IndiraLightfoot

Indeed, Ieo! Add that to my disclaimer.

This is not a wishlist, this is a list of ten aspects to a new CRPG by my favourite game developer that I want to see fulfilled, and I'm sure they want it too. There is no particular order of importance to the points listed: 1) An open world with freedom to explore almost every nook and cranny. Linearity or level-locked areas is not a valid alternative - make me regret going to certain places instead 2) Make the initial character creation process an intricate joy. I love rolling up characters. I don't mind if it takes hours. Adjusting our pc's appearance matters little, but assigning attributes and skills, as well as choosing class and background traits do. They key is plentiful of choices and scales to slide 3) Give me encounters that are challenging, and at times, really tough. This applies regardless of how the encounter is resolved: combat, stealth or diplomacy 4) Update stealth so that it is a valid and interesting way to resolve many situations and encounters in a party-based CRPG. This has almost never been done, so there is room for some effort here 5) Spawn forth enemies that are slightly different even if it's the same category: Bandits, trolls or shadows can be randomized to quite an extent: size, abilities, equipment, colour, speed, background, motives, etc 6) Don't allow for player characters to get good at almost everything and to join almost every faction. A game like Skyrim felt very disappointing because of it. Encourage true replayability 7) Surprises, easter eggs, hidden quests, whatever you call it - it should almost as important as all of the main plots and quests. I'm addicted to poking around everywhere and need some wierd rewards for doing so 8 ) Character progress should be interesting every level, so keep the choices and skill branches coming. One drawback of D&D systems is that some levels were just intermediate checkpoints. 3.5 did it best, but it can be even better. As for the possibility of respecing my character, I would sternly say nay 9) Vary the tempo of the game, especially as far as encounters go, including difficulty. I don't want a see a stream of critters steamrolling me constantly, nor do I like a steady pattern of a few baddies per map 10) Try to keep fedex quests to a minimum. I'd rather have such quests removed and find rare stuff just by exploring the world. Good quests are braided into the dialogues of NPCs and the events of the world What are your ten commandments, I mean, almost demands, that you think need to be achieved? In this topic, the abbreviation "tl-dr" is not allowed Disclaimer: This is no "do this or I'll no longer support PE"-rant. It is just things that I care about and want to see realized.

My take is that getting rid of tough curses should be quests in themselves, coz TRX850 is of course right. The great majority of players would get annoyed. JFSOCC: That's a milder kind of curse, cursed items with strange capacities for most players, but a blessing to a few. I like it!

I'm an Indian eremit guru without a thread on me body and who eats me own poo-poo, can I please have the option to have a party that do not have belongings at all, including clothing? Also, I want holy effects from rare excrements. As a coprophagist, I prefer the finest lark droppings simmered in water buffalo dung.

Curses in CRPGs have been watered down as of late. You just chug some potion and then its over. That won't do. Curses should last for a lifetime and you need to get rid of it in some very logical, but horrific way. Like pouring lye on the corpse of the curser. Stephen King, I'm looking at you. The same goes for poison. I think there's room for extremely strong potions that more or less kill you on the spot, or things that paralyze badly. I know there will be lots of reloads, but it certainly would enhance the RPG of it all. Imagine if Frodo did not get stung by Shelob by a potent poison. He just kept on going, hardly affected at all. That would have been boring, no?

TRX850: Yea, see my post further up, about chain-critting...

What Rjshae said, so well-informed reflections in a blog would suffice nicely, I reckon.

How about some perk granting you chain-critting, where one crit leads to another based on some condition? Sort of a "crit cleave".

PrimeJunta: ubercute cat! As a proud cat owner myself I see that you have good taste in cats... Helm: I laughed out loud when I read "don't tell him you don't like combat xp or he'll hate you forever"! EDIT: Helm: "Don't tell him you don't like easy stealth xp, else a cruel fate of fur and shredding claws awaits"

JFSOCC: An interesting compromise. I do like it to some extent, at least if it is a simple system. But even simple can suck big time. Diablo 3's repair system comes to mind, it was but a tax that Blizzard could regulate their economy with. So weird.

I completely missed it, problably because Commandos didn't ring a bell for me! Great ideas there. Marry them with some of the ideas here and it will surely juice up PE's stealth system etc. But Commando on C64 I remember, pretty fun back then.

Ah, those were the days! Then we have something in common in our PnP background, and it sure does explain why kill xp is no necessity at all for me. Games heavily built on hack-n-slash and getting kill xp is arcade for me. I remember Gauntlet fondly, but it is far from a CRPG. On the opposite end of the arcade spectrum you had the cinematic Dragon's Lair, and still today I'm no cutscene freak either.

Hmm, so, say, if I still want to achieve a crit on some nasty ogre with a low-level party, perhaps I can use the party creatively to lower the defenses of said ogre. The rest of party distracts, tangles or blinds the big grunt while me tiny dwarf slashes one of his heels in what would normally be a 5 % chance of a normal hit, but with the help of some other party members, that window slid into the realm of crit possibility!

As long as control-loss effects are in I'm a happy camper! Thanks for letting us know, Josh! As for Accuracy and defenses being a slidable window, where an encounter with an overpowering foe would mean a lot of glancing blows and even a few misses, it sounds interesting. But my concern is that you cannot make a critical hit then, if I understand you correctly. If so, that would negate some of the adventure-feel of taking on tough opponents.

That is the best way to go, I think, as far as my experience as a game designer stretches (not that far, but still). Objective xp purely, and sometimes that happens to be part of quest xp trees (coz there will be a big web of them, trust me). PrimeJunta has some important points on objective xp, but if we take away the quest xp conundrum we have ourselves a winner, I reckon!

Nonek has a very valid point here, or rather two. I think a bit of wear and tear and repair to our armours and weapons is to be preferred, and yes please to less hauling and less unnecessary stuff. Both of these things I think Fallout New Vegas addressed pretty well. The repairing felt important and sometimes urgent, but it was still an easy system. Likewise with the DT-thing and ammo penetrating armour etc. All items should have some use or be some kind of currency or another. Yes folks, this means I wouldn't like to see a system where we get to pick everyhting we see on NPCs and enemies up. It would be inventory hell and quite boring. Better to hold our horses and use NWN2's design of hand-placed loot in reasonable amounts, it can be married a bit with FNV's more "you get to keep the dress"-style.

Great points, jivex5k! This is indeed a chance for OE to set thins right as far as stealth goes in a CRPG of this kind. And is almost a necessity, then , to make the system transparent and clearcut for the players. Osvir: Running awa, retreat, escaping, all that is great stuff and should be in! However, I wouldn't like a morale system. I want to decide whether I've had it or not in an encounter. Preferrably, I want to have that control of my party members as well. It would be so annoying if a few of them kept running away all the time. This, mind you, doesn't mean that I am against fear-effects and such for magical reasons or reasons of unmentionable horrors, hehe.

Not to mention creatures messing with our minds or getting into our dreams, there will be ciphers and souls after all.

If I have to choose I pick attack animations any day, coz those you'll see over and over, but hopefully want come to me too often, seasoned and all that I am...

Thanks for the link, Nonek! And what a lovely list of ideas! Some of them needs to be sharpened into simplified mechanics, obviously, but still escape and retreat is an option I've found wanting in most CRPGs. It was an old post, you've been around here longer than I. And encounters that make you quiver would certainly be wonderful. And imagine that you could try to sneak past some monsters that are far beyond your league just to get to some chest and snatch the coveted items inside. However, I think I read somewhere that some sort of general "you need to be a certain level to be here"-areas will be used, although I detest such things. I want a game that takes care of that the logical way - the hard way (Not like in Kingdoms of Amalur "You must be level 9-15 to enter this cave/area"). If you can survive the encounter, you die. And I always love the opportunity to try the impossible. I can spend a day in a CRPG just to try to bring down something "I shouldn't". I killed a deathclaw in FNV by adjusting tactics and movement in the terrain and a 9 mm machine gun in like an hour with numerous reloads, and still I loved it!

Amen...tep!

Thanks for the input, Helm: 1) Elaborate. It should be possible to ensure that encounters always need to be solved game-wise by the player (no fast-skipping here) 2) It is easier in such circumstances, but it could sure work in many cluttered environments as well 3) Sneaking per se should not give you xp, like in Skyrim - heh, you could get good at sneaking by sneaking by yourself up in some mountain, but successful sneaking, say, through a scene with bad guys, should. Depending on their preception skills, more or less 4) I reckon that should give you a bit extra xp, but more so because of the quest objective being achieved 5) No can afford to pure pacifist in PE. A sneaky monk in PE will get detected, it just is matter of time, and then he/she will have to fight or die.

Osvir: I've played Dishonored a lot, including the dlc. Stealth takes much more time. I very soon became a fast killing machine, but stealth (without metaknowledge, coz I did that the first go) was much more time-consuming, easy.

Hmm, you've got a point about in-combat sneaking as opposed to not detected yet, but still it would make sense to use the same triggered scene in the game. At the very least it should be very hard or even spell-dependent to stealth around unnoticed in the midst of battle if the battlefield is an open field in broad day light with full visibility. But in many cases there will be forests, shadows, out-of-line-of-sight zones because of various objects in the terrain, and then stealth and sneaking in-battle could work. As for the triggers: My point is that the game needs to measure whether you manage to sneak past the enemy, so I was very focussed on the mechanics of it: a trigger, party and enemies placed on starting points (waypoints), and then you are free to try and sneak passed them. It should be difficult, and at any time it could go haywire, so you get detected and then battle ensues. And yes please to people sneaking pass lots of encounters missing content, but sometimes it should be the other way round too. Hack-n-slashers could miss out on content too. An Jobby, I love your idea of getting overhear stuff and evesdropping. It could also be an opportunity to pickpocket npcs.

Reading the topic "Stealth and Combat" and several other topics, I realize there are many complaints about stealth being the easy way out or the MO of least effort when it comes to achieving xp whatever its shape. There are also complaints about stealth being weird or clunky with an entire party - it's only good for one pc or it doesn't belong in PE at all. All these complaints gave me an idea: What if sneaking and stealth was just as hard and time-consuming as combat? What if it drained you of stamina and other resources as well. And what if you could have a party of all sneakers passing by a group of enemies just like an encounter where you do battle with them? But this time its sneaking passed them undetected that counts. I propose a system like that in Dishonored, but for the isometric party-based PE. Perhaps mad, yep, but now I've said it! :D By pressing some sneak mode for each character in your party, you do get to try to stay undetected until you reach a certain point on the map where the encounter takes place or you simply manage to pass them in a certain area, which is calculated by the spawning algorithm with waypoints and all that determine where the enemies and the party start when the "battle scene" is triggered. Simply, your party and the enemy is always lined up in such a way that there is a decent distance and a number of critter/enemies that have to be passed undetected for it to be a success. For those of you unfamiliar with Dishonored's system, it is a system based on each enemy's sight/hearing/detection range. Sight, especially, is like a cone of light in the direction of where the enemy's eyes are looking. Inthe game there are skills that can make these detection "fields" visible to the player and they can be made to shrink, IIRC. Similarly, in PE, a pc can invest in skills that make you a better stealth character. So, say an entire party ninja monks in PE has to pass a gang of thugs in a forest to reach a forlorn crypt. Then the game can shift to that mode for each pc trying it, almost like infravision, nightvision etc in the old IE-games, but now its sneaking and stealth values that are determined in the encounter with colours or visibility (think of Company of Heroes 2, where the visibility /fog of war is much more flexible and realistic depending on where the object moves), that could be implemented in PE's encounters. Most likely, you'll need to use pause or at least the slomo mode Josh mentioned to try to do a good sneaking for an entire party of silent monks. But if you have only one pc and there is just one big dumb troll, the sneaking can be done in real time. So during the encounter the enemies move and look in different questions and you as a player as to navigate passed them silently and slowly, or quickly and unnoticed (various ways should be available, even a teleport-like Blink perhaps?). Better yet, a nice bonus is that this could give us a valid retreat system for a party. Say that a battle goes really bad and you want to flee to save precious resources, stamina, whatever, then now you can. Just turn on this stealth mode and try to sneak out from the combat scene. What do you think, folks?