PrimeJunta

Coding for multiple threads is a lot harder than for a single thread though. Harder means longer development time, more and harder-to-catch bugs. Race conditions can be real bästards to pin down. Bottom line: don't do it unless there's a real, concrete need, and a real, tangible benefit. As far as P:E is concerned, from what we know about it I doubt that's going to be the case.

<sigh> Oh, Volly. You keep thumping your chest about that 'challenging' thing but it still ain't so. Insta-kill doesn't make a game with unlimited saves challenging. It just makes it repetitive.

It's not that hard I think, if you take into account that the designers also control encounter design. Just include a suitable mix of ranged and melee units in each encounter. Give them two stances: aggressive and defensive. In aggressive stance, the melee units will go after high-value targets preferably, but if engaged before they get there, stay that way until incapacitated; the ranged units target the high-value ones and attempt to stay clear of being engaged by melee units. In defensive stance, the melee units pair with the ranged ones to shield them, intercepting and engaging any player-controlled melee units that attempt to go after them. On an open battlefield, this would turn into a situation where you have lines of durable melee units slugging away at each other while ranged units shoot at each other, concentrating fire on highest-value targets on either side. Which is, more or less, how pre-gunpowder infantry tactics actually worked. Throw in some shock units with suitable AI, and you've got a recipe for challenging and engaging combat. Even applied as simply and as mechanically as this, it would make for a wide variety of interesting encounters by varying the specifics of unit composition and terrain. If you add a bit of higher-level AI so that e.g. it recognizes gaps in your line and tries to punch through, or weaknesses to your flanks and attempts to outflank, and it could get quite hairy indeed. Also, it's not like this is anything new; RTS's with decent AI have done more or less this for years -- and P:E, being an RPG rather than an RTS -- doesn't even need to do it that well.

Here you go – [ http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Companion ]

Damnit, what a great post. All I can really say is "hear hear." Also in re Kreia, I loved the way KoTOR 2 subverted the whole light side/dark side dichotomy in general. Of NV characters, I especially enjoyed Boone's story, and liked Rose's story least, largely for the reasons you describe -- Rose was basically sitting there drinking waiting to be rescued, whereas Boone had some heavy **** to deal with which he eventually dealt with himself, with you just the catalyst. Veronica was a close second to Boone. In fairness, though, I think e.g. the laser pistol quest reflects more the massive breadth and ambition of the game. I thoroughly agree that it would have been much better if there were other options than a simple treasure-hunt, but with a game that size, some of the sidequests are bound to be less fleshed-out than others. I'm optimistic about this with P:E. For one thing, many of the writers who've written this kind of thing are involved, and Josh has explictly stated that he's not a fan of ego-stroking as narrative technique, and doesn't want to encourage it. So yeah, I will be disappointed if this ends up as another biowarian egotrip. But it won't. It may fail in many ways, but that's not one of them.

Your combat scenario sounds about right, but I'm not so sure about the stealth scenario. If detection is based on radius, there could easily be situations where your fighter's detection radius is simply too large to get him past the guard without tripping the alarm, no matter what you do. And that's all good as far as I am concerned.

For most people, the answer to your question is "yes." People respond to incentives. Games are built around incentive systems. They work. If you want to give the game long-lived artifacts that stay with your character, then don't provide artifacts which outclass them. Either make them gain in power with the character, make them insanely powerful to start with, or make them cursed so the character can't be rid of them. But expecting the player to keep a +2 sword around when a +3 is available for role-playing reasons is unreasonable. Of course, there's nothing to stop you, as the player, from doing just that anyway. But designing the game around the assumption that you will is bad design.

Sounding lovely. Can't wait to hear what it's like with a live orchestra. I wonder how many of us think of this sound as 'game music' or 'movie music' though? Anyone else here go to concerts, opera, or ballet, or listen to recorded classical music at home? It certainly warmed my heart that Justin Bell turns to Bach when in trouble.

While I don't think rogues should necessarily be weaker than fighters in combat, I do think something has been lost with the "utility character." The party leader of my most fun party in Storm of Zehir was just such a character -- I built him to have all the skills... or, well, all the skills needed on the world map anyway -- so when combat started all he could do was sit on a rock and plink with an arrow, more or less. On the other hand, everyone else was a minmaxed-to-the-hilt wrecking ball, so they made up for it. That was fun to play specifically because of the changed party composition, and the constant discoveries on the world map made it more than worth it. (Okay, technically I did kit him up with scrolls in case extra magical firepower was needed, but that was rarely used and more of an optional extra.)

BG2 was as mainstream as games got at the time.

I had an A4 graph paper notebook full of hand-drawn dungeon map, starting from a ruined keep at the top, all the way down to some rather hot places. Then I moved on to world maps and city maps. Found this one in an archive in EPS format, with only the dingbats designating cities borked into rectangles...

Criticism, even strong criticism, is not the same as dislike. I'm extremely critical of D&D as a system, yet I played it as my primary PnP game system for 25 years. I would not have done that if I disliked it. My criticisms of BG2 in particular are strongly related. It's a great game, but also hugely flawed. That is not a contradiction in terms.

Combining things in new ways is innovation too. In fact that's what most innovation is. I can't think of any game that has even most of this particular combination. Can you?

Whoa, the Bitter Brigade is out in force, I see. How does P:E innovate? I guess we'll see when we'll see, but one can always speculate. First off, it's billed very much as an evolutionary rather than revolutionary game. The innovation isn't going to be something knock-your-socks-off unexpected. It's going to be in the smaller things. Nevertheless, there's a quite a bit we know about already,. Technical. The 2D combined with 3D lighting and volumetric effects backgrounds are innovative. At least I don't think I've seen anything exactly like that anywhere, and they promise to take the top-down isometric experience to entirely new visual heights. Mechanical. The game mechanics design goals of P:E are pretty damn ambitious. It wants to be both diverse and balanced, eliminate cookie-cutter builds and parties while producing genuinely different gameplay for different builds and party compositions. Breaking out of the "fighters are strong but dumb, wizards are smart but fragile" mold counts as fairly major innovation in my book. Lore. The whole soul magic thing is original and highly intriguing IMO, and it looks like they've thought it through extremely thoroughly, from in-world explanations for the supernatural abilities various classes have, to magical materials like skein steel, to the politics of animancy, to its history, and so on. Time period/history. There haven't been many cRPG's set in the Renaissance/Age of Discovery period, and fewer still in a 'colonial' setting where a new culture arriving from overseas collides with older, established cultures. Even better, it looks like they're doing this in a way that avoids making it a transparent allegory for how it went down in our world; for one thing it appears that the cultures are on a much more equal technological/military footing. Languages. I don't recall seeing many cRPG's make even a slightly credible attempt at conlangs; fantasy names are usually just vaguely Celtic syllables strung together at random. P:E's have structure and feel and flavor. (That's a big, big deal for me personally BTW.) Funding and production model. Doing something of this scale through Kickstarter is pretty innovative in itself, even if they weren't quite the first to do it. What's even more interesting IMO is the way they're using and sharing assets. Unity is largely OSS, and they're sharing both their tech and some of their people with a 'friendly competitor,' i.e. inXile. I find that pretty damn cool because it's a win-win situation. That was just off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more -- but P:E looks pretty damn innovative from where I'm at, certainly more than the next AAA instalment in some well-established FPS franchise.

In most mythologies Heaven and Hell are places you can reach by walking. Used to be so in Christian mythology as well, certainly Hindu and Buddhist mythoi, and most definitely ancient Greek mythos. Olympus is an actual, real mountain in Greece, and there were several known entrances to Hades – Orpheus went through a cave in Taenarum, Odysseus through one near Lake Acheron, and Aeneas through another one near Lake Avernus. Yep, those are real lakes, one in Greece, one in Sicily. The idea that heavens and hells are somewhere 'out there,' unreachable through physical means, is a thoroughly modern one. The various religions pretty much had to re-interpret their traditions in light of the astronomical discoveries from Galilei on out. So IMO reaching Hades by going down far enough a giant dungeon system isn't out of place at all!

Hades. I would want to see us end up in Hades. A cold, still place where the shades of the dead wander, presided over by the vast, looming form of the god and goddess of the dead. At the bottom, obviously, and with suitable lore attached. But it would be cool if it was a place you could reach just by going down, instead of having to plane shift or such.

That's a Bethsoft peculiarity. I hope we won't see it in P:E.

Duh.

Perhaps a little paradoxally, I think random insta-kill effects only work in hardcore/roguelike modes. When dead means dead, you do a whole lot more to avoid them, which can be exciting and rewarding. But combined with unlimited save and reload, they don't make games harder, only more repetitive.

As I recall, the KS was shooting up way faster than they expected and they just ran out of ideas for a final stretch goal. Putting in that one was more of an expression of exuberance than an actual goal. If it were an actual goal, yeah, it wouldn't be much of a one, I agree. But then a friend of mine ran for the university student council with the slogan, "More of everything for everybody, or at least lots."

If you're really keen on this, just roll a d6 and allocate the points yourself. Not everything has to be a feature. Just sayin'...

Gotta hand it to @khalil. Not everyone has the gonads to do the virtual equivalent of walking into a Hell's Angels bar and going "You know what? Real bikers ride Hondas."

The Xaurip animation looked pretty good. Very fluid. Costumes need some work though.

So the only two options are forcing you to figure out everything by trial and error, and "massive handholding." No middle ground possible. Glad we got that cleared up.

PC.