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Brother Pain

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Posts posted by Brother Pain

  1. I'd rather cut down on the abilties casters have honestly. I'd much rather manually activate the (comparatively few) abilites my frontliners have, than micromanage my mage, cleric and cipher. A modal ability that let's your casters be "healer", "support", or "blaster" without my constant input would be nice.

  2. I agree pathing was a big problem in the BG games, and it may be the biggest problem I had with the series and it's realtime with pausing combat.

     

    Other than building every single pathway large enough for most of the party to traverse, you could allow characters to be in the same space, at least out of combat.

     

    As for the problems with especially melee characters blocking each each other, I think there should be a better solution than just throwing more memory and processing power at the problem. Not using discrete rounds would be part of the solution certainly, and perhaps some way of setting one character to wait for another to pass before advancing...

    • Like 1
  3. Planescape: Torment defenitely had the best written and most memorable companions IMHO, though all of the Bioware games on the list have fairly good ones as well, Baldur's Gate least so.

    You can say a lot about Bioware games, but since Jade Empire and KOTOR, they've been excellent at writing companions, and the companions in Dragon Age 2 was actually one of the only really good things about the game.

    Fallout did have some memorable ones (mostly due to shooting me in the back Ian) and Fallout 2 had some good ones too, some I actually loved to hate.

  4. Hmm, the only really sound-based puzzle I've seen in a long time was in The Secret World, and required you to enter a code based on the sounds the buttons made, since the person entering the code was between the keypad and the hacked camera you watched through. A lot of people had a lot of trouble with said puzzle (though TSW has a ton of puzzles requiring you to do on the fly decryption, math puzzles, looking up obscure artists, and whatnot) but it was actually one of the few puzzles I found easy :)

     

    That said, I know most people don't have absolute pitch and relative pitch, just like not all people are good at ciphers, riddles, or math, so I'd hope that there's always a way out of a puzzle, perhaps in the style of cutting the Gordian knot.

  5.  

     

    I'd be a nice source of income/reputation/xp/fun to be able to take on a job as a caravan guard, and if it worked like in Fallout and Fallout 2, it'd even work fine for being a guard on a merchant ship as well, if the cities are port cities as mentioned.

     

    Being able to assault caravans could be interesting as well.

    The only source of experience in P:E is by completing quests. You will receive zero experience for every combat encounter unless victory in that encounter is the end of a quest.

     

    And you could pick up a "quest" (mission/objective/what have you) consisting of escorting or assaulting a caravan. It could even be a repeatable source of xp in a game without combat xp.

  6. Having the computer doing complex calculations to determine a target number for the lockpicking skill could be done, but is unneccesary, and more work for the level designers.

    Having more skills for lockpicking? No thanks, but having small bonuses (let's call them synergy bonuses and you'll know what I mean) to your lockpicking skill from other relevant skills could work.

    Lockpicking minigames is still one of the weakest parts of the Elder Scrolls series (and 3d Fallouts) other than level scaling and crap writing*, and I'd rather do without.

     

    If you want to expand lockpicking and skills in general, how about single use items to boost your skills on that one very difficult task. Like a skeleton key, security tunneler, or Ancient Poetry for Dummies book :)

     

    (* New Vegas avoided those mostly but still had the lockpicking and hacking minigames unfortunately.)

  7. In regular PnP, where the GM can improvise on the spot, fib dice rolls (even if they don't) and so on, I still prefer games that don't so easily outright kill you. Like games with Fate Points, bleeding rules, and so on. Losing a character in a PnP game is disheartening, and if it happens too many times, I tend to lose any and all empathy with the new characters I make.

    And a total party kill has often been the end of a campaign.

     

    I can't imagine I'll ever touch Iron Man mode, and any game that makes me lose several hours of progress when I die is a game I likely won't be playing for long (see: mid to high level Everquest, Demon's Souls, DayZ, and any game without free saving or regular save states/check points).

  8.  

    Please never give me another cut-and-paste dwarf companion who swills ale, has a beard, loves fighting, uses an axe or warhammer, hates elves, speaks in a Scottish accent and so forth. Not even if he wants to be a monk and beat people up with his fists.

     

    Oh come on! Oghren was a laugh with his drunken tirades, his utter lack of social graces and anything resembling hygiene. Besides that, what made him funny was that he stuck out among his kind exactly because he acted so much as what we perceive to be the stereotypical dwarf.

     

    I'm pretty sure they're talking about Khelgar Ironfist, the dwarven fighter you pick up as the first thing once you leave the starting village in Neverwinter Nights 2.

  9. I really enjoyed the origins in DA:O and they really fit that game, as it was heavy on fairly linear story, and the origins gave you a decent hook without forcing you to play a particular character (eg. Shepard, Hawke) or force a completely cliché background on you (like BG, NWN, NWN2, and many many others).

    For a much more free game, as it seems P:E will be, options like the backgrounds in Bloodlines and Arcanum would probably work better though.

  10. I loved the "arenas" (dojos, proving rings, boxing matches, etc.) of games like Fallout 2 and Arcanum, and felt that tournaments added a good deal of enjoyment to Mount and Blade as well.

    And I'd guess nearly every civilization since at least the ancient Greeks have had some sort of this, be it for training soldiers, sparring, underground matches, punishment for slaves, pure entertainment or what not. It just depends on how narrowly you define it honestly.

    Mind you, I'd prefer that it wasn't something every character was forced to use. If I build a fighter-type that's excellent in combat, it's fun, if I play a squishy mage hiding behind the meat shields tougher party members it might not be so fun. In Arcanum you could use other means to avoid having to enter the fighting pits if you preferred, and in many other games doings these fights were completely optional.

    Btw, the easiest way to do arenas are regular fights in a small area with xp/money gained after slaying the opponents, but the idea of having a proper tournament could be cool if there's time to implement it. As for such only being accessible to the rich, this shouldn't be a problem for an adventurer that's gained their own stronghold :)

  11. I'd prefer to have no phony "Ye Olde Englishe", since it looks corny (and fake) and is just annoying to read. Doubly so if the lines are spoken. I'm not saying have the dialogue in modern English, but the style that BG did with dialogue was cringe-worthy IMHO.

     

    And please do keep the low Int speech. It was a great option in Fallout 1+2 and Arcanum, and was a reason not to dump Int. Of course, having Int be useful for people other than the mages would help in that respect too :)

    • Like 2
  12. My thoughts on digging:

     

    Digging up a few buried treasures with clues etc. and possibly the option of digging up graveyards complete with possibly bad rep (in other words, the shovel in Fallout 2) would be fine.

    Digging randomly, or whenever you get a hint or something similar (eg. like Fable) would be sucky.

    And if the models for shovels/spades are being put into the game, why not use them as clubs/axes as well? I still have fond (and weird) memories of people using spades in PnP, notably in GURPS.

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