teknoman2

well if you look for a particular person, and you know what he looks like you may get his circle to be of a different color than the rest of the neutral population. your party has blue circles, enemies have red, neutrals have white, important people you know of have green. of course as it happened in BG, if you put your cursor over a guy you get his name, so if you know the name you can just mouse over them and see who is it.

what i meant to say, is that actual sword fights between experts (and not sports), do not have the flashy, wide and long sequences of moves you see in movies and games. they consist of short feints and attacks of opportunity, and the guy with the best reflexes or the guy with the most tactical planing of his moves wins. after you stopped an attack you dont pull your sword back to make a strong swing (that would give the enemy the time to put his guard up), you just go for the most vulnerable spot you can reach, starting the attack from the position the sword is currently in.

Flase. Arms and legs are parts of the body that move the fastest and are hardest to hit. Fighting techniques focus on gettinga hit, thus targeting parts of the body that you are most likely to hit. Torso and head and the center focus of swordplay. i have a friend who was practicing kendo and sometimes we sparred for fun. the thing he told me, is that most of the things you can do with a sword in modern sports is limited by the rules and the teaching methods of swordplay is thus limited accordingly. in some rule free practice matches he had, he found that a most effective trick, was to attack the opponent's attack move instead of defending. and the most vulnerable spot for this kind of trick, was the hands as he showed me.

well those were the grand minority... and were armed and trained to handle the odd beast if they got lost and would know how to get by. travelling, even short distances, was dangerous back then and had nothing to do with education. to travel you didnt need just maps or road signs, but weapons and a number of people to travel with you and wield them to ward off wolves, bears, boars, bandits and such. this is why few would travel more than a couple of km even if there were roads

let me give you an example of a quest that has the basic structure of a fetch, but doesnt feel like it in act1 of witcher 2, you find some soldiers that have captured an elf woman and want to hang her for being a terrorist. there you get the choice to try and find who is right or just ignore it (the classical accept the quest or not). after that you are asked to go into a cave, reach the end and come back (classical fetch style). however what makes it more than a fetch quest is the fact that you can lie and save her or tell the truth, in which case you may let her hang or give her a last chance to prove her innocence and have her lead you into an ambush... after that she hangs. and if you save her she will be useful later on in the game

depending on the situation, any of the options could apply a big city is surrounded by farms and small villages so the transition is gradual, however an outpost in the middle of nowhere, has wilderness as soon as you get out of archer range from the walls and maybe even sooner. of course the immediate surroundings of habitable zones should be safe and guarded and depending on the importance of the place maybe even a bit further

Yes, as far as the abstraction of the game mechanics is concerned. Your character doesn't start as a fetus. He/she starts as an adult person. Obviously he hasn't been "adventuring" since the fetal stage, but he/she's been doing SOMEthing up until the present. That's a lot of time to learn things. A year-or-two of blacksmith apprenticeship will have you able to produce weapons and armor. Also, who says the game is obviously going to allow your character to become a master smith? I haven't even studied engineering intensely, but I bet I can build a shed out of wood that won't fall over. Does that mean a professional carpenter/builder can't make something 17 times better/sturdier/more efficient than I can? No. Does his ability to make such a thing mean that someone else can't even assemble pieces of wood together into some sort of free-standing construct that functions on some basic level? Nope. Oh, wait, I forgot. If we put something in P:E, it's GOT to directly model an existing implementation from another game. Drat... Darn that unwritten rule!!! *fist shake* And, as Micamo said, the whole time thing is already abstracted. Why doesn't healing take you 3 weeks of sleeping, in-game? Abstraction. So, yes, you could improve your smithing skill at an abstractly faster-than-real-life rate, and STILL be a novice/amateur relative to master smiths. to put it simply, real life smithing is like this i know how to bang the metal and shape it into a sword i know how to handle iron, steel, titanium, mithril, adamantite and alchemical silver i can turn any of the above metals into a sword.

this is... pointless. instead of pressing F5 (quicksave) - Esc - click on quit, you press Esc and click on save and quit... saves you the press of a button that option exists in almost all games and it's called continue game (loads last save). what it actualy does, is spare you the 2 extra clicks you would need to select and run a save file from the load menu and pointless too. spares you one more click compared to the above

in BG you dont set out to save anyone or anything. you set out to find your father's killer. the stopping of a war along the way is just a bonus that comes from hunting the guy who wants to start it. being evil does not mean you have the same goal as the other evil guy, so stopping the plans of sarevok in BG, while you act like a psychopath does not make you neutral just because along the way you stopped a war in the making. if the joker had a fight with penguin for personal reasons and through it he stopped penguins plan that would have defeated batman, thus saving gotham, would he be less evil? in mass effect, your quest is to save the galaxy. you dont get an option to be evil, you can be honourable about the way you do it or you can be a douche. so good or neutral, but if you were allowed to be evil, you would have the option to join the reapers

well im definitely a chaotic character. all 3rd edition dnd games i played, i started as true neutral (50-50) and ended up somewhere between chaotic neutral and good (0-70 or 0-80) by making the choices i would do if the in game situations were real.

certainly the game will not have any army vs army battles, and the shots will be done at closer ranges like 10-15m at most where accuracy is not that much of an issue and the arrows still have most of their speed, but still the fact remains that metal armors are hard to pierce with projectiles, especially if not hit at the right angle. but we are talking about a game here so i dont see the reason for anything than the standard combat rules to apply.

im going with the majority here. i played FNV in hardcore, and i didnt find it difficult at all. i played metro 2033 in ranger mode the first time and the second time in normal seemed too fake with the hud on, so i quit and restarted on ranger. i played the IE games at core rules, deus ex at realistic and human revolution on the deus ex difficulty... so in short the setting the game was meant to be played on for the best experience... usually its also the most balanced

i havent read your previous posts. im just saying that DRM itself isnt evil, it's the way they make it work that makes it look such. im not for the extreme use of it that seems to say "all customers are pirates" but i dont see the reason why people start crusades against it even when used in a non invasive or restrictive way. the simple cd checks of the 90s were also DRM, but i didnt see anyone complain about them.

i had to rush my post cause i had something to do. what i meant to say, is that DRM is not a system made to cause problems to legit customers. however, due to the bad implementation that only caused problems for legit customers, everyone thinks that DRM=harassment of customers, period. so even if the DRM is made in a way to be without any inconvenience for the user, people still see it as a monster out for blood. to put it in a different way, ubisoft's usual DRMs are like the demon possessing the little girl in the Exorcist, while steam is casper the friendly ghost. both are supernatural entities but are they the same thing?

i think you mistake DRM for starforce or the rest of the ingenious ideas ubisoft (mostly, but others too) had over the years. DRM is a system intended to verify that you have a legit copy of the game and keep piracy at bay. most of the time of course that doesnt apply so im impressed that companies still waste money on it, but that is besides the point. DRM can do what it is made to do in various ways that almost always inconvenience the legit customer: limited number of installs, installation limited to one pc only (and if you change hardware you can no longer play), always online, trojans that keep track of the game's files (starforce in a nutshell) and so on. so basically people consider these limitations and inconveniences on the use of the game they bought as DRM. much like the people in older times, considered snakes evil for being poisonous... in short it's not the DRM that is the problem, is how it was implemented that lead people to hate it unconditionally. now steam is technically a DRM, but how does it work and how inconvenient is it really? let's see: to play a game, you have to be online the first time you run it and only until the "preparing to launch" window is open, after that you can do whatever you want with the game... you can even take your pc and go to deserted island for a year with no internet and the game will play fine. to play you need to have the client open, and that client is only 17MB, which means you dont even notice it's there when it comes to performance. there are no limits to when and where you play your games. as long as you have the client and your account you can play in any pc anywhere in the world at anytime you want... by using the offline feature, you can even run multiple clients on multiple pc with your account, effectively sharing your games with others. the only limitation i see on the use of steam, is the need for a 17MB client and an occasional need to be online in case of new games. so if you still consider that DRM is a system designed to inconvenience the average user unconditionally, i dont see how steam would fit into this category

i say the highlight button is necessary. think a bit about BG2. pressing tab, revealed containers (often from the 13 chests and 25 barrels you could see in the room, only 3 and 8 were usable, so why pixel hunt them all to see what you can use?), doors, loot and i think that's about it... so stuff that your party could obviously see were highlighted so you could see them even if something was blocking the view. but i dont remember puzzle elements, traps, secret doors and such to be highlighted, unless your party had found them. the only objection for the system, would be for containers that were supposed to be hidden but nobody is perfect

Would you like to have Photoshop or Windows Movie Maker start everytime you run a game? let me catch my breath because i almost suffocated laughing when i read this. when it comes to resources steam in idle uses 0% of your cpu and 17-18MB ram... it really makes the system kneel under its weight doesnt it? imagine that: steam makes loadings slower by 0.01 seconds on a 2GB ram system... who can afford to waste an extra 0.01s waiting for a game to load? and now that we had a good laugh, please try not to compare apples to cars anymore, noone will take you seriously if you do. also on the general question of the topic: if all DRM was like steam's, nobody in the world would ever complain about DRM... hell they probably wouldn't even know that DRM existed at all

while it's quite nice, i would make some changes to use the empty space on the left. that would be to put the buttons for the skills and spells there (1 button per spell level). pressing one of the buttons would open up a list of available choices above it (ie pressing the 3rd level spell button you would get a list with the lv3 spells you can cast)

a way to make money balanced in the game, is to have items in shops with various bonuses at various prices for all levels and wallets. by pacing the area difficulty and loot/profit of the player in a way that he can buy an item better than what his usual loot is, long before he goes somewhere he can get something better, will make players use their money more often. if to make the money for an item you want, you have to pass through an area where you can get something better, it's practicaly useless to have the item for sale in the first place cause no one will feel compeled to buy it and just keep their money

stylized yes, large no. it should have all we need with a nice artistic appearance, but it should not cover more of the screen than what is necessary. using something that could be considered technicaly obsolete just for the nostalgia factor would just be a negative point in the gameplay. a modern strategy for example, would have rally points, one click waypoint setup for the units, formations, aggressive/passive movement orders, building queues and so on. if you made a strategy with none of that, like the mid 90's games were for technical limitations of the time, would it be considered a great old school game or a pain to play (even from older gamers)? i was playing tiberian sun a few days ago.. for it's time it was probably a great game and is still fun to play, but the limitations on all counts were obvious... even compared to it's almost contemporary red alert 2

in all ancient and medieval warfare, bows were used mostly to break the enemy ranks and lower the morale through harassment. they were never intended as the main killing tool of an army. arrow inflicted casualties in a battle were at most 10% of the total and often they were non lethal as they would mostly criple the enemy by hitting unarmored arms and legs.

Durability would have meant a money sink that actually works because you have to repair items (on the higher difficulties). Now they contemplate letting you pour money into your stronghold etc. which may not be necessary at all (players may end up not doing it) which is just beautification bullcrap. No one needs that. even so i never understood the need for a money sink. have available for sale special items that cost a lot but can be aquired before you get to the point of the game where similar items are part of the loot and there you have it... the player will spend his cash to keep part of his gear a step ahead of the competition.

after rereading some stuff and thinking about it a bit, i think durability was the easy way out of the dilema: how do we make crafting skills useful to characters for more than just making items now and then. and they put it in an update to see our reaction to it, to know if they can use the shortcut or come up with something more intricate

In all probability, it is a minority. I am completely confident that the vast majority of backers an potential buyers simply wouldn't have cared either way. I'm sure most backers receive emails about updates, but very few chose to voice an opinion on the matter. Realistically speaking, those most likely to say something on this topic are hardcore RPG fans with articulated opinions on RPG design, and I doubt that these are in the majority anywhere in any group. So yes, while the decision to take out durability and crafting skill may have saved P:E some customers at the cost of causing minor butthurt to others (me), I highly doubt it would have made a noticeable difference, economically speaking, to keep durability and crafting as is. i too dont care either way, but i think it was an overall poor decision to put in an unspecified "crafting" skill connected to the durability of items, in order to give incentive for players to raise that skill on more than 1 character. there are far better ways to do it as i said in another post

as infinitron said, the most probable reason was an internal disagreement about using this mechanic, so they turned to us to see which way the wind blows. and, as most may have noticed, those who are for durability, have no problem playing the game even if it's not in, while those who are against, will just call the game crap if it's in. so that minority, as some called it, was actualy an indication of the percentage of players who may have ditched the game just for that. so it's not about who made the most passionate argument, or about a democratic vote to decide how it should be made... it's a cold-calculated assesment of how much the sales may be hurt by the implementation of this mechanic