Hormalakh

Yeaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Can't wait to play a freaking awesome chanter. weeeeeee ROAR i guess it was the Obsidian guys who had mentioned the "phrase building" (kinda sorta?) mechanic. My mistake.

this is along the lines of what I was thinking. i believe that this is similar to what josh sawyer wanted to do with specific "camp sites". the resting locations would be limited in space. The question I was trying to raise was would these rest sites also be limited in numbers of uses? Can you only use a specific camp site a few times outside of cities?

lol thank you for being you.

racism lives on! even in this thread. HA! told you OP. check my privilege. HA

i disagree sensuki. the whole issue with pathfinding in IE was that you didn't know where your characters were going to go: up the stairs or around the whole city because you had someone blocking their path up the stairs. With the "line" you could see what their intended path is. that's the whole point. in the beloved IE games, I always shift clicked paths. i guess i could do the same here, but sometimes i ended up having to make a ludicrious amount of shift-clicks because i couldn't risk my party rolling up all willy nilly next to the dragon without my knowing it. this is meant to give players feedback. in a tactical game like this you need as much feedback about party intentions as possible without cluttering up the game. sure, maybe you can turn off the pathing just like you could turn off the feedback circles in the old IE games. but it should be a mechanic that exsits. tactics demand it.

regardless of what sort of crazy thoughts gfted1 has, the main issue with this sort of mechanic is the tired old "let's roll the dice and see what happens" paradigm. If it becomes a random dice toss of whether a moderately-safe or non-safe location has enemies attacking, then what you will have is this: oh crap i'm low on health. let's save the game. hit rest. oh crap monsters! ok reload game. rest again. NICE no monsters! *rinse and repeat* The other proposal was where you'd have non-random monster generation in non-safe locations, i.e. resting in the forest will always have monsters that spawn and attack with the player only restoring a percentage of their hitpoints. That might be a possibility, as it serves as a deterrant to "rest-spamming" and "degenerate gameplay," words which I'm sure will rile gfted1 up immediately. so the proposal isn't bad, you just have to watch out for unintended consequences. that's what a good designer would do anyway. the point is however, that no game should be without limits in its mechanic. good design always demands limitations and regulations on any one individual mechanic. an unlimited rest with the capacity to restore all health at any time makes hit points a moot point and thus destroys whether players would care about hitpoints outside of each individual battle.

i think that all these "magic-based" classes like the cleric, wizard, bard, are pretty much the same in the old D&D systems. They just have a limit on which spells they can cast. Otherwise they all have pretty much the same mechanic. As such, i think the "build-your-own-poem" mechanic as has been proposed previously (not OEI devs) can be interesting for them and can make them stand out from the other classes. So basically, one person (I don't remember who) proposed a system where your chanter knows certain magical words or chants and what you'd end up doing is stringing them along in a "chant" and that this would build specific bonuses to the rest of your team (like what a bard would do). So for example, first level you know the chanting words: fire, ice, protect, self Then you can string along the words fire-protect-self. and this chant would protect one individual from fire. or you could do ice-protect-self (protection from cold). then as you level up you gain extra words: group, attack, poison. Now suddenly your chants open up to several different ones: 1-ice-protect-self, 2-fire-protect-self, 3-poison-protect-self, 4-ice-protect-group, 5-fire-protect-group 6-poison-protect-group. Note I didn't use the attack chant because the combinations attack-group and attack-self would be detrimental. third level you get the word: nearby and then you end up having to lose a word (let's say self). so now you have 1-ice-protect-group, 2-fire-protect-group 3-poison-protect-group. 4-ice-attack-nearby. 5-fire-attack-nearby 6-poison-attack-nearby. etc etc then you could play with the words and see if you can come up with all the different possible combinations. perhaps you could start "saving" chants so you wouldn't have to keep reclicking each word individually. and as you pick up more words and drop more words, you options will vary in the game in terms of what chants you could do. you have to decide which words to pick up and which to drop.

There have always been people who sang songs of war during battle to maintain morale. many great examples and ^ this one is great too. please share if you have or know of some examples.

Hi, So one thing that I think the old IE games was missing was that whenever you moved your party, a big part of the pathing issues was that it wasn't clear to the player what path the party was going to take before they took it. My solution to this would be to implement some sort of path line between the character and the destination. Like a small dotted green line on the ground that shows the path that the party or each individual is planning on taking. This way the player knows which path the party intends to take before it becomes too late. If the pathing system fails at guessing what the player wants, then the player can "override" the pathing and shift-click several way points to get their preferred path.

Gregorian chant. Christian monks chanting it up. I've always loved how these sound though I've never understood what they've said. another one in french. from the movie Of Gods and Men: a very excellent movie.

Buddhist monks chanting. I'm not as familiar with this as I am with the Quranic recitation, but it's similar.

josh had this to say a while ago about chanters and I wanted to bring the discussion back to it The video reminded me of something that I am fairly well familiar with. Here is an example of real-life chanters that I know about and it'd be cool if different cultures/races/etc had different "chanting styles." this dude is reciting a portion of Arabic text (yep, it's the Quran) for a group of people. He isn't singing or anything and a big part of good quranic recitation or incantation deals with the proper "pronounciation" and proper inflections and other rules that one must follow when reading the Quran. These aren't rules that are followed when speaking Arabic in daily activities. They are called "tajwid" rules and this dude is very famous for his "mad chanting skillz." The word al-Quran means the recitation in any case. Here's another one. One thing that is measured is how good you are able to measure your breath when reading the Quran without reading too fast and at the same time following the recitation rules. The background "ahhhhh" or "awwws" you hear are people praising him, basically. Here's an interview he had. This dude is basically famous the world over and is a historical hero for many Muslims.

Wow this was deeply insightful. Good.

Aguy, the option to decrease difficulty can be set on a slider at the beginning of the game (or whenever) through the option menu. It does not mean that the designer should become lazy and then describe the lack of proper rest-limit implementations as a feature of their game. This is basically what most people fall back on when they describe the IE games' rest mechanic: that it was a feature for you to sleep anywhere at any time. It was poorly implemented and not meant to increase player choice. Now if you think that different difficulty levels should have different rest limits, I won't argue with you. In fact, that's the whole point of this topic. The question is, where do we place the limits and how do we limit the players?

This made me lol. Not trying to be a jerk or anything, but apparently sexism, racism and other kinds of bigotry no longer plague us? Come now, friend: be a little more reasonable. Unless you're part of the privileged class/race/sex/etc, you'd be aware that stuff like this still goes on. *rant off* Otherwise, carry on.

That's a good idea. I think the biggest issue for me during the IE games was that the positioning of the characters was always dependant on the linear arrangement of your party, i.e. top character was always the leader. It made the limited formation choices and its irrelevance to positioning pretty useless. I would recommend allowing players to set a particular formation up and "lock it" and then also allow us to choose who the "leader/speaker" for the party is, like we do in King of dragon Pass (you have one clan member in the ring chosen as your spokesperson). That way, you've locked your formation and you've locked your speaker. When you have an in-game "cutscene", keep your formation locked and allow the player just to pick the angular rotation of that formation and your speaker has already been pre-selected to be whoever you chose, regardless of where they're placed. So basically the developer has already chosen the x,y of the party location, but the formation is pre-selected/created and its angular rotation is chosen by the player during the initial set-up for the cutscenes. You can limit "cheating" by only allowing formations to be saved only within a limited area. For example, any formation can only be "locked" if all players are within a 2.5"x2.5" or whatever area. You drop down a blue box centered on the speaker/leader on the floor when a player wants to "lock" a formation. If all his party members are not in the blue box, the box turns red/yellow/with a big X in the middle (whatever you choose) telling the players that the formation isn't possible because party members are spread out too far apart. I hope that makes sense... I'd prefer having a custom option that allowed you to create a formation of your choosing through a menu. I picture the it being something like a circle where you can paint where each party member will stand. Yeah that works too. It doesn't matter how they implement it. I was thinking like how AOE2 did it. you place each party member in a spot and then you click the "hold formation" button or whatever. the main idea is more important.

good monster. more please. i also second the request to look at community ideas: some of them are actually pretty good.

That's a good idea. I think the biggest issue for me during the IE games was that the positioning of the characters was always dependant on the linear arrangement of your party, i.e. top character was always the leader. It made the limited formation choices and its irrelevance to positioning pretty useless. I would recommend allowing players to set a particular formation up and "lock it" and then also allow us to choose who the "leader/speaker" for the party is, like we do in King of dragon Pass (you have one clan member in the ring chosen as your spokesperson). That way, you've locked your formation and you've locked your speaker. When you have an in-game "cutscene", keep your formation locked and allow the player just to pick the angular rotation of that formation and your speaker has already been pre-selected to be whoever you chose, regardless of where they're placed. So basically the developer has already chosen the x,y of the party location, but the formation is pre-selected/created and its angular rotation is chosen by the player during the initial set-up for the cutscenes. You can limit "cheating" by only allowing formations to be saved only within a limited area. For example, any formation can only be "locked" if all players are within a 2.5"x2.5" or whatever area. You drop down a blue box centered on the speaker/leader on the floor when a player wants to "lock" a formation. If all his party members are not in the blue box, the box turns red/yellow/with a big X in the middle (whatever you choose) telling the players that the formation isn't possible because party members are spread out too far apart. I hope that makes sense...

the obsidian devs need to place a random number generator in the game where random npcs pop up throughout the world and mention something to the effect of, "oh hey! you're an adventurer? It would have been great if you were here maybe ten days ago. I had a huge rat problem I needed solving. But I just had someone else take care of it. Anyway...you're late." that would totally screw with us players. we'd be trying forever to get to that quest earlier and earlier and never "get there in time."

Really like the clothes idea. It's sort of silly to have only "naked" and "plate armor" as your only two options in any gaming world.

Basically what mstark said. If I were to change BG2 I wouldn't add more quests to chapters 3-7. I would allow greater accessability to the Athkatla quests further down the line. I would make "limitations" on accessability more organic. For example, in BG2 your party could mosey on up to Fiirkaag pretty early in the game. But the nice thing that they did was that they limited your progression into th dungeon based on the difficulty of the enemies. There never was an invisible wall that said "you have to wait until chapter 6 to finish this quest." and when you get to fiirkaag, you get one last chance to turn around and come back when you're at a higher level. that is my point, really. give access to the whole world (like Fallout!) at the beginning and then create organic barriers to entry. Then allow access to everything in the beginning so that if my party keeps failing at a certain avenue (like killing Fiirkaag) I can go back to a quest hub and work on something else for a while until I can figure out what to do about Fiirkaag.

Right, and I think the fact that you had a plethora of quest choices in itself was what made Chapter 2 awesome and why I disagree with Josh. I believe I understood Josh's reservations and I have tried to respond to them. My main issue - and I have noticed this with many games - is that developers will sometimes try to "dose" the fun for you by giving you nuggets of fun and spacing them for you as if you wouldn't be able to handle the whole world at once. I guess it does make sense from a story perspective that you'd want to keep the quest coming in at a staggered pace and to tell your story in some sort of organized fashion, but then what happens is that the world feels very linear and people tend not to want to replay those game again. Take BG2 for example: pretty much everyone who plays that game hates Irenicus's dungeon. It's a great dungeon and it's fun the first, oh maybe three times you play it. But then after a while, it just acts as a stop-gap before you can go out and explore the world. Not even do quests - you can't jump from area to area (in other words, explore). You have to fight your way out of the dungeon before you can "really start" playing the game. I bet you that if Irenicus's dungeon was another "module" that we would get to play through in the game, people wouldn't hate it as much. This is all really just more a matter of story flow and area design over changing the number of quests. I would ask Obsidian to look at the Zelda games, the Assassin Creed games, the GTAs games, and other "open world/sandbox" games for inspirations. These games could have very well told their stories in linearized fashions (and many of them do - in a way) but they allowed the players access to a big part of the world immediately and players could get lost in just exploring. I don't think we need sandbox P:E, and when I think Zelda, I don't think "sandbox game", but there are specific methods of telling the story that really stand out as superb and non-restricting. ------------------------- A lot of good points were brought up in this thread. Thanks for everyone who has shared so far.

I suspect that players may game this system by having their monk character don armor in the middle of the battle, once the wounds limit is reached. I seem to recall you could do that in the IE games--albeit with the loss of a round. No inventory access during combat. Edit: Ah I see Josh already answered. As for monks and someone asking me about they hadn't deviated from what they had said in the past: in the past we didn't have concrete information really - just tidbits. We now have more information and it seems like the monks have been well-thought out. As for the cultural clothes: I don't understand people's gripes about it being too "generic", whatever that means. The general consensus has been that we don't want ridiculous fantasy in this game, and when we are given fantasy that isn't ridiculous people throw up their arms and cry "too generic!" Which doesn't really make sense because the clothing styles and cultures here are not generic at all. It's funny how many people called these cultural dresses Greek, Slav, etc. I've seen the same diversity of clothing in the Middle East, specifically Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Yes, they're more traditional clothing, but up until the early 1800's people in Iran, for example, would be wearing clothing styles similar to these. Clothing style hasn't been as "fancy" and as rapidly evolving throughout the ages as it is now after globalization and the upswing of the fashion industry.

Josh was asked about his comments on BG2 a few weeks ago and what in particular he didn't like about Baldur Gate 2's implementation of quests and he responded, I have been thinking about this for the past several days and while I can understand the reasoning behind what Josh said, I think that I may partially disagree with him in terms of whether it was a bad thing or not. Firstly, I would have to agree with the sentiment that compared to Chapter 2, the rest of the game felt fairly linear and less complex and that this detracted from the game. The following chapters were less fun than being able to mess around in Athkatla. However, at the same time, this doesn't detract from the fact that the multitude of quests in Chapter 2 was sort of fun and kept the player engaged and in fact may show that Chapter 2 was probably doing something right and the rest of the game was unfairly juxtaposed to a well-developed chapter. One of the things that I think was good about the implementation of Chapter 2 has to do with the multiple paths a player can take during their gameplay and the ability to work on several aspects of the story at the same time. If a player would start to tire of a certain setting during the game, he or she could quickly change his attention over to another quest and work on that for a bit. This is ultimately the benefit of the multitudes of quests offered early in the game. It's like designing a non-linear dungeon that has multiple entrances. If the player starts to get frustrated with one certain quest, s/he can work on something else at the same time and come back to the previous quest later. Thus, it keeps the player engaged and rarely feel like he is stuck in a rut or that s/he has to "grind" his way through a certain aspect of the game to get to his reward. I think this is important in a good RPG and it would behoove the devs of PE to think about this aspect of Athkatla's design. Allow the game at any time to have several opportunities for players to "work" on a multiple quests simulatenously. This limits the feeling of linearity that can come in games. If you do want to limit the content density to "spread the content" evenly through the game, make sure to give players opportunities to work on several different aspects at one time and allow them the option ot choosing which one to tackle at any time. This will limit player fatigue and keep the player engaged with the game longer. If possible, keep as many different quests/opportunities/actions to take available for the player, so that they can make the decision in what to do next. This allows the player to feel that he or she is in a sand-box type game even though it may not necessarily fit that description. Anecdotally, I've realized that certain games are fairly linear in their content design, and that these games allow me to play the game only in one certain order. Thus, if I get myself in a rut or can't defeat a particular challenge, I end up quitting the game for several days and getting back to it only when I have the energy to try again. The game starts to feel like a chore, and I rarely get back to playing it. However, I've realized that games like Baldur's Gate 2 and other games that give me the opportunity to choose from several different actions at any point, allow me to change my focus and tackle another challenge. This "refreshes" my interest and I keep playing the game. And then I remember these games more favorably! What do the rest of you guys think?

you aren't thinking it out completely. there will be points where it may be advantageous for your monk to wear armor. some enemies might overwhelm your wounds abilities, making wearing armor important. at this point, this is all speculation. theory. you don't really know how things work out mechanically until you have the game in front of you.