PrimeJunta

No me gusta. P:E should not, repeat, not, be or become a twitch game.

We can't really know that yet, can we? It all depends on how frequently spaced the rest areas are relative to the combat areas. If there are relatively few rest areas, you will have to be very careful about managing your health; if they are relatively frequent, you won't, and if some areas have more or less than others, they'll offer different types of challenges. FWIW, I kinda like this system precisely because it offers the possibility of varying the challenges in this way. With the standard system of hp + plentiful healing magic/potions etc., there's really not much to health management -- just stock up on enough make-well kits and you're golden. The workarounds to that aren't unproblematic either; if you make healing magic/potions rare, they'll easily get into "too awesome to use" territory and push you into save-scumming for optimal battle results every time, for example. Whether P:E will actually end up like this we don't know, of course. I for one am optimistic, though.

Hormalakh kicked off this thread by proposing that the Endless Path be continued forever in a roguelike fashion. Whatever the precise definition of roguelike is, I think he got the idea across that way just fine. Take everything that you can take from rogue -- i.e., procedurally generated, random or semirandom dungeon levels going ever deeper -- and drop it into a graphical, isometric, RTwP cRPG, and you'll get something that looks a lot like Diablo. Whether the result still counts as roguelike I'm sure we can keep on debating till the cows come home and die of old age. Frankly I don't see the point though.

Now I want a sword that has 15 other swords sticking out of it. Curse you, Lephys.

Good idea, but sounds more like a shaman than a druid to me. I'd prefer the Celtic variety meself.

Being able to find out information about monsters and have that information appear in a bestiary is great. Being able to add notes to the bestiary yourself is also great. Having the information appear there automagically just after encountering a critter... not. It's the difference between player agency and handholding. Same thing as with a quest log that records conversations and information discovered, and a quest marker that walks you where you need to go.

No. Bad idea. Kill it. With fire. That is the correct damage type. But not automagically.

That. They do character interactions extremely well. Not romances though. The interactions in MotB were brilliant, but the romantic twist to the Safiya story made me go like "Wait a minute, has this whole thing been a really extended blind date?" Jarring. Would've been better just to leave the possibility hovering in the air, as it were, without all those "...my love..."'s.

The correct definition of 'roguelike' is serious business.

Oh, OK, you meant no indoor fireballs without associated shockwave effects etc.? Yeah, that does make sense. It would certainly take a good deal more convoluted fantasy physics to account for that. I can think of ways, but they would have to be pretty far-fetched. (What ways, I hear you asking? Well, for example, the fireball could be produced by momentarily exchanging atmospheres with the elemental plane of fire. Once the near-instantaneous spell effect is over, the fire goes back to where it came from, and the air it displaced comes back, only marginally heated. You'd get a gust of hot wind but not an explosion strong enough to blow out windows or doors. Yeah, convoluted.)

At least I got it from the names on the map (and elsewhere too). Ruins of Eír Glanfath sounds pretty Celtic to me...

Hur, our real-world physics aren't entirely internally consistent either. The Theory of Everything is yet waiting to be found, Higgs boson notwithstanding. Your statement is pretty intriguing, though. I think I can think of pretty consistent systems of fantasy physics that would permit both mundane campfires (chemical combustion) and fireballs (magical fire). I'd just have to posit some source of magical energy and then make up rules that describe how that source behaves and what magicians can do with it. What fundamental problems do you see with doing this?

Are you saying I edited that article all for nothing? Curses, foiled again.

Meh, whatevz. It's a matter of taste I guess. Personally I find outlandish weapons and armor more jarring than magic, esp. if there's an internally consistent fantasy "physics" underlying the magic. I like things to make sense. Internal consistency and all that. Of course in something as contrived as a cRPG, it's better not to think too hard since you'll certainly run into something absurd soon enough.

Uh. NetHack isn't a roguelike. Right. rec.games.roguelike.nethack on Usenet Chronology of roguelikes on Wikipedia Description of NetHack from Wikihack: "NetHack is a roguelike computer game, and the most famous and popular of its kind." Description of NetHack from Wikipedia: "NetHack is a single-player roguelike video game originally released in 1987." Seriously, NetHack is one of the first roguelikes -- it, Larn, and Moria are pretty much the games that made the term necessary. Sheesh! Edit: I most definitely am playing to win. In rogue, you win by finding the Amulet of Yendor somewhere around level 26, and then returning back to the surface with it. In NetHack, you're still looking for the Amulet of Yendor, only it's way deeper and you have scads of other stuff to do before getting it, and you have a different endgame. There may be roguelikes with no victory conditions, but they're certainly less typical of the genre. Edit edit: Okay, strictly speaking, Hack is the original roguelike; NetHack is a direct descendant of Hack that came out five years later. Yeah I've ascended (=won) both. Edit edit edit: Whee, Wikipedia is fun:

The Chinese have some pretty badass swords too, like the "horse killing sword" zhanmadao. Not sure how well that would work in melee against people, but at least it's a real thing.

Whoa, that was an entertaining meltdown. Moar plz?

I asked about this earlier, and the weapons nerd consensus was that there ain't no such thing. Double-headed spears do exist. So do weapons where the shaft or pommel is designed to be usable as well, e.g. by weighting. But no double swords, axes, or the like IRL. Sorry.

Realism != verisimilitude. I find it perfectly easy to imagine a world where the laws of nature allow a powerful wizard to shoot fireballs. However, I find it difficult to imagine a world where an orc double axe would make an effective melee weapon for a humanoid creature. A dreamworld, maybe? I would make an exception for Sauron type characters, where the appearance is merely an outward form of an inner power. By all means give them all the spiky pauldrons and outsize, impractical weapons you want. But yeah, call me conservative, but I would like weapons and armor usable by mere flesh-and-blood humanoids to look like something mere flesh-and-blood humanoids could effectively use in combat. For me personally this isn't what I'd call a showstopper, more a niggle really. But I do have a preference for worlds that are internally consistent, even if the laws of nature are radically different from ours.

I would like to see druids done as an integral part of the game world. They should have a particular standing in the culture from which they spring. They usually feel a bit out of place to me. Perhaps P:E with its Celtic inspiration will be different. Also,

That is quite true, and I didn't mean to imply the contrary. Being a good gamer is a prerequisite to being a good game designer (because you do need to understand what the artifact you're designing is supposed to be), but a good gamer with no design experience isn't likely to be any better at game design than any random dude from the street. Design is a skill. You can't really study it; you can only develop it through practice. It's also strongly related to talent -- most people simply aren't capable of becoming good designers, whereas a few pick it up almost naturally. This talent doesn't relate much to general intelligence either; it's somewhat similar to musical, artistic, or mathematical ability IMO. There are a surprising number of top-tier software designers with few or no formal qualifications. Also, Karkarov's last paragraph is very much the kind of thing I had in mind.

I think the problem with discussing level scaling is that thanks to Oblivion, it's become a proxy for The Decline. I.e., casual-friendly handholding that removes consequence and challenge from a cRPG. That's rather silly, like declaring credit cards evil because some people have gotten over their heads in debt by misusing them. But hey, let's. Time-based scaling. This would create a positive feedback loop, which is probably not a good idea. If you're ahead of the curve, you'll find the going gets easier, which pushes you even further ahead of the curve, and you'll waltz through the game too easily. If you fall behind, you'll find it harder and harder to catch up, until you hit a brick wall of difficulty. I find it hard to imagine how you could design an interesting game around this mechanic, since an early head start would be so decisive. (Good strategy games have features in place specifically to avoid such decisive early-game winning strategies, since they're particularly prone to this dynamic. Civ V, for example, allows entirely viable single-city strategies.) In any case, it would be a very bad idea for a game like P:E, with, oh, a 15-level optional dungeon to explore. Difficulty-based. This sounds like a synonym for difficulty levels. No comment. Chapter-based. Now this idea has promise. Sure, you could set up the encounters in Chapter 2 at two different levels, and have party strength at the end of Chapter 1 determine which one it gets. For Chapter 3, design them at three levels. Could work, and would have the advantage of hand-crafted encounters every time. OTOH you might get into a situation where a party that just clears the hurdle will find the going gets much tougher, which could be construed as a punishment. I believe you could mitigate this by scaling the rewards to match, though: tougher challenges would be rewarded with greater rewards. Oblivion-style. Kill it with fire. But there are other algorithmic ways to do level scaling that doesn't fall into the Oblivion trap, where avoiding levelups resulted in easier gameplay. What is it, then? From where I'm at, it's a tool that can be used to pull encounters from "boring" and "impossible" into the Goldilocks zone of enjoyable gaming. If you're using it in such a way that avoiding leveling up will make the game easier (which is exactly what happened in Oblivion), you're doing it wrong: you're punishing players for success.

I'm not in games, actually; I've only done a couple very small ones in my free time ages ago. Software is software, though, users are users, and design is design. And believe me, Val, I've come across many, many users like you over my career -- and if they have the final say over features, the project is guaranteed to crash and burn. Seen that happen too. That doesn't mean users like you are useless for feedback, though. Quite the contrary. (Although I do prefer to work with users who cop less of an attitude.) No, Val, the trick is to understand what the user needs, and then find a way to provide that. The users generally speaking don't know what they need, so they can't tell you, and what they tell you is usually wrong. So you, the designer, have to figure it out. If I was a designer on P:E, for example, I would consider much of what you've said on this thread very valuable information -- you have described quite eloquently how you like to play a game, what you value in it, what you enjoy, and what you don't enjoy. If you were paying me four meellion dollars to craft a game just for you, I could certainly figure out a way to leave out level scaling. Trouble is, I'd also have to be considering what Sharp_one, Lephys, and that jackass Juanita have been saying about how they play games, and figure out which of them I'm able to accommodate, and how. That's where features like level scaling come in. And if somebody asked me if level scaling is in, I'd probably say "Well, you'll see when it comes out, won't you?" 'Cuz it really isn't any of your -- or my -- business. That kind of decision should be left to the designers.

Because I am a professional software designer with 25 years experience at it. Duh.

Ha! That didn't take long. I win 10 internets! Thing is, gamers are not necessarily any good as game designers. These are two largely unrelated skill sets. That means their opinions about specific game design features are usually wrong. A good designer observes how they play games, listens (critically) to them explaining how they like to play games, and ignore most of what they say about how they'd like games designed. Specifically, gamers who are categorically opposed to level scaling under any circumstances are wrong. They -- even you -- would not enjoy P:E as much if it had no level scaling at all. No mind reading required, just lots of experience working with users in software design.