Hormalakh

Stop trolling Infinitron. We all know you're trying to hype up the easily-hype-able. Tsk tsk. Or tut tut, if you prefer. I don't know which one you use in Israel.

I think that if there are no systemic money inputs (faucet) then there is no need for a systemic money output (sink). Since most monsters and loot are hand-placed, then there is only a limited (and known) amount of gold that can be gathered in the game. If you do intend on implementing systemic faucets in certain content then implement money sinks that are comparable within that same content. That way you know how the money flows in your game and too much money shouldn't be a problem. The problem lies in that most players assume that these cRPGs have hand-placed, limited loot in the game, so as you continue to play, your chances of victory continue to dwindle (less money, means less chance of buying what you need/want to win).

Rust monster destroys your Durgan steel weapon. (and a reload). Easy to fix that. Make your "rust" status based on random dice throw and do not show it taking effect until a game week later: after players have moved further on. Players will be unsure as to whether their weapons are "rusted" until after the fact unless they take it to a forge and check it. Or something to that effect. Take the ability of players to immediately reload away from them.

Just because they have decided to remove item durability as a systemic mechanic doesn't mean broken items and scripted-events won't happen. Perhaps certain monsters could apply this status to certain items. I wouldn't rule it out quite yet. All the best to you guys at Obsidian. I hope you are able to come up with mechanics that continue to excite us. Thanks again. I believe that having systemic bonuses for characters who invest in skills is a fantastic idea. I'm glad you're continuing to go this route.

Hi. I want to be clear: I don't have a philosophical issue with item durability as a mechanic - I just believe that its current iteration is poor design for the reasons mentioned above. Yes, it's still too early to tell what the big picture looks like and not enough information has been provided, but with the information provided, I have serious reservations about the mechanic. I mention the things that I do because I want to shine some light on possible stumbling blocks in the future. I have seen many similar so-called "tacked on" mechanics in games past and I want to make sure that these mechanics are robust elements of gameplay. I believe most people here want broadly similar things: however some of us take a cynical approach to mechanics while others take the optimistic "Obsidian can do no wrong" approach. This is where the philosophical juncture lies: some of us believe that Obsidian will always notice the flaws and fix them, while some of us have seen enough failed game design in our lifetimes to know that sometimes developers get stuck in the trees instead of looking at the forest. It happens when one is so intimately involved as developers are. Sometimes creative approaches are foregone because of the comfort of the past. Otherwise I believe you and I are on the same page. I don't disagree with your post. As it stands the mechanic is too insignificant to be much of a factor outside of higher-difficulty gameplay. There are no mitigating factors outside of crafting as a skill and no exacerbating factors either. It falls flat as a robust mechanic.

The issue is that players don't play that way. Yes, the usual hardcore player will set rules on himself to not go back to town to repair mid-dungeon, but most players will go back every 5-6 battles to repair and restore durability and come back: the very definition of degenerate gameplay. Players will undoubtedly bring several weapons with them and rarely use the most impressive weapon unless needed - and otherwise will use the weapons they find on enemies to fight future enemies. It doesn't play as a tactical challenge as it is currently described; it is only a nuisance and a money sink and nothing more. It is dishonest to portray it otherwise b/c it hasn't been sold to the players as anything more than a money-sink and an opportunity to make crafting more relevant to multiple party members.

I've already mentioned gold being a way to unlock quests/content (a la stronghold), but here are a few others: Gold as a character advancement mechanic a la Might and Magic's training costs. Each level costs more money to train. Gold as a party advancement mechanic. e.g. purchase bigger backpacks or mules to follow you so you have more of a "top of stash" or faster travel time. Gold for hiring adventurers Gold to sleep in inns and use forges, alchemy tables (perhaps certain "better" forges and labs give more per item, but cost money to "rent".) Gold for certain (not all, some can be found in dungeons) epic items. And then finally this one which comes with a disclaimer. For all of the above-mentioned items, these are mostly one-time costs with permanence in what they offer. You rarely lose the value of the item purchased. However, ... Gold as consumables for potions, arrows, item repairs (yes even this)... is different. These items are items that do not have permanence and thus are riskier investments. You purchase them because you believe that you might need them, but there are occasions where you can opt out by playing more tactically, etc. The main reason I think most people don't like the item durability as a consummable money sink is because there is no mitigation when it comes to it being a gold sink. You'll always lose the same amount of durability (outside of the craft skill) regardless of how you play your melee characters. I believe that if item degradation was proposed to us as a combat mechanic with several inputs (certain spells, talents, and even skills - like crafting) that can mitigate the degradation, less people would be opposed to it. Many people see it more as a time/money sink than a tactical challenge. And as it is proposed now, this is exactly true. Why make a constant money sink, when you can just "turn down the faucet" as someone aptly put it?

How is it not a non-combat skill? Crafting directly affects item durability. And item durability affects combat effectiveness. Thus crafting affects combat effectiveness.

After the initial shock and further thinking, I guess my two main issues with item durability are these: 1- I'm afraid of the inanity of repairing items. I don't find this to be particularly fun nor do I like spending time checking and rechecking my weapons after every battle to see whether I need to return to town to repair, rest, restock. Place a UI marker to help players quickly identify when they need to return to town and make it a quick and easy to do this. Don't make me waste 15 minutes every hour just to fix my stuff. If item durability is meant to play as a money sink, don't make it a time sink. 2- With character health, the way you use tactics can affect your costs. You can minimize your costs with potions and buffs, etc. However, regardless of how you use your armor and weapons, you'll always have to repair them and at the same rate every time. At least make durability have several inputs in which it can be affected. Crafting is one input. Place a few talents or abilities and a few spells that can positively and negatively affect this. And make item durability affect enemy items too.

Crafting was a non-combat skill. They said as much.

It's too difficult to tell how all the skills work together currently, but I don't like crafting and item durability to be so intertwined. Non-combat skills and combat skills are mixing: the opposite of what OEI said would happen. This needs a lot of thought and rework. It needs to NOT BE A CHORE.

Soon P:E will also have cleaning your stronghold as a skill too! It'll be great, vacuuming and dusting. Then in P:E2 you won't be able to tell the difference between SIMS:Dungeoneer and P:E.

The problem with this is that crafting is meant to be a non-combat skill. Honestly, I believe Obsidian is going against their design objective of keeping non-combat skills, non-combat. It certainly doesn't play that way with item durability.

And now for my thoughts on crafting and item durability. Firstly, I don't think that crafting and item durability are "bad" in and of themselves. The problem lies in that they tend to not be very fun aspects of the game and become more Skinner Type boxes and chores that players end up wasting a lot of time on. Item Durability: For example, I don't think most players find item durability fun, not because it poses a challenge but because they dread the hours of time they'll have to spend going back and forth between dungeon and town to repair all the items in their shop after every outing. I have heard a few people be fine with big spikes in damage to items (e.g. acid destroying armor, or single enemy special attacks - a la Might and Magic 4 diamond golems destroying weapons, or iron golems in Arcanum). They however don't like the slow wittling down of weapons and armor because it enforces a chore on players. I call these mechanics "Frustration type mechanics" because they aren't particularly fun or challenging, they just serve to frustrate the player. So I propose a few solutions: 1- Make durability a binary status (broken/damaged vs normal) instead of a granular status (durability). And then make only select enemies/spells/quests/etc affect it. e.g. If you players become unconscious 3 or 4 times then their armor becomes damaged (like Might and Magic did with death and armor). 2- Make repairs automated or extremely easy to do with a single button. For example, just have the ability for players to have a daily loss of coin/crafting items that goes into repairs (or upkeep or whatever you want to call it) instead of having players have to go through each item for each character and click on repair and then reequip the item, and then have the next item sent to the player, etc (a billion clicks just to keep questing). Crafting The biggest issue I have with this is that it is sort of becoming a skill that is required for all melee characters to have. The developers are making it a skill that players have to think twice about forgoing (because of the item durability) but then mixing it with a skill that unlocks content (item creation). The problem is that most people never had an issue with lockpick being a singular skill that only one character had to take, but now crafting is a skill everyone has to take because we want to make it a "choice ." I'll admit I don't know the whole pool of skills in this game and I think a big problem is that we don't have a clear understanding of how all of these skills work together, (probably what Tim Cain meant at the end of his post), so it's difficult to properly understand how everything works together. From what I understand right now I propose two different solutions: 1- Make "item maintenance" a separate skill that most characters would need to consider taking if they want to deal with item durability (a combat-based strategic skill). Make crafting a separate skill that unlocks content. Then make crafting usable in certain solutions for quests (e.g. craft a doll for the baby troll so he doesn't kill you). This would split skills into skills where a single character would suffice to have that expertise (like lockpick or language:Vailian) and skills where each character gets combat bonuses (like item maintenance or stealth). 2- Make sure all your skills have a possible use for each class and have several uses. Crafting does a billion different things, so stealth should be the same and everyone should take stealth or lose out on the benefits. Mechanics should benefit everyone. etc etc. Basically why is it ok to have one lockpicker but we need 5 crafters?

Having read a lot of the people's comments here, I'd have to agree with many of them: We like spending our coin on unlocking content, not on allowing us to continue the game without a disadvantage. Many of the examples given here are along the vein of what Baldur's Gate/2 did with the economy: it unlocked further quests and allowed players to further explore the world. Instead, what you are proposing here does not add anything to the player experience: it only punishes them. I know you have worked on IWD/IWD2 and its expansions, and you are looking at the criticism there, but you also need to look at the criticisms leveled against BG/2. Namely, crafting and economy was not an issue for many players. Look at what those games did right and build on that: don't try to make P:E an answer to your critics of IWD/2. Your solutions don't have to be binary either: put some unique items in stores and some unique items in dungeons. The adventurer's mart, the 20k to continue the main quest, etc are all things that players didn't particularly hate from BG/2. These things added content that rewarded players for hoarding wealth. At the same time, they weren't the only method to add content to the game. The games were varied enough that there was plenty of content to go around without having to only spend money. Perhaps one thing you can do is to make several large quests huge money sinks. Either players get the stronghold (new content) or they spend their money on sherpas that take them near Godhammer Citadel (new content) or they spend a majority of their money to travel (maybe by buying a map) the lower levels of Od Nua (new content). I have more to say on the whole topic of item durability and crafting as a skill, but I'll post this in a second post.

interesting...i can see this as a way to continue the use of lower level armor and weapons on "trash mobs" as the repair of them would be free. i'm not a big fan of crafting as it remidns me too much of WoW but I'm willing to give it a try. hopefully crafting will generally stay out of my way... Question: If one character in the party has a high crafting skill, will this reduce the durability losses for the whole party or just that particular individual? Q2: will enemies also have durabilities on weapons and armor? if so how are you going to avoid cheesing by players who wear cheap armor/weapons and wittle down the enemies weapon/armor? after you defeat the enemy will you get the armor at that previous durability? Q3: will durabilities affect costs of weapons/armor being sold? q4: will crafted items be resellable? q5: will you make sure that inns and bars have hearths that can only be used after you purchase a room for the evening? so that inns actually have a use in one of these games outside of the useless drinking? q6: will every in-game item be craftable? As in, will Battery armor be craftable? What about epic level items? Will they be craftable? will certain epic level items be ONLY-craftable and so only high-level crafters can get those items? finally: last question: You are taking notes from Arcanum and putting trash cans in the game where junk can be turned into amazing stuff right? Right.

Yay for a Tim Cain update.

The problem with this map and the other map was the scale. The scale of the map you linked is of a country side by the looks of it. the map of p:e was more of a country. I'd like to see old school maps of whole countries instead of a city. http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~28882~11202:Map-of-Central-Europe-comprising-Gr here's an example. it's 1800's (so later than 1600's) http://photos.foter.com/129/gutia-c-rrez-the-americas-1562_l.jpg america's map 1572. (you're right here but this one is really off scale) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/GoughMap_ca_1360.jpg/800px-GoughMap_ca_1360.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cartography

since this is the only post i know of on the OEI forums about the map, I thought I'd share my two cents on the map. This is mainly feedback for the devs and I know that it's WIP, hence why I'm mentioning it. 1- I think the icons used for the map are non-intuitive and actually hinder the understanding of the scale of the map. The huge icons make the map look smaller than it actually is. 2- The paths drawn on the map also do this map a disservice along the same vein. Those paths are too wide to be roads and again make the map look smaller than it actually is meant to be. 3- The color used in juxtaposition to Eir Glanfath make the rest of the Dyrwood look like it's a desert. Perhaps the color scheme could be slightly altered? 4- A legend in the final map would be very helpful.

We've talked about it, but for now we're going to see how the rest areas work on their own. Some people on the team believe that if we limit the use of the rest locations it will be excessively punitive.Knights of the Chalice generally allows players to re-use rest sites, but there's at least one area I remember that doesn't and I saw a lot of negative response to it. Personally, I do worry about the potential for player dissatisfaction either if resting removes all challenge or if restricted resting makes things too frustrating. In any case, it's something we're going to be looking at and thinking about more as we continue development. So, it looks like things are still up in the air. Assuming the game does end up supporting unlimited resting in rest areas, an alternative solution would be to respawn monsters in the dungeon every time the player rests. That would mean the player would have to think twice before clicking that Rest button, because clearing the dungeon again could turn out to be a big headache - not to mention he might need to rest again after doing it! Remember, we want resting to have consequences, but the solution has to be relatively cheap to implement, because in the end, this game is a story-driven RPG, not "Dungeon Simulator 2014". So that means complex scripted things like "the goblins fortify the dungeon and beef up their patrols while you rest" aren't a viable all-purpose solution. Thoughts? Late to the party... I've mentioned this before and I'll mention it again. Resting is an abstraction, so we will need it. The issue of it being too restrictive or it minimizing strategic concerns and removing all difficulty can be solved based on player difficulty settings. Resting should be limited use for normal to hard difficulties (increased difficulty, decreased number of rests, being slightly more forgiving for normal difficulty) and unlimited in easy mode for those players who find the difficulty of the limited rest resource in the game too frustrating. This should be the philosophy of resting. Everything else is just mechanical details. How it's implemented should match up with the setting of the game, designer choices, story reasons, etc

I've mentioned this before and I'll mention it again. Resting is an abstraction, so we will need it. The issue of it being too restrictive or it minimizing strategic concerns and removing all difficulty can be solved based on player difficulty settings. Resting should be limited use for normal to hard difficulties (increased difficulty, decreased number of rests, being slightly more forgiving for normal difficulty) and unlimited in easy mode for those players who find the difficulty of the limited rest resource in the game too frustrating.

It doesn't have to be intuitive. Avoid the "weird looking" words like you've done (bean to cean). Try to incorporate as many of the words into the voice acting as possible. Some other words can have pronounciation guides. Try to limit the number of conlang words used overall (because then P:E becomes a technical treatise on conlangs). A few unintuitive words will not bother most people. When I was younger I would mispronounce most english words like melee (mee-lee), pause (pa-oo-sey), etc. As I grew up and heard the words pronounced, I fixed my pronounciation in my head and now I can't believe that I used to mispronounce those words. As you create more P:E games, the unintuitive words will lessen and people will develop a knack for how to pronounce the words.

hello, i haven't read everyone's posts so apologies if this has already been stated, but the conversation/discussion about real-estate and Josh's concerns about the user moving his mouse from one side of the window to the other to click things is valid. However, if certain GUI elements are only for information output, then these can be separated from areas that require player input. For example, if the characer portraits only display information (statuses, image, health, stamina, etc) and have their input elements stripped (and located elsewhere) , then there is no reason that the portraits need to be near the player's "active area" (meaning the GUI elements that the player interacts with).

It sounds like they'll kind of just be patterns of the phrases, as customly assembled by the character. I mean, I'm sure there could be default ones. I don't know if the game's going to force you to go in and actually assemble them, lest your Chanter just stand around in combat muttering the same phrase over and over and over and over... ("You never assembled a chant for me!"). But, it also sounds like the specific sequence of phrases, in conjunction, will enable a specific shout. So, it would actually be interesting to know exactly how that's designed. I mean, Aefyllath Ues mith Fyr 5 times in a row wouldn't be as effective, like Josh said, as 5 different phrases. BUT, what if that same phrase 5 times in a row enabled an immensely potent silencing shout? You could cone-blast a handful of enemy Wizards with that, and BOOM! Any verbal-component spells, rendered useless for like 15 seconds. Oh, the possibilities. ^_^ Okay, Easter Egg proposal... Have little piddly, obscure quests to find the words for "Earth," "Fire," "Wind," "Water," and "Heart." And have them summon General Nature. Or, you know... we could throw in a "Fus... Ro-DAHH(ahhh-ahh)!" in there somewhere. i like the captain planet bit. don't like the skyrim one. can we get some more info of these guys? is the chanter class meant to be more active or passive what with the modal abilities of chants? can we save these chants? I really hope the chants give an insight into the history of the world kind of like how king of dragon pass myths were freaking AWESOME