Sacred_Path
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Posts posted by Sacred_Path
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a bit different in that you just have some stores that are "better" than others, no matter what you're selling, right? I think having certain kinds of items being at better prices, and certain items at worse prices, depending on resource availability would be more interesting, as well as less "compelling" in the manner Sacred_Path argues. This is also something that could be more subtly hinted to the player (so that they'd notice its existence) than "if you're looking for good deals, visit X", which takes all of the complexity away from the mechanic.includes BG 'regional' pricing guide: http://www.forgottenwars.com/bg1/miscellany.htm
discussion on BG2 'regional' pricing: http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=44971
discussion on IWD 'regional' pricing: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/256221-icewind-dale/63966399
so there is a good chance it will be in P:E (it is supposed to be based on the IE games anyway), so far most arguments have been for regional pricing that is more flavorful and realistic (less exploitable).
Also, if the fewer items the mechanic extends to, the better (= less of a balance issue). If you get better deals on weapons, ok, there are only so many weapons you'll want to have. Strictly talking about buying, though... speaking of which, the whole thing would be much more amenable/ less gameable if it only extended to buying.
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Dear devs, manuals are actually a good place to include more information on any given gameplay element than what fits in a pop-up
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Ok some jump out at me, but they tend to be the bad kind.
@Obs, do you know what kind of NPC I never need to see again? Celebrities.
"I'm Drizzt Do'Urden, level 500 Derpmaster. Pay me my due respects or abuse my poor AI to steal my scimitars"
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Looking through all the RPG's I've installed right now, nothing jumps out at me.
Well, maybe your right hand from the Dwarven Noble vignette in DA:O. They struck a really good balance between him being jovial and respectful with you. OMG GOOD BIOWARE NPC
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Your point (I'm tempted to say "obviously" too) doesn't take into account that different players have different tastes and play styles. You are a statistical basis of one. All we can glean from your experience is that at least one person was not adversely affected by regional pricing in IE games.
Your point (that no two players of BG play the same way is just as speculative, *obviously*.
If we now find someone who has noticed regional pricing and liked this attention to detail or even used it at least once we could make a good case that this can be a nice feature. One could argue that we have already found them because the wiki/forum links above show at least some interest.
I would never be so foolish as to say that something cannot be liked by at least one person on the planet. This can be true for bugs, glitches, Bioware romances etc.
Your insistence that a good compromise between insignificant and too significant can't be found would only work if
1) money could be as closely balanced as the healing potions in a linear shooter
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2) the game was balanced on a player using the regional pricing instead of balanced on a player ignoring regional pricing
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3) that there wasn't any fine tuned (and in-game changeable) difficulty settings with which players can tune the difficulty to their play style anyway.
The question is what you find to be a "good compromise"; and no I'm not convinced by people using it like some mythical reference.
As I've already said, but I will repeat myself, there are only two possible cases: Either getting better deals doesn't count (i.e. because you can buy everything you need on all difficulty levels with the money you'll get naturally), or it does count (because i.e. you'll want to use magical ammunition against every single enemy in the game; maybe on Insane difficulty with no reloads in BG1?). I find the latter to be very likely to kill fun for me, and yes, I speculate, for others too. As an example, in that link for Icewind Dale you posted (the only one I read), the poster who said that the best deals can be gotten in the Severed Hand also said "if you want to go down there". And THAT is exactly the point.
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As always, Arcanum is a good example. It starts with a bang, quite literally. You wake up on the crash site of your blimp, some guy says mysterious stuff of utmost importance, then another guy hails you as the Chosen One.
This is the same for every character, but it's a very short sequence (in contrast to the, in my opinion, way too long opening dungeons of PS:T and BG2)
There are good examples for both kinds. Arcanum as you said is a good example for the medias res approach, a good example for an opening dungeon would be Wizardry 8. (Though of course it could be argued Arcanum's prologue is actually crash site + Shrouded Hills)
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When you put a number of young, fit men and women together what happens is a whole lot of he-ing and she-ing goes on and there are undeniable consequences, even in the modern era.
If it was inevitable, it would not make the news, I think
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So your point just a moment ago wasn't "if prices differed, you'd obviously be COMPELLED to go out of your way to take maximum advantage of all the pricing differences?" I guess we just imagined those direct quotes from you.
If you go to the trouble of reading my posts, you will see two points:
1. "if money is an issue in the game, the game is tough, and money can make it easier, you will be compelled to do what you can to get more money"
2. "if money is not an issue, your regional pricing will simply be lost on the player."
Obviously, since I have said I have played the IE games on a higher than normal difficulty, and I didn't notice the difference in pricing at all*, we're talking about #2 here.
* it's possible I actually noticed the difference, but just didn't adjust my playstyle (as there was no need). It's been some time.
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includes BG 'regional' pricing guide: http://www.forgottenwars.com/bg1/miscellany.htm
discussion on BG2 'regional' pricing: http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=44971
discussion on IWD 'regional' pricing: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/256221-icewind-dale/63966399
so there is a good chance it will be in P:E (it is supposed to be based on the IE games anyway), so far most arguments have been for regional pricing that is more flavorful and realistic (less exploitable).
Interesting. I didn't even know the IE games had regional pricing. I've played all of them on core difficulty without reloads and never had a need for more money, which proves my point I think.
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It's definitely a more MMO-esque approach to experience, and I'm still not sure how you decide which mini-goals are worth rewarding and which aren't.
Welp, you can look at it like a deconstruction of a traditional quest. You have the quest to find the missing caravan in Icewind Dale. You could roughly break that down into "finding the Orc cave", "looking for clues" [= killing Orcs and exploring cave] and "learning of the caravan's fate" [= killing the ogre and reading his papers]. I'd say a threshold is reached when you have both used your character's skills a certain number of times/ with a certain input of player skill, and when it makes sense thematically. PrimeJunta could make a better case for objective XP than I can though.
It depends... did these conversations ever actually happen, or did the journal entry magically appear as soon as I entered the area, leaving me to imagine having had said conversation? It's been done before.
I would suspect the first in most cases, but it may also be the latter in others, for example when it doesn't make sense for an NPC to be present (i.e. finding an interesting location in the wilderness).
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Well, surely someone is responsible for informing you of that rumor, right? Isn't that the questgiver?
In a purely technical sense, possibly. But you do not report back to them, you don't get your reward from them, and perhaps most importantly, your rewards become much more modular. Instead of "bring me item X from dungeon Y" discovering the dungeon, entering, finding the lich's lair etc. all come with their own batch of XP, and you may cop out at any time and not be left with empty hands and a failed quest.
I don't really see how rumors appear out of nowhere... and I don't want stuff to pop up in my journal without any explanation if that's what you're suggesting.
Uhm... you don't want journal entries that keep track of conversations?
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No, but there are many games that offer alternative ways to complete quests. "NPC X wants you to bring Y to him? Bring it to me, NPC Z, instead!"
That's actually what I meant.
There's some opportunity for your character's motivations to resonate with the ideology/promised rewards of sentient questgivers, whereas there is little way to call a player's character's motivations into questions when you simply spring the quest on them when they enter an area or do all of their goal-setting for them. It's sacrificing narrative depth and any pretense of roleplay, with little but expediency and a bit more incentive for metagame-y completionism to gain.
I guess you misunderstand my proposal. Let's assume that you get an entry in your journal that there are rumors of a black market operating in town, and this hint is oh so subtly written in gold, which indicates that there is an opportunity for you in all that. This hint doesn't ignore or take away any aspect of roleplaying; it's entirely up to you to investigate this rumour, be it because you want in on the scheme or because you want to rat them out to the town guard, not to mention the many reasons why your character may want to simply ignore these rumors. This isn't in any way less roleplaying-y than accepting a specific quest from the captain of the town guard to locate the black market.
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Admittedly this is sort of a problem with quest-based XP in general, but at least with a questgiver in the picture you have the option of either doing what the NPC wants or doing the opposite, and either will likely result in an XP reward.
what's the opposite of doing a fetch quest?
There still aren't many games that will offer an alternative reward for turning down quests.
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Well, what do you think doing it in such a way would accomplish?
Nothing except giving the devs a myriad ways to make the player engage in quests and bestow XP without using the tired "person needs you to go into dungeon to retrieve item".
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However, the notion of questgiver-less "rumors that evolve into quests" isn't exactly a novel idea. The Elder Scrolls games have been pushing this concept as long as I've played the series, and from what I've heard GW2 took questgiver-less fetch quests to a whole new level.
do TES games actually use objective XP?
No, I don't think so, but I'm pretty sure GW2 does, like many MMO's. Why?
because it plays strongly into what a quest is. I know that the idea of a quest starting as a rumor isn't novel, but I personally haven't played a CRPG that does what I was talking about.
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However, the notion of questgiver-less "rumors that evolve into quests" isn't exactly a novel idea. The Elder Scrolls games have been pushing this concept as long as I've played the series, and from what I've heard GW2 took questgiver-less fetch quests to a whole new level.
do TES games actually use objective XP?
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Monsters are fine, as a nuissance they may well be mainly ignored or left to wandering bravos to dispose of, but if they are proving a hindrance to trade and colonisation one can imagine that the ruling powers will hunt them down and exterminate them as the dumb beasts they are.
In a lot of settings, monsters thrive toe-to-toe with developed intelligent species and their sprawling cities/ industries. IOW, monsters aren't the kind of thing that yields to logic.
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Negative. In a given segment of a game, in which you make your way from one merchant-dwelling settlement to another, the person who sold all his spare weapons in Settlement A might get 100 gold. The person who sold all his stuff once he got to settlement B might get 110 gold for that same stuff.
I assume you're talking not about an open world? That's a specific case, and in a game where you have no choice of what merchants to frequent the effect of regional pricing would be different (largely diminished).
Since selling random pick-up-ables to merchants is not the only way in which to obtain funds in the game, you're going to have income outside of this, regardless of when you sold those weapons, from all the other stuff you did in and around both settlements, in this example segment of the playthrough. So, let's say that, just doing the other general stuff, you get another 100 gold (off of dead bandits or something, who knows). Well, person #1, upon reaching settlement B, has 200 gold, while person #2 has 210 gold. Person #1 can buy 10 more gold worth of stuff than person #1. Maybe that's a single thing that cost between 200 and 210 gold, or maybe it's an extra stay at the inn, or some potions, etc. You're not even necessarily going to spend anywhere close to 200 gold every time you arrive in a settlement.
PLUS, there are other opportunities to go get gold. If you sold your stuff for 10% less, and you want to buy something that you need 10% more gold for, then you have to first go get some more gold. If you got 10% more, then you don't have to do anything else before buying what you wanted.
Let me rephrase: between two players who play the same way - kill the same monsters, do the same quests - the one who goes for the better deals will have more gold and/ or better equipment.
You're making a similar argument to macman here - players can breeze through, and taking advantage of better deals may just save you time. So it is clearly a balance issue, but one about which you may choose not to make a big fuzz; you're using relativism by saying "if the player could fill his material needs by cutting better deals, they just have to grind less".
You're assuming that players aren't trying to game the mechanics. You're talking i.e. of a story-driven game that people play only for the narrative and as long as they can progress along the main path - either by grinding more or making better deals - they will be content. But for this we'd have to imagine a game with a very strong narrative, and even then it would only apply to a segment of the RPG player crowd.
Right now there is only one case in which I'd sort of agree with you on that point; and that's if the goods/ services you can buy for gold are actually sorely limited. IOW, you can make better deals all you want, and you can grind for gold all you want, but you won't be able to actually put that gold to use. Of course this is objectively speaking a design flaw, and one that would get/ gets quite a lot of RPGers raging.
Not to mention, the buying prices would be different, as well, for various goods. There might even be better/worse deals within the same settlement, as settlements can have more than 1 vendor. Also, prices might fluctuate every in-game week or so, making that whole "player who makes lists of everything in great detail" scenario quite moot.
Wildly adding even more variables to your proposed mechanic doesn't help your case, I think. Rather, the less reliably you can plan your expenses, the less positively challenging the process actually is for the player, and the more dumb luck comes into play. We agree that it's nice for the player to have to make some decisions; "do I buy/ repair this sword for the locally charged price, or do I seek out a better deal?" If you're shaking up the numbers wildly, with fluctuating prices across several merchants in one city with several cities on the map, you're just forcing the player to make a stab in the dark. Stated goal of the mechanic not achieved.
BTW, to repeat myself, it's not as if the trading process in CRPGs traditionally doesn't involve decision making. That's not true. As far as I can see, regional pricing/ fluctuating prices add one more layer of decision making, but at the cost of jeopardizing a lot of other aspects of the game.
And finally... even if one player COULD make elaborate lists and backtrack everywhere and get everything in the universe, how would this be any different from oodles of systems in any other game? Fallout. Hey, a door that requires Master lockpicking! Welp, I'll have to make a note of this, and come back to it later when I get 100 lockpicking. The player who doesn't do that doesn't get what's in there. Does that mean the game sucks for the player who doesn't open that door, and the game's therefore COMPELLING him to both make elaborate notes of all the 100-lockpicking doors AND get his character to 100 lockpicking? Is there no one in the world who ever DIDN'T max out lockpicking and who just went through the game not-caring about those doors? The players that DID open all the doors in the game: did they get 700% more stuff than the players who didn't? Or did they simply end up with more accumulated wealth and extra ammo and such, at the end of the game, than the players who didn't lockpick all the things?
I doubt that in any RPG, the number of locked doors comes close to the number of all purchasable items. This is accepting that you can gauge how much lockpicking you're going to need, which a lot of (most?) RPGs are actually silent about. I accept that RPGs sometimes reward making manual notes, but not to the degree you're implying.
A player who puts more effort into efficiency is ALWAYS going to be better off, at any given point in the game, than a player who doesn't. Should we remove all systems that allow for varying degrees of efficiency?
A game can only be faulted for a system that rewards players if the system itself is accepted as being not central to the kind of game it's supposed to be, or if it's accepted as being not fun by the majority of the target group.
It's accepted that players who are good at building characters may have an easier time than those who aren't. I don't think the same is true about obsessing over store prices.
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Overall P:E will be a dungeon-heavy game, and therefore I think development of the surface world isn't so critical.
I certainly hope by "dungeon-heavy" you mean no more than 70% sapient-created environments (e.g. castles, dungeons, cities, etc.}. I'd like to have a substantial portion of the world comprised of wildernesses of various ecotypes. Where else might druids and rangers truly shine?
I think they haven't clarified any of that yet. As for rangers and druids, considering the balancing efforts, I expect them to be useful regardless of terrain.
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I think they should take cues from Baldur's Gate 1, and I think I can remember that this is what they were shooting for in terms of content density. I think the outdoors should always be relatively unsafe; It's very hard to get the player immersed in the world and excited when you know that you can travel out of the city, pass some farmsteads on the next map, then onto another map that only contains meadows and butterflies, and only when you're three maps removed from the city danger starts to seep in. Therefore, like in BG1, I want to see some safe smaller settlements around towns, but as soon as you move 2-3 screens away from the last sign of civilization, you should possibly run into some straggling monsters/ outlaws.
IIRC the Dyrwood is to have a bit of a colonization theme going on, so it needs dat frontier feel IMO. The concept sketch of a village doesn't feature any (functional) fortifications though, so they might not share my vision.
Overall P:E will be a dungeon-heavy game, and therefore I think development of the surface world isn't so critical.
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With P:E's objective XP, I'd love for simple quests to simply spring up and not be tied to a quest giver at all. I.E. you hear tales about or can see in the distance a watchtower that has been taken over by monsters. You receive the quest to investigate. If you move closer, you receive your first batch of XP and a new quest (like finding an entrance).
To avoid the nuisance of having unsolved quests in your quest log, they could alternate between quest log entries and journal entries.
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I was totally awestruck by signposts and asking for directions in Ultima VII. That was a long time ago though.
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needs a "none" box
My answer is no across the board. I've been wondering lately if P:E maybe just should have stayed with the "core four" classes; while I tend towards saying "no", I don't think the game would have been any worse for it.
In Dragon Age yo have only thre classes mage, rogue, fighter. This system works ... but even they have specializations
In Dragon Age, I would argue that "magic" was a dump stat for fighters. I hope something like this will be avoided in P:E. Also I don't think Rogues and Mages can tank in DA; it's still a pretty traditional DnD setup.
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Dream: I could derive ~5 to 10 years of solid entertainment from P:E due to choices & consequences, variety in party setup, lots of character customization and overall great balance on all difficulty settings.
Hope: P:E will take some inspiration from IE games but improve in all areas where IE games were lacking.
Fears: More cool features will be left out/ dropped in order to offend the least number of players, as it happened with durability.
Mercantile Skills in Project Eternity
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
Did you read my post above? Ah, anyway.
Because it's true.
If strength has, as you put it, a "small but significant" advantage over all other stats (maybe the bonus to melee damage is both bigger and more useful than everything else), players will feel compelled to create a party with many strength-based characters. Of course, players can simply choose not to give into this compulsion; maybe they've played the game already that way, and want a change. Or maybe they just find melee too cheesy and exploitable in this game. Still, it seems to be an obvious flaw in the system, doesn't it?
Anyways, there are reasons not to abuse this balance issue. The same can't really be said for gaming the trading system. I can't imagine many good character-based reasons not to frequent the "best" merchants or cut the best deals. I simply don't have the same motivation to decrease my own performance by intentionally making worse deals as I would have running a 6 ranger party in a melee heavy game. I hope I got my point across.
There are different players and different playstyles. A balance issue is a balance issue.