PrimeJunta

Strawman much? I'm only assuming that the game is designed for players who have not played the game through yet, and therefore will inevitably make less than optimal choices through it. They'll pick less effective skill/feat/class combinations, spend their gold on less than optimal items, miss or fail sidequests. This applies to knights and first-playthrough knerds equally. In the real world, though, good game designers design games for knights, and accommodate knerds through harder difficulty levels. And, once again, in a game with a significant amount of optional content and a significant amount of openness, you will either have to have a very, very creative design, or some form of level scaling, or frustrate everybody but the small minority who happen to do stuff in the order the designer intended it -- in which case the design isn't really open at all; it's a linear design masquerading as open. Those would be "knoobs." I didn't even include them in my little parable. And I agree, designing for knoobs primarily is usually a bad idea, and that is exactly the reason behind the famous decline of cRPG's since the golden age. Good game devs do want to accommodate knoobs too, though, even ones designing primarily for knights. Difficulty levels again. "Easy" for knoobs, "Hard" for knerds, "Normal" for knights. Tell me, if you have to complete all or most of the optional content to become powerful enough to complete the main quest, in what way is the optional content optional anymore? Those would be the knoobs, yes. I agree, I don't as a general rule enjoy games designed for knoobs much either. I think devs should accomodate knoobs by putting in easy difficulty levels. It's usually pretty easy to scale down a game's difficulty so they can be happy too.

Quite. In fact, that makes the knight/knerd divide even broader, even allowing that knerds will probably play at higher difficulty. So not scaling at least some encounters up to knerd level will bore the knerds even more. I'm sure there's no way to please everybody. In a reasonably complex, partially non-linear game with some optional content and lots of character and party build options, it will always be possible to make stronger or weaker parties, and level certainly isn't all of it. However, I feel pretty strongly that not adjusting to player level at all in any way is a bit of a dead end. The game will only play really well if you happen to play it in more or less the same way whoever did the balancing played it. In which case making it open and with lots of options is kind of pointless. Just be perfectly clear, I am absolutely opposed to the braindead way Oblivion did level scaling. However, I'm quite sure the devs on P:E are smart enough not to make that mistake. There are many other ways to do it, many of which have been discussed in this very thread. Level scaling is like sugar; if you have none, your cooking options are kind of limited, but use too much, and you give everyone diabetes.

Hur. Semantics. Fun. NetHack is also only semirandom, has a finite number of levels, and has lots of constant locations, some constant objects, and two constant quests. Yet I don't think I've ever heard anyone dispute its status as roguelike. And yeah, I agree that not having permadeath is a significant point against its roguelikeness, which is why they put in Hardcore mode, I suppose. (Also, lots of people save-scum when playing roguelikes. I certainly did before I got the hang of it. Haven't in years though.)

What was wrong with the spirit eater? I loved the mechanic. Played through a few times, including one where I suppressed it as much as possible and another where I ate evvvvverything. That had me doing some truly disgustingly evil stuff. I still feel dirty thinking about it. Either way, I didn't find it hard to manage at all, on the contrary, I thought it added a lot to the game, not least a sense of urgency.

Maybe you can dual-wield two grimoires.

Erm. Merikir. I remember when Diablo came out. The buzz was all about "Dude, this is NetHack with cool graphics 'n shiznit." I played it. It was, sort of. I was a little disappointed because in terms of gameplay I thought it was actually closer to rogue than NetHack. It had scads of items, of course, but none of the really intricate and deep interactions with and between items, monsters, and the environment that make NetHack still one hell of a cool game to play.

Nah. I think it's more the opposite. That without level scaling, the main quest would be so easy it's boring for the most enthusiastic players. Why wouldn't you want it scaled up to your level? Seriously, think about it. Suppose you're trying to accommodate two types of players. Let's call them "knights" and "knerds." A "knight" will probably play the game through once. He'll make an effort at understanding the game system and making educated guesses about character building. He'll follow leads he stumbles across if they seem relevant to his interests at the time. Maybe he'll role-play a particular type of character, and choose dialog options accordingly. The knight wants an experience, perhaps an escape from the daily grind. A "knerd" will start the game maybe a dozen times to get a feel for the mechanics. Once comfortable with them, he'll try to make the most effective character and party he can. He'll meticulously scour the game for sidequests, secrets, and hidden treasures. He'll grab every optional area he can as soon as he's able. He'll manage his resources with care, in order to be able to equip the best, most situationally appropriate gear every time. Sometimes he'll even backtrack to a previous save if he feels he's made a mistake. This is because the knerd wants a challenge, to his dedication, intelligence, and endurance. Now, without level scaling, either the knerd will find the later parts of the main quest laughably easy, or the knight will find them impossibly difficult, or some unhappy compromise between the two. This is the exact opposite of what the knight and the knerd are looking for. This does not make sense to me. All you'd have is knights ragequitting because it's too hard, and/or knerds boredomquitting because it's nerfville. Granted, there is another way to approach this. You could roll level scaling into difficulty levels. "Easy" = encounters scaled to the assumption that you'll only play the main quest + 25% of optional content. "Normal," 50% of optional content. "Hard," 100% of optional content. All content scaled to match. Otherwise everything is the same. The beginning of the game would play the same way at all difficulties, but the challenge would ramp up differently from them. You might more options that let you push up or pull down the difficulty curve without affecting the angle, natch. Don't think they'd go for it this way, though; it's probably too different.

@Osvir, do you have any idea how hard it would be to write any kind of story arc that would adapt to the protagonist dying anywhere during it? Insanely hard. There are going to be enough weird story hiccups anyway in a game with free-form parts. Hell, there often are even if it's not so free-form; The Witcher's Chapter 2 for example became almost impossible to follow if you didn't do things in the "right" order. And that's a near-linear game, albeit with branches to the narrative. Most importantly, all that effort is removed from making the story with the protagonist alive richer and better. So I'd bin this idea with the roguelike dungeon and the dynamic world economy in the '...and the kitchen sink' bin. Make a great game with an exciting, branching story arc with choices and consequences and a real sense of agency, then get rid of every last bug, and then consider this kind of stuff.

The devs have stated that there will be no resurrection magic, and that the story will be centered around the main character who survives a tragic supernatural event. IOW, if the main character dies, game over. They've also stated that the main character -- or indeed any party member -- won't die in combat at normal difficulty. Instead, they'll be "maimed" if health hits zero, which is presumably a Bad Thing (due to the low availability of healing magic). Presumably only if the entire party is knocked out will it be game over. As far as I've gathered, the consequences of less than complete success in combat are something like: If the party wins the encounter anyway (last one standing is a party member): Stamina 0, health > 0: knocked out, recovery with no ill effects. Health ≤ 0: Normal difficulty: maimed. Not good. I would expect that there's some way to heal but it's not going to be easy. Expert mode: killed. Party member removed from the game. If it's the main character, game over. If the party loses (everybody knocked out/maimed/killed), I would expect that it's game over. In Trial of Iron mode, it's game really over, as you can't backtrack to a previous save. Start a new one and try again. I for one will probably start with normal (or easier, depending) difficulty and Trial of Iron, to stop myself from abusing savegames.

If they do make Forton the mentor, I hope he's more Iggy Pop than Mr. Miyagi. Looks the part too.

Sorry, Karkarov, but you're mistaken about this. There was level scaling in BG2, and it was there for the reason I stated -- the designers couldn't know how strong the party was at each quest because they could do it in any order, and had to allow for it. It was subtle, though. The fact that you didn't notice is a testament to how well it was done. They did it not by making individual enemies stronger, but by changing the composition of mobs. JES has said they intend to do it the same way in P:E. There are two opposite poles to the way you can structure a game: open-world and linear. In an open-world game, you can't know how strong the party is when it gets to a given area, but you get a sense of freedom and emergent narrative that can be really cool. In a linear game, you do know the strength of the party, but you lose that sense of freedom; the player is more like an actor following a script than a truly free agent. What you get for that loss of freedom is better-tuned combat challenges and the possibility to write richer narratives, since area progression maps to narrative progression. You can also have a hybrid design -- a linear game where the rails aren't really rails, but areas of varying difficulty. The problem with this is that if the player wanders off the rails, he'll get squashed very quick, and if he misses a low-level area early on and arrives at it at high level, neither the risks nor the rewards are going to be very exciting. This is very hard to pull off well. IMO Gothic 2 did it well, but it had a brutal early-game learning curve. You do learn if you get eaten by a shadowbeast the minute you step off the road to explore a little. So if we're talking an open design, you have basically two options: either scale the areas to the party level, or do it Gothic 2 style by designing the game as linear but without any "hard" walls, and instead railroading the player by placing appropriately scary monsters to push him where you want, and then including enough hints to keep the player from carelessly wandering into areas that'll kill him in one blow. And if you do want to make it genuinely open, then, yeah, you will need some kind of level scaling to keep things interesting. I get the feeling that when you say 'well-designed game,' you may have in mind something like Gothic 2 -- no level scaling, possibility of getting et by a shadowbeast by stepping off the path for a whizz, open world, enough hints to stop a player from accidentaly going where he shouldn't be going. If so, I'll have to disagree a bit: in my opinion, that's not 'well designed' as such; it's just one type of design among others, which comes with its own set of trade-offs. Any of these three basic types (linear, open, hybrid) can be designed well or badly. I've played good open-world games (Fallout, Fallout 2), bad open-world games (Oblivion), good linear games (Deus Ex, PS:T, The Witchers, VtM:Bloodlines), bad linear games (Neverwinter Nights, yech), good hybrids (Gothic 2), and bad hybrids (Gothic 3). I don't even have a huge preference for any of these types; they're all good if they're well designed. Each gives you a different experience.

Thanks, that's what I thought. I have some very limited martial arts experience with staves and swords, and just couldn't figure out how you could use anything like that effectively in combat.

^ What he said. It's not a horrible idea by any means, but very much in the "...and the kitchen sink" category, right with a dynamic world economy and Dwarf Fortress type free-form stronghold management. I.e., if you've done the best combat AI evar, the richest, most varied, most engaging quests in any game hitherto seen, the most beautiful, exotic, exciting, and amazing environments, the deepest, richest, most varied companion interactions, and the most perfectly animated chainmail-bikinied elf chicks, and wrung every last bug out of the thing for good measure, then yeah, sure, knock yerself out. But as it is, please use those assets for making the core game better.

Question for the weapons geeks here (out of pure curiosity), are there any real-life counterparts to those D&D double-sided weapons, or are they a pure fantasy conceit?

More like this, which is already at the point where there's gameplay footage. (Yup, backer.)

I have no comment on the specific system you're proposing, but I do think that some differences in weapons, beyond brute damage, should go in. I like the armor penetration mechanic that has been presented so far, and reach might also be useful. However, I think the law of diminishing returns sets in pretty quickly as you start piling on more stuff. No comment on the specifics of your post; whether they're workable or not depends on how they hang together. My spontaneous reaction is that it looks overcomplicated; it ought to be possible to get more or less the same result more intuitively and with fewer variables. I also like what I've heard about the combat mechanics so far. They seem to have it well in hand.

Now that I'll grant you. The little simulationist in me winces whenever charged by a passing bear. But it would be pretty tedious to actually have to trek, in-game, as long as you do in a real wilderness before getting anywhere. And each other. From the orc's POV, humans are just another pesky goblinoid race. Assuming the races had some ecological differences that would give them an edge in different circumstances, I don't see why they couldn't coexist for a quite a while. If you're positing magic, why not posit a protector deity for each of the races, willing to intervene if it's faced with extinction? Plenty of reasons why those deities would prefer to fight each other by proxy through the mortal races, rather than face to face. Maybe they inhabit different realms. Maybe they're immortal. Maybe they're family and have a spell put on them by the Overgod stating that if one of them kills another, the world will end. I guess what I'm sayin' is, I don't find it particularly difficult to invent somewhat consistent in-lore explanations for the diversity of fantasy races in a fantasy world.

I would expect the game to have changeable key mappings. So bind "pause" to Ctrl-Alt-Del. Problem solved.

In human history, settled farmers displaced roving hunter-gatherers just about everywhere the two came into contact. So if roving hunter-gatherers were able to effectively exterminate Pleistocene megafauna, and settled farmers were strong enough to displace (and eventually effectively exterminate, when there was no more wilderness to run to) hunter-gatherers, then why would settled farmers not be strong enough to displace Pleistocene megafauna should the two have come into contact? I also don't see a huge difficulty with megafauna coexisting with settled farmers for a significant period of time -- say, several thousand years --, given the right conditions. It would be sufficient to displace them, but as long as there's virgin wilderness for them to be displaced into, they wouldn't necessarily go extinct. At the very least, I think a human settlement could make itself enough of a nuisance to a dragon-sized predator that it would prefer to go after easier prey.

I'm a big supporter of believable ecologies, even in fantasy games. However there are better ways to do this than just make everything bigger (although you can if you want to, and goblins farming giant botflies is a pretty good idea actually). But a giant orb spider could just be eating birds and bats instead of flies and moths, so there's no need for giant insects to go with it. I'm willing to overlook the problem of how it breathes. It also doesn't follow that having big scary beasts would have made civilization impossible; after all humans evolved in a world where the beasts were pretty bleeping big and scary. It's likely that our ancestors even hunted most of the biggest and scariest into extinction. Maybe they do that to giant spiders. Perhaps the venom is a prized commodity. Maybe that's weeded out the aggressive ones from their gene pool and left the rest either timid or way out in the wilderness.

"Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals," Page 271 and on.

A party-based cRPG should not be twitch-based. Limiting pause would make it just that. Resounding NO on that suggestion from moi.

This implies a linear area progression. One of the nice things about e.g. the Fallouts and BG2 was that the early to mid-game was not linear; all areas were accessible from the get-go. This means that the dev can't know how powerful the party is when they first enter an area. I for one prefer Fallout-type worlds to, say, Witcher type worlds, and would be a bit disappointed if P:E ended up linear.

I contend that you are wrong, and degenerate player behavior is always indicative of a design flaw in the game. It may not be possible to completely eliminate it in a more-than-trivial game system, but it is very possible to push it to the margins. Consider NetHack played on a server. It is possible to play degenerately, but the ways are either relatively low-impact (e.g. start-scumming), extremely labor-intensive (pudding farming), or so late-game that you've basically won the game anyway by the point you're able to do it (Death farming). By far the most enjoyable ways to play the game do not involve degenerate tactics, and the game, in general, does not reward such attempts -- i.e., there are enjoyable and "legit" ways to get the same results quicker. On the contrary, I contend that "attempting to manage the behavior of players" is implicit in the very definition of game design. An well-designed game manipulates the player into doing enjoyable things. A poorly-designed game manipulates the player into doing repetitive, unenjoyable chores. Therefore, degenerate play is always indicative of a design flaw. You're approaching this from the wrong direction. It would probably be pointless to try to design out exploits that are deeply embedded in an existing system -- for example, any attempt at making AD&D 2e un-exploitable is probably doomed to failure. However, when designing a new game, the decision to put in any mechanic should always be accompanied with questioning, "Is this mechanic or feature exploitable for degenerate gaming? If so, how could we change it to avoid that? If we can't, does the mechanic really add so much enjoyment that it's worth paying the price in exploitability?"

Critical hit?