Karkarov

Okay since you don't seem to "get it" I will put in the most blunt way I can. Example: Bluff - "Errr I have had enough of you guard.... Move aside or.... I will knock you aside myself!" Bluff fails Guard says "Sure you will." Conversation ends. Example: Intimidate - "I am going to count to 5. If I get to 3 and you are still there you will cease to be when I get to 5. Understand?" Intimidate fails Guard says "Just try it and see where it gets you." You reply "It gets me standing over your corpse." games pauses as combat begins. Do you see the difference between a bluff and an intimidate now? A bluff is a bluff, you are lying, you aren't going to do what you say you are going to do. An intimidate is not a lie. You REALLY ARE going to attack the guard if he doesn't walk away.

I know a guy who once made 9 other guys back down from him using an all-out bluff. It's all about passion and delivery. The "circumstances" necessary to get the result you want MAY exist, or they could be part of the bluff, a complete fabrication that only exists in the minds of those you intend to manipulate. Smoke and mirrors, my friends. Here's a good example of intimidation in film. http://www.youtube.c...ed/co5xVHsMRV0 Now watch it again, and make the assumption he's out of bullets. Still damn convincing, huh? You guys know you are arguing something totally off topic now right ;p? That being said, I don't agree but nice post. Here is the ultimate difference between intimidate and bluff for in game purposes - Bluff is just a really big lie. You either won't do, or are not capable of doing what you say. Intimidate is not a lie. You will do what you say, and you ARE capable of doing it. Example: Bluff - "Hrmmm, what a bore. You know I am mates with your captain right? Unless you want latrine duty for a week step aside!" Bluff Check fails and NPC responds "Stow it you blowhard! Show me your papers or you aren't crossing the border!" Conversation ends. Example: Intimidate - "I have had about enough of you Guard, unless you move out of my way I will move you myself!" Intimidate Check fails and NPC responds "Stow it you blowhard! Show me your papers or you aren't crossing the border!" Player responds "Wrong choice." Game pauses as combat begins. Do you see the difference now?

Question 1: The math should be simple enough that any educated human being in high school or better should get it basically at a glance. Question 2: The game shouldn't tell me crap. I don't want to see a string of nonsense about how I roll a D20 and got a 15 on a bluff check plus my bluff skill VS the DC yada yada yada. It adds nothing to the game and is slightly off putting. Just because it is easy to understand doesn't mean you need to tell me EXACTLY what happened or what my percentage chance of succeeding is. Question 3: No compromise, the game working as intended and being fun to play is vastly more important than me understanding how it works on my end. Like JFSOCC said, this isn't brain surgery. Bigger numbers = better, lower = bad. I am a fighter so I want bigger numbers in things that make me hit harder, hit more often, and make me take more hits before I go down. Figuring out what does that should be fairly simple without and big explanation, a simple tooltip on a stat that says "Strength: It makes you hit stuff harder and you can carry more things" will suffice.To borrow a line... "Common sense rules the day at the Friendly Arm Inn."

I fully agree and endorse this post with the full backing of white rabbitness. Yeap, great post. Summed up my feelings on the subject to a T.

It is perfectly fine (and realistic since this seems to be big deal for most) for a master crafted and very well made suit of full leather armor to be superior to say a chain shirt. Just because it is a leather armor doesn't mean you can't have light chain on the joints, or a stiff but thin metal backing on the breastplate between two layers of leather. Specifically from the Update I will say this. They should go for cultural style superiority for a number of reasons. What do I mean by that? Simple, in the fictional town of Ostwin there lives a blacksmith with a long tradition! He is in his later years, has multiple apprentices, and this smithy has been in his family as long as anyone can remember, say 150+ years. Also they focus specifically on the making of fine chain mail armors. That is all they make armor wise. Word is the local nobility get all their armor from this smith and outfit their elite troops with his chain armors, and mages seek it out when they want to make enchanted armor. So it goes to recon that this guys chain mail is going to be made of sterner stuff than what you can buy at "Ali Baba's Discount Armor Market". Having armor "tiers" be handled this way adds a touch of realism and can contribute to the lore of the game making PE over all more believable. Remember, in the real world all renowned smiths had their own trader mark. A way to point at an item and say "this was made by Masamune" or whatever. So instead of making "Chain Hauberk +1" or "Chain Hauberk - Masterwork" this guy might produce a "Ostwian Chain Hauberk". It could be not only lighter than a normal chain hauberk, but also add better protection due to superiority in crafting techniques and maybe even materials. The same concept works for weapons as well. Nothing says these things even need to be manufactured in "current" times either. Maybe the best sword smith that ever was lived in a country that lost a war 50 years ago and the smith died with his secrets? The only way to get one of those weapons would be to find one, it won't just be sitting in a shop. It goes without mentioning though that this should still be combined with standard armor "tiers". Breastplate -> Half Plate -> Field Plate -> Full Plate. Just now there are sometimes one or more versions that are better than "standard".

Realism is great when it comes to "how things look" and "how things are animated". A human should look like and move like a human. A house should be a house. A Two handed sword should look at least similar to a "real" two handed sword, and in animation have the character do "real" attacks with it. However. If the two handed sword has lightning cascading off it's blade, a sapphire gem in the cross guard, and the players otherwise realistic looking armor is covered in glowing yellow runes. it is fine.

I would rather they improve over time. Again, not D&D, and a system that isn't hard line on set values probably gives a little more wiggle room to the devs on how they want the mechanics of their game to work.

I disagree, you can still pull this off. For example "Oh yes, your daughter is very ... lovely." VS "Your daughter is quite the radiant beauty!" VS "Sir, I have never seen a woman half so beautiful as your fair daughter. She is like a star shining though the dark of night!" So of those three lines, which is honest, which is a lie, and which is a bluff check?

No thanks. While it is somewhat possible to force say... 3.0 D&D feats and such into trees the tree in question would be insanely huge and stupidly complex. If they can make it work, go for it. But I would prefer if each class had so many options that condensing them into a single tree just wouldn't work.

I guess they are just preparing for the inevitable day when people will be able to post spoilers? Saves them a good 10 minutes like a year from now after all.

Going to assume you never played the "real" planescape and only know what Torment told you. Cause trust me, buying a sword in Sigil was just as easy as buying anything else there. So, no, the no sword thing had absolutely nothing to do with the setting of the game.

Quoted for truth. I don't recall ever feeling like I "said the wrong thing" in any Obsidian game I have played to date (including Alpha Protocol). No reason to believe I will need to start second guessing the dialog in PE.

Well that's easy. When you get the dialog option "Give me the information I want or I will chop your legs off and beat you to death with them!" you just don't choose it unless you REALLY mean it.

From a cosmetic side I don't see an issue with letting us change the color of gear or equipping a vanity tabard over our armor. As for all the realism stuff, I think it is assumed that when I put on my plate armor I have some chain to protect the joints and a gambeson to protect my skin as an already included thing.

I think all he is saying is he doesn't care if it takes more than 1 dvd ;p. With todays compression technology and the already mentioned "addon download" gag I don't see why they couldn't swing it.

All that is fine except TSR made Cranium Rats not Bioware. Dieing to advance the plot has happened in so many games now it is almost it's own cliche at this point. None of "insert race here" was actually pretty standard for the setting by Planescapes own Manuals. Elves etc preferred the primes or planes run by their own deities and in general hated Sigil. The stats thing was sort of... dumb. Case in point, what happens when I actually want to play a fighter but still get a decent ending and dialog options? I have to gimp myself to do it. That is bad design, no two ways about it. As for the grand universe shaking quest? That's nice, but not having that does not make the game better by default. The no sword thing however was downright stupid and where the line gets crossed. It wasn't challenging a trope, it was being different just so they could say "we were different". Especially when you factor in one of your party members has a sword, and you encounter and sometimes kill multiple npc's who all also clearly have swords. It is really odd how almost every enemy in the game drops the weapon they use when I kill them, but when they used a sword it is nowhere to be found? When I got to a market where someone screamed about having the "finest Toledo blades" (uh what? Why would people in Sigil be using swords from Spain?) only to find out none of the vendors sold what they were yelling about I wasn't thinking "oh cool" I was thinking "who thought this was a good idea?" Planescape is NOT the direction this game needs to go in. On topic, I would love the Asian Monastery in the middle of Neverwinter to go bye bye.

The dice connotation needs to be removed regardless. We aren't at a kitchen table we are at a computer. So I am going for the 1-8 + - whatever applicable modifiers. That said I don't see a problem with static damage either. There is many things that go into this type of decision and can change what would be the best method. How high is a "strong" characters HP total? Will armor have actual damage reduction, and if so, how much? Will that DR be random or fixed? Will evading an attack be something separate that is determined after a "hit" is calculated or is it just hard factored into how tough it is to land the hit? If it is done separately will it completely negate damage or just reduce it? If it reduces it how much does it take off? Yada yada yada.

No, you misunderstand. I have already said multiple times now that making the game available at multiple and much higher resolutions than most people play at today is a good idea. In one post I even explained why doing it isn't even that hard or expensive. But if you think a Macbook Pro means anything in today's gamer market you are just plain wrong. I also think you need to take a look at games of today if you think anything in Baldur's Gate is even close to being "artistically detailed". Truthfully they shouldn't have much trouble fitting the game on a single DVD unless they really go overboard. Or maybe they will do what Skyrim and Sleeping Dogs did and just make the "Hi Res" texture packs available only as a download and not on disc. All of that aside, the reality is still this. No matter what any company does, and it doesn't matter what their name is or how hard they try, 1920x1080 will still be the most common resolution for gaming. Will that be true in 2016? Maybe not. In 2018? I certainly hope not. But in 2014, it most definitely will be.

Because in every setting it is used it almost always makes zero actual sense and seems completely out of place in the context of the rest of the game. If your game is going to be in fantasy medieval Europe then you need to use fantasy medieval European Monks. Not fantasy medieval Asian ones. Edit: I guess the biggest problem with it is just as I said before. Monk is actually a very broad archetype that fits many different settings and characters. However we keep getting force fed the most cliche over done version of he character and being denied the ability to play something else. If the class of "Monk" can only be a Asian philosophy inspired martial artist then they don't live up to the actual potential of the class name.

Exactly, and that is why Monk is a good class name just like Fighter. It doesn't shoe horn you into a specific role or archtype. Again, Forton looks like a 40 something dude who has watched wayyy too many Bruce Lee movies going through a mid life crisis. That doesn't mean he represents all "Monks" in the game though, or even a reasonable percentage of them. So yes, a guy who is really good at Martial Arts and beats the crap out of people in hand to hand can be a Fighter. But a Monk can also be a dude sworn to silence who only fights with a staff and sling while wearing thread bare robes. Or a big fat dude who talks a lot, makes his own beer, and beats people down with greco roman style wrestlng. It isn't the class name that needs changing, it is the fact that it keeps getting portrayed as a skinny bald Asian dude who kills people with jump kicks and Buddhism that has to go.

This game is not targeting PC Enthusiasts. PC Enthusiasts are too busy playing Battlefield 3, Crysis, and whatever the next Call of Duty is at 80+ (oh wait my eye is physically unabled to tell the difference) FPS and running folding home at the same time. They are not playing isometric top down view CRPG's with graphics an I5 could probably handle without an actual GPU. This game is targeting a niche audience called "People who like Classic Computer Role Playing Games". Which are games you have never needed a top of the line system to play. That and "enthusiasts" make up a very small part of the people who actually own or game on a desktop. I would say less than 10%. Maybe even less than 5%. I said it before, saying it again, you want to bother with DPI switches and options go ahead. Whatever floats your boat. But it should be a very low priority. As far as the resolution thing this thread goes on about... I already said it is a good idea and really won't even take much more work. It is just a question of disc space. Future proofing a game is a first world problem if there ever was one though. I called it a Retina monitor simply because that's what all the market idiot's at Apple are calling them and I knew everyone would know what I meant if I said it. So there Also I fixed one of your sentences. See if you can find it.

You guys really don't understand how the real world market works. The average consumer is not replacing his pc monitor but maybe once every 4-5 years if even that often. HD tv's have been available since the early 2000's but now near 2013 they just within the last year maybe two got to the point where the average consumer can actually afford a decent one. More telling there is still a good percentage of tv owners in america who even now don't own an HDTV even though they literally don't make SD ones anymore. The average consumer will not have a retina monitor in 2014, you are kidding yourself if you think they will. It will be a bare minimum of 2016 before even 40% of computer users actually have one. Windows 8 is not a trend in monitor design, it is a trend in that people are using their phone and their tablet more than their pc because it is designed for tablets first. PE isn't going to be played on a cell phone, and maybe not on tablets either. We are in an economic slump, people are not going to be diving in on new tech unless they are rich or enthusiasts. The other 90% will wait as long as humanly possible and avoid spending anything until they absolutely have to or the price comes way down. They want to put in a DPI switch, sure whatever floats your boat. But that should be a bottom of the barrel priority at absolute best. Meanwhile this thread is about resolution, not DPI, and D3xter already wrote a great response on what the difference is and why resolution is still more important for the foreseeable near future.

Concur. I would gladly help out if I could. I don't know unity for example but I have awfully good recording equipment and wouldn't mind doing things like throw away lines for generic bandits and what have you.

Uh identifying items is just a boring chore. "What about the risks of a curse Kark?!?" Uh, what risk? You mean you actually equipped something before you identified it? I know I never did, thus there was no risk and there was just chore. Leave it out please. There are far more intelligent and interesting uses for a lore skill than identifying random items you find.

Yeah Alpha Protocol is a massively under rated game. It just had one problem in that some builds sucked and others were godly. Give me a character with high pistol skills and I will cremate every encounter in the game. Heck I killed the last boss in about 40 seconds. It also encouraged replayability really well and even gave you a reason to gimp yourself by choosing the weakest starter "history". Because once you beat the game on that mode you then got to pick the "veteran" where you were basically Solid Snake and Sam Fisher with a dash of James Bond rolled into one and could literally break certain story choices cause you were just that bad ass.