Sensuki
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Posts posted by Sensuki
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Yeah when I fought Cail the Silent I beat him on the first go without any trouble, but that was in the first patch or something. I imagine it might be a little bit harder now.
Re: Wizards apparently if you want to get amongst it as a Wizard you've got to blow like 4-5 per rest spells, oh so worth it
. Not that you need to though as they're pretty useful party members. As now they're *mostly* ranged damage dealers, and there's not much, if any immunity to damage - that makes them very valuable and effective (but not as fun as they were in the IE games, IMO).That's what you get when you have a lead designer and a couple of forums worth of people that don't like BG2 "Mage duels" though.
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One thing I'm consistently underwhelmed with is enemy ranged attackers and spell casters, they just never seem powerful enough or smart enough as they need to be to be as scary as they are in a lot of games.
That was done deliberately I think, but as a result ranged CC is now king I guess.
People on Something Awful and whatnot cried about archers and stuff in the IE games, and thus they were made not very strong.
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Oh my god, they actually go around each other now as opposed to stare into each other's eyes before giving up on this mind-bending puzzle of walking. The future is here!Path Search Nodes 40,000 is generally pretty good.
Yeah because it's not the default setting (because BG was made to run on 133MHz processor) I'll bet there's a lot of people out there who's nightmares of IE pathfinding are because they never changed that setting.
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Yeah it's a night and day difference, it's pretty amazing how bad it is in comparison. 1998 > 2015 obviously
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That's not a problem in combat though it's because the pathfinding takes into account the black fog of war. Path Search Nodes 40,000 is generally pretty good.
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try playing bg1 lol
that game's pathfinding issomething else
why go through the tunnel when you can go around it hahaha
It has better Combat pathfinding than Pillars of Eternity though.
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Yet most of the games they made are real-time with pause RPGs and their roots extend all the way back to Icewind Dale games. And they managed to create an RPG with a combat system which I actually greatly enjoy, something that vast majority of RPGs I have ever played fail to do. "They're bad at RTwP design" coming from someone who, to my knowledge, never released a popular RTwP RPG isn't really an argument which would hold a huge deal of sway given their history.
Obsidian have made two RTwP games in the past.
KotoR2 - uses KotOR1 engine. They didn't make the RTWP engine for that, BioWare did ... nevertheless the combat in that game is pretty bad (and there's not much they could do about it), but it's easy and requires very low player input. This is my favourite Obsidian game, and the only Obsidian game that I've ever finished - it has a good story, great writing and some good characters. With the restoration mod it's a fine game.
Neverwinter Nights 2 - Own engine this time, but pretty disgusting (although easy) combat and horrible issues with attacks of opportunity. A far cry from the Infinity Engine games. More fun than NWN1 though IMO due to being party based.
Josh Sawyer has worked on Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale 2 - BioWare created the combat engine for these games. Black Isle made some modifications that improved it in some ways and made it worse in others. Icewind Dale 2 is my least favourite Infinity Engine game, the AD&D 2.5E implementation by BioWare is better than Black Isle's 3E implementation. IWD2 has the most boring combat overall IMO but it has the advantage of having some cool scripting in encounters such as Goblins riding Worgs, Battle Drum Re-inforcements and things like that.
I think IWD2 combat is more fun than Pillars of Eternity combat, and I don't like IWD2 that much.
All of their games have a history of having bad combat as well. Obisidian games are not games you play for the combat. Although heh, with Pillars since it addresses specific concerns of a small group of disgruntled people that played the IE games, there are some people that do here. You seem to fit exactly into that group
edit: and you can post off-topic all you want mate. This forum does not require posts to be on-topic. Moderators will let you know if there's a problem.
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They're bad at RTWP design. They should be making turn-based games as that is their personal preference and forte. But because $, here we are.
Josh's implementation of immunities is IMO a great and actually very brave decision by Josh. Other eventual 'failures' of BG2 could be sorted out in regards to a sequel without implementation of entire mechanics.
The affliction immunity system could be much better. Once again, bandaid implementation of a system as a shallow attempt to solve a problem.
As you were saying, "immunity" as a state was not limited to creatures in the Infinity Engine games (particularly BG2). Immunities could manifest in creatures having a natural immunity to a damage type or 'school' of spell, or something like that. Immunity could be achieved through equipping an item, such as Ring of Free Action, as you were saying. Immunity could be achieved through buffs, such as Death Ward - immune to Death spells. These states were achievable by both enemies and the player.
The spell-based immunities could also be removed (by enemies or the player) which helped make combat a reactive environment. It is the reactive element that is lacking here, where the actions that enemies take is largely irrelevant as long as you follow your pattern. The ability to counterspell and dispell would go a ways to achieving a reactive state.I like immunities but yeah, that's not a very good implementation of them that they have currently. Tunnel vision approach. It's a start, but it would be nice if they expanded upon it.
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So you think that
1. No Engagement.
2. No Per/Encounter Abilities.
3. No Movement speed debuff
would naturally lead to better encounter design?
No. The issues with encounter design IMO largely lie in the core system and ability design. The more homogeneity and restrictions, the less you have to work with / the less things will play differently.
I don't have an issue with per-encounter abilities, they just need to be far less abundant IMO.
One thing with the combat being repetitive is that it's probably more common on the PotD, because the enemies have so much more brute force and resistance, taking certain risks and experimenting with certain tactics and abilities and being lax with preparation and micromanagement is much more punishing. This isn't really a situation unique to Pillars either, even playing better tactical games like XCOM or Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13, I've found my biggest tactical adjustment to cope with the overwhelming brute force on the highest difficulties, is usually to play in a more cautious, more structured and more repetitive style and while it's more effective tactically, I find it to be significantly less fun than playing on a next difficultly down and taking more risks and experimenting more, so while the tactics may be good from an effectiveness stand point, they aren't good for an enjoying the game standpoint.
I actually always played on Hard, not PotD because when you play on PotD you're not playing on 'Core Rules', and the game is not balanced at all for PotD. It's balanced for normal, but normal and hard aren't too different, hard just has more elite creatures and stuff in encounters.
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I'm not sure why you're so obsessed with it
I actually didn't even think about it until I joined this forum and started talking about Project Eternity during and post-Kickstarter. The reason that I bring it up so often is because it has been acknowledged by the lead designer as being a problem that he dislikes about the Infinity Engine games, and believes that the majority of players used it to trivialize combat - the game design has been directly influenced by this view and these people. I hate this fact.
You new guys haven't been around to be privvy to this discussion, so I can see why it can be somewhat confusing.
Half the time my group does exactly what Fenixp described
Fenixp is actually talking about Baldur's Gate there hahah, not PE.
I just know that if one were to draw out the logical flow of your arguments... the end result would be something that closely resembles the shape of oatmeal.
If that's the case, then yours would be melting ice cream
- I think most of your problems with "rote" combat could be fixed with better encounter design.
I don't think so. The problems are systemic and IMO it is best to tackle the problem at the root of the cause. With better system design then the game would have to lean less on inventive/scripted encounter design to try and alleviate the problem.
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No.
Firstly, they're not two opposing arguments.
Not rest-spamming limits your per-rest spells, and you won't have them for every fight. Meaning that you only use them when you think that you need them, and you do the rest with the bare minimum or nothing and roll with it. You opt-in to the strategical resource management. The act of resting itself occurs outside of combat but it affects the resources you have available for combat. You still play as effectively as you can.
You can rest spam in Pillars, but it's superfluous to due to the Health system, per-encounters and Monk, Cipher, Chanter resource systems. Fights play differently to IE where instead of how well you react to enemy actions, fights are won mostly due to pre-encounter setup and alpha strike. To make fights somewhat more interesting you have to what? Deliberately do bad positioning or deliberately don't use per-encounter actives at the start of combat? Lol.
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Sensuki, do you realize what you're saying here is that playing Pillars of Eternity in a certain way really trivializes its combat, and a bunch of posts later say that you need to avoid playing Infinity Engine games in a certain way to not trivialize combat?
I do, but they're not the same. To fix that problem in the IE games you simply don't rest spam. In Pillars of Eternity you have to play badly.
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I think a lot of people discount the combat in the IE games because it was possible to rest-spam, pre-buff and trivialize most fights into requiring not much attention, and thus, they missed out on the really enjoyable gameplay that was there.
Definitely agree on the potion drinking thing, I notice that too. In IE combat, reactional potion drinking for healing, debuffing and sometimes buffing is something I did very often. I'm not a fan of the move away from this gameplay either, it's just one of the things they've removed that makes the combat require less attention and less thinking from the player after the opening.
Virtually no counter-spelling is another thing which really impacts the combat feel. There is very limited counter-spelling available - delaying of negative buffs and reducing the duration with the Prayer spells, but I honestly never used the Prayer spells, and I used the one that delays affliction durations maybe three times. Due to this, you may as well just ignore 99% of enemy actions if there's nothing you can do to stop the effects and/or the effects themselves aren't worth stopping, or moving to get in range to stop, if engaged.
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I don't have a problem with per-encounter abilities (the concept). I think that there could be less of them and less overall uses of them per character or per-short rest (with a different name) in a short and full rest system.
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These crowd-control abilties, should they be per-encounter? They seem like the kind of thing you'd want to use often.
The game already has heaps of stuff that can be used to control movement - anything with a disable. The Fighter can have three knock downs. The usefulness of this ability does not change with Engagement on or off, in fact arguably it's more useful because you might use the ability to drop people to control their movement (knocks enemy prone .. no longer moving) rather than just to make them not attack you, whereas with the Engagement system, simply attacking that unit stops them and makes them attack you. Slows also become more useful as well.
Building characters as dedicated "engagement breakers" is a role that the "hardcore" players don't seem to have experimented with much. Instead they'd rather try to micro-manage movement and formations perfectly so that they never have to.
The ones that are related to disengagement defense are pointless IMO unless you're doing one of those Triple Crown Solo builds. They do not guarantee no damage, your movement recovery is still slowed and they cost character advancement points (like if you picked something for that reason, you're giving something up instead) and they only benefit you when disengaging. There is no incentive to disengage with movement anyway because of the move recovery penalty. Instead, you could just stand still and be more effective (like, why would I ever take Zealous Charge over Zealous Focus? The only reason is to stay out of engagement range when kiting, and that's what TCS players sometimes do).
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The engagement system isn't what causes it. It's more that every single thing in the game is basically a 'channel' type attack, even an auto attack. A lot of games use 'channel' to add more layers to balance, letting some attacks do more/better/different things, at the cost of having to stand still. Here, everything is standing room only.
That's not true. Attacks in the Infinity Engine games are mechanically similar to Pillars of Eternity but what determines how quickly you can perform actions differs.
In the IE games, characters perform non-movement actions based on their number of attacks per round. The attacks per round dictates how many non-movement actions they can perform over the span of 6 seconds @ 30 FPS (and 4 seconds @ 40 FPS, so on and so forth). If you have one attack per round and you use it, you have to wait until you can perform a non-movement action again just like you do in Pillars of Eternity when you're in action recovery.
It's the fact that when you move in Pillars of Eternity your recovery is slowed down by a percentage simply because you moved and because if you move when engaged you suffer a disengagement attack. In the IE mod, you can disable the movement recovery penalty (and Melee Engagement) and both of these problems are eliminated, but it doesn't do much to fix the repetitiveness of performing actions in combat. As I previously said, it is a problem but it's a smaller problem in the grand scope of things that make the game play how it does.
More important are things like the rote active ability spam, and the fact that there's barely a cost or consideration to using them.
What I came here to say is that the way the poll is set up is horrible and you should probably drop it.
Sure.
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So I don't really see the point of this poll or advertising your soon-to-come 'piece', there's not much to talk about until we start talking specifics.
Simply to start a discussion, to generate more thoughts and ideas. Most of the ideas I've had have arisen from discussing and arguing things with people, which I find very constructive for getting the thought process going.
(1) more diversified enemies and enemy composition - POE actually has a very good variety of enemies for a new franchise game on a limited budget, but they are clumped without a thought for presenting complex tactical packages.
To be brief think that the design constraints put over enemies prevents instances where anything really stands out, unless you do something super extreme like the Adra Dragon. The system design also makes it difficult for things to not feel similar and also the lack of "unique" enemies.
(2) rejuggling per-enc and per-rest ability systems altogether - having both was important to achieve class diversity in POE, but it's also led to many niggling balance issues, and more broadly contributes to a repetitiveness. I don't think full per-rests is viable while retaining class diversity, but there will need to be a clearer design about what gets to be per-enc and what gets to be per-rest, etc.
I'm not entirely sure which direction the developers would take in a sequel but from what I've read it sounded like elimination of per-rest abilities in favor of per-encounters only or unique resource pools like the Cipher, Monk, Chanter etc - in other words resources that only replenish over a short period of time.
I think that characters can have too many active abilities with virtually no resource cost, so combat essentially becomes spamming of these abilities with not very much thought involved. Take Rogue's Crippling Strike for instance. You get two of these every encounter, and you're mad to not use them every encounter, and it makes the most sense to use them first because they deal higher damage and they also debuff - so your other party members attacks that target whatever Crippling Strike debuffs (I forget) have a higher chance to hit. You also may have many other characters that have 2 or more of these abilities each.
In contrast, this never happened in the Infinity Engine games. I found that combat had a much better feel, and mix of active and passive characters. I have heard devs say "if you don't want to play an active character, make a passive one" but my issue is not the fact that characters are active, it's that I'm just performing rote active abilities rather than the use of those abilities having much tactical consideration. Active abilities in the IE games felt more tactical to me - being per day, I had to consider when to use them, and a lot of abilities were not the kind of abilities you would open combat with, you'd wait and use them during the encounter.
Changing the resting / resource system is likely warranted, such as to how it's handled in D&D 5E with the short and full rest. I have a few suggestions there including less active abilities overall, mutually exclusive choices and/or a limit of overall per-encounter uses rather than a per-ability limit but yeah I'd like to write up something more comprehensive rather than just throw an idea out there without any reasoning.
(3) the initial wailing and gnashing of teeth about engagement was uninformed and short-sighted.
I vehemently disagree. The very concept itself (AoOs in Real-time combat) is uninformed and short-sighted, and I have a stronger argument as to why.
It's not just about battles being static. The system is non-reactive and combined with the movement recovery penalty together, the game promotes moving in combat as little as possible if your intention is to perform non-movement actions on that character. Movement as a reaction to enemy actions is penalized - in other words moving when you don't have to is a mistake and thus you plan around not using movement as a tactical reaction to enemy actions. This makes combat overall a less tactical and reactive experience (this is not the full argument).
It is my belief that movement in combat should be controlled actively just as it is in every real-time game with combat in this style, through crowd control abilities themselves - that is reactive. You the player have to actually identify when you need to control enemy movement and then use crowd control abilities as a reaction to enemy movement, rather than the game snagging people for you, and then dealing free damage when they move [because the AI is dumb] and you simply avoiding movement if you can. And then if you are also controlled by CC, you have a situation to think about and react to as well.
Active control of movement occurs in the vast majority of real-time games. It works, and it's fun.
The system is not a major contributor to the overall problem, but it is a problem as it simply penalizes legitimate tactical options, thus reducing overall tactical reactivity.
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Most encounters dont require nearly that much preparation. I think that if prepare that much for each encounter you are both wasting a bunch of time and making the game more boring by making easy encounters even easier.
Oh, I know. "Trash encounters" don't require all of that but if you do some of it you can minimize your damage taken quite significantly.
I feel like the game was largerly balanced for players that just kind of run around without much caution. If youre reckless, you're likely to end up interesting tactical situation, but if you're careful they are almost always easily avoidable.
Yes, I agree. If you make a mistake, you can put yourself in a situation where you need to do something different. If you're a good player though, this generally doesn't happen unless you're being kinda lazy, and it has ramifications - loss of resources = shorter adventuring day, if that means anything to you.
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I am no longer a player of this game, but after recently reading many of the threads around here it seems that there are many players with a good knowledge of the mechanics that seem to be talking about the same core issue that I find with the combat in this game. I have put this issue into the following hypothesis:
If the player has a good understanding of the Pillars of Eternity system design and competently builds and equips a full or close to full party of characters, controls their party in combat effectively and makes little to no mistakes, combat in Pillars of Eternity becomes a repetitive exercise where the player performs the same sequence of rote actions throughout almost every combat encounter in the game.
This rote sequence entails a pre-encounter setup where the player uses Stealth to scout ahead and detect the location, makeup and line of sight of enemy compositions which allows the player to dictate the exact terms of engagement in the majority of encounters in the game. This is followed by optimally positioning party members for combat, usually in a very similar arrangement of designated tanking characters forward, melee strikers (if applicable) further back and then ranged and support characters in the rear, just inside their range limit. Once characters are in position, the player will initiate their ‘alpha strike’ where the player uses one or more active per-encounter abilities to inflict damage and debuffs on the enemy composition before combat begins.
After the pre-encounter setup and alpha strike phases are completed and units have engaged each other in melee combat, the field will stabilize. If the player correctly performs their stealth, initial positioning, alpha strike, opening set of abilities and controls the targeting of enemies, there is little to no chance that the player will lose that encounter, let alone suffer any casualties. The player will then spend the rest of the encounter keeping their advantage by using up the remaining per-encounter abilities of their characters, usually in a very similar order every encounter.
Encounters that do require players to break this rote sequence are usually against specific creatures or creature types that have powerful disables, can charm player units or have very high damage special attacks, and instances where the enemy AI targeting clauses for specific types of enemies prioritize weaker party members. Most of these challenges are optimally dealt with by a change in encounter strategy and/or opening actions. The player may alter their equipment (such as changing armor to lower or increase DR to alter enemy targeting priorities), use alternate initial positioning, leave particular characters out of the encounter until certain enemies are dealt with or use a specific character to soak up all initial enemy targeting.
Due to the nature of the system design, a player that successfully executes such an encounter strategy will almost never have to vary from this formula and will rarely have to pay much heed to the actions performed by enemies after the opening set of actions taken in combat.
The hypothesis does not mention the recent addition of affliction immunities, but they are largely a strategical consideration and may fall into the instances mentioned in the fourth paragraph where the player may have to alter their encounter strategy but still proceed with the rote sequence.
I have pondered on this issue for a long time now, and I'm thinking of producing a piece that will closely examine this problem, and other problems related to the game's combat and system design and present some feedback and possible solutions that might be of interest for the sequel IF there is any acknowledgement of this issue and intent to try and solve it - and by this I mean intent to design a combat system that is more reactive and requires more tactical diversity from the player.
Explanations as to why you agree or disagree and discussing the points I made in the hypothesis would be welcome, thankyou in advance.
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Yes, I actually do not play very often anymore simply because it can be very addictive and it's very easy to just sit there and play it all day.
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You cannot have a half or partial frame, an animation frame is either rendered or it isn't. 11.26 frames would either just be 11 or 12 frames, I'm not sure if stuff like that is rounded up or down, but in this particular example it looks like down?
You would be better off asking Josh Sawyer on the Something Awful forums - I got my information from him during the beta. It is possible that they have not told us some things, or slightly changed some things.
I found that many times during the beta the way he wanted things to work and the way they actually worked did not match up, either because the person who implemented his mechanics did so differently than asked (misunderstanding?), or because of a bug.
Back when I originally looked at frame by frame recordings of attacks, my calculations matched what I saw on the screen, but I was not dealing with complex additive maths from many bonuses, just simple ones from raw character creation, armor (or lack of) and global recovery mult.
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By constant player input I mean literally holding down a key as input. If the key is not being held down, nothing happens. This is a feature of (all?) action games. You can certainly click or press once to move once or attack once but to constantly perform an action you have to hold down a button or key, it is not automatic.
Much earlier in the thread I said "constant input stream" when talking about real-time gameplay which just means that the game accepts input at any time. Real-time non-action combat games have auto attack and waypointed movement.
The reason why I consider DotA 2 to still be considered an RTS is because it uses RTS camera and controls, unit movement and features pretty much everything that you would find in an RTS multiplayer game aside from the base building. No doubt it incorporates some RPG-like elements as well - but it's a multiplayer game with no story, just an objective - destroy the enemy throne.
I don't really see the need for a comparison with Counter-Strike. Sure they're both competitive multiplayer games that involve some resource management. Counter-Strike is clearly an FPS game though with FPS mechanics. The controls require constant (or active?) player input. DotA 2 has RTS camera and controls with RTS mechanics and does not require constant player input [as in you don't need to literally hold down keys to do things].
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Warcraft 3 is definitely a pure RTS. The single player has some RPG-like elements to it, but there's no choices to be made. You follow the story in a linear fashion and complete mandatory and optional objectives just like in the Starcraft singleplayer, which had no 'heroes', just named units with more health/damage etc.
I do not consider a unit progression system to be what defines an RPG. Most RPGs have them, but I'm pretty sure if you had an RPG with no unit progression system but with choices and consequences, then it would be an RPG. I'd like to see that actually - particularly with action combat similar to Jedi Knight 2 lightsaber mode or something like that - combat that is based purely on player skill, rather than character skill.
DotA did not take away the 'real time strategy' parts of the game, it took away base building and *some* of the resource management (wood, training units and food supply). The game is still real-time, the game is VERY strategical and your team still has to farm gold although it is gained in a different fashion.
There are some RTS games without base building.Action combat also implies constant player input, such as if you are not holding down a movement key, your character is not moving. If you are not holding down the mouse button then your character is not attacking ... etc
DotA is a MOBA but it uses an RTS engine, and has RTS controls. You could say it is both a MOBA and an RTS. Kind of like how some RPGs use an FPS engine - thus they're RPGs and FPS games.
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DotA's not an RPG. DotA Allstars is a mod Warcraft 3, which is an RTS and DotA 2 is essentially that in a new engine. It's a MOBA.
DotA and Action RPGs have nothing in common.
Warcraft 3 and the Infinity Engine games control veeeery similarly though.
. Not that you need to though as they're pretty useful party members. As now they're *mostly* ranged damage dealers, and there's not much, if any immunity to damage - that makes them very valuable and effective (but not as fun as they were in the IE games, IMO).
A query on combat gameplay
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
Nah Cail the Silent is in "that fire area". I forget the name of it.
Dragon fights in the IE games were SooOOOooOoo much better. You could cheese them but it was fun doing it straight. Very reactive - dispelling their protections, removing fear, confusion and the other afflictions they affected your party with, managing aggro and damage when they wing buffeted away everybody. Great encounters, every one of them.
PE dragons are booooring in comparison.