Zeckul

I share your concern, and it's not just you, it's how the IE games played. In a low-level campaign like BG or IWD there just wasn't that much physical resistance or magical defense to deal with, it was a matter of focusing fire, keeping the low AC characters out of reach and using a few buffs/healing spells as necessary. The level of player involvement and micromanagement seen here is more reminiscent of high-level mage duels in BG2 than anything we've seen in BG1 or IWD. This may be a matter of taste but I think that this is not a good direction for this game. I'd rather not have to work too much for ordinary battles against ordinary monsters and leave the deep tactical thinking for boss battles. It's a matter of pacing and keeping the player's interest - they're going to lose mine quickly at this rate.

Yes I agree, we're definitely looking into it. Sort of relates to what I said above. I would also prefer if the big huge epic music would only trigger when its meaningful to do so. For example, if your party is overpowered compared to an encounter, then the music shouldnt feel epic. Baldur's Gate "Accidentally attacked a squirrel" music: It had humoristic value, the first few times, at least. Anyway, one possible approach would be simply not to have combat music except for specific encounters in the game. I don't recall ATM whether IWD was like this or if combat music was simply more subdued or didn't play systematically, but I never got annoyed by it in IWD like I did in the Baldur's Gate series.

All the ingredients are obviously there, now it's a matter of chemistry and incubation.

I hope this is true, but Marceror makes some good points about the emphasis on selectable abilities, timing and difficulty. When the AI improves to target weaker characters, this is going to get just downright SCS-like in terms of micromanagement required. There's a big pacing issue there IMO if every battle is a tactically challenging one. It may sound good on paper but it's not going to make the game very enjoyable. IIRC Josh Sawyer said this was supposed to be less difficult than Icewind Dale 2, well IWD2 certainly wasn't this difficult. Even the first time I played the game and made some poorly designed party I was able to advance quite quickly on normal difficulty.

Do you find yourself going through fights relatively quickly and easily once you master the system? Or is it always very involving? I'm going to get quickly bored playing this game if it constantly makes me work. This would be a big change of pace from the IE games especially the Baldur's Gate series. Icewind Dale had quite involving combat but that was the whole point of the game. This seems to be more involving than IWD but is supposed to be less combat focused? I'm confused.

Ok, I had some free time and there's a new build out, so I tried having some fun with this game. I'm playing on "Normal" difficulty, which is one notch less than what they recommend for experienced IE players. And man, this reminds me of playing BG2 with the SCS mod with everything turned on, as in: every single encounter I have to carefully plan every move I make and pause constantly, and if I do everything just right I'll win, and any mistake will mean everyone gets roflstomped. Admitedly, I don't understand the system very well at all, whereas I understood that of BG2 perfectly, so this is why I'm not sure whether my criticism of PoE is fair. Still, in BG2, most battles were a simple affair of casting a few buffs and focusing fire, i.e. very basic tactics. In PoE, it looks like basic tactics are far from sufficient and you need to make good use of at least your per-encounter abilities. Focus fire is not that powerful anymore because enemies have just so many hitpoints. It's also difficult to correct any positional mistake because attempting to break engagement triggers repeated attacks of opportunity (or whatever the term for that is in this system); the penalty seems much more pronounced than in D&D 3.5. I don't want every battle to be a really involving one, there should be tough battles yes, but not at every turn. By the way, what are some good resources to learn about the combat system? Any tutorial videos? I'm quite confused by all the terminology and stuff happens in battle that I don't understand whatsoever.

It's all about gameplay. I find the Icewind Dale games more replayable than the Baldur's Gate games because there's so much variety in party creation and the combat is so consistently challenging. BG, once you know the world and plot, it's always the same thing, and the combat isn't as good (although Ascension has some very nice battles).

Obviously RTwP combat can work very well and be a lot of fun, otherwise I don't think we would have given Obsidian 4M$ to create a new "Infinity Engine". Black Isle made successful games based entirely on the strength of that approach (IWD), so the proof is in the pudding. At this point it's just a matter of improving the UI responsiveness, AI targeting and pathfinding, and fine-tuning all the parameters. So I entirely disagree with the idea that the combat would have been better implemented as turn-based, that seems like an absurd thing to say.

Picking up any item in the inventory screen, including on the character, has a ~600ms delay between the click and when the item is actually picked up and can be placed elsewhere. This feels unresponsive. Expected: no perceivable latency.

I should add that zoom to cursor is a convenient way to scroll around when some edges of the screen are difficult to access, which can happen in windowed mode or in multi-monitor scenarios.

Ok then I misunderstood you, I thought you were talking about all games. Well, as I said, in these games you typically don't zoom except perhaps for the fun of inspecting animations from time to time. In RTS games where zoom plays a really important role because of their scale, as in SupCom or SoaSE, it's implemented as zoom to cursor. These games would be impossible to play otherwise. Anyway, PoE zoom scale isn't that large so it limits the inconvenience of having to pan the camera to recenter it after zooming (you won't have too much panning to do), but still, it's a slight inconvenience. I'd probably use the feature more if it allowed me to move the camera around faster.

Exactly, so they're not relevant.

The vast majority of games that have a zoom also auto-center the camera on something, i.e. the player character. I think I illustrated well that in games and applications with zoom and panning and where zoom plays an important role, it's implemented as zoom to cursor. I'm not sure why it would be annoying other than perhaps being unfamiliar, but there are enough widely used applications with zoom to cursor that it shouldn't be that strange to players.

Are you arguing that they don't change it often? I find that not be true in my case, although the unnecessary amount of work to reposition the camera due to it being centered on the screen seemed to encourage me not to. People are more inclined to use a feature when it works well.

I knew there was something I used that zoomed on mouse that had bugged the **** out of me. wish google maps had a way to change that setting. Current workflow in Google Maps with zoom to cursor, if you want to zoom on a particular point on the map: 1. Put the cursor where you want to zoom 2. Scroll with the wheel until the camera is at the position and zoom level you want You're telling me that you'd prefer: 1. Scroll with the wheel a little 2. Pan a little to approximately recenter the camera where you want it to be 3. Repeat until the camera is at the position and zoom level you want - this may take arbitrarily many repetitions This is clearly a lot more work and fussing about.

Note that this is also the behavior in Google Maps, which everyone is familiar with. Or the Windows Photo Viewer, or any good image editor. Basically in any application where zoom is actually important it will be implemented like this.

In Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 it's a zoom-and-tilt that serves practically no gameplay purpose - most players actually disable the functionality to avoid accidentally triggering it. I haven't played DotA 2 but I would assume it's similarly useless. For the little I've played PoE I found myself zooming in and out often depending on the circumstances (zoom out is useful to get an overview, zoom in for combat, etc.) There's no advantage that I can see to having zoom always centered on the center of the screen. If you spend any sort of time playing a game that supports zooming on the cursor it just feels primitive and awkward to have to do this movement in two distinct motions rather than one.

After issuing a move command, a player will often want to move the camera towards the destination. This is accomplished very efficiently and easily in the Infinity Engine by issuing the move command with a double-click (the first click issues the move command, the second click re-centers the camera). PoE should also support this.

As a long-time RTS player, my expectation in a game with RTS-like camera controls and zoom is for zoom to be centered on the cursor rather than on the center of the screen. This allows me to zoom-and-pan in a single motion which is very efficient. See Supreme Commander, Sins of a Solar Empire. Not being able to control where zoom takes its center point feels clunky.

Vsync will still result in at least a frame of lag precisely because it has to wait. But yes, the induced frame lag should be the same for N-buffering, when N > 1, assuming they don't do it stupidly. Late reply, but: the "lag" you're talking about is the intrinsic refresh period of the monitor. You can't do better than that. You cannot be more on time than the next refresh of the monitor. If you don't want to wait and turn VSync off, your frame might not be displayed at all, or only partially. Part of the actual picture you're seeing will still be lagging one refresh period behind. It's not true that you're removing 1 frame of latency there; you're creating an incoherent picture that's partially late and partially up to date (leading to the infamous tearing artifacts. The tearing line is the division between the frame that's up-to-date and the frame that's late). At best you could say, in a sense, that you're removing 0.5 frame of latency on average, but there's no guarantee of that. The only way to properly refresh while not waiting on the monitor is to reverse the algorithm and have the monitor wait on the GPU refresh, which is what G-Sync and Adaptive-Sync do. Now with these you actually get a real 1 frame less latency.

They did not. You can choose to kite if you want. It's just not an effective strategy in this game.

Ammunition management is pure overhead and doesn't result in any fun. I always installed the mod for unlimited stacks in IE games and bought tens of thousands of arrows at a time so I would never have to think about it again.

Some thoughts: Some gameplay things are very broken and in very obvious ways - poor party and monster AI, combat responsiveness in general - but these might be relatively easy to fix. What takes the most time is polishing all the content, gameplay can feel pretty rough quite late in development. I don't think we can conclude with any certainty that the game will be delayed based on gameplay bugs in the current beta. That said, gameplay is so broken currently that I wonder how they're able to iterate on it effectively. I mean above all it has to feel fun and it's impossible to get much fun in its current state, regardless of how well the underlying system is theoretically designed. Lack of a bugtracker - I guess they don't really intend on using us as formal QA at all, although that is kind of a missed opportunity. As I understand, they have some QA people reading all the forum threads in the bugs section and doing the filtering and formalizing, so it's not worthless to report bugs, although it's hard to tell if something was reported before - note that even with a good bugtracker it's still hard to identify duplicates as different people report the same thing in completely different words. I'm personally not participating much in bug reporting due to other time constraints (I actually work on a large software application for a living, so bug fixing is my life already), but I encourage those with the possibility and inclination of participating to continue reporting problems, as this can only help make this game what it ought to be. By all means, keep complaining, but don't lose hope

So when is the next beta build? Looks like the release cadence is going to be pretty slow.