ArcaneBoozery

This is an area where I hope PE will be more like Fallout 1/2/ Arcanum than Baldur's Gate, meaning you can enter a building seamlessly without the inconvenience of a loading screen. Playing Baldur's Gate/ Planescape Torment these days, that might not seem to matter, as computers are so much more powerful now, and the loading screens take a second at most, but when those games first came out, the loading would take a while (same as it would with PE now), and these constant loadings were a definite pain, considering sometimes you would have to enter/exit multiple buildings within a short span of time. Hope you guys agree with me.

While mage combat was a lot of fun in Baldur's Gate games, pure melee fighting was very boring. As a fighter, you would just click on the target, and watch as your character stands there and whacks away, however many attacks they had per round. I hope this will be remedied in PE, with a more active melee fighting approach. Just like a magic user would be constantly selecting which spells to use based on the situation, so a fighter would have a large selection of melee abilities to choose from (e.g. simple slash, thrust, power attack, parry, dodge, sidestep, jump, feint, throw weapon, etc). Also, there could be different styles of melee fighting, such as power based, speed based, technique based, etc, which would allow different choices from the overall pool of melee abilities. Finally, it would be nice if melee fighting had a different feel from magic casting (i.e. it didnt feel like melee abilities were just spells with melee names, cast quick thrust instead of magic missile). This could be done in different ways probably, but one way I thought of would be to make it more speed/reaction based. Not like an FPS or anything, but for example, certain melee abilities can only be activated within a short amount of time after something happens (e.g. you activate the parry skill, and when you see your character actually parry the enemy blow, you have 1 second to activate the counterattack ability before it becomes unavailable). This shouln't be a requirement, if you are not interested you can just set your melee fighters to auto-attack/tank, but for those of us who want to "main" a skilled melee fighter, this would add an active component to the gameplay that would be different from spell casting, but fun in its own way.

Quest arrows/compasses are terrible and really ruin the exploration aspect of RPGs. The ideal way to handle this is as many people pointed out is to have detailed text entries in the journal for every quest/tidbit of info, and then allow the player to use that to find these location themselves. This introduces a whole new layer of enjoyable exploration to the gameplay and brings a sense of satisfaction after finding what you were looking for, as opposed to following arrows on rails in a mindless manner.

In the early 2000s, as most RPGs and RTSs transitioned from 2D to 3D, one of the things that really bugged me was how the camera in the 3D games was allowed to zoom in and out, rotate, and change the angle. In 2D isometric games, backgrounds were just images, so the camera was entirely fixed in terms of zoom distance, angle, and rotation (with some rare exceptions). As 3D games became popular, I'm sure the developers were excited about the chance to show off their three dimensional worlds from different angles, and at first, this sounds like a good idea, giving this flexibility to the player. But what I found in practice is that this camera freedom was actually extremely detrimental to the gameplay experience. Since these games were designed with the free roaming camera in mind, different camera angles were optimal (or even required) at different times. Sometimes you would want to zoom in to check out your new weapon graphics (badly visible from distance), other times you would need to zoom out to see the entire battlefield. Sometimes, you would need to tilt the camera up to see inside buildings, toher times down to see where you are going. Rotation also became a necessity to see around obstacles. In the end, I found myself spending half the time fighting against the camera, as opposed to actually enjoying the game, and missing those days of 2D games when camera was transparent, and not something you had to think about. So because of that, I am really hoping that with Project Eternity, Obsidian will go back to the fixed cameras of older games. What do the rest of you think?

Hi everyone, and I am really excited about Project Eternity! The RPGs that this game will try to emulate and that the dev team has worked on are some of my all time favorites and truly great titles (such as Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 1 & 2, etc). Having played all those back when they came out and also more recently, I do, however, have a couple of suggestions which I think are important, although I think this will be a great game regardless. The first suggestion has to do with the combat spellcasting. Given the early state of the game, the developers might not have delved too deeply into combat details yet, but I think it's good to bring this issue up early. Overall, I loved the combat system in Baldur's Gate, but if there is one peeve I had with it, it was the the way casting time interacted with spell interruption. As I am sure many here remember, spells in BG had a casting time, from the minimum of 1 for low level spells such as Magic Missile, to the maximum of 9 or 10 for highest level spells such as Time Stop. This determined how long the caster would be stuck in the casting animation before actually casting. Spell interruption was the mechanism in BG whereby, if during casting, the caster suffered any kind of damage (from an enemy hit, or spell cast, or damage over time), the spell cast would be interrupted and the remembered spell lost. Taken separately, those two mechanisms make a lot of sense and work just fine, but when they combined, I feel like it led to broken mechanics. What do I mean? Well, if your party was facing a powerful enemy wizard for example, your own mage could effectively dominate that foe by only using his very low level spells. Provided they used some mid level or higher spell to remove the enemy's spell defense first, your mage could then cast Magic Missile or a similar low level spell the moment you see the enemy wizard cast something. Due to casting time, your low level spell would be cast much quicker than the high level spell the enemy wizard would typically cast, hit him while he was still casting, and interrupt him. Since in AD&D, low level spells were memorized in large numbers, this could be repeated over and over, effectively stopping the enemy wizard from casting any of his own spells while also doing damage to him. My problem with this is twofold, first, the AI was not ready for this mechanic, so it could be exploited by the player, and essentilly remove the challenge from facing certain high level foes, and second, it just seemed cheap and unrealistic. Wizards, according to lore, study for long periods of time, hoping to learn the secrets of the universe and powerful spells to boot, so it seems wrong that such powerful incantations can be simply countered by a level 1 spell that any mage school flunky would probably posess. Maybe some people wont see this as a big deal, but for me, personally, it kinda ruined the feeling of strategy and proper spellcasting somewhat in Baldur's Gate. So because of that, I really hope whatever spell casting system Project Eternity ends up adopting will not have this kind of issue. The second suggestion has to do with adding anti-cliche aspects to the game. I've beaten Planescape: Torment several times and it's also one of my all time favorites, and that game is amazing when it comes to reversing cliches in the RPG genre. However, I feel like it took it a bit too far, settling for anti-cliche elements for the sake of being anti-cliche, as opposed to for the sake of enhancing gameplay. For example, things like not being able to wear armor or wield swords did not really add anything to the gameplay or enjoyment in my opinion, but made outfitting/building up your character less fun. I am not saying the Nameless One should've been strutting around in shiny polished steel, given his background, but dull, heavily worn armor would not have changed the atmosphere for the worse, once again in my humble opinion. So given that, I hope for Project Eternity, anti-cliche aspects will be implemented in areas where they add to the quality of the game, and not just to be hip. The reason I thought of this was actually because I read one of the recent updates where the developers mentioned that guns will penetrate mages' armor spells, and thus most mages might want to choose to wear traditional armor. Of course, I don't know the rationale behind this design decision, but it seems like this might be one of those anti-cliche moments, where in this game, mages will sport full plate perhaps instead of the traditional cliche robes, and be vulnerable to firearms. But to me, the question is, will this actually enhance gameplay or hurt it? Personally, I think playing a mage character who dresses differently from a warrior is much cooler, as is being able to face your foes purely on the strength of your arcane knowledge, rather than physical barriers. Other people might disagree of course, but I hope the devs will make decisions based on coolness/fun rather than being hip/original for its own sake. Anyway, thanks for reading my ramblings, and good luck with what sounds like it could be a really awesome game!