teknoman2

i have a question... has anyone here ever played bloodlines? it did not have xp for killing things except "bosses" or for any other thing you did for that matter, except for completing quests...i dont see it being scorned for "not being RPG enough because in an RPG you need to get xp every time your character does something no matter what it is" if the game is designed around an objective based xp system, then the entire gameplay will reflect this decision.

in IWD2 when you get xp for quests it just says "the party has gained experience" but not how much. it did not bother me in the slightest. as for power players, even if you dont have a message saying "you get this much xp", they will just look at their character sheet and see how much it was, since this king of players keep a constant track of the character's xp

in BG2 the first time i played, i fought the shadow dragon in umar hills. the first spell i used against him was a chromatic orb and the 1 in a milion chance came along that it bypassed his resistance and he failed the save, thus getting petrified. in later plays, i used lower resistance and malison and buffs, but i never got any hit or miss spell to work on him

they even have launched satelites to monitor the weather

after inception?

giving xp for each kill is making the player decisions follow a railroad path. i play fallout 2 and get into the vault with the sentient deathclaws. i can talk with them, come to an understanding help them and get information about my own quest in exchange. but once the quest part is done i save and start killing them. why? because each kill is worth half a level of xp. not killing them when they are no longer useful, may have been the roleplay correct approach for a nice guy character as mine was, but the xp was just too tempting to pass. if there was no xp for killing them, i would have had no reason to swear like a port worker while trying again and again to kill them for no other reason but to get the fat xp (since my diplomatic approach had already got me the desired result)

reading this post just made me think of something... not having "per kill xp" is not the same as not having "combat xp". if you meet a group of particular enemies and kill them you may get combat xp for winning the fight. what you will not get is xp for each individual kill, or xp for just killing a random wolf or bear. i.e: you go in a cave just to explore and find it full of orcs. you can sneak past them, see the whole cave, steal some treasure they have and leave, getting 500xp for exploration. but what if killing the orcs is a separate objective that is worth 1000xp? see? combat related xp! you will not get separate xp for each orc you kill, but if you kill them all you get 1000xp. but unless you kill them all, you will not know that there is a reward, and since you do not know it, you have the option to just leave them be... while if you knew that each orc is 50xp you would just kill them without thinking twice

here's how a hypothetical situation would work with kill xp 1 you meet a man who hides from a bounty hunter and agree to help him 2 you find the bounty hunter and talk him out of hunting the man and get 1000xp 3 you then kill the bounty hunter and get 500xp 4 you return to the man and say the job is done and get 1000xp for the quest 5 then you kill him and get 100xp 6 then you take his head to the crime boss posting the bounty and get another 1000xp 7 then you kill him too and all his guards for 1500xp without any penalties since he is a criminal doing it in any other way would be less rewarding, hence your choices on how to handle it are minimized

i do not see how not geting kill xp is limiting player freedom. if you dont get xp, you will not engage in combat? and what guarantees you that you can avoid combat? and if killing the dragon you just persuaded to let you go, was an extra objective that would give extra xp and you just dont know it? so there will always be the chance that killing a guy you did not kill was worth extra xp, or not killing a guy you did (for no xp) would open up a new quest line. you just dont know, and that actually promotes freedom, because you wont have the certainty of an extra reward in xp for certain play styles and you just play however you feel like

but the so called "random" encounters are just preset situations that the developers have set in the game. it's not like the game just creates something randomly like the first diablo did for the maps. they just occur at random times or order.

i thik they will use a deus ex style of xp... you wander around and come across a cave, you go in and take a look, you get some exploration xp. you sneak into a building and overhear a conversation about a robery, you get spying xp. you do something with that info, you get objective xp. in a random encounter situation, you have some bandits asking a toll to cross a bridge. you can pay, you can fight, you can cast haste and run across and so on. the objective is to reach the other side and once you do it you get the xp. if you had per kill xp, there would be no reason to choose any alternative to fighting it's a much better system imo, than the BG style, talk to the guy, convince him to do things your way, get conversation xp, then kill him for the kill xp, then go get quest xp

you can look at it this way you are in a dungeon for a quest you kill a guy and get 60xp you disarm a trap and get 30xp you unlock a chest and get 10xp you kill 2 more guys and get 120xp you kill the boss and get 80xp you turn in the quest and get 300xp total 600xp would it not be the same if instead of getting small amounts for each individual action, you got 600xp at the end of the quest?

actually the companions in arcanum do not get xp in the fight. they level up at the same time as you do. i had a lv28 character and i took a lv5 in the party. he got to lv6 when i got to 29. he got to lv7 when i got to 30. he was not getting any individual xp, he just waited for me to level up to get his next level too.

Climbing up walls and swimming in rivers to access better entry points etc are going to be in as scripted interactions in certain places. they already showed some screenshots of it

the thing about BG2 was that side quests had a story related purpose. they were odd jobs you had to do, in order to get the money you needed to move on with the story. not just fillers to make the game longer

in IWD2 at high levels, a priest had a lv8 spell that was called divine intervention (or shell, or shield... divine something anyway) that offered a huge amount of damage resistance from all sources to the party and imunity to mind effecting spells. in certain situations it simply felt like a god mode cheat. i cast it on the party just before the fight and then i unleashed hell... fireballs, firestorms, acid storms, acid fog, meteor swarms, blizzards and any aoe nuke i had available. the enemies droped like flies and i was coming out of it unharmed a spell like this would be nice to have in PoE too

or it could be linked to the accuracy. X accuracy, reduces by X% the ff damage of an aoe spell DAO on pc had ff always on, unlike the Xbox version that only had ff on highest difficulty

he did not answer a question though... do the enemies start looking if your outer circle touches theirs, or if your character goes into their circle?

the cooldown mechanic proposed could be like this you try to cast a spell that needs 6s. that starts a 6s timer. if the casting is interrupted for whatever reason, you cannot cast another spell untill the 6s have passed. so if at 4s your high level 6s casting time spell is stopped, then you have to wait 2s before you can cast any more spells. unlike traditional cd, you can give the order to cast the next spell, but the wizard will just wait these 2s before starting to cast if the spell needs 4s, the timer will be 4s. no matter the cast time of the spell, if interrupted, the timer will have to reach 0, before the casting of the next spell begins

i think you missunderstand something healing does not mean how much hp or stamina a cleric restores with a spell, it means how much hp you naturaly regenerate when you rest. so it rightfully belongs to might the ruins screenshot screams DRAGON FIGHT!!!

if the game deserves a second play, i like to have achievements to give me ideas on how to change my play style for a different experience, or just for comletionisms sake if there are none, i dont really mind if there are but i dont think the game is worth a second play, i may have more than half still locked, i just wont play it for their sake

im half asleep so i just read it right without looking at the spelling... yay for blurry vision

it doesnt even need to be set by a option. people will use one according to their relation to you and it can simply be put in the dialog the same way a single name would instead of having one variable that will be picked by the program and will be added to the dialog text at the apropriate position, they can have 3 and decide which sould be set for each dialog an example Your Neighbour: Hey (insert first name) you overslept again? Your Landlord: Mr (insert last name) you still owe me 2 gold pieces for the rent! Your Friend: Sup (insert nickname)? Your Teacher: (inset first name, insert last name) you are late for class again!

that's the thing that really pissed me off too. and since i had no pad, it was even harder to go to the right direction in certain places

that's a good system except it encourages min-maxing a lot, so I would make it so picking a detrimental perk unlocks less points than picking the opposite positive perk costs points not if it is done right let me use fallout as an example if you take the smart, you get +1 to your intelligence and 1 point bonus to all int based skills, but you may not have less than 8 int so 2 stat points at character creation go to int even if you dont want to if you take dumb, your max int is locked at 4 with all the resulting consequences in the game (not even implants can get it higher and the fact that the initial int is 4 and not 5, does not mean you get the lost point to use on something else... it is lost and that applies to all perks that cap a stat) if you take military training, you get 10 point bonus at all weapon skills, but your str, per and end cant be less than 6 if you take unfit for combat, str and end are capped at 4 and you start with 20% less hp than normal