tajerio

Agreed. I couldn't get over the idea that the big lunk in front of the party was essentially exercising a limited type of mind control over every enemy we faced, regardless of their intelligence and training, their leadership and discipline, or their ability to comprehend human speech. I couldn't help but imagine how much more interesting and fun the game would be if tactical positioning were a more realistically effective way to manage which party members faced the brunt of enemy attacks. Of course, such an approach would've forced everybody to play the game the way I played it-- zoomed all the way out in the overhead tactical view and pausing every 4 seconds on average. You play like a Man, and I approve of this post. Hey now, Monte, my girlfriend played the exact same way. Can't have you being gender exclusive in a BioWare game thread.

That's really not what the Defender mode does though. It's NOT all or nothing. Instead, it creates a cost-benefit situation. Moreover, to use it really effectively you'll need a chokepoint in the first place.

I think that's basically what we know. I'd add only that every class starts with a bonus in a pair of skills.

I don't see any reason to assume that an attack of opportunity is any more than a regular "default" attack that is made immediately and has a much increase chance of hitting. I wouldn't expect a single default attack (even if it were an automatic critical) to be so serious as to either immediately kill your foe nor weaken the foe to the point where they are no longer a threat. If it prevents the opponent from moving through your zone of control at all (even with an attack of opportunity) then we are getting back into "flypaper" territory. I understand the problem that such abilities are trying to solve -- but the ability of monster's to bypass tanks to threaten weaker / more vulnerable targets is one of the few advantages that opponents in CRPGs have. Any ability that is designed specifically to eliminate this capability is deeply worrying to me. Josh isn't trying to eliminate the ability of enemies to bypass the front line on the way to the casters. He's trying to attach some cost to doing that, so that enemies can't waltz right by your careful tactical positioning, thumbing their noses on their way to stomping your wizard. Instead, the AI has to make a "choice," about whether taking the hit is worth it in order to attack the casters or the ranger or whoever's back there. And you as the player will probably be faced with the same situation.

Well, as to your first point I think there are several posts above that outline differences between PoE and DA:O. Also, I'm not sure I'd consider DA:O an action RPG. The pausing, ability to control multiple characters, and slowness of the combat would seem to militate against that--not to mention that player skill has no effect on whether or how attacks connect. To me, it's kinda halfway to action RPG but not all the way there. As to the second, if you consider per-day abilities a cooldown then all the IE games had cooldowns.

I think there are a few major differences between likely PoE combat and DA:O combat that would tend to make PoE a lot more like the IE games: 1. Extensive class variety: DA:O has three classes, two of which aren't really that different from one another (hell, warrior and rogue share the entire Dual Weapon and Archery family of talents). PoE, on the other hand, has eleven classes, each with their own suite of abilities, which is a lot more reminiscent of the IE class-with-kit variety. 2. Ruleset symmetry between player and AI: In DA:O, enemies have abilities the player can't have, the player has abilities the enemies can't have, and the enemies have hitpoint totals that occupy another universe than those of the player's party. In PoE, Josh is aiming for the AI and player to draw from a not-dissimilar ability pool and to be in the same area vis-a-vis hitpoints--which is very like the IE games. 3. Tactical challenge and complexity: 1&2, in my mind, come together to produce this one, plus the fact that PoE has room for six party members while DA:O only allowed four. The tactical challenge of PoE, due to the elimination of hard counters and the smoothing of power progression curves for the different classes, will probably be different from the IE games in kind. But, I submit, it'll be much closer to the IE games in the degree of challenge and complexity than it will be to DA:O. I could add some others, such as the likely breadth of enemies, non-regenerating health, considerable weapon differentiation, and so on, but I think those are the biggies.

Yes, we know there's a "flypaper" ability for fighters. What you pulled out of your behind is that it involves messing with or switching off enemy AI. It merely means that a fighter can stickily engage multiple enemies at once. I would expect that enemy fighters have a similar ability. If the AI, without interference from the player, would accept a disengagement penalty in engage target B, but is blocked from doing so by a player activity ability, this is "disabling the AI". "Taunt" and "Heat" mechanics work on the same principal: granting the player an advantage by forcing the AI to make decisions than it would otherwise avoid. If, after all, the AI would have remained engaged with the fighter without the ability, then what was the point of the ability again? I think it's possible you're incorrectly understanding how engagement works. Everyone can engage one target in melee. If someone tries to move out of the engagement, that provokes a disengagement attack, which is NOT a player activated ability. It just happens, though I believe it has either an accuracy or a damage bonus. This is also a two-way street--if I try to bull past the AI's front line to get to their casters, I'll suffer disengagement attacks in exactly the same manner as the AI would if the AI were trying to bull past my front line. Fighters have an modal ability that allows them to engage three targets--hence the flypaper description. But an AI fighter could use the same mode and make my life difficult. It's not an asymmetric mechanic like aggro in an MMO.

But...isn't this also a 3rd person action RPG with cool-downs? At the moment, I'm not sure what the difference is, unless I missed something. Will this not have cool-downs? Or will it not have lots of action? Or will it not be 3rd person? From what I've seen, it will have special abilities in combat, which, logically, means there'll probably be cool-downs of some sort (because something has to stop you from spamming your best ability as quickly as you can mash the button). Special abilities in combat tends to mean you'll be killing lots of things (rather than killing a few things, as was the case in Baldur's Gate), which indicates action-heavy. And doesn't 3rd person mean viewing the character from somebody else's point of view, as opposed to 1st person? That's not the definition of "action" used in "action RPG" and I know you know it. As for cooldowns, if you, for instance, look at update 71 you'll see that the anti-spamming mechanism appears to be limiting abilities on a per-encounter and per-rest basis.

Thou art a more forgiving man than I, Gunga Din. I can usually understand the motivations of characters who do bad things in fiction, but I almost never sympathize with or feel bad for them.

Please do so, Bryy. Because so far you've managed to come up with a laughably small list by normal RPG standards. 30 different enemies. A number that pitifully minute is not worthy of being compared to what Baldur's Gate 2 gave us, which is easily 5 times that many. And No, this is NOT about "liking one game over another". (I liked Both games. A lot) But a game's Bestiary is not a subjective, opinionated thing. We are dealing with numbers that can be counted. Give credit where it's due. Baldurs Gate 2 did a few things objectively well. Its bestiary is one of them. I don't think that 30 different enemies is necessarily a bad thing--depends how well differentiated they are from another--but I will emphatically agree that BG2 had excellent breadth and depth of enemies.

It's a trollpocalypse!

Me too, but I'm also pretty tired of companies not-making isometric cRPGs. PoE is pretty encouraging when it comes to a lot of things we're tired of. The irony is that the isometric games have held up the test of time very well. They still look beautiful. Morrowind, FFVIII etc? Not so much. Great RPGs but it is amazing just how terrible some of these games look when you see more contemporary 3D games. A lot of that's a question of taste I guess. To me PS:T especially is eye-searingly awful graphically. On the other hand, so are all those earlier 3D RPGs, so maybe I just hate everything.

Martin is an excellent example of someone who confuses "dark and terrible" with "realism." I don't especially like it when games aim for realism, because it's usually code for "everything is really awful for everybody all of the time." That's not realism, that's just a different kind of fantasy, and usually a worse one, because it's so self-conscious. Tajerio: How much have you read A Song of Ice and Fire? You know it tells about kingdom in very turbulent conflict between several of it's noble families? It's not gonna be pretty that's for sure, but "dark and terrible" is far from it. Also I highly doubt Martin ever meant Westeros to be "realistic". That's just his way of crafting and telling a story: Getting into details and going deep inside characters' heads instead of focusing on big picture. There was surely lot of gritty stuff happening in Middle-Earth too during the war of the Ring, we just never saw most of it. What George R.R. Martin has achieved in my opinion is creating completely believable fantasy world inhabited by real people. It means there will be some stuff about tax policies, but mostly it means you are getting bunch ofmaybe the best dialogue ever, interesting tensions all over the place and as the story progresses even some high fantasy starts to raise it's head. ASoIaF is kind of like reversal LotR: In LotR magic is dying; In ASoIaF it has been dead for a long time and is coming back with a bang. "Dark" in the sense that it's a free-for-all intrigue and murder fest, in scores of shades of dark grey-to-black, which might make for fun writing but doesn't bear a very strong relation to the medieval Europe I studied and he's clearly borrowing from; "terrible" in the sense that his writing is absolutely awful. I don't think the people are very real. The concepts behind them might shakily work (the Hound and Tyrion are to me the most believable characters), but because Martin's a bad writer and has worse editing, I don't buy them. Now, that's very much a matter of personal preference and I can understand why someone would think differently. So too, in the end, is believability--some people have more rigorous standards for it than others, and some people have wholly different standards than others do.

My point is more that when I choose to take a potion, the only consequence is that I lose one second to drink it. At least with a lot of other choices there's something else I can't do--not so much with potions. I do agree that there are ways around it. I thought the DA2 way was clunky--what do you mean I can't drink another potion? Why not?--but it did kinda work.

That definition actually just changed about a year ago in the US, so there's a step forward. Of course they can add to the game. But not putting them in can make a game more strategically and tactically challenging than it might otherwise have been, since potions are basically a strictly positive option without downsides in most games (one of the few things I found tactically interesting about the Witcher series is their spin on that).

Martin is an excellent example of someone who confuses "dark and terrible" with "realism." I don't especially like it when games aim for realism, because it's usually code for "everything is really awful for everybody all of the time." That's not realism, that's just a different kind of fantasy, and usually a worse one, because it's so self-conscious. That said, I think Josh is aiming for verisimilitude, which isn't the same thing as realism. Verisimilitude, for a fantasy game, is just making sure that people and the systems they establish still behave like people and the systems they establish in our world. They deal with different things and the laws of physics might be different, but the people stay the same.

Yeah, I'm not sure why this is seen as a step forward other than making the game arbitrarily more "hardcore." Wasn't it Avellone or Sawyer who pointed out that drinking a health potion when your health is low is neither difficult nor tactically interesting? To me, this should go into the dustbin of RPG features, along with "pre-buffing." The problem is that games with regenerating health still have trash fights. Which leads to either a bunch of generic mooks having the ability to take the party down, or a lot of stupidly boring combat. Have fewer, more difficult combats, and regenerating health is great. But since gamers tend to expect lots of combat, and game devs tend to want to put it in, well, it doesn't usually work out. No (or limited) health-regen allows there to be more combat without it necessarily being immediately threatening to the player or boring, since every fight is strategically relevant.

Because the whole romance debate makes my brain melt out of my ears, I'll bring this back up. They've been a bit reticent on mechanics, which makes me mildly suspicious, but overall they've been proclaiming their intention to shoot for a middle spot between DA:O and DA2. So your paratrooper enemies are gone. Health no longer auto-regens to full. It either doesn't auto-regen at all or it regens to the nearest quarter--they haven't been exactly clear. Their idea behind that is not to have the godawful boring-arse trash fights of DA2. Aside from the fact that warriors and rogues appear to have some goofy chain-pulling move that looks like the powertech from SWTOR, I couldn't tell you much more about combat. I do know that they're aiming for a synthesis of exploration of large open areas with a critical path plot, instead of the six areas of DA2. Part and parcel of that is no level scaling. I could tell you more but I'm not entirely sure what else you'd want to know.

Ditto. Deluxe edition. Does it come with the table? Yeah. the table's actually an interactive thing that you use to dispose of your Inquisition forces.

No. (h/t Volo)

Not strictly on topic but they are still very much aiming for a point between two stools with Inquisition, at least from everything I've read about the combat.

Particularly since DA:O's combat is slow without being particularly tactically challenging, I don't think this ought to be a worry. The tactical challenge of combat has been in the team's mind from day 1, and nothing that's been said since has caused me to believe that they're deviating from that focus in combat.

I guess my problem with this is: I think "Fighter" is a touch too broad to be an archetype. To me, it's a description that doesn't signify much more than someone who doesn't use magic in battle. Within that description, there are archetypes that expand upon how somebody fights. Rogues, brutes, barbarians, stalwart soldiers, etc. are all fighters in my lexicon.

Well you did ask why rogues can't be as good as fighters. Which implies there's something wrong. So you don't think it's true that there is an objective right or wrong in the debate concerning Rogues, especially in AD&D which you've referenced in your posts. Correct--I have a personal preference but I'm very much aware that it's personal and not universal. A lot of people seem to think that there IS something objectively wrong with a rogue being as competent in combat as a fighter, though, and I was curious as to why that was. That's how Obsidian are explaining their roles. Heavy hitters and tanks. That's the shorthand they're using--I think the actual terms Josh used in update #71 were heavy hitters and the front line--but there's a lot more subtlety to it than just "this guy does the damage, this guy takes the damage."

So what is your answer to the Rogue? And 4th edition is very much part of this discussion. Do you think PoE is getting it right by slotting it into the DPS role? Compared to the Fighter who isn't. I think that the approach PoE is trying could end up being one that's quite fun, though I won't know until I play. "Getting it right," though, implies that there is an objective right and wrong in the debate, and I don't think that's true. I'm also suspicious of categorizing rogues as DPS and fighters as non-DPS. Comparing them in one instance of dealing damage, yeah, the rogue will deal more than the fighter. Across forty seconds, well, the fighter's durability and accuracy bonus would seem to have a pretty fair shot at giving him higher sustained damage. But both of those things can be described with the term DPS. And that doesn't mention the ability the fighter has to control the battlefield with engagement, or the rogue's ability to inflict status effects. Their roles are more complex than the bog-standard MMO "DPS and tank."