IndiraLightfoot

Heh! I admit it would be a bit crazy. However, I am chuffed to bits over ToN's ambitious xp system attempt, and I do feel both versions we've been "shown" for PoE are lacking: quest only xp and quest+subquest+bestiary+lock/trap. Also, the divide in the comminuty, although false, has been going something like this: Those for kill xp and the system in BG are supposedly degenerative, xp-hungry non-RPG munchkins, and those for quest xp/subquest are true RPG:ers with pure playing at their finger tips. So, why not try something that goes beyond such fallacies?

I just realised that you can customize your own faction in Endless Legend! Just click Add faction, and then you get to start making your own based on one of the graphical templates via a point-buy system. It's very fun and intuitive. Thank you, Amplitude, for that!

30 min gameplay, no commentary. At the start, you get to see how you pick your party with those awesome cards, and then how you set a Landmark, etc.

You may call me Exaggeration Man. Indeed! This T:ToN-system is a far less drastic step from the xp system in PoE BB than good old xp tables and kill xp, skill xp, crafting xp, quest xp - xp for most stuff. This is why I reckon it may be a worth a discussion or two. In fact, it's not too hard to implement either, especially not in several months.

Samsonetta?

Having party-xp (Discovery points) and individual xp separated is pretty cool. I have run D&D campaigns in that vein. It could work here. The problem is that Josh & Co aren't good with what we have now: quest and subquest xp. In fact, they plan to change it pretty radically, with discovery xp, bestiary xp and skill-use xp, so, given the big postponing, this is indeed the time to discuss what such changes could be. It would be really nice if it emphasised the RPG bit of it all much more than opening a lock or just passing a trigger in a choke point grove.

This is more of hypothetical exercise, as well as a source of inspiration. What we do know is that they are indeed changing their xp system, especially now with all these extra months a lot can be changed and done, and that they're adding in some kind of discovery xp is more or less confirmed at that. It's always nice to think a bit outside the box, especially when you are about to overhaul something which have been so hotly debated. Instead of adding in trap and lock xp, which almost nobody wants, Josh & Co has a chance to insert a much more RPG-friendly system.

Well, hold on to your hats, because this is a pretty radical xp system, and it's nothing like traditional IE games or D&D. From the latest K update for T:ToN : "It's not a strictly traditional advancement system. First, as we've often said, you get XP when you solve problems, complete quests, and make discoveries—not for individual kills. Second, XP is spent, not accumulated – like cyphers, XP are a resource not intended for hoarding. Most of the time, you'll have less than 4 XP, because that's how much most character advancement steps cost. Third, you can also spend XP on short-term benefits—on things other than character advancement. That last one raises a couple of obvious questions. Why would you spend XP on short-term benefits when you can give your characters lasting benefits like new abilities (or flipped around: what happens if you spend all your XP on short-term benefits and get to the final confrontation with a 1st-Tier character)? Also, if the game has enough XP such that players can spend some on short-term benefits and max their Tier by the end, what's to stop them from spending all their XP on advancement up front, basically maxing out their Tier halfway through the game? How could we balance the game like that without scaling? Our answer to these questions is what we are, in Torment, calling Discovery Points (DP). Throughout the game, you will gain both XP (per character) and DP (for the party). Experience Points are gained primarily by accomplishing critical path tasks: progressing quests and solving Crises and other major encounters. Each character gains their own XP individually, though usually if the party completes a Crisis or a quest, all party members will gain the XP. (SIDEBAR: Sometimes you can leave a Companion behind and pick them up again later in the game. In these cases, they will gain their own XP outside of your influence (they don't just sit around waiting for you, after all). So if you pick them up again, you will find them close to your level.) Each character spends their own XP on character advancement steps, each of which cost 4 XP. These advancement steps include: 1) Increased Stat Pool 2) Increased Stat Edge 3) Increased Maximum Effort Level 4) Additional Skill Training 5) Improved paincasting ability (Last Castoff only) 6) Additional Class Abilities (beyond what you get for your Tier) 7) Reduced Armor Penalties Every four advancement steps, the character will advance to the next Tier. The first five can only be advanced once per Tier, and #5-7 are really optional steps (the Last Castoff's paincasting ability will be improved in other ways in the course of the game). Typical character advancement might look like this: (gain 4 XP) add a new Skill, (gain 4 XP) increase Might Edge, (gain 4 XP) increase Maximum Effort Level, (gain 4 XP) distribute 6 new Stat Pool points. Then as soon as the fourth one is done, that character advances to the next Tier—they gain new abilities from their Focus and choose new abilities and Skills from their Type (glaive, jack, or nano). They can also then use XP to purchase any of the advancement steps again toward the next Tier. We're planning on balancing the game out to 6th Tier (the maximum Tier in the Corebook), though completionists may still be able to purchase certain advancement steps beyond that if they collect enough XP. Discovery Points are primarily gained through (wait for it) discovery: figure out how to communicate with an ancient (and alien) intelligence, access a memory abandoned by the Changing God in your brain, or decipher the tale told by an ancient set of moving cave drawings. DP can also be gained by accepting Intrusions. These are opportunities to make an easy encounter more interesting, rewarding the player for dealing with an added complication. For example, say you're taking on the Sorrow directly (it's not a good idea, but let's say that you are). You discover it's weak against fire damage and, with the help of a flamethrowing artifact you found, are actually doing pretty well against it. Then an Intrusion occurs. The Sorrow begins to shifts its own molecular make-up so that it's weak against something else but fire barely hurts it. This Intrusion won't always happen: most Intrusions will only trigger when an encounter is already proving easy for you, and many of them have additional conditionals that must be met. Now that this one has triggered, you have a choice: you can spend 1 DP to stop the Intrusion (how that works out narratively depends on each Intrusion, for example maybe you strike a lucky blow, doing little or no damage, but disorienting the Sorrow long enough that it can't finish the shift), or you can let it happen to gain 2 DP. DP is gained and used by the whole party, and it is spent on short-term benefits. We haven't finalized what all those benefits will be, but some examples might include: • Refusing an Intrusion • Making a recovery roll without needing to rest • Gaining an extra level of Effort on a task for free • Taking extra movement during a Crisis • Performing an extra action during a Crisis • Retrying a failed action during a Crisis • Crafting special items that require a crafting cost The goal here is to maintain the mechanics that make Numenera fun, to keep Torment balanced (so we can estimate approximately what power level characters will be in a given Zone), all while doling out frequent and exciting rewards." What do you think? Provided that all encounters in PoE were treated as special encounters, this could be a drastic solution, perhaps, a slim chance?

Sensuki: The camera angle in PoE is indeed a problem. Compared to BG, it makes it hard to view all the units strategically. At its worst, PoE is reminiscent of a side-scroller game. Hiro: Very informative post. Aside, from the screen space issues, having played all the three games - BG1, BG:EE and PoE - I can actually conclude that BG:EE is the winner when it comes to useful UI and best use of screen space and zoom.

Planet of the Apes, Bladerunner... A pretty decent trilogy, of which I recently read the first two: Justin Cronin's The Passage and The Twelve.

Heh! I brought myself to finish Act 2, and haven't touched it since. Perhaps I will, when I'm out of good games to play.

Geez!! I have a computer that's like three months old, and it was pretty decent in all respects when I bought it, and still it doesn't fulfil every criterion in that Recommended spec list (nearly, though). What's more, well, my source of HD space required that I posted earlier was off with 10 GB!

Hiro: Just to make clear that I understood you correctly - Have Sensuki confirmed that the maps are like elongated rectangles, with choke points all over? If so, RIP BG1-CRPG-area-design spilling over into PoE...

Darn! That sounds really fun. I knew this would happen. My new game-account, as it were, has been overdrawn, so I can't get Styx until laterz. I had a feeling it would be good, but this actually sounds like it's much more Thief than Thief was this spring.

Yep! The last patch was an improvement (Sensuki won't agree, though ) for that map. Personally, I'd still remove one or two encounters more. Those shambling hulks feels very out of place, for instance.

Cubiq: You recall correctly. You could stumble upon lost children, fruit foragers, mad trios, and sculptors head over heels in love, and so forth.

"And so sayeth the law of the jungle!" *Bam!* *Purrrr*

This isn't exactly a new subject as much as it is a concern that needs to be discussed more thoroughly. Disregarding the obvious: the BB build is bogus - it has been set up for us to test the game and it most likely won't reflect the real thing - I still have that nagging feeling that it does reflect encounter density and area sizes pretty accurately. Our tastes on this matter vary, still here are my preferences: I really enjoyed BG1's rather empty approach. Large area maps, with just a few random encounters for each of them. I like to seep in the mood and atmosphere, and then stumble upon an encounter here and there. The contrast of fighting and combat gets starker this way. I don't want an ARPG D3 endless onslaught hell situ. In the PoE BB, you have maps that are about one fourth of BG1's outdoor maps in size, but they include at least twice as many encounters. I've been watching a few streams of DA:I gameplay outdoors, and they are pretty big with encounters reasonably spread out as well - no mean feat for such an AAA-game. Another 3D-CRPG, Kingdoms of Amalur, had too little space in between encounters, for instance. I'd say this is true for WL2 as well. The landscapes are desolate, but sometimes there are almost too much of enemies and skill stuff to do in the areas. The best areas of NWN2 MotB had this kind of pacing just right, IMHO. Ideally, if PoE's outdoor maps won't get any bigger than those we have in the BB, I'd like to have 3-5 encounters on them. However, these should make sense given their context and the story threads of the game, and above all, they ought to be more challenging and varied - not just filler, filler, filler, and then a sub-boss. If this would indeed come true, we could argue that every encounter is a special encounter, and in that sense worthy of some special encounter xp as well - via sneaking by it, talking them into submission, killing them, whatever. Which are your thoughts on this? They have bought themselves a few extra months. Could this be an area in which they can improve the game in this time?

Undecaf: It's not too far-off, and that goes for both combat and its over-the-top-effects and the colourful world. Obviously, the graphics are overall a lot better. I very much hope that the gameplay is very much better, though.

Well, what did you expect? For all their "we will listen to our fans and mend our ways" rhetoric, BioWare is still a EA-owned company and there's only one authority they will listen to. Co-op sells your game and customizable attributes don't --> co-op is in, complex attribute system is out. Look through the hype wall and don't let your judgment be clouded by marketing sweet talk. Inquisition may end up being a good game but anyone who expects to get another Origins is on the way to a sore disappointment. Just a heads-up: All those opinions are quotations from a Reddit session that I just edited in. It's not my opinion.

Labadal's advice seems sound enough: Think of it as a party-based 3D ARPG and you won't be disappointed. Monte Carlo: I know. All your scepticism recoils the more you watch this colourful open-world RPG explosion. If anything, I think I can say with some confidence that it will deliver hours and hours of unadulterated fun.

Mike Laidlaw: No, assigning stats is not part of level up. They grow as you level, buy talents, and, notably, equip gear. Some say: More organic way of doing things, perhaps introduced to eliminate the problems of 'you need x strength to equip this armor', given they're trying to free up customisation between characters and classes. It gives you more meaningful choices and takes away some of the treadmill aspect of RPGs of this style. Although, oddly, since they're doing encounters with preset persistent difficulty, the treadmill isn't nearly as much of a problem as it would be in a game with scaled encounters. Others are more upset: This irks me. I like to customize my character my way. My first DAO insanity no injury run was with a warrior archer. Warriors now can't hold two weapons or bows. Don't fool me again bioware, this better be fantastic. It's too bad but there isn't really any point to having control over the attributes now anyway. Even blood magic is gone so there's no reason to stray from the defaults. I understand why they are boiling down choices, I just hope it pays off. The question that this poses (and answers) is really: were you actually customizing your character, or were you being given the illusion of choice? This change doesn't really have anything to do with the questions of whether or not Warriors can use Bows or Dual Wield, it's about how DA2 framed stat choices. Moving from DA:O to DA2 meant that, for example, Warriors build needed to prioritize Strength and Constitution in very particular amounts, with a very small amount of Willpower depending on how ability focused you were. Dexterity, Magic, and Cunning were worthless to them, there was little to no point at all in investing in those stats. Mages and Rogues had similar issues, yes, you could invest in the various non-main stats, but they literally did nothing at all for you given the consequences of focusing character builds, armor, and abilities on particular stats. Leaving that in the game no longer really made any sense, it was a waste of time to not just follow a natural progression of stat values for each character and refocus the decision making on each ability investment you make with a lot more varied options to chose from. This doesn't really reduce the number of character design choices you make, relative to DA2 at least. In Dragon Age Origins, you were customizing your character. You could actually play against type in that game. I played a rogue who wore heavy armor and dual wielded two full sized long swords on the front lines of combat once, just because having control over my stat allocation allowed me to break away from the light armored dagger/bow user the class is typically meant to be played as with sufficient investment. In DA2, you were stuck along the rails because you were limited to your weapon selection, and other stats were useless for your abilities. Some other opinions on it: That does explain why talents give attributes, that confused me a bit. That is just lazy design in my opinion. What can make passives skills worse? Boring passive skills. +5 Strength from a level up ? That's a gratifying experience right there... That may be okay for games where the level cap is much, much higher. You'd equip armor that has the stats you prefer. This is meant to compliment the crafting system, I suspect, where you can make armor that isn't class or stat restricted, unlike armor you find in the world at large. I think there's also passives that permanently increase attributes, though it's up in the air how versatile they'll be based on class (like if mages get a passive for Strength alongside the standard Will and Magic). Great change, if you screwed up in previous games and didn't allocate enough points in one or two important stats depending om your class/spec, you were pretty much ****ed for entire game. This system is much more flexibile and it encourages preparation in camp and swapping out different gear for specific encounters. I think they're drawing a little too heavily from Diablo 3 for this game. 8 ability loadout limit (Diablo 3 had a 6 ability loadout). And now you can't customize your attributes with level ups, your main attribute is just raised automatically; the only way to customize attributes is through items or passive abilities. Yeah, Diablo 3 did that too. I can see why they're doing it: to accommodate 4 player co-op dungeon crawler gameplay. Doesn't that leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth, or is it just me? And don't pretend this isn't the reason. I'm the biggest Bioware fanboy there is, but let's use some common sense and objective deduction here.

Yet another vid find! This time the guy who's playing is much more CRPG savvy too. I also like how he keeps his main character in view (probably via toggle, so the rest of the party are just hidden, until he turns and faces them, or ask them to do a task - very neat! It's obviously spoiler-warning on it all. You get to see the inventory, you get to see a character levelling, you get to see the cloth map being used, you get to see how to find hidden items, bash down walls, and much, much more. It's colourful, even with sunflowers blowing in the wind, but it kind of grows on you. Actually, it reminds me of some areas in Bioshock: Infinite and Dishonored: Brigmore Witches in so far as there are some great graphics, and also cool indoor areas of rich people in a period setting - posh furniture, mirrors, wallpapers, decorations, but also, stuff's in decay somehow. Right now, this came can't come soon enough. P.S. It seems hard to not play at least a rogue as a pretty jump-happy fella, but this player never (hardly ever?) used back-flipping, and he did very well!

Felthar: I'm old enough to be your father, and then I personally know a few forums members here, who actually could be my father, so you're young and squeaky clean, lad.

I found a new vid, a much funnier one! The guy is clueless - he's probably never played a CRPG, but here you get to see the tactical view, and that other characters can backflip too. Also, yes walking is in!! And to top it off, poor Varric will be crushed by a Dragon.