PrimeJunta

I get a special kick out of beating a difficult fight. Sure, easy fights can be fun too, but it's a different kind of fun. The IE games had fights that were difficult in a good way (as well as sucker punches).

Not everything does, no. But IMO not everything needs to be survivable solely by adapting your tactics on the fly. I would like to see some encounters that really are so tough you will die if you didn't prepare accordingly – with enough hints available beforehand that you can prepare, without being forced to trial-and-error it.

I don't think there's much risk of MMO-style cookie-cutter party being required. Josh has explicitly stated that his goal is to allow as much party diversity as possible. I.e., that an all-ranger party will be entirely feasible and will be enjoyable to play – even if it'll be quite different from the "standard" one.

Druids what, in which cRPG's? At least in all D&D3 based ones, druids do the opposite of suck. They rule. Stomp. Win. They're the best all-rounder class, hands down. They heal, self-buff both offense and defense, debuff, area-debuff, area-damage, are extremely durable especially with long-duration self-buffs, they're supplied with a big honking meat shield, and they have that spontaneous-conversion summoning that's so powerful it's almost not even funny. If you want to solo any DnD3 cRPG, druid is the way to go. A while back I made an all-druid party in SoZ and it made the game a freakin' cakewalk. Battle consisted of (1) start, (2) everyone summon suitable minion, (3) watch them obliterate the opposition. Okay, for the tougher ones, (4) watch minions become killed so (5) summon another one. The only challenge was keeping track of which druid summoned which minion so I could have the right ones re-summon them. (Okay, I gave one of the druids high INT, Able Learner, and one level of rogue so I got those skills covered, but still.)

Would Kangaxx have been less memorable if there had been a possibility to pursue a lore trail of him, which would've turned up clues about his strengths and weaknesses? Perhaps accounts by adventurers who somehow survived an encounter with him? If this lore trail hadn't been forced on you, but had been something someone hinted at and you had to follow yourself?

So Josh announced that PE won't do GM sucker punches. Meaning, encounters you're only likely to beat the second, third, or fourth time around because beating them requires foreknowledge of what you're going to be facing and how. That is good in my opinion. I always thought this kind of thing was lazy design masquerading as challenge. However, it's not obvious how the game will or should play with this element removed. Something could be lost. In particular, I think preparation is a fairly important gameplay element in the IE games, whether we're talking about spell lists, pre-buffs, or weapon loadouts. I would not like to lose that. Conversely, I also get a kick out of beating an encounter even when I wasn't properly prepared. Some ways things could go: South Park style. All the mechanics are completely transparent. You can see the weaknesses and immunities of every enemy, with crucial defenses like Shielded and Armor visible all the time. This lets you adjust your tactics on the fly, using whatever you happen to have. To keep things even a little interesting, you have limited scope to e.g. switch weapons in combat. Encounters are balanced to be beatable even if you don't have exactly the right attacks and counters, but they will be easier if you do. New Vegas style. The game provides you with information about each enemy type through a variety of mechanisms. If you pay attention you can figure out how to fight them before you have to. If not, you can still play by trial and error. Encounters are balanced to be punishing if you play them wrong. Roguelike style. Encounters are punishing and some can only reasonably be beaten with proper preparation and tactics. They're not telegraphed beforehand. However, retreat is always or almost always possible and the game mechanics don't punish you for it. If an encounter isn't going your way, you can run away, rest to heal up, prepare properly for it, and try again. I'm sure there are others. Of these, I would prefer New Vegas style. South Park style takes preparation out of the equation, and roguelike style only fits comfortably in roguelikes; it also doesn't really work with restricted resting since there will just be lots of trekking back and forth to campsites. Ideally I'd like PE to provide information about the monsters and combat challenges in upcoming areas in in-world ways: people talking about them casually, mentions when quests are given, books, and perhaps specialists you could actively seek out and interview. New Vegas did some of this, but it could be taken a good deal further. Perhaps combine it with a Witcher style bestiary you could fill up not only by killing things but by researching things.

Maybe it'll be a Renaissance noir. Everybody mostly just standing around after dark while it's raining, wearing wide-brimmed hats, smoking meerschaums, and glaring at each other balefully, then somebody discovers a corpse in a sea chest, with blood going slowly drip, drip, drip on the floor. And eventually somebody catches a ship and sails off into the gray North wind. Probably not though.

It's far too late for Paradox to affect any of that other than difficulty. Those are design decisions, and will have been made months ago. Changing them now would be extremely messy (read: expensive). I'm quite sure both Paradox and Obsidian are fully aware of that.

Already been done. I remember trying at least avocado ice cream, tomato ice cream, garlic ice cream, onion ice cream. Also blue cheese ice cream which while not a vegetable falls in the same cateogry. Most very very good. I'm sure celery would be too. The trick is that they're starters, not desserts. PS. That was in France. They'll eat anything and make you like it.

D&D had spell variants too. They even had an entire mechanic for it, namely metamagic feats. And then there were straight-out variants like magic missile -> minor missile storm -> major missile storm, lesser dispel magic -> dispel magic -> greater dispel magic, and so on. I quite like metamagic actually; the thing I don't like about Vancian magic is that it's extremely rigid, and metamagic introduces some flexibility to shaping it. A metamagic-focused sorcerer is my favorite caster class in D&D. (Also ridiculously overpowered at higher levels, but hey.)

There's a case to be made for making the Kickstarter stuff non-exclusive. The better they make them, the better they'll be able to sell them.

I would guess simplicity. If it doesn't scale you don't have to implement scaling, and you don't have to account for scaling effects when balancing it. The overall effect on character power is more or less the same if they gain more powerful variants and more of the weaker ones.

I understand that you can't share the dollar details of the deal, but some information on the structure would have been nice. E.g. "This is a revenue-sharing agreement on copies sold on top of the Kickstarter." FWIW I have zero problems with that, as long as it stays DRM-free etc. It's the "we give you money, now we own you" type of thing I don't like.

I like both. They're clearly more focused on tactical play than the "traditional" versions, but both hew closely to their respective archetypes. The grimoire is a great idea; a bit of a nod towards Vancian casting without the annoyance of having to micromanage spell lists. @Gfted1, what do you mean by a "nuker" mage and why wouldn't you be able to make one? Several of the wizard spells are AoE/multi-target damage, which is at least what I'd expect from a "nuker." I've no doubt there will be ways to pump up those at the expense of other abilities.

Many of these spells are geared for tactical play. The druid area heals for example are all about taking and holding ground. I find that extremely encouraging.

I just finished it yesterday. I liked it, even though I'm not a huge South Park fan: Far and away the best voiceacting in any computer game I've ever played. This is the first computer game where I haven't switched on subtitles and clicked through to skip the dialog. I can't stand listening to bored actors trying to emote in front of a microphone. This was good, every bit as good as the TV series. Why can't they all be this good? This kind of humor is hard to pull off without coming across as mean. This mostly succeeded. It only stumbled a bit with Mr. Slave IMO. South Park catches something about what it's like to be a kid. These stories are pretty much just like what we told each other when we were in fourth grade. Gameplay was good enough to get the job done. Not brilliant but serviceable. Very easy, but if they had made it harder it wouldn't have been any more entertaining IMO; it would just have been more work because I'd have had to play the boss fights by trial and error – on the first try throw everything at them to see what sticks, then die and use what you've discovered the second time around. I don't particularly care for that type of gameplay so I'm pretty cool with easy. On the other hand, I found it a bit too easy to discover two simple strategies – one for group fights, one for boss fights – which steamrollered pretty much everything. From there on out the fights were mostly mechanical application rather than particularly interesting or creative. The length was good. It ended before I got bored, but I didn't feel like I was left wanting more. The quality was good. I only encountered one bug that forced me to roll back to a previous checkpoint, and that was about three minutes of gameplay. Very few smaller bugs as well. I probably won't replay, at least not any time soon. Doesn't feel like there was a whole lot to discover. I might faff about a bit with one or two of the other classes though, just to see what they're like.

Some of you people worry about the strangest things.

If they're sharing an engine, base assets like maps, models, animations, sound effects etc. ought to be shareable even without them having to do anything much about it.

Actually, Mr. M., the Numenera setting isn't like that. The general level of technology is pseudo-medieval. The super-advanced tech plays the role of magic – relics with weird properties that some people have learned to use, to an extent. Mechanically Numenera's esoteries, cyphers, and artifacts work just like spells, scrolls/potions, and magic items. In fact, Monte Cook Games is working on another RPG called The Strange, which is a multiverse-type setting based on the same ruleset. One of the sub-settings or 'recursions' in it is Ardeyn, a high-fantasy world. Numenera is fully compatible with it; the Ninth World could be a recursion in it, or the future of the prime world (the Earth). So a PoE/T:ToN crossover mod based on The Strange would not only be feasible, it could even be consistent with canon -- just use the PoE assets to portray a piece of Ardeyn.

Cool topic. And whoa, long post. I'll try not to make this a habit. I like to look at this in terms of structure. There are a number of options, each of which has strengths and drawbacks. Mostly linear. This is the "late BioWare" style. The story arc remains the same whatever you do. Choices are mostly illusionary; the least illusionary choices are related to the kind of role you're playing, e.g. hero vs. anti-hero. The advantage is that it's easier to write, which can lead to better pacing, fewer inconsistencies, a tighter narrative, and deeper interactions with NPC's, both party and non-party. This is also easy to sell to publishers as there's no "wasted" content -- every player gets most of it with every play-through. The downside is that you as the player have much less agency, and if taken too far you end up in adventure game territory. It also doesn't help replayability. Branching. This is the "Witcher" style. There's a grand story arc, but the plot branches at some predetermined points, depending on your choices. It retains many of the advantages of the mostly linear style in that the writers still have overall control over what goes down and can write accordingly "deep" stories. The downside is that with more than a few branches, especially if they cross, this can get seriously hairy to keep together, which can lead to narrative and even technical problems like dead ends. It's also hard to keep all the branches fully fleshed-out. In The Witcher 2, for example, one of the branches left a great deal of the underlying story untold, which made the endgame highly confusing (I played that one first), and in The Witcher 1, playing the investigation sequence in the "wrong" order could get very confusing indeed. Sandbox. Here we have a very loose grand story arc that's funneled through a few chokepoints. Most of the action happens in "sidequests" -- stuff that's just there for you to do whenever you happen on it. These sidequests may or may not branch and may or may not have different resolutions. They also may feed into mechanical subsystems that create reactivity, e.g. reputation or karma systems that open up content depending on how they develop. The grand story arc may require specific choices of its own to resolve, or it too may be affected by the subsystems. The upside is can maximize player agency, and the subsystems may even create emergent gameplay -- stuff that wasn't really designed in but happened "by itself." These are also easier to design than branching plots with lots of intersections which need to be dealt with individually. The downside is that it's hard to make it all hang together. Oblivion was a failure (IMO) because it didn't: you just had a ginormous sandbox with scads of stuff to do, but none of what you did changed anything in any meaningful way, beyond the resolution of the little thing you did (and those resolutions had precious little choice either). OTOH if you tie things up too tightly, you end up with a super-complicated and probably broken Witcher-esque thing. It's also difficult to write in as much narrative depth or as involving plotlines as in the first two -- although with the right chokepoints and right reveals, it can get pretty damn good. (I was wowed by several moments in FO:NV for example.) I've enjoyed games with all of these structures greatly: my favorites from the first group include PS:Torment, Deus Ex, Knights of the Old Republic I and II, Mask of the Betrayer, and Jade Empire; from the second group, both Witchers and Baldur's Gate 2, and from the third, TES: Morrowind and Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas. Personally I can't really pick between the latter two; on the one hand I have a thing for deep plotting which you can't really get in a "sandbox," but I really like the freedom and feeling of agency you get in one. Before I played FO:NV I tilted towards "Witcher-style" but that was done so well I now honestly can't say which style I like more. In summary, I don't really care about the number of endings. I do care about meaningful choice. With mostly linear games, it's possible to give meaningful choices in character development and the way you relate to the story and the world (Deus Ex did both); with branching ones you can have a smaller number of genuinely meaningful choices (like in both Witchers); with sandbox ones, the critical bit is making those disparate bits hang together through some underlying mechanics so you're feeling you're making a difference. I'm hoping PoE is going to have a sandbox structure with perhaps a few more chokepoints than FO:NV, and similar reactivity to your choices. That would be rad.

Writing code that's understandable and functional is hard. I haven't met anyone who can do it who isn't fiercely proud of what s/he does. There is something similar to an artistic temperament about being able to do that, although IMO a great coder/designer is more like a great swordsmith than a great artist. OTOH being fiercely proud of what you do is no guarantee of quality, especially if you have people with an inflated sense of self-worth. There are lots of those around. IME most coders can't actually code worth a damn, even if they have the formal qualifications to do so. If you have that problem, I only know two ways to solve it: bring in someone who's ten times better, who proves it to them by coding circles around them, then proceeds to point out exactly what they're doing wrong... or give them about ten years to figure it out themselves.

@Alfiriel In my experience the best programmer-deisgners are the lazy ones. They'll always find a way to do the most with the least amount of effort, and they'll know to have a break before they're so tired they'll start to do damage. The ones with a strong work ethic are the worst; they'll sit there all night and produce gigantic quantities of garbage code nobody's able to understand except them.

I like the undead concept. But are they romanceable? :ducks:

More like a political philosophy. It is all about class warfare after all.