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PrimeJunta

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Everything posted by PrimeJunta

  1. PrimeJunta
    Fine, I'll start another one. Kobolds quiver, for here I come. Again.
  2. PrimeJunta
    Whereas I didn't even like BG1 one much, so...
  3. PrimeJunta
    The feel I get is that Might is tied to intimidation in conversations. I thought Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects was pretty damn frighteningly intimidating, but Kevin Spacey is no Hulk Hogan. I would have no problem describing him as Mighty though.
  4. PrimeJunta
    I'm already sure this will sail past NWN2 and laugh as it sails. That game was mostly derp. Decent character-building if you like DnD3, and the trial was cool although it fell completely flat with the conclusion, but other than that... derp.
  5. PrimeJunta
    At this point? A qualified yes. The combat is the big ? right now. If there's time to get it properly sorted, it will almost certainly be a resounding YES! I'm not at all worried about the central hero, memorable companions, emotional writing, mature thematic exploration, or dungeon-diving; the small dungeons in the BB are already pretty cool and Obsidian can write all three legs off a donkey. Miiildly worried about the exploration; if all the wilderness maps are as small as in the BB, that's going to be a let-down; OTOH if some of them have really cool stuff to find, that'll make up for it. So for that part we'll have to see. All in all it's looking pretty good from where I'm at. Of the planks they listed, combat is clearly unfinished and exporation is a little worrying, but the others are all good.
  6. PrimeJunta
    @Karkarov yeh, I dig... although I only agree, like, 50%. My only real beef with the encounters is those $!#@!! beetles. Get rid of at least two groups and make the remaining ones wander around a bit. Maybe have the stone beetles lie in ambush underground for more excitement. A bigger map wouldn't hurt either, those drakes and wolves and totally-not-shambling-mounds were crowded quite close together. I liked the spider-infested cave -- man, there are a LOT of spiders there, and it builds up kind of nicely from the crystal spider to the real mob with the spider queen -- although I would've liked to see some rationale for the friendly cohabitation they were having with the ogre; I'd have thought that one or the other would've seen 'lunch' rather than 'roommate' there. The Dyrford ruins and the Pwngwllwenhwhwatever dungeon were right cool. But overall there was way more variety by way of enemies and encounters in the little beta than I would've expected. Dozens of different critters, not just three or four. Felt like a bigger variety of beasties here than in all of Dragon Age.
  7. PrimeJunta
    Damn, this is a minefield. Sorry, I should watch what I'm saying better. It wasn't even directed at you specifically, but rather at the general contingent of people expressing a lot of animus against Josh and his decisions in general. You've mellowed out a lot lately, and I'd hate to harsh that.
  8. PrimeJunta
    Stun, I am very, very sorry if you took that as a passive-aggressive barb. I meant it entirely in good faith, cross my heart. As to the crafting skill, I thought he changed that because is proposal was received really poorly by his public, not on a whim.
  9. PrimeJunta
    But but... I'm pretty sure Josh is basing his views on a lot more than YouTube. He has been making games for all of his professional life, which must necessarily include a lot of playtesting. Another thing I'm 100% certain about is that Josh is concentrating on making a fun cRPG. He is clearly passionate about this project, and is doing his level best at it. He also knows the fallout [sic] will be massive if he fails. I know I wouldn't have the bronze balls to do what he's doing where he's doing it, I'd collapse into a quivering pool of jelly halfway through. The crux of it is that what he thinks is fun will not always agree with what you or I think is fun. If enough people agree that it's not fun and are able to explain to him why that is so, then there is a good chance that he will change it. Sensuki can already point to multiple instances in which this has happened. Finally -- I don't think it's productive to harp on the things that really have been nailed down ("bring back combat XP! bring back the DnD attributes!"). There's plenty of stuff there that's not, and changes there will have a huge impact on how it ends up playing. I.e., I would suggest that rather than rant about how Josh has ruined the game by how he's changed the wizard, it would be more helpful to, say, calmly explain why you feel that it would be improved by giving him invisibility, charm, and conjuration spells and an extra slot in the grimoire, even if this risks overlapping somewhat with Stealth, the cipher, and the chanter. It's by no means a shoo-in, but I believe it has a realistic chance of producing a positive change.
  10. PrimeJunta
    Designing one thing is much like designing any other thing. Can you give an example of a philosophy or goal of Josh's that has changed on a whim? And there, Stun, lies the irreducible, irreconcilable core of our disagreement. Edit: I still like you though, and especially your fervor about the IE games. It takes courage to love something so unconditionally.
  11. PrimeJunta
    Yup, failures in execution. Not in intent though. Also failures that can yet be corrected. Beta, you know?
  12. PrimeJunta
    I thought prebuffing was removed primarily because it was rote. I certainly thought it was rote. What's more, the current system certainly doesn't eliminate planning. If you've scouted out the enemy and know what to expect, you know what buffs/debuffs to open up with. You have the initiative. That's not reactive. Check out some of the cipher's abilities? Those sure look like dire charm and domination. I think he removed them from the wizard to create more class differentiation with the cipher... and I don't think it would hurt the game to put them back. The wizard is a bit boring as it is. Not every spell has to be unique to a single class. As to save-or-die effects, we've already discussed those, and simply disagree about them. (FWIW I also did not like the Deck of Many Things or the Wand of Wonder... in BG2 that is. I did use both in a PnP game where you couldn't savescum the bejeezus out of them.) Uh... where did you get this? Stealth isn't a rogue-only skill, you know. I also would like to see invisibility spells etc. restored. (Also a complete overhaul of stealth which is IMO currently clearly the weakest of the P:E subsystems.) I think he did say that about spells like Knock though. I'm not sure this was entirely necessary though; Knock wasn't a perfect substitute for lockpicking because it had a significant resource cost. The nerfing was a good idea. The 2-dimensionality is not. I too would like domination/charm/fear type stuff brought back, as well as conjurations and stuff. Only blasting things is a bit boring. I know you like underpowered classes because of the extra challenge, but I disagree with that. Primarily because if you want to gimp yourself, you can always find ways to do it. Demanding that the designers serve you with classes gimped by design is unreasonable IMO. Just crank the difficulty to max and decide to, say, never use any consumables, or never use a magic weapon, or whatever other limitation you want to impose on yourself. Breathe, Stun. You're hyperventilating again. 'Cuz that system does take the edge off rest spamming. You can still do it, if you're willing to trudge back to the village, and it can be tuned to be more or less lenient by adjusting the availability of camping supplies, but on the whole it does work, no? According to Sensuki, the stats are about to receive a major boost in significance. As to the "merely bonuses" thing, that's only cosmetic. A baseline of 0 with -1 per point below and +1 per point above is exactly the same as a baseline of 0 with +1 per point. I honestly have no idea why you're so stuck on it; it's just accounting. Sorry, Stun, I'm not going there again. I've said everything I have to say on that topic, and it's not going to be changed anyway, so there's really no point.
  13. PrimeJunta
    Yup, that. Josh has elaborated on that a lot though, including what he thought didn't work well in the IE games, and how he wants to address that. These are also design goals, and they too have remained remarkably constant through the entire process.
  14. PrimeJunta
    It won't be finished until it's released. Design is iterative. You start out with a blank page. You sketch out what you think the central features of the design should be. You make a proof-of-concept implementation of those central features. You iterate on it until you're confident they'll work. Then you add more stuff and iterate on it. You keep doing that, bringing in more people for feedback, adjusting, changing, discarding, adding as you go. Eventually you run out of time and money and release. I.e., the rules won't be finished until release, and very likely not even then, what with patches and all. This is by far the best way of designing anything at all complex. The idea that it has to somehow spring magically fully-formed from the designer's forehead won't work. It's a recipe for fundamentally broken junk. No designer is that good, not even bone-fide geniuses with decades of experience. (In fact that's exactly why most software we have to deal with is so broken. The way the business is structured, the requirements docs tend to get nailed down in excruciating detail before a single line of code has been written, and it's incredibly difficult to get anything changed even if it becomes blindingly obvious that something isn't going to work.)
  15. PrimeJunta
    If you've saved the Pirate Pistol, you will not have died in vain.
  16. PrimeJunta
    Hiro, no it's not. I've been following this from the start, and got an extremely clear idea of Josh's design goals from day one. They have remained the same, and all of the decisions he's made make perfect sense from their point of view. The direction is perfectly clear. Sometimes stuff doesn't work in practice as well as it looked on paper, and then it has to be changed. Sometimes the design solution wasn't all that great to start with. But whatever you can reproach Josh for, lack of direction isn't it.
  17. PrimeJunta
    Can't wait. Also getting curious about your obvious and well-earned hotline to the devs... are we going to see that green tag next to your name any time soon...?
  18. PrimeJunta
    That's not what design is like, nor what he's doing, but whatever.
  19. PrimeJunta
    Tsk tsk tsk... "Spiritual successor." That's a very fluid term. Is IWD2 a spiritual successor of IWD? It uses rather dramatically different mechanics after all. No class kits, no dual-classing, a whole new wacky thing called "feats," XP requirements per level rising arithmetically instead of geometrically, weapon proficienies by weapon group rather than by weapon, and only two levels of it, XP awards for monsters computed by challenge rating rather than fixed, ... If IWD -> IWD2 is legit, then why couldn't P:E be a spiritual successor to the IE games, despite using yet a different ruleset?
  20. PrimeJunta
    I haven't really missed having more than those four. OTOH the wizard spell selection is kinda limited as it is. One point-damage spell, one area-damage spell, one area-debuff, one self-buff. Mix damage types, debuff types, and buff types for each level. With more spell variety it could be, but then having multiple grimoires will help.
  21. PrimeJunta
    No, it's called a straw man. We were discussing Degenerate game play. Freedom within the rules is assumed, because that's what Degenerate gameplay IS. My argument has Always been that once a developer sets the rules, his job is finished. He should NOT be coming back trying later to change those rules for no reason but to check-mate players who dared to 'misbehave' within the game. Uh... Stun. P:E is not made with the AD&D rules, or even the D&D rules. It's made with a whole new system. Josh hasn't even finished making up the rules. He is not "coming back later." Indeed you do, Stun. Indeed you do. Aaah... I think I'm starting to see the root of our disagreement. You appear to treat P:E as a direct mechanical continuation of the IE games. I.e., you believe that they do, or at least should, use if not exactly the same mechanics, at least mechanics that are close to identical. Whereas I have observed that this is not what P:E is: it is, instead, a game with different mechanics, inspired by the mechanics in the IE games. So, from this POV, you're still allowed to tinker with the rules, as long as the end result produces gameplay that is if not 100% identical to the original, at least a very close approximation, including things like grinding, rest-spamming, save-scumming, dump stats for different classes, and so on and so forth. Am I at all correct? 'Cuz if I am, then it's clear that this discussion has run its course. I believe very strongly that one of the primary goals of any redesign of the rules is to address the failings of the rules being redesigned. Like, to pick an example at random, the way D&D3 addressed the problems with dual/multiclassing in AD&D. This represents a fundamental difference in views, not something we can actually resolve and come to an agreement about. Put another way, I enthusiastically support Josh's goals even if I disagree with his solutions from time to time, whereas you will necessarily consider them a bad thing in and of themselves, since the intent is specifically to change the way the game plays.
  22. PrimeJunta
    As things currently stand, the combat itself isn't all that much fun. It has a lot of potential, but it's not there yet. As to the classes, some of them are much more fun than others. The priest is boring, the wizard is serviceable and versatile but not particularly exciting, the cipher, druid, and chanter are genuinely cool. The wizard could easily be made much more interesting with some cool talents and a broader selection of spells, and I'm not quite sure what could be done about the priest. Which is a shame, but perhaps they'll come up with something.
  23. PrimeJunta
    Sorry, Stun, but I'm not going to let that go so easily. You explicitly said that developers should not do anything to limit a player's freedom to choose his playstyle. Yet the very notion of rules is there to do just that. Consider the dual- and multiclassing rules in BG2. They're utterly, completely arbitrary. Two sets of rules. One for humans, one for non-humans. Both with arbitrary limitations about what you're allowed to dual and what not, and arbitrary limitations on how it happens. What is that if not "restrictions on game play freedom?" The fact that you don't like some particular decisions Josh has made has no bearing whatsoever on the principle. And at this time, I'm not interested in discussing those particular decisions; I'm interested in discussing the general principle, and the question of whether "degenerate gameplay" is a useful term or not, and whether designing systems so that they minimize the possibility is a good idea or not. If you want to discuss rest-spamming or save-scumming, we can do that some other time, or you can discuss it with someone else. Of course they're not. I was using cheat codes to debunk your argument that "more freedom is always better." It's called a reductio ad absurdum.
  24. PrimeJunta
    Ah. Misunderstanding. By "Bang you're dead" I wasn't thinking of the IE deathspells, although I can see why you'd think that. I was thinking of something like Soul Ignition as it was in the first BB. Something that literally, reliably lets you kill anything by clicking on it. Freer, but not fun. As to "freedom within constraints," sorry, Stun, that's not opinion, that's a fact. Rules are constraints. You can't have a game without rules.* If a game becomes more enjoyable for you by cheating, it just means that your opinion about what's fun differs from the designers' -- or the designers were not successful at implementing their vision. It still wouldn't be a game if there were no constraints. (Tangent: this is IMO the main way Numenera fails. There are too few constraints and too much freedom. Higher-tier characters can succeed reliably at pretty much anything, regardless of their character concept or the way they built it.) *Except Calvinball, and that's imaginary.
  25. PrimeJunta
    I'm pretty sure those are bugs. They also said they're going to add Accept/Cancel buttons to chargen and levelup.
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