Jump to content
The Community Blog (An Invitation)

Bhazor

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    68

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Bhazor

  1. Bhazor
    Bible Black RPG. Guarantee it.
  2. Bhazor
    One thing I've noticed is that a lot of companions have maxed out Perception (Aloth: 16, Grieving Mother: 17 Sagani: 19). Makes me think they were originally designed for the earlier version when Perception was a more important stat. I have no idea why Durance has 19 Resolve.
  3. Bhazor
    THANK GOD I am also intrigued by the "Companion Attributes" adjusted point. Certainly the companions are far from ideal with some of them being outright appalling Grieving Mother in particular is inexplicable. But to have their stats adjusted mid game just feels weird to me.
  4. Bhazor
    I've always thought IWD2 was far better written than it had any need to be. I mean it was essentially an ARPG dungeon crawler in the Infinity Engine but it had a solid story funny banter and at least three really interesting conversations. The blind seeress in the first chapter especially is one of the very best cryptic prophets in gaming. Though she was written by Avellone who seems to have a raging hard on for blind old cryptic women in video games. But then don't we all?
  5. Bhazor
    Personally I don't understand how people can say the combat in BG was better. It was naff. Built on the D&D 2.5 system where the majority classes had no combat options beyond select all and attack and the AI would just tangle up in a huge mass. Where you could cheese most battles with kiting. No the combat in PoE wasn't perfect. But its a first edition RPG system. It needs play and reiteration.
  6. Bhazor
    Of the Infinity games Icewind Dale 2 probably had the best combat. This is purely because of how encounters worked in that if you triggered one enemy the whole group attacked. So you couldn't just pull agro one at a time like you could in BG 1 & 2. Sadly though you can do this in PoE where its actually much more unbalanced because of all the per encounter abilities. This is honestly my biggest complaint with the game. It essentially lets you divide one room into three seperate encounters.
  7. Bhazor
    On steam it should list all DLC you have registered with your purchase (almanac, book, map etc). It will all be in PoE's Steamapps folder.
  8. Bhazor
    I think perceptions are seriously tinted by nostalgia when it comes to the party members in BG 1 & 2. For the most part they barely spoke. It certainly was nowhere near as dialog dense as Planescape or even Dragon Age. The writing in PoE in general is very high quality. But it lacks the core of the games where Avellone was lord and master. In Planescape and Kotor 2 every conversation or side quest or plotline was thematically linked to the central themes of the story. Planescape revolved around identity and belonging. Kotor 2 revolved around the political and ethical considerations of military interventionism and that Jedi's are actually just a bunch of bickering jerks. In contrast PoE has central concepts but then it gets side tracked with long meandering quests that don't link to any of it and kind of just do their own thing. Y'know, like Baldur's Gate 2.
  9. Bhazor
    I know there are Rogue likes who do similar things. I'm sure one of the Disgaea games had a mechanic where you could respec any party member when they died. They could add a "Trial of Steel" mode, in which the game bricks itself when you die. If you want to play again you have to buy a new copy. Would that be sufficiently hardcore? I just discovered a pretty cool version of this in Steel Battalion a hard core mech sim. If your mech starts to blow you have to go through the eject/self destruct procedure. If you do your character survives and you can retry the mission. If you don't it deletes your entire profile.
  10. Bhazor
    I stick my priest and mage in heavy armour because I don't care about their autoattacks. So let them rock some full plate shrug off arrows and bullets and hold them back until you need them to cast a spell. Who cares about my wizard missing out on a couple of pissy little rod attacks if it lets them survive long enough to walk up and fire fan the whole mob from behind.
  11. Bhazor
    Guns are high risk high reward. You generally will only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow, before the mob is on you. But if you hit that's all you need. According to the admittedly rough numbers the Arbalest (heavy crossbow) is actually the best ranged weapon. http://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/30rso5/ranged_weapon_dps_some_rough_numbers/
  12. Bhazor
    Anyone remember when the PS3 version of Skyrim had a game breaking bug that save files were getting incrementally larger until they'd no longer work? Just makin' conversation. http://www.geek.com/games/skyrim-ps3-save-bug-renders-game-unplayable-1442017/
  13. Bhazor
    Just cleared out the dungeons (killed animancer, saved apprentice) and wanted to return with the burnished key to open the locked door in the basement, but everytime I click the stairs down in the sanctuary it opens a loading screen but then only loads to a black screen with no UI but the cursor still apears. Since this has happened I've tried going downstairs without the key or telling the priest about the apprentice and the same problem happens. If I click on anything it brings up a "Program not responding" message and crashes to desktop. It happens everytime I try and this does not occur with any other transistions. I was able to finish the quest by taking a different route. I'm getting errors whenever I try to upload any files on here. Will try later.
  14. Bhazor
    The IE games* were all almost entirely combat focused. There is actually far more scope for alternate/non violent paths in Dragon Age than there ever was in the IE games*. *except PS:T
  15. Bhazor
    You mean you don't carry multiple weapons that deal different damage types?!? Christ, my DM would eat you alive. Heck in my P&P games I don't cross the street unless I have at least two different swords, a mace, two daggers, a cudgel, a silvered dagger, a short bow (with four different arrow types) and at least one cold iron weapon ready to hand. In RPGs different damage types are incredibly important and that is why you should hang on to multiple weapons not because you forgot to spend 5 minutes laboriously repairing dozens of different weapons and armours. All the examples you gave are single character RPGs, imagine the added busywork of Arcanum multiplied six fold. I agree given the work already done that it should be kept as an optional "hardcore mode" feature but it definitely should not be mandatory. I find it funny the things that will "annoy" some players. It's a game: the whole point is to overcome obstacles. No matter. By the same token you could claim that crashing to desktop is part of the game and you'd be a fool to complain about it. The whole point of games is for overcoming satisfying obstactles. Not irritating ones.
  16. Bhazor
    Personally, I've always wished for a more realistic or at least balanced and functional economy in RPGs, but basically as long as it's not broken mechanically, it's fine. Other than that I thought this was a good update and I'm in favour of your decisions. Funnily enough that feature is exactly what got me excited about Fable 2. But of course Molyneux was involved. In this gif the attractive lady represents Peter Molyneux the way she's flirting represents the promise of a fully modelled reactive economic system underpinning an RPG Joseph Gordon-Levitt represents the gaming press and the beer drinking represents all the beer I drunk after I actually played it.
  17. Bhazor
    The problem with durability as a money sink is it has to be stupidly expensive (as in "cheaper to buy a new one") or else its valueless as a money sink. In BG 2 I had around 150,000 gold with nothing to spend it on. That is the kind of money a late game party will need to "sink" and putting that into god damn sword polish is a tiny bit completely nuts. If maintenance is included it should be for immersion and gameplay reasons not because your loot tables are ****ed. A better use of money would be quests where you could bribe or hire people to deal with it as the "good guy option" instead of the coward or evil method.
  18. Bhazor
    I've started to come around to the idea of durability and repairing equipment. But it still could end up as needless busy work in execution. What about if equipment was autorepaired on visiting an inn in the same way characters autocast healing spells before they rest in the IE games? As it stands having to manually repair each piece of equipment you've used sounds like absolute tedium. Remember its not just one character you have to fix the equipment of like in New Vegas. You might be maintaining a half dozen party members. That's a half dozen weapons, a half dozen back up weapons, a half dozen shields, a half dozen sets of armour that would all need to be fixed up. That might include having to shift all that junk on to the party's designated crafter and then moving it all back. The idea of item durability is nice but it needs serious consideration for the execution. It needs to be absolutely painless to use and add to the game otherwise people will just end up modding it out. Also crafting can still go to hell especially if it turns out like "socketing" in arpg which is what Tim made it sound like.
  19. Bhazor
    Thats just mitigating the tedium/fiddly bits. That still doesn't make it any fun. I would actually love a hard core crafting sim. Something like the crafting in Dark Messiah of Might & Magic expanded into a full game with dozens of little nuances like the heat of the forge and fully modelled molten metal. That would be awesome. But pocketing any old junk you find then just walking up to an anvil and picking it from a list is... well it isn't awesome and why should I encourage things that are not awesome?
  20. Bhazor
    Well as its moddable I imagine there will be an antidegradation mod within the first 24 hours. @ Greatwizard Exactly. Generic crafting is rubbish but crafting as a quest is great. If there were like a half dozen "legendary weapons lost to time" that you had to go on multi stage quest lines to find then I'd be all for it. My party chasing a rumour of an unmarked kings grave, finding a mysterious gem embedded in an altar, talking to a deranged scholar for the secret incantation that will call forth the new bearer of the weapon, rad rad rad. Hoovering all the junk off the floor, dumping it all on a forge, picking up the resultant dozen sets of identical armour and then going next door to sell them at ten times the cost of the materials, lame lame lame.
  21. Bhazor
    Actually rereading the update my biggest concern is the part about "add fire damage to any sword". So much for unique loot. So much for carefully picking which weapon to equip. Just socket a fire gem into everything you own. Legend has it this mace was created by a blind pauper, his hand driven by an angel, the mace was bought by a king who saw in his dream that this was the weapon that would kill him. The kings fate and that of his kingdom is long forgotten but this mace still remains, rumours have it that to this day there is a dark cult that worsh- pass me that hammer would ya I'm gonna carve a lightning rune in it, thats like +3 damage brah. @IEO Well I'd question whether you can ignore crafting in any rpg. Even if you don't craft at all you're still going to end up having to sort through a dozen useless trinkets whenever you loot something or visit a vedor. Replaying NWN2 and its amazing how much junk my non crafting character has to scroll past to find that one special ready made weapon.
  22. Bhazor
    Ugh. Really not a fan of crafting in RPGs. The amount of junk it adds to vendors, the amount of busy work it takes to sort through whether this strip of leather is more useful than this piece of bark, the endless inventory bloat, the grinding for reagents, the grinding for drops, having to write a damn shopping list to tell whether you need this piece of litter or not. How about instead of crafting you can find "recipes" that you then give to vendors who then start selling that item. Take your potion recipe to a magic vendor, take your armour "recipe" to a smithy. If theres no actual player input in crafting beyond picking what you want from a list then what are you losing? As for weapon durability. That has never worked well in my experience, its always just another hassle. At least theres no gradual decline in stats, it's just "Fully functional till its broken". Least that means you can completely forget about for hours at a time.
  23. Bhazor
    Which means he would have to be a gimped mage and a gimped fighter. A role that is already filled by the Ranger, Cleric/Paladin and Monk classes in D&D.
  24. Bhazor
    And where exactly does the traditional fighter fit into all this? What's the point of having a warrior when an arcane warrior can fight just as well as them and have magic powers on top of those skills? Talking of Jedi, they're the reason pen and paper Star Wars RPG's are so one sided with everybody playing a Jedi.
  25. Bhazor
    Key word is the player will get "Seperate" skill points for combat and non combat skills not the same skill points. I imagine there will be a balance that will shift one way or the other depending on class. Fighters get double combat points but only half as many non combat skills. A mage will get half the combat skills but double the non combat skills etc. Or it might be stat based, have high intelligence/charisma compared to strength/agility then you'll get more dialog skills than combat skills. But really, I'd say after 20 years Obsidian know how to make an RPG better than I do.
×
×
  • Create New...