PrimeJunta

Chanter, cipher, monk, druid. Specifically, I'd like to know where they come from in the world of P:E. Are all classes available to all cultures? If not, where do these classes come from? Do different cultures have different palettes of classes to choose from? (Personally I'd find it a bit surprising if a high-Renaissance type culture like the Vailians would also produce barbarians, for example.) * What the hey is a chanter anyway? Are we talking Norse skalds, Provençal troubadours, Celtic bards, all of the above, none of the above, something else...? * How do they intend to differentiate ciphers and druids from wizards, in terms of mechanics? * What's the cultural/religious context monks come from? It's pretty obvious from the Forton art that they have a kung-fu-unarmed-martial-artist archetype in mind. Is there an "Eastern" culture in the world too? If not, where do these types of monks come from in the "Western" cultures we've already seen?

You might want to read that again, Sharp_one. 'Cuz Sawyer is clearly stating that his intention is to do exactly that -- make a variety of armor/weapon combos available, and avoid a situation where there's only one objectively "right" (dominant) way to build and equip a character. Whether he'll succeed is a different matter, but he does have a fair bit of experience tuning systems to do just that, so I think the odds are in his favor.

Sure, it's viable. Also marginal. I've no doubt it'll be in because so many players would howl bloody murder if it wasn't (the "badass factor"), but I think the effort needed to implement it would have better payoff in terms of richness of gameplay elsewhere.

If they BOTH say it, then we have a paradox. No, we don't. All these riddles are insoluble as they're stated here. For all we know, everybody could be normal people who sometimes lie and sometimes tell the truth, in which case you can't deduce anything about what they say. You need some sort of meta-information to make the riddles soluble. For example, that they either always lie or always tell the truth. In which case this riddle would have a solution (it's not a paradox). (I love these problems, btw. Got a great book full of them. Called What Is The Name Of This Book, by Raymond Smullyan.)

Bah, that what maxed-out Handle Animals is for. There's not much a well-trained sheep can't accomplish.

Or a wizard who can summon goblins you can send into the trapfield to set them off. Or a ranger who can tame sheep that can be used as living minesweepers. The possibilities are endless.

IMO what JES is saying is pretty much common sense. Of course there's a risk of "overbalancing" to the point that all classes end up in the same place (e.g. a rogue is just a wizard who throws grenades instead of fireballs, and a wizard is just a rogue who uses Knock and Find Traps spells instead of Open Locks and Search skills), but I think he and the rest of the P:E gang are smart, experienced, and self-aware enough to be able to avoid this pitfall. If the game has a viable path for any relatively sane character and party build, and different character and party builds produce materially different but interesting experiences, it will have been a success. I mean seriously, why would you even want to implement riding if there are no horses in the game? [Yes, I know this has been done. And it is puzzling to me.]

Actually, they're very practical. Probably not what you had in mind though.

Here. I'd take it further than that; I don't have any problem with being able to roll up squibs that hit a brick wall at some point, at normal or harder difficulties anyway. However, I'd think it unfair if you end up with a squib even though you made reasonable assumptions about what your choices do.

I'd actually pass on this RPG cliché altogether. If you have to have it, then small weapons only for the off hand. And please don't make it overpowered, like having double the number of attacks per second. Shouldn't work like that.

Yeah, a dynamic economy would be cool. It would also be a hell of a lot of work and tune so that it wouldn't be outrageously exploitable or easy to break down. Especially if it's any more complex than a handle of goods, a handful of sellers, and a handful of buyers. Try it for spits and giggles: model the turtle beak market of Chelonia, starting with the following equilibrium: * Stock: 100 beaks * Buying price from Chelsea the chemist's: 1 penny/beak * Selling price to Chelsea the chemist: 1 penny/5 beaks * Base demand: 10 beaks/day * Base supply: 10 beaks/day Now try plugging in a couple of different formulas for Chelsea to decide on her buy/sell prices based on how many beaks she has left at the end of the day, and supply and demand curves that respond to these prices, and then put yourself into the shoes of an unscrupulous trader who wants to make a bundle by cornering the turtle beak market. (That would be you.) This brings up questions like * How elastic is demand for turtle-beaks in the short term? In the long term? * How elastic is supply for turtle-beaks in the short term? In the long term? * Do I have to factor in a potential crash of the turtle population, if a demand spike drives up turtle-hunting? How do I model that? * Will an increase in long-term demand be offset by an increase in supply through imports? And before you know it, you'll find yourself modeling the trade patterns of the continent, the ecology of both nearby areas (which determine the limits to short-term turtle beak supply) and far-off areas (which determine limits to long-term supply through imports), customs and excise, taxation, the economic impact of smuggling, and so on and so forth. I know, fun. What's more, it would have major implications for the gameplay -- for example, time would become a lot more important. Normally time doesn't really matter in cRPG's. This would totally wreck the economy since you could just wait out any market disruption you may have caused to the dynamic turtle beak market. In sum, personally I'd prefer they put in some killer quests, encounters, companions, dialog, story, classes, and what have you, and mmmmaybe deprioritize modeling a dynamic economy.

Sure! I just think it's a bit of a brute-force way to do it.

There's a lot of Sawyer hate around, these days. I don't really get it. From where I'm at, what he's saying appears to be, well, common sense really. Why would you even bother implementing a "ride" skill if there are no horses in the game? That said, there is a trap there -- an overly enthusiastic attempt at balancing everything can make everything the same. For example, an "open locks" spell that opens all locks is probably a bad idea if your rogue's raison d'être is an open locks skill. Going by what JES has said, though, I think the P:E team is entirely aware of this potential problem and quite capable of avoiding it. What I would like to see is a very broad take on what constitutes challenges and rewards. It's too common IMO to view these through a powergaming lens. I.e., if, say, Read Ancient Poetry doesn't net you an item of at least as awesome power as Open Locks, [or XP, or whatever] then it's a bad choice. The payoff for that skill could be a really cool twist to a story. Or even <gasp> Ancient Poetry -- say, background lore that deepens your experience of the game. Similarly, I think it'd be cool if the game had a solid variety of different types of challenges -- combat challenges, for sure, but also dialog challenges, puzzles, traps, intellectual challenges, and so on. [in fact IMO this would mean that characters who are less strong in combat would still be viable choices, if they would be commensurately stronger in the non-combat challenges.] I also think that it would be kind of dim if every character and every party was equally awesome. A part of the fun of playing games like this is to figure out how to make the awesomest character/party you're able. That said, I would like to have enough information from the get-go to be able to make an educated guess about how to make an awesome character. Case in point: the archery mechanics in DA:O are extremely counterintuitive: it doesn't make much sense that your awesomest archer has maxed-out INT and shoots a shortbow. So please don't do that. If I want to make a fabulous archer, I would expect to need DEX and a longbow, TYVM. I'm not sure that skills should be balanced by the designers by making the more useful ones cost more. I think it's more important that the game telegraphs the usefulness of the skills it offers, either explicitly or implicitly. I would be bummed if it turns out that all the points I invested in Open Locks were wasted once a mage with the Knock spell joined my party a quarter of the way through, for example.

A resounding YES! to spears and polearms. Spears would fit the Celtic theme great too. Gáe Bulg FTW!

The first one. Didn't bother with the others because I didn't enjoy it much. I didn't count the hours, but 30+ sounds about right -- that's short in my book. It was utterly awful, borderline unplayable on release. With enough patching, especially community patches, it became quite playable so that wasn't the problem. The problem was that it was an enormous world full of same sameness. It had its moments, but to get them you had to trek through endless deserts of tedium. By the time I was halfway through Nordmar I couldn't take it anymore and just let it drop. It's too bad, really; if they had made the world smaller and dropped 75% of the filler it could've been a hell of a good game. As it is, you have to have a really high tolerance for mindless grinding to get to the good bits. I'll probably lose all my geek cred here, but I haven't played either of those. I missed BG and went straight to BG2, which I enjoyed enormously once I got over some serious initial frustration. I didn't play the IWD's because I understood that they're basically dungeon crawlers all about the combat challenge, and I prefer to play roguelikes for dungeon crawls and RTS's for combat challenge. I'm getting curious though and might give 'em a shot at some point. What I look for in a game is a bit analogous to what I look for in a movie, comic, or a book. It has to have something to say, and it has to say it in an at least moderately interesting way. That "something" could reside in the gameplay, the story, the characters, the lore, or whatever else. But it has to be there. Hitting things until they fall down, getting better things to hit them with, and eventually running out of things to hit doesn't do it for me. Nor am I very interested in playing the same game over and over again. So I loved Morrowind (unusual, challenging, creative, interesting, believable world) but got bored of Oblivion plenty quick (vanilla, unchallenging, uncreative, boring, repetitive, artificial-feeling world). [Repeat for a half-dozen more like/unlike pairs of outwardly similar games.] That's what's missing in AAA cRPG's these days, mostly. It's like they're really afraid of pushing any boundaries in case somebody doesn't like it. [And the fact that the boundaries are different in gaming than in, say, daytime TV doesn't change it any; it's just pandering to a different audience. Rampant sexism, racism, and blood/gore might be edgy on TV, but it's edgy as potato in games.]

I've also played Oblivion, Gothic 3 (modded out the wazoo), Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age: Origins, to name a few other relatively recent ones. I put a quite a lot of hours into all of them, but only finished ME, and that because it was so short. I didn't ragequit any of the others, they just started to feel more and more repetitive and tedious the further I played them. As a general rule I stop playing a game if it's less fun than my day job. Not saying I loved all the oldies. Arcanum had the same soporific effect on me as those others I didn't like; that was a real disappointment actually because many people whose taste I generally trust think very highly of it. It just never clicked for me. Felt like so much hitting things until they fall over and doing do-this do-that busywork for various people. Skinnerian mechanics again. (N.b., I also loved the original Witcher when that came out. Or, strictly speaking, after version 1.1 came out, which got rid of the insanely long loading times whenever you entered a building. I just think The Witcher 2 did everything it did only better, and without the tedious back-and-forth trekking of the first one.)

@Karkarov -- Yes, and no. But mostly no, I think. Yes, games have gotten better in some ways. For example, in general they're better nowdays at exposing their mechanics to the player, either via tutorials or tutorial-like events, and they rarely have any completely useless character-building options, even if it's still entirely easy to end up with a squib if you don't know how stuff works. That is good in my opinion. But no, they're still not rid of the kind of god-awful design bloopers that were a dime a dozen in the good ol' days. And mostly no, they're not better. They've gotten "streamlined" to the point that a lot of the depth and breadth is gone. Instead there's a shallow wading pool of pretty but easily accessible pap. And they rely more on Skinner type mechanics that have you pushing the lever to get the pellet. If I had to name five or ten all-time favorite cRPG's, I think only one relatively recent one would make the list (The Witcher 2). And even that one had some truly bizarre design moments, specifically with some of the boss fights. [God I hated that squid-thing.] OTOH if I had to list ten most forgettable or actually "I want my N hours back" cRPG's, most of those would be relatively recent. This despite the mechanics being really badly broken on some of the golden oldies.

I would very much like to see better AI, with enemies trying to actively outflank you and such. I recognize that it would probably be too much of a break with cRPG tradition, but I'd like to see AI features of squad-based real-time tactical games introduced. Like suppressive fire, units seeking cover autonomously if under fire, even (dare I say it?) morale. The latter would be a natural tie-in to abilities and skills and would make things like willpower more meaningful.

I love puzzles. My only stipulation would be that there's some effort to fit them into the larger context. I.e., that there's some excuse for the puzzle to be there in the first place, and ideally some reason nobody else has shown up to solve it yet. Even better, put in some really hard puzzles in optional areas.

It's funny, but I still think the game with the best squad-based tactical combat I've played was Microsoft Close Combat from the mid-1990's. It was simple enough to be manageable, the command UI was perfect, there were enough unit and terrain types to provide genuine variety, and it had a hell of a good campaign. The AI was really well done, especially in the way it modeled behavior of individual soldiers under fire. It made concepts like suppressive fire actually matter -- you could pin down an enemy squad with one well-placed machine gunner and then have the rest of your squad outflank them. The enemy AI was smart enough to try that on you as well. It managed it with a handful of basic unit types -- the rifleman, the machine-gunner, the sniper, the tank, and the fixed gun emplacement. No tank-healer-dps archetypes there. (Well, other than the actual tank, which is not at all like the cRPG tank. Very satisfying to bust when getting close up. Very annoying to lose through careless use.) I played some of the later ones in that series as well, but didn't like them as much. They started trying too hard, piling on more and more mechanics that just added complexity (and realism, of course) but none of them were just as much sheer sweaty-palmed fun. (Hm. That sounds naughty, but you know what I mean.) I remember thinking "Goddamn, somebody needs to put this into a cRPG" back then. I'm still waiting. Apologies to those who disapprove of tangents. Thought it might be interesting anyway.

Yeah, New Crobuzon had some seriously imaginative stuff. It would make for a great RPG setting. Very not P:E though. Erm, I think. Come to think of it, that universe could work out great for a Torment spiritual successor. Certainly more than weird enough...

^- QFT. It ain't rocket science people, just introduce a mechanic properly as it comes into play, whether it's a mad new technique, or a scary new monster. Beyond that, make 'em as fiendish as you want. At highest difficulty levels the toughest fights damn well better be sadistic nightmares of encounter design artistry.

That would be bad, yes. I would prefer to have visibility range a good deal higher than spell effect range, which would give you time to buff up when you spot those wellithids headed your way, before they can use their mind-control ray on you. Or, even better, have a stealthed rogue scout ahead. The IE games did allow this at least some of the time. I should hope P:E does too. I'm not saying there should never ever be ambushes where a bunch of nasties catches you flat-footed, but that should not be the most common type of combat challenge you get. And ideally, I'd prefer that you did something careless to walk into the ambush, rather than the usual cut-scene-followed-by-ambush thing.

On a more serious note, I'm in the pro-buff camp. It adds a lot of variety. What I don't like, though, is the encounter-as-puzzle mechanic, where you have to repeatedly die and reload to find out what they're going to throw at you, then set the right buffs, then win. For example, the game could drop hints about what to expect in a boss fight so you can prepare buffs intelligently beforehand, and, like, throw one mind-controlling wellithid at you so you'll have an idea what to do when faced with a roomful of them. I also dislike generic "make ur character stronger/faster/tougher" buffs, except very short-duration ones that can be used to swing a battle. Long duration generic buffs just end up as chores. MotB had plenty of those, like long-duration damage reduction, AC improvement or stat improvement buffs. They're just boring. If you want to make it possible to do that, just provide items for it instead. The best buffs are specific, and have a great deal of utility in specific circumstances but are near-useless in other circumstances. So, mind-control/elemental/paralysis/any-specific-effect resistance is good. Extra damage to undead/demons/beasts/humans etc., good. Short-duration, high-cost haste/damage reduction/damage boost/ability boost, good. Long-duration of the same, bad. Just my 10¢.