Infinitron

Re: engagement, I'll say this: If Obsidian does end up removing it, it won't be because people dislike it, but because they can't get it working properly. My opinion is that in order to really do something like engagement properly, you need a character movement and animation system built to support it from the ground up.

Actually, I'd like to amend this. There is one important difference with the IE games - those super-fast beetles, which I don't really like. (Also, in the IE games I would have reloaded after my fighter dropped, but screw that.)

I'm willing to bet that this means either: 1) It doesn't play like the handful of challenging set-piece battles I've cherry-picked out of the IE games. or 2) It doesn't support my personal idiosyncratic IE game playstyle as much as I'd like it to. or both! (Of course, the really funny thing here is how Infinity Engine combat, which has been mocked since its inception by turn-based loving, trash mob-hating RPG grognards, has suddenly become a holy grail of design to some.)

lol, nostalgia filter levels in this thread are off the charts Shevek has shown you that Pillars of Eternity combat looks and plays exactly like similar Infinity Engine combat did...and you're saying it sucks.

Yeah, it's pretty horrible, isn't it? Makes you wonder how Obsidian's internal playtesters play the game.

I don't know about gear, but I do think familiarity and skill play a factor, especially when dealing with fast enemies who swarm you. The less confident you are about your ability to handle events, the more you pause. The more you pause, the more awkward and "not fun" combat feels. The Infinity Engine games didn't have many fast enemies, but they did have some. The werewolves in the Baldur's Gate 1 expansion were fast, especially compared to the slow walking speed of characters in the vanilla BG1. Here's an LP of the Werewolf Island, done by a "pause-a-holic" LPer: Looks pretty awkward, doesn't it? One of the reasons I'm a bit skeptical of accusations that Pillars of Eternity has incredibly chaotic combat is that the way the accusing people are playing it just isn't all that different from the way novice players play the Infinity Engine games.

Sensuki: Considering how often you invoke the dreaded "banalce", I'm surprised at your championing of DR over DT. Simply put, DR is always less mechanically interesting than DT. Handling a character who takes 50% of damage from all attacks across the board is less interesting than handling a character who might take trivial damage from one sort of attack (like a dagger stab) but takes more-or-less the same amount of damage as everybody else from another sort of attack (like a fireball). And I would certainly think that most Infinity Engine "grognards" want high damage magical attacks that always kick butt, and aren't decimated by armor DR values. tl;dr You've out-Sawyered Sawyer.

Interesting, but the truth is that as soon as Obsidian cut down the speed of all enemies by half, 90% of the people on these forums will declare that the combat is now great, mission complete

hence the need for testing, community feedback and improvement He's not talking about the mechanics and actual gameplay feel. He's talking about the "feel" induced by the fact that he doesn't know who his characters are. For that reason, I think Obsidian should seriously consider releasing a demo of the game's first area (the one we saw in the game's big media blitz back in July) at some point.

Sensuki is incredibly, aggressively hypersensitive to anything that disturbs what he perceives as proper IE "feels", no matter how minor. That makes him useful for providing analysis, but it also means his opinions aren't representative of most players. For my part, I don't think the melee engagement system is a very important factor at all among all the factors that make this game's combat messier than the IE games'. (Of course, I also think that its degree of messiness is being greatly exaggerated in general.)

What is this thread about?

You should only award XP for opening locked chests and disarming traps on trapped chests. I probably don't need to explain why - those are the things that every player is going to want to do in every playthrough. For locked/trapped doors, there might be another way around them, and when there are trapped floors, it's a common tactic to just detect the trap and walk around it, rather than disarm it.

Obviously, but nevertheless I think the amount of complaints you're going to see about "OMG, MIGHT AFFECTS BOW DAMAGE, THIS DOESN'T MAKE SENSE, THIS MUST BE WHY THE COMBAT ISN'T FUN DESPITE THE FACT THAT THERE'S ABSOLUTELY NO RELATION BETWEEN THOSE THINGS" is going to plummet once the visual and feels issues are sorted out. Also, at the risk of drifting off into the hypothetical, it's almost certain that every possible designer this game could have had would have added more abilities to formerly purely passive classes, not just Josh Sawyer. That's the direction that D&D itself has been going. In fact, it probably could have been a lot more extreme. Josh at least acknowledges the fact that some classes should be more passive than others, even if they aren't as passive as you want.

Not really. The beta's problems have little do with rules and everything to do with implementation and "feels". The principles of "Sawyerism" (by which I mean things like class balance, "gamist" attribute design, etc) have little bearing on issues like animation and visual feedback, combat speed, pathfinding, etc.

Combat in NWN good? What planet is this?

Oh, get banned already, will you?

Challenge: Try to think of an RPG - one single RPG - that wasn't delayed.

I really don't want to. =) I don't think we are going down that route. I don't make the final decision on it, but I don't think it is in the cards for us. OK, I hope Paradox's new percentage isn't too harsh (assumptions.jpg ). You guys did seem to be very very eager to release the game this year and very sure that you would, and I have to wonder why.

So, Brandon, Steam Early Access release on the original release date? You know you want to.

Now the question is, how are they funding this?

That's one hell of an anti-Icewind Dale rant, but I have no idea what it has to do with Pillars of Eternity. Followed by a...plea for kiting? Really? O_o (and once again, Sensuki can't restrain himself from liking your post - yeah, that's not gonna help you get your ideas across bro)

I think the real issue may be that people just aren't used to having to think about attributes at all.

FFS, just wait for them to make an announcement.

Holy crap. nipsen, I can tell you in all honesty that Sensuki does not have any special privileges with Josh. On Something Awful, Josh almost makes it a point to ignore him - and god knows there's lots to ignore (no offense, Sensuki!)