rjshae

My understanding is that Stamina is not going to be used for non-combat activities.

Short-ranged click = walk; mid-ranged click = jog; long-ranged click = run. Greater speed = greater likelihood of being spotted or heard from a distance.

I'd like to second BasaltineBadger's comments above; this has been so overdone. If powerful items are made available, the process of acquiring them should somehow be made very exclusive. The other one, of course, is a generic +X weapon, armor, or shield. Every magical item should have some form of distinctiveness, even if it is only minor. This could be a small skill or save bonus, or perhaps a minor attack-only bonus against particular enemies. I'd also like to find useful items that include negative qualities so that the player must make tradeoff decisions.

The only reason games used a nice even distribution of damage like 1d8 is because anything else is more complicated and time consuming. But there's no reason they need to do this on a computer. A more realistic approach would likely use a normal distribution, putting the damage on a bell curve. This is very easy to implement using the Box-Muller transform; requiring just two U(0,1) random numbers plus the log, sin, and cos functions. Doing this is trivial on a computer. The game designers would just vary the mean and deviation of the distribution depending on the weapon type and other factors.

Yes, that's true. But in that case the timeline of the stronghold development would need to be significant in the main campaign. The developers would essentially have to force your hand and make you borrow, or face calamity.

Yes, the AI for DA:O was pretty decent and I can definitely live with something like that. What I really want though, is to control the party's tactical positioning. In DA:O, the party size of 4 was too small and it didn't even allow you to form a front. As a result, all the battles just felt like the same roaming skirmishes. I hated the fact that I formed a bottleneck at an opening but the enemy just squirted through at will. (It felt even worse in DA2.) Hopefully that will be much improved with the six member troupe in OE.

The problem with cursed items is the problem with traps: game reloads. To avoid this, the curse effect would have to be insidious, gradually working its magic over the course of a significant length of game play. Alternatively, cursed items have benefits that must be weighed against the imposed penalties.

If there is no XP for killing monsters, then that changes the dynamic of respawning enemies. Respawned monsters become a deterrent against withdrawal; if you retreat from a locale to restore your health, then you may have to fight your way back in again.

It must be a slow news day...

My understanding is that the elements of the scene are initially being rendered in 3D, then projected onto 2D followed by artistic touch-ups. That means they will have the 3D information and can use that to determine shadows from the Sun/Moon directional lighting as well as from fixed point sources. If they wanted to, they could use the 3D information to generate the shadows only for each Sun/Moon position (and other lights), then turn that into an overlay. It should be monochromatic data, so I wouldn't think it would take up much disk space.

They could be found on coastal areas. Kind of like sahuagin from D&D. Sahaugin die within a day if they can't immerse themselves in water. You could change it to lizardfolk, but their primary advantage is a thick hide: you don't need an aquatic race for that. ... and coastal areas don't have any water nearby? I don't see your point. The party travels a day's march from the sea on a quest. Your aquatic companion dies. The point is that an aquatic physiology is at the minimum not a benefit, and possibly even an encumbrance, for a non-aquatic campaign. If there are balancing factors then that would be fine. But an aquatic nature in and of itself usually isn't useful unless there is swimming involved.

"Monk" is no more out of place than "Druid" would be in a non-celtic setting. What matters is that the class is integrated into the society, culture, and history; there needs to be a valid reason for those roles to exist in this setting.

I like having a distinction between defense and damage resistance. Beyond that, "keep it simple" usually works. I'm sure the developers will come up with a good design that works for their system.

To give item identification any depth, I think they would need to provide more than one set of descriptive information for every magic item. For example: Unidentified -- it looks like a well-made sword and is very useful for opening envelopes. Qualified -- it is unusually well balanced weapon and has some magical properties, giving it a 5-10% better chance of striking a foe and inflicting around 4-8% more damage. The weapon seems to hum slightly when you breath upon it. Identified -- this is the long lost sword of the winds. It improved attack odds and damage by +9%, while gaining a +24% to critical attacks against winged creatures and air elementals. The wielder gains a +1 to Parry and once per day it can cast gust of wind. You get a Qualified result after using it for a period, or by studying it with a low Lore skill. Identified requires a much higher Lore skill, either by a player or from an expert using various identification techniques.

I wouldn't mind seeing a method for displaying skills as a "group". That is, certain skills can benefit from the synergy of the group working together. For example, the sneak skill of the group would not necessarily be equal to the lowest sneak skill within the group. The more skillful members can signal the poor sneak skill members to avoid noisy surfaces, move more slowly over certain areas, halt until a distraction occurs, and so forth. Another example is the Appraise skill, which can benefit from multiple members with that skill, even if just one party member has a high skill ranking.

Troll with a capital 'T'...

Can anybody answer the question of how difficult it would be for a complex, 2D object to self-shadow? I guess you would need to simulate it through an invisible 3D model, then project the resulting shadow onto the structure's 2D image and subtract out the concealed parts. For something like a tree, that would seem to be be messy and compute intensive. A thought occurs: they could use a series of pregenerated shadows as semi-transparent overlays. Just fade between each over the intervening time. (Probably storing the shadow deltas would be the most efficient.)

They could be found on coastal areas. Kind of like sahuagin from D&D. Sahaugin die within a day if they can't immerse themselves in water. You could change it to lizardfolk, but their primary advantage is a thick hide: you don't need an aquatic race for that.

An aquatic race would seem to be handicapped as a surface creature.

...now just imagine that scene 20 pixels tall.

Dude, you're just digging yourself in deeper. Try taking the mental perspective of a female player.

That does have a certain cultural connotation, particularly if STDs don't communicate well between the different races. It may lead to some decadent cultures where the most desirable prostitutes are non-human. Long-lived elven consorts could develop their expertise into a political tool for manipulating short-lived and weak-willed humans. After 500 years, an elven Cipher consort may be a beautiful but very dangerous individual with a lot of influence.

Yeah, another skewed poll. I think women should be small, pixilated figures with barely discernible features in the game. But the text can paint just about any picture it wants in your mind short of soft porn. The only aspect that really matters here is whether figures can appear nude in the inventory/paper doll panels. I very much doubt that they will. But it would be good if they weren't overly prudish with granny panties and so forth.

If it's done in the medieval pattern, then a military stronghold is a right granted by the nobility, or earned through force of arms. It's not a house paid for by the owner.

For the really expensive stuff they could do away with most of the currency and just use barter, possibly combined with auctioning. The barter could be represented by a rare and precious type of object greatly desired by the most powerful individuals; such as a "Spirit Stone". If you want that +5 long sword, it'll cost you a basic sum just to get you in the trade, plus 20 Spirit Stones. These stones can be made too precious (and dangerous) for trade with normal merchants, so the natural tendency is to horde them (or go to a limited number of places to sell them for a heavy mark-down). If the stones can be made useful for other activities, like item crafting, the player will need to decide whether to use them up or horde them. Their very usefulness for powerful individuals is also what makes them hazardous to own. Using Spirit Stones as trade items for expensive gear allows the game's other currency requirements to be lowered.