Infinitron

I think part of the charm of arbitrary restrictions, although we may be loathe to admit it, is that they actually simplify things for the player. When you find a sword in AD&D, you immediately know your cleric and your mage aren't ever going to use the thing. It's one less thing that you need to think about when you optimally distribute your equipment.

Josh: Getting tips on proper pronunciation is cool. I'm reminded of the little pronunciation explanation your companions gave you in Ultima VI when you asked them their names. It was such a small thing but very immersive.

Budgets aren't the only reason not to do full voice acting.

You might also want to draw comparisons with the amount of VO in Wasteland 2's demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dH6AIlIrko And this is a game with a lower budget than PE.

You might want to check out the works of the recently deceased Jack Vance.

Interview with Kevin Saunders and Adam Heine at Iron Tower: http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,3339.0.html

Can one of the mods move this thread to the Game Mechanics forum? Thanks.

I was envisioning something like: vanish, stab, vanish, stab. I don't have any idea how stealth works in PE but couldn't a rogue re-vanish after attacking in the IE games? Nope, once you were engaged in combat you couldn't go back into stealth. That was the selling point of the Shadowdancer prestige class in Neverwinter Nights - they were the only class with the ability to hide in plain sight during fights.

It's hard to "whittle down mooks" when they're hitting you back and you're just a fragile rogue. I suspect that the rogue's special abilities will be a more important factor than weapon selection. Can you provide a link to where they discuss aggro mechanics? I hadn't heard of that and am interested in reading up on how it will be handled. There won't be any.

Eh it is just going to be like a WoW rogue. Lots of prep, perfect positioning, unload with a set of specific skills.... then start prepping again so in 30-40 seconds you can do damage again. Meanwhile the guy with the two hander does steady reliable damage to multiple enemies the entire time. On a "pure damage" number crunch the two hander guy probably wins.... but the Rogue will still be better for one on one bursts of massive damage at a short time. In other words two hander is for trash killing, rogue is for precision strike on high threat target. Except that in WoW you use cheesy aggro manipulation tactics to keep the heat off your rogue so he can keep hitting. It won't be as simple in PE.

It probably will - unless you use the dagger with one of the rogue's backstab special abilities. I'm guessing that the PE Rogue will be somewhere between the MMO DPS Rogue and the traditional D&D Rogue. You can do lots of damage, but it won't be as easy to pull off without getting your ass kicked.

Perhaps this will make things more clear (the first paragraph): http://forums.somethingawful.com/sh...=17931&perpage=40&pagenumber=12#post416190543 rope kid is J.E. Sawyer.

I think you've misunderstood how magic in this game will work. You won't use skill points to gain spells, and you find spells in the world individually, not just in grimoires. The grimoires can then be customized with whatever spells you want to put in them. Want to use your combat spells? Load up your grimoires with combat spells and rest. Want to use non-combat spells? Load up your grimoires with non-combat spells and rest. In any case, just because the wizard might have access to non-combat spells doesn't mean the other class' non-combat skills will be useless. This is about usefulness of all classes, not perfect balance between classes.

No, in PE, wizards need to memorize (or "prepare" or whatever you want to call it) their "per-rest" spells by loading them up in a grimoire. It works much like Vancian magic. http://eternity.gamepedia.com/Wizard

The point is magic is not clearly a combat or a non-combat skill. If it's similar to AD&D, it will be mostly, but not entirely, combat, but some will be non-combat related. Meaning they either need to shave off the non-combat spells as skills, or spellcasters really do have less combat utility than non-spellcasters. Again, I'm not sure how that follows. Do you remember how AD&D wizards worked? Spells weren't a skill, stat or feat. They weren't a character attribute that you developed through level-ups. They were tangible things you found in the world, scribed into your spellbook, and memorized at will. If you wanted to be at maximum combat readiness, you'd memorize lots of combat spells. And there were plenty of them to be found. Surely you're not claiming that just because non-combat spells exist, that somehow makes wizards less combat-proficient than other classes??? In any case, Project Eternity wizards will have other offensive capabilities besides spells.

What's the problem? If your mage finds some utility spells he can put them in his spell grimoire and memorize them, but he might need to switch them out for combat spells for tougher battles. Granted, you will gain some spells on level up. I suppose you're referring to a situation where a mage could choose non-combat spells exclusively on level-up, or something like that. I don't know, maybe they won't let you do that. Or maybe it won't matter because you'll find enough combat spells in the game world to compensate.

I must have missed that developer response or totally forgotten it. I believe you, but I just find it very hard to believe. As far as I knew every class could be combat efficient, but the game is still being designed to allow completion for "fight your way through it" and "talk you way through it" party builds/setups. I just find it incredulous that the latter would be anywhere near as combat efficient as the former, therefore the segregation in my post. Monster respawning is after all only about combat. Your characters will have separate skill point pools for combat and non-combat skills, so you literally won't be able to build a character who isn't proficient in something related to combat (and non-combat). (That may sound dumbed down, but it's actually not really different from D&D, where combat was mainly governed by your stats - Strength, Dexterity, Constitution - that could be upgraded occasionally, while non-combat skills like Diplomacy and Bluff were part of the skill system, which was mostly dedicated to non-combat skills.)

Remember that in PE, all classes are fully combat-proficient, so there isn't really such a thing as a "combat specialized party" (though a given party might not be well-suited for the challenges in a particular dungeon). I agree that respawning seems like an "inelegant" solution, and there's something satisfying about knowing you've cleared a dungeon forever. It does get the job done, though.

That's probably true, if the rest spot is far away enough. Like maybe back in town. I don't think anybody is suggesting anything as extreme as forbidding the player from returning to town (although it could be cool if there were dungeons that trapped the player inside).

My apologies. Check out this post, it's a pretty good explanation of the design philosophy behind Project Eternity: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/63091-josh-sawyer-on-miss-and-hit/page-5?do=findComment&comment=1296177

No: What's the difference between being able to rest anywhere or being able to rest unlimited times in a nearby designated rest spot? It just takes a bit more time. There needs to be a harder limit.

There have been enough discussions with J.E. Sawyer on this forum about why a designer has an obligation to remove exploitative metagaming tactics from a game. I'm not really interested in revisiting that topic. If a game is too hard for you, that's what difficulty modes are for.

You're assuming that the dungeon is a linear tunnel, rather than the rest areas being somewhere off to the side in a large, non-linear area. Besides, the point is that if you end up retreating to a previously visited rest spot, you'll have to fight enemies again when you go back to where you were. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Exactly. I've explained what the problem with that is the in the original post.

Well, there's dungeons and then there are fights that take place in towns and other civilized areas. In the latter case, a rest area is never far away, so I would propose that fights in towns always be highly difficult "set piece" battles that require your party's full resources to win. Yeah, I figured Horm would have created a thread for that, but now I'm bringing up the respawning solution as well.