PrimeJunta

Ziets on Formspring about the cultural and technology level: [ http://www.formspring.me/GZiets/q/450375950014634053 ] While this is clearly a few hundred years from steampunk, I think it does have something of an Arcanum vibe to it. There's the same feel of ongoing revolutionary change brought on by new technology. I really like that, especially since it's not been done all that much in fantasy settings -- they seem to tend to stay more or less the same for thousands upon thousands of years. ¡Mucho me gusta!

@AGX-17, just for your information, fantasy world steampunk is a pretty well-established sub-genre. Consider China Miéville's Bas-Lag series for example. Magic up the wazoo, and steam engines. Arcanum is bang-splat in the middle of that. In fact the "steam" -- technologist -- gameplay is a great deal deeper and better developed than the magic or melee gameplay. Which makes it doubly tragic that it's a candidate for worst balanced game ever. Damn thing keeps kicking you in the nuts. There are mechanics in there whose only purpose is to make you scream in frustration, I swear. I just dropped my elephant gun somewhere in the wilderness. Again. So here goes another runaround of gun shops to find a hunting rifle to make a new one. :sigh:

Whee! Let us dissect the words of Prophet Joshoboam: "CNPCs - Many of their introductions didn't sit well with me and I felt that there were too many who didn't have an equal amount of development given to them. While it was great that so many of them had a ton of quest content, I would have preferred a smaller list of companions with more attention to each one. This is what we said we were going to do at the start of the Kickstarter and it's what we're still planning to do." Agree 100%. More so for BG1. The companions are reduced to a handful of characteristic one-liners + really badly written fan-service "romance" in BG2. I think rose-colored spectacles play a big role here -- I believe BG introduced the whole notion of cRPG companions with personalities into western RPG's, but things have evolved a LOT since then. With companions, I say either go the IWD way and let you roll up a party by yourself, and only give them canned combat barks but no attempt at personality, or go the PS:T way and make them fully-developed characters with deep interactions between each other and you. The BG/2 way was the worst of both worlds; restrictive because it severely limited your party-building ability, but without all that much payoff in story, engagement, and, well, role-playing. Personally, the only companions I didn't actively dislike in BG2 were Keldorn and Yoshimo, and we all know what happened to Yoshimo. Everyone else was just incredibly annoying, which is why I finally succumbed and went with the "multiplayer" exploit to make my own party and shut everyone up. "Being required to find/save Imoen - I didn't like it then and I still don't. I wouldn't make the player rescue an NPC with whom he or she may or may not have a positive relationship. It's a very specific plot point and easy to not do. I understand that a lot of people have no problem with the rescue plot, which is totally fine, but I don't think that particular plot point needs to be repeated in PE." Neutral on this point. Most cRPG's are based on "find the McGuffin," and in this case the McGuffin was a person. No problems with this one. It would've been a lot better had there been some strong motivation established about why I should care about that person, other than general humanitarianism, but eh. "Style of dialogue - I prefer naturalistic -- some would say "dry" -- dialogue. BG2's characters are much more expressive. This is a personal thing and I recognize that most players *don't* like the same style of dialogue that I do. What I strictly prefer and what I write and have others write are not the same thing. My characters in F:NV are still on the dry end of the spectrum (e.g. Arcade Gannon, Chief Hanlon, Joshua Graham), but there are plenty of more flamboyant, expressive characters in the game that other writers developed." Not sure if Joshoboam is trying to be polite here by using "expressive" and "dry" as euphemisms for "derpy badly-written over-the-top teen fanfic style" and "realistic, adult, professionally written." If so, hell yeah. But taken at face value, I disagree. I would characterize Morte, Nordom, Dak'kon, Annah, and Fall-from-Grace as "expressive" and I loved the bejeezus out of them. "Being flooded with quests in Athkatla - To be honest, I don't think is a controversial opinion! I've seen many other players say the same thing. BG2 has a crazy amount of quests, which is great, but the density in Athkatla was a little too crazy. I think those quests should have been spread out or staggered in some other way. PE is going to have more of an exploration focus than BG2 (though not as much as BG), so I believe that will help spread the content out more." Partly agree. For me, the problem wasn't the quest density per se; it was, again, a problem with the writing. There was no flow in Athkatla; the quests were disconnected things you stumbled into in every direction, and what's more they would stomp on you hard if you innocently started with the wrong one (=too high-level for ya). I hadn't considered the density aspect of it, but I did think that it would've worked better if the quests had flowed to you differently e.g. by being placed in a way that you'd be more likely to find the easier ones first, and if there was something in the writing that suggested why you were being offered all of those quests. So I guess I'm in the kinda sorta agree with 50% camp here. Ironically, the one part I really, strongly and unequivocally disagree with is this: "Even though I had those problems with BG2, my job as a lead designer and project director is not to create content that appeals specifically to my tastes. Obviously I would have a difficult time making a game that I *disliked*, but I have (and continue to) push for elements I feel that players will ultimately enjoy even if I'm not super thrilled about it. That's my job." I will not explain why.

Wow, I'm still amazed at the levels of butthurt certain people are able to maintain. Carry on...

Maybe I wasn't paying attention, but I only caught this conquistador vibe now. I dig it. It gives the setting a dynamic tension that's different from most fantasy settings. Also, cool aumaua head. Also digging the idea of fantasy Polynesians. Really happy to get these twists on generic western pseudo-medieval fantasy; I did not expect that when backing the project and I salute Obsidian for having the stones to depart from the BG-IWD formula in this respect.

Arcanum. I have finally, finally, FINALLY managed to get into it. I now get it, and absolutely bleeping love it. It's also unbelievably broken in so many ways it NEEDS a spiritual sequel that does it right. Seriously. My Arcanum history in brief. I played many, many characters up to level 15 or so, which then fizzled. The first ones I rolled were a bit like MCA's -- disastrously underpowered; constant dying was not fun. My very first character concept was a technological gunslinger. I did not know how to build one. It was not fun. Then I figured out the most egregious loopholes in the game: how XP is awarded, and, um, Harm. So I rolled up a nearly pure diplomat, and watched as my minions steamrollered everything in their path. The game essentially became a "Win!" button, which got really boring. So I ditched my diplomat and made a (nearly) pure mage instead. Once my arcane affinity hit near 100% and I got a couple of staffs with 40-50 mana, it was "Win!" button again. I only needed relatively limited spells to mow through the game, so I easily maxed out Persuasion again. So... boring again. And finally I'm back to my original concept, and this is fun. It feels like a constant balancing act, constant hunt for stuff to use, constant drive to find creative ways to overcome challenges. Of course I did cheat a bit at the very beginning: I had the difficulty set to Easy until I managed to get to the point where I had my gunslinging abilities up to the point where I wasn't getting mauled by wolves every time. The tragic flaw of Arcanum is that to have this much fun, I have to intentionally gimp myself: to forgo the most efficient ways of playing the game. If magic and diplomacy were balanced the same way as technology, it would be a much, much better game. Specifically -- (1) Nerf Charisma. Maxing out Cha makes your party four times more powerful than average Cha. No other ability has this level of impact on your power. It's tantamount to an instant-win button. (2) Add resource costs to magic. The most fun part of playing a technomancer is having to hunt for schematics, components, and materials. In fact the crafting mechanics in the game are the best I've seen anywhere. Mages would be way more fun to play if you could find or buy spells the same way you find or buy schematics, if you could craft magic items the same way you craft tech items, and if the more powerful spells required material components you would need to find, buy, or craft. With the cheap and plentiful stamina potions, you can just spam Disintegrate to mow through anything. If every Disintegrate used up a diamond (crafted from Rough Diamond, magically crafted from Coal?), you'd have to think more strategically about it. (2b) Nerf Harm. It should not scale with level and magical affinity as much as it does. You shouldn't be able to waste, say, Granite Rats or Ore Golems without taking a scratch and with your stamina barely depleting just by going clickclickclickclick. But yeah, now I get why this is a classic. It's been totes worth the trouble to work around its flaws.

LTTP but... (1) Support for making the characters easy to identify would be good. It would help both mechanics and the imagination. (2) Breastplate is breastplate, whatever's in it. I like realistic-looking armor, and P:E is shaping up very nicely in this respect. (3) I really like the idea of tabards, insignia, painted shields etc. (3b) I would add hats, crests, and plumes. We already saw those. Besides plumes rule. I want that golden potato with a feather sticking out of it. I'd like to see tailors that let you easily adjust these major cosmetic aspects of your character. It's fun and should be relatively easy to implement. As to the masculine/feminine aspect, I'm sure different cultures would have different takes on it. Personally I'm hoping they'll bring back millstone collars.

Since the physics of deflecting blows are the same for both sexes, I doubt it'd look all that different. Men come in a variety of shapes and sizes as well, y'know.

I'm sure you could do something with a prerendered overlay for time of day shadows, but it would be a non-trivial amount of work that would have to be done for every level. Not worth the trouble IMO since the day will progress slowly enough you wouldn't see the shadows move in any case. It's pretty noticeable in the video when the cycle is sped up over a few seconds, but I very much doubt most people would notice when the game is running in real time. There are always trade-offs, and so far I'm really digging these ones.

I have a confession to make. Up to this point, the art style presented in P:E hasn't really rustled my jimmies, except a couple of the concept portraits -- Sherlock Orlan and Sagani to be specific. I mean I thought there were some neat ideas there but nothing that would make me really go wow. Even that scene; I thought it was nicely done and a worthy update to the BG2 style of graphics. I didn't back P:E for the graphics. But NOW I see what you guys are after. That looks really, really sweet, both technically but especially artistically. So yeah, impressed. Especially the dynamic lighting. I think I know the clever trick you're using there (came across it in... oh, 1992 I think, in a 3D modeling package running on Silicon Graphics workstations, where you could model lighting in real time on a prerendered model, 'cuz the hardware wasn't good enough to do it in real time in 3D yet)... but damn it looks good.

Arcanum done right would be awesome. Keep: the idea of a classic swords-and-sorcery world suddenly in the throes of an industrial revolution. Build on: the tech/magic split, so the mechanics are way more meaningful -- for example, someone with high magical aptitude should make tech items around him critically fail, not just be unable to use them, and vice versa with someone with high tech aptitude; magic shouldn't work within 100 yards of a steam engine, and engines shouldn't work within 100 yards of magic hotspots, etc. Fix: combat, character development balance (magic is WAAAY overpowered), general world structure. Cities should be surrounded by large farmlands. There should be a frontier, with railroads pushing into it. There should be real antagonism between "civilization" and "natives." A dark and fantastic twist on the conquest of the West would work very well, like in Felix Gilman's Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City, or why not China Miéville's Iron Council. (In fact, Gilman's Half-Made World would be a fantastic setting for a cRPG, what with the Gun and the Line, the frontier towns caught between them, the Old World, the First Folk, and the Unmade Lands.) I've finally managed to put together a character that's playable enough for my lazy style that I've been able to drill into the weird world of Arcanum, and it really is something rather special. It's such a shame it's so badly damaged in the execution. I'd love to play a technologist, but dread the tedium of die-and-reload early levels as one would entail, with the temptation of spamming Harm so alluring...

I'm all for a no-level-scaling mode. Add another control for encounter difficulty -- Easy locks all crit-path encounters to the bottom of their scaling band, Normal to the middle, and Hard to the top. Make it a startup option only, like Trial of Iron. Should be quite easy to implement and would add a lot of value for people who object to any form of level scaling for whatever reason. It's a pity they didn't think of that as a stretch goal actually -- I'm sure it would've pulled in a few more pennies from the Valorians of this world and it would've been easy to do.

There are also lots of possibilities there, beyond Fallout's "buff up your social skills to the max and clickity-click on dialog options." Corruption, both as petty bribery and at the large scale. Stealth. Careful balancing acts between factions, pitting them against each other. Tricking crucial NPC's into saying the wrong thing at the wrong place, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could be quite a lot of fun. It would also be a quite a lot of work. I'm more in favor of a free-form approach. If "pacifist options" fit in a given context, then of course they should be included. But to go out of your way to make sure every situation on the critical path has a "pacifist solution," especially in a game that's overtly billed as combat-heavy? Nah. With Torment: ToN on the other hand... yeah, the pacifist thing fits the Tides perfectly and I would hope to see much more of it there.

It's funny how tastes change. At some point, someone thought that putting a gilded potato with a feather sticking out of it on your head made you look more fearsome. Gotta love plumes. They should've put that in as a final stretch goal, would've broken 4.5 mil with no problems.

That's kind of the point, don't you think? Character differentiation doesn't mean anything if every build will be as good in all circumstances. I'd much rather see a game where a ranger is genuinely more at home in the wilderness, a well-bred rapier-carrying noble in the royal palace, and a rough knife-wielding street thug in the back alley. This kind of diversity would make for much better replayability and would encourage you to build a diverse, well-rounded party. The only real pitfall is that you'd have to be careful to avoid situations where your critical path is completely blocked due to your character concept, but I think the Obsidian devs are smart enough to avoid that.

The hat. I want one just like it. With orange plumes. I will wear it always.

Still in re BG: whoever thought that getting randomly struck while lightning because of very frequently occurring weather conditions was a good idea ought to be spanked. Hard. Lawnmowing is getting boring. I'll probably head to Baldur's Gate next, see if the story goes anywhere.

Tried one more time. Played through to the Mines, re-recruited Yeslick, flooded the mines, traipsed around the map. Yeslick's timer is still running. Oh well, no cleric for me then I guess. I'll have to make do with Ajanti's lay-on-hands and lots of potions.

Oh, and, I checked. Yeslick left, again. Killing and raising him did not stop his quest timer; wandering around the map for a bit got him to leave again complaining about those stupid mines. Do any of you know of a way to really properly reset his timer? This time I did keep a save when I entered Cloakwood so I'll only have to replay that part to get back to where I was. I really have no luck with clerics.

Pocket knives and shotguns in rural areas are tools, not weapons. I'm sure back in the day hunters carried bows, knives, and axes. But you don't see people in full combat armor, with assault rifles and hand-grenades. Also I think you may have misunderstood me: I'm not calling for "no combat scenarios in cities." Quite the contrary: I'm calling for different combat scenarios in cities. Back-alley gang wars, fought with knives and cudgels without armor, rather than longswords and longbows and full plate. A palace coup, where you infiltrate the royal ball, stealthily assassinate a couple of key people, and then take control. That sort of thing. Not because it's more realistic -- although it is -- but because it would provide more variety, support a wider range of character concepts, and just be fun. This would have to be fully supported by the character system of course; you could have a specialized warrior who's deadly with an arquebus and pollax, a specialized commando lethal with cloak and dagger, or one who's pretty good at both, with the appropriate tactical consequences.

Lots of points there. I'll pick only one for now. Randomization and replayability. I'm not a huge fan of randomization except for games actually based on it, like roguelikes or Dwarf Fortress for example. It tends to fit poorly with hand-crafted content and have a generic, soulless, bland feeling to it. If it's as light as you suggest, it won't change your experience all that much; if it was BG you'd have the same playthrough, more or less, except sometimes you'd get that +1 short sword a hair earlier from a random loot drop, at other times you'd not be able to find a Stinking Cloud scroll anywhere. Not enough to interest me at least in a second play-through. In my opinion a much better way of enhancing replayability is through multiple solutions to problems, and through branching story- and questlines. If you can get to an objective by fighting, talking, or sneaking, your experience will be very different each time; you'll need a different type of character or party, and will be doing different things. If choosing to help Gravlax the Lich opens up a series of quests that end up with you setting fire to the High Chapterhouse of the Paladins of the Living Salmon, whereas helping the Paladins leads to a series of quests where you hunt for Gravlax's phylactery, again you'd have a completely different experience. If each of these quests has multiple solutions and varying outcomes, again, massive replayability. Even if each questline has exactly two branches, you can get massive replayability by having them affect each other through different outcomes or rewards so there's more variety than the simple "good path" and "evil path" in the above example.

I've been to a war zone, and my wife grew up in one. Openly armed people who are not part of the armed force -- militia or regular military -- that is in control of a zone tend to get shot on sight. Fully-armed freelance adventurers are not tolerated at all. You do see a lot of the particular armed faction that's in control of course; a part of that control is showing up and asserting your monopoly on the use of force. There are mercenaries, but they only gear up after they've got a contract with the local warlord, and then only when they're on an operation. Even in anarchic situations you get militias who set up zones of control. The block in West Beirut where my wife grew up was controlled by an extended Druze family which turned into one. They kept the other militias out and the people in safe, more or less. When a heavily armed regular military showed up -- the Israelis in 1982, the Syrians on several occasions -- they tucked the Kalashnikovs and RPG-7's under the beds and faded out sight, only to pop back when the regulars left. Carrying even a concealed weapon if you're not part of the militia would have been extremely risky as you're likely to be stopped at a makeshift checkpoint and patted down, and militias tend to deal with such stuff harshly. Hell, sometimes they'd shoot you just because they were having a bad day. I'm fairly certain the same logic has applied to every war zone everywhere, more or less, barring interludes of pure every-man-for-himself chaos. If you're part of the force that controls the ground you're on, you're armed. If you're not, said force makes sure you're not armed. So there's almost invariably a single group asserting monopoly of use of force in an area. If there are two, you get a battle. Unaffiliated, fully-armed individuals are not tolerated; they're treated as enemy combatants by default. Which is why being a skilled knifefighter or unarmed combatant is a much more practically useful art of violence nowadays than being a skilled swordsman, even though a katana is an obviously deadlier weapon than a fist, foot, or butterfly knife.

Okay, another Let's Play interim report. Faffed about with my multiclass character a bit, but she was too fragile to have fun with. So I gave up and decided to brute-force things and rolled up something I've never actually played because I don't care for the role: a paladin. Cavalier to be exact. Now I have a steamroller. Imoen, Minsc, Dynaheir, Kivan, Ajanti. I traded in Ajanti for that dwarf fighter/cleric from the Cloakwood mines when I got that far. Cutting through stuff like a hot knife through butter. Almost too easy, except very occasionally; some of the random "You have been waylaid" encounters can get hairy if some nasty beastie gets at Dynaheir. Inventory management is a drag. Nice sense of exploration and discovery; there's a secret or two on every map and it's fun to find them. With those boots of speed I'm lawnmowing like a boss, too. But damn this thing is bugged. I did flood the damn mines, but that did not reset that dwarf dude's quest timer! I got suspicious when I tried talking to him and he was griping about aimless wandering instead of flooding the mines. Wat? I flooded 'em! He was right there with me all the time! So I tried it: saved, then marched around the map for a week or two, and sure 'nuff, he walked out on me. Time for the Internets. According to that, a killed and resurrected party member's quest timer gets canceled. So he had an unfortunate accident, and then got raised courtesy of the Imam at the Süleymaniye Mosque ^H^H^H Temple of Lathander. Now he has nothing to say to me when I talk to him, so mmmmaybe that sorted it. Unfortunately Ajanti drowned in those mines, so if I'm losing the dwarf dude again I am going to be seriously pissed off at this game. The whole party's at level 6, except him who's 5/5, typically for multiclass. I do not want to grind up to that level again, especially as now I've lawnmowed a great part of the map. Fun level? Varying between mostly tedious and pretty fun. I do get the appeal. I also think the genre has progressed hugely since. It's mostly the dopamine reward circuit that's keeping me going, not particular interest in the lore, world, gameplay, or characters. It's not bad as such, but I still think it's among the weakest of this line of games I've played. The only ones I liked less, I think, were Shadows of Undrentide and Throne of Bhaal. (I have played most of the IE and NWN games; so far I think the only ones I haven't played are ToEE and IWD 2.)

Yeah. Most fantasy cRPG's which have people traipsing around in full plate armor toting claymores are silly when you think about it. That's like driving into downtown NYC in a main battle tank, then going shopping at Macy's in a heavy flak jacket and kevlar helmet while toting an assault rifle and a belt full of hand grenades and extra clips. I have a feeling Mr. Bloomberg would have something to say about that.

@AGX-17, those are pretty superficial criticisms IMO. They're not fundamental to the setting or the design ideas in it. The magic/tech balance thing is simply a balancing issue -- either nerf magic or make tech more powerful; problem solved. I'm surprised nobody's (apparently) modded this in, as it should be technically dead easy; just adjust some constants here and there. (Lots of playtesting though.) The throwing thing is a simulationist criticism. It's only valid if you accept the premise that a game ought to be realistic. I accept that premise for certain types of games -- for example, I like Rome: Total Realism a lot more than vanilla Rome: Total War, precisely because it strives to be more realistic; no flaming pigs and what have you, but lots and lots of different flavors of spearmen. However, that doesn't apply to most games IMO. Some games are designed for the gameplay: chess, to take an extreme example, is not a particularly accurate wargame, but it's a fantastic game in its own right. Others are designed with other goals in mind. A cRPG for example can be any number of things -- it can strive for verisimilitude (low-fantasy, with a clearly-defined set of rules governing how magic operates, for example), whimsy (like Arcanum or Fallout), surrealism and atmosphere (like Torment), high/heroic fantasy (most of the IE games other than Torment), and so on. The verisimilitude/realism requirement applies to each of these to different degrees. Where will P:E stand? We'll see when we'll see, I guess. Going by the chatter in the weapons and armor design thread, though, it seems like they are going for a degree of verisimilitude in that. If that's the case, then yeah, throwing daggers should have pretty limited utility. That said, what I would really like to see is a variety of scenarios with different constraints on what you can do. Almost all fantasy cRPG's are really monotonous in this respect -- other than the obligatory "you've been thrown in jail and lost all your gear" episode, you go into every battle fully kitted for combat. I'd like to see other situations as well: stealthy assassinations at the royal ball, cities where only guards and nobles are allowed to wear armor and carry weapons openly, that sort of thing. This would open up a huge and rich range of gameplay and character concepts -- daggers, for example, would suddenly be extremely useful in circumstances where you can't carry a sword or spear, nor wear armor. A master knifefighter would be deadly, where your master swordsman would be in real trouble without his sword.