Hormalakh

Mr. Cain, you never fail to make me smile Thank you for sharing a part of your day with us. PS. The cultures are awesome. I actually don't mind the monk anymore. Thank you for listening to the fans on this.

check out gziet's formspring account. google is your friend.

The great thing about Baldur's gate 2 though was that although you could summon a whole bunch of monsters (making it seem OP) there were certain spells (wail of the banshee?) that automatically killed all summoned creatures without a dice-roll. While it may seem like a RPS type game at that point, that was basically what mage battles were in bg2 and why so many people loved it: a sort of chess-battle between two mages. This would be a decent "counter" to a summoner and would make fighters important in battles. Perhaps we can have similar spells but at lower levels for mages in PE? A sort of counter for the summonner, necromancer?

Perhaps, as you do with most other things in the game, there can be a sort of give and take between summoning multiple monsters and summoning a singular monster. For example, as you increase your monster numbers, the levels of your monsters decreases. So, for example, if you have 20 levels worth of monsters you can cast, your caster can either control 5 level-4 monsters, or 2 level-10 monsters, or 1 level-1 monster. You can try casting above your "level limit" but then the chances of losing control of your monster and it turning on you increases. I can see several interesting tactics developing with variable monster limits. Some battles might be better served with multiple targets with lower levels, and others might be better served with a singular target that hits harder. It's like in starcraft: you can zergling rush your opponents or bring in the single ultralisk. They might cost the same in resources, but swarming has its advantages as does bringing in the big guns. This can probably be explained from a lore perspective in this way: as each caster has to draw upon their own soul's ability to control another creature, this becomes tougher with stronger monsters. The ability of a caster to summon and control monsters is based upon how fully realized their own soul is (level based). As they increase in level, their souls are able to control either individual higher leveled monsters or multiple lower leveled monsters equal to some equation based on their own level.

GO BACK TO BIOWARE YOU HOOLIGAN! seriously though....another romance thread?!

What do you mean there's no such thing in real life? What do you think fantasy lore is based on? It is based mostly on Medieval lore which was in turn based on real events. It might have been romanticized but much of the conflict portrayed in mythology and in games took place in daily Medieval life. Quests can be seen as errands and common activities of Medieval existence and adventure is exactly what I would expect an errant knight would have been up to. Besides, have you ever stopped playing games for five minutes and gone out back? There's plenty of adventure to be had in real life. All of that aside I certainly have no idea what you mean bringing up verisimilitude* but I feel you're distracting from -my- point. There had better be a good reason I can't rest because text flashing across my screen saying I can't is an immersion breaker. There are ways to discourage it as discussed above which are much more convincing. I don't agree with a simple difficulty slider as it implies that for me to even -attempt- to rest when I want I will have to sacrifice enemy AI and a proper challenge. Am I to be labeled a novice player because I want the game to have a rational feel? When you fight you often get injured, and when you get injured you stop fighting and take rest. So about that difficulty slider, this is not something to be lumped in with that... include it as its own option or forget it. Players can rest as rarely as they want, that was never an issue. Also I wanted to add to that, if you're a masochist and want to torture yourself with a game come to my house and I'll give you my copy of Dark Souls. There are games for people like you, but you don't have to punish people like me who want a well paced challenge just so you can say you beat the hardest game on the hardest setting. Come on now... there's a difference between playing a game with rules and playing a punishing game. I want this game to have rules. Resting anywhere is rule-less. if you want a reason for limited rest areas here's one that will fit your "realistic" mind-set. How many people do you see resting whenever wherever out in the woods? Usually you have to set up camp. That takes time and resources. Camping anywhere in a dangerous forest is the easiest way you can set yourself up for being ambushed because monsters can see your fire and come chasing you. to get restful (think healing) sleep, you'll need to set up camp. You can always rest to catch your breath, but that doesn't mean you recover health. in cities, you aren't allowed to hobo around becuase there are rules and regulations. city guards patrol and tell the vagrants to find an inn for the evening. you might be able to sleep in the woods in smaller villages, but then you'd better do that outside of town because the townsfolk don't like camps in the middle of their village. of course then you'll have to worry about bandits. enough reasons for you to limit resting to specific areas yet?

This right here is an important thing. It is a thing that I hate, and a big part of the reason I brought up New Vegas on the first page. The idea that opposed actions action can bring you back to neutrality is a weakness in a lot of reputation/morality systems. Saving an orphanage then burning a box of puppies does not make you "neutral", it makes you a giant **** who has done some good. Helping faction A then hurting faction A doesn't make them ambivalent towards you, it makes them wonder what the **** your deal is. New Vegas got that bit right. You save an NCR train from getting blown up then murder one of their patrols, and they'll consider you a wildcard, not neutral. Even Mass Effect, for all that its paragon/renegade stuff was horrible - spoiler alert: pretty damn horrible - completely separated paragon and renegade points and only allowed values to increase (though there was a lot of dumb hidden stuff in ME2 because, again, the paragon/renegade system was pretty damn horrible). yep. you're right - i agree, that's a better way to do it. the point still stands though. it should be a nonlinear curve towards good or evil. perhaps you start neutral, but then doing good and doing bad can shift you between hated -> wildcard -> loved: all the different spectrums or whatever else.

problem is, we've already got a creature named phoenix

Very nice. It was immediately clear to me it was the infamous skuldurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (if you haven't noticed, i hate the name, but that's just me). anyway, it's awesome! good job - would love to see the finished pic.

That's also something that paleontologists have come to understand never happened with dragons. They didn't breathe fire, they shot lasers.

There is no such thing as adventuring in real life. When making a game, versimiltude comes secondary to entertainment. You can choose your pace by picking the appropriate difficulty slider, allowing you to choose the appropriate limits on resting (unlimited for beginner, for example). that was the whole point of this conversation from the start. Please refer to the original post.

Hi, good topic. I really like the idea especially having two different "aspects" quantified (emotional vs. practical). Three things I'd like to add. 1- Each individual NPC should have their own "calculated rep" for you. They would derive their calculated reputation based on several variables: your actions against/for that individual or conversation choices made, the reputation of the faction of which they're part of, any extenuating circumstances modifiers, specific character skills/bonuses hat affect reputation. You can have each of these variables have different weights for each individual NPC. Some people (the sheep) always go with the mob mentality (0.7*faction reputation+ 0.3*everything_else) whereas others care more about what you do to them individually (actions/speech*0.6+faction*0.1+etc etc). Then of course, the faction reputation can change based on a calculation done on certain influential people in that particular community. Perhaps through conversation we can figure out who these individuals are who modify reputations ("Oh he's the king, we love our king and listen to him") as well as figure out who has an individual mind vs hivemind ("oh jack? He's always striking out on his own.") 2- If we were to draw a graph of reputation on the y-axis and actions done by player on the x-axis, the reputation line should NOT be linear but rather "S-shaped" in that there are two asymptotic lines at "100" and "0". Thus as you are liked/disliked more and more by factions/individuals, it requires more and more significant actions to make them "LOVE" or "HATE" you. It should be fairly easy to be neutral within a faction and doing one good and one bad might cross each other out, but you need to make a concerted effort to have a whole faction love you. Usually the repuation systems with a linear line become sort of silly because you keep repeating the same conversation line to them and after 5 times of repeating the same thing or giving them some money, they suddenly love you. which brings me to my third point... 3- Do not allow repetitive actions to alter the reputations so much. This was done terribly poorly in Arcanum for eample, where if I complimented an individual three times, suddenly they loved me. I always thought that was weird.

Creating "mods" for this game would be like making hacks and "trainers" in any other game. you can't stop them. And "optional" modes would be like the modal cheats that certain games have. Many times these "cheats" are quick jump to points for devs for dev-type purposes, i.e. not meant for actual gaming. As long as the developers don't intend the game to be played that way, I wouldn't be playing it that way. I just want the devs to set up the rules right. Anyone else can play with their own house rules and it won't bother me. I will be bothered by the devs having to waste their time(and I do believe that this is a waste of time) setting up "optional modes" that are not modes of gameplay that the devs intended or that do not fit the rules of the game.

Though, this isn't the topic at hand I did want to address this point. There's a huge difference. Josh may have taken out inventory weight limits but he put another limit on them at the same time. The rules may have changed but there are still rules on inventories at the end of the day. Instead of weight or space being the limit, there are only certain locations where you can access your inventory. Ultimately, the rule change made the monotony of having to shift items between a local cache and a global cache non-existant, but there are still limits to when you can access items. Thus the rules changed, but the game still has rules.

Tim is writing next week's update. Awesome! Thanks!

whether its the horse or the monkey, people really want to beat some sort of animal on these forums.

"Is there a particular feature that you would like to know more about?" I would like to know more about what Tim Cain's up to. Can we have him chat with us a bit?

Because a game isn't meant to be consequenceless. It is no longer a "game." It becomes merely an "experience." And I see experiences as things lesser than games. In games, you have rules. You have win/lose scenarios and boundaries. You play within the rules and if the rules are difficult, then you change the difficulty. Imagine playing chess where everyone was a queen. It's great and all, but after a while it's not fun. I do not buy the "let them play the way the want." It is a weak argument. We will play the game the way the designers want us to play their game.

frankly, i believe that if a system takes no decision-making, then it is a failed system in a game. this is how bg2's sleep mechanic/system worked. it had no decision-making whatsoever. you could rest anywhere, anytime, without any sort of negatives. i do not want the same thing happening in PE. limiting the rest areas to only specific areas is a step in the right direction, but once again , if there are no pros/cons to making a decision between resting and not resting, then it is a failed/broken system. if resting requires time, then time should matter. if resting requires resources, then the resources should matter. if having to move to a certain place to rest is implemented, then it shouldn't just become a thoughtless "let's head back to camp". monsters should respawn, enemies should attack at camp, etc. if you can't acheieve a certain goal within a certain set limit (defeat the enemies in a dungeon), you should be given a failure state. some failure states are harsh (like death, game over) some failure states are "soft" (retry mission, start again from checkpoint) which just mean that you have to try again from a setpoint. resting should not become a mechanic for which players refer to when they fail a particular goal to make it easier. the difficulty slider is what that is for. resting, if it becomes a game mechanic, should be implemented in a way where you cannot refer to it to decrease your difficulty. a battle of attrition and returning to rest is ultimately that. this is what i do not want. i am in agreement with those here who basically said that if it's going to be half-assed, then don't implement it at all.

this game is combat-oriented. keep that in mind when discussing crafting. the reason we don't have crafting as a parallel problem-solving "tool" is because combat is heavily focused in this game. i would like some crafting specifc quests in this game or crafting specific solutions...

pretty sure the beta will be found on the open seas soon after it's released...

Umm, I am pretty sure there are going to be names in multiple tongues in the game besides Glanfathan. Skuldr sounds like it's Eld Aedyran instead. per google translate: the icelandic for bat is kylfu. wikitionary has this to say about the etymology of bat. Dialectal variant (akin to Swedish dialect natt-batta) of Middle English bakke, balke, from Scandinavian (compare Old Swedish natbakka, Old Danish nathbakkæ 'night-flapper', Old Norse leðrblaka 'leather-flapper'). so this creature is like the "soul seeker." or soul mirror/ soul seeker. andi komist (soul seeker in icelandic) or andi spegill (soul mirror). ...spegill andi. spegilund...Seglund? segilund? segulant? Comusant? Andicombs?

hello. would be interested in hearing more about mood and how you intend on developing tension in game. maybe some more music samples we can hear? a few thoughts. first, excellent job so far. things are seeming to come along nicely. keep up the good work. hopefully prototype 2 is as successful as 1. a few criticisms. 1- skuldr sounds too "herp derp." it doesn't really seem to follow the conventions you've set for your world when naming creatures. the more things integrate well and seem seamless, the more "immurshun". an example. it seems that the skuldr is a "spirit bat", sort of. well if it's found in the eir glanfath area, perhaps it can follow the naming conventions there (and different cultures have different names for it. For example, the scottish gaelic for bat is "ialtag." irish gaelic is sciathán leathair (=lit. leatherwing) bás dorcha (=lit. dark death). source: http://www.irishgaelictranslator.com/translation/topic93609.html well then let's play off that. we can make a few names from sciathan leathair or bas dorcha or ialtag. or maybe the glanfath language has words for "dark death" or "leatherwing" or maybe "spiritmirror" (as it bounces/mirrors "sound" off spirits to find it. etc etc). anyway it's an idea. skuldr doesn't fit the game. Biamhac did. we don't necessarily need to know every naming convention for each monster, but if asked there should be an answer. If skuldr is the name, perhaps it's because a different culture named it thus. Why would it be foudn in glanfath? well maybe this other culture introduced them to the area to help with "pest control." they were popular by their old name as used in another culture and now they've become the new pests in the area. you might not need to tell us that, but perhaps it'll come up in a future game or something. even taking into account what i just said, Skuldr still sounds too "tacky" IMO, so.... 2. any particular reason why a humanoid creature like the ogre has "tusks" coming out where jawbones might be? "coolness" factor aside, perhaps the tusks can be located somewhere less "cool" and more "useful?" An amalgamation of the elephant and the human would have tusks located inside the jaw as upper incisors (like they are in elephants). Yes, that makes them look like the typical ogres we've all seen, but that just makes more sense. Unless the jaw structure of the ogres in your game are different and they don't have a normal humanoid facial bone structure, i'd say it looks "weird." some people are particular about armor. i'm particular about my monsters "making sense." i thank you and skull-durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr thanks you. all the best.

This isn't really about verisimilitude. It's about gamism and making a fun game. There are always aspects of "real life" that you can incorporate into a game to make the game "make sense." My point about difficulty limiting the rest is that some gamers are not that great at games (this describes me sometimes) and so it's a matter of balacing challenge for hard-core players and allowing other players to enjoy the game at a more "casual" pace. It's a difficult balance to find. Good players would like to play a difficult game and get enjoyment from that (this also describes me too) especially after playing the game for the story. They want a tactical challenge to, well, challenge them. Others want to just play the game for the story.