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Jajo

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Everything posted by Jajo

  1. Jajo
    I'm all for it. They'll just have to take care when designing encounters to put some guards and wards or something like that in enough of them, to not trivialize the content. Having a careless group here and there, that can slowly be killed in this manner, would give it even more depth and replay value. We don't know much about spells, so I'm going to borrow from D&D: what about paralyzed/held monsters? Spells that could hold multiple opponents would become really powerful this way.
  2. Jajo
    How can people make such a big deal out of nothing? Instant death (& equivalent) effects were always a part of IE games. Were they worse for it? That's news to me! Did they stand out as being difficult to handle? Hell no! Did they add to the atmosphere and excitement? Undeniably! It also goes both ways. When I play a caster, I certainly do want to have instant kills at my disposal. Removing these options can not make game play anything but more limited and poorer. And for what reason? Because some people are afraid to load once or twice? Since when is having a little accident in a computer game a big no-no? It's E3 now - just look at what happened to Thief series because of such attitude.
  3. Jajo
    This would be the ideal solution, but unfortunately, it's been the one solution explicitly ruled out. I don't have the quote at hand, but Sawyer said, that this would effectively mean designing each area twice and there's just no budget for this.
  4. Jajo
    I must have missed that developer response or totally forgotten it. I believe you, but I just find it very hard to believe. As far as I knew every class could be combat efficient, but the game is still being designed to allow completion for "fight your way through it" and "talk you way through it" party builds/setups. I just find it incredulous that the latter would be anywhere near as combat efficient as the former, therefore the segregation in my post. Monster respawning is after all only about combat.
  5. Jajo
    I don't like respawning monsters. It just favors certain kind of parties too much. Resting in restricted areas or time limited resting seems more than enough to me. If Sawyer feels, that unlimited resting in designited areas is still too loose, I'd introduce two kinds of resting areas. One type can only be used once per day and the other (like an inn) unlimited number of times. This way combat specialized parties still have a significant edge in rough places, since they don't need to backtrack nearly as much.
  6. Jajo
    Combat log is not about the size of the stat, but about how you use it. How, after pages of examples, is this still not clear? 1. Diablo's rules of engagement are nothing compared to D&D or equivalent rules. Prone, stun, helpless, sneak attack, attack of opportunity, flanking, spell resistance, spell DC, damage reduction, grappling, sundering, charging, bull rushing, size category, tumbling, concealment, displacement, ... their combat mechanics are several worlds apart in complexity. 2. Diablo's combat lives in a world of statistics. This is due to character's and monster's HP bloating and in some cases having a very high frequency of attacks. Outcomes can therefore be very accurately predicted to a small margin of error. Therefore, combat log would always carry much less information for Diablo than in D&D. There are no 5 minutes worth of real time beat downs on the bosses in D&D. And even without pausing the game, the frequency of attacks is at least one order of magnitude lower. Using RNG for almost anything does not mean, that statistics will accurately predict an outcome. One also has to have a large enough sample count. 3. In Diablo you control one character. It's much much easier to painstakingly monitor what's happening (or has happened) to one character than to do so for six of them.
  7. Jajo
    Ranging from explicitly said, differently phrased to heavily implied. Although, personally, I attribute the quantity of responses to the belittling and condescending attitude in the continuation of the post. On the other hand, did someone else actually say (or even heavily imply) that they want everyone to have the combat log always visible? Because I'm more than fine with being able to turn it off, even though I never will. This option can only make the game better - letting people play as they wish to play.
  8. Jajo
    You don't see how that will turn into approximately white noise after just a couple of seconds of combat with more than 10 participants? I also sincerely hope, that knocking someone on the ground and similar effects will have a better tactical meaning, than just melodramatically show that someone has been hit for 20+ HP. If everyone would have been throwing visual clues like that around, artists woule have been hard pressed to not make combat look like a panto-show. The problem with audio clues is: once they are played, they are gone. So what now? Keep the combat rolling for another round and hope, that next time you'll be able to pin point the source of the sound (hopefully before he/she dies), or look at the combat log. Why, oh why, have I thought that having luscious identical triplets in my party was a good idea?! Saying, that visual and audio clues can "easily" convey just half the things a combat log can, is an overestimation and a half. I won't even compare the effectiveness of both approaches.
  9. Jajo
    English is not my motherlanguage, I don't always manage to tune my register perfecly, sorry. I didn't mean to upset anyone. Oh, that particular comment wasn't aimed at anything you've said. The rest of the post, however, was and that's why I've quoted you. Good point, but D&D's social skills were only a part of it. Different conversation choices in SoZ are also very dependent on character's abilities (high wisdom and intelligence were extensively used), character class and character alignment. If I recall correctly, Sawyer is quite in favor of physical attributes still being one of the big factors in a conversation. Anyway, I still wouldn't like to see a direct copy - I just wouldn't feel OK deciding what NPCs are saying to other NPCs by myself.
  10. Jajo
    No need to be condescending because some people don't like you(r designs). But back on topic, if Obsidian manages to visually convey to me that: one of my characters has run out of arrows, out of two different opponents hitting one of my characters at almost the same time, which one did the most damage and what kind of damage, I've landed my attack, but its damage is absorbed, other stuff, I can not be sure we'll find in P:E, like precisely identifying enemy spell when a mage starts to cast it, I just can not tell you how SUPER impressed I will be. Until then, I'll use the combat log in these common combat situations, so I really hope they will include it. I've never been a fan of a black box approach.
  11. Jajo
    @IndiraLightfoot Oh, right. I forgot about the mercenary camp. Autonomy for companions and being able to pick replies for mercenaries would be the best way to go then, in my opinion.
  12. Jajo
    Why do you equate conversation log of an interactive conversation being displayed like it would have been in a book to the story being linear and non-interactive like it would have been in a book? How is it even possible to jump to such conclusion? I don't think SoZ's dialogue mechanism would fit well with P:E. In SoZ each of the character was the player's creation - like in IWD. It therefore made sense to be able to play them out like you (the creator) wanted, by selecting what they have to say. In P:E we have companions and their personality is not created by the player and therefore the player should not be able to pick what these autonomous characters have to say.
  13. Jajo
    They do have moving water and foliage, so I don't see why not. I doubt it would be done with cloth dynamics in-game, if faking it (making the animation in advance) can achieve the same result as real time calculations.
  14. Jajo
    Oh, so by conversation management system you actually mean conversation window. I thought you were asking them to reinvent the wheel.
  15. Jajo
    Despite the GUI, how is that any different from IE? Because of the GUI, how is that any better than IE?
  16. Jajo
    You've answered yourself. Because it's pretty. Styling made towards split second decisions and 5% greater space awareness is essential for DotA (your example), but the same principles should not be the basis for an exploration game, where action can be paused at any time for as long as one likes. Even tactical isometric games (like X-COM) do not fit into this category, since combat will supposedly not be the alpha and omega of P:E. Yes, more of the background is visible with transparent UI, but I don't see how miniscule and detached (by HUD) pieces of background contribute to visual aesthetics more than not-minimalistic, yet well made HUD.
  17. Jajo
    You sure are late to the party, ORDUCKMANIAC.
  18. Jajo
    You've nailed IE feel perfectly. I hope you'll divide as much attention to various architecture styles, as you seem to do with inhabitants (I'm not complaining, I'm in awe). If you do, P:E is likely to be one of the most visually memorable RPGs. Make Icewind Dale proud!
  19. Jajo
    Nice purple numenera you have there, in the center.
  20. Jajo
    I don't see a need for one. If it is, fine. If it isn't, also fine. The only real argument I can think of [for or against the minimap] is actually against it, from an immersion point of view. If you get lost in an unknown city, you have to stop and look at the map...
  21. Jajo
    I'm very much against putting everything on the bottom for a simple reason: Virtually all today's monitors are wide-screen. If you take away the bottom part of a wide-screen picture, it will only become more squashed. Great for side scrollers, not great for (near) top-down view games. Storm of zehir's overland map is a great example, where one had to frantically click when traveling to the south, because of the bottom UI being in the way.
  22. Jajo
    YESPLEASE.
  23. Jajo
    While I would understand, if they deviated from the pitch out of necessity, I really hope, they will not. That's not because the pitch is so perfect, that any alteration would inevitably ruin it, but because P:E is one of the paragons of kickstarter games and one of the spearheads of this genre at the same time. The more promises it fulfils, the better for future (Obsidian's) kickstarter projects of similar scale. Sid Meier's worries are sound, if one commits to some very well defined design decisions - defined in enough detail to disallow flexibility. But I don't think that's the case P:E. P:E's pitch and stretch goals have been put broadly enough to allow a myriad of different approaches.
  24. Jajo
    Entitlement? No. I'm not demanding anything outside of scope of what Obsidian has pledged to do. I'm just expressing my disappointment about the update, which has - objectively speaking - significantly less information than vast majority of others. Ungracious? No. It lightens my (almost) every Wednesday morning, to read a P:E update during my breakfast and I've expressed my gratitude for the updates many times before. I am grateful for this one too, but that has no relevance to my disappointment about the amount of content in this particular update. Grumbler? This week, yes. But I hope I'm not the only one, that would rather see a trend of a few grumblers every update, than a trend of sketchy updates. I consider that healthy. EDIT: This will be enough derailment from my side.
  25. Jajo
    What a sketchy update Update from the monster man himself and no information on the monsters at all. Not even the one (and only one) in the concept art pictures. This all despite "concept artists, modelers and animators have been tearing through the bestiary and delivering quality assets at a rapid pace". No elaboration on the higher goals (goal = cool just sounds awfully too similar to goal = awesome™) and even the pipeline has only been described to a half point. Would describing it in full be just overwhelmingly too much information for the only update in a span of 3 weeks? If this is the alternative, just let Sawyer write the update content...
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