PrimeJunta

@Malignacious... not sure that talking to you is a great idea, but here goes anyway. P:E is explicitly billed as a retro game. The selling point isn't cutting-edge physics, graphics, or similar things. The whole point of it is to bring back the feel of the Infinity Engine games. It's also a game that's being made on a very tight budget. That's why, for example, they have painted "choose your own adventure" intertitles instead of animated cutscenes or custom animations. I think it's pretty safe to say that most of us backers would prefer that limited budget to be spent on things that help recreate and build on the things the IE games did well -- big, sprawling, beautiful worlds, scads of quests and story, deep and well-written companion interactions, lots of gameplay variety with various character builds and party compositions, lots and lots of different monsters, and so on. While fantastic animations, physics, and what have you would be nice, they don't really contribute all that much to these things. The fantastic demo you linked to, for example, is done with very expensive middleware. It is not a priority for this game. If you value things like immersive physics and graphics, then P:E is not the game you're looking for. There are others. Why not go play them, instead of ranting that this one does things a little differently, and how benighted we all are because we like it that way?

That is entirely incomprehensible to me, but to each their own I guess.

That Euphoria demo was pretty damn cool. About as relevant to P:E as a flight simulator though.

It's not just one more attack. It's the ability to block critters from moving through your zone of control, and punishing them -- hard -- if they want to disengage and try another route past. This will solve the IE game problem where it was basically pointless to try to position your fighters anywhere there wasn't a conveniently-positioned narrow doorway, since the gankers will just scoot right past them to go after your squishies. This will make it possible to use actual tactics -- have a line of heavies in front of your squishies. I hope it's going to also immobilize the fighter, as it will fix one more annoying thing about IE-style AI -- the propensity for your characters to run after enemies after they gank one (Guard button notwithstanding). Don't forget that it's an ability you can turn on and off at will. Pick a position, park your fighter at the choke point in defend mode, and you're all set. Edit: note that there is a certain amount of speculation in the above. I'm extrapolating from what Josh has said are his intentions when designing the mechanics. It would be cool if he showed up to confirm/debunk, as appropriate.

@MReed, have you followed what Josh has said about maimed characters? By the sound of it they're seriously gimped, plus they will be dead if hit again. I've seen nothing to indicate that it'll be a DA:O style easy-to-shrug-off condition you can fix on the fly with a consumable or spell.

When you want to move? (Okay, not sure about this one -- I think I heard it mentioned somewhere that this is a "defend" mode that parks your fighter somewhere. Could be that it has some other trade-off, but I'm pretty sure there is one. Paging Dr. Sawyer to the OR, stat!)

To pick some of the most obvious ones, DA:O has aggro mechanics (and it's quite crucial to use them to play effectively), but P:E doesn't; DA:O has cooldowns, but P:E doesn't; DA:O has (plentiful) spammable potions for health and mana, but P:E doesn't; DA:O has maiming which is fixable on the fly with an expendable, P:E has maiming which requires you to rest (with limited resting); DA:O has no permadeath, but P:E does even in normal mode (a Maimed character whose health hits zero is permadead). So spellcasting in the IE games was a cooldown too, because you had to rest to regain them? Okay then, glad we got that cleared up.

More to the point, your description of those mechanics WAS ALMOST ENTIRELY WRONG. Which kind of starts the discussion off on the wrong foot.

And where did it say that the "flypaper" ability does that? I'm fairly confident that all it means is that the fighter, unlike other classes, and when that ability is active, is able to engage more than one target at once -- and possibly that his disengagement attacks are meaner. There's nothing about disabling AI there. Yet Josh has explicitly stated that "heat" (aggro) mechanics won't be present in the game, and has not mentioned the presence of "Taunt" at all.

Yes, you do. But that interpretation is entirely yours, and not founded on anything the devs have said. Read what Josh has said about the reasons he changed that mechanic. It was not to get rid of the need for counters, but to get rid of the necessity for trial-and-error-reloading. Before, if your main caster was hit by a paralysis, petrification, or death effect, you effectively lost the battle. Now, you will have a chance to react to the turn of events after it happens. I.e., a surprise attack by basilisks suddenly becomes a possibility that won't trigger an automatic reload. It does in no way imply that you won't need protection from petrification anymore. That would be silly.

Yes, that's the one you got right. Yes, there will be no hard counters. However, that does not mean there will be no counters, full stop, nor that there will be no effects requiring (or greatly mitigated by) counters. To take a trivial example, there will be elemental damage, and I'm pretty sure there will be counters that help resist elemental damage. They just won't be hard counters, i.e., effects that completely and reliably cancel out effects that would otherwise be immediately lethal. Somewhat, as in completely, yes. Yes, we know there's a "flypaper" ability for fighters. What you pulled out of your behind is that it involves messing with or switching off enemy AI. It merely means that a fighter can stickily engage multiple enemies at once. I would expect that enemy fighters have a similar ability. Not when you get the known facts wrong, or are pulling speculations out of thin air and describing them as facts.

Indeed. I think only one of them is right (the first one). As to the others -- Hard counters. True, there won't be any. However, @MReed doesn't appear to know what "hard counter" means, since we certainly don't know that counters won't be required. Equal roles. In fact, we know the contrary -- classes are more differentiated in combat than in the IE games. What we do know is that classes will be closer to each other in combat power – i.e., we won't have the situation where wizards are useless at low levels and gods at high levels, or that rogues or bards kind of suck in combat at all levels. The second part is directly contrary to what we know, i.e. that fighters will have more modal/passive abilities and fewer active abilities than, say, wizards. Interfering with AI. Wut? Josh was describing disengagement attacks, not something "interfering with AI." I.e., fighters pack an extra-mean punch when an enemy tries to disengage. Presumably the AI will take this into account when deciding what to do, just like you would if you were fighting a fighter -- but this is nothing like aggro mechanics which they've said won't be in the game, and which are interfering with the AI. I.e., another fine post from the Bitter Brigade. He forgot to whine about "no combat XP" though.

I <3 this thread.

Haha wow. You realize that you just called three big-ticket backers ugly and identical?

You know what's the hardest thing about making a game (or pretty much anything that involves more than one person, as a matter of fact?) Project management. Everybody has ideas, there are scads of skilled writers, artists, musicians, modelers, scripters, testers, and programmers around, there are great tools, there are great marketing channels; you name it. But keeping that whole pack together and getting it to produce a coherent whole, now that's tough. One reason I feel optimistic about P:E is that the guy in charge produced IWD2 in ten freaking months. That's some seriously badass project management mojo right there.

I don't know what the numbers are, but DA:O certainly felt much more same-y than BG, in terms of enemy variety. On the other hand, IWD2 is feeling pretty DA:O-ey in terms of same-yness so far, although I'm sure that it has a huge variety of things, since it benefits from and builds on the bestiary from its elder siblings. I think that feeling of same-yness is created by having lots of near-identical encounters strung together, even if in the end you have so many that the total variety is pretty big. I think two or three similar encounters, tops, should be enough; after that it just becomes rote, a chore, even if by then you've figured out the tactics to get through it quickly. A thing that adds to it is having many variants of the same type of critter that only differ in power, even if it's not actually mechanically done via level scaling. DA:O had both. In spades.

@Lephys Josh also said you can only carry camping materials for 2-6 camps, depending. I.e., rest-spamming is still out.

Remember that Star Wars: A New Hope translation where "Must be some kind of drill" became "Sen täytyy olla jonkinlainen pora?"

If genre definitions become a straitjacket, that's a problem. As a shorthand way to categorize things so they become easier to find, they're OK. Personally I especially enjoy genre crossovers. Perdido Street Station, to name one.

Genres have fairly strict definitions though. Libraries and bookshops use them to classify things. I'm not sure it's helpful to knowingly violate them.

@Malignacious, this is not the game you're looking for. :jediwave:

To be fair, some of the classics had lots of repetitive, filler combat too. I'm on an IWD2 playthrough, and it's starting to wear me down. IWD1 had much better variety; things were changing frequently enough to keep it interesting. It's really too bad they didn't have the time and budget to do that, and had to build length by throwing mob after mob of goblins/orcs/Aurilites/ice trolls etc. at you. If there was a mod that removed 80% of the combat I'd apply it.

Fluid terms. Change with context. I think they're more about who the protagonists are, what motivates them, and how the world is portrayed. I understand 'high fantasy' to be a near synonym of 'heroic fantasy.' Villainous villains. Threats that threaten the very existence of the world, or something damn close. Ancient bloodlines. Noble knights. The wise king who has gone over the sea, leaving the kingdom to the perfidious pretender. Ancient and terrifying secrets. Capital-G Good and capital-E Evil. That sort of thing. And 'low fantasy' to be something at the other end of the scale. Muck-filled streets. The cutthroat struggling with his remnants of conscience. Corrupt politicians. War, but not one about Good and Evil, but about power, wealth, glory, greed, and usually the protagonist is someone who's just caught up in it as an outsider. Sex. Crime. So it's totally possible to have high-magic low fantasy, or low-magic high fantasy. The Witcher is high-magic low-fantasy, for example. Can't think of a low-magic high-fantasy classic off the top of my head because few high-fantasy authors can resist the temptation to also put in high-magic. Robin Hood would fit the bill, if it wasn't usually classified as historical fiction. It's also totally possible to write a low-fantasy story in a high-fantasy setting. Kirill Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer is a low-fantasy take on Middle-Earth, for example. Edit: ho, cancel that. I looked it up and it looks like I had the term completely wrong. As did you. It's actually a more interesting distinction. Quoting: "Low fantasy is a sub-genre of fantasy fiction involving "nonrational happenings that are without causality or rationality because they occur in the rational world where such things are not supposed to occur."[1] Low fantasy stories are set either in the real world or a fictional but rational world, and are contrasted with high fantasy stories which take place in a completely fictional fantasy world setting with its own set of rules and physical laws." [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_fantasy ] I like that definition more actually. What term should we use for the kind of stuff I mistakenly thought was low fantasy, though? We have 'heroic fantasy' for the other kind.

@BrainMuncher, P:E doesn't have combat XP.

I don't have the references, but I'm pretty sure Josh said dialogs will work according to 1 and 2 at least. I.e. if you want to surf the dialog trees the only way to do it is by savegame abuse. The journal will probably auto-update with relevant info though, and I expect there will be a pretty long dialog log you can scroll back on too. As to 3, IMO it should be more of a situational thing. I have no problem being able to have the same "What can you tell me about Targos?" conversation with the barkeep over and over again, but yeah, for plot-critical NPC's it should work that way.