Infiltrator_SF

Further evidence of cat supremacy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n-3cFIuQBc I can see more uses for this in PE than a midget dog taking out my trash

I think a dog or pet is fine, but taking a character slot is not. He should be the extension of the main character (perhaps for some classes only) and potentially have his own skill tree, but not a full fledged character, it's just a wasted slot - he'll never be able to wear armor, have weapons or have the impact on the story like a human, even though you can "love" him. I just think it's far easier to let you tag along with a pet without having to sacrifice a human(oid) for it.

First off I'd like to congratulate Obsidian for the great animated scene that was just released, I really like the art direction this game is heading. I wanted to talk about an aspect that is often tweaked very late in the development so I imagine I'm not late to this sort of thing - balance of weapons, spells and abilities. Oftentimes, even veteran developers are introducing blatantly overpowered or incredibly useless abilities/weapons in their games. This goes mostly for singleplayer games, like PE, where they try to fit in something for everyone, but end up making a totally one-sided scale of power when it comes to these elements. Case in point - Bioshock infinite that some of you may have played. When you die, you revive at 50% health points. There's an equipment slot that basically lets you revive at 100%. Every revival heals enemies and takes your money. This is an example of an incredibly stupid skill done by a developer that has had plenty of experience in the industry. Someone might say this will let you take on enemies more easily after a difficult encounter, but why would you want to encourage people to use a skill that benefits from a situation you should always be trying to avoid in the first place? Why not take one of the blatantly stronger skills that grants more damage, but instead rely on corpse-flopping your way across a difficult choke? I know what you're going to say - PE is not aimed toward people that are mindlessly going through the game, we're all experienced min-maxers and such a game will be most certainly have no glaring balance holes. Well, look at the D&D games that PE is taking a lesson from - most of them have a myriad of useless abilities and spells, not to mention weapons and armor scale awkwardly where you have a lot of great longswords to chose from but a few lousy axes, for example. Daggers in D&D were largely useless, the best assassins use staffs because the backstab multiplier takes in account base weapon damage. TeS: Oblivion, for example, punished you for levelling as soon as you saw the levelup notification because you could miss out on skill points while mosters scaled based on your level. I hope the PE devs think hard on how some of us enjoy a wide variety of viable abilities and how important it is for every one of them has either a strong synergy or otherwise can be used to good effect in a min-max scenario. This will most likely come down to number crunching but I guess the important thing is that the item/skill itself does not promote some counter-intuitive mechanic first.

We've gotten confirmation that rogues will be getting the 3rd D&D sneak attack. But since we're no longer restricted by rulebooks I was wondering if a rogue could get something akin the 2nd D&D backstab. For those who don't know this would translate into stealth+behind target only, devastating hits, which I really liked from the games such as BG2. I assume that the rogue would have to forfeit some other skills as a consequence, of course. Furthermore, the multipliers should definitely not use base weapon damage as it would make daggers and low-damage/high attack speed weapons unfavorable compared to slow weapons with a big base damage.

Since those are powerful bonuses, the leader of the party, which is a role hot-swappable, should be the only one to give a bonus. So if you know you're going to be fighting undead, move the priest up to the front of the party. Lots of traps around? Rogue to the fore! IMO, it should only be the original PC's passives that are gotten like that. Swapping your party leader on the fly to meet the situation's demands doesn't seem right at all.

I don't like how a lot of people things thieves/rogues should be "support" or "debuffers". IMO, there should be a specialization that allows them to excel at conversations, traps, pickpocketing and non-combat skills, but a specialization like an assassin should most definitely be a heavy single target damage dealer.

As talked about in the latest update, the dev team are prototyping the 4 core classes which have been revealed as the Warrior, Rogue, Mage and Priest. Anyone who's played an IE mage is very familiar with these archetypes. The question is, what do you feel that should be different about them this time around? For me, I am definitely someone that does NOT want streamlining as we are used to seeing today when it comes to multi-platform games. I am, however, in favor of some mechanics that felt redundant in the IE games.. The Warrior - in the IE games, a basic fighter was little more than an attack machine. Unless you multi/dual classed, the fighers were, for the most part, just there to hit things and take the hits, there was nothing strategic about them until you moved up the level chain. I feel like their role was good, but they needed some utility abilities early on to make them more engaging and interesting. The Rogue - my favorite IE (and any other RPG) character, the Rogue was mostly there to get rid of traps, unlock chests and little else for the majority of people. I adored the Assassin kit in BG2, for example and exploited backstabbing to the fullest. That said, I feel like stealth should be remade so it does not do a check - you should always be successful in entering stealth but your success in sneaking up on someone should be determined by your hide/walk silently levles and the enemies spot/listen checks. Daggers are also very redundant in most RPGs because they tend to use just base damage for multiplication and their increased attack speed means little when your 1-4 damage is the only thing that gets multiplied by a backstab multiplier. So I think they should be looked at closely and made much, much more interesting for backstab-happy characters. The Mage - Mana or Memorization, that is the question, I guess. Perhaps it can be a hybrid of both. I am very much against having a lot of tools at your disposal at any given situation. A mage should by all means prepare in advance for anything AND properly apply those spells in combat. At the same time, it feels kind of cheesy when your mage can just litter the field with everything he's memorized in a few turns with no hindrance. Picking up schools and restricting some spells while gaining power with others seems like a good starting position to me. The Priest - Another tanky class, these guys have been mostly men and women of cloth in recent yerars. In my opinion, they should keep their full plate armor, as in IE games, they have always been very different from warrior-types despite this similarity. Akin to mages, there's the question between having a mana-pool of sorts or sticking to the original formula of memorization. One of the things that was annoying was the abundance of priest spells that very quickly became useless as you gained levels, as well as the constant need to swap out old heal spells with new ones. Feel free to add your opinions.

Yes, of course.. (If the target audience are raging 15 year olds about to hit puberty.) *To be read like Edwin line

And if they're not going to let me get those DAMN COOL finishing animations where the guy just spins around and decapitates everyone, then they'd better let me have a personal huge-ass dragon mount, and if they're not going to let me have that then they'd better let me romance a oversexualized female with 5% chance of failure because only that can fill the void in my real life. Ah... wait a second.. you're just an entitled console player thinking this is some kind of Dragon Age spin-off. Cute

There has to be class balance in relation to class balance against the world, but there obviously is no need to analyze which class would beat each class in a 1 on 1 situation from a PvP perspective. Now, someone might say - "a lot of the NPCs you face against just might be classes that a player can choose him/herself", to which I would reply - the mechanics/item combinations that players can exploit surpass those that are utilized by the AI so, in the end, the problem cancels itself out. In the end, all of the classes should have a spot in the world, some of them better at something, others at other things, some classes being specialized more, while others being able to fit multiple roles. The only balance that has to be taken in consideration is that there shouldn't be a no-brainer class/kit to pick. For example, it would be ok that on higher difficulties, you absolutely need a healer, but it would be bad if there was one class/kit that was outright the best pick regardless of situation/composition.

I never wanted to make this an argument of realism. Like I said, it should be about choices and consequences. The normal and easy game difficulty should be there to allow you to beat PE without worrying too much about that, so you can't "screw up" your party to the point where the game becomes impossible to beat. And please, PLEASE do not mention atrocities such as DA2 in my topic. PE is the spiritual successor of IE games, that is, CRPGs, not consolized pieces of trash that appeal to horny 15 year olds who happen to throw a fit of rage should everyone in their party NOT be leveled up regardless of activity.

I think that all armor types should be viable from start to finish. That said, there should definitely be "normal" variants of armor that are simply weak compared to the magical variants. I think that there wasn't much distinction between armor in IE games when you would compare the same tier, i.e. if your character was a thief, initiatlly, you'd want the leather armor with the lowest AC and eventually you'd want one with the best magical attributes, which typically had the best AC anyway. Same goes for robes for mages and plated stuff for fighters. But I think that some armor types should have a subtle, specific property on their own and not just an AC modifier. For example, mail armor should be resitant to piercing and/or slashing attacks, while padded armor should be resistant to bludgeoning sources of attack. This would all go in addition to the armor benefit that you gain across the board. But it shouldn't stop on that, some variants could also provide benefit to sneaking (low noise) casting (easier to move hands) etc. These bonuses should not be big, but, again, enough to favor a certain style of play.

Powergaming and balance are two very, very different things.. just because a mage uses magic shouldn't mean he'll be better in every aspect than at lockpicking/thievery than a rogue. I think Obsidian failed with the aspect of class balance in PT - as in, the Thief was a vastly inferior choice of class compared to the Mage/Warrior. But for example, the Assassin Kit in BG2 was a great pure class, probably the one with the biggest insta-gib contender in the game. But I am sure Obsidian realized their mistakes in balance when it comes to PT.

If there was no powergaming or min/maxing than you would be essentially removing a polarity from a game, the other one being absolute casual (i.e. one who picks stats/spells randomly on level ups). RPGs are the soul and body of powergaming - there is no other ganre who can emulate this concept quite obviously, and you want to make it "irrelevant"? If you don't want to play a game like that, no one is putting a gun to your head forcing you to do it.

Damn, that's a whole new level of low, getting butthurt over someone getting butthurt eh?

I dont remember that IE games forced you to change any character, either through quest design or through game mechanics. Its not like you go "on a quest" and someone says "PICK ME, PICK ME!" like for example in Mass Effect. You could stick with your team for the whole game and personally, it made more sense for me as you get somewhat morally invested in these characters. Also, as being D&D, you only had so much characters that fit "your" alignment available. Sure, more good than bad iirc, but I dont think many people just picked the evil companion over someone that was with their party for quite some time, only because the new one has better stats. I for one didnt. It even went so far that I pretty much disliked anyone in BG2 besides my usual party. And you did not really give examples, on what would be the reason to change party members in a game, where you dont "need" to switch party members in and out. I agree. I think many people's viewes are skewered by the ME franchise, which is something that PE definitely should not look up to. The characters practically begged or were forced by the game to be parts of certain events, even if you didn't plan on that. The story in PE should be structured in the same manner like PT or BG - you should not feel any need to bring a certain member on a certain quest (that is not part of their companion quest-line). Of course, they should only "open up" to you after a LONG time, unlike in DA:O where you could instantly get it going with Morrigan. PT abd BG characters made you WORK for their trust.

I didn't intend to derail this into a discussion, it just irked me a bit, and I did not know about the song..

I'd like a large variety of weapons. I'm sick and tired of RPGs boiling down weapons into smaller categories with each and every successor. Take a look at Morrowind > Oblivion > Skyrim. Maybe, just MAYBE merge the dagger/shortsword into one. As for variety, I think the piercing, slashing, blunt damage types would be just fine.

You have a LOT of reasons listed in this very thread why people want inactive party members to be left out of the experience, just read it out. There is no "metagame" forcing you to switch characters out. It didn't exist in previous IE games and it won't exist here. You pick out a party and stick with it, simple as that. There won't be unsurpassable obstructions you just got to have that level 5 druid for. Just deal with it, think your party through and go with it, this game probably won't have multi-classing/dual-classing that makes your head hurt, but I am pretty confident it won't be the casual fest 15 year olds have no trouble getting into.

I agree, but it shouldn't be too hard to make stealth depend on lightning. Basically, there should be a heat map on every background, places under shadow should be darker, while illuminated ones lighter - the brighter the light, the lighter the heatmap, opposite to darkness, making the heat map darker. The heat map would basically incur a bonus or penalty on stealth checks. And yeah, conversations triggering when you enter a room with your stealthed assassin is really awkward and just ruins it, I hope they realized by now they have to do away with those.

In single player RPGs, I always name my main PC after my real name.

Couldn't find the appropriate topic on the subject, but I was thinking just how long a game of this scope might take to produce. In my opinion, it will be no less than two years, which is unfortunate since there's a few games that I would want more than a BG/PT/IWD spiritual successor. Truthfully I shouldn't think about this game because upon realizing the production hasn't even stared yet makes me want to forget I even know of its existence

CDs have been abandoned some years ago as a physical medium, in terms of art, the sizes of the textures alone will be huge but we have to consider some huge games were also surprisingly small considering optimization like you said (Skyrim is a noteworthy example, being only ~5 gigs in size).

Not only america is watching and funding you guys