[Party System]

Currently BG2 has hundreds of interesting NPC mods which I would like to play, but I don't have 10 life-times to play them all. And I keep thinking "if only there was a cheating mod which would let me have 20 characters in a party at a time."

 

I'm actually just hoping the PE will be more mod friendly, so I can apply this cheat 10 years down the line when there are hundreds of interesting fanmade NPCs to try out.

[Resting system]

For countryside resting perhaps tie it to a "Woodsman" skill which not only affects liklihood of being attacked, but also how much you heal, druids and rangers would be particularly good at it but it would be open to anyone.

I'm open to this idea.

 

And the opposite. A "hunting" skill, increasing the likelihood of being attacked while camping in the countryside. Hunting for pelts, ingredients, experience, stuff like that.

[A question of Loot]

I want there to be impossible opponents like Kuroisan. I want to be scared out of my mind and flee from the terror.

 

But when the time comes and I actually manage to defeat them, I would want whatever awesome weapon they were wielding. Because that feeling of such grand rewards is just plain nice.

[Thoughts on Firearms]

Personally, I'd prefer matchlocks

Didn't know what that was so I just looked up some videos. Man those old types of guns are cool as heck.

 

 

EDIT: I'd also like to see firearms useable as melee weapons when unloaded. A pistol could double as a one-handed club. A musket could either be used as a two-handed club, or as a spear when you attach a plug bayonet:

Kind of like throwing axes in BG2? Those weapons were impractical to manage in the old infinity engine games. We had to go into the inventory and right click the weapon and then activate melee mode.

It was much easier to simply switch to a two-handed sword in the middle of the fight.

 

 

 

Not really sure why an arquebus should have such a terribly long reload time

Remember, the arquebus replaced the crossbow as the ranged weapon of choice for the european armies of the 16th century

Most importantly, it's probably a matter of game balancing. I prefer guns to be balanced rather than game breaking.

 

Then our real world is one thing, the engineers in PE might not have developed their guns as well as we have.

[Party formations. Ideas for customising.]

Just as a reference point to see what we're up against.

This is the old BG2 formation behavior for party+summons. As we can see the summoned creatures are in a straight line behind the party.

This is neither a useful formation (why should the meatshield be behind the party...?), nor is it realistic as per rjshae's disciplined/undisciplined argument. (although skeletons might be the exception here).

 

I think we can all agree that this needs massive improvement one way or another if there is any sort of summoner play style in PE.

 

 

Or perhaps they get hover points that they tend to return to, when there isn't an interesting bush to sniff or rabbit to chase?

I love this idea. It's even better than my suggestion when it comes to realism. Allows the summoned monsters to stray away temporarily but ultimately return to its hover point.

[Party formations. Ideas for customising.]

Then again, animal companions should probably a bit undisciplined and not quite as subject to formation control.

We can play with that idea too. While normal party members have small fixed points, summoned animals might have larger random space.

Perhaps like this?

This would be expanding on the idea of that green field. Since animals aren't so orderly they might be anywhere in their big circle.

[Party formations. Ideas for customising.]

In update #3, we had some info about formation and party management.

Something I think is worth discussing. Maybe we can give the developers some more ideas to play with.

 

Say, if the player character is focusing on Summoner play style. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to customize formation for your summoned creatures?

This was something older games like lacked. I remember in BG1 when I walked into a greater basilisk with petrifying gaze and my animated skeletons with stone immunity was walking behind my party due to the way the default formation was hardcoded. So I had to manually manage the skeletons as a separate party (which could disappear into the fog of war if I told them to walk too far).

Something like this proposal would improve a summoner centric play style greatly, wouldn't you think?

 

 

Maybe there could be slot(s) for summoned familiar(s) as well?

 

 

Then there's formation for the main party. Let's say that we have run out of invisibility spells and only the rogue managed to stealth.

We could have his scouting position customized into the formation:

Here's a couple of additional ideas I had. What if we could customize a random field for the forward position? Every time you move the party, #3's position gets shuffled within the green field.

(I'm actually not sure what kind of use case this could be useful in. Just trowing out some random ideas to get the creativity rolling)

Or how about this alternative. We've given #3 three fixed positions, but every time we move the party his position is randomized among those three positions.

I imagine something like this is much easier to program than that green field above.

Again, not to sure how this randomization gimmick could become useful. Perhaps for summoned creatures? We typically don't care about when a summoned creature dies, or when their spell duration simply run out.

So maybe the randomization could be useful as a redundancy mechanism?

In this situation the formation could become vulnerable if Summon 1 and Summon 2 dies. Very critical positions. But luckily Summon 5 and Summon 6 could take their place.

 

What do you guys think about all these ideas?

Please do suggest something better if you think of something. Or maybe think up some more interesting use cases.

[The Scaling Poll!]

BioWare implemented scaling into Dragon Age 2 - look how wonderful it turned out.

They also implemented scaling in Baldur's Gate 2 as far as I remember.

 

It had reasonable scaling. If you were a high level party, some of the creatures would be replaced by some other creatures, kobold->orc for example

 

(Or maybe I remember wrong)

[Enhanced Pets]

I think birds are basically not a bad idea. But what would they do?

Scouting perhaps?

It could be in disguise somehow so the A.I. thinks it's a neutral creature, maybe.

I remember in BG2 where I always wanted to explore each inch of the map to remove the black fog. Some places weren't accessible, so a flying pet could be nice.

 

But it doesn't really matter much to me.

[What's Everyone Looking For In Strongholds?]

Do you know that feel when you come home from a journey and have 20 full plate armors and 20 two-handed swords +1 from some unfortunate enemies who were in your path?

 

Would be nice if the player character could upgrade his guards with those plate armors and weapons.