Hormalakh

When I stop hearing about all those great gaming experiences people have when they limit themselves to certain rules like "no reload." Free will is what makes life exactly worth living. Except in save-games. At that point it's most important to dictate the terms.

Tim Cain talks about fuzzy logic in AI programming for Fallout 1 (if he were to do it again) and I'm sure he's got a whole array of AI ideas that you could implement. I hope you're working together with that guru on this very difficult and complex problem.

I think a lot of people are forgetting that the gods have a huge role in the game. We have a god-touched race too, so keep in mind that it would be nice to introduce some gods that would fit a certain god-touched race that you'd like to see. Demon god - demon-touched. Chaos god - chaos-touched Dead god - dead-touched etc etc it's tough to create a monotheistic god paradigm with god-touched races.

yes to queuing. another aspect that some RTSs do well that can help the RPG RTwP system be more effective. I also like the second color coded idea a lot. probably would be careful about using the red color, because sometimes that can mean different things (chars being attacked, invalid move, etc) Maybe a different symbol? Like movement was the four triangles, attack is a sword, and spells a different symbol. i don't think anything is added to gameplay by arbitrary limitations of queues. players often will change actions based on outcomes in combat, so most people won't be queuing too many commands anyway.

@Osvir some of what you wrote i like. it describes professions. those are good. the personalities, i don't like so much. they limit the character design too much.

Man that has got to be the most pathetic reply I have ever seen. At what part did I say my character had no lock picking skill in that post? I even end with a paragraph that talks about how you should require certain skill levels to even be able to "attempt" an action to begin with. Of course I could not have picked the lock if I had no lock picking skill, but at that point the presence or lack there of the mini game would be a non issue wouldn't it? If that is really all you have to say then you need to stop posting in this thread because you have nothing constructive to add. Hey .... what I said back there... yeah, I'm sorry. I was taking my frustration from a different thread out on you. So I apologize about that. Going back to what you had written, and re-reading the last paragraph again, I can see now that you did indeed mention character skill being an important aspect of it. The main concern I have is that some players might still be upset if they cannot pick the lock fast enough and blaming the minigame for ruining the game for them. in your same story, if someone was to die they might either blame themselves, or more likely, they'll blame everyone but themselves: the mini-game for being "stupid", the developers for making a stupid "mini-game", their character for not being able to simply by-pass the lock. ultimately, the primary goal of the mini-games should be to be fun. For different players, that means different things. if they do implement such a system, making it optional would be the most ideal. of course, then they have to design with that in mind, and that costs even more dev-time, and so on and so forth. hopefully this was a more substantial response to your posts and you find something worthwhile in it. no hard feelings, eh?

^That sucks

@Umberlin I would never dream of controlling the casual difficulty level. My concern was for the harder difficulty levels. The ironman mode has inherently been one filled with trepidation not because of its difficulty but because of instability in the game design (bugs, bad AI). If we knew that ironman would never fail I wouldn't even be bringing this up. But there it is, and here I ... was. But yeah, it is pretty sad. I do have self-control when it comes to saves/loads for the most part. But there are those few moments when I've lost a party member to chunking and I've been playing the game for a long time now and having to take such a big hit really bothers me. So I just come up with excuses as to why I should reload that save game and spam cloudkill on the umberhulks this time. it's those few occasions that are bothersome. and i know many a player who truly loves those moments. they are the moments that players love talking about and are most memorable. a lot of the more "hardcore" players don't play games at a higher difficulty level because of some sort of weird nerd disfunction that is inherent in their genetic make-up. it's because of the emotional experiences that they have when their choices are made to matter in real-time and they suffer the consequences of their actions without recourse. you can learn a lot about yourself from a game. of course, now that i've had further time to think about the situation, i do agree that putting down such a harsh striction on games as unbelievably long wait times would be not a good idea. As I said before, I've come up with a better solution for myself, hyperbole be damned. as for the other players, i believe everyone can come to their own level of acceptability with this. those who are blind to the enjoyments of a game with meaningful choice will either come around, or they won't. those who are like me - and there are quite a few - will find their ways. mods feel free to lock down the thread if you wish. i don't care much for the hate on this thread.

A Dr. manhattan type god. He doesn't care much for this world.

ok take all my internets. how did you do that?

You mean bacchanal?

OH ****--!!! ARE WE GONNA SEE ORLANS AND AUMAUA NEXT UPDATE?! Here's hoping! Since we're not sure if gods really exist or not, in this world: I'd like a fake god in there. One that a group of people came up with and that have some sort of conspiracy towards getting him to "kill" the other gods. They're really in it for the political power/money. They don't believe that the gods are actually immortal beings with divine power. Something like that. One of my favorite monotheistic arguments for why there is only one God is that if there were multiple gods in existance, then there would need to be some supreme power that would keep these two gods separate (gods being omnipresent, omnipotent beings). Then the argument becomes a reductio ad absurdum beause each god would need another god to separate them, thus making an infinite number of gods exist, each only existing to act as "in-between powers" to separate the other gods. How about a god that has this power? The ability to keep gods separate in multitudes and controls their omnipotence and omnipresence by being "in-between" all gods, creating a space between them. Obvious is obvious: god of souls. gods of: courage patriotism - i.e. thomas jefferson, george washington, mao zedong, kim jong il, imam khomeini, - all have become some sort of divine representative mechantry, wealth - merchant class god ideas - allows people to have ideas dreams - controls the dreams that people have. lies - god that is deceitful and trickster. nature/animal god - druids worship. magic - mystra-like. Edit: Cow god brahmin. Two headed cow god.

^ I actually like this one. Need moar!

I have a pretty interesting topic of conversation that I want to discuss, but I'm a little scared of the response. I'm going to think it over a little before posting. Tomorrow.

^Cool story. But, this is a roleplaying game. You're playing the roles of characters who are not you. If your character doesn't have the skill to pick a lock, you shouldn't be able to pick it regardless of how cool a bro you are.

Nah, I don't want a Hormalakh difficulty level nor do I want to make a poll about this. There's been plenty of vitriol both in this and previous thread when discussing save-scumming. Ironman mode was one mode determined to let those of us interested in playing a more "risky" form of the game to do so. But honestly, there are legitimate reasons as to why you wouldn't want such a mode. Bugs destroying a game being one of them. My OP was meant to encourage a discussion on how to implement innovative methods to dissuade save-scumming on harder difficulty levels without only having one save-slot. As in previous threads, I was told to "leave us kids alone!" I have come up with another solution to this problem however. Literal save-scumming. I'll just keep a copy of my iron-man mode save game in a different folder and when I reach a bug, I'll find my old iron-man mode save game and replay it from a last save. It's not exactly optimal, but the point was for saving to not be optimal. Having to keep moving savefolders is a pain and I'd only really do it in exceptional cases. *troll* Otherwise I'd play noob-version quicksave. */troll* Edit: This isn't to say that not allowing saves in certain situations/locations or allowing c&c to ripple down further in the story aren't good ideas. I hope that those are implemented in the game in either case.

Prosper, are you Mr. Phipps back from the dead? Those designs are so SoA, it's uncanny.

Which is why I'm scared of playing Ironman mode on my first try. I don't want to ruin the story, but I want a difficult experience with some semblance from Ironman mode.

Even just some sort of party formations ala Baldur's Gate would be refreshing. I have been playing Civ 5 quite a bit recently and it is really hard on the scroll wheel -- so much so that my finger is starting to get sore. Be careful what you wish for when adding more functionality to the scroll wheel. good point.

This board has been dead for quite a while. It was crazy when the kickstarter was going. Right now, it's relatively quiet.

A little bait and switch, some baseless assumptions and subtle implication that the way you like to play games is "normal". Nice one. Will probably fool many people into thinking that you actually have a point here. Nice one. Will probably fool many people into thinking that you actually have a point here.

Bingo. That's the point. Your choices don't matter. You find the most optimal and go with it. I'd do the same thing. But if I knew that if I picked a certain dialogue option, that would be the only time I could choose unless I started the game over, I would actually sit and think about my choices before making them. If you want to do that, fine. But I want the game to make me consider my choices as a one-time thing.

Well...yeah. The Devs design the game the way it is supposed to be played. If it is designed to be incredibly easy then I will judge it to be so. I suppose I could play the game not wearing armor or not casting spells or whatever as an attempt to artificially make it more challenging but then I am not playing the game as designed. Nobody flipped out during the IE games that we couldn't save during battle that I noticed. Or was that a really huge outrage? I don't remember. He wants it to be significantly worse than just not saving during combat though. It's funny. I've never owned a console and most of my gaming has been on PCs. My original post wasn't a "this is the way you should do it" post. It was an observation. I don't need others speaking for me, thank you. I can speak for myself. Now I will admit that I was being a little snarky with my earlier post, because namely I really hate the "don't dictate how I play my game" line. It's worthless and smacks of antagonism and negativity. My point was something else completely and it's irksome to have to wade through the bile spilling from the texts of some of you to find something worthwhile. Now that that's over, having a modicum of self-control and putting down arbitrary game rules on myself is fine and all if I want to play a challenge run. But if I want to play on a harder difficulty, I would expect the developers to take into account easy ways of "cheating the system" and working out mechanics that take these into account. Not saving/reloading your game is all fine and dandy when you theorize about it, but when it comes to actually playing a game where you've actually spent a good deal of time developing your party members and all of a sudden you lose one to a dumb move, it's really easy to convince yourself that the AI screwed up, etc. Cognitive dissonance is a *****. Sometimes everyone needs a rule forced on them to seriously gauge their actions. Everything about a game should convey an atmosphere. Even the metagaming aspect. This isn't to say that everyone has to play this way. Easier modes can have innummerable save states, etc. But I would like a game mode where my loading and saving is a more difficult choice to make, but not as dangerous as an Ironman mode where serious screw-ups (bugs, or some other horrific thing) which are not my fault are actually hindering my experience and will to continue playing the game.

I don't care about your experience. I care about mine and I don't want to put an arbitrary limitation on myself that the developers either didn't consider or that it wasn't implemented because they were scared that "casual players" would hate it. If they allow me to save at any point, then I'll do so. Then I'll say the game sucked because it was easy.

^ Yeah, I know that feel bro. See my thread on save-scumming. I did want to tell you though that I expect to be disappointed in this game and I think a lot of people will. Everyone wants something different and there will be aspects that players will want that won't be implemented. It's just the nature of an idea. Everyone has in their mind a different idea of what P:E will be. And they hype up the game in their minds with interesting ideas that don't fit the developers vision. At the point when the game comes out, many people will whine and complain as to why their game idea wasn't implemented. Then they'll be disappointed. For no reason other than the fact that they had imagined the game differently than the developers. So ... just a way of saying (I guess to myself) keep your expectations low, and you'll be happy with the P:E results.