SunBroSolaire

I'm a little puzzled that he seems to be arguing against the way he himself handled romance in the DA and ME series. All the companions in ME were romance options as far as I can remember. Same for DA2, right? BioWare, and Gaider specifically, are basically the poster-child for pandering wish-fulfillment fantasies.

Totally agree with the OP. If some races/class combinations synergize really well that's fine, but if races are only optimized for a couple different classes that kind of cuts a lot of choice and customization out of character builds. Given what Josh Sawyer has said about weapon proficiencies, I think it's unlikely we'll see any races that will specialize in a specefic type of weapon. I'm too lazy to find the quote right now, but on SA he mentioned that if they implement proficiencies, it will probably be in themed groups like the cowboy and grunt specializations in New Vegas. If they were to give bonuses to Aumua Weapons to all Aumua, bonuses to Orlan weapons for Orlans, etc... that would avoid the trap of locking races into specific classes, since the weapon groups would likely cover a pretty wide range, but would still add a unique feature to each race. Plus it would Make Sense.

how does that make them better? If you can't tell which ones are kamikazes it's just russian roulette. That sounds pretty unfun and unfair to me. I also don't think sprinting enemies in general are great in this kind of game. Fights shouldn't be about reaction time in a rtwp rpg.

Dark Souls also slowed you down based on equipment. Additionally, stamina regenerated slower for more encumbered loadouts. The major difference I see is that in Dark Souls and Mass Effect, even with light equipment you can avoid taking damage. Here, since you can't avoid damage in melee, I think the tradeoff is going to enforce combat roles a little more strictly.

On Formspring, Josh detailed some of the tradeoff mechanics they'll be using for light/heavy armor: Sounds pretty good to me. I was a little surprised they aren't increasing chance to dodge, but then I guess "dodging" still isn't really confirmed. I can see his point about damage avoidance vs. damage mitigation being equivalent benefits. Using attack speed as the incentive to wear light armor makes it more of an interesting choice. The one suggestion I would make here is that maybe instead of basing speed completely on armor type, why not base it on total equip load? He didn't answer whether strength would affect a characters ability to use heavy armor. My instincts say that it should, but I'm not sure what the gameplay benefit would be beyond "realism".

@Ieo: Could be wrong, but I remember D&D combat being decided by a single attack roll. If you roll over the enemies defense threshold (AC in D&D), you do the # damage that you rolled (x3 for critical hits). In Josh's most recent proposed P:E system, if you miss the defense threshold by more than 50%, you get an outright miss. If you miss by less than 50%, you score a glancing blow (50% minimum weapon damage, so your roll doesn't matter). And anything over defense threshold counts as a hit. Then your total attack score is calculated (based on modifiers, not a seperate roll) and compared to Damage Threshold; if it is lower than DT, it does 20% total attack score in damage (40% for crushing weapons), if it is higher, DT is subtracted from attack score and the result is applied as damage. Critical hits do x1.5 maximum weapon damage. Whew... If you were to differentiate dodging from blocking, you could simply compare the original attack roll to "chance to dodge" first. If the attack is under the dodge threshold, no damage is done. If the attack is higher than dodge threshold, follow the directions above. Same as Josh's system, except with defender's dodge threshold calculated independently instead of being a fixed 0.5*(defense). You could still use only a single attack roll. In this system, it would be possible for dodge threshold to be higher than the "block threshold", but in normal circumstances it would probably work similarly to what Josh outlined in his SA post. For normal characters, dodge threshold would be significantly lower than block threshold. You would have to optimize your character to be "dodgy" in order to bring that number up, and that would come at the cost of lower block threshold, and likely, lower damage threshold. By the way, what game is that? PnP or cRPG? It sounds deep.

Ico did something similar, where the language was translated in NG+. I like this idea. It would be a great way to add hidden themes and plot elements to the world. From what Josh has said about the importance of language in P:E, I'm guessing they're already planning something sort of like this.

Yeah, I think it feels more natural to think about it that way. That system you described sounds awesome, but I doubt Sawyer & Cain would go that far with it. Some of these principles would be simple additions to Sawyer's recent proposal, though, such as "to dodge" scaling with DEX, and "to glance" scaling with STR, with other factors also exerting influence. I believe Sawyer already mentioned there will be an active ability to parry, so I don't think that should be abstracted in standard melee combat. To be honest, I think it's a cool idea but likewise, if text represented in a log, it could be the same thing and having "dodge", "block" and "parry" be random generated in the text log. I don't think there's going to be a "block", "parry" or "dodge" animation.... IF there's a dodge animation they should naturally be independent but if there isn't, then I think having the "Log Text"-Representative is simple and fulfilling enough. Rogue has one "dodge" ability so it might be a little bit "Player skill" tied to dodging. Which sounds great Well, I meant "dodge" as in a full miss, and "block" as in a glancing blow. I will edit my post to make it more clear [edit: I cannot edit that post anymore, but I meant dodge = miss, block = glance]. Full misses could be dependent on different stats and details than partial damage glancing blows. The point, very generally, would be that a light, rogue-like character could be very good at dodging but not good at actually deflecting blows that DO land, and conversely, a large, heavy character could be very easy to hit, but much more likely to suffer only partial damage. This would add a little bit of nuance to combat, character building, and equipment planning. Additionally it would make light and medium armor viable late game choices. Finally, it would support "high risk, high reward" characters for those who wanted to pursue that route, and add variety to the enemies.

What do you guys think of the idea of making "chance to dodge" independent of "chance to block"? What I mean is, instead of having "miss" be part of the miss/glance/hit/critical range, miss threshholds could scale seperately from glance thresholds. This could be based on stats, equiped weight, racial traits, and active abilities. The lower your equip burden, the easier it is to dodge attacks completely. Maybe the small Orlans would get a slight bonus to dodging but have poorer overall defence, while the Aumua are easy targets but are more able to deflect attacks. I see a few potential benifits to this idea: 1. Provides a permanent tactical incentive to use light armor. In the armor update, Josh talked about the importance of making character concepts viable through end game. Builds like the loinclothed barbarian, or the leather-armored fencer were typically not viable using older armor class systems. If lightly armored characters have better chances to evade attacks completely, those builds will still be viable (and even optimized), even though their overall defences are lower than a heavily armored tank. 2. It makes "sense". One of the major complaints about the binary hit-miss system seems to be that in low level IE encounters, characters would swing away on eachother for minutes hitting nothing but air. I agree that that felt bad. It doesn't make sense that you can only land one out of every five hits on an orc grunt. It does make sense that you have a hard time hitting an Orlan assassin, though. I think it would be intuitive enough that players would not be confused by the extra math, and maybe it would even feel more intuitive than a static range of miss/glance/hit/crit. 3. It adds an element of tactical consideration to combat. You probably don't want to use your powerful magic nuke on the Orlan assassin, because there's a higher chance it will do nothing, compared to using it on an Ogre, where it is practically guaranteed to do at least some damage. I don't know, what do you guys think?

From Something Awful: So congratulations you pushy bastards though obviously it's not finished yet, it looks like Sawyer might have been swayed... I was fine with the other system, but I admit that this sounds great / possibly better than either of the previous implementations. I like the idea that some character builds could be naturally better at dodging, instead of just ALL characters being better at dodging as they stacked on heavier armor. That always struck me as odd... It would be cool if he went one further and tied %miss to equip load, but that might just be the Dark Souls talking... Still want to hear about ranged attacks, but this gives me more confidence that projectile misses will be possible.

He talked about this on his formspring account. As he said there and here, the system is still being worked on.

Hormalakh: I hope you're right, I just can see getting worn out by the way every little design decision is instantly criticized into oblivion when it isn't exactly the same as Baldur's Gate. I also really hope they aren't taking all of the fan advice too seriously, because 90% of it is seriously ill advised imho.

I wonder how much the PE crew is regretting that open, transparent development initiative right now

edit: eh, never mind. don't want to derail the topic further.

DT is applied to the damage done. So if the hypothetical longsword doing 6-12 damage has a miss result, it does 3 damage, which is then compared to DT. Then it would seem like a lot of misses would be completely negated by DT, or am I misunderstanding damage threshold?

Personally, I backed this more for Obsidian (and specifically Avellone, Cain, and Sawyer) than I did out of nostalgia for the IE games. If I didn't trust them to make a good game, I wouldn't have given them my money. As far as sticking to the IE formula, they said they would try to capture the feel, not exactly replicate the entire D&D system. D&D is complete balls in real time crpgs, frankly I'm shocked so many people are defending it.

BruceVC: I think realistically, companions should have a very compelling personal motive for joining the party in the first place, so their opinion of the PC might not matter terribly much. Have you played the games I cited: Alpha Protocol and Walking Dead? They both did negative relationships very well. Sometimes it was actually in the players best interest to antagonize other main characters, depending on the results you could achieve. Frankly, I don't know what to expect on this topic. I'm really not sure how deep Obsidian are going with the character interactions here. It was one of the three pillars of the original vision statement (exploration, combat, characters/dialogue), but we haven't heard much about reputation mechanics and reactivity. I know that that stuff is more dependent on the writing than on mechanics, but I would love to hear their plans for the design of those things. Obsidian have spoiled me with their constant updates, hehe.

That's fair, but the new system will also have spikes and valleys. idk about you guys, but I would rarely perform a single melee attack in the IE games. Rather, I would set my fighter to hammer away for a few turns, at which point the extreme spikes are smoothed out, and I don't think there will be a huge difference with the new system.

Honestly I did not expect them to stick to the old d&d formula as closely as they have been. Seems like every mechanic or feature they announce is a slight variation on a d&d counterpart. I know it was supposed to be in the style of the IE games, but it's still an original world and RPG system. Imho being tied to the dice and turn based combat was the worst part of those games, and I wouldn't mind Obsidian straying even further from that.

I agree that it feels weird when applied to projectiles. I'm not really strongly in favor of either system over the other, just trying to wrap my head around people's objections.

That has lead in bosses that have 11000 hp and you clip at their health for 5 minutes,following the exact same tactic the whole time.that's not tactics,its tedious.Compare the dragon battles in BG2 and Dragon Age2.Firgraag had 180hp,the other dragons similar or even fewer.The encounters with each would last from 10 seconts(party wipe)to 2 minutes and were more memorable and chalenging than any modern game dragon fight.Dragon age dragon battle: you clip dragons health for 2 minutes(you just spam attacks ,on PC i just clicked on the dragon like it was Diablo or something),dragon flies on a rock,some dracochickens attack you.You kill them,dragon come again.You clip at his point for another 2 minutes(drinking a healing potion when nessesery)he flies away.Repeat the above 3 time and you won But how is it more "challenging" or interesting to have success riding on the rng? I don't like damage sponge bosses either, but I don't think a fight should be determined by attack rolls alone. I don't really see how this would necessarily lead to hp bloat either. If anything, it should allow the designer to have a better idea of the damage a party can inflict over a shorter period of time, and thus design shorter, more balanced encounters. The more random the attack rolls are, the longer the fight will have to be in order to be fair.

I liked DT in New Vegas, so I think it's a good inclusion here. Slashing - piercing - crushing is a good division, I don't think it needs to be any more granular than that. I hope that there are some real benefits to light armor, such as quicker movement, increased chance to evade, etc... I'm sure they will implement some balancing mechanics. Overall, it sounds better than the old AC system in IE games.

I'm not sure I see the problem. Whether they use a miss or glance system, it still boils down to the expected value of melee attacks over a period of time. If I can do 50 damage 50% of the time, and I attack once every 3 seconds, I'm averaging 8.33 dps. If you use a glancing system where I do 50 damage 50% of the time, and 10 damage 50% of the time, I'm averaging 10 dps. I see a lot of hate for dps based combat, but it comes down to the fundamentally the same thing over a long enough encounter, doesn't it? The only difference being, as JES said, random spikes. I don't think more randomness is necessarily such a great thing. I don't play pnp games though, so maybe some of you guys have a different perspective on this.

True, but I think it's just as silly when ALL your companions are potential romances. I also think it is not very good when a companions character arc depends on falling in love with the PC, as in Mass Effect. Just because I don't want to bone some character, that shouldn't mean their character development stops. Ideally I would like to see companion relationships that can resolve in multiple satisfying ways, like in Alpha Protocol or Walking Dead. Whether some of those paths end up with the NPC falling in love with the PC, I am pretty indifferent on. I agree that to completely ignore love/romance in the world of Project Eternity would be a mistake. Skyrim was a very sterile, lifeless world where I didn't feel like any of the characters actually had strong feelings for each other. That's just bad writing, though. I'm sure Obsidian will do better. Veronica had a great love story, as did many characters in past Obsidian games. Doesn't necessarily have to revolve around the player character.

Gotcha. I agree, that was damn well executed. Not really a romance, though, unless you played Lee very differently than I did I'll bite... What game? I would love to see a good implementation. The Witcher 2 is probably the best I've played, but CD Projekt Red had the advantage of using a predefined player character, which PE will not have. Actually he is wrong. NWN2 Platinum has been taken off Steam. Of course, I'm referring to "relationships" as any type of character interaction (not just a very one that also involves sexual interest), which I would argue Obsidian does excellently. NWN2 MotB has some of the best character interactions I have ever seen in a game, and the other games Obsidian staff have worked on(like Kotor2, PST, FONV) are pretty damn good too. Obviously there is room for improvement(like more dynamic negative relationships), but Obsidian does characters and relationships well enough where worrying if they won't be good or bitching about one type of relationship for 100+ pages seems a bit silly. Obsidian will make this part of PE well I assure you. Of course seeing promancers and antimancers mudsling at each other is almost as much fun as being a grammar nazi to ruskis, so please don't stop. Yeah, that's pretty much my take. I'm confident Avellone and company will handle the character relationships intelligently. If there is a romantic relationship, fine; if not, fine. As long as they're done as well as Obsidian's past characters, I'll be happy.