PrimeJunta
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Everything posted by PrimeJunta
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Only if encounters are designed only to be soluble by trial-and-error. It's totally possible to have challenging encounters that you can figure out on the fly, by playing carefully and intelligently and adjusting your tactics... if the mechanics support it. Try NetHack for example, no save-scumming there and if you're good enough almost every game is winnable -- but if you're a newbie, you're lucky to make it to level 3. -
Neither of which are in any way essential to the game or story. Nowadays they would've just charged five bucks for it as a DLC.
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Whoo, good summary and interesting thoughts there too. My quick take on the points: BG2 1-2 - save-n-reload. Hate it. Wish it would die already. 3 - quadratic mages. Dislike. I tend to go for late-game power which means I play mages, which means early game is a tedious and tiresome careful tiptoe of rest-spamming. I strongly prefer classes to follow a roughly similar power curve, but be powerful in different areas. 4 - level scaling. No comment. If I don't notice it, I don't have a problem with it, and I never noticed it in BG2. 5 - quest hubs and narrative structure. Agree. 6-7-8 agree. I tried to start a BG2 playthrough a while back but after the first conversation was about a hamster up a retard's butt, I headdesked and gave up. PS:T 1 - character creation. Agree. My radical take is that PS:T would've been better with no character creation at all. Just give a prefab TNO and let you evolve him when playing. You do know you can change class on the fly, any way you like, and the ridiculous logarithmic XP means you can get to quite decently high levels in thief and fighter even if your 'main' class is mage? 2 - aesthetics - never paid any attention. 3 - yep 4 - I didn't think the combat was all that bad actually, and except for the endgame and the lead-up to it it was pretty well paced too. 5 - npc's - yeah, they rule. 6 - Modron cube. Never had that problem with it. I don't think I've ever properly ground it, after completing the quests in it. Never had a problem affording things either.
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Gotta nitpick... there are in fact a few times where Tolkien alludes to elven ears as being pointed. The most explicit ones are from his early work though, and therefore not canon, and the most recent one actually describes hobbit ears with 'elven' in quotes. According to this splendid essay, there isn't enough evidence to unambiguously settle this important matter one way or the other.
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:catches up: Huh. From where I'm at this argument is to a large extent about semantics. Personally, when I say 'kiting' I am referring specifically to the degenerate strategy, i.e., exploiting flaws in AI or the combat mechanics, which let you hit and move without being hit by careful micromanagement. The IE games had holes that let you do just this. This doesn't mean that attempting to avoid engagement is in itself kiting. If you're faster than the opposition and use that speed edge to your advantage, that's totes legit, whether we're talking bullfighting or a cRPG.
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PrimeJunta replied to Infiltrator_SF's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)I would expect that undeath isn't a curable condition, since death isn't either. Although I suppose it might be possible to transfer the soul of the undead noble into a living vessel. Hard to see how that would qualify as the good path though...
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@Fearabbit for the record, I'm not arguing against Obs's armor designs. I think they're just fine. I do have an issue with Sarex's position that because something is fantasy then nothing needs justification, and I find titillation and pandering a turn-off rather than a turn-on. I do reserve the right to argue these positions should the spirit so move me.
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Yes, "grasping at straws" is a very good description of what you're doing here. Since you're still wriggling to avoid the point, I'll go full Lephys on you. After that I'll just have to write this discussion off as a waste of time. Suppose that you play a fantasy game. In this fantasy game, all the carts have square wheels. Yet in this game, the carts, and their wheels, function exactly like you would expect carts and wheels to function. If there is no in-world explanation beyond "megic!!11!one" for square wheels functioning like round wheels, then the setting is internally inconsistent. If the author only put in square wheels because he thought it would help Sarex maintain an erection while playing, then that choice is 'pandering' and 'lazy worldbuilding.' Now substitute boobplate and warriors for square wheels and carts. Dig? (PS. I noticed that you chose to take off on the tangent I specifically said I wouldn't follow instead. That's your prerogative of course. You might want to read Samantha Swords' blog btw; there she discusses specifics of how to beat physically stronger opponents in fights.)
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Which part of "internally consistent" don't you understand, Sarex? Here, I'll put it in real simple terms. There are obvious, mechanical reasons why boobplate or golden codpieces make for lousy armor. Therefore, if in a fictional setting one gender or the other charges into battle wearing such stuff, it needs an explanation. Either they get lots of fatalities, or there's some other magic thing going on, which needs to be explained. If there is no explanation, the setting is internally inconsistent. It fails to account for something obviously, mechanically, wrong. With me so far? There is, however, no physical reason why one gender of any given species should be physically weaker than the other. In fact the contrary is true in many species. Still with me? Good. Therefore, the creator of a fictional setting can make genders in fictional species or race -- human, demihuman, humanoid, other, whatever -- be just as equal or different in physical or mental characteristics as s/he wants, without having to give an explanation for it. This is because it doesn't violate any of the setting's internal rules. This applies to aumaua and orlan just as well as ocean or meadow humans. Of course you're also wrong about women of the species homo sapiens sapiens on this planet not being physically capable of, say, fighting in full plate armor with a Doppelschwert, given suitable training, but that's a tangent I'm not going to get into here. I'll just leave a couple of links: http://fashionablygeek.com/videos-2/this-armored-lady-won-the-longsword-competition-at-a-world-invitational-tournament/
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A fictional setting should be internally consistent. If you want your male warriors to go into battle wearing giant golden codpieces and nothing else while the women wear functionally designed, meticulously crafted Nürnberg plate, then there should be some in-world explanation for that. To do that just because you like giant golden codpieces and lots of hard, muscular male flesh is careless, shoddy worldbuilding.
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I don't know. I do know that if I was given two writing assignments, "write dialog for this story, assuming Pro Tagonist does the talking" and "write dialog for this story, assuming any of Pro Tagonist/Pallegina/Edér/Aloth/Sagani/Cadegund/Kana Rua/Adventurer's Hall Type does the talking, whichever has the highest appropriate stat", then it would take me a lot -- like a LOT -- longer to complete the second assignment, and the result would be a great deal blander and more generic.
@Sensuki ya think? It's pretty long-running for a fad IMO, and it's having a real, positive impact. From where I'm at, it looks more like some hitherto extremely male, extremely white, extremely straight Internet subcultures have finally started to go through the process of realizing that hey, there are non-male, non-white, non-straight people who want to participate fully, without having to mask their identity, and not as tokens, mascots or sub-subcultures. I see terms like "white knight" or "SJW" as just derailing attempts by the people who for some to me incomprehensible reason see their white, straight masculinity threatened by this process. The good news is that it's not working. There's been a massive improvement in gamer/geek culture over the past ten years or so, and it's only gathering momentum. It won't be too long until the last die-hards will be left behind with the MGOTW's, pickup artists, and MRA's in their little bitter self-imposed jerk circle.
@Ineth the main reason is that it would make writing the game a lot more complicated. If the story is at all personal, it's going to be very tricky to write all the dialog taking into account that it the character talking might or might not be the PC. I.e., it'll only really work in IWD/SoZ style games where there is no distinction between the PC and other party members. We already know that P:E won't be like this.
There's a big difference in abstraction level between Unity and Infinity Engine. Unity is more like an engine for making engines; the P:E engine is built on top of that. Obviously way easier than doing the whole thing from scratch, but definitely more work than what IWD2 had to do.
That will address that problem. I have to say though that I dislike the "only PC skills are checked" thing, except in conversation if it's always the PC that does the talking anyway. If there's a heavy rock to lift, it just doesn't make sense that the big brute of a muscle wizard can't lift it for the PC. I'm on a KOTOR2 playthrough. I like the way it was handled there, except that like with everything else the game is much too generous. Most routine interactions could be handled by any party member, but there were plenty of conversations and one-on-one interactions where only the PC's skills count. There also was a relatively limited number of skills, most of which were genuinely useful. It would have been none the worse if some of the skills had been merged to pare down the list even more, e.g. Repair and Security into Mechanics and Awareness and Stealth into Scouting. The only thing it would really have needed though is higher thresholds. It's way too easy to get everything.
In my opinion, no. Updates are PR, and if PR is led by the developers, then PR must take second-priority to development tasks. Normal turbulence will shift around second-priority tasks. They have been demonstrating constant tangible progress. That's what counts.
Re delays... I work in software development myself and have a pretty good idea of the kinds of things that can go wrong and throw the schedule out of whack. Teams that manage to deliver consistently on budget and on schedule are much rarer than teams that occasionally see slippage. Sometimes it's not even the team's fault; all it takes sometimes is that one key person becomes unavailable at a critical time for whatever reason. I.e., I have a quite a lot of understanding for schedule slippage. From where I'm at it's the end product that counts. That said, repeated schedule slippage is usually indicative of something else wrong. P:E's hasn't slipped yet, unless you count the schedule they had in mind when starting the kickstarter, when the project was one-quarter the size of how it ended up (and I don't; it's impossible to make even a slightly accurate estimate if you don't know the project scope). So if it slips once, I won't even shrug. If it slips twice, I'll raise an eyebrow. From the third time I'll start to get worried. Finally, one thing Obsidian has managed to do, historically, is deliver on schedule, even when the conditions are extremely unfavorable, and Josh has a really good track record managing these kinds of projects. So I guess the short version is that I'm not worried at all.
@rjshae That depends entirely on how deep the skills are. If the same skills are used in crafting, conversation, and interacting with the world, and there are plenty of opportunities to do so, then five skills are plenty. I'd rather have five deep, well thought-out, and fully-fleshed skills than twenty trivial ones. The only real problem with only five skills is that it will probably be easy to max out all of them in a party, which removes much of the validity of choosing between them.
Did I miss something? Why is their credibility wavering in your eyes?
