Teahive

In a game like PE I'd prefer a relatively simple upgrade system to a full crafting system. For example, you can find certain rare items that let you improve the equipment you already have, with the type of item determining the bonus you get and what equipment it can be applied to. As nomotog mentioned, souls could be used for that. Upgrades should be permanent so the upgrade item will be consumed in the process, making when and what to upgrade a meaningful choice. This could be combined with artisan NPCs which have the required skills for certain upgrades, but will only help the PC if they're on friendly terms.

If you want to make die rolls persistent for every (non-combat) challenge you might as well assume that the skill check itself is fully deterministic when playing the game, but that the success threshold for each challenge has been randomised just once. Which is fairly easy to implement using just a single seed value in the savegame. In fact you could just assume that this randomisation has already been done by the designer. In such a system you'd always know that if you fail a test, you'll fail it again unless you boost your skills. Which does have some advantages.

One problem in IE games that works counter to a "gather intelligence, pick spells based on that information" mechanic is the implicit tie between resting and memorization of spells. It is impossible to come to an area, scout (potentially using a spell like Invisibility), then pick the right spells without having to fully rest again.

From a realism point of view, when someone is injured or ill it makes sense to rest for a longer period of time. But for a game I think the problem with rest spamming or auto-recharge is that it comes at little to no cost. It doesn't matter how badly you fought the last fight, you can just rest a bit and you'll be just as well off as if you had fought flawlessly. And generally, when you lose a fight you reload, so there is simply no difference in outcome - with the notable exception of any consumables you may have used. Learned spells and health thus become free resources. Which is odd given the fact that they are, in parallel, available as expensive resources in the form of scrolls, wands, potions, magic ammunition, etc. Thinking of other game genres, FPS and other shooters often feel particularly tense when you're low on ammo and desperately need a medkit. What's interesting about these games is that you always get a chance to replenish these resources after a while, if you hold out just long enough. The odd ammo crate here and a medpack there, often as reward for exploring. Importantly, there hardly ever is a need to backtrack. And to be forced to backtrack, accumulating minutes, maybe hours watching your party walk across known parts of the map just to get back to the nearest town/inn/safe place is the worst kind of punishment for the player. It's wasted time. "Risk" doesn't work well either. If you're lucky you get health and spells back for free. If you're unlucky and get ambushed. You either die and reload, or survive and are back in the same situation as before trying to rest, just maybe even more hurt. Back to step 1. Thus I think the best way to deal with the issue is to give regeneration of spells and health a real, "painful" cost in terms of other game resources. Resting and channelling energy could cost an item, or gold. Game time could be a scarce resource, and every night of rest brings the player closer to bad news. In fact, you could go as far as completely getting rid of spellbooks and rest-healing. Want to heal? Consume a potion. Want to cast a spell? That consumes a scroll, a charge, a gem, etc. In a deep dungeon, it should be possible to replenish those resources without backtracking, but in a way that rewards players which are using their resources well.

The game allows you to pause as much as you want. The designers already have to take that into account, but as PE is not an action game nor an RTS clicking faster or more precisely should make no difference. You could play PE with a crappy trackpad and still give your party as many commands per game time as anyone with a high precision gaming mouse. I'm really not sure how you think this "changes the options for play style".

I'd prefer the full map to be either in hand-drawn style, or simply for it to be the highest zoom level without switching to a different screen. And I want to be able to annotate the map.

Please explain. Given the limitations of the human visual system there is no reason not to go lossy. You simply need to make sure not to go overboard, and no one will be able to tell the difference.

If larger OLED screens were to be stuck at current pixel density levels for that long, it seems likely that many users would opt for high-res LCDs instead. Looking at the mobile space where OLEDs are relatively common now, OLEDs do trail LCDs a bit in terms of pixel density, but the Galaxy Note II still comes with a highly respectable 267 ppi 5,5" screen. Pet peeve: You probably mean TN (twisted nematic). Practically all active matrix LCDs and OLEDs are TFTs (the thin film transistor layer is the active matrix).

Infinity engine did in fact support tiles. Not everything in those games is unique. No need for guessing, the IWD image is a 4.13MiB JPEG image, which means it's a little more than 3 bits per pixel, or 13% of an uncompressed 24bpp image. And it's still very high quality. So yes, 45MiB of on-disk storage for 8 times the pixels would be plenty. With optimised compression you could probably get below 2bpp.

With combat you have a string of tactical decisions and dice rolls, and a bad roll can add to the tension, might make you use that expensive scroll or potion you saved up for a rainy day, and generally adds to the feeling of overcoming a real challenge. Non-combat parts of the game need to take a slice from this. Bad rolls are ok if at least something interesting happens. Instead of a single check failure leading to "I don't like you, I'm never going to talk to you again", at least give the player some opportunities to respond to a bad roll. Maybe you can do the NPC a favour to win back their trust (which might anger someone else), bribe them, threaten them, make them forget, or maybe after repeated check failure they give you misleading information, directing you into an ambush. There should be multiple levels of success, and different paths with interesting decisions to get there.

I'm not sure it's odd at all. What else would you do if you're badly injured, if not rest and tend to your wounds? The only problem I see from a game perspective is that the cost is too low.

Windows 8 is meant for all kinds of PC, and touch is not limited to Metro apps. By the time PE is released there will be millions of touch-enabled Windows 8 PCs, That most of them will probably use the tablet form factor is neither here nor there, they should all be powerful enough to run PE. PE does not rely on particularly fast or precise input, you can always pause. Thus no rebalancing is required. IE games can be played almost exclusively with a mouse, a keyboard is not necessary except to name your characters and savegames. PE will likely be the same. Pointing can be emulated well with touch, there are just a few things that would have to be handled differently because touch can't do right-clicks or hover. From the top of my head, these are actions that would have to be handled differently, with examples. The rest is just finger tap equals left click. Name character, savegame - bring up the on-screen touch keyboard built into Windows Scroll map, log, or journal - swipe with one finger Zoom the map (assuming it's supported in PE) - two-finger pinch Select party members - add a select modifier button on screen. While it is pressed, tapping a party member adds it to the selection (= Ctrl-click), tap-and-drag creates a selection rectangle. Show tooltips - add a second on-screen button. Pushing it shows all tooltips (useful to identify NPCs and loot) Right-click (to bring up item descriptions) - tap-and-hold Move item - tap-and-drag (same as with mouse) Move partial item stack - tap-and-drag, then swipe second finger up or down to adjust the number of items moved

I do agree it's important to properly support high dpi, but the existing variety of screen sizes, resolutions and viewing distances already is enough to justify supporting a large range of scale factors for both the UI and the world view. And then there are tactical considerations for zooming in and out of the latter. The level of detail shown in the 2560x1440 screenshot published is amazing. If they can increase the detail beyond that, great! But even if it were to go slightly blurry when you play it on a large high-dpi display and/or when you zoom in, that would be nowhere near as bad as the texture quality in most 3D games when you walk up to a wall. By the way, even integer upscaling looks somewhat worse than the same image shown at native resolution. That is still true if you just do nearest neighbour sampling (the fact that there are twelve tiny light sources instead of three in the same area is perceived differently by the eye).

Agreed, though the reason I want to be able to adjust text-heavy elements is so they don't stretch over the whole screen. There's a reason newspapers are printed in columns. A collapsible, RTS-style minimap could be useful if the area is large, particularly in towns. Other than that, I'd like there to be a touch-friently mode for the UI.

I like the idea of items with associated lore, but those items should be rare and manually placed. Some might be held by powerful NPCs and can be obtained by defeating them or helping them, while others are well hidden, And they don't necessarily have to be more powerful than everything else, though they are likely of high quality and they might have a very specific unique bonus/ability that is consistent with the lore. I also like the idea of items gaining special status by using them while performing a heroic feat.