Karkarov
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Posts posted by Karkarov
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Oh not asking for race restrictions, just using the common cliches.
Thinking about it Karkarov's idea of a merchant specialising in high end goods, and charging ungodly prices, is also something i'd like to see implemented. You could even make a quest out of getting an invite to his establishment, or make it dependant on faction reputation. The finest attire for the infiltration of Lord Limpfondles soiree, or parade armour suited to the new Baron of Bosman keep.
Actually I didn't really suggest that but it is a good point. There definitely should be some vendors with premium stock that do requite hoops to be jumped through.
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Sadly, you're mistaken about that. Dig through some of the "Armor and weapons suggestions" threads, and you'll find some lamentably deluded people arguing in favor of moar spiky bits for the sake of looking badass.
PrimeJunta what's your beef?!?!!? Everyone knows a Warrior is only as badass as the size of his horns! If his helmet has no big bad ass horns he may as well just go to the kitchen and make everyone some muffins like all the other suzie homemakers!
(if anyone doesn't get it I am joking ;p. Though I probably said that word for word while playing WoW more than once.)
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I am a bad ass adventurer killing machine. Unless my pet is able to tear a bandit limb from limb I don't want him around in the first place, he can just hang out at the house and chase mice instead. After all they are my cherished pet buddy, why would I want to risk their life in combat with a giant ogre or fire breathing drake if they were not able to be a legitimate threat on their own? I would be sending my supposedly loved cuddly little companion into certain doom!
That said.
Minsc and Boo were great, but Boo was a pet in name only. It was the writing and the voice acting that made them so cool. Boo if you didn't notice... never actually did anything other than squeak. The only game I have seen a pet done right (as an actual in game entity) was Dragon Age: Origins where they Mabari Hound literally is your pet but also serves as a stand alone party member. Like I said before if my pet is not capable of standing on their own 2 to 4..... possibly more feet/paws/claws, then they aren't worth having around outside of some players for RP purposes.
So if they want pets to be something you keep with you, either go the Boo route and make it an NPC and be all in the writing while the pet never actually "exists" in game terms. Or make the pet a stand alone creature that is equal to any other party member. Otherwise just make them things that hang out at the player house and maybe have some funny little side missions or mini game like activities based around them. Such as tracking it as it sniffs for buried treasure in your back yard, or bringing it a collection of weird animal bones it can gnaw on which results in it fetching you a "adamant long sword +22 of slaying death and such" if you bring it like a hundred of em.
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Uh this is fine but don't go over the top. We don't need rules for "this merchant is really greedy so if you pay double he will get up in the middle of the night". Is it more believable, maybe, but sometimes you are going a little too far down the rabbit hole.
Do the day night cycle as it has been done in many games thus far such as Skyrim. Some shops close, npcs move to different locations, some people could out to the streets at night who are otherwise not there, some events happen only at night, yes some shops may only be around at night. Or the most common implementation, different monsters and enemies are around at night.
Just don't go too crazy with it.
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Honestly I think there should be no level cap. However, to borrow my own commentary from other threads...
In a well designed, balanced, and planned RPG (especially one with objective based XP) there is always only *so* much EXP to go around. While there should be no level cap there should definitely be an over all idea of how powerful the player should be if they do "everything". There also should only be enough EXP in the game to get them to that point and not one step further.
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They literally were miniature ogres. Or more accurately, ogres come from qunari broodmothers. Hurlocks come from humans, genlocks from dwarves, and shrieks from elves.DA:2 I had to wonder how the Qunari leader could even move his head considering just one of his horns was bigger than his entire head and neck combined. They looked like miniature Ogres with really small heads, not people. They even had full on claws which suck for holding weapons by the way. You can have horns and not have them be the wing span of a 747. Example: Tieflings have horns.
Yeah Tamerlane, one problem. Humans don't actually look like Hurlocks. Nor do Dwarves look like Genlocks. So why do Qunari in DA2 look like Ogres?
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Dual wielding is okay as long as the off hand weapon doesn't double attacks and instead actually focuses more on buffing things like parry chance etc. One of the few people who developed a real world dual wielding style was Miyamoto Musashi which he called Niten Ichi Ryu. Point being his off hand weapon was always smaller and he typically only used it for parries or the tie down an opponents weapon so he could create a opening to attack with his katana.
Also I want to echo one part of what Sacred_Path said. Dual Wielding, while not a gimmick to me, is something that realistically is designed for duals and small scale personal engagements. In any form of large melee or against "monsters" like a dragon dual wielding really would not be viable realistically.
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I haven't seen the 'original' desgins for the Qunari, but I'm calling BS on the horned apparence always being the intention too, Barothmuk. I understand one (and speical one at that) having the 'rare' genetic quirk of no horns while the rest do, but the other qunari you actually see in DA:O also having it seems odd. I don't know if the metaltic skin tones were abandoned, but it's been decided that "Tal-Vashoth" (ie the Qunari that don't follow the Qun religion) means 'true grey' implying that whole race is generally grey skinned.
Heh, yeah true enough, I never got why they all have grey skin in DAO or DA2. DAO said Bronze, DA2 said metallic-hues, bronze, gold, silver... all we ever saw was Grey, and not a metallicy grey.
Except up until Dragon Age 2 it was never mentioned in the lore. Yes it was the original design (in the original design they also had tails) but in the actual game it was never depicted nor mentioned.
Time for another harsh Karkarov opinion.
Here is the thing, screw lore. When lore says you should design your characters to look idiotic, be incompatible with the games gear designs, and over all just not be popular with the average player then it is the lore that needs to change not the design. Anyone with any sense will tell you the DA:O version of quanari was superior. They didn't look completely ridiculous and over the top, you could actually believe they could function as actual "people", and you could relate to them.
DA:2 I had to wonder how the Qunari leader could even move his head considering just one of his horns was bigger than his entire head and neck combined. They looked like miniature Ogres with really small heads, not people. They even had full on claws which suck for holding weapons by the way. You can have horns and not have them be the wing span of a 747. Example: Tieflings have horns.
The DA2 Quanari is just plain bad design.
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It always bugged me how god damn slow the bears in BG were. Bears are really ****ing fast. Like, way faster than you or me. And I don't know where the myth that they can't run downhill came from, because they can.
They should bearly be able to catch you, as opposed to barely being able to catch you?
Don't knock him man. He is just trying to make sure the mechanics he considers to be bear necessities are in game.
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I've also played Oblivion, Gothic 3 (modded out the wazoo), Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age: Origins, to name a few other relatively recent ones. I put a quite a lot of hours into all of them, but only finished ME, and that because it was so short. I didn't ragequit any of the others, they just started to feel more and more repetitive and tedious the further I played them. As a general rule I stop playing a game if it's less fun than my day job.
Which Mass Effect did you play again? All of them took me 30+ hours, but then I do play to completion a lot. ME 1 particularly could have a very long play time if you were crazy thorough.
I won't go into specifics (other than the fact that Gothic 3 is a terrible game period by most accounts) but will say the games you listed are no more (or less) repetitive than say... Baldur's Gate, or Icewind Dale.
A note to Karkarov: Think you mean Obsidian when you typed Oblivion. If not, I've missed something and I'd appricated it if someone caught me up.
My brain has an auto correct problem. Long story short, yeah, I wrote the wrong thing. What is odd is the forum won't let me edit it. Specifically the game I am insinuating though is an oft panned and critically hated Obsidian game that did one thing really really well. Alpha Protocol.
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And mostly no, they're not better. They've gotten "streamlined" to the point that a lot of the depth and breadth is gone. Instead there's a shallow wading pool of pretty but easily accessible pap. And they rely more on Skinner type mechanics that have you pushing the lever to get the pellet.
I respect your opinion PrimeJunta, I do. We will get back to that later.
The issue I have with newer games isn't because they make some things "easier" like automap. It's that they are actually POORLY designed and focus on the wrong elements. Old games had a lot less "switches and levers" to deal with and so were more intentionally designed. They didn't care about GRAFUX and AWSHUM MUSIC, they cared about FUN and INTERESTING and CHALLENGING. Those were what drove them.And now we get to the real problem. You two blatantly don't play modern games. You read about the "popular" ones and assume you know. CoD is a modern FPS game, but it is an FPS game targetted at FPS fans not people who play RPG's. More specifically modern FPS is even targeted at people who like multiplayer, since most of them have laughable single player campaigns, some don't even have that anymore. Most MMO's are also RPG's and also really hand holdy.... but they are designed for maximum accessibility so the most people possible can play them.
Go play some Amnesia: The Dark Descent by Frictional Games. You will think Planescape had the atmosphere of a gas station bathroom after playing it. It is only 20 bucks too. Assuming you can't find a sale for a better price and can handle the game itself. People say it is kinda scary.
If you think Baldur's Gate was "tough" or made you figure things out for yourself I will gladly buy you a steam key for Dark Souls if you can prove you have a pc to run it. You will find out real fast just how tactical real time combat can be and what a game that refuses to hold your hand really looks like. Considering the most common advice I see given to new players is "go read the wiki, no, the whole thing" sort of speaks for itself. By comparison the hardest game Oblivion ever made on it's hardest sitting is a doting grandfather offering you a firm hand holding and a nice piece of candy.
Heck you can even get old school hard core first person dungeon crawls still. You just have to play them on hand held systems for the most part and deal with the fact that only Japanese developers make them anymore (go fig). Some of them like Atlus's Etriyan Odyssey even force you to make your own maps.
Seriously, try looking at modern games instead of looking at CoD and BF3 and making an assumption. You will be surprised how much fun you maybe could have had plaything through Mass Effect 1-3, or a the new co-op small party action RPG Dragon's Dogma, or the recent X-Com which is easily more tactical than any game Oblivion has ever made. Heck even though I think it is over rated as crap you can even look at things like "The Walking Dead" which completely tosses gameplay in favor of focusing purely on story/character development. Considering the VGA's gave it the "Game of the Year" award despite having no FPS gunplay, pretty par graphics, and no sound track worth talking about it must have done something right. I even got it for 12 bucks and it actually lasts around 10-12 hours on average. (So much for 10 hours = 50 bucks)
PrimeJunta at least played the Witcher 2 recently, which sadly is another highly over rated game that he is "mostly" right about.
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^Oh ok, thanks. Yeah like I said I didn't play dark Souls. To be honest, I don't play any newer RPGs and haven't actually. I'll probably get around to them when I'm finished playing all these delicious oldies.
Don't take this the wrong way... I am playing BG:EE right now and really enjoy older CRPG's as well. That said, a lot of people on this forum I have noticed don't seem to realize that those games in many many ways were not very well designed. Or at the very least had a ton of room for improvement. Even the more modern iterations like NWN2.
My advice? Stop limiting yourself and play something actually made in the last say 3 years. You will be surprised how much easier games are to simply simply sit down and play these days, even the ball bustingly hard ones or games that are heavy on tactics. Such as this years X-Com: Enemy Unknown. Tons of head way has been made in redesigning genres, getting rid of frustrating or un fun gameplay, and or just trying new things. If you gave other games a shot you may find out there there are many games out there far more atmospheric than Planescape: Torment, that combat can be done better than the D20 system, real time combat dare I say it... can still be tactical, and that the best conversation and NPC interaction system in a video game is from an Obsidian product but not the one you are thinking of probably.
P:E is a game in the same vein as Baldur's Gate. But that doesn't mean it IS Baldur's Gate or that it needs to play like a game made on mechanics that are near 20 years old. It needs to play like a game that was made based on mechanics of 2013 and it needs to take the isometric genre into the future to succeed, not the past.
Or TLDR: If dumped on a desert island alone with a generator that lasted forever and one video game + tools needed to play it and I would never have another game ever again what game would I choose? Well, it wouldn't be BG2.
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I haven't played Dark Souls, so I'm not sure about your exact situation, but thanks for the example of what I'm talking about.
Good thing since his example doesn't hold water. He could have gone for any number of weapons that have high base damage but aren't based on stats and still been perfectly viable with his character. Dark Souls has no one "best" build sure, but it definitely has an armada of twinky builds all designed to min max and excel at only one thing. He was reading those builds obviously which he probably didn't realize are all also based primarily on PVP not PVE. You really have to try hard to make a character that is useless in Dark Souls, being an all arounder (which most go for at first) is completely viable for the solo story content of the game. It might not be "optimal" but it will work.
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As to actual numbers and the balance between "unacceptable frustration" and "acceptable frustration" we can do that by changing the encounter possibility percentages. That's an easy fix.
Thanks for saying that. Because it ties in perfectly to this very legitimate comment...
I'll give you that save scumming (and other "degenerate" forms of gameplay) makes it easier (why else would people do it), but I think there are better ways to make a game challenging than by simply limiting the player can do.Meaning that your system of rest anywhere but risk a random encounter will always fail over all. Why? Because...
#1: The encounter rate is so high it is basically going to happen so no one bothers trying and loses time as I already said.... Or
#2: The encounter rate is so low it may as well not even be there and getting ambushed is a fluke flash in the pan.... Or
#3: The encounter rate is perfect but some (if not most) players still save scum it (especially considering the potential no exp for combat kills) on the off chance they do get ambushed
Simply put, designing hand placed and pre planned "safe spots" to rest is a better option. It gives the player a goal to push for if they know one is near. Gives them a good idea of where they should probably stop to take stock and consider heading back to town instead of moving on. It also creates a clear sign post for how much progress you have made in an area. Lastly it does what Dream said good game design should do (and he is right) eliminate a possible cause of save scumming by removing your reason for doing it. It is safe to rest so there is no fear of ambush so no need to try to game the system. Getting there might be tough though and you had to work your way to it.
Another alternative with many of the same perks but being slightly more free form would be to allow for full healing no matter what. In other words you "might" get ambushed, but even if you are your rest still took effect and you start that ambush at full health. People might still save scum this but most players would probably take it in stride now since they got the benefit of resting regardless of the ambush. After all the game should not require a rest after every fight by design so even though I may take some damage in the ambush it should still be perfectly manageable.
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Good luck with that (convincing people games should be tough and sometimes frustrating by design). In any case, the ideas I brought forth do increase tactical decision making when it comes to combat, I believe and still adds to the flavor of the combat within the game. Wouldn't you agree?
As far as resting goes absolutely not. With a percentage chance that insanely high I would simply never bother resting and would just take the 5+ minutes to walk back to town and sleep at the inn. No matter what though I am still left with either a frustrating waste of time or a frustrating encounter rate that makes it near impossible to recover enough to make real progress.
Good design does challenge the player, but it never, ever, frustrates the player. Frustration and challenge are not the same thing. Hence why I liked Demon's Souls more than last years Dark Souls. It had far fewer moments that felt down right cheap and rarely did I ever feel like I died to something other than a mistake or bad play. I died many times in Dark Souls to bad mechanics and or cheap design. Nothing like fighting an enemy so tall your lock on drops off when they stand up, which results in your already input attack going in the totally wrong direction, which leaves your back completely open to a massive counter, which ultimately leaves you dead. I wish I could say it only happened once.
Truthfully there is another game that had an alternate approach to healing that came out this year called Dragon's Dogma. In it you had your hp and that was that, stamina was there too but it was used for executing special moves. What was interesting about HP was as you took damage you took what became "penalty" damage. The more you got hit, the more damage you took, the lower your max HP would become. You had casters that could heal you but they could not heal you past the "penalty" damage cap. To get past that you had to actually rest with an inn keeper or use healing items. Fortunately the game also had an encumbrance system which could prevent you from just carrying a metric ton of healing items, but I think it would have been even better if they had just taken it a step further and made an inn rest required to clear the "penalty".
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^ This. with one correction.Stamina is not shield. You take damage in both stamina and health simultaneously
It is a comparison as a means of explaining the concept through a situation that is similar to the game which the person reading may have actually experienced first hand. Not an actual blow by blow of how mechanics will work in the game. I pretty sure everyone got it.
It doesn't matter if it's called shields, stamina, or whatever; it's the same thing as regenerating health.No it isn't. Losing all your stamina in P:E means you got knocked out and have to take a nap until combat is over. Losing all your "Health" in P:E means I hope you didn't like that party member very much, and or, a game over screen. Because in P:E death is death, you don't get rezzed, if a character dies they are gone.
Also in your insulting bad comparisons you are comparing it to games where all you have to do is hide behind cover for 5 seconds and you are all good. In P:E you don't regen stamina during combat aside from specific skills (which may have highly limited uses), and you don't regen HP period aside from resting. As Malekith pointed out you can still take HP damage without having to lose all your stamina and that damage can not be regenerated "over time", and not at all in actual combat. That is kind of the exact opposite of "don't get hit for 5 seconds".
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As for multiplayer, are you honestly going to tell me that CoD has more tactical depth than TF2 (which, as an added bonus, has a healing class) or Quake live?
but you can play without the medic, in any IE game running around without someone to heal you is highly unpractical
I can't think of any sillier line of argument that what seems to be going on lately in this thread. We are talking about Project: Eternity, not CoD, not BF, not TF2. None of those games will handle regenerating health the same way this game does. In fact, P:E doesn't even have regenerating health.
Wut you SAY?!?!?!?!
That's right. Stamina is NOT health. It is simply how much you can take before you fall unconscious. Even The Elder Scrolls games have ways you can play this way, taking a guy out through Stamina, not HP, damage. Your health slowly goes down as you fight in different encounters and does not regenerate until you rest. Think of it as Mass Effect (specifically Mass Effect 1). Stamina is your shield, it regenerates and grows back quickly on it's own but can also go down quickly if you take a few clean hits, or even just one big hit. Health in that game did not regenerate, you had to use a medpack to heal it. So P:E is basically ME1 with more robust shields and no medpack.
Trust me, or better yet trust Sawyer, it will work.
The "trinity" (tank, healer, dps) is only one way of making a game work and moving away from it is not a bad thing. I honestly think it is one of the simplest and least tactical ways of designing combat in fact. It is so common simply because it is so easy to design and everyone knows how it works almost instinctively. Don't mistake a large number of archtypes which all boil down to 1 of 3 things for depth.
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even though you're only really fighting the way the Developer intends, it never feels like you're arbitrarily railroaded into a specific tactic
Actually, that's pretty much the opposite of how you play DAO. You must always have at least one tank and one healer to not get wiped really fast. There is precious little room for variance, since these fill half your party slots. So, I'd prefer if the devs would stay as far as possible from DA and its kind.
Actually I beat Dragon Age Origins on it's highest difficulty setting with no healer just potions and one mage only. I also got the achievement for beating the game without your main character ever dying on that playthrough too. You most definitely did not have to have a tank and a healer, it just made it easier.
As for all this buffs debate, no, buffs suck. There is absolutely nothing fun about playing buff chess. Years of WoW raiding taught me that real fast, hell even Blizzard doesn't do that anymore in their fights, or does it very little period. What used to be a wall of like 10-20 buffs in that game is now like 6-7 and they all last so long that unless you die you only have to cast them once every hour or more and auto target your whole group when you do cast them.
There is nothing tactical about taking 5 minutes to cast 10 buffs before you start a fight. Or casting the same 5 debuff spells every time you fight a mage to undo his buffs. It is just busywork.
A fight should be won based on tactics, player skill, party skill, party "power", and to a lesser extent party composition (since it effects what skills and tactics are available).
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As a hyper-elite Tier One operator from a wargaming background, I don't get what Sawyer is saying.
I grew up with Squad Leader and hex paper. All of this is second nature.
I blame story-tymers and promancers myself.
He is saying that designing your game around the concept that every player will know the system inside and out, make no mistakes, and have a perfectly built team of twinks is bad game design. Because the truth of the matter is the vast majority of players won't have that team or play that way. They are making a game for people who like PC RPG's, not people who are mix maxing monty haul twink masters.
In simpler terms. A fight that requires you to have a mage in your party with this specific set of spells to be winnable is a poorly designed fight. Why? Because it forces the player to bring a mage with those spells. The player should have the right to play with whatever team they want and still be effective (within reason). If you ultimately plan to force a specific party make up then there was no point in giving the player control over party creation to begin with.
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This is AMERICA (deep, throaty, GTAVC/SA gun shop voice,) if their idea failed in the marketplace of ideas, then it wasn't a very good idea.
Right. Americans only ever buy good ideas. Snort.
This is America sure (at least where I am) but America should never be confused with "Corporate America". They aren't the same place. They failed due to poor marketing and bad timing, not due to bad ideas. That said the humor isn't lost on me.
Also Americans buy all sorts of crap garbage, just like everyone else.
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Okay just no. Nothing about that dude looks proud or majestic. Let's not forget the "furry race" thread had to be locked and that is exactly what Aumaua will be if they turn into cat people. Obsidian, please keep them mostly human and if you have to give them bestial traits make it subtle.
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I think that's brigandine, or plated, coat of plates, or whatever it's called.
Basically those leather "stripes" have a bunch of metal plates inside. Flexible, resonably comfortable, good protection.
(and then mail shirt below, will there be layered armor, I bet not)
More than likely it is just a simple leather gambeson over a chain mail shirt or "coat" if you prefer. Nothing in either image implies metal plates are attached to or covered by the leather itself. Especially when you factor in the visible wrinkles in the concept art, the lacing that would have to go through the "plates" in places, and the over all shape and curved portions of the gambeson.
Brigandine (which I am pretty sure is just a fantasy armor to begin with) is typically metal plates worn over leather it is then sewn into with another leather armor worn over that sometimes. His armor is no where near bulky enough for all that plus a chain mail coat and a padded shirt underneath.
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Worked poorly for "Shaker"...Old School.
Pretty cheap dude, don't kick people while they are down.
Not so on topic.... How about "Poopinany Popinjay's Lejendary Jaunt of Rezurrection"?!
Or (serious this time)... why not just call it "The Watcher"? I mean to get that title you had to donate a butt ton of money and it is blatantly in reference to some important in game group or entity. Alternatively if the actual "world" name is cool just call it that with some subtitle like "Cool World Name Here: Silent Dawn" etc etc.
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I think it's important to view a potential "flee" mechanic in light if save/reload behavior as well. On one hand, players may argue that there's no point to flee and you might as well fight to the death because you can just reload and either try again or wait until you're higher level; the abstract issue with this view is that it's metagame strategy. It'd be very interesting, IMO, to have an actual flee-regroup mechanic developed to off-set that and to also offer combat flavor:
I do that all the time in games. Hell I am making a profession out of it in Far Cry 3 right now. Earlier in the week in BG Enhanced Ed I did it to a bunch of Ankegs I couldn't beat all in one rush.
This is just another good reason I should have the option to run away. It can be a viable tactic for winning fights and or setting up traps/ambushes.
The passing of time and 24/7 shops
in Pillars of Eternity: Stories (Spoiler Warning!)
Posted
I only agree in so far as that there should be an npc merchant (say a pawn shop) who will always buy anything. That way if you are just looking to offload your junk fast you can find someone to do it. But those who take the effort to sell to the appropriate vendor should get slightly better prices. I do agree 100% on one thing, Elder Scrolls games always limit the money a merchant has on them, which is dumb. If you don't want me to have money just give me a lower sell price on the goods, don't stop me from selling it in the first place cause the so called merchant is broke.