Infinitron

You are contradicting yourself. We are the beta testers and we are verifying problems by debating stuff in this forum. I think "no bad builds" will always be a failure. Just makes the whole choice of stats totally uninteresting and unimportant. If I can just pick random stats and still have a good character in all situations then you have totally failed with game design. I'm not contradicting anything. All attributes being useful to all characters doesn't mean all those characters have to play the same way. Get. Your. Head. Out. Of. The. D&D. Box.

This debate really is a waste of time. If all attributes are useful to all characters, then that's good. That's a design goal. But if you can play your character in the same way no matter what attributes he has, with no perceptible tradeoff, then that's bad. That's what beta testers need to be verifying now, IMO.

The Earth is round, and stars are gigantic balls of fiery gas trillions of kilometers away. This is unintuitive though so obviously nobody can understand it.

It's nonsense. Whole concept of classic wizard (that comes from D&D obviously) is a guy who LEARNS spell formulae. He is like medieval version of scientist. It's like an idea to play as dumb scientist and expect that he should win Nobel prize. Why should our roleplaying choices be constrained by what a bunch of guys from TSR thought was the only way to build a wizard back in the 1980s? There's a reason they introduced the Sorcerer class later on, you know.

The solution to this would be to demand more interesting quests, not a bribe for putting up with them.

Yes, as a matter of fact, he does want to play a dumb wizard. Also, that wasn't the only example he used.

I think the problem is that a muscle wizard and a glass cannon spell throwing wizard would have the same stats. Both would stack might, you actualy cant make a "muscle wizard" without making him a good spell nuker. Josh made a video about that back in February, FYI: http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/76165227151/do-you-think-it-is-important-for-attributes-to-allow

It seems that for many players, not being forced to give their different characters particular sets of attributes makes it seem to them that the attributes are meaningless. Instead of embracing the wider choices available to them, they conclude that there are no choices to be made at all. I find that sad.

What a curious oversight. I don't see any reason why that wouldn't be in. A bug, perhaps?

People act like this is self-evidently a bad thing, but I'm actually not sure why. Why is gaining 0 XP a bad thing? What exactly are you being deprived of here? Personally, I think it's cool when you can't count on the inevitable level-up to rescue you from a tough encounter. You have to make due with what you have. No level-up for you until the quest is over.

This an Infinity Engine-style CRPG, not Thief: The Dark Project. Nobody's going to savescum to preserve stealth, unless they're in some sort of gimmick playthrough. Your characters are equipped and built to engage in combat. You're going to use them, because it's the more straightforward option.

Well, with regard to stealth, I think people are overestimating the applicability of that. First of all, it's unlikely that your entire party will be stealth masters. Typically you're going to use stealth to bring one or two of your characters into a position before springing an ambush, or something like that. More importantly, however, stealth is unreliable. What happens when one of your six stealthed party members fails a roll and suddenly that enemy you were stealthing by sees you and all hell breaks loose? It's not really safe to leave a living enemy behind, especially in a non-linear area where you're likely to pass by him several times as you wander about. I believe most players will dispatch all enemies and that bypassing all encounters using stealth will be reserved for so-called "gimmick playthroughs".

What sort of combat will it encourage players away from? "Random encounters" and wilderness "trash mobs"? You can't uncover all of the fog of war and explore the entire map unless you've defeated all of those. This isn't a first person game, you can't "go around" if you really want to see everything. As I stated earlier, for many players, probably the majority of them, this alone will provide sufficient reason not to avoid that variety of combat. Quest-related encounters? You will typically get XP for defeating those, if not immediately then at the end of your quest chain. You might say that this system incentivizes pacifist solutions to quests, but my impression is that in quests players usually role play, especially since this is an Obsidian game where some degree of long-term choice & consequence may be involved. Also, quest-related encounters usually come with interesting loot, providing another reason to choose the violent solution.

I like this guy. He's honest. Deluded, but honest.

Infinity Engine-style RPGs have been described (often derisively) as "fog of war uncovering simulators". But it's true - to a significant portion of players, just revealing the entire map is its own reward. And to uncover all the fog of war, you need to fight all the monsters you find in it...XP or no XP. I play like this, and I'm sure most people in this thread do the same.

I don't think he would be resting this much if the combat wasn't kicking his ass. It's harder. As for the resting itself, well, Infinity Engine-style RPGs aren't roguelikes or survival games. You aren't supposed to ever completely run out of resources and be forced to quit the game - running back to town to rest is always an option. In this case, the town is close by.

A hotkey or mouse button (middle click?) to move things to the stash could be cool. Maybe they also could let you marquee select groups of items, drag and drop them, etc.

Use the stash

Buahahaha. Lol. What's so funny? What he said is true. And what's with the "like" from Obsidian developer Roby Atedero for this worthless, content-free post? I am disappoint.

Dragon Age crowd is basically the casuals of rpg gaming. Why would they be interested in a game that lacks all of the important AAA game functions like fully voiced characters, cinematics, 3D world and so on? Because it's still more similar to Pillars than any other mainstream game aside from difficulty and presentation

Well, the first and foremost "mainstream audience" that Obsidian needs to target for marketing is Bioware and Dragon Age's 3-4 million strong fanbase. But I guess that goes without saying.

Pausing a real-time game regularly doesn't make it turn-based. It's only turn-based if the characters take turns, ie, only one character at a time can perform actions in between "pauses". I'm amazed by how many people fail to realize this.

Action queues are more suitable for games where: 1) Most abilities are single target as opposed to area effect 2) Character movement is generally unimportant In a tactical RPG where characters are moving around and throwing area effects at each other, queues might be more likely to cause a mess than help anybody. That queued up fireball you had ready? The character you were aiming for is long gone.

http://pathfinder.obsidian.net/

Immortalis: What happens when you've reached the end of a dungeon and then realize you left one single monster alive in the corner of some cave way back at the beginning? No XP for kills: Act like a real adventurer would and move on. XP for kills: MUST KILL EVERYTHING MUST EXTRACT ALL XP FUUUU For further reading, see "degenerate gameplay".