Sensuki
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Posts posted by Sensuki
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"the game is bad, it's a sinking ship, combat is bad, nothing is fun."
You mustn't be reading my posts man, I said a few pages ago that the character system is fun. Bit hyberbolic there.
Is there anything that Sensuki likes about POE? i'm just curious.
I'd ilke to know what Sensuki would save from POE
Anything and everything can be improved but what I consider very good or better: Some of the Environment Art, Scripted Interactions/Interstitials, some of the UI design, some of the character system, Durance, Grieving Mother, Eder and Aloth. The soul detective quests are pretty cool/unique and the hollowborn storyline is the most interesting part about the plot even if it's only a side piece of it.
Good: Majority of the Environment Art, Character/Creature Art, Weapon system, portraits, some of the music, most of the animation, unified attack resolution system, attribute design etc etc
The new Sensuki narrative: After having backstabbed the grognards, Obsidian are now planning to plunge the knife all the way through and make PoE2 a full-blown casual game.
No. It's just putting two and two together. Obsidian are a mid-sized developer making RPGs. There are not many of these companies left in the world, let alone indepedent ones. They have a burn-rate of over a million USD per month to be able to afford to pay their staff.
A mid-sized project like a Pillars of Eternity sequel will need to make a significant return on investment, and Feargus Urquhart has already gone on record saying that most of the time, sequels are a sophomore slump as far as sales are concerned. Feargus is also a man who plays it safe.
To make the ROI that Obsidian needs on the sequel, they will need a wider audience and to get that audience they will most likely need to make the game more accessible, easier and aim a bit more for the lowest common denominator - at least that is the 'safest' way of getting such an audience. The Story Time mode is one example of this, this is a mode that will allow people who are very, very bad at RTWP combat to get through the game without getting so frustrated that they might return the game on Steam. A slower combat speed is also another thing that will make the combat more manageable for such people. Game journalists will be laughing as they demolish everything in their path when playing for review, if the default settings are Story Time and the default combat speed is slow. "9.5/10 great gaem, finished it in three days and now I've got two days off!!".
For the sequel I think you'll see a better story, better environment and character art, better load times, possibly better performance. I think you'll see less trash mobs. The character system will likely be simpler. The UI will probably be super-over-the-top transparent and handholding (possibly detrimentally so). I don't have too much hope for better quest or encounter design but the combat system probably won't be worse.
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DId I miss something in those first couple of days when Pillars was released? One day Sensuki was keen on the game the next he loathed it. It was rather sudden, too sudden... Makes me think that it is personal. Was he offered a job by Obs who reneged, or was he hoping for a job which never materialized and now he is upset with them. It goes way beyond normal though. There are plenty of things out there that disappoint me - games, books, movies, but you accept that and move on. Or not as the case may be
My opinion of the combat has always been that it needed work / wasn't right ever since the start of the beta. I raised my concerns about the combat and was told that my experience was based on a small level range [4-8] against underwhelming content. Unfortunately the problems that I had with the beta were only magnified in the full release.
I also thought that despite not really liking the combat, that since that it was an Obsidian game, that the story would at least be good as they have a reputation for good writing and I did really enjoy Knights of the Old Republic 2.
Unfortunately what we got was something closer to Neverwinter Nights 2 OC level of quality, featuring a copypaste 'trial event' from the same game, big issues with the plot, player motivation, player agency, a very weak antagonist and a severely disjointed thematic leap from Chapter 2 to 3, which basically feels like a different game altogether. This was more disappointing than the combat and the reason why I stopped playing.
(I *think* this is a result of the design by committee approach they took to coming up with the story and Eric Fenstermaker not being full time on the project for a significant period at the beginning. This problem will likely not re-occur for the sequel as if and when they do one, they'll have a much more focused effort from their two 'lead writers'.)
What you witnessed was me trying to do everything I could to promote the game, then after playing it, judging it by it's own merit and realizing that ... it's not very good, I didn't enjoy it and I'd spent a huge amount of effort to receive a negative return on investment as far as gameplay enjoyment went. It does not have anything to do with suggestions being ignored, or anything any of the developers said or did external to the game itself. Many of the devs were very cool to interact with during the beta (Nick Carver, Dimitri Berman & Roby Atadero in particular), it's super handy to have a Lead Designer that is open about mechanics and design decisions and willing to reply to questions, and I think that a lot of the technical people - Environment Artists, Character Artists and the like did a very good job.
There's nothing that I could have done or suggested that would have made me enjoy the full game. The problems all arise from the core design decisions and the content - of which, could not be influenced through the beta. I did learn a lot about game development and (vicariously) game design in the process, and for that I am very thankful and would not do anything differently.
For the record, I also don't really like how Wasteland 2 or Divinity Original Sin turned out, but they weren't my dream concept. This was. I did like some of the titles from smaller companies though - such as Expeditions Conquistador, The Banner Saga etc.
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It's not about being lazy, it's about being smart. If a poster wastes time putting facts in your face, all ya do is fall in to denial mode. Proof, evidence, and logic are wasted on you since all you're really looking for is a reason to post your spam.
Every post I made in this thread prior to you and Gromnir coming in with your personal issues was on topic. For you spam seems to equal posts from a person who does not enjoy the game.
Since you have no standards (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
Lol.
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My post history is publicly accessible so if me talking about people is all your eyes can see then that kinda tunnel vision further explains why your game suggestions continue to be ignored.
You don't even know what you're talking about, what suggestions exactly?
The fact that obsidian changed the attribute system after release. does not change your mewling before and after the change. you shoulda' been happy 'bout the change and yet you were still complaining.
Why? Because our theory was right? Big deal. Attributes are one of those set and forget things, they have little to no impact on the actions that players perform in combat. They were never really a big problem.
and we didn't mention trap or lock xp as your concern... you naughty boy.
No you didn't, you mentioned XP awards - what XP awards? The only time I have talked about XP rewards is after trap and lock XP was implemented and I said the implementation was poor. Otherwise I have not talked about experience at all. Either your memory betrays you or you are just making stuff up.
regardless, we gave the links. check any number o' josh response to sensuki... particular near release. too lazy to bother looking?
*snort*
Too lazy to provide a specific example.
and yeah, even codex saddled you with the cuck title after your little multi-fora meltdown and dirtbag antics regarding pj's review.
belated grats on the well-earned handle.
It was well-earned, but not for the reason you think. I also didn't start any of those confrontations on the other forums, Shevek and others did, if someone starts slagging me on a forum I read that's only an invitation for me to reply to it.
guy gets double-secret probation at sa for chrissakes. gotta be pretty over-the-top for that.
Specific post: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3706905&pagenumber=552&perpage=40#post446918209
Doesn't look very over the top to me.
ps deleted material as this is gonna become another thread where sensuki plays the victim
I came here to discuss the topic. You and Zenbane did not.
It's a wonderfully made single player game - both in story, combat
If you have low standards, maybe.
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The article states that WarCraft and Command & Conquer are RTS games that do not have a Pause function.
Press F10. Game pauses in single-player with the menu overlay.
You have a very poor grasp of RTWP games
I do like how your response to calling you out as a troll is too... call me a troll :-pI actually talk about games, all I've ever seen you do is attack other posters.
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No that list is very much correct; you just need to argue against it because your attempts to portray PoE as the "worst RTWP ever" suddenly falls apart. You are trying to define "RTWP" in such a narrow way that it serves your purpose. It's not hard to see through this type of ruse, it's quite common especially on gaming forums.
Most real-time games offer a pause function (including the game being paused when the menu screen is showing) to allow players to leave the game running while they're not at their computer or ALT-TABed as a convenience feature. This does not make them real-time with pause. If a game allows you to issue commands while paused, then it is RTWP.
From memory, Rollercoaster Tycoon does allow you to issue commands while paused, and thus it is RTWP but it has no combat, and I'm talking about RTWP combat here.
Games like AoE2 and Warcraft 3 and the like DO NOT HAVE RTWP combat, they have real-time combat, because you cannot issue commands while paused, in WC3 you can't even move your screen position.
If you want to religiously follow what some TV tropes list says about games, go ahead.
You show the same kind of dogma here. The fact that I have the gumption to judge this game on it's merit rather than blindly follow it seems to irk you considerably. You are essentially white knighting.
It's very common for a cheerleader to make these type of "follow around" claims on Forums. It's cute, but it blatantly ignores the fact that the troll (in this case, Sensuki), is posting the same thing everywhere all the time. So unless someone leaves the forum, if they respond to the troll then one of the troll's cheerleaders will be like, "why you following us around, bro?" lol
If anyone's trolling around here, it's you
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if you say so. regardless, you made many suggestions regarding issues such as ability points and hard counters and xp awards, no? is a great many instances in which obsidian went a different direction, and even when the direction obsidian went were a relative minor change, you took... poorly. and so we end up with the sensuki we got today.
The current attribute system has exactly the same layout as the one Matt and I proposed in October last year.
I don't recall making any specific suggestion to implement hard counters because I know that it would have been a futile effort.
I was against XP for traps and locks (I don't think there's anyone here that will disagree that they were only haphazardly implemented to shut the people up who were complaining about them on the forums) but that's not a big deal at all. How experience is payed out is pretty inconsequential to the things the player does in combat.
So I'm not exactly sure about what different direction you're referring to at least with those three examples.
is actual amusing how many factual corrections o' sensuki posts josh made over at the SA boards.You've mentioned this a few times, but you don't list any specific examples (likely due to laziness). Most of the factual corrections were because Obsidian had changed the mechanics of how something worked.
still, is too bad as you were making a real contribution til your pride (or whatever) git hurt.No, you just have a personal issue with me, and codexers in general. It seems you're not immune to prejudice either.
http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/82713-age-of-decadence-launched/?view=findpost&p=1741297
Nah, 99% of the time I just ignore you, so the last thing I'm going to do is trawl through pages of you following Sensuki around from thread to thread or whatever. Much as 99% of the time if there's a game I don't like I ignore it rather than wandering in to (not so) randomly diss it.Just thought people who weren't aware of your background and chip on shoulder with respect to the Codex/ VD etc needed to know where you were coming from.
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that is kinda the point. most of your suggestions would not have made a real difference, but you did complain.
I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make.
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Other than the removal of Melee Engagement or Movement Recovery Slow (which were both implemented in the IE mod BEFORE the game was released), what suggestions did I make that were 'ignored' that would have made any difference to the non-reactive, hardly tactical rote combat gameplay?
I can't think of any, that's not something I'm bitter about. Just disappointed at how the combat (and the story/plot) turned out.
We were able to do about 90% of the UI changes I wanted in the IE mod as well - blue circles for NPCs, always show circles, classic tooltip style, classic TAB functions, Karkarov made a beautiful solid HUD and Bester made it modular to support a wide variety of preferences in layout and portrait, button types.
I had some concerns about the combat in the beta but I was basically told that my experience was based on a small level range against underwhelming combat encounters and that the full game would be better, so I went in hopeful. Unfortunately the problems only amplified with the full game, which was quite disheartening.
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PoE is one of the best RTWP games on the market, and for a noteworthy list of RTWP games:
That list is wrong. RTWP as a category refers to the ability to pause and issue commands to your party members while the game is paused. That list just includes real time games that allow you to pause the game.
When the game is paused in Age of Empires 2, you can't issue commands. No one can do anything until the game is unpaused. It's not an RTWP game. It's a real-time game.
Apparently FTL RTWP is also very good, but I haven't played it.
PoE is one of the best RTWP games on the market
The combat is not good. Its only saving grace is that it uses an RTS control scheme and fixed axonometric camera, making it enjoyable to interact with when compared to some of the other horrible implementations in the past. Actual combat is quite bad and the higher player input does not correspond to an increased amount of active decision making by the player.
The character system is 'fun', as in there's a lot of choice and you can make any character you like and it's viable in the game but the actual combat gameplay is inferior to the IE games (BGs and IWDs anyway), 7.62mm or Aarklash IMO.
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I guess i'm the only one who likes both TB and RTWP.
I like both too, but PE is the worst RTWP I've played since DA:O. Not sure which I hate more.
Good RTWP - Infinity Engine games, 7.62mm High Caliber, Aarklash Legacy. I remember the original Dungeon Siege being ~okayish~ but it's been so long that I don't remember.
Obsidian devs are pretty much all TB/Tabletop fans and it shows in how they approach the design of things. They really should be making TB games instead IMO, but here we are.
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The hidden danger is that if it turns out that 80% of the players play in easy mode, they won't bother with a hard mode anymore, or they'll do hard mode by buffing all enemy defenses, attacks, and damge by some percentage. That's what happened to most mainstream games -- hard mode is just a grindy, tedious version of easy mode. So it's a real danger.
Josh also stated that they'd like to make combat speed closer or slower than the current slow speed in Pillars of Eternity, just to add some salt to the wound there.
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Is there any precedent for Obsidian to make a dumbed-down game based on community feedback?
For the sequel? Absolutely. Just check the Something Awful and badgame forums.
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The ship has already sunk IMO. They may as well just pander to their new audience, it would probably end up making a better game for the sequel (although not necessarily one I would want to play).
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I don't think so. If they wanted they could 've gone with a random fps and get more dollars so i think there is a true passion about rpgs behind the making of
Sure, just not RTWP combat.
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If the aim is the most sales as possible, it was a better idea to make a different game, with less text and better graphic, i don't get it
They couldn't because they needed to ride the nostalgia dollars for the Kickstarter. Now they don't.
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If the aim is the most sales as possible, not a bad direction to go in.
Totally unsurprising direction too. Foreshadowing Pillars 2 - story mode and half speed combat default!-
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I think that's very fair. I do think there was something, at least in torment, that gave those companions a humanity that's been harder to find since. Morte, aside from being a skull, had something very real about him. Not the wisecracks, but the lying and the guilt. He doesn't drone on and on about it, but it's there and you understand why, and when you get there it's a good moment. I'd say more than half the companions in that game had something nice and real in there, and that's a big part of why the ending came together. The post-Kreia work (including Kreia) has gone off in a direction that's much less understated. YMMV is a good way to put it.
Chris put an unhealthy amount of effort into Torment (by his own account it was very detrimental to his health) and that's probably why the work is so good
Unfortunately we'll probably never get anything like that again from him. Hopefully some bright star somewhere will come along and give us some good quality RPG companions elsewhere.I don't really see it coming from Obsidian because they have gone down the route of making safe, risk-free games and the criticism they've gotten over the years for lack of polish has got to them, now it appears to be one of their top focuses.
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It is hard to gauge, but we do know that a large lot of content for GM and Durance were cut (particularly GM) and they were supposed to have an arc involving each other, which was also cut.
Chris has never written 'real' characters. They've always been larger than life in style and substance but I find that enjoyable. I would have preferred fewer companions with more content like Durance than what we got, YMMV. -
With Durance, he's said that he wanted to explore the mind of a terrible person and explore whether he could be redeemed. But oops, he didn't have Durance do or say anything even slightly redeeming, so it's really not the best exploration. It's funny that he calls out the linearity of the plot. Durance might be the only companion that doesn't change course at all in response to what the player does.
Chris does not take credit for those characters as they were largely re-written by the other writers, so I imagine issues such as that (and whatever problems people have with GM) are largely in part due to re-writes and cuts.
I thought Durance, GM (despite HORRIBLE VO), Eder and Aloth were good companions but Eder and Aloth needed more content IMO.
Kana, Sagani and Pallegina were boring and I didn't use Hiravias much because I got him last.
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You describe a series of actions that are intrinsically active (stealth and positioning) as rote.
Active abilities are also active. How does the fact that stealth and positioning are active make them not rote ? You perform them before every encounter because performing them during combat is penalized.
The stealth system combined with the penalties for changing positioning in combat quite drastically changes the gameplay for the worse compared to the Infinity Engine games IMO. Rather than tactically reacting to enemy movement, positioning and targeting in combat you perform a large amount of it before combat begins, which I don't think is very fun.
Optimal setup combined with perfect play almost always leads to rote combat.
No it doesn't. Not in the sense that it is here. The issue is that the player is performing actions regardless of what the enemy does. In action games, you react to enemy attacks and movement. The Infinity Engine games often require you to react to enemy actions - you drink potions, you dispell, you counter-spell, you move and re-position. You almost never have to do these things in Pillars of Eternity, especially on non-PotD difficulties.
In the IE games you also don't spend the majority of combat spamming actives. Pillars adds a lot of 'busywork'. As a high level Kensai in BG2, you might have 9 uses of Kai per day but you might face a hundred encounters, and the player has to decide which encounters are pertinent for it to be used in. Per-encounter abilities here you use *every* encounter and often in the same pattern. There's no thought or cost involved, it's just a mindless increase to player input.
Your optimal positioning is far from the only option. Many fights are best resolved by sneaking your melee dps ahead of the front lines so that they can stun or kill enemy controllers. Sometimes door tanking is better. Sometimes running away is better. Sometimes the important thing is to get the hell away from the exploding elemental.
I never stated that there was a one true 'optimal position'. Optimal positioning falls into pre-encounter setup, and while the terrain combined with common sense may dictate where the good positions are, it's still something that you perform before the majority of fights in the game due to the penalties for doing it in combat.
I believe that if a player is actually able to realize when they've made a mistake and fix it/need to make a change then they should not be punished for it as it goes against the core thinking process of players in real-time games. Players are required to be actively thinking and determine for themselves if and when and what decisions and actions they need to make and perform - this differs from turn-based where the game dictates the structure of your decision making and actions.
The engagement system is a turn-based style solution to a real-time problem. The developers want to punish you for making an active decision - this is bad.
Of course ranged characters stay back. That's why they're ranged characters. Complaining that characters do what their designed to do is counter to the purpose of rpgs.
This was not a complaint. So it was a pointless thing to bring up as a 'criticism'.
Many classes specifically allow you to break engagement and encourage that type of gameplay. Rogues and barbs are especially adept at zipping in and out of the scrum.
And the ability to do this costs character advancement points that could be better spent on being more useful more of the time. The Rogue's invisibility is not a good ability because it breaks engagement but because it makes you invisible/untargetable and it cannot be dispelled, unlike the Infinity Engine games.
The Barbarian's leap? ability in TWM:P1 is not a good ability because it breaks engagement but because it allows you to clip through other units (I would think). With Engagement disabled these abilities would still be good abilities - they're not really things that you pick for the ability to break engagement, but for their other uses.
If each fight has a makeup that requires custom positioning, then that undermines the idea of rote combat, since scouting and positioning is part of the combat.
No it doesn't because the combat pre-positioning only occurs because the player is penalized for performing such actions IN combat.
There are encounters that break up a "sequence" and require you to change tactics. How does this help your argument?
Change encounter strategy, and largely consists of out of combat decision making.
PotD throws several hordes of enemies large enough that the fight never really stabilizes.
More enemies dying means more moving to attack new enemies, or enemies moving to attack you ... however WHEN no units are dying, how much movement is there? Close to zero, I'll bet - because of Melee Engagement, bad pathfinding and Move Recovery Penalty.
This argument does not prove that the state of affairs you describe comes from systems design. It only mentions systems design at the end, and does not describe how system design contributes to the state of affairs you describe. Even if the rest of the argument was accurate, AI or encounter design could be at fault.
This a somewhat valid point, but I do have answers that explain the correlation, I just didn't write them in the OP. My forum posts cover some of it - overabundance of per encounter abilities, the stealth system, engagement and movement recovery penalizing movement and re-positioning in combat, homogeneous system design, lack of dispelling and counter-spelling - a bunch of other things. When/if I have the inclination to write about it I'd like to do a proper post about it sometime.
It fails to recognize player agency in both builds and gameplay options. The way you optimally execute encounters plays far differently based on builds. A party of 6 rogues plays very differently from a party of 6 rangers.
This is true, but then this is also true for the Infinity Engine games. My experience is with a PC and the NPC companions. I believe that the game would still likely have the same repetitive nature to it with a gimmick party though.You fail to outline alternatives to a self-selected problem. A system where everyone excels at melee and ranged attacks? An RNG heavy system that is based more on reacting to randomness than careful gameplay? A series of onion peeling spell defenses and counterspells while everyone else flails around aimlessly? A kite and spank game? Criticizing without suggesting alternatives is fairly useless, especially when the criticisms are generalized enough to apply to most systems.
Yes, in the OP I do not provide an alternative solution to any listed problems.It's nothing new. You didn't even bother writing a fresh post.
Actually I did, and while I've been making a lot of the same arguments there is new things in there, especially in my forum posts. -
They were? I thought his were easily the best, even if they were in a kind of jarringly completely different style to every other character in the game ... in a way that kind of overshadowed everyone else.
I did like Eder and Aloth as characters as well, but their content was on the thinner side.-
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BG1 is pretty uneven in terms of usefulness of party members in encounters, and all of the IE games have a bit of that. I think BG1 was a bit too uneven, but in the other games it was better.
That's actually one of the things that I find makes Pillars a bit stale is because everyone is useful all the time, repeating the same useful things all the time, and that gets boring.
One of the really fun things I find about IWD is that I can do encounters with 2-3 characters and save some of my others. A lot of the time it's more optimal to make sure that enemies are targeting the lowest AC character because that means the party will suffer less damage overall, so I'll take my Fighter with the best gear and a couple of supporting characters along to take care of several encounters and then bring my more specialist characters in when needed.
I also split the party across the map a few times - combat was a very dynamic experience.
In Pillars on the odd occasion I did leave characters out of fights because of ranged enemies like Shades etc that would just target the squishiest character and to minimize total damage to the party, just leave that character out of combat and use characters that will take less damage but the concept of combat is super rigid with "encounter" "combat only" and the whole party vs "one encounter", etc. It's a more controlled and less fun/freeform experience.-
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I agree - and the designers (Josh specifically) focus everything on the character building side and not the actual what-you-do-in-combat side.
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White March Part 2 officially announced, coming January
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted · Edited by Sensuki
I did. actually - you weren't there. The response to my concerns about the system design was that it was too late to make changes and the thing I've previously re-iterated twice. Due to the fact that they were not going to change any of that stuff, I did not bring it up again until post-release. I also don't think there was really anyone involved in the beta that predicted that the combat across the game would be as repetitive as it is. I'm not the only one making these claims, I've seen posters at Something Awful and badgame.net, people who *hate* me say exactly the same things as I have.
If you're really interested in what I did and didn't do, feel free to search my post history, specifically threads created.
"Over a million dollars a month" is from a Feargus interview. Infinitron or someone else from the Codex should be able to back up that statement, having also seen the interview.
Obsidian outsourced the majority of their Wilderness Area Environment Art to a company in Portland. They said (quote is available somewhere) that Outsourcing is expensive. What exactly are you suggesting that they outsource ?
I don't think it's a gloomy scenario for most people, and you keep bringing up my ignored suggestions when you have absolutely no idea what I suggested or what was ignored. You're simply following on from something Gromnir said.
I didn't imply a change of horses, simply a broadening of the fanbase. The fanbase of Pillars of Eternity is not the same as the group of people that crowdfunded the game. It is pretty obvious simply by seeing who posts on this forum that the majority of people are new, non-backers.
I did not say that the presence of a Story Time mode is a bad thing. I do not care about it. If I was intending to play the sequel I would be concerned about the change to the combat speed though as I don't believe that action speed is the problem with the pace of combat. It's the swingy damage, and the movement speed of units IMO.