wormix

This thread was dead for over 2 weeks until someone replied to it. Let it rest in peace.

All I want is some kind of strategic element that persists between combat encounters. I can't speak for others, but I think this is one of the main things that attracts people to the Vancian system despite all its other flaws. Short cooldowns not only generally remove tactical thinking in a per-encounter situation, but have no strategic concerns with regards to managing and conserving your parties resources. Longer cooldowns can achieve this as deciding whether to use an ability now can affect how many uses you have of it later. But at this point it's not really a cooldown, as the amount of time left before you can use it should be longer than you'd wait around for. Resource systems can achieve this in some cases, but if there are already limited resources governing your skill use, cooldowns just seem like a sloppy way of balancing powerful abilities. However due to Sawyer stating that he doesn't want to punish the player "twice" for having trouble in an encounter, and then having some kind of penalty (extra fatigue, loss of spells, having to go to rest somewhere) I think the challenge of combat will only be per-encounter, and conserving resources between encounters will not be a concern. NB: Lack of sleep may have made me repeat myself somehow...

This is such a backwards way of thinking and isn't even an argument. We use certain words to convey our intent to others. If cooldowns covers everything it is a meaningless term. The game mechanic "cooldown" in the context of RPGs, is commonly understood to be any ability that has a cooldown period after you use it. i.e. a cooldown timer. If someone uses the word cooldown to describe a different type of mechanic, it's entirely their fault if they are misunderstood. I don't think there will be per-day abilities at all, as this runs into the same issue Sawyer is trying to avoid where you can find a safe spot to rest to refresh your 'per-day' spells. Also it doesn't make any sense for resting to not refresh your spell if it turns "walk back to town" into "go make a coffee".

There is a rest mechanic in the game

I don't get this mentality at all. Limited number of slots of inventory in the IE games was a flaw in the system, rather than a feature that should be kept around. A single arrow should not take up the same amount of inventory space as a suit of armour. That's what encumbrance is for. One of the cool things about arrows in some of the IE games were all the different effects you could find on different arrows, which was undermined by the fact that it took up so much of your inventory "space" to carry even a handful of arrows of a few types with you.

Level scaling implies that all that's changed is their level. If you ignore the bandits, become level 10 and you come back and the bandits are higher level and have razed the town, then that's OK. But that is definitely not what level scaling suggests.

The point is this doesn't even make sense.If there's a bandit camp outside a town, and I go there at level 20, suddenly it's an camp full of assassins? Or a camp full of bandits who could singlehandedly go and slay dragons or kill the entire towns populace? Level scaling only works if there is a limit to how the scaling works. Blanket scaling from 1 to infinity gives you Oblivion style level scaling, and even encounter scaling wouldn't save this. The only benefit "level-scaling" has over "encounter-scaling" is that it lets the developer be lazy. This should be something no one wants.

In a game where tactical and interesting combat is meant to be a feature, you don't turn around and say "we don't have time to develop this properly".I can accept scaling difficulty to your party to some degree, but the system needs to be fully realised and not just a band-aid fix to let parties go wherever they want, whenever they want. It is this concern that a lot of people (rightfully so) share based on the context of the level scaling comment. You might have confidence that things will turn out 'for the best', but not everyone shares this sentimentality, nor should they. This is a place to discuss the game, and voice their concerns about the game. Hopefully these concerns will be addressed so that we better know how things will work. People are not going to donate their own money to a game when this is the response to their concerns.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EricSchwarz/20120502/169672/Why_I_Hate_Cooldowns.php

Not to beat a dead horse but this is a good example of why the game needs to be designed (and balanced) with certain features on or off. You can't just disable quest markers in a game such as Oblivion or Fallout 3, because the game doesn't give you enough information in dialogue to complete the quests without these guides. In Fallout: New Vegas you could disable quest objective markers for the game, as there's enough information given to you in-game for (almost) every quest.

This really just highlights the problems with adding additional difficulty toggles onto a game. If the game isn't balanced around these additional modes, the difficulty added could range from non-existent to impossible. If you fight generally equal numbers, the additional tactical options are welcome. If you regularly fight hordes of gibberlings, probably not. I think the focus of PE combat difficulty would be getting through the combat, rather than getting through the combat without useless limbs, bleeding from every orifice and being brain dead.

I'd advise you to take the "boring" bit of the poll as a well-meaning misplaced joke... I'd assume that what the OP (and most people) think of as a barter system, is where vendors don't have infinite amounts of gold (or whatever the currency is) and that gold isn't accepted everywhere. For the places where it's not accepted, it still uses the same 'values' so trading still works. Each 'region' could even have its own value multipliers for different item categories reflecting their demand, although this is getting a bit complicated. There's something else to consider, which is whether the game tells you how much an item is worth. My personal belief is either the game should tell you outright (every adventurer knows the worth of a +2 sword or the sword of poking), or there should be a skill to estimate it (could be combined/paired with a trade/barter skill).

I'm not really sure what to make of your post because you don't actually address the point I'm making. I explained why it's wrong for any common item to not have weight from a gameplay perspective, because having to reiterate how it's wrong from a realism perspective is needlessly pointless. Instead you seem to prefer to make condescending comments, and nitpick the definitions of currency and greed. You fit the definition of a troll more than anyone else in this thread.

Nowehere did I state that weight == value. Infact I stated that the value to weight RATIO is important. Basically your weight capacity in the game is there for one of two things. One is your combat effectiveness. You can only carry a certain amount of weapons, potions, etc. And the other is carrying stuff you dont want to sell. In a game where you're picking up items to sell, these items are directly competing with gold for how much you can carry out of the dungeon. If you say that you should be able to carry as much gold as you want out, then why not every item? Having a game with weightless items is fine from a design standpoint, as long as it's one or the other. This is a very simplified scenario that explains why gold needs to have weight in games where a lot of items you pick up, you only pick up to sell at a later point. You can apply this to any dungeon, just condensed. It doesn't make any sense for gold to be 'free' while other items which are only valuable to the party because they can sell them in town, need to have their weight considered.There are many other types of games that use weightless money, like RE4 which has a very well designed inventory for the type of game it is. But in an RPG where it is assumed all items have weight, it never makes sense for gold to also be weightless (except for party-pooled gold, but when why is only gold poolable?) "IT WAS WORTH FAR FAR FAR MORE THAN ITS WEIGHT" You just said before that weight =/= money? Now it has a worth, I'm confused :psyduck:I said why is gold special compared with OTHER items that also only exist to be used as currency. In a barter game you could also take a magical sword you looted to buy what you need. Does this mean it should also be weightless so you can carry as much as you want? Before you mention the utility of the sword, almost every item useful to the player in an RPG with increasing item efficiency eventually becomes useless except to sell. In short: Yes. First of all, just because gold has weight doesn't mean you'll be literally swimming in it after each dungeon, and again is an argument against bad design rather than gold with weight. Second of all, if you prefer to go back to loot items on the ground of a dungeon already defeated, that's your choice. The game should not be designed so you can loot as many items you want to feed your horder compulsion. Items disappearing from previously cleared or visited dungeons is a very simple concept both from a design and realism view (bandits/locals/whatever loot the place while you're gone) Because every single person who is defending it comes up with a specific scenario (that makes zero sense to be in a game in the first place) in order to explain why they oppose it. It is weak because it's obvious that they're just arguing this scenario in order to defend it, rather than thinking about it properly. It can also be applied to any other item: items shouldn't have weight because it takes me 10 trips to sell all my loot in Skyrim. And yes I'm referencing an unknown, which shows that whether it works or not is to do with how well it's designed, which is key. There may or may not be flaws. Weightless gold on the other hand, is always flawed in this type of RPG. I was going to make a quick reply and then it turned much bigger and less focused. There are numerous errors and problems in my post that you could point out. However most of it would be to do with the type of game being referenced. Gold became weightless because it ended up being pooled between the party, and it became too difficult to incorporate it into the encumbrance system. In Action games, where you don't pick up items to sell, your inventory capacity is only for determining your combat capabilities, and gold haing weight doesn't make sense. But in any game where 'useless' items (such as magical +3 swords when your entire party is using +5's) are assumed to have weight for whatever reason, handwaving weightless gold doesn't fix any design issues, it just creates more ones. As for being called a troll, trolls are the new nazis I guess.

Of course it should, and no matter the difficulty (there is a good reason for this). Whatever the base currency, this will be the measuring stick for evaluating which items are worth holding onto for the purposes of selling. If the interface tells you how much an item weighs, and its estimated value, it should tell you the value per weight. (Almost) Nothing in your inventory should have an infinite value:weight ratio. If anyone ever played Fallout 3 and picked up every pencil (and bullet for that matter) you ever saw, you should know why. With weightless gold, concepts like an item being worth its weight in gold become meaningless. Imagine a situation where you defeat a dragon. (or some other being that has hoarded varieties of wealth) You can only take with you what you can carry, and if you return later the remainder has been looted by others. If gold has no weight, then you are now so rich you never have to worry about picking up another item to sell again. Yet if gold does have weight, the situation is not so different from other games where you have to decide between which items to leave behind when you reach your carry limit. So why is gold so special? There's no logical reason except people found it "inconvenient" to have to make a decision to do with leaving behind "precious loot". This situation also explains why weightless gold being a toggle doesn't work very well, as the game needs to be designed around gold being weightless, and making it have a weight just penalises you instead of fixing what weightless gold breaks in the first place. For everyone who is complaining about having to go back and forth to pick up all the gold. You already "have" to do that with normal items. (Hint: you really don't, the first step is admitting you have a problem) What if the items were gone if you went back to town and returned? This would fix the issue entirely, but I seriously doubt many would prefer that. And for those who really want to keep everything, that's what bags of holding or equivalent were created for. The other complaint I see is people assuming they'd have to go "back and forth" to gather enough gold to buy expensive items, which is just coming up with weak excuses to defend weightless gold. Nowhere has anyone stated that items would be worth more than you could carry, and indeed it would be ridiculous if you encountered items like this regularly, not to mention all items having weight is meant to be meaningful while adventuring, not shopping. That is entirely dependent upon the relative value between the currency and item pricing. Which brings me to the last point. All of this allows for different types of currencies in different worlds. Some worlds or regions might have more valuable money per weight, while others would have heavier currency making gems and enchanted items more valuable to people to hold onto. Removing weight from gold (or any item encountered regularly) not only impairs design (see above) but removes a fundamental part of the world building, no matter how simple it is. Having said all this, I think it's moot as JE Sawyer has said in the past he is not fond of currency having weight, so I would bet on it being weightless in this game.