rjshae

^^^^ I wonder though whether flank/rear attacks would compensate for that somewhat. That is, even if your attack odds are low, if you can attack from the rear you will still have some chance for a crit. In that case, a mob attack becomes something to be feared.

For the purpose of simplicity, perhaps an "endless supply of X" is something you can gain during the game by cutting a commodity deal with a merchant's guild? Say, 500 gp to supply the party with ordinary arrows; 5,000 gp for improved flight arrows, and so forth. A cool-down would then just represent you drawing from this stash. Sure it's somewhat abstracted, but it would smooth out those pesky logistical details. I could actually see a savy merchant guild cutting deals like that. They may calculate that as an adventurer either (a) you will die before collecting the net worth of all those arrows, or (b) you will want to pay even more to get a commodity upgrade. If the merchant guild cuts enough such deals, on average they will come out ahead. The "endless arrows" commodity can just be treated like an item that has a cool-down power.

Meh, I'm not hung up about it. There's usually so much going on in a party-based game that I usually don't spend much time focusing on the particulars of the character animations. As long as they aren't jarring, I'm okay with just a few animations. They could always just implement rag-doll physics for the death drop.

Perhaps, but that would appear to go against the canon in the films. Yoda didn't use healing to cure himself from the lightning attack in the film series; he withstood it.

Sensible group AI behavior is probably difficult to implement because there are so many interactions to take into account; increasing as n-squared. But it might be reasonable to implement a type of cooperative AI based upon the nearest neighbor's behavior. I.e. find your nearest neighbors within a certain radius, see what they are doing, then give a percentage chance to cooperate with one of them. If the neighbor is badly damaged, the character could counter-attack his attacker. If the nearest neighbor is charging an opponent, then join in the charge. If the nearest neighbor is an archer that is being melee attacked, battle the opponent so the archer can withdraw. &c.

Why do they need a healing power when the game already has healing packs? If the draw is the Jedi from the films, then why do they need to add powers in order to make them non-boring? That makes no sense.

Looking at the perks in the OP, I think I see one issue there: my understanding is that the developers are not leaning toward social skills like Intimidate. Your character's thuggish nature would come across just from the way that you respond to dialogue choices. "Dutch Courage" (sometimes called "Liquid Courage") seems like a reasonable perk; you gain some type of performance benefits from being inebriated -- perhaps an improved willpower and the ability to ignore "miss" wounds. The ability to summon a war dog... well, that might be crossing over into class-specific abilities a little too much. I tend to prefer taking perks that don't just replicate something that you could gain anyway just by advancing in level. Thus, I don't care for skill bonuses, but I do like unique tactical abilities.

The KOTOR series overplayed the whole Jedi powers ability. In the films it was generally a subtle thing; mainly consisting of some TK, intuitive hunches, and remote empathy. There was non insta-heal ability apparent.

Well, they could start by getting rid of the name 'feat'. The word 'talent' seems more appropriate.

That (loot damage) would be okay for random loot drops; less so for pre-positioned treasure and quest items.

In BG it's a real nuisance to know who still had the Find Traps mode enabled, so I'd like a simple means to identify whenever a character has a stateful mode active. For example: search mode, power attack, or tracking. An icon next to the character portrait would be nice for this, or some type of visual effect.

I wonder if it would make sense to have endless mundane arrows, but with a cooldown period? I.e. to simulate shooting off X arrows in a row then resetting your stock. I know some people are opposed to cooldowns, but perhaps that would be less objectionable than micromanaging your stock of ammo. Possibly the player could then gain talents that speed up the cooldown rate or improve the types of endless arrows.

It'd be nice if there was an easy mechanism, perhaps even an AI rule, that causes an archer to switch from regular ammo to scarcer but more effective ammo. In BG it was kind of a pain to do so, given the number of potential targets and the task of opening the inventory and swapping ammo in and out.

Awww....

Was it BG where they had the PC head-scratching animation while wielding a wacking-great weapon in the sword hand? Amusing, that was.

I like the little bits of background clutter that add atmosphere to a setting. The mysterious stains on the wall, a hole in a thatched roof, broken windows, a leaning chimney, cow piles in the pasture, leaves floating down the stream (Drakensang!), old hand-built stone walls, a dilapidated door hanging on one hinge, rocks from a partly collapsed tunnel ceiling, a scruffy kid chasing a dog down the street, the woman leaning out of a window to dump slop from a pitcher, a field left fallow, a war veteran walking with a limp, the charred remains of an old burnt building, a stuffy wizard smoking a pipe by the fire, the unfilled hole in a cobble road, a cat licking up the slop from the floor, an old woman carrying a large bundle of sticks on her back, a barrel maker, ...

How does this argument make any kind of sense? You use up arrows; you don't use up a melee weapon. I don't really care that it doesn't seem "fair" for archery not to have the same advantages as melee. Tough sh*t; war is brutal. The benefit of the bow is that you stay out of harms way while killing off some of your opponents. The rest you'll just have to deal with by other means.

Having a limited stock of arrows shouldn't be discouraging, since spellcasters suffer from the same limitation. It's a matter of the developers properly balancing the game and players being more flexible in their tactics. If each archer has, say, 24-36 conventional arrows available at a time, those should readily last through most battles. They can then use their gear inventory to hold special purpose arrows for those situations where the opponent would be too tough to finish off rapidly. (Note that most medieval quivers only held up to about a dozen arrows; many archers just carried the arrows stuck through their belts.)

But, more importantly, will we have a "shake your groove thing" victory dance animation?

I disagree with your assertion that "most people" dislike archery in games; that's just an unsubstantiated opinion on your part. I've used archery in virtually every FRPG I've ever played, and I don't see matchlock weapons replacing that (if only because of the painfully slow reload). What I wouldn't mind seeing is a mechanism to restock arrows in between fights. I.e. limit the available arrows during combat, but allow an automatic draw upon stored stocks when the combat ends. In this sense it would work somewhat like spells.

This scares me. It will either be very good, or it will suck horribly. And we have had too much horrible already. meh. Oh come on, you can whine better than that.

Hello Mr. Bremerkamp, and thank you for your comments. I look forward to seeing your work.

They had something comparable with the camp companions in DA. I could imagine hiring a few henchmen guards to protect the loot, a cook, animal handlers, and so forth.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." -- Albert Einstein. Otherwise known as degenerate gameplay.

The ability to provoke a mass pillow fight in the brothel and sneak off with the elixir of maddening lust during the ensuing mayhem.