Doppelschwert

Suppose PoE had Romances, but only with hideous, old characters that don't apply to your sense for aesthetics, but great personalities. Would you be happy and rest your case? More to the point, suppose that there is an RPG that demands storywise that you can only play an old character, so that the same constraint fits from a story point of view. Having kids is also out of the question due to age. Would you be happy? Interesting question, its very hypothetical the suggestion that a development company would create a party of ugly old characters and expect Romance to be as popular? But to answer your question, no I don't think the Romance arc would be as appealing. And the reason is I wouldn't be able to identify with my party members as easily. Also I am not dismissing the relevance of classic love stories like Beauty and the Beast, I am saying they are not normally applicable in RL. In other words I have to be attracted to someone to have a Romantic interest in, I could not date someone that I'm not on some level physically attracted to. I imagine this is the same for most people? Ok, suppose I actually make the game 'Senior Citizen Merlin, mature of time' featuring Merlin the Wizard as Main Character with Companions Gandalf, Dumbledore, Ravel and some other olderly Wizard Women, for which I somehow got the licencing rights. You said you don't find the arc to be appealing, but would the game be better for featuring romance between the old characters or could I skip it without loss? It's an awesome game btw, so there is no denying anyone would want to play it, so thats not an issue.

Suppose PoE had Romances, but only with hideous, old characters that don't apply to your sense for aesthetics, but great personalities. Would you be happy and rest your case? More to the point, suppose that there is an RPG that demands storywise that you can only play an old character, so that the same constraint fits from a story point of view. Having kids is also out of the question due to age. Would you be happy?

Obviously, given what we know so far, we can assume they LARP most of their time.

I'm a mathematician, so you're probably right about your observation. It's also fine by me to decrease the bonus of the skill, I just would've skilled differently if I had known this. Again, don't get me wrong: I have fun playing the game, I don't regret buying it, and I'm sure that its getting easier/more fun the longer I can play and skill my characters. Most of the observations people told me here I have already made myself as well while playing the game, so its not that I didn't invest time in it. However, for me this is not the perfect RPG that it seems to be for most people here. It's good, but I'd prefer a more transparent experience, which I'll probably get from PoE. I personally dislike crafting because it often feels generic, but maybe I'll look into it later, if everyone is recommending it.

Let me stop you there. If the game gives me this option, I expect the trade off to be balanced. I didn't like the companions when I started a trial run before the main run so it seemed like a good choice. I don't think I should have to play through the whole game before I can take some options presented at the start without screwing up.

To figure stuff out is part of the fun. Learn and improve. Also the basic systems are pretty transparent if you take the time to read and study. This game needs time and dedication and that's actually a good thing imo. And no, mages are not far superior (it only seems that way at the very beginning of the game). A well balanced party is far superior to anything else. In late game melees and archers are VERY important. I don't really get why especially my German countrymen have so many difficulties/complaints with the game. That's really beyond me. It really should be the other way round. We Germans should appreciate a game like that and praise it. Or have we all become filthy casuals? I blame consoles... I don't see what that has to do with nationality. Figuring stuff out is fine as well, but you need proper feedback for this to work and I find the presentation of the game lacking. For example, the game tells me that I get a bonus on skills if the corresponding attribute is high. So I look at the teleport spell the archer has, which lets me teleport 15m for 4 AP. Then I increase dexterity and now it says I get a 5% bonus on top of the skill, because I have high dexterity. Turns out the skill still costs 4 AP and teleports me 15m. I can conclude that MAYBE it doesn't work on the skill or MAYBE it only has influence on the AP cost and is not considered because 5% of 6 is not an integer. However, for the haste skill of the rogue class, the attribute influences the chance of getting the haste status in the first place, which brings me to the conclusion that it probably wont affect the teleport skill at all. Which leads to the question why there is a hint that I get a bonus from my attribute. There are a lot of such mixed signals in this game and IMHO this is just plain intransparent and bad design. There is also other stuff that you just don't get told like what you get at lvl up and inconsistent stuff like not getting any talent for having 5 lvls as a witch. I didn't even consider crafting given that I have no skills in it. Don't get me wrong, I'm able to workaround this stuff but the game just feels random at parts due to such reasons. However, stuff like cutting the magic resistance of warriors by half in the latest patch is not helping the transparency of the game either - if I had known this, I may have skilled differently instead of rushing Man at Arms 5 ASAP.

I'm lvl 8 now but I don't get all the praise for this game. The story is meh, the character system is pretty unbalanced and the manual is close to useless. I've started both characters with the lone wolf perk because it sounded fun, choose one as an archer and one as a swordsman. Without elemental magic, you can't really use the elemental fields everywhere and the elemental arrows are quite limited in quantity. At the same time, the game is balanced around flinging elemantal stuff all the time, making mages far superior. I'm not complaining that its hard this way, I'm complaining that there was not enough information available at any time to make better choices. I also find the talents structure to be lacking. Why do some skills unlock a talent on lvl 5 and other not? And given the way your gear needs attributes, you really can only specialize in archer, warrior or mage archtypes with minor modifications. It is enjoyable if you figure stuff out, but PoE will be superior for me just because it has transparent game design.

Don't forget the spaceship battles and the cameo of Vin Diesel. Given what we know of the setting, the only plausible reason why they haven't been confirmed is because they are integral to the story, which we are supposed to know nothing about. BTW, Vin Diesel played DnD for over 20 years.

How are racial abilities any different? They are proabably more beneficial to certain classes as well.

It's set up as spoiler free on the main story.

Josh said there will be 2 weapon sets available for each char, more if you take some talents for it. That implies that you will only have a binary choice anyway, so it wont be hard to learn which weapon should be used in which circumstance. Unless you want to reload to relocate weapons, but the game is not designed with this in mind, so I dont see a problem there. And I actually don't see the problem with the complexity of the weapon system. There is a simple scale: Weapons: Extreme 1: Big Weapon <=> great damage, slow, low accuracy <=> useful for heavy armor Extreme 2: Small Weapon <=> low damage, fast, higher accuracy <=> useful for light armor Everything independent from this scale are minor modifications which you should choose as you prefer them personally. Just choose 2 of the 3 sets 'big, small, ranged' and you should be fine. I also think the intention is to rather focus on targeting than switching weapons. Want to be more tanky in general? Take the weapon with the deflection bonus into one of your sets. Don't want to differentiate between attack types? Choose the weapon that has best of two attack types. Etc. Regarding the attack types (slashing, crush, etc), they already said that there will be no combat puzzles in the sense that an enemy is highly resistant against everything but 1 or 2 types. Just give your party a spectrum of different stuff and you should be totally fine by clever targeting. After a couple of fights you will know which armor should be targeted by which weapon as you will have a lot of visceral feedback anyway.

You missed to link humans.

I don't think Early Access has been confirmed. If it was, I'd be pissed because someone late to the party gets to play the game earlier than me, a silver backer, just because I want my copy to be on GoG. Besides, I think early access is a terrible business model.

You should also note that the beta is not the actual game but rather a small section of it. You can consider it more as a demo which is meant to showcase gameplay and mechanics.

Totally understandable, but the same case can be made for numerous things: voice-acting, graphics, the stronghold, crafting, etc. Objectively, on a case by case basis, it's fair to say "I think, given this game's budget, etc., there shouldn't be any romance in it." But, there's hardly any evidence supporting "romance = bad, just as a sheer concept in RPGs." I mean, if it was a stretch goal, and they had raised an extra $250,000 for it, would it be okay, then, in principle? Since it didn't detract from the budget? Or would there still be sufficient reason for people to be upset with its inclusion (before even seeing how it's included, etc.)? The intention of my post was the probably hopeless attempt to make Bruce less dismissive about the legit concerns that people have towards romance by appealing to his empathy (which he surely must possess, being a foundation for any romance). Regarding your claim that there is no evidence that supports romance=bad, what is your conclusion? The way I read your posts, you sound like your argument is that there may be a good implementation that proves everybody wrong, we just don't know it. From a scientific point of view, that makes little sense - you can't check every implementation because there are infinitely many, so the most rational thing would be to just assume that the majority of samples are representive. And you know just as well as everybody (except Bruce and the BNS) that most implementations have a lot of flaws and most people on this board find them unsatisfactory. Of course, no one will object if you can construct such a counterexample, but until then, it's IMHO more reasonable to assume that such a thing does not exist. My conclusion is that this whole arguments breaks down on the subjective level of your standards, and I get the feeling that most people agree with me on this. In the same vein, I don't see how additional 250.000 $ makes any difference. Its still subjective in the end, the people who would spend the budget on romance would do it no matter how many money there is and the people that wouldn't spend the money on romance wouldn't change their minds either. For the most part, atm the thread is more about getting Bruce to acknowlegde that other people have different and in particular comprehensible views. And the occasional humor of course.

See, thats the reason most antimancers are, well, antimancers. For them, this distracts from the game, and if the existence of romance also implies that other things are cut from budget, then even you can realize why they feel that certain are games are better without romance.

You were suggesting that different attributes factor into the same derived stat. Your example consisted of Dexterity and Might factoring into Accuracy. In this situation, you usually become indifferent to which attribute to increase in order to increase accuracy. This becomes clear in systems like Arcanum where the derived stats grow in a linear rate with the attributes, but even in your example where we have a product ( modification(might)*accuracy(dex) ) you can skip one of the attributes (although the incentive to just go for one attribute is smaller in your example). The result is that when you have to raise an attribute, you don't need to consider between dexterity and might anymore when it comes to accuracy so your decision becomes actually easier. If, in a classic setting, strength governed chance to hit and damage and dexterity governed chance to hit and evasion, the decision boils down to damage versus evasion. If you then feel like you don't ever need evasion because you have a tough armor, the decision becomes a no-brainer. However, if the attributes are evenly spread in function, then there is IMO a greater incentive to spread your points accordingly. If strenght only governs damage and dexterity only governs to hit and evasion, then you probably need both to keep being effective at hitting things. Don't get me wrong, you can have such a system and it works, but this is a matter of preference. The system you describe may be more realistic or may be able to express more stuff, but it probably ends up convoluted and with a lot of special cases. To refer to your example again, as soon as you introduce might into the equation for the greatsword, then your greatsword has a lof of downsides: You have to give up your second hand, your attack speed and you even need two attributes to use it correctly. Balancing dictates that this weapon should somehow offer more in exchange, which makes it then strictly better in some sense compared to other weapons. Because to use it is either a penalty to players not having enough attributes or an advantage to players having enough attributes (again, compared to other weapons), wherever you want to put the baseline of balance. Again, this actually decreases incentive to use this stuff in the first place as it nudges you to the 'correct' attributes you should choose. Again: It all boils down to the question whether you prefer to display a lot of people through attributes or if you prefer to have intuitive, balanced rules. I prefer the later, simple and intuitive approach. The example with the monk just highlighted that, even if other attributes give you bonuses as well, if you aggregate enough derived stats the decision becomes a no brainer. Your argument is solely based on epic levels, which are not what most people play. Immunity towards mind-affecting spells, as well as the other epic talents are available at lvl 20+ only, whereas most people prefer to play DnD between the sweet spot of lvl 5-15. I can make a similar claim that up to lvl 20, given evasion and in particular improved evasion, the reflex save is not every important to a monk so that a higher will save will prove better. Furthermore, given the high saves of a monk, I think saves are not the important thing here. Making a WIS monk ensures that your monk kills wizards before epic levels, which is IMO the point of the class. And in this context, a high DC for stunning fist is far more important. About the skills, that all depends on how you play the monk. There are also a lot of interesting and effective wisdom based skills available, for example healing. Don't get me wrong, you are right about the epic levels, but its hardly fair to assume that everybody only plays with the ultimate goal to be in epic levels.

You do realize that this devalues every factor at the same rate, do you? The feat 'intuitive strike' (or whatever it's called) gives a character in DnD 3.5 the ability to use his wisdom modificator as an attack bonus. Give this to a monk and basically everything he relies on is governed by wisdom only: Attack Bonus, Armor Class, DC of class abilities, Will Save. Sure, you could also use strength for attack bonus or dexterity for armor class, but why would you do that at this point? The result is min-maxing core stats which is exactly what PoE tries to avoid (and actually accomplishes). And min-maxing are in fact boring and not very interesting results.

I'd guess that the talents available to every class are almost exclusively passive buffs or combat modes at best. In the DnD games using 3E the active talents are heavily tied to the fighter class (knockdown, aim: body part, whirlwind attack) so I'd guess that the combat classes in PoE just have these kind of abilites built in on lvl up of the respectice classes in order to differentiate them better (whats the point of giving everyone the same active ability?). As far as I understand the design goals, talents would best be used to differentiate different builds and thats probably achieved most easily if you just give buffs to mechanics that are most often used in different roles (better healing, better evasion, better handling of certain weapons, better summons, better flanking, etc). Also, note that the plan of the devs is to lock talents behind OR conditions. So even a powerful attack skill can be just using up one talent point if you lock it beneath (18 Might OR LVL 10). I don't think that they will differentiate between physical and magical attacks as even Might, the attribute governing attack strength, concerns both. Therefore its not a problem if a class has access to a powerful talent - it either paid its price in attributes or waited an apropiate time. So thats probably a reason why there won't be long talent lines.

beta is not a demo. It cannot be "DRM free". When you log in, you help the company iron out bugs from their server. I don't understand your reasoning. It's totally viable to have an installer for a beta and manual patches. There are (mostly Indie developers) that do this kind of thing. Even with this approach you can have a system that creates log files on a crash, the difference being that you have to allow the program to send it to the developers. And those kind of betas usually also have a special subforum on the forums for bugs and the likes. Is it less efficient than having everything automated while being permanently monitored through the internet? Yes. But it also has the advantage that you don't need to program all this stuff in the first place as well. Personally, I wouldn't care if they had their own client, but I would feel cheated if I had to use steam for the beta when I ordered my game with the intent on getting it via GoG. Or lets rather say I'd be dissappointed.

I'm interested in playing a human monk myself, but I'm going to try out all the classes during the beta so that I can see what are the most fun mechanics. In the end, I'm aiming for a kensai, so monks wearing swords are the obvious starting point. The rest is going to be written companions for the first run. I'm going to build some nonsensical custom parties afterwards.

Let's just hope the beta will be available DRM free.

As long as you reject the Truth, you'll always be an omega, my friend. Just look and learn: What do I have to do to be a xi? I think that'd be neat on my resume.

As far as I can remember, they once said that the beta would take part in an optional part of the game world in order to avoid spoilers related to the main quest. However, I don't have any source available for this claim, so sorry. I'd say that this at least makes sense as most modern games have demos where they drop you in a part of the game world where you only go during mid game to show some advanced features. This also ensures that the work done on the beta areas is not subtracted from the work on the actual game.

To get back on the topic: It was previously stated (or rather, I can recall an interview where one of the devs said) that the design of talents available to everyone is the last thing that is done, after the classes are properly tested and balanced. It was also stated that the devs are unsure about how open the class talents will be. For example, at one point they were thinking about letting you choose a talent from a list of exclusive class talents at some levels for certain classes, thus changing the order of talents available to you. There were also some ideas about having prerequisites of talents in the form of stats OR lvl. For example, a fighter could be able to select a special fighter talent at every level, where for each talent you have to have some stats or a minimum lvl. So talent1 may be available at lvl2, talent2 may be available at lvl3, but you could also take it at as soon as lvl2 when you habe 14 Might. So even with a limited amount of 1 extra talent per 3 levels, just reordering class talents may give a lot of customization and change the tactics available if they are going for this route. I would also expect the talents system to undergo several revisions until the end of beta, so I don't think we can expect any information anytime soon.