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Blackstream

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About Blackstream

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    Wanderer of the Obsidian Order
    (2) Evoker

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    Video game programming
    Gaming
    Single Player - RPGs, Sandbox games, anything creative or exploration based
    Competitive - Fighters (especially 2d), RTSs, Board Games, PvP of all shapes and sizes

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  1. Here's the way I look at it. I should get rewarded for doing stuff, enough that it justifies the time, effort, and most importantly resources spent. If the loot is good enough, that's probably okay, but I do think that if my party spends its time wiping a map completely clean, over time that party should have a level advantage over a party that skips all the encounters. A lot of issues stated in this thread can be solved with variable quest rewards, though. Use social skills or investigation to solve a quest non-violently? Get a larger quest reward bonus for the effort and brain power spent. Or get a special reward you wouldn't have gotten just killing everything. Note that I think quest reward should be the majority of your experience, but there should be a difference exp wise and eventually level wise between someone that does the quest to kill the ogre and skips everything up to the ogre, and someone that does the same quest and kills everything on the way to the ogre. You've got to manage consumables, camp supplies, stamina, spell slots, etc to do all the extra fighting, I think that should be rewarded with more than an extra beetle shell or whatever.
  2. So assuming the damage is constant per second, that's 534 over 12 seconds or about 44/second. 21 might - 534/12s 19 might - 496/12s 14 might - 460/12s Just looking at that, there is some huge gains for the values past racial limits for might, unless I'm missing something. If the other stats don't get that treatment, then getting a class with +2 might is the way to go. EDIT: Someone else said their 19 I was 23 seconds and not 22... plugging those numbers in instead, I get 511/12s. That gives approximately a linear increase of 7.2 damage over 12s for every point of might, which seems a lot more legit. So 3 Might should in theory be about 380 base damage if everything is right. That still sounds like a ton of damage tbh. EDIT 2: Went into the actual game and sure enough the numbers are listed, each point of might being +2% damage. I can't quite get the numbers to work out right, so I assume there's some rounding in the above numbers, but that puts the base damage of this spell somewhere around 365 or so, if you were to somehow magically have a 0 might character. That's quite a bit lol. Don't know why I went into all this math trouble when the numbers are fairly plainly listed, but oh well.
  3. I'd like to reiterate that I think item durability belongs in expert mode. By description, "Expert Mode will also enable more punitive and demanding gameplay elements, in and out of combat.", which, like fallout new vegas which has things like dehydration, I believe damaging equipment falls under. That way the people who don't like the busy work of paying for repairs don't have to have it, and the people who want the realism can have it.
  4. I like this, by the way. Consumables are a good way of providing depth to a combat, and making battles so hard you have to use them (although, chances are there are going to be builds that don't need them... it's just a thing that usually ends up happening), in my opinion really adds in the element of danger and feels like you're working for your victory. EDIT: Editing this post so I don't just have a post spam going on. I've noticed a lot of people hate item durability. I'm not entirely sure why, as it's always been a minor inconvenience at worst and adds a little bit of immersion, but I feel like the best solution for everyone as it doesn't really add anything to gameplay (unless you make items that have an effect on damage or while damaged), would be to move item durability to expert mode (which is, IIRC, PE's Fallout NV hardcore mode effectively). That way, people that want the game mechanics that give them inconvenience for realism's sake can have it, and the people that don't, won't. Since it's expert (or hardcore or whatever), you could add in weapon's permanently breaking if you use them too long while damaged too. As far as crafting, I'm a little surprised at the general outlook on it. Maybe it's just the vocal minority, but the crafting system is exactly what I expected, and more or less hoped it would be. I mean, you could create some kind of crazy skill-based crafting minigame to make the actual act of crafting a challenge too, with greater rewards for doing really well, but I'm sure people would hate that just as much. I think people assume too much about how the material gathering is gonna go though. I'd be willing to bet that common crafting materials (wood, silk, iron) will be buyable from npcs (as well as gatherable if you want to iron man it), and the important stuff will be found from quests (special materials, recipies, likely boss drops and found in chests and stuff). I don't really see them requiring you to grind out minotaurs to gather horns so that you can get 10 horns that you can grind down into a powder or whatever. Basically what I'm saying is, this system could go a million different ways depending on how they decide to implement it. On top of that, there are gonna be people that like and hate the system no matter what they do, and I think everyone should keep that in mind. I mean, there are multiple people in this thread alone that think they didn't go far enough with item durability loss. Finally, to answer the question "What do I want to spend gold on?" I think some legendary weapons and items should be buyable. The rest should be findable/craftable. The best gear should be findable in the end game only, but you'll likely want to buy gear on the way as it'll be more accessible and will give you an edge up on getting to that gear in the first place. The crafting system should be a money sink of sorts, especially for making potions. Making uber weapons should cost money, the ingredients for making consumables should probably be non-trivial, especially the uber ones. For those that don't wanna craft, just buying the consumables from NPCs should also be viable, but at a somewhat higher cost. Stronghold/player housing stuff At some point, it'd be nice if the players get super rich anyways and feel like they can buy the world. Higher difficulties, due to higher reliance on consumables, should make it something of a struggle to make money.
  5. Couple things of note for me. I'm sure the devs are already discussing internally how to balance found loot with crafted loot, and ideally neither one should obsolete the other, and possibly should work off each other to be even better. It would be equally depressing to have an end game where the best builds require legendary sword X found in level 14 of the megadungeon and armor Y found off the fairy king in the Dark Woods story arc, etc etc, as it would be to have an end game where the best armor and weapons are crafted and you might as well not even go loot hunting. If the devs want to put in a way for people to level crafting without leveling it on their party members, they could always put in a blacksmith/cook/enchanter npc that you can level by giving them work and materials (and money). Or possibly that join your quest and sit in your base and you can go back to them to have them make you stuff. As far as the kind of stuff I want out of the crafting systems, speaking as someone that loves to make builds, and will spend hours obsessing over build and gear design, the things I like to look for are: 1) Non homogenous gear. Diablo III is a good example of what I don't want. Everything is +stats, +crit (in some form), and +ias, and nothing else matters. Every skill works off of weapon damage, and every weapon gives weapon damage that works with every skill (with a few exceptions). Diablo II on the other hand, has good examples of non-homogenous gear. There's lots of things to build for that are all super helpful, and work for different casters. IAS, FHR, weird stuff like auras, specific +skills, on hit effects, etc. Translating to IE style games, I don't have a ton of examples, but even BG had interesting things to build for, even in D&D's system which is fairly homogenous (weapons are dice of damage and an enhancement bonus, armor has an AC and an enhancement bonus... woo). Most of them revolved around unique gear you could find around the world. Casters with hacked out -cast time gear, stacking magic resist gear on certain classes to make them immune to magic. Filling holes in stats with specific uber gear (giant strength belts, human influence ring, dex gauntlets). And so on. The gear in BG was fairly straight forward, but it was also interesting. So I guess what I'm looking for is a lot of interesting affixes that make building interesting, and not just one big game of stack the 4 or 5 stats that matter. 2) Wacky affixes that allow for interesting builds. Somewhat touched on above, but this is a more specific thing. Things like the simulacrum helmet, or armor that has a chance to turn you invisible everytime someone swings at you. A ring that lets you summon dire wolves once a day. A sword that has a % chance of stunning the target everytime you hit (...>_>). A dagger that gives you health when you backstab, a shield that makes your charges not provoke. Things like that, that you know will make some truely BS endgame builds, but are cool at the same time. 3) Sounds like you guys are planning on this already, but all the really good stuff should require questing and exploring to find. Materials, recipies, whatever. Divine favor as a 'material' component might be interesting as a sidenote. I dunno, just rambling, but I like where the system is going and it probably covers all these things already, but I just wanted to ramble on a bit.
  6. Lets plays actually seem quite popular on youtube, I guess people are interested in seeing how other people play and how the experience differs to their own? I sometimes watch lets plays to see how other people do stuff, but my main use of lets plays is a way to preview and review a game. Screw big news site reviews, watching someone else play the game is a million times better.
  7. It should be logical on how the bodies disappear. If enemies respawn there, the bodies should disappear some time after you leave (once enemies respawn). Partially because you could potentially end up with infinite corpses, partially because the enemies themselves would clean up the bodies. If the enemies die in a place trafficked by people, they should be cleaned up after some time even if enemies don't respawn there. If enemies die in a place that there is no respawn and no one would logically go by there (except you), then they should just stay there for a long time. Maybe after like a week or two in game passes you could say critters get to them and despawn them then. Or if they're out of reach of critters, the corpse could turn into a rotting corpse, and after a long time, a skeleton. That'd be cool too.
  8. The one thing I hate is that the devs seem to think asking for romance = asking for sex. Sex isn't even a big point in the bg2 romances, which are already simple as hell. In fact, you can screw yourself over in some cases by jumping to it too quickly. I just want to be able to pursue the full spectrum of relationships with my companions. Be it friendships, romances, frenemies, bromances, or whatever. And the characters should stay in character, so if the companions cheats on me, gets mad jealous whenever I interact with other guys/girls, obstains from sex until marriage, doesn't really understand the concept of love so it's a weird wacky sort of thing, or whatever, that's fine too. And preferably, if you do get into a healthy relationship that ends up involving sex or whatever and a romance and stuff, in future games you would get to deal with what comes next stuff. It'd be kind of cool to have a husband and wife team fighting against dragons and solving mysteries together. Or maybe you get into that phase and find out even though you guys made things work in the beginning, in the long run the two of you have opposing views on life and stuff and you can't make it work. It's actually more work to make what I'd actually want, than a cheap point a to point b with sex at the end romance, which is more of the bg2 style
  9. Before that, they were going with a reanimated orchestra, with the conductor being a Necromancer. Jokes aside, they were probably gonna just have some musicians create some music on the computer as opposed to actually recording music being played at a studio or something. So there would be a difference in quality.
  10. I think the only thing they've said on this so far is that it'll be similar to switching between chapters in some of the IE games, where you get a narrated sequence, accompanied by static art (which I love, btw). Animation simply is too expensive/time consuming to fit within a crowd sourced budget (and there also seems to be little demand for it in the fanbase). That's why way back when kickstarter was running, I suggested drawn character portraits for dialogue, like say how recettear does it (Note that Feargus did say he put it in his big list of things to talk and think about, so I assume by now they've already decided for or against this). It allows you to have cutscene visuals with a fraction of a fraction of the cost of a real cinematic, cause all you need art wise is to draw some stock images for the main character and some expressions, and the same for anyone they interact with (which is like, a couple pieces of character art max, and since you're already drawing the characters in game, it's not much of a step to give them a full drawing. Note that in the picture I posted, there are both dialogues that just overlay the map you're walking on, for when you just have a random conversation on the road or whatever, and for more special dialogues, there are also some with backgrounds. The only problem is that doesn't fit PE's style really right now, but if a solution like this was at all attractive to the PE devs, I'm sure they could find a way to make use of this in a way that would work with the PE art style and presentation.
  11. The specific things mentioned in the 4m stretch goal might not have been put in though. Live Orchestra, dev in game commentary, making Chris play Arcanum. The live orchestra music was the big one for me, I'm looking forward to some quality music in PE.
  12. I'm personally on the fence as to whether or not a defensive 'slide' option is needed. I've played games with AoO that both had and didn't have it (old d&d games like secret of the silver blades did not have it, d&d 4th ed does have it. But one thing I would like to see are feats/class abilities that modify the effects of engagement with that player. I.e., debuffs on the enemy or buffs on the player. Spells too. A spell that makes it so that when the enemy engages with someone, it gets a huge penalty to accuracy or something would be awesome. Or maybe the enemy takes damage everytime it engages or disengages with someone. One potential exploit to watch out for (although maybe it's wholesome gameplay). If engagement distance can indeed be extended with things like polearms, I totally forsee sandwich techniques where two players stand on opposite ends of a creature and engage it, and no matter where the creature moves to, it provokes an AoO. And if the two PCs keep at range and keep engaging, you could essentially lock down an enemy and get lots of free (huge) damage. Add on any abilities and things like multi engagement bonuses and the such, and you could in theory have some very sick AI destorying combos (for example, the AI might be coded to not want to break engagement and take huge damage, so it just stands between two people and is effectively mezzed because it doesn't want to break either engagment).
  13. This means that firearms after a few more advances in technology will eventually become the dominate way to do battle just like in real life, since they'll lose the only restrictions currently afflicting them. Unless of course similar advances in magic happen (maybe the only reason magic shields don't work against bullets is because guns are so new, no one has researched that area of magic). Or people start integrating magic with technology (although magic guns seem like the obvious result of that). I don't like this very much. Personally I think health/stamina damage should be a property of attacks and spells. As in, some should do more damage to one, and some should do more damage to the other. It allows you to do things like make a boss that does ridiculous one shot level damage without autokilling your team. It allows you to make cool buffs that manipulate the incoming stamina/health damage. It allows you to make attacks that don't do very much stamina damage, but do much more dangerous health damage, making enemies that are very scary for any prolonged engagements. All sorts of things. I think a ratio is good as a baseline for how abilities, weapons, normal attacks, etc work, but from there they should diverge. If there's one thing that excites me, is that Josh's view of how dialogue and world interactivity should work, is something I've always wanted. I think one of the reason games feel hollow to me is that designers focus too much on the short term immediate reaction part, and not nearly enough, or sometimes not at all on the long-term effects of what you're actually saying or doing. This leads to things like playing through the game multiple times and realizing that no matter what you say or do, all characters will regard you the exact same and the same things will happen. It's even worse if they work off of a global reputation system, because that leads to things like you saving a shopkeepers business and his daughter, but oh look, you punched a drunk in the face outside the bar, so the shopkeep grabs a sword to try and slice you up since you are now a criminal (I'm looking at you Skyrim).
  14. The only thing bad about buffs is in games where you can, and end up basically encouraged to, prebuff. It's extremely immersion breaking, yet also extremely optimal (as every buff you prebuff is one more action you can spend in battle kicking the opponent's ass), to prebuff for a fight your party can't possibly know is coming. It's a somewhat minor thing, to be fair, I'm not gonna cry if PE doesn't address/fix this issue. The obvious 'solution' is to disallow any combat casting until combat is initiated, but I don't really like that. I mean, it'd be fairly simple to classify certain spells as 'in-combat' only, and certain spells as free cast (friend, long term buffs and summons (anything that lasts hours you could reasonably choose to want to keep up all the time), utility spells, etc), but thinking far far ahead, I'm predicting that top difficulty all higher difficulty modes activated playthroughs are going to revolve around careful prebuffing, and the strategy of that isn't really something I want to see go away either. So yes, buffs are cool. In simple gameplay terms, it's an opportunity cost where you sacrifice actions that could be used to hurt or control the enemy to try and get an upper hand by improving your party instead. It makes combat more interesting and strategic, because you not only have to ask yourself if it's worth your cleric's time to give everyone +1 strike, or if you should be healing, or casting another hold person spell and hoping the dice roll in your favor, or just swinging your mace some more. And then it's further interesting, because in a lot of games, there's maintenence issues too. You casted that buff, and it's really nice, but in a few turns, you'll have to cast it again to keep it up. Have enough buffs going and pretty soon it's all your buffer is doing. So you got a tricky balancing act to do.
  15. Reminds me of Skyrim shouts. Might even be where they got the inspiration from, who knows.
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