Pipyui

Sorry to derail your topic here, but can't I like "Offer options that are sometimes an obvious reward" AND trains? But it wouldn't be right for me to post without contributing, so I should say I like the idea that my companions can intercede my conversation when it suits them, even if it doesn't suit me. I don't need a party of yes men or mute drones, I need a party of people. Second, I liked timed dialogue when appropriate in the Witcher 2, but I don't feel it should be used in a cRPG like PE. I could be convinced otherwise though, and wouldn't throw a fit if it were implemented. Third, it's absolutely necessary that stats influence dialogue options (strength too, you don't need to be charismatic to threaten someone). I would like it though if some of these options could backfire, with subtle context clues to indicate that they might. That way I'd actually have to think about choosing to use my intelligence in dialogue, with fear that I might insult instead of add insight. It should be fairly clear which to choose when encountering established characters, but I might get thrown off guard when encountering a new NPC, for example.

I'm sorry for insulting you (I'll admit, my last post may have been a little passive-aggressive, but my concerns remain unwavered), I'm just trying to get a little more elaboration out of you on your arguments. As I said, I know my argument presented above was a strawman attack on your own, but I still feel that it addresses an issue many others here seem to be concerned with about your argument (it was meant as a medium to better relay my own concerns, not as an attack on you). I'm not saying that respecing is equivilent to the examples I portrayed, but that it is a small step towards those concerns. Players should be granted a lot of freedom in what they do, but too much freedom can lead to an undermining of a game's design. How do you intend to address the topic? Also, I did state that I supported respecing with hefty penalty, because I don't believe that a lack of full knowledge and experience with a game and its mechanics should be a barrier to playing it, but respecing should still be discouraged.

I can kinda see Rubicon's point in "if you don't like it, don't use it," however, so much as he tries to justify it, it is a rather silly argument to keep pushing without context. The trouble with this is that there is a very slippery slope between what you can let players get away with as a "feature," and what undermines the purpose of the game. Not enough money to buy that new battleaxe? That's fine, there's an optional discount if you don't have the funds. Don't like it? Don't use it. Ugh, that guy was almost dead; I just needed one more strike! I don't want to restart the whole battle, so I'll just redo that last attack roll. Don't like this feature? Don't use it. While I'm not trying to strawman Rubicon's argument like this, I am saying that this is a serious flaw with it. Please Rubicon, I don't intend to be mean, but if you're not a troll, try to respond to the concerns others have presented with a little more than "It's a feature! If you don't like it, don't use it." Anyway, on a completely different note, I agree with a few above that making respecing too trivial of a task demeans the value of creating a character and playing the game with that character in the first place. Spec-ing properly though, I feel as Sawyer does, shouldn't be a barrier to playing. Idealy, as someone above has also noted, respecing shouldn't be necessary, as character development should be very modular (hard to really screw up). However, since achieving such is a little far-fetched, I think respecing should be available at a hefty price, like a level drop or something. If a new player screws up their characters so much as to make continuing the campaign impossible, I don't think it would be fun for him/her to have to restart the whole thing without so much as a sandbox (respecing) to help facilitate the learning of game mechanics.

I like the idea, but I agree with Halric that it would likely put too much pressure on the devs to account the story for every concievable path a series of quests can take. Perhaps only in a few sidequests? Ones with little real reflection in the rest of the game. That aside, it may be conceivable to have quests not with randomized outcomes, but with randomized content. Fetch / rescue quests don't always have to send you to the same places, for instance. Or, side quests can have slight, maybe even quirky, variations in presentation depending on choices the player has made in main quests. If you let a bandit leader live early on for example, you might find later that he has kidnapped a couple's daughter for ransom, and you'll be hired to get her back. If you killed him, his sister and second in command has taken his place, and you find that the couple's son has been kidnapped because this young new bandit leader found him dreamy and intends to marry him. In this scenario, the structure and outcome of the quest doesn't change, but it's presentation cannot be predicted by those without a strategy guide. Is it fully deterministic? Sure; but it does I think add an illusion of randomness, or at least random consequence, to a campaign.

Where's the "tl;dr" option in your poll above? I kid, but what it sounds to me like you described is a way to play the game, for those of us who hate fun. As much as I enjoy being a masochist, I think I'll pass on being a merchant.

I think it might be kinda neat to not know whether or not an item is magical, though I don't know how well that might fit into the lore (perhaps magic has an intrinsic flavor). Of course, then we'd all just ask the wizard in the party to examine it, nothing really changes. The idea of using the lore skill to determine how many enchantments an item has can also be expanded to classify enchantments in merely qualitative terms at lower skill levels. You'd be able to ascertain that an axe may incinerate foes for instance, but not how much damage that incineration yields. Plus, since items are going to be mostly unique and not randomly generated, magic effects might have unique twists too - side effects only knowable to arcane experts. Also curses, definitely riding the curses wagon over here.

Well, I do think that giving players too much money is a problem, but more than that I think there needs to be more incentive to spend money. There's no reason to hoard gold and never use it, yet this is what I've done in every RPG I've ever played.

I don't think converting a 2D object to 3D to render shadows would be too conceivable. Shadows would be "baked" in when a scene is converted from the 3D model to a 2D image. Thus the only dynamic shadows would be used in cases of occlusion, and those wouldn't need to be too detailed. Perhaps this is what you meant, Rjshae? How will shadows be managed in cases of occlusion, where a 2D image layer is casting a shadow on a 3D model? In this case, self-shadowing is a non-issue. Already baked in. The problem would be in casting correct dynamic shadows based on 3D and not 2D geometry. I think an invisible low-poly model to cast shadows, while plausible, isn't quite the best solution to this problem. Maybe the shadow itself could be a special shader that includes angular data, and would be only visible and computed when it occludes a 3D model? Honestly, I'm not too knowledge in this type of thing, but I hope this helps.

Alright, so players are making and carrying around way more money than they know what to do with. Breaking coin into denominations makes distributing wealth across the world easier and more consistant (stunted goblins might carry a copper or two, but elite enemies may carry 2 or 3 gold), but I don't think this would stunt player income or facilitate player expenditure. What if we have tiers of coinpurses? At the beginning of the game, your wallet would only be able to carry a small quantity of wealth. When your party fills this purse, you could exchange the full wallet for a near-empty larger one at a shop. Bigger purses would be available from merchants further along the story path, or in more dangerous territory, so that as you advance the game, explore, and level, you would be able to continue earning greater quantities of coin while also being limitted in how much you could carry at any given time and level. Of course this also adds a little "fun" into deciding when to upgrade your wallet.

The blood won't stop flowing from my eyes! It's flowing other places too, but let's not talk about that.

Right, I think it's more important to limit income than to increase expensenses haphazardly. Or go with something along with what Rjshae suggested, though I'll admit, I'm not quite clever enough to fully comprehend his "spirit stones." In any case, I already suggested that inventory be limited at increased difficulties. I think this is an all-around good and simple solution, as it addresses more than just the wealth issue. We still need more reasons to want to cash in on our money though. Traditional merchants exist solely to offload loot. Weapons and armor they sell are never much better than what you find lying around. Is it enough to give merchants significantly better equipment to sell? I'm thinking we'll also need other sinks to put money into. Various maintance and upkeep costs could help, but too much won't "gel" with players well, they need more positive incentives to spend, whereas maintainance feels to much like a tax. It's better I think to reward players for spending than to relieve penalties for it. What variations should these incentives take? Some have suggested stronghold upkeep (a little better than simply a maintainance cost, because you get clear rewards for spending more). Others have suggested paying for content (in game currency, not cash-shop) such as gambling or dungeon levels. Hoarding gold is only so much fun when there are no good reasons to want to spend it. What would you sacrifice your hard earned gold to recieve? Remember, income isn't so infinite in this thread, so anything you buy leaves you with less to spend later on! Choose your investments wisely!

Detailed terrain shadows would be neat. This wouldn't need to be dynamic, and shadows of say trees could be done in high quality with sprites. Then lower quality dynamic shadows can be used only to cast shadows on (and be casted by) 3D character and creature models.

Some good ideas so far, particularly the taxman one. Like a shadow that follows you wherever you travel - with every one you kill, and you will kill one, he's replaced with at taxman bigger and badder. It'd be like having a growing bounty on your head, not because of your actions, or what enemies or allies you decide to make, but because the system won't let you get away without paying your dues, hero or no. I think also it's common consensus here that enchanted items are worth way too much. They either should be rare or have a significant price cut (for selling at least, and I'm rather partial to magic items being rarer). Stronghold wealth and picking up damaged equipment from fallen foes also sound promising. A supply and demand economy would be neat too, though that might be a real project and might just annoy some people. Other thoughts: Harder difficulties have reduced inventory cappacities (who really carries around several suits of armor and a plethora of weapons in their bag?) Sponteneous halfbaked idea here, but what if magic items could be stripped of their "soul" (presuming this is how magic items will work in PE) and collected either as crafting material or some other boon? I don't know yet how this would work so as to incentivize consuming rare equipment rather than selling it, but maybe one of you has an idea (or will be sure to tell me of how foolish this idea is, no hard feelings I promise)? Maybe enchanted items need to be recharged regularly? (Ouch! Alright, who's throwing the stones?)

I'm sure this is an old and dead topic, but I couldn't find it with a forum search so here goes. How can currency be given a real value to players in PE? In every RPG I remember, I would systematicaly collect and mangage loot to optimize the money I could get selling it. But for the life of me I can't understand why, because in every game money has been a completely useless resource, meant for hoarding and nothing else. Sure, I could buy weapons and armor from merchants - weapons and armor little or no better than what I find dungeon-delving. Heck, maybe I could buy property - a single-payment investment that meant nothing considering my income. And then there was there were the bribes for info and selfless acts of sacrificing coin to help the needy - what sacrifice? "No trouble, maam. I'll just sell an enchanted necklace or something and make it back. There's likely one in that barrel behind you anyway, so if you'll excuse me..." You all get the point, and I'm probably preaching to the choir here on this one. Money in RPGs have, so far as I know, always been completely useless. So how can we change this? First I suppose is to make money less prolific, and not just make items/services more expensive; I doubt many would argue much that this wouldn't be a necessary step. Player income needs to be considerably less abundant. But how can money then be given a real value, made to be worth the effort of collecting? Are critical items like health kits and portal scrolls (or whatever PE will use) to be given exclusively to merchants? Will investments into things such as strongholds require more than a single-cost payment? How else can we make the decisions of spending or sacrificing coin carry more weight than the nil it has in past titles? Would it be better to remove bribes or sacrifices made in coin from PE entirely? What are your thoughts on this matter, and what might you suggest be implemented if you agree that this is an issue that should be addressed?

Yes, a no-nonsense health system is definitely better. NWN, clicking the rest button after every other fight to heal, sometimes having to backtrack a few feet to find a safe place to camp. Those were the days. My PC didn't just go down fighting, he went down fighting with every ounce of vigor as he started with. Ah, the nostalgia. Seriously, the whole rose-colored glasses, any-new-innovation-since-1/2-decades-ago-is-dumb thing is silly. Of course PE isn't going to be exactly the same as BG. There are some things too that can just be plain implemented better, like the health and rest mechanics. I personally think that the staminia business, if it's what I imagine, is a welcome addition to PE. Perhaps a heavy blow to the head isn't enough to kill me outright, but it sure might knock me the heck out of a battle. If it doesn't, the daze will certainly leave me more vulnerable to more damage and/or still yet a KO. And when I step out of battle, the fatigue may dissipate so that I can step into a new encounter with renewed vigor, if not replenished health. Let's face it, no game is perfect and the IE games are no exception, regardless of how vehemently some may try to deny it. There is a lot of room for improvement here I think without straying from what IE games were.

Alright, so I read a bit more into tiling, and came to my own conclusion that tiling is a dead end for PE if we want anything remotely close to unique landscapes. So that brings us (or me anyway) back to where we started. Unique landscapes require, according to the devs, a whole ton of memory. Will compression be enough, or will other tricks, less lossy than tiling, be necessary? What kind of compression should be used, anyway? Edit: Sorry for the self-righteous attitude here, just trying to get a little more inspiration in this thread - the tiling debate is going nowhere fast.

Forgive my ignorance in such matters, but I'm not too sure that reusing objects is the same as using tiles. It sounds like you're descibing prerendered sceneries with a few objects rendered onto them, which would do very little to reduce their aggregate size. What I had imagined was texture tiling such as was used in NWN. This would reduce memory impact from game maps, but would also be much less pretty without a GPU powerhouse of a computer to run on. Edit: Sorry Frisk, you're right, this topic is really losing traction.

I like the idea of unused NPCs having their levels capped just below used ones. I think the slight restriction on companion choice adds more real decision to the game. I'm sure I'm not the only one with the habbit of powering through my game to experience every single bit of content, and this habbit is both unrealistic, and removes much of my games' replay value. I'd like it if my PC only made bonds with companions he traveled regularly with, and that I couldn't completely experience all 8 companions in one playthrough. This doesn't necessarily have to result in left companions getting less EXP, but should otherwise restrict the amount of content I can experience regarding them, such as them being less "open" with my PC, or missing dialog elements during quests. This is of course a touchy suggestion, as many feel that it is their right to experience everything a game has to offer at once. Yet I feel that player decisions and actions should be reflected in the world for consistancy (I shouldn't have to explain how awkward it was to be the arch mage, thief, assassin, and fighter in Skyrim all at the same time), and that this should also extend to companion choice, thus making party generation more dynamic.

Does anyone really think something like this could be done using tiles?

I'd like finisher move animations, so long as they're short and don't, or very hardly, interupt combat. Varied combat animations like NWN had made combat feel a little more dynamic than the turn-based system might suggest. As for character models, I look forward to seeing some pretty impressive characters. Using the 2.5d approach, I would think there should be enough room for some high-poly characters/creatures. I suspect though that this depends on how much vram is left after loading scenery.

You help assuage my fears a little, Infiltrator. I suppose I could like combat stealth so long as it was done right (not DAO). But stealth is more than just getting the first strike in an encounter. What other elements/skills are you looking forward to your rogue (umbrella term) having? Personally, I'd love to see some infiltration type encounters (I have a hunch that you may feel the same). Quests that require the skills of a rogue for more than just opening combat / chests / dialog options (looking at you again, DAO).

Your Fighter is making the enemy Fighter pre-occupied, your Wizard is having a duel against another Wizard whilst their Archer is focused on your Rogue. But the Archer gets distracted when a Magic Missile hits his face, and the Rogue is gone, the Archer lost focus and is now focusing the Fighter. Couple moments later the Archer goes down as the Rogue had taken this moment to sneak around the perimeter and flanked the Archer. Likewise, an easier example: 3v2, you have 2 fighters and a Rogue, the enemy got 2 Fighters. If both my Fighters keep the enemy Fighters busy, they won't have much of a clue of my Rogue sneaking about. That's why it isn't silly, it is just the execution of it (specially in Baldur's Gate) that is somewhat silly (in combat). It could definitely be improved on, and made better. Stealth isn't necessarily your character vanishing into thin air in plain view, it's your character tricking the enemies and pretty much stay in hiding. Your enemies should know that you are out there (if used in combat), they might just not know exactly where. And they should never return to their duties like nothing happened, if you get seen you get seen, the soldier that saw you and his fellows around him should be on high alert. Maybe they should even run across the entire dungeon and alert all of their buddies too ("sound the horns!" works too) making the dungeon suddenly much much more difficult <- That would advocate for quick take downs before everyone are alerted of your crawling about. That's kind of the feel that I was trying to get at (pre-combat anyway), and I can't entirely disagree with the rogue sneaking so long as other enemies are preocupied, which brings me back to my first point: terrain / lighting stealth modifiers. The trouble with having rogues with little other utility than sneaking behind enemies during combat is that it's reminiscent of Dragon Age: Origins rogue combat. And that really stunk. (Traps really were useless in DAO) If this can be improved significantly (see terrain modifiers), I think it would bother me less. Hopefully this example helps to explain better my fears for stealth gameplay (I'm not the only one who thought stealth was crap in DAO, right?).

That's too some extent why I changed my view a little bit. Stealth during non-combat is fine and I do not think it should be cut, I just think that stealth during combat can be rather silly. That isn't to say that rogueish characters shouldn't be able to backstab or anything, but rogueish combat should be more about trickery and misdirection than about sneaking behind opponents. I still think it'd be neat to give stealth classes more devices to work with towards this end. Traps, caltrops, smoke. I'm saying that rogues should have more power to manipulate combat to make up for loss of combat-sneak.

The problem is that while there are many settings where stealth is acceptable, there are also too many settings where it is not. I already used the barren field / broad daylight example. Especially when in a combat setting, this is not acceptable. That's why I suggest a terrain/lighting stealth modifier. I'm not trying to heckle assassins, I love playing assassins/rogues in games. I just feel that if I'm gonna be one, I'd like to feel that I'm playing as one. Entering combat with my whole party, entering sneak mode, and walking right into an enemy to stab them on every encounter does not give me that feel. That's why I think that rogue classes should have more of a combat-control element in combat, and save the stealth for non-combat, where it's truely useful.

Garden gnome. It wouldn't even have to be animated, just always appear from offscreen in front of you as you explore, creepy little lawn accessory that he is.