rjshae

Gear repair in Fallout 3 and Oblivion was an interesting element of those FPS games. But I'm not sure that armor and weapon degradation wouldn't be just too much detail in a game of this scope. It's kind of like food and drink: you can more or less assume the party is taking care of it during their spare time. But perhaps it is something that can be added to the Expert mode?

I'm fine with the standard progression of treasure in D&D. It's an important part of the game experience and one of the more enjoyable elements of the PnP version.

Grappled!

Au contraire. Charts and data without a proper design is just wasted effort.

The whole thing sounds pretty fishy to me...

Doing otherwise would probably have taken a fair amount of coding effort: you've got to hide the benefits of the item from the player while still providing those benefits during combat. Otherwise, what is the point of having an Identify spell or a Lore skill? Perhaps they need a different mechanic than the old Identify magic item concept. Maybe magic has to be attuned to a person (or party) before its powers can be used? If it is not attuned, then perhaps it is liable to act in a mysterious manner with the benefits varying chaotically?

Another approach is fractals. I know they have fractal-based systems for generating terrain. Somebody must have done comparable work with fractal texture generation. That may be useful for generating consistent, non-repeating terrain patterns, such as grasslands or desert sand. Basically trading disk memory for CPU load. Fractal-based, non-repeating? I thought fractals were about a pattern repeating itself so it looks the same close up or far away. It's the way nature repeats itself, so it makes sense to have fractal patterns in tile systems of nature. Yes they are self-similar, but that doesn't mean they must produce identical, repeating patterns like tiles. For example, you can use fractal algorithms to generate any number of trees, no two of which are the same. But it's probably too much work to be worth implement anyway, unless there's a graphics library handy.

The main benefits of fly and levitate to a mage would be two-fold: to get beyond the reach of melee weapons and to move to places you can't reach as easily through ground movement. It should be possible to simulate either of these capabilities without building an elaborate flying simulator. Flying, for example, could be a point-to-point teleporter with a visual effect. Levitation moves the character slightly higher above their ground marker, accompanied by a visual effect, and adds melee immunity against those on the ground.

I have no idea, but I hope they don't use the borked up system they have in Neverwinter Nights 2. That game allowed a character to identify all but the most powerful magic item with just a single point in the Lore skill. That made it totally useless to spend skill points on Lore until you got to very high levels.

Another approach is fractals. I know they have fractal-based systems for generating terrain. Somebody must have done comparable work with fractal texture generation. That may be useful for generating consistent, non-repeating terrain patterns, such as grasslands or desert sand. Basically trading disk memory for CPU load.

Taking the crossword puzzle approach might help a little. If you knew the answer was 6 characters long, that would help avoid the situation of knowing the right answer but not typing in the right word.

They could perhaps solve the DR penetration issue by employing a non-symmetrical damage distribution scheme. In most games you have an equal chance of rolling the low damage score as the high damage score. But, in all likelihood, the high damage score should be more infrequent: you're targeting a smaller part of the opponent, so there's a smaller chance of hitting it. Example: Rather than rolling a 1d6 for damage, the system could roll, say, two 1d12 and choose the lowest score. 75% of the time the damage will be down in the 1-6 range, but a quarter of the time you'll get damage from 7-12. Hence, even if the opponent has a DR of 8, you'd still have a chance of causing at least some damage. There might be a better mechanism for implementing this, but the point is that a non-symmetrical distribution can be more representative of combat reality and it can allow even a small weapon to inflict damage to a heavily armored opponent.

^^^^ There is such a thing as too much information. Companies don't feed weekly reports to their stockholders. I don't think most of us contributed just so they could feed the forum discussions.

Haven't been to a real theater in several years. Can't stand those loud ads blasting at you for fifteen minutes straight. (Unfortunately I have really good hearing and I can't tune it out, even with earplugs.) Grumble, grumble, ... The last bluray I picked up that I really enjoyed was Outlander. It's a fun popcorn movie and I've watched it several times since.

Character development is all well and good, but half the fun of a D&D-style game is the cool magic items. I don't particularly want to make it to the end of the game fighting with a broom handle. I can, and have, played low magic games already. There's nothing special about that approach. Personally, I signed on for a Baldur's Gate experience; not a medieval western. The standard D&D item progression works fine for me. It doesn't overwhelm the player's own attributes, but it does allow you to take on tougher and more interesting opponents. My 2cp worth.

Quest markers may be a feature that belongs on the easy (Casual Gaming?) mode; something for people who want to speed through the exploration aspects and get directly to the meat of the game.

I understand your concerns, but I see a problem with your statement about what players want. Not every player is looking for the same features in a game; some of the elements that have you concerned are the same features that others find very appealing. Personally I'm taking a wait and see approach; I like a lot of what the developers have detailed thus far. Their general philosophy matches the type of experience I enjoyed in the IE games, but they are also adding in some gaming features that have been introduced since that time. Hopefully it will become an enjoyable blend.

Okay, so do you want a system where that decision takes 3 seconds to quickly assess, or 3 minutes to analyze in detail? (This being my point. )

In the general sense though, I wonder how complex this system should be? Computer games can handle a lot of mechanics that would be unpleasantly detailed for a tabletop game. But you can reach a level of diminishing returns. Sometimes simpler can be better, with just enough detail to allow interesting decisions to be made, but not enough that it turns into a grind just to pick the right armor for the right occasion.

Okay, a couple of points here. First, this is not medieval Europe. The chronology will be different, as will the introduction of technology. All the authors need to do is create a timeline where the two-handed appears at or before the events in this story. Second, in many instances the characters will not be fighting a pitched battle against a well-armed and armored force. A two-handed weapon employed against a wild creature need only make contact with sufficient force to inflict damage. It doesn't have to fence with a rapier wielded by a bear. But in the situations where parrying does matter, it's up to the game designers to take that into account. Perhaps some weapons will provide a defense bonus against frontal attacks, in which case two-handed swords probably wouldn't receive that. Or they could just fudge things over and assume things will balance themselves out. If they want to simulate the unwieldiness of two-handed swords, the designers can do so with Strength minimums; just give the great sword a high strength requirement. Anybody below that strength will get a penalty and most likely won't use it, Thanks.

The background graphics look like they will be stunning and I assume the character animations will be visually appealing and anti-aliased. What intrigues me though is what the effects will look like. The old IE spell effects were clunky looking, even though they improved on the GoldBox games. The effects were greatly improved by the time of NWN2, but that game was pretty hard on the graphics engines of the time. I'm wondering what quality of graphics they are looking at for visual effects and what generation of GPU we'll need to drive them at a satisfactory rate?

That would make sense in lieu of the fact that the game encourages mages to wear some form of armor. Bullets that freely penetrate the defenses of an arcane veil (or whatever it was called) would do full damage against an unarmored target. Damage-reducing armor would probably be a nice way of modeling that (as well as being a more realistic approach in general).

But only if the game allows 23 different types of polearms...

Mmm... I'm going to guess 'cost'. The Romans had lorica segmenta, but it was costly and harder to maintain.

Or the miser's variant: the Bag of Hoarding.