IcyDeadPeople

All we really need are separate subforums for spoilers and tech support, perhaps another for modding, but until the game is released none of these is necessary. Splitting the forum up into so many arbitrary sections at this point, long before the game is in beta, will only result in duplicated discussion topics. We have already seen a lot of duplicated topics with the separate Gameplay & Mechanics, Widgets & Bytes and General Discussion sections. Fragmenting the forum even more would be a mistake in my view.

Personally, I don't mind wading through areas with lots of enemies. I've played other games with mods that add more spawns or otherwise enhance the difficulty. However, if I kill a creature, I certainly don't want him to see him stand back up in 30 seconds like they do in MMOs. And if I clear a dungeon it's OK if enemies return to the area after some time, but there must be a logical reason why they have returned.

I suspect at least a few of those votes may be from folks like me who never played Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale or Planescape: Torment. In my case, I pledged because I'm a fan of the work Obsidian team members have done over the years on Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Fallout New Vegas, Neverwinter Nights 2, KOTOR 2 and Alpha Protocol. Recently bought BG1 and 2, as well as PS:T, but haven't had a chance to try them yet.

I picked Call of Duty not really as a joke, but because I've never played any of the other games. I don't have a frame of reference to form an opinion as to whether it should be more like Baldur's Gate or less like Icewind Dale, etc. I've never played Call of Duty, either, but since it was obviously in jest, it seemed equivalent to a neutral "I have no idea" sort of response. Perhaps I should have not voted at all, but I can't help clicking on polls sometimes ;-)

I certainly don't mind seeing enemies respawn a few days or weeks after you clear a particular dungeon, but I cannot stand the way that enemies respawn constantly in MMOs like WoW and TOR. It was so jarring and bizarre to see monsters standing around just waiting for the player to approach, then you kill them, they lie down and respawn 30 seconds later. It makes the entire game world seem like a phony haunted house maze.

Personally, I enjoy finding lots of different items all over the place (yes, even lots of "silly Elder Scrolls baskets"), but it would be great if the vast majority of stuff you find is very low value, almost worthless stuff, like rags you can break down to craft bandages for injuries, clothing or armor, various items you can use to craft traps, animal organs or other alchemical ingredients for cooking food or brewing potions and poisons. It's great when everything has at least some use, even common miscellaneous items. However, crafting higher value items should require at least one or two rare components. I like to find lots of items that can be collected and used for crafting, even perhaps some interesting in-game book, or recipe, etc., as these are great rewards for exploring the heck out of every area. However, those loot driven games such as Diablo and Borderlands seem to be more about constantly finding the most overpowered items possible, and the entire game is designed around it, so it would be incredibly challenging, almost impossible to go through the entire game with a low level weapon. I understand the appeal of that type of game, but finding overpowered gear is the least interesting aspect of any RPG in my opinion. I may wish to role play a character who carves and fletches his own arrows from reeds and goose feathers, brews his own poison from the glands of deadly treefrogs, carves his own bow from the wood of a felled oak tree, with a bowstring woven from animal sinew, etc. For me, finding all those ingredients and making my own relatively weak weapons would be infinitely more enjoyable. Even if the end result is much weaker than finding some +90 Legendary Vorpal Sword of Doom, etc., I might take some pride of ownership and prefer to play through most of the game with my character using a weapon he crafted from scratch. (Depends on the type of character, of course.) As for artifacts, if they are treated in an interesting and genuine way, they should be extremely rare, like only perhaps 10 - 15 in the entire game, with a very lengthy quest and detailed backstory. In my D&D campaigns, there were only a couple of artifacts ever available in the world, and these involved tremendously lengthy quests for the highest level characters. Some of these artifacts were also sapient, with some ideas of their own about what they wanted their owner to do.

Yay, just barely managed to increase my pledge with 4 seconds left to go! (increased from $20 to $45) - congrats on reaching $4 million! If you have time, I would be grateful if you can update my custom title to "Milk Drinker of the Obsidian Order"

Can you explain a bit more for those of us who have never played Planescape: Torment or Baldur's Gate? What do you mean by "spoken lines only" vs "descriptive text" - perhaps you can provide an example?

Personally I tend to find combat encounters boring unless I'm dying and reloading lots of times.

I think certain gameplay systems might benefit from a system that preserves randomness, for example, if you save and reload perhaps the pins of a lock are reset to a random position (if there is some sort of lockpick minigame). However, in my view, if the dev team were to design all the levels and combat encounters in a way where you can actually complete an entire area without dying and reloading numerous times, the resulting combat would become far too easy and quite boring. Personally I don't enjoy combat encounters in an RPG unless I'm dying and reloading dozens of times and I find games with a checkpoint system that forces you to play through half of a level again each time you die to be rather tedious. Checkpoints seem to be a way to camouflage a lack of content or a lack of challenging A.I. in a very short game. I much prefer to be able to save anywhere in the game and actually be challenged to figure out how to survive tough battles instead of being punished with the boredom of repeating checkpoints.

Not to beat a dead horse but this is a good example of why the game needs to be designed (and balanced) with certain features on or off. You can't just disable quest markers in a game such as Oblivion or Fallout 3, because the game doesn't give you enough information in dialogue to complete the quests without these guides. In Fallout: New Vegas you could disable quest objective markers for the game, as there's enough information given to you in-game for (almost) every quest. Good point, particularly for a hub and spoke sort of game as I understand Project Eternity will be. In an open world game like the examples you gave, although better location descriptions in the quest log would have been welcome (and there may be some mods that do this), you can still collect dozens of quests and roam around until you stumble upon landmarks or areas near the quest. A hub and spoke world isn't really designed for this kind of exploration.

Why not just keep going and deal with having a shortage of arrows?

The leveled lists could provide for not only the items that drop on an actor's death, but more variety in the items he spawns with. So, Bandit type A doesn't always use leather armor and short sword. Sometimes he has fur armor and an iron dagger, or studded armor and a steel mace, etc.

They should be very powerful and slow to draw, easy to fumble and miss a shot if you get hit while drawing the bowstring. Although it was designed for a different sort of game (first person, 3D perspective with hit detection) and some aspects might not translate to PE, Duke Patrick's Combat Archery mod is a good illustration of an archery system that works really well for an RPG. The mod author is a medieval archery expert and he went through a lot of effort to capture the fundamentals of archery. Here are some of the features of his mod: IIRC, it also made arrows significantly more scarce compared to the vanilla game.

Whether ammo items have weight or not is a separate matter from whether the player should have infinity arrows. Why stop with arrows, why not provide unlimited crossbow quarrels, arquebus rounds, throwing knives, spears, etc.? How about unlimited traps? I'd be interested to know where the heck the PC is getting all this magical infinite stuff. Does he have some sort of magic bag of holding? Is it really any different from providing the player with unlimited crafting supplies, or unlimited healing/mana potions, for example? First, this is very unrealistic and breaks immersion for some of us. It makes archery feel a bit more like shooting a magic laser gun. It can also lead to balance issues, resulting in very weak arrows or cooldowns for archery abilities. And it's also a problem for those of us who enjoy role playing our characters, making choices based on what we think they would want to do. If I'm playing an archer, his bow and arrows are his most important items. He's going to want to learn how to craft them, perhaps improve their quality, explore the word and find crafting recipes or learn them from NPCs. He's going to want to find, steal, or save up and buy the best damn arrows he can get his hands on. And he won't waste them, he's going to make each shot count. It's hard to do this if he gets a magic dimensional portal in his arrow quiver with infinite arrows. Things like throwing knives and axes at least cost a few more gold and took up a lot more inventory space. The arrows, bolts and bullets were all effectively unlimited; we just had the shopkeeper store them for us in HIS bag of unlimited holding. I don't understand, so you are saying the problem is that you think arrows are too cheap and they don't weigh enough? It seems we have different playing styles. I can't recall ever leaving a dungeon in a game because I ran out of arrows or didn't have enough inventory space. I just discard what I can't carry, or make do with another weapon until I can find some more arrows, or sneak and avoid enemies. Often I complete a dungeon and retrieve much less than the sum of all the loot that was available, simply because I can't carry it all. I don't recall going back and forth to town just to carry stuff out of a dungeon, except perhaps in a pen and paper game, where the GM can make time fly. The devs could wave a magic wand and get rid of all encumbrance, and you would no longer have to worry at all about inventory management or the tedium of walking back and forth to town, but wouldn't no encumbrance at all be boring? In my case I haven't experienced that tedium of leaving a dungeon to go back to town and empty my packs of treasure, buy more arrows, etc., because I keep soldiering on and leave a lot of stuff behind that I can't carry.

Whether ammo items have weight or not is a separate matter from whether the player should have infinity arrows. Why stop with arrows, why not provide unlimited crossbow quarrels, arquebus rounds, throwing knives, spears, etc.? How about unlimited traps? I'd be interested to know where the heck the PC is getting all this magical infinite stuff. Does he have some sort of magic bag of holding? Is it really any different from providing the player with unlimited crafting supplies, or unlimited healing/mana potions, for example? First, this is very unrealistic and breaks immersion for some of us. It makes archery feel a bit more like shooting a magic laser gun. It can also lead to balance issues, resulting in very weak arrows or cooldowns for archery abilities. And it's also a problem for those of us who enjoy role playing our characters, making choices based on what we think they would want to do. If I'm playing an archer, his bow and arrows are his most important items. He's going to want to learn how to craft them, perhaps improve their quality, explore the word and find crafting recipes or learn them from NPCs. He's going to want to find, steal, or save up and buy the best damn arrows he can get his hands on. And he won't waste them, he's going to make each shot count. It's hard to do this if he gets a magic dimensional portal in his arrow quiver with infinite arrows.

Thanks very much, and I also learned that the "Lake of Drow Tombs" is actually the "Lake of Drowned Tombs"! Unfortunately, it's not possible to edit older posts, perhaps I should wait until we have more information about the various groups and then ask a moderator to help update the OP. I understand your sentiment, although I think in addition to a limited number of groups the player might actually join, the narrative environment can benefit from having lots of smaller factions that the player doesn't necessarily join, but that react to the player's choices and actions, perhaps we might see a system that tracks the player's reputation with many different groups.

Haven't played the game, but this sounds interesting. You would order different party members to gather different materials? Did they have different skills used for these activities?

Yeah I was also a bit surprised to see a poll option for unlimited mundane arrows and limited magical arrows, instead of the other way around. If any type of ammo is unlimited, it would seem a bit more appropriate for magic arrows conjured up by a mage's spell, which has a limited duration and consumes magic resources (or must be memorized if they take the Vancian approach). Great point, infinite arrows also result in balance issues, compensated in some games by making arrows very weak, or by giving archers bizarre spell-like effects on a quickbar cooldown timer that have absolutely nothing to do with archery.

I hear ya - I hadn't had that experience either until I tried Duke Patrick's mod. It really opened my mind to the possibilities of archery in RPGs.

so when you run out of arrows in a game like icewind dale, do you really enjoy walking back to town to buy more? Does it actually add any value to the game? I mean, its a minor enough hassle that I really don't mind keeping up with arrows. I just don't get what is enjoyable about it. Seems like realism for the sake of realism to buy arrows for your elf. Never played icewind dale, but if ammo is scarce in a game it makes it so much more enjoyable to find some arrows after killing some enemy archer, for example. If I'm playing a character who specializes in archery and I run out of arrows, perhaps I'll pick up some other weapon to use in the meantime, or try to sneak and avoid enemies. If you were an archer in a dangerous place, how would you handle the situation? It becomes important to plan your shots carefully and take caution not to waste any. A mysterious bow that shoots infinite magic missiles just doesn't capture the essence of archery. Arrows are very important to any archer. If you want to role play an archer character and consider your character's perspective, isn't he going to be just as concerned about getting his hands on some good arrows as he would be about obtaining a bow?

I find the archery systems in games with unlimited ammo to be boring at best and at worst on the level of pew pew pew style MMO combat where archery is just another button on a cooldown quickbar timer, like a spell, etc. For those of you who prefer unlimited ammo, would you propose unlimited ammo for crossbows and arquebuses as well? How about unlimited throwing daggers, unlimited spears, etc.? Personally, if I'm playing an archer or crossbowman character, I want to be really pleased to find a couple of arrows or quarrels, or a recipe for crafting them. Unlimited ammo ruins this aspect of the game, and it makes the entire archery system feel much less realistic. Same goes for arquebuses, or whatever sort of medieval flintlock firearms will be in the game. Wouldn't it be fun to play a character who learns how to craft the black powder and buckshot, or whatever sort of primitive bullets they use? If it's all unlimited, then there's no point in crafting them. Duke Patrick's Combat Archery Mod for Oblivion got this right. The guy is a real life archery expert and he put a lot of work into designing some mechanics that recreate something of the feel of real archery combat. Arrows have a lot of force and damage, but you can't pew pew pew them like a laser gun. It takes time and concentration to draw the bow and it's easy to stumble, or mess up your shot if you get hit with melee while you are drawing.

Why would you need a stack? Couldn't you simply buy (or craft) as many arrows at a time as you want?

There is already going to be some sort of dynamic events system incorporated in the game, as the dev team has mentioned the player will experience random encounters when fast traveling. Hopefully they will be designed in a way that reacts to previous player choices, so for example if your reputation is very low with a particular faction perhaps they will send someone after you, etc. Incorporating dynamic events into quests would be great if possible. Certainly it can greatly add to the replay value if smaller quests might use aliases for the quest objective, so for example, it might send you to some random dungeon you haven't explored yet, instead of the same dungeon every time you play.

Thanks very much, Rosbjerg! However, I really hate to bother you guys to do something like so minor, like updating a poll option or adding one or two lines to the original post, etc. Is there any chance this policy might change as we have more members joining in recent days?