Falkon Swiftblade

Good job guys, to clarify I'm only taking out killing. Though combat likely would change to some degree.

We've probably all played the old IE games at some point, and it's pretty much a gimmie in any D&D type of game there's going to be many a smashing of toes and boots to the faces of baddies everywhere. So here's the design challenge I'm creating. It's the entire PoE game experience, only the main game play mechanic that would change is death and killing is no longer a system in the game. The question is how would you play? How would that affect your party make up, and what would you do? Feel free to invent your entire scenario or game play idea. You can choose one system or game play mechanic to replace killing with from another game, or choose to use the info already known about PoE or similar IE games to describe your play through in this alternative reality game. For extra credit what fictitious character outside of the fantasy genre would you bring into the PoE universe and what would they do or how would they help your party?

First I'm glad this game has animal companions for the ranger class. I would have liked the opportunity to have some way of making the animal more of a story driven thing so one of the main objectives in the rangers arc is finding his animal companion. Partly because of what was said that the animal already seems to do what the party should already be doing, but if you plan on having many enemy's on screen at once, I could see that extra crowd control as vital. I'd like it if he had to earn the right to have a cooler pet, even a rare pet. Possibly there would be a skill that allows the Ranger to develop animal bonding the more he's around them for a chance to entrap a special pet type. Will we gain more than one pet over the course of the game? How will the pet change over the course of the game and can it use upgrades like collars? It seems wonky to me that the pet shares your health and stamina as you level up. I'm guessing the current plan is the more you level up the pets damage mitigation increases a wee bit? Just a question regarding battles, on average what is the current plan for how long a battle should last for a single person vs a full party? Cool art, looks wonderful, but the scale seems off based upon the trees, the stairs and the well wall seems like a tiny hole with really obnoxious stairs, and arches seem only barely wide enough to fit one person through tightly. However maybe this is way zoomed out. Looks pretty though. I'd like to know more about the chanter and priest next time.

that's cool stuff Jumble, reminds me of an artist I saw who created an entire scene in 3d using one 256x256 texture map and he was creative with how he stored it on there. Here's the story http://www.unrealengine.com/showcase/udk/amazing_one_texture_environment/

Has there been anything mentioned how baddies will be targeted in combat? I remember in the old games you had to click on the baddies to attack them. I find myself split down the middle on that game mechanic because part of me feels like there should really be some type of soft locking auto targeting in the game, and part of me thinks it's an acceptable challenge to chase the baddies on screen with my mouse. However, the more I think about it I find myself hoping there's at least a soft lock targeting of creatures, especially for my ranger I'll likely roll. It's a royal pain trying to target creatures that run all over the screen while you try to click on them and fire, especially if ammo is limited and I end up wasting ammo trying to hit my targets. I really hope it's in also because I know there's several difficulty modes, and that's gonna be stressful trying to manage without it. Similarly, I hope there's a way to adjust the weight of the fights, so if we choose we can make more of the baddies come in all at once, or use their strongest attacks as they're available.

Not to beat a dead horse, but it's funny how that game telephone works. The guy who starts the message quickly get's his message twisted until when it gets back to him the message has completely changed. Josh never said those animations were pre alpha. That's what the internet does. His exact quote was, "Yeah, all of the character animations are alpha and will be receiving more polish later in development." Not the same thing at all. An Alpha pass means it's pretty much done and in place. It may get tweaked a little bit later on, but a pre alpha would be things that are still going through many iterations and could really change from the final pass. Once Beta pass is in, it's just a matter of balancing behind the scenes. They've recently stated they've almost completed all the primary animations and asset creation. So more or less what ya see is what ya get. I still would like at least 3-5x more animations and fx too, unless each battle is designed to last 1.5-3 seconds, then I guess it won't matter. I did have high hopes for a game with a lot of combat coming out 15 yrs later the quality of animations would be like 20x better than back then. I voiced my opinion already several times that they needed more help with the animation budget even from the very beginning. It's only one guy doing the whole game. Granted, with the latest Unity patch, his work flow should greatly increase though.

all I called into question regarding the stones when I spoke of it was why all 30 or whatever of them were falling apart in the same place? It seemed like mad overkill on the prop and they could have just used like 3 arches and made it interesting.

you know a skill I don't recall seeing being used as much any more is one that allows you to take possession of a creature and attack his peers. I liked riding the troll guy in Batman while he bashed the goons that were coming after me. I'm not sure where that would fit in the attributes, but if there's room for that type of persuasion, that would be fun.

deleted double post

Hooray for a really interesting update! Good work Obsidian. 1) The Ancient Engwithan ruins near Twin Elms above looks really lovely, I especially like that the rocks show depth and look 3d, and the environmental scenery is beautiful. I hope the final version may include blown leaves going across the screen. A few things that kinda seem jarring to me though that I can't put my finger on that may just be a specific art style you're going for, but I feel a sense of dissonance when I look at it. For example I think it may just be the texture pattern used in the art, the big rocks look legit, the small rocks seem a little too samey. I think the tile pattern is too similar to be repeated so close to each other. Also why are there so many arches broken, in almost the same spot? That's just weird. It looks cool kinda, but functionally they seem arbitrarily placed to fill up space. Maybe have a meeting with your team and ask them why does x need 30 broken arches in the same place? Could it just be 3? That could be the designer in me asking, I just don't see that occurring in nature around me. 2) The character update was a great improvement from older character models we saw in engine. This one almost has enough detail to feel unique from another beasty next to her. I'm satisfied with that level of polish for an alpha pass. Josh mentioned they're probably going to make a shader to change her to seem more ghostly, is it a lot of work to make a command that randomly tweaks creatures skin tone in a specific hue or saturation level by a tiny amount? I'm just curious because I hate how games have been out for like 50 years and any time there's more than one baddy of the same type they have to look the same, unless it's a low level, mid and high level fighting together who are black, red, and green. Could we possibly have random hues and color shifts of the blacks, reds, and greens just to give the creatures some personality or diversity? 3) The UI update was a nice surprise. I really love the skin of the ui, I love creating ui skins and all that kinda stuff. One suggestion is to allow for tool tips when we hover to help in usability, or even simplify it more by using much of the same info by hovering over related content elsewhere. One way could be highlighting a chest piece that shows the stat's but changes the # value, like green/blue for better and grey/red for worse. It's nice to have that kind of level of info, but what is the pace of the game going to be like? Is this meant to be a min/max game? It's wonderful to have that option, but it appears that players have the option of choosing to play a wide spectrum of 6 play styles each, and I wonder if that level of micromanagement will remove our minds from the flow of the narrative and game play? It takes the focus off playing the game, and more in the role of playing cards or something. Maybe that's really appealing to people. You guys are the pro's. I'm not complaining though, just saying it's pretty, but there's just a mad amount of info, and I wonder do we really need to know it all, or could there be more done under the hood and have an option to turn it on in leu of messing with the combat flow. Also I'm a bit behind on how all the attributes work, thank you for explaining a few of them in this thread, but it was mentioned that Animation annotations were added to Unity. "We can now call sound effects based on specific frames of animation." Does that mean hypothetically, you can choose specific frames or animations to change now too? I thought it would always be really awesome if our attributes changed the way our animations worked. Intel may change the way we gesture when we talk for example or toss spells, dexterity would of course change the way we walk or dodge. If you had a really low dexterity, then you probably stumble a lot when you walk, or you seem very fluid and agile if it was high. Maybe other attributes would be a mixture of combat animations and social animations that influence the animations based upon the attributes we choose to increase. It would have to be a collaborative process. If that's too much, could you consider creating an alternative themed animation set that might be the same, just timed differently to emphasize maybe a more angry caster vs someone who doesn't know how to shoot a magic missile and it knocks her back a step every time? That's more relatable to how I envision someone starting out, vs a higher level character who has more control over their power. Just have fun with it!

I'll keep that in mind, I'm planning something similar to bring to kickstarter, but I was thinking more 1600's

I'm curious to know is the game going to be a beast to balance with all the additional modes? Typically in RPG's the one thing I despise is the redundancy of crappy junk drops, and a narrow loot table. With the addition of several difficulty scales I hope the loot drops are unique enough to warrant extended play throughs. I tried Heart of Fury Mode back in the day, but it was too hard, but I liked that it was available at least.

from my experience I usually see it post ~ 11:30pm ET on days where there's an update. The nice thing about these updates is they get more interesting each time as everything starts to come together! I hope it's not a tiny one since the last was a big one. It'd been a month, so hopefully its a goody!

If it's not already in the cards, I'd love it if there's a nice game editor included. I have always wanted to create a game like this, but just don't understand the under workings in a game like PoE, so if you guys could create a modular world generator that gave a lot of re-playability for the dungeons or wilderness that would be superb! I know recently there was an article expressing interest in creating an open world version of PoE too, & that's along the lines I'm asking about.

I was wondering what's the possibility we can have rolling hills or different terrain we can travel through in this $4m version of the game? It would be cool for strategic purposes to launch missles down on a group of nastys, or have a warrior jump down and cause an earthquake on the baddies for example. In fact, can you guys create some maps specifically so as we come to a hole in the ground we can jump down below? You could use it as a way to transition from map to map. What is the current plan for in game transitions by the way? I like how kingdoms of amalur used the fancy pants doors that were different each time. That was cool. I know a game like this probably won't need many loading screens, but I just wondered how they were being used so far.

I think it might be a fun mini game to find relics or "Cyphers" that are keys to unlock puzzles or secret doors, and you can use the mini game as a way to teach us the proper way to speak it. I'm glad to see your thought process and happy to have some interesting breadth and depth of the races in the world.

It's an interesting phrase to call something "epic." Look how they handled breaking up the Hobbit into 3 films, when you could probably read it in a weekend or less. I think you're probably asking them to make sure the stakes are appropriately balanced, but you can do that in a 2 hour game as much as you do for a one hundred hour game. Have ya ever watched the TV show 24? Jack Bower gets more done in one day than I do in a year! As long as they offer us plenty of opportunity's for advancement and balance the pacing with meaningful choices and consequences I think they can make it super mega epic if they wanted to and I'd be fine. One of the things I really hope for is a unique enough storyline, or enough twists that offer several play throughs worth of content regardless of the length or breadth of the game.

First the developers said specifically in the kickstarter they were creating a PC game. Next, I don't feel it's a negative thing to ask for console versions of the game. I think that's a really narrow minded PC elitist mindset that thinks pointing a mouse and punching 1,2,3,4, or a handful of letters on a keyboard in a game that isn't doing anything cutting edge in the technology department should need to be on PC only. On twitter I follow dozens of developers who make PC games who have tiny indie offices up to big studios and I'm consistently reading how easy it is to create their PC game in weeks to a couple of months now on the PS4 and Xbone. It wasn't possible to make those kinds of games on consoles 10 years ago. Now a days you absolutely can, and most consoles have the option of using keyboard and mouse now if that was really a necessity. It just is more difficult to play that way 10 feet from your TV screen than 12 inches on your monitor. "and the fact that console licenses are skyrocketing through the roof right now due to the next generation being released means it would not only over burden these developers that are acting alone with no publisher, but would also give the industry another example of the death of true WRPG's. " What are you talking about? The licenses this gen are way cheaper than they were last gen. Why do you think there's so many indie dev's creating games on the PS4 and why do you think Sony pushed indie development so hard this year? Those indies are the guys with the tiniest budgets, yet those are the most games we see out there right now... Also the time to have a playable game on PS4 from 0 to playable is 2-12 weeks now, not 9-12 months like it used to be. The game Warframe was on PC first, and it took them 3 months to bring it to the PS4 including enhancing it. That's pretty impressive. I have no problem playing this game on PC, and maybe even buying it again on console if it comes out for it. Some games i've bought 3 times because I've enjoyed it so much. I just can't see this game only being on PC and being anything special that the Xbone or PS4 can't do at least as good, and maybe even better than some PC's out there. It would also save the dev's a lot of time because on PC you have a thousand different audio and video cards, and other systems you have to account for when play testing. Not to mention Obsidian's record of releasing buggy and unfinished games aren't exactly a secret. On the consoles you can create one solid version and you're good to go. You know what's bonkers to me? Obsidian raised $4 million for this game, and 2 guys from Ironlore who made Titan Quest, which was also a low budget pc game that was basically mouse and click kinda similar to these games, are finishing up a spiritual successor of that game in the next couple of months with a very tiny staff of people that's being made for only $540k and it looks pretty awesome. After playing Titan Quest now from the recent steam sale my expectations are a little higher for what I hope to see in this game. Especially after seeing what they're making on only $540k with a smaller team of folks. Regardless though, it's a good time to be a gamer!

did you see the recent gameplay video they released?

I haven't finished reading all the posts in this thread yet, but I read in the big big update in one of the interviews they just finished creating the whole mega dungeon. So it's already completed. Saying that however and to answer the OP question, I would prefer a mixture of fighting and puzzle/riddles for the possibility of finding really nice lore related epic drops. Possibly extremely rare artifacts that can be used to combine with a weapon of my choice to add some kind of perk to it for example. I would like a lot of hidden doors, or a lot of things like cryptic messages you have to find stuff for to decipher it from the main game to know how to progress. Unless you just like trial and error until you make it through. One thing I would've liked to have in it was a combination of interior and exterior spaces. Also I want a few rooms I can just drop nuke types of attacks to do massive AOE damage.

I agree with the guys take in the video pretty much all the way through too. I surely hope "Mature" in this sense of PE is not gimmicky and excessive blood splatter gore fest and sexual innuendoes just to fill juvenile lustful desires. I'm hopeful for a more serious take and thoughtful game that utilizes game play mechanics, and vested story telling to help reinforce the narrative in a meaningful way. One of my favorite films was Shawshank Redemption, and the reason for that was the characters were flawed but believable men who had a believable & real character arc that they went through. They did some horrible things in life, but you liked them in spite of how dangerous they were. They showed us even if you are a bad mofo, there's still consequences for your actions. You actually got to see them mature and grow over the film. I hope PE can take a bit of the companions meta story and make it viable into the world, and create something that is more meaningful than just spamming attack buttons and magic missile over and over until we slay the dragon in the end. (Note I don't know that's the end, but standard fantasy trope #3 is every bad guy nemesis is an ancient dragon from the center of the earth.) I'm hoping whatever they do, they do it with some thoughtfulness. Shoot even the disciples of Jesus Christ he chose were some of the most hated people because of their race, jobs, or generally non qualified people for the job they were hired for, and yet they went on to do amazing things. That's the kind of mature game I'm hoping they attempt to create here. I still want to have fun, but it's nice to have a vested interest in the people in your story rather than mindless repetitive actions spamming mechanics over and over just to advance.

I'm missing my Green K too.

deleted

I must admit the party banter in the BG games was one of my favorite things, along with Irenicus. I would like to have a fair amount of choices of battle cry's and personality's though, and if it's volunteer based they could at the least make it easy for us to mod in some different personality's or banter for flavor. Or allow for an optional VO for the script once finalized. But at the same time, there's a few you-tubers out there who do playthrough's now and do their own voices which are fun to watch too.

I Desperately want any extra money to fill in any gaps of repetition. (Now having the choice to grind is something else altogether though.) Whether that's in the types of quests, or having the same swing or attack for everyone including monsters, or having the same music looping, etc. As much as I want a big world to explore, if it's the same stuff re-skinned all the way through just to fill space, I despise that & really want a game I can actually play through several times and get a different experience each time. I know they are doing a decent job systematically with some things, but I'm hoping for something a bit more organic feeling with animations, and game play mechanics.