SunBroSolaire

Great, another victory for design by committee. Can't wait to play Project Eternity, the upcoming game from legendary game designers Something Awful, RPG Codex, and Obsidian Forums.

Holy ****. I salute your determination here Sensuki.

You now no longer take crafting for crafting as a power gamer, you take it for item durability reduction. You think the durability bonus will be a greater benefit than actually making new weapons? What are you basing that assumption on? It totally depends on how durability is tuned. Assuming that it will be such a huge advantage that fighters will have to take it to optimize class, seems ludicrous.

I am talking specifically about power-gaming. The Rogue will benefit the most from Stealth because they do the most single target damage. So having a Rogue will max stealth will mean you can sneak up real close to enemies and deal a bucket full of damage in one strike. Rangers are supposed to be next in line regarding single target damage as per D&D4E, so they would be the next most beneficiary. Having it on a monk is useful when you get abilities like "Stunning Fist"/"Quivering Palm" etc. And we likely will get abilities like those, so what is your point? You seem to be suggesting that it would be a bad thing if there was an optimal configuration for crafters, but then your talking about power gaming, so..? So what if it is optimal to take crafting as a fighter? I think it's very unlikely that it will be optimal to focus on crafting with more than one character, but that's impossible to say without more information. Optimizing should be hard. If a choice doesn't involve real tradeoffs, it isn't a real (or at least not an interesting) choice. Tying durability to crafting gives that skill more value and makes optimizing harder. I don't see how that is a bad thing.

You can't say it's going to be a chore yet. I feel like your having a knee-jerk reaction here. Do you really think Tim Cain or Josh Sawyer are going to design a totally useless mechanic that's just a chore? Not saying that anything they say is automatically great, but they're really good game designers and it seems a little dismissive to just assume you know better than them.

Sure, but if you are power gaming, leveling up your crafting means that you will not be able to have high points in both stealth and mechanics - so you'll need another party member to compensate probably on the mechanics shortfall. It's definitely not about loss aversion for me, I would rather see a Diablo 2 item durability system than have Crafting and Weapon Maintenance lumped together to give people an excuse to take Crafting on multiple characters, it seems like a clumsy excuse to keep Crafting in the skill pool rather than just keep it as a separate action like BG2 and KotOR2. Remember that Sawyer has said other classes will have equally high starting skils in Mechanics and Stealth, so the Rogue isn't locked into being the mechanics and stealth guy. If you already have your Monk focusing on stealth it might be a good fit for the Rogue to pick up crafting. We'll have to see what the other skills are before we know what classes will do best with crafting. Are there weapon or armor skills? Those would probably give a much more tangible benefit to Fighters and Paladins.

There's no wasting money. Repair costs are proportional to damage, so fixing a sword twice from 70% should cost about the same as fixing it once from 40%. You know this? Anyway, I was speaking to the fact that it will likely be less efficient to constantly repair than to preemptively repair anything under 75%. Say you repair all your equipment once before you go dungeon spelunking. Than half way through, your equipment dips below 75%, so you run back to town and repair everything back up. Then you finish the dungeon off, find some good loot and level up. Now not only is your crafter more efficient at repairing, but you likely don't even have to repair some of your gear, since you found replacements in the dungeon. The most efficient path will be to wait until the last possible second to repair equipment, unless repair costs are balanced very weirdly. I think it's waaay early to jump to conclusions like that. We have no idea how it will actually feel, unless you're thinking of a game with similar mechanics. I did not feel that kind of black cloud tension in Dark Souls or New Vegas. Well. the main reward of the crafting skill is access to unique items. Durability is only an ancillary benefit, and incidentally, only an ancillary punishment for not picking up the skill.

I didn't like the IE games all that much. P:T had awesome writing, and they all had great visuals and music, but beyond that... I backed this project because I want Josh Sawyer, Tim Cain, Chris Avellone, George Ziets, Eric Fenstermaker, and all the other talented folks whose names I don't know (sorry!) to make a hardore RPG that isn't a Bioware or Bethesda clone. I'm getting pretty much exactly what I wanted and what I felt that they promised, though I worry sometimes that they're listening too much to the vocal minority on the forums.

Personally I would love some simmy minigames, but I really doubt we'll get anything like that. Doesn't seem like Sawyer's style to add in some minigames just for fun and/or verisimiltude. Maybe Tim Cain could sneak some in, though. If any of you guys played that Candy Box game that was big for a few days there, it had some pretty fun crafting. All the recipes were really vague and you had to 'cook' in real time, so it felt sort of like real cooking/baking where you're not sure if you did it exactly right. For some reason I'm sure Josh would never allow something like that, but I would dig it.

It's true that we will have to tune whatever values we wind up using for money you get and money you spend, but my higher-level concern is systemic. If there aren't core systemic drains, many players will simply wind up with a lot of money toward the end of the game. Many of you don't seem to care about this, but as I said earlier, I've heard complaints about it on every game I've shipped. I care about this! New Vegas had a really great game economy. I've been hoping you would do similar things with PE.

I wonder if cooking / enchanting is a separate skill or combined?

You should develop a negative psychological response to wasting money on I disagree that there's no reward. As you say, it will create a concern in the back of your mind. Then when you repair your stuff at the forge you relieve that concern. Tension/release is inherently rewarding. I wouldn't mind if they added a temporary buff when your weapons are above 90%. 'Sharpness' bonus, or something. Make sure it doesn't last long enough that people would rely on it, but it would give a nice extra reward for keeping equipment in good shape. Kind of like the 'well rested' buff in the Fallout games.

No, because there isn't percentile damage reduction like in New Vegas or Dark Souls. As long as weapons don't get down to 0% durability, your character isn't penalized. So just repair your stuff in town between quests; you only need one crafter. You could argue that there's a cost associated with not picking up crafting for frontliners, because they take the most abuse and therefore benefit the most from better degradation rates, which is a valid point, but there is also an opportunity cost for not picking up any other skill. I seriously doubt the small amount of cash you save by having to repair your equipment less frequently is enough of a benefit that it will overshadow other skills. That is only an ancillary benefit after all, while skills like stealth, or lockpicking or whatever are actually giving your character a primary advantage. So I would conclude that it is still suboptimal to have multiple crafters in your party. Now that I think about it, I wonder how they'll handle other skills like lockpicking.

Durability is a good feature, if implemented well. It adds a little complexity to resource management, and makes the game more interesting in general. For one thing, it provides another attribute to compare items by. For example, in Dark Souls, Crystal weapons were way overpowered, but they had such low durability that it was risky to upgrade a weapon along that path. Second, the crafting skill is pretty unnecessary if it's only used for creating unique weapons. Including durability gives crafters a real combat benefit. Finally, like Josh said, game needs money sinks. As long as items don't degrade too quickly. New Vegas was just a little on the fast side, but you could repair items on the go so it wasn't too annoying. Dark Souls nailed it.

Bear in mind that all (I think all?) classes have their own stamina healing abilities. In that context, and in the context of dual HP pools, auto-regeneration is not such a crazy idea as it would be the IE games. After thinking about it for a bit this morning, I kind of like the idea. It will create a strong impetus to keep pressure on the fighter, since letting up for even a few seconds means losing ground. It kind of forces them to be a high priority target, reinforcing their role as the front line of defense. For the player, it means your fighter is being 'wasted' if he isn't in the middle of the battlefield. Yeah, seems like a potentially good idea. We'll see when the actual game comes out, of course.

Punishing is the wrong word for what EC is trying to say. Punishing difficulty suggests severe consequences for doing something wrong. Dark Souls is definitely punishing. Small mistakes can set you back an hour, or sometimes even have permanent, intractable consequences. That's punishing. Inconsistent, cheap, or unfair are better words for the type of difficulty they're criticizing. I suppose they didn't use those words because, yeah OBVIOUSLY cheap difficulty is not a good thing. I think it's a really important distinction, though. Conventional wisdom these days seems to suggest that games should minimize frustration by curbing or eliminating punishment. The auto-save feature that's present in all new games is the perfect example of this philosophy. The thinking is that a game shouldn't waste the players time with boring repetition, which is an admirable goal. There can be problems with that approach to games though. First, you're making sure the player gets through the game, but not that they understand the game. When you play a punishing game like Dark Souls or Age of Decadence, you learn how to play. When you play a relatively forgiving game, like Skyrim, you really never have to get any better at the game because mistakes are not corrected. You can just kind of coast through the whole campaign, maybe retrying the occasional section every once in a while, but basically making constant progress. So while trying to remove frustration, you actually end up removing one of the most rewarding parts of playing a game, which is mastering systems. I don't think games have to be punishing - you can also make a game more demanding of precision, like Super Meat Boy, or more demanding of analytic thought, like Braid. Those games are very forgiving but still require you to learn the mechanics to progress. Saying that punishing gameplay is always bad just dismisses the validity of learning through repetition. Anyone who's learned to play a musical instrument should know how misguided that is.

The water looks fantastic in the wilderness shot. Like, a lot better than in the old in-game footage. Wonder if it's placeholder, or if they've made some advancements. I'm guessing that Defiance Bay concept is Kaz and the Store Interior is Polina, both are beautiful. New map is a big step up, but one thing that irks me about these maps is, what's with all the tan territory? Is that desert? I'm assuming grassland or something, I just wish map would reflect that. As is, it looks like the Dyrwood is in the middle of a desert. I hope that UI is just a placeholder for level testing, it is fugly. I hate the transparency and shape and the whole layout. The first one they showed was fine.

This stuff would be great, if they can fit it in. The trade caravans and random travelers in New Vegas made the world feel more alive and gave an explanation for the merchant's frequent restocks. Finding bear caves and hunting deer were some of the funnest parts of Skyrim. And of course, the wolves in Arcanum :D. If they have time, I'd love to see this stuff, but I guess I would put it as a lower priority.

Watching the Dreamfall Chapters video now ( /watch?v=EsAmaDfyO6k ), looks really good. It's nice to see more crowdfunded games delivering. Can't wait for the PE presentation though

*raises hand* This wasn't a problem. I've never once played a CRPG where it felt like the combat was anything other than time-wasting filler that got in the way of me enjoying the parts of the game I actually liked. It's my least favorite part of all of them. The last thing I want is a more involved "strategic layer" to get in the way of my fun. Oy. What have you thought of the PE updates so far?

End respawning after the boss is defeated. That game is not very well designed; see the fact that it isn't fun after the first hour. They completely failed to balance the resource management, so it is either trivially easy or impossible depending on luck. PE isn't a survival sim, those kinds of mechanics don't have any place in an IE successor. Besides, resting doesn't need to be a resource if it does not provide the player with an advantage. If enemies respawn, there is no advantage to rest spamming. Nearly every game is like this. What RPG has finite gold in the game economy? There is almost always farming. It's not that hard to add money sinks, though. Equipment durability is a good one. You could keep fighting bandits forever and collecting their gear to sell, but you'll be wearing out your own higher quality gear as you do it. Disposable items like scrolls, potions, arrows, throwing knives, etc... are also good money sinks. And the stronghold, of course. On top of that, item value should deprecate as you flood the market with that item, to discourage boring farming. You don't need (or want) to make farming impossible. Implementing a system of diminishing returns is the best solution.

I disagree that it's a "story driven rpg". Basically everything we've heard so far has been about the combat, we already know that there's no pacifist playthroughs, and dungeon crawling was a major part of the original pitch. I think they should prioritize fun and balanced combat over 'immersion'.

Yes, I support this. It's a simple solution that has worked in games such as Dark Souls. Since Project Eternity will not have combat XP, there would be no incentive to farm enemies or grind. It would also allow more precise balancing, since the designers would have a pretty good idea where players are at in terms of health. I hope they implement this.

Not even exaggerating guys, this is shaping up to be one of the prettiest games ever. When the vertical slice is done, can we expect another video demo?