PrimeJunta

Other than engagement (I know we disagree about that), what else did I get wrong? Played a bit more, this time with a fighter, through to the ogre cave. There were many, many spiders. Then I got a freeze when recruiting an adventurer and had to force quit. And yes, now this is fun, which it wasn't the last build I played. And yes, I like the way engagement works now, and am still having no trouble disengaging when I have to. Also, that first-level oil slick spell seems a leetle overpowered maybe?

Hello again. Been a while. I got a bit burned out on the beta and skipped a couple of updates before firing up 392. First impression: man, it's come a long way. Thanks for bringing back point-buy skills. The level-up UI is much nicer, as is the loot UI. Everything feels a lot more polished and "finished." And... combat is finally starting to feel "right." It's no longer a chaotic dogpile, but you can actually tell what's happening and react to it. A lot of it has to do with movement speed. The updated icons make a lot of difference too. Normal difficulty feels about right to me, it's fairly challenging but not murderous. This is actually going to be a fun game, and not just for the writing and exploration! -- This was the one area that was starting to worry me as combat seemed to have been treading water for a while when I last played it. So I'm feeling both relieved and happy about this. I'm still firmly in the pro-engagement camp, and now it's finally starting to work like I was hoping it would. It gives the game an RTS-ey feel of being able to control the battlefield even when there aren't obvious choke points, in a way that just wasn't there in the IE games. With the UI improvements it's finally possible to see who's engaging whom, and having to deal with that adds a nice dimension to the combat. I also like the various methods there are to break it. I (successfully) used Arcane Veil plus run away when a nasty engaged BB Wizard, Repulsing Seal on another occasion, and Knockdown on a third. These were all much more interesting than simply buggering off like in the IE games. But... way too many beetles in Dyrford Crossing. Srsly Not impressed by the voice sets. They sound fairly uninspired and amateurish, and there's a lot of repetition. The standard to aim for IMO is Planescape: Torment, but this isn't even Baldur's Gate level. Also some of the NPC's have too much voice; an entire paragraph is too much. This is obviously not a make-or-break thing, but IMO if voice is worth doing at all, it's worth doing well, plus less is more. There are also issues with voice FX; the combat barks have an echo like they were indoors even when we're outdoors. Tried playing with a ranger again, now that it works properly. I like the animal companion synergies you get with the perks and feats, but (still) dislike the shared health pool. It just feels gimmicky, and also seems to heavily favor getting as durable a companion as possible, especially with mob fights where there's often more than one enemy engaging each frontliner. It "feels" like the logical way to play a ranger is to park the beast in the frontline and deal damage at range, using the synergies to the max. So between an invulnerable animal that deals no damage and a vulnerable one that deals a ton of damage, why would I ever pick the second one? But perhaps I'm just missing something obvious. I played with an antelope and it worked OK enough. But all in all this is starting to feel like a real game. If everything is at this level of readiness and it was released now, it'd already be better than most I've played. I've had no framerate issues bothersome enough to notice, but then I'm not all that sensitive to them. Ran this on the OS X side of my Mac for the first time, by the way, and it crashed the first time I exited the Dyrford map to go to Dyrford Crossing, but restarting and reloading worked fine. Summa summarum, Obsidian have clearly been working their donkeys off on this one, and it finally feels like they've been playing it too. Couple more months and this is going to be awesome.

Edit: never mind, you're not worth the trouble.

No, although for some reason most opponents of Atheism+ appear to think it is. Understandable perhaps as they have a be-a-u-tiful hate-on for many of FTB's bloggers. It is unabashedly progressive and big on social justice issues though, which drives the libertarian/reactionary wing of the atheist/skeptic/secularist movement bonkers. The drama is great fun. Check out slymepit.com if you want a laugh.

Gamergate and the failure of ethics [ http://freethoughtblogs.com/indelible/2014/11/02/gamergate-and-the-failure-of-ethics/ ]

Points of interest would be cool. I'd much rather take them than, say, animated vegetation. There are going to be alternatives to fighting; in fact there are several examples in the BB. Alternatives to winning once you commit to a fight, I'm not so sure about. As I said I think "losing scenarios" would be a bit wasted on a game like P:E where the default behavior is to reload if you lose a game. There is Trial of Iron of course where they would make more sense. I wouldn't object to adding a couple, but I'd rather they spent most of that effort on reactivity that follows from choices of what you attempt rather than how well you succeed. As to PS:T, there was a quite a bit you missed if you didn't let yourself die every now and then.

Oh, you meant the standard "lose boss battle -> go to jail -> break out of jail/send party member to break you out of jail" scenario? Sure, there's room for that in P:E. It's not so much a feature as a trope and quest structure; the only twist would be that it's possible to avoid going to jail by winning the battle. The trouble with that is that if it only happens in a few battles, the standard mode of play becomes to reload after you lose. I.e. only very few players would ever even see that branch. I believe they're using the P:E engine, yes. Numenera has much, much less combat than P:E though, and their notion of "Crisis" is way cool and permits twists like this to happen. It also worked great for Planescape: Torment. Thing is, in both of these games it only works because you, the protagonist, are a defined character -- The Nameless One in PS:T, The Last Cast-Off in T:ToN. In both cases you get a special ability that makes you deal with death differently. I don't think P:E wants to be that kind of game. I agree entirely. Where I (possibly) disagree is what constitues "purging of faults and updating" and what constitutes "doing something altogether different." A lot of the things you listed are cool but are not and should not be high priorities for a game like P:E, or indeed conflict with what it is trying to be.

Your last one was most definitely a pony. You would either have to script a "losing outcome" for every single battle in the game and account for the knock-on effects down the line, or create a dynamic world where the "losing outcomes" emerge systemically. The former would be a gigantic amount of scripting, the latter would be a whole different type of game. And finally... yeah, I gotta be that guy. This game isn't about "breaking out of a standard scheme." It is about bringing back a long-neglected standard scheme. Many of the things you listed would be perfectly wortwhile enhancements to it and something that would be nice to have if budget and schedule permits. Some of them are fundamentally incompatible with what the game is trying to be. As to the budget, 4M is not a lot. They have to make trade-offs. One of the trade-offs they've announced they're making very early on is that they want a broader range of different kinds of maps, monsters, weapons, spells, and attacks, even if it means that each monster, weapon, spell, or attack will only get a single animation, or that animations are reused between them.

Yes. The mechanisms are scripting (changes happen through quest branches) and reputation dynamics (changes happen based on your reputation with different factions). Agent AI is not reactive. Haven't noticed. Kind of hard to pull this off in an isometric game I think, when you're viewing the thing from a bird's eye perspective. Haven't noticed anything like this in the beta. I believe this was mentioned as a "would like to implement if there's time" type of feature set. I believe so. That's not really a complex factional relationship; that's scripted AI behavior. I haven't noticed anything like this in the beta. And a pony?

I don't think the timing system has much to do with the problems in the combat at all. OTOH I like the idea of things affecting how long things take at a more granular level than haste/slow.

Nah, now they're naming them after fictional fighter pilots and Friz Freleng toons. (Or places in California, if you want to be boring about it.) Edit: they also finally managed to make a file manager that's actually useful for managing files. Only took them, what, 30 years.

Eye contact for dummies: Seek eye contact. If you make eye contact, smile. If you get a smile back, it's OK to initiate conversation. And conversely, if you don't make eye contact or it is immediately broken, then it is creepy to attempt to initiate conversation. That's all there is to it really.

The solution to that is better AI and more interesting mixes of enemies. If they have naked glass cannons too and use them to target yours, things will get a lot more interesting.

That is exactly what I think you should not be able to do with impunity and without use of special abilities, IE games be damned. You should be in trouble if you get engaged in melee by something that's better in melee than you are. Inherently squishy units should have ways of dealing with these situations—like, y'know, magic for spellcasters and Escape for rogues. But it totally should not be something any toon can do at any time. It removes an enormously central element of tactics in gameplay, so much so that without it I'm a bit uncomfortable even describing the combat as tactical. And yes, that applies to the IE games as well. Edit: just got to the your post at 02:12. Let's drop this topic for now; I'm in full agreement with your priority list. If it still feels bad after those are taken care of, I'm willing to reconsider my position.

Which can be addressed by adjusting how engagement/disengagement works. For example, add a zone of control around the toon, determined by weapon reach and visible in the UI, within which you can move without provoking a disengagement attack. You're throwing out the baby with the bath water here, Sensuki.

Yes we do, no they didn't, and yes we do.

Here's a pretty good summary.

Perhaps. Then P:E needs a mechanism better suited for RT for the purpose. No they were not. If they were, the IWD maps wouldn't be designed with all those narrow doorways that were the only thing that put any structure into the encounters. Again: if you put two fighters side by side both within striking distance of the gap, enemies should not be able to just run through it. A heavy's role is to block movement. You should not need to micromanage this. "Forcing the enemy AI to attack your front line" is a lousy way of doing it. Why not add aggro mechanics while you're at it, and go full WoW? Sure, there were lots of other tools you could use to win battles, but IMO it is no too much to ask that a game with tactical combat has a decent implementation of the most basic element of combat tactics, controlling battlefield space by the positioning of your units.

Both. (In all honesty though, primarily enemies getting past my frontline. If I line up three characters, it should not be possible to just run through them.) The entire point of having a front line is that it stops enemies from getting to you back line. If there's no mechanism in place to let it do that, a big dimension of tactics is gone. Sure, this was the case in all the IE games and their DnD successors, but it's not the case in any RTS game worthy of the name, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be possible to make it work in P:E. AoO's were an attempt at addressing this, but not very successful in a RT game (although they worked well in ToEE). There's got to be a better way. I would start by allowing a zone within which you can move while being engaged so that e.g. you can reposition yourself. Two combatants circling one another.

@Sensuki I strongly disagree with you about melee engagement. The one thing I hated about IE combat is the way toons could just scoot past each other with impunity. To make for interesting combat challenges the maps had to be really contrived, with choke points designed to be plugged by two toons shoulder-to-shoulder. Restricting movement is the point. I.e. if they do remove melee engagement, they had damn well better come up with something else that lets us control the battlefield in the same manner.

Okay, early impressions. The variety of talents is delightful (and I really love some of the names—very DnD-ey, in a good way), as is the way they blew open the builds, esp. the fighter one. Now it is pretty close to what that original vision described--you really can take it in different directions, although the best class abilities are still front-line oriented. But that's cool. Not so thrilled about the decision to completely connect skills to talents. I think the intent is to give you an optimization problem, having to find the best compromise between the combat talents and the skills you want to have. It's not a very fun optimization problem though IMO. I'm either ignoring the skills and picking the talents for what they do, or ignoring the talents to get the skills I want. Either way I'm treating one fairly big subsystem as irrelevant which can't really be the intent. I would rather see that decision rolled back. The old system was mechanically fine; just the level-up UI was kind of... not good. Why not just have a simple, basic point-buy system with the price going up geometrically? Display your current skill levels, the cost to level up each skill, and the number of skill points available. Cf. VtM:B for example. Lots of small but nice improvements to the UI in many places. Give a much more polished feel to the whole. Some (not all) of the character model heads now look good even in CC, which does a lot to make the game look less "cheap". I'm am getting pwned by the beetles. Ouch. Dunno if it's something I'm doing wrong or if they really did make them that much tougher, but... ouch. Dengler still won't talk to me. Do I have halitosis or something? Like the loading screens. Another nice bit of polish there. Loading times though still need optimizing. I find it especially jarring to have to wait when entering buildings. Do something about that plz? Overall? I like the way the game is starting to cohere visually. The new icons, loading screens, tweaks to the UI, tweaks to the character model, etc. are extremely promising. If all they do on that front is make moar icons for everything, I'll be pretty happy. I like the revisions to the character-building mechanics... other than the choice to link skills and talents. I like bestiary XP, but don't like trap/lock XP. The BB is too small an the XP awards too inflated to say much more on that though. The combat however isn't progressing as fast as I'd like. Despite the individual improvements to the combat UI the overall experience hasn't jelled. It's doesn't "feel" any better than in 278; it's still chaotic and confusing, and it's hard to tell what you did wrong when you get your ass handed to you. That's a bit disappointing since they have had a while to iterate on it by now. I think the main problems right now are with pathfinding (still!), movement speed (still!), and numbers balance. The balance also appears to swing wildly from buld to build; 278 was pretty hard, 301 was easy, 333 is very hard. Keep banging on at that though, you will get there... but this part does need attention.

Whoa, big update. You guys been working hard. Surprised you changed the skill system so drastically, will be interesting to try that out. Still don't care for the idea of lock/trap XP. Very happy about the massive number of talents, general combat and pathfinding fixes, and adjustments to core abilities. :runs off to try it:

@Zoraptor IMO the big tragedy of the Egyptian revolution is that the non-MB opposition couldn't get their act together. If they had agreed on a single candidate he would've had good odds of winning. As it was the vote was split. I would probably have held my nose and voted for Morsi as well in the second round, given the circumstances. Both of the opposition groups had their shot and blew it -- the secularists before the elections, the MB when they got into power, so here we are, with the generals back in charge.