Sensuki

I believe you have encountered B a N a L c E

You can already do that if you have a second weapon equipped though.

Both good points. The first is, I believe by design as that was part of the "tactical inventory" thing that the lead designer was talking about. I don't care too much for it either, but I'm not hugely upset about it, as you can metagame around it if you have to (save and reload). The second I would say is just that the inventory is unfinished. The lead designer has talked about shields carrying across into the second weapon sets but I just don't think they've found a way to implement that yet.

One of the downsides of having an ambitious lead designer I guess. Call me a grognard!

Many of us do I loved the IE inventories. It's one of the areas that didn't even need a change, although not everyone agrees with that.

Pirate weapon style

You may have found an exploit, or that's by design. Either way - screw single weapon style - Pistol and 1H all the way.

The first RPGs I played were Ultima Underworld, Might and Magic IV: World of Xeen and Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, which I think is fitting for my age. You also can't expect to come to a sub-forum for an Infinity Engine style game and not encounter reverence for the Infinity Engine games.

That actually works? Awesome. Do you incur a damage penalty from TWF?

The game animation speed is 30 FPS. Fast melee weapons have a 20 frame animation followed by a 20 frame recovery time Every other melee weapon has a 30 frame animation followed by a 30 frame recovery time. Weapon styles, shields and armor influence the recovery time: 1H No Shield - +15 Accuracy, +50% Recovery time 2H Weapon - +50% Recovery time Armor and Shields increase recovery time by the amount listed on the item Don't know how two weapon fighting works.

They would be if the inventory scaled with resolution. At 1280x720 the icons are big enough, but at any higher resolutions they are tiny.

So, it turns out you agree with that?... Absolutely not. There's no way we're getting an improved IE inventory, only a worse one. Much like the Main UI, my absolute preference is out of bounds. Just as in the IE games, if a character is *wearing* an item, they will still be wearing that item when you boot them out.

This time I am taking a shot at the Pillars of Eternity Inventory Design. But first, some history ... Inventory design in this game is hampered by the notion that the party inventory should be of a limited size for "tactical reasons". This is an approach which many other games have used successfully in the past - notably the Diablo series. The player's inventory is limited for this reason, so you can't pick everything up at once and sometimes have to make a decision about what you want in your inventory when out crushing Succubi crying out in sexual pleasure upon death, much to the grievance of Chris Avellone. Pillars of Eternity actually has many types of items and is a game that promotes taking the kitchen sink with you. So why is the party inventory limited to a measly eight slots? Is this fun? Pillars of Eternity also features a party stash. Similar-ish to the Diablo series, the Stash is not accessible in the field. In the Diablo series, the Stash is located "in town" and you have to go back to town to access it. Going back to town in Diablo is a great thing that the awful designers of Diablo 3 wished to once take away from us (and luckily they added it back in). Going back to town breaks up the adventuring pace nicely. Baldur's Gate 1 had a really nice adventuring pace. You would normally be able to last in the field over the course of many areas, held up by your Cleric's healing spells, healing potions and the ability to rest (without camping supplies), and the act of going back to town was undertaken when the party inventory was full. This felt like a very natural thing. When the amount of items that you could find in the IE games rose to the ridiculous levels, the Baldur's Gate 2 designers thankfully threw the famous "Bag of Holding" into the mix to give players a large (unlimited with the Tweak Pack) storage space without having to redesign the inventory system of the game - great job. This tradition was also continued in Icewind Dale 2, thankfully. Now for some reason, the sacred act of going back to town has somehow been lost in translation or outlawed by the game designers of today. People are becoming more impatient and rather than enjoying sifting through their inventory while taking a break in adventuring, today's gamer somehow does not find this an immersive action, compared to the gamers of yesteryear and are reminded of the dreadful task of sorting their daily laundry, or their dusty CD Collection which they have not touched since they started downloading mp3s from Kazaa ... oops that's too old school *ahem* downloading V0 Torrents from a Russian Torrent Tracker. So unfortunately we sigh as we move into this new age of inventory that cringes at the notion of per-character inventory over multiple tabs, that cringes at the simulationism of such a design. All party list inventories have become the norm, with very small screen space dedicated to the actual lines in the list. Ironically Pillars of Eternity DOES have a per-character inventory. This was not going to be the case originally, so if anyone is interested - feel free to search around on Josh Sawyer's posts on this forum for posts about inventory from 2012 or early 2013. Other places that also contained this discussion are Something Awful - albeit an old thread called "OBSIDIAN IS DOING A THING" which requires Archives Access for $9.95 USD, and Josh Sawyer's formspring account which you will find on google. What you may find, on the formspring account is this conversation: This conversation between Infinitron and Josh Sawyer changed the inventory from party inventory to per-character. Another thing that has also changed is that people were (thankfully) unhappy with the notion that slots in the inventory would be tied to an attribute such as "Strength". What we have now people is this: Why have we regressed from a perfectly good sizable per-character grid inventory that also included a bag of holding to an incredibly small per-character inventory that has a function that doubles as a bag of holding (the stash) that is now only accessible at the Stronghold, Inns, Shops and Camp? Some strange notion that a limited tactical inventory is a fun thing, or something or rather... The question I ask is this - If we can't have the good old style of inventory, why bother beating around the bush and take the next step? Ladies and Gentleman, I present to you: Get rid of the per-character inventory. In fact - get rid of the party inventory altogether and just have THE STASH. THE STASH - Massive grid inventory that contains everything, accessible everywhere outside of combat. Complete with already incorporated Pillars of Eternity equipment filters, but also including the auto-sort button from Titan Quest (a great step in inventory design) and a Search bar just like in Windows 7 where you can type in a string of text and the inventory will (idealistically) do something like highlight the items if the string matches, and filter the items when you press the enter (or return key on Mac) in the text box - and obviously, using the ... filter would reset the inventory back to normal. I have ridden the inventory of the horrible buttons below the weapon sets and included the absolutely fantastic Witcher 1 Quest Item system, a set of never ending scrollable horizontal slots that stores all of your quest items for you, visible in the inventory screen - another great step in inventory design. Another suggestion which I have not included is to include a separate tab on the inventory for Crafting Ingredients, another thing which The Witcher did well, although unfortunately they limited the available slots for Crafting ingredients - which modders modded out straight away. Let's face it. The first mod someone will make for the game will be "Access Stash Anywhere", and anyone who even thinks about using mods for the game is going to use it, so why even bother with this limited per-character inventory we have at the moment? It just seems pointless to me. Oh yeah one other thing I thought I'd demonstrate. I've talked about this in previous videos, but some extra inventory tooltips are needed - here is one of them: Some closing points: If you can craft an item or enchant an item any time outside of combat, you should be able to access the stash anywhere outside of combat The inventory and ALL of the UIs should scale to higher resolutions. The lucky bastards using a laptop with a 13" screen get a full screen inventory at 720p, why can't we have the same? (I'm going to cry when I buy the 27" 1440p screen I plan to get in a few months). The UI screens should have a uniform look and uniform navigation set, preferably in the style of Windows - OK, Apply, Close for options menus and a big DONE button at the bottom for everything else in the style of the IE (can leave the cross at the top though I guess). Weapon Damage for Weapon sets should also be displayed in the inventory, preferably next to the weapon. Currently there's not enough space, but anyway. Cheers everyone for the ongoing support, I hope you like my inventory design and there will be many more suggestions to come in the future unless overtly opposed.

Kinda surprised they didn't include ammo at all. I think the reason is because having ammo promotes having different types of ammo which goes against the inventory design of the game. Not having ammo solves this issue. Some people have no patience at all and have trouble keeping a clean grid inventory it seems . I always found that inventory management broke up the pace of adventuring nicely - just like "going back to town" in Diablo 1 & 2 - which I can't believe they were even thinking of removing from the game at some point. What has game design come to.

Minimalistic UIs can work in games if the whole game is designed for it. Context sensitive much better suits a turn-based environment because you have the time in between rounds to navigate the menu(s). Pillars of Eternity's mechanical complexity requires something different.

Except that you couldn't get Grand Mastery with any weapons in BG1 unless you cheated. Can only get High Mastery at the TotSC XP cap 161000 (for Fighters, level 8 - 125,000 XP) edit: sorry, no you can if you cheese dual classing.

Most people here will laugh at you for even mentioning radial menus. You have simply come to the wrong corner of the gaming world to promote them. Never forget NWN guys, or ToEE ROFL. This is an "Old School" RPG.

Radial menus are the root of all evil and should be burned out of everyone's minds forever.

I have played Baldur's Gate 1 over 50 times before, so I know where to expect to find the random encounters in the areas. In the Peldvale example, the Black Talon Elites have 20gp each as well as Arrows+1 and Cold Arrows, so they are worth farming. I am also a completionist and explore and clear as much fog of war in areas as I can, take on all the encounters and do all the quests.

Sure. I made a Monk first (Island Aumaua Monk) and I found that she had better survivability than the BB Fighter, although I min/maxed and dumped the crap out of Per and Res, so I basically had Max Might, Dex and Con. I just auto attacked with the Monk Fists and used the active abilities as soon as I received enough wounds. I have found that sometimes you are not dealt enough damage at a time to gain a wound, and other times you are dealt quite a lot and you can't spend the wounds fast enough to shrug off some of the damage due to the recovery time length (and also I suppose the selection and command bugs added to that). Currently I would say the Monk needs a bit of work, like others do. I also did play the Cipher but only briefly as I don't want to get used to how over powered they are. I like the flavour of the Cipher and it seems like a fun class, throw some balancing in the mix over the next patches and we'll see where we are from there. That is true yes but I think they just don't want to have facing mechanics in the game. Detection involves hearing as well as sight. The scouting circles are just a temporary UI element at the moment

Those three areas aren't that empty. Gullykin is, it has one quest connected to it (Firewine Bridge) and it has a group of Bounty Hunters and a bunch of random encounter spots. The other two had enough encounters. The Viconia area has heaps of random encounter spots where groups of Black Talon Elites show up. Those guys in a group are pretty devastating, particularly with a mod that increases the amount of enemies you face (I forget which one I used in my last playthrough). The spider level has a gew web trap with spider combos, and it has sword spider, phase spider and huge spider groups over to the west. But once again it only has one quest.

Floating numbers or feedback would help alot. It worked great in ToEE. The numbers right now appear at a weird place under the character and have a very hard to read font or color. You missed the point. IN THIS GAME YOU CAN TURN OFF DAMAGE FLOATS AND COMBAT HUDS MEANING YOU NEED TO RELY ON TEH LOG TO DISPLAY THE INFORMATION. JUST LIKE THE INFINITY ENGINE GAMES. THIS IS AN OPTION THAT MANY PEOPLE WANTED.

Do you design UIs for games that have the option to play without tooltips and damage floats?

Well I can only say this after having seen the system at work, which is currently fairly similar to the NWN/NWN2 AoO Clusterfûck, except only with enemies that you are "engaged" with. Something less turn-basey, like an attack bonus with melee weapons against moving enemies. This is hampered a bit by recovery time though. Best to wait and see how it feels with the new pathfinding system.

Left or center is good. Right is bad. All of which I've covered in my recent videos.