khango

The Mongols had a bazillion types of arrows, but considering how many kinds there were in IE games it never occurred to me to worry that there wouldn't be some different types.

I'm not so thrilled about this. Kiting should be a very viable strategy. This is why the Mongols destroyed all their enemies. It's why the French lost at Agincourt. And it's why swords went out of style when guns came about. To oversimplify. In IE games, I always thought that is was somewhat realistic how you had to clog or surround doors or send your attack in with specific waves in order to keep your weak-but-powerful characters from getting clobbered or targeted, and how ranged weapons were often more practical than melee. It makes perfect sense that a thief with no armor to speak of can pretty much run circles around some guy with a heavy weapons and a hundred pounds of plate and baggage, especially in a wide open area, but that he loses that advantage as it becomes more enclosed. Yes, there should be an area around someone with a melee weapon that you can't speed through without risking a hit, but for the average sword you're talking maybe 6 to 10 ft. radius, and if the the person who wants to make a run of can get their opponent to take a swing or make a parry is probably home free. Likewise, the mechanics change once you've closed inside of a weapon's effective range. This is why many sword styles teach techniques like pommeling for emergencies when you've failed to keep your measure. In general, lightly armored people have a pretty good chance of not being troubled by heavily armored people if there's enough space or if they can use the speed/maneuverability advantage to keep their enemy out of proper measure. For most weapons there's a distance where the weapon becomes too awkward to use, while still being too far away to easily grapple. The viable strategies for protecting your non-melee characters who aren't able to run ought to amount to blocking entrances and constraining access, or stacking up near them (body-guarding) so that anybody can't make a melee attack on them without being stuck in clobbering range of your heavies, not leaving loads of open approaches that game mechanics prevent attackers from taking advantage of.

Also Linux only here: CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge (i7 performance, but closer to i5 in price) RAM: 16 (2x8) GB Corsair Vengeance Low Profile DDR3 1600 Mobo: ASRock Z77 Pro4-M (This is the one thing I'd definitely choose differently if I did my rig over. But it does work.) GPU: Radeon HD 7770 1 GB GDDR 5 HDD: Samsung 830 Series 120ish GB SSD (+ various SATA II disk drives I've had for ages) PSU: SeaSonic M12II 620 Bronze Modular PSU Cooling: GELID Solutions Tranquillo CPU Cooler + Case Fans (So far I've been quite happy with these - they've been cheap AND quiet) Case: Fractal Design Arc Mini Case Monitor: ASUS PA248Q Black 24.1" 1920x1200 Monitor Running Linux Mint. It's been a lovely system so far. I've been Windows free since 2006. I also heartily recommend my CPU to anyone looking to save a few bucks off an i7.

My guess is that they won't because most of you can not be trusted to write decent content, they would then have to keep everyone closely informed and up to date with game lore, and the editing costs would end up exceeding any savings.

This is a stupid poll. There can be hordes of ammo varieties without it being 'leveled' or 'enchanted.' I suggest the op look up how many types of arrow the Mongols had (whistling, armor penetrating, etc), or even just look at a website that sell pistol ammunition. From subsonic rounds to high velocity to slugs to hollow points there are all varieties of ammunition and arrowheads. Your poll options are silly.

Fact: You can abuse movement in RTwP combat while in Turn based you can't. Attack, move, attack, move. Heal, move, heal, move. Or move while rest of party attacks at range. Fact: There are typically more options in Turn based combat RPGs compared to RTwP. Meaning you have different attacks. Like AoOs or Trips or Disarms. There's typically less emphasis placed on these options in favor of simply autoattacking so combat goes by quicker and the player isn't forced to pause several times during one turn/round. I'm trying to remember if there were AoOs in RTwP games. If there were then moving to not trigger them would require a lot of pausing. Fact: Controlling a party in real time is chaotic that's why there is a pause. This is an admission right here that real time combat is bad for this situation. They insert a pause and party A.I. to automate things for the player so the player isn't overwhelmed with Real Time combat. Why not just keep it turn based? Because some people have ADHD and can't sit there a 1-3 minute encounters in turn based? It has to be over in less than 30 seconds or they get bored? Who cares what those people think? Let them play Dragon Age 2 and 3 where everything is crappy real time action combat. Fact: Party A.I. doesn't always do what you order it to after you unpause. So they waste a turn or you have to pause again and reissue a command. Fact: Enemy A.I. is better in Turn Based games. Not sure why, but I'm assuming it's just easier to program an A.I. in a turn based, grid system while in Real time it's just too difficult to get the A.I. to work well. These are all facts and have been demonstrated in games. If you can't recognize these are facts and not opinions on how mechanics have worked in RPGs then I don't know what to tell you. This is what I've been saying all along. That turn based mechanics work better than RTwP and are less exploitable. The only bad thing I've heard about Turn Based combat is the combat takes longer. But that's working as intended giving the player full control of his party. While I do like RTS games because you have to make decisions quickly. That's what real time is there for. It doesn't mean there are more options like with Turn based combat. Just that you have to multitask several things at once and the pressure is due to time and keeping track of everything. Things are simpler because of this. Ex: WC3 and SC2. Blizzard uses a rock, paper, scissors system with armor types and damage types keeping things relatively simple for controlling mass units. In turn based games (not just RPGs) you have time to think. Plan your strategy, read several moves ahead, adapt to your opponent's strategy. There's so much you can do. In real time this becomes chaotic and difficult to manage. Also, Dream is wrong. Players don't always pick the best strategies with enough time. Mistakes are made even with unlimited time and you can't always know what your opponent is doing exactly and even if you do, you can still lose. My guess is he's never played any chess before and is just making up crap. Personally, I play Go which is quite a bit more complicated than Chess. Computer programs can't compete with average amateurs at that game. Even pros who play games make mistakes from time to time and misread the board, misread their opponent, etc. And they spend several hours on most of their games. Pretending this stuff doesn't exist is a joke and either incredibly ignorant or perhaps he's just trolling like I thought. Your facts are not facts. In real combat moving and attacking are part of the same thing. Likewise, you could put a healing potion in your camel-back and use it while fighting, just like astronauts have straws in their helmets and road bikers drink without letting go of the handlebars. It's not high technology, either. Likewise, 'options' are not a function of the existence or lack of existence of pause or turns. Properly speaking they should be a function of first person tactics, and thus in both turn based and pause based games can not be controlled fully outside of silly 'special moves.' The idea that with either game you are actually controlling a meaningful combat decision such as whether to attempt a disengage, or choose, say, parry 1, 4, or 7, is silly. Tactical decisions are not discrete take-turns events. At best you can let everyone make a decision and then execute them at once, but to make meaningful decisions in melee requires first person, not 'activate ultimate strike rage.' You site thinking ahead in turns as somehow preferable and more ideal than knowing what commands to give when. What you are really saying is that you can not deal with realistic combat because it is 'chaotic' and too difficult to manage. This is silly. In real combat you have to constantly update your tactics and approach. If you disengage the exact same way 3 times in a row, you will die. In real combat if you both execute 'lunge' at the exact same time you will probably both die. In real combat you can stop what you're doing at any time and try a new approach. In real combat because each member of a side on a melee has some idea of what's happening you can respond as a group and need only a few short commands. Real time with pause is very analogous to this -- pause allows for the initiation of tactical actions at the appropriate moments much as a human would, especially with autopause. You can wait for a critical miss, analogous to someone over lunging, and then use that moment to disable a defensive spin type ability and counter attack while they're suffering the appropriate penalty. Hopefully the AI might be smart enough to have been saving a magic missile so that your attack is disrupted while their fighter regains his balance. Even chains can considerably more complex than this, and they fit well into a realtime with pause system, whereas in turn based systems such realistic tactical considerations by definition CAN NOT EXIST. Turns become discrete and there's no ability have such complex chains of interaction without making things entirely unmanageable. Let's try to reconstruct the same scenario in a turn based game. Your opponent critical misses. You now have to wait for the rest of hist party to do stuff before you can do anything. It's finally your turn. Maybe he now has a temp penalty or something so you can try to disable your defensive ability and attack (hopefully it doesn't take an entire turn to disable it). You attack, and it has an immediate effect. His party a) couldn't tell he critical missed until it was the other team's turn, b) couldn't support him by trying to knock back the counter attack, and c) even if the turns were per character, would still have to guess that the enemy would disable defensive spin and react to it, without it actually occurring, leaving the character in question to make some other decision instead. Turn based combat not only takes forever, but is also completely disconnected from any realistic fighting or tactical scenario involving combat, and tedious as hell. Likewise, your 'Party AI doesn't do what you want it to' complaint is actually an artifact of turn based systems, which tie actions to 'turns,' instead of making them discrete, interruptible, or of actual length, not a downside of RTWP. As for AI, I can't say I've noticed enough to make a generalization like yours, but what you seem to be saying is that "turn based is simpler so it's easier to make an AI." That just sounds stupid, but whatever. As pointed out above, RTWP is more realistically tactical, and as such likely to involve more thought and AI. Which brings me back to thinking. You can obviously spend as much time as you want doing that in both systems, so I can't see how you can make it into a difference. Like you I play go, maybe 10k KGS on a good day, but I really can't see it's connection here. I mean sure, you can have a ko fight over making different groups live, and it's a little like pressing an opponent with a series of attacks designed to leave some sort of final opening, but I don't think go for the most part translates very well into fighting analogies. And as pointed out above, unless you have first person high precision control that level of person to person combat isn't really possible with either turn based or RTWP.

What's with the console lovers and turn-based game purists popping up everywhere? Also, why does the op seem to think xbox controllers are the only wireless input devices?

I hate turn based computer games with a passion (particularly when the turns are not concurrent). "Hoy mate! Now be a good little goblin and stand there while I smack you a couple times. Don't worry, in a couple minutes you'll get your turn. It's only fair." All kinds of mechanics break and become ludicrous and unrealistic in turn-based games.

I hope some of the weapons have sabot and flechette style ammo. Over history there have been lots of interesting and weird things tried with firearms, from firing large leather-sheathed metal bars (rebar-like) to using rocks as cannon ammo. The Mongols and Chinese used a whole variety of non-firearm gunpowder based weapons, mostly variations on the rocket, and they were credited with making the difference in several victories over European armies.

I think he meant SF, and probably 'win' meant at least the series... I actually wouldn't be against baseball being somewhere in the game. It'd be kind of funny. It could be like a religious ceremony or something.

You could have an enchanted Tamagotchi where the virtual pet is a 32 year old pizza delivery guy with a trash-filled studio apartment who gets his application to Harvard rejected every year.

I don't like repeatable MMO quests, but I do like random encounters, or mysterious encounters. The building where you find Celestial Furry and the party in that one inn which will just attack you come to mind as fun non-quest encounters in BG II. Likewise, once in a while you encounter a random group of baddies while travelling on particular maps where they re-appear every so often (Aggressive native species). I liked those types of encounters. I hope they're in project eternity. This leads me to a suspicion that there will be one or two ongoing quests, like redeeming rat tails in PST, (maybe this time it will be wolf pelts) kind of make sense and get you a little XP. I also figure there will be some 'flavor' side quests, like killing or bringing in one or two bands of bandits, or maybe some random encounters with 'competing' bands. Maybe to make such things rewarding they can give you reputation or fame?

I worked at a place that uses scrum and I didn't really like it -- I think it's a management tool to give managers meaningless numbers to show off to various people above them mostly. At least where I worked Scrum tended to cause frantic development and a lack of design and engineering. I come from a background that's had some exposure to 'extreme programming' and systems-oriented project management/product design methodologies and I find scrum to be lacking comparatively. I'm not for waterfall, but I do think it's critically important to do pretty deep spec of new products before implementing as it allows for a much better ability to work in teams and split up tasks. Scrum seems to give managers the impression that they can take a 'story' and assume it's good enough for immediate development, pass it off to a dev, who then just hacks at it only to find their time estimates are horrible because there was no planning and that nobody took into account how it would fit into the overarching infrastructure or existing systems. 'Hey, I implemented that thing you wanted.' 'Oh, does it do x and y, that I didn't mention in the user story, and also z, that all fizzbuzz-X add-ons need to do to be compatible with the venusian-flogger-X we don't really use anymore, but would screw up everything if it didn't work?' 'No, wtf is the venusian-flogger-X, I don't think anything we've developed has tied into it in over a year... 'Oh, Dave knows about it...' ... Dave: 'Oh, that... well Jeremy wrote it before we decided he was a screwup and fired him 3 years ago, you can probably just read it and figure it out...' ... Code: A few 200 line functions + 20ish slightly different copy pasted files + no comments ... I really prefer a systems approach combined with extreme programming and highly iterative development that involves programmers in the systems requirements and design phases. But I also got into trouble because 'business' side made lots of decisions that I found questionable but had to go along with. It's a matter of my view being that the customer's interests are always best for the business long term, whereas business side would screw the customers or take massive short-cuts that caused huge technical debt for short term cash flow. In my experience extreme programming method along with loose UML meant a little more meeting up front, but delivery of features in a much quicker amount of time as well as all devs having a better comprehensive understanding of product, rather than piecemeal walled bits of expertise. But I guess the problem is that if there never was an initial architecture or design to anything, you're just screwed. For all eternity. Anyway, lesson being that companies that need to use tech without in-house competent technical experience to begin with are often a travesty and basically live in their own **** while believing it to be nectar. Kind of like the litmus test for knowing if someone is a good PHP programmer is how bad they think the language is. The worse someone thinks PHP, the better a PHP programmer they probably are. Whereas someone who thinks PHP is a great language and loves it is probably not someone you want. Though I guess that test doesn't really apply to other languages as well. Just that PHP is probably one of the default places to find Nectar Lovers wallowing in crap. VB and Asp.Net maybe being others.

Unicorn, obviously.

The same general principal I applied to XP can also be applied to levelling. Past a certain point attributes could increase as part of an infinite series that approaches a particular value. A really simple example might be making attacks per second for a particular class with no stats bonuses equal to the summation of 1/(2^n) from 0...n-1 where n is your current level. The series converges on 2, so no matter how many times you levelled, mathematically your attacks per second would approach 2, though you'd probably hit rounding error fairly quick. Level 1: 1/1 = 1 attack per round (1-1 = 0, 2^0 = 1) Level 2: 1/1 + 1/2 = 1.5 attacks per round Level 3: 1/1 + 1/2 + 1/4 = 1.75 attacks per round... ... and it gets closer and closer to 2 attacks per round from there. No matter how high you level, you'd never break 2 attacks per round, but you'd always improve. Now I'm sure you could find a better convergent series for number of attacks per round, though maybe this one would actually make sense for a wizard or something The downside to this is that the first few levels become much more important than later levels, though if the convergent series only began to apply at later levels, that would be less of an issue. Anyway, just pointing out once again that if you use math you can almost have it both ways. Personally, though, I'd rather apply this kind of thing to levelling overall as in my first example, than to progressions of specific stats when levelling as in this example.

Probably there will have to be an invisible cap (max unsigned, or < max unsigned int squared if levels are stored apart from current experience) unless Obsidian feels like using arbitrary precision math (unlikely), but if the levelling intervals eventually reach a rate of growth where big omega of the experience required to reach the next level is in the c^n, or maybe even n^c class it would probably become moot. It should be possible to have an effective level cap mathematically without ever flat out limiting additional experience gain. They can probably come up with some bounded equations to calculate the experience required for each level and eventually make the bounds grow so much faster than the available experience. It's not that complicated. Let n be a particular level, then let m be the experience required for it. You can then define some basic algebraic intervals like below to smooth progression in normal gameplay: n <= 5 : m = 1000 n^2 (Level at 1000, 4000, 9000, 16000, 25000 respectively) 5 < n <= 10 : m = 200 n^3 (43200, 68600, 102400, 145800, 200000) 10 < n <= 15 : m = 30 n^4 (439230, 622080, 856830, 1152480, 1518750) 15 < n <= 20 : m = 4 n^5 (4194304, 5679428, 7558272, 9904396, 12800000) 20 < n <= 25 : m = 0.5n^6 (42883060, 56689952, 74017944, 95551488, 122070312) ... and at some point just start doing 30 < n : m= 2^n or similar... Then scale experience gain at a lower order of increase and you diverge. Wa-la! Effective level cap without there being a hard cap.

It just looks complex. It's really not. I'll agree that going with the flow in it isn't so bad, but if you actually want to have some basis for making decisions or to maximize particular attributes, or even find the least expensive route to some ability node, their system pretty much requires you to implement complicated versions of random graph algorithms like dijkstra's or prim's just to figure out how you should design your selection tree.

The main thing I don't like in IE games is how much space 'notes' that you find take up. Totally needed a 'scrapbook' for that kind of thing. However, I'm not that concerned about how it will in this game. It won't be worse, I'm sure, and probably will be better.

Quit making these threads. Go play Wasteland 2 or something.

That Path of Exile stat thing seems really overwhelmingly complicated now that I've looked at it.

I've never felt like the stats in IE games were horribly unreasonable, though I have found it obnoxious that's it's not always obvious what stats will nerf particularly classes. When I was a noob it was really not obvious that having 18 vs 16 int was really important for a mage because in most other types of PC games the relative impact of stats is lower than in D&D style RPGs.

Yeah, I can kind of see how it might be a lot of work if the engine doesn't have hooks for something similar to begin with. On the other hand, if there are going to be 'hands off' in-game cut-scene style sequences, it seems like a number of the hooks (for replaying a sequence with the same effects) probably exist already? *shrugs*

I like the idea of collecting phrases with different effects and then arranging them in different ways. There could even be a quest to find a lost epic that turns out to be an awesome chant of several stanzas/lines/snippets that you could work into your existing stuff. I think it's a neat idea.

Urgh. That is possibly my least-liked fight in all the IE games. Outside of some masochistic Path of the Damned mode every fight in the game should be possible to beat on the first try without using any OOC knowledge as long as you've mastered the game mechanics, and that fight is the exact opposite; you're practically required to face it and die to learn how the fight works and then come up with tactics (and even then there's a decent chance bad luck will kill you). Disagree, outside of one or two fights in BG city itself, I don't remember it being all that hard. In any case I'm against the 'win every fight on the first try in the first playthrough' philosophy. Unless you've explicitly decided to start in nerf mode or something. The easiest mode should totally be called nerf mode and your bows and guns should shoot little yellow cylinders like nerf darts. Heck, make all the weapons look like foam in nerf mode.

You don't really need a whole plot or giant system, just consideration of the context of starting location.