Grimlorn

How?

I don't really think there are any weaknesses with turn based combat. Real time with pause has that whole move in real time, fight in turn based thing. So if you get hurt you can move out of range of a mob in real time, while the rest of your party takes it's turns fighting and killing the mob and mobs usually have no way of closing the distance. I think in IWD you can actually do an action for your turn, then immediately after it's done you can move for a few seconds while your turn ends. I think that's a bit weak too.

Meh, there was no publisher involved with Bioware when they made those terrible design decisions. They chose to do them by themselves.

I was talking about the cooldown system specifically. All you did was make up a scenario about arrows to support your point. You can simply stock up on arrows and bullets in most games so you don't run out. If you forget you have to walk back. Crafting arrows isn't a bad idea, but it's not really a strategic choice between buying arrows, pulling them off corpses, and crafting them. It has nothing to do with the cooldown system that's being suggested. you brought up arrows and bullets, not me. Again all you did was make up a scenario about arrows to support your point. You also said it adds strategic choice to choose between buying arrows, looting them from corpses or crafting them. It really doesn't. It also completely disregards my original point.

Are you wishing to imply the problem with DA2 is a lack of tedium? I believe so. The lack of a particular kind of tedium that cannot be removed without also removing most of the fun of the game. Dragon Age specializes in a kind of pointless tedium and it probably came about due to precisely the kind of logic that Josh has been using. Everything has a price and the price of attempting to remove the tedium from every single aspect of the game, no matter how crucial to the operation of the mechanics, leads to not 1% of the game being tedious, but all of the game being tedious. I think 1% is better than 100%. So it's not so much the 1% tedium that I like. It's the fact that that 1% is protecting me from the 99% if I tried to eliminate it. I didn't respond because I thought the question was a joke because it had nothing to do with what I was saying. I was talking about how DA2 went with a CD system and had your health regen or fully recharge after battle. DA2 obviously did this to prevent tedium in healing and downtime in between combat. So to suggest that I implied DA2's only problem was a lack of tedium is incredibly stupid. I'm just saying you would get a cooldown system like DA2 with little to no downtime in between combat. DA2 had a ton of problems. DA2 also had cds with 30+ seconds if I remember right. Some may have been a minute or longer but combat also lasted a few minutes on nightmare with all the waves of mobs with tons of health. So when Sawyer mentions a CD system with spells having a 45 second to 5 minute CD it starts making you think of DA if you played those games. I know he's also said that he's not talking about a system where you cast fireball every 30 seconds after one another, so we'll just have to wait and see what they come up with.

I was talking about the cooldown system specifically. All you did was make up a scenario about arrows to support your point. You can simply stock up on arrows and bullets in most games so you don't run out. If you forget you have to walk back. Crafting arrows isn't a bad idea, but it's not really a strategic choice between buying arrows, pulling them off corpses, and crafting them. It has nothing to do with the cooldown system that's being suggested.

Arrows are now expensive and money is limited. I literally cannot afford to use a bow and arrow against every enemy in the game. Oh what's that? I can learn to craft my own arrows though? And even to salvage some of the arrows that are sticking out of all of my enemies? And I just replaced the tedium of walking back and forth to get arrows all the time with legitimate strategic choices and potential challenge. For spells, I'm not sure. I'm not a game designer. Limiting where I can rest would be a start. What does this have to with anything I said? Nothing.

I disagree. Games shouldn't sit there and immerse you with combat 24/7. It just shifts to being more of an action RPG. I think it's ok to have some downtime. Yeah walking is tedious. But there hasn't really been a good idea yet except a vague notion of cooldowns. Cooldowns, I don't believe, have ever been done well. I'm pretty sure all the old great RPGs had tedium of some sort. Games like DA2 don't have this stuff and look how it turned out. I'm saying a game should have it's ups and downs and most players don't realize this is good. It should punish the player for making mistakes, and that encourages the player to learn and adapt. It gives a sense of accomplishment. Judging by your post, you'd rather not have arrows or bullets because you could run out and then have to return to town to restock and that would be tedious. Players (and I think devs) just think well here's some tedium. It's bad how do we get rid of it. You get rid of it be removing and simplifying the game and making it so there is no downtime and just combat all the time. Which means a shallow cooldown system to prevent the player from having to rest or return to town. removing tedium doesn't have to mean removing elements of the game. It could mean changing what was a tedious activity to an actual rewarding and valuable part of the game. Yeah you can say this and it sounds good, but how do you implement it without a cooldown system and while keeping the game tactical. You can't think of a way. You can just say well lets replace the tedium in the game without removing elements. While we're at it, let's make everyone's favorite RPG in the whole genre. Empty words.

This isn't a MMO. You control 6 characters at once, so using a MMO as an example for well done combat is terrible.

I disagree. Games shouldn't sit there and immerse you with combat 24/7. It just shifts to being more of an action RPG. I think it's ok to have some downtime. Yeah walking is tedious. But there hasn't really been a good idea yet except a vague notion of cooldowns. Cooldowns, I don't believe, have ever been done well. I'm pretty sure all the old great RPGs had tedium of some sort. Games like DA2 don't have this stuff and look how it turned out. I'm saying a game should have it's ups and downs and most players don't realize this is good. It should punish the player for making mistakes, and that encourages the player to learn and adapt. It gives a sense of accomplishment. Judging by your post, you'd rather not have arrows or bullets because you could run out and then have to return to town to restock and that would be tedious. Players (and I think devs) just think well here's some tedium. It's bad how do we get rid of it. You get rid of it be removing and simplifying the game and making it so there is no downtime and just combat all the time. Which means a shallow cooldown system to prevent the player from having to rest or return to town.

I'm surprised they fixed it. I thought I had heard people were still having problems with their accounts after the initial DA2 problems. I figured that it was always working as intended.

What threw me is that they don't really look the same except for the clothing. But now I see they're the same person with same hairstyle. The same face paint would've helped too. I wonder if they were by the same artist? Hm, is the monk sporting a dagger on his hip? I'm sure someone noticed that already. Interesting. The fighter also has a whip in the solo artwork of him. So you know he's into S&M.

No if you look closely, it's actually pretty bad. The fighter needs to go tank that tentacle creature before it starts destroying the ranger and musket woman. The monk should be able to take care of those other guys (by preventing them from climbing up there), and the mage should lay down an AoE spell to kill them. The Ranger and Musket woman should be focus firing down the tentacle creature. After the mage wipes out most of those enemies, he should switch to casting powerful single target spells on the tentacle creature, while the monk finishes off any stragglers. Terrible tactics in that picture. Who's playing the game that way?

I imagine they were talking about the same system IWD had where bosses/minibosses had 4-5 items they could drop and would only drop one of those randomly.

I was thinking of the suite system Sawyer was talking about. It sounded like there might be some form of memorization with it. I was thinking it sounded like it could be similar to the Sorcerer DnD system only you'd have suites instead of levels. But you could set a certain order to the spells which would affect their charges. Like a lvl 5 or 6 Cleric might have his lvl 1 suite spells, and cure light wounds would be his first spell of choice and that would get 5 charges, meanwhile his second choice might have 3 spell charges and that could be Bless, followed by Cure Poison at 2-3 charges, and then maybe a few spells or the rest at 1 charge each or something. This would give you a set number of charges for spells you use often, but would also give you a spell point in spells you'd rarely use or possibly need rarely. You can also change up the order to suit your needs or style. I don't know I'm just brainstorming here.

Those players can select the easy difficulty. There is no reason to make the game boring for people with average or above average IQs so someone with an IQ of 80 can beat a game and feel good about himself. That's what the easy difficulties are for. People not good at these types of games. Your statement makes 0 sense. Where the freakin heck did I say I wanted the game to be EASIER? If you're going to sit there and tell me that running 3 minutes to a save area and running 3 minutes back makes a game HARD, I'll point you to runescape where you grind iron ore for 1857 hours to get 99 mining, like any monkey, small child, or simple automated program can do. All forcing walking back and forth does is add tedium. It's a thing that wastes time that takes little to no skill to accomplish at all. Played force unleased and force unleashed 2? The final fight with vader in force unleashed was HARD, it was challenging... In the second game they gave him an insanely long health bar and it was just plain boring because the fight took 2 hours with almost no skill involved at all. You want to make bad players do better? Give them an incentive to get better where resting less = rewards. Not resting more= punishment. If you think walking is just tedious and it's unrealistic to walk back to town to recuperate than I don't know what to tell you. Try the AoD demo. They just teleport you from one location to another as you quest. You can also fast travel inside the city so there is little to no walking. But a lot of people complained about being teleported during quests when they played it because it took the freedom away from the player to control his character. You also were occasionally teleported to a place you've never been before and had no idea where you were. The player who does well is rewarded with less walking. If you just reward the player for less resting, it will create this affect where someone who rests too much will be underpowered compared to someone who rests little and gets rewarded/stronger for it. The person who rests less will either start running through the game easily or to make it challenging for them, you'd have to make it too challenging for the player resting too much. Unless these rewards are just cosmetic and therefore meaningless. Which is why I recommended the easy difficulty for people who continue to fail and need to head back to town all the time.

Those players can select the easy difficulty. There is no reason to make the game boring for people with average or above average IQs so someone with an IQ of 80 can beat a game and feel good about himself. That's what the easy difficulties are for. People not good at these types of games.

Just wanted to answer these questions but thread was locked before I could. Nothing is good about having to walk back and forth, but there is nothing wrong with it. It's ok to punish the player if they make bad choices in combat and spend their spells too much. Choices and consequences. A lot of players and I think even developers think that breaking up the flow of combat is bad through walking to heal or resting is bad but it isn't. You can't be afraid to punish players for making bad choices. It's what makes those old games memorable. Encounters being varied and challenging and adapting and overcoming them. It gives the player a sense of accomplishment. You don't have to ego stroke the player by making it so they can just spam a couple of attacks every battle to win like you see in games like Dragon Age 2. I'm playing through IWD right now and I love the combat. Sure I could abuse the system by quicksaving after each battle and reloading until I rest uninterrupted but I don't play it that way. I fight each battle until I run out of healing spells and the health on all my characters are low. I make it through probably 3-4 fights average but that's also not a bad thing. It makes it seem like my party isn't all powerful and rofl stomps everything it comes up against. They can fight for about 6-8 hours in game time and rest for 16 hours usually after that to recover. This adds depth to the game because my party isn't superhuman and also makes the enemies I'm fighting challenging too. If I run out of arrows or bullets I have to walk back to town and purchase them. Yeah it sucks,, but it's my fault for not stocking up enough for the dungeon. One of the things KotC did was put campfires down you could rest at. It was perfectly reasonable to make it to a campfire before needing to rest, but if you didn't because you didn't spend your spells wisely or took too much damage from not fighting smart, you'd have to walk back to town or the last campfire and rest there. Yeah that sucks for the player but tough. They failed. There are plenty of ideas out there for this rest mechanic. Like resting only once a dungeon floor at a certain place. If you don't want them to have to walk too much, there are always exit/town portal spells/scrolls. I'm not great with brainstorming ideas for how to fix this. It depends on what specifics of the combat system you develop and the challenge of the encounters, but I don't think a cooldown system even if you can only cast spells once an encounter is ideal. It just makes magic trivial and you'll just be using the same spells each fight. Also, a lot of people don't think combat is important in RPGs and just gets in the way of story. And I hate how they use PST as an example because its combat was weak/bad. Combat is an important part of RPGs and has always been there. Please make a game with not only a strong story, quests, and characters but also with a strong combat system so you can prove those people wrong.

Nightmare was a joke, especially with the wave mechanic. Also a lot of the combat moves didn't work properly. For example I would use, I think it was Mighty Blow, (which is just a jump and vertical swing down on the enemy) and it would hit my party members standing to the left and right of me. I don't think the game was ever meant to be played with friendly fire. And with the whole third person camera view it makes it a lot more difficult to see what's going on around you. IWD is just so much better than it.

I don't really care for achievements much. I kind of like ones that force you to do something unique or weird to attain them. Like forcing you to change your strategy or gimp yourself. Gives you a different perspective on how to play and something new to try from your usual way of playing. Don't like the ones you get for just playing through the game and beating bosses normally. They're not really achievements. Beating a game through pacifism is an achievement.

Actually, the sad thing is that I bet they probably weren't. There's no shortage of 20 and 30 year olds that act like petulant twits as well. Furthermore, the kids aren't the ones that grew up with games like Baldur's Gate and I know for a fact that some of the people that got on . I think it'd be decidedly eye opening if anonymity were suddenly gone on the internet and people were immediately accountable for past comments. I can understand someone stating it was unprofessional of how Aaryn and Jen initially responded (it was), but to pull out the "but the children" argument? I mean, they possibly swore at children (that were being foul mouthed belligerents). To quote Kurtz: The horror the horror. The main point I was focusing on was the comments Bioware made in response. I wasn't just thinking it was horrible to swear at kids. I was thinking it brings you down to their level and acting like kids when you respond in kind. The same goes for if they were adults acting like kids. Part of listening to feedback is dissemenating genuine complaints and what is just loud and boisterous individuals that feel slighted. People wonder why it took a while to approve the extended cut, but we have to make sure it's not just some near militant group that vocal but ultimately quite small. It happens with every game (some guy told me that I should have been aborted as a fetus so that BioWare could have hired more competent QA before releasing a piece of trash like DAO), and you're deluding yourselves if you don't think it makes us (even on the DA team) go "Hmmm, that was quite the reaction ME3 got. In what ways is this bad? Are there any ways that it's good? What should we do differently and how should we do it?" My question to that would be why would you even need to ask yourselves that after seeing the ending? If you played ME1 and 2 you'd know it makes almost no sense and throws everything out the window. Did you guys ask the same questions after DA2? Were you surprised that game wasn't well received too? It must be hard being objective and rational when you spend 1 to 2 years developing a game. I don't understand this irrationality and why people are so quick to defend you developers for making bad games. For example you're just developing a dialogue system and making sure it works. You're not writing for it and not one of the guys deciding everything, so what's preventing you from judging the game objectively? If it's crap, it's crap. Developers make a living. They get paid for their work. It's not like they need to be protected from criticism on their games because they're so emotionally invested in their games they can't think straight. Right? So why be so upset if people don't like a game you played a small part in creating? Since RPG can't even be consistently defined, it's probably best to point out that this is what you value in an RPG. There's no shortage of people that don't particularly care for combat in RPGs, and frankly BioWare's combat in some insanely popular games like KOTOR is frankly pretty lackluster. It doesn't stop many people from considering it BioWare's best RPG experience. Nor does it stop people from challenging that notion. Given that I find the best RPGs are the ones that enable the player to minimize combat, I frankly disagree with your idea that combat is essential to an RPG. That it's roots were in D&Desque dungeon hacks from the 80s that were all combat is irrelevant. To be perfectly frank, combat is often one of the weakest aspects of RPGs mechanics-wise, and gamers have historically been all too willing to excuse shoddy mechanics and questionable gameplay decisions. Alpha Protocol is one of my favourite RPGs but many of it's game mechanics (and I don't mind the Deus Ex/Mass Effect style of skill progression) are clunky and in many cases random. But the conversations are the best I've ever seen and the level of reactivity in the game is pretty mindblowing. I've already mentioned that PST's combat is pretty crap (especially early in the game) but it's my favourite RPG of all time. The best ending as far as I'm concerned is where you don't even fight the final boss (it's also what I loved about Fallout, which is easily #2 on my favourite RPG list) I'll agree that most people's favorite RPGs tend to have weaker combat systems and more focus on story and interesting characters and settings, but that doesn't mean combat isn't and hasn't been essential in RPGs. Combat is still a main component in those games. There is also a difference between creating a game that has noncombat options to succeed at and putting a button you can press so you can completely skip the combat situations you'd have to fight in. People try to say it doesn't hurt anything to have those options, but I think you and I both know that takes resources and time to put into the game. It also takes emphasis off of combat and making it challenging in favor of making it easy to "ego stroke" the player. I also think better combat systems can be developed and perhaps haven't been because developers didn't have time or resources to. Play through Knights of the Chalice. One of the best turn based combat systems based on DnD and one guy did it by himself. It's a great game. It's only weakness is it doesn't have a lot of classes to choose from which the sequel will rectify. Great combat, classes, feats, encounter design. I'm playing through Icewind Dale right now. Also has great encounter design. Challenging combat. I get through about 3 or 4 encounters before having to rest. It definitely forces you to use your surroundings and use your spells and attacks wisely. My only complaints are that game lags when there are a lot of units on the screen making the UI slow/difficult to use and pathing sucks. The problem I see with RPGs is there is a focus on combat or story and characters. Good combat RPGs tend to be weaker on stories and characters and vice versa. That doesn't mean the other isn't important and both can't be well done, it just means it hasn't yet. I played through DA2 a little bit when it was released just to see what it was like. That game had a ton of problems. I won't go into them all because it would take forever. I played it before the huge patch that looked like a list of changes in a MMO was released. A wave mechanic a few times in a game might not be bad, but if you intend on sticking with it and just adding a reason to it (like mobs waiting to ambush you every time) you're going to be sorely disappointed when you get that same negative reaction. It tends to be unrealistic and it ruins the whole tactical/strategic approach because after defeating the wave of enemies others appear out of nowhere and ruin the battle for you. There is no way to account for how many waves and what types of enemies you'll be fighting so you either have to muddle through the waves blindly, which is god awful when it's every time, or you die and reload with knowledge of what you'll face. Even if you die and reload there might be waves you missed so you still might not be prepared for what you'll face. So someone might die through 2 waves, reload, make it through 4 waves, die, reload, etc. One of the great things about IWD is that it throws all the enemies at you at once. From there you know what you're dealing with and you can plan accordingly for the encounter. They're also challenging and offer something different on every dungeon floor. DA2 had that crappy third person camera. Isometric is so much better. You can see what's going on in the battle field. It's a lot harder with that third person perspective. I think the real reason you guys are sticking with waves is because you guys are slaves to console limitations and graphical demands of your fanbase. You can't just put 10-20 enemies on a screen at once and have everything run smoothly, but if you can you should just buff up those mobs so the encounters are challenging, instead of throwing wave after wave of enemies at a player. It's a terrible idea. About fan reaction. This is just a hypothesis so it may be wrong, but I think Bioware somehow brings out the worst in people/their fans. I don't know how exactly. But you don't hear about these kinds of reactions on other websites. Either that, or they downplay them a lot better. Maybe it's just the kind of people your games attract. or the fact that you try to listen to those people that are too emotionally invested in your characters and flip out easily. Mentally unhealthy people who flip out when you don't give them what they want because they're so use to you giving them what they want. It's not like Bioware is even the biggest RPG developer out there. Blizzard and Bethesda sold 10+ million copies of their games. I'm guessing Bioware only did about 2 million on DA2 and around 3 million on ME3. So why is Bioware's fans the most vitriolic?

The kickstarter is doing better than Wasteland 2's so far and it's doing slightly better than Double Fine's adventure game. Someone was creating a graph and comparing the money they raised over their kickstarters. People were just really excited when the news was first announced and now it's dying down a bit. It's perfectly natural.

The most exciting thing is: they could invite Chris So when we saw the holy three name at first, 1.1 million was funded by 27 hours. Now we need a new stretch goals like that. Yeah but they already have Chris for this, so it should automatically get that bump anyways.I mean who else are they suppose to get? David Gaider? Excuse me while I go throw up.

It's 5 months old and people are nostalgic about it. It's crazy.

They're game developers. Where are they going to set that kind of stuff up where people gets mugs and tshirts? They don't even know whether this thing is going to take off or not and there are only about 50k donors. Not all of them want mugs and tshirts, so how are they going to set up what the demand will be and how much everything will cost. You have to know someone in the fashion business and mug business to help you with those kinds of things. Seriously people, think before you post.