tajerio

Yeah but what makes companions deep is not the dialog, or it's not just the dialog, it's how they react to the environment, how they react to each other, how they react to the PC, sprinkle in some banter talk and they are deep and have character. Give me more characters with less dialog (which is time consuming) and just give some reactions and banter talk. Everything a character says is dialogue with something.

The issue I have is not that restaurants should be banned for serving asparagas, simply that if restaurant chooses to only make dishes from asparagus, however tasty asparagus-lovers might find them, then it is going to run into trouble. And winning the award for best restaurant in 'Asparagus Weekly' is not going to appease the restaurants funders of which many do not like asparagus. Again, the point more broadly is that the asparagus...er...sorry, characters of PS:T were all of the same thematic style and if you place all your companion eggs (Oh, god, more food metaphors) into one basket then you will run into trouble. Obviously the P:E characters will be different to the ones in PS:T, but if they're all cut from the same cloth then the problem remains. And, of course, that problem remains even if I personally LOVE all of P:E's characters. I don't think all the characters are going to be cut from the same cloth. When the devs say "PS:T-style characters," they're talking about depth of interaction. Now, we know that every character will have some important stake in the major themes of the game, but that doesn't mean that all the characters are going to talk about all the same things all the time. And frankly, I don't know what the point would be of companion characters who didn't have something meaningful to say about the principal storyline. So there'll be some points of commonality, but I think a game with a strong story emphasis, as P:E is intended to be, benefits from that approach.

Gishing is my favorite way to play any D&D based game. Given what Josh has said about classes' varying capabilities, I think gishing should be completely viable in P:E, but if the devs are down for giving it some extra love I support that wholeheartedly.

That, yes. Definitely. It may make balancing easier but it prevents so much fun you have tinkering and evaluating the system. And sadly no one will ever play a PE pen-and-paper session. The rest of your post was for my taste too much tainted by nostalgia. I would find it highly boring if I could just use the same tactics I used years ago. If I'm not mistaken I think Josh explicitly said in an interview with Cybergamer that he definitely wanted to have a combat log to aid people "in understanding the mechanics in detail." Bit of an older piece but I don't think we need worry that Josh has changed his mind on this one. http://www.cybergamer.com.au/article/3083/page-2/Interview-with-Josh-Sawyer-of-Obsidian-Entertainment/.

Hasn't Josh explicitly said that there will be no such thing as a purely non-combat skill? Has he? What are crafting, stealth skills, and so on, then? I should probably clarify what I meant by "unintegrated", which is a situation in which you have a comple and unified combat system (ex. combat-based classes and attributes that affect combat performance), and then non-combat skill points are something that you independently allocate on the side, implicitly relegating non-combat approaches to a secondary, comparatively simplistic role ("okay, now that you've spent the last twenty minutes defining your character's abilities in combat, just allocate some skill points and you're good to go!"). Josh said the following on his Formspring a couple weeks back: "PE's skills grant auxiliary combat bonuses. I'm designing them to have a minor but not insignificant effect on how individual battles and series of battles unfold. Combat capability is dominantly determined by your class (and class abilities), attributes, talents, and gear." So I assume that he did not mean to exclude any skills. If you recall, part of the whole reason for the now-scrapped durability mechanic was to make sure that all skills had combat and non-combat applications. I understand your fear with regards to lack of integration, but I think, given the above and other things Josh has said elsewhere, that it's not a peculiarly reasonable fear.

Hasn't Josh explicitly said that there will be no such thing as a purely non-combat skill?

Saying something "is like Item A" doesn't mean something "is Item A". It gives the customer a frame of reference. Clearly some of us felt the frame was more/less involved based on our own interpretation of what they gave us. This is it exactly. Obsidian obviously wanted to trade on the appeal of the IE games, but they equally obviously weren't going to make another one--like any sensible business, they wanted to move forward and use new ideas, even if they took inspiration from the past framework of their success. I think the perception of how closely these games were going to hew to the IE template varies from person to person not depending on what Obsidian said--since that's more or less a constant--but on how devoted people were to those IE games, and how much they've liked/disliked CRPGs since. I like the IE games, with the exception of P:T, which I think is excellent. And I have liked the CRPGs that I have played since the days of the Infinity Engine, while lamenting the loss of the depth of character in P:T, and the options of character customization present in all of those games. So I don't feel any pressing nostalgic need to go back to the halcyon days of yore, but I do want them to bring the good bits back.

I'm not arguing for or against romance here. I've never seen a romance in an RPG that I particularly enjoyed, in large part because real-life romance is always incredibly specific to the people involved, and CRPG romance has to be pretty generalist because of all the PC options. So I think it would be very difficult to do well, since it would have to hit both specific and generalist points. That said, because of the high degree of difficulty, I think I would stand up and applaud if P:E had a romance done well. And if the devs decide it's a good use of resources, I'm not going to second-guess them--they're the ones with experience and expertise, not I. @BruceVC: I certainly wouldn't argue that the ME and DA franchises have been excellent in terms of sales (they've saved EA from having a huge stinking turd of a balance sheet more than once), but I think it's a bit much to say without a doubt that romance hasn't affected their sales at all. There's just no way to measure that.

I think you're indubitably right Gfted1. This sense of betrayal, though, because Obsidian didn't want to duplicate the IE games, doesn't make sense to me. They never promised that, and it's pretty hard to get the impression that they promised a retread game if one reads through their pitch material. If people just saw "Infinity Engine" and went "huzzah!" and pledged, then felt cheated later, that's their fault for not doing their research, not Obsidian's for advertising falsely.

Nice try, BruceVC, but I think if we were all in agreement this thread wouldn't be seventeen pages long, and wouldn't be the most recent of seventeen threads either. What you present there is almost the textbook definition of anecdotal evidence. As any behavioral economist will tell you, people are more easily swayed by a few colorful examples than by the weight of data. So, though it is--as you have clearly recognized--a good tool for scoring points in arguments, anecdotal evidence doesn't actually prove anything. Here in this thread I can find a number of examples of people who believe the antithesis of what you do, as strongly as you do. Would you then concede that romance doesn't help with sales, just because I can find anecdotal counterexamples?

This is precisely the issue. The ruleset is not the game. The ruleset is what we use to navigate our way through the game's content. It seems to me that Obsidian are taking the best parts of the content and presentation from the IE games, and leaving aside the many problematic elements of a ruleset that could never be more than awkwardly shoehorned into a cRPG.

A positive correlation of romance and sales, where sales are the dependent variable and romance is independent, seems to me to be the shakiest sort of ground. There's no analytic, objective data on the point that could help to prove or disprove that hypothesis. We've got anecdotal evidence from posters here, and lots of conjecture, but nothing that could be the basis for a rational case. However, we do know a few things about what helps a game do well in sales. Given the constraints under which Obsidian is currently operating, they currently have access to one proven major cause of good sales: make a good game. If adding romance helps that, in their estimation, then by all means, they should go for it. If adding romance would hurt that, in their estimation, then keep it out. Any other considerations of romance have to be secondary to that.

This is one of the points that hasn't made sense to me throughout this discussion. A lot of people want to have deeply specialized characters, and seem to have strong opposition to the jack of all trades concept. But a lot of these people are the same people complaining about verisimilitude, and the lack thereof with the system they believe Josh has described. Those two things don't really flow together. If you want real verisimilitude, then either every adventurer has to be some kind of jack of all trades, or all adventurers are constantly in parties and never have to fend for themselves in adventure situations. To my mind, people seem to be confusing "verisimilitude" with "the D&D paradigm," which is quite silly.

I think this is a nice move forward from the stale attribute system of D&D. In D&D and the CRPGs that used a D&D system, the role and class I wanted to play more or less dictated my attribute allocation. If I wanted to make a rogue who was only middlingly dexterous and fairly stupid, but was super strong and hardy, yeah, I could do that, but then my rogue would be terrible at his role. P:E seems to be shooting for the possibility that you can build a bunch of different fighters, rogues, wizards, etc. who will all be capable of successfully contributing to combat and non-combat resolution. They might not all be excellent, but they will all be mechanically useful. I don't see how it's a bad thing that we'll have more options for character concepts that actually work both in terms of mechanics and in terms of roleplaying.

I think the experience of top-grade projectile weapons against top-grade armor, in the periods about which we're talking at least, has generally been that shooting directly at the armor is doing it wrong. Optimal results required trying to shoot the enemy at his joints or neck, instead of right on the point of his concave breastplate (because placing force at the point of maximum resistance is wasteful). Now, for most ranged combatants, in battle settings, the weaponry and training weren't really there to establish the accuracy necessary for all of them to be drilling armored men in the shoulder all day long. So they used massed fire harassment tactics, trusting to the weight of probability rather than skill. And depending on how the Renaissance period is defined (geographically and temporally), firearms in P:E could still be very much at that standard of needing to hit joints, or could be capable of punching through plate.

Given the intermixing of races within cultures that Josh has mentioned in a couple of updates, I don't think we'll see something quite so simple as "the major Human faction."

Taking Monte Carlo's bait = always a mistake.

They said explicitly in one of the early updates that the printing press does not yet exist in P:E's world.

Increasing slowly. I liked the way NWN2 (via 3.5) handled it, because it gave you a chance to redirect your character based on what you were perceiving to be useful in the game, without making a wholesale adjustment.

Realistically, the situation should have changed drastically by the time you return. The opponents should either have had time to better prepare for your arrival, or else left the scene entirely. But that is in the hands of the developers. I think an intelligent way they could deal with this sort of thing is simply to respawn a new coterie of minions/protectors of the boss, without loot. Only really works if you get XP for objective completion, not monster killing, though.

Sounds like an excellent idea, if the ability exists commonly enough in P:E's world to manage that sort of binding. I'm all for the souls-without-bodies thing showing up.

Some basic level of tactics would be excellent so I can avoid having to believe both that a) my companions are actual characters with minds and personalities and b) they don't know how to defend themselves when attacked without instruction. I'm exaggerating somewhat, but micromanagement down to a very basic level of tactics hurts my immersion.

The point of the game is not to repeat what was done before, but to build on the things that were done well to produce a new experience evocative in part of past games. The market for straight nostalgia of that kind isn't $4.1 million and 79,000 backers strong.

Maybe not necessarily this particular curveball, but I would be greatly pleased if Obsidian really reached outside the confines of the usual for at least one race.

If the relationship is more mentor/mentee than parent/child, I'm fine with that. The PC seems to me to be on the mentee side of that relationship far too often, and it'd be a lovely change of pace for the PC to be a mentor.