies' as well. For real, if you don't believe me go watch my IWD Let's Play. In the IE games (especially the IWDs) I try and extend the adventuring day as long as possible. I didn't rest in IWD until the entrance to the Vale of Shadows main dungeon, I did the intro, Kuldahar pass, every mini dungeon in the Vale of Shadows and all of the exterior enemies in one rest. I went to Dragon's Eye and did all that in one go too, I realized I forgot to buy arrows and potions, and just rolled with it, so I had virtually no arrows on my two archers until level 5. I had to reload a few times because I kept screwing up the fight against the Lizard King, but I managed to do the entire last floor with one rest (right before Yxunomei) and I did it with only one single weapon that could harm her (a +3 mace that i bought early on). The mod I had installed made her immune to everything except +3 or better weapons and have really high save vs spells, so that was really the only thing that I could hurt her with. I tanked her with my Priest but realized I wasn't getting enough mileage out of her ap/r so I switched the Mace to my Fighter who wasn't proficient with it and then slowly beat her down with that, while throwing healing spells on top of my Fighter for my Priest. I also had to draw aggro with other characters several times to spread the damage around. Here's the video, fight is near the end

I think that's why they had an internal playthrough week this week But yeah I agree, if I had to guess I would say many of the staff hadn't played too much of the game and probably haven't even touched an Infinity Engine game before or in a VERY LONG TIME. A lot of the decisions seem to be based on the memory of a memory of the Infinity Engine games, and not actually what's in the game.

I never did any of that, I played the IE games fairly. There were wombo combos and cheap tactics that you could do in all of the IE games basically, however if you actually played the game properly it was really fun. So if you had a bad experience because you played like that I'd say that's your own fault. I recently did a full IWD Let's Play, I power gamed the crap out of the game but I didn't cheese anything really and I had a great time, so much more fun than Pillars of Eternity's combat. Pillars of Eternity aims to prevent that kind of play, and fair enough I guess - but a lot of the decisions they have made have also taken the fun out of the gameplay for those that played properly.

That's not true. There was way more reactional movement than Pillars of Eternity (switching of aggro, and tactical retreating especially), reactional potion drinking, buff and debuff dispelling, counterspelling, casting different spells depending on different situations (remove paralysis, dispel magic, neutralize poison, vocalize, silence, breach - literally heaps more). You don't cast any of those at the start of the fight, those are all reactional spells. There was less reactional play required if you issued a perfect strategy or you got a lucky roll or did something cheap, such as Lower Resistance ->, Lower Resistance -> Chromatic Orb -> Dead Dragon combos Here's an example: Final fight of IWD where you can't have any pre-buffs because you get dispelled. This fight is with mods, so it plays out differently to vanilla IWD, as Belhifet is immune to pretty much all spells with the mods I had installed. Recorded like last month, as well. Comparitively, combat in Pillars of Eternity would be over in 10 seconds and almost rely solely upon my opening execution strategy, after that there wouldn't be much to it other than using a few per-encounters because it's dumb not to. If you're in melee you can't move, and you can't retreat so melee combat is essentially binary gameplay - zzz

Output log contains these thrown errors

The pause thing is a combat lethality and speed / activity issue, not an encounter issue. I would prefer combat to be a bit more sensibly paced but have more challening encounters. The current system doesn't really support that for various reasons.

The calculations can be shown in the combat log if you mouse over the entry, it will bring up the math. In the Infinity Engine games you could turn the math on so that it would give you the raw numbers instead of just a "A hit B for x damage". I would prefer to see the raw numbers by default myself. Got some stuff coming up for ideas how to improve combat, some of it in collaboration with other backers, probably over the next few weeks.

I agree and I am going to focus pretty much all of my efforts over the coming months to identify problems and solutions with combat. I will keep doing these videos though so that new players who want to play the beta can play through the game while having an easier time with the combat. I'm currently writing a PE Beta Preview for the RPGCodex and there will be a big section on combat, why it's bad and how it might be able to be improved before release, and I've got a bunch of other ideas for threads coming up as well. The speed of combat (it's quick to commence and quick to end) is the main problem, other than that I think part of the problem is that a lot of the decisions made for combat have been made in a turn-based mindset. One of those is the idea that movement and non-movement actions must come from the same 'resource pool' like they do in turn-based (actions and action points). This is not how it is in real-time (and also it doesn't have to be like that in turn-based either, as there are games that split actions into movement points and action points) and while thankfully they've removed recovery time pause while moving - there's a few more things holding the game back from remotely feeling like an Infinity Engine game. There are reasons why people like Kotaku are saying "why isn't this turn-based?", but the answer is not to make it turn-based, it's to turn the design more towards real-time.