[To all of our backers and fans...]

do you have a rough idea of what the ratio of dungeon crawling to (peaceful) overland travel is going to be?

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

It's not all down to player choice/ preferences/ style of course.

 

Example: during one quest or story segment, you're proceeding through the levels of a dungeon. There are two mandatory encounters worth noting. One involves a group of enemies who can't be taken down easily at your level (or scale) and they deal much more than trivial physical damage. Another encounter further down the dungeon involves one very powerful magic user who also can't be taken down easily and deals much more than trivial magical AoE damage. Let's say the first encounter is especially painful or just memorable to you or maybe you don't even get past it. So your next party is built around the avoidance of physical damage by, say, high deflection scores. The downside is that you have pretty low reflexes across the board. So your new vigorous party deals well with the first encounter, but when they hit the mage, they get the clobbering of their respective lives. That wouldn't be cool, right?

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

My argument revolves around design before player choice. After all you have to set up your systems in some way before the player ever gets to influence them.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

if i have a defense that determines if i get hit or not from traps and i make sure that i spring no traps i dont see why it should bother me.it would bother me to have a defense against traps in a game that has no traps

I'm not sure that you grasp it but you are arguing in favor of a useless stat. If it's easy enough to bypass traps that you never need a defense for it then, by all means, that stat is useless. If traps are absolutely trivial either because they can easily be avoided or because the damage is negligible anyway, then there might as well be no traps in the game to begin with.

 

on the balance topic, i dont see why anyone would balance the game to make sure each defese type gets the same amount of use

because you believe that if it costs the player equally much to raise A as it costs to raise B, both should be equally useful. If you haven't noticed any signs of this mentality in the P:E design process you probably haven't followed Sawyer's statements.

 

but even if they did, the result would greatly vary from player to player. if i focus all fire on the cipher and kill him before he can use his skills on me, then i dont need to worry about having high psyche

And if you focus your fire on an enemy with physical damage (assuming, like you did, that there is only one per encounter) then you don't need much deflection. Your point?

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

why is it a bad thing if you have different defenses for different types of attacks?

never said anything like that

 

and why should it matter how many times you may or may not have to rely on a particular defense type?

If you had a defense that is never tested, would that bother you, for instance?

 

or what you are afraid of, is that for every sword swing that you deflect there will be a fireball to make sure your reflexes wont be used less in the battle

A perfect balance across defenses would probably be silly either way, no matter how it is achieved. Have a 1:1 ratio of melee attacks and spell attacks, or half as many spells but doing twice the damage, etc.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

you should read the skill descriptions better. deflection is a defense vs direct physical attacks. reflexes is a defense vs attacks of opportunity, traps and aoe damage. psyche is a defense against mental attacks and i dont remember the last one

so a rogue will easily avoid most of the aoe damage of a fireball and a fighter wont, however if a barbarian is pounding  on the fighter's shield with an axe he will barely put any hits in, while he will easily cut the thief in 2. that is the difference between the 2 stats. 

they do not provide the same defense in a different way, they provide defense against different things

Oh lawdy... and where does that go against what I said? They are both defensive stats, and there is a good chance that Obs will try to make both equally useful - i.e. block the same amount of damage over the course of the game.

 

BTW I was hypothetically speaking about two attributes, one of which influences deflection and one influencing reflexes. These may exist or not.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

I thought it's an established fact that green is the quintessential colour for evul magicks.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

 

 

 

 

this makes no sense. each does a different thing and what it does, depends on the kind of enemies you fight. if you manage to fight against fighters only during the entire course of the game and you never fight a magic user, the stat that defends from magic becomes useless. besides not all characters have the same defense stats: a fighter has high physical defense, but next to no magical defense, a wizard has high magic defense but almost no physical

 

You don't seem to get it. I made a hypothetical example of two stats that might well exist in the game and support certain defenses. I think deflection and reflexes are the two terms in P:E. What does it have to do with the fact that fighters will have high deflection and rogues will have high reflexes? Nothing. My concern was that both stats could be interchangeable if they are used to the same extent in the game, i.e. the difference between fighters and rogues would be non-existant, defense wise. Which I would find derpy and uninspiring.

 

P.S. I doubt that Obs would put both deflection and reflexes in the game if only one was ever tested by the game. So no, the "only fighters" and "only mages" scenarios won't happen.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

I understand that, and I share that sentiment (regarding a class being "inherently weaker"). The problem, I think, lies in the plethora of interpretations of that, and the disconnect between them. What I'm getting at is that, if picking a Mage gets you through the 100 combats you have to get through to beat the game, and picking a Warrior gets you through the 100 combats you have to get through to beat the game, then you could very easily say "they're equally feasible/useful," so they must be bland and horribly un-unique.

My problem isn't that it makes both classes bland, but maybe that in both cases, there's nothing to be learned for the player. If a noob starts out making an uninformed decision about wether to play a fighter or a mage, let's say he's 50-50 about what class to choose. If you've played around with the game, and you find both fighters and mages to be equal in pretty much all circumstances, you're still at 50-50. You can't say "I'm going with an all fighter or fighter heavy party, because I've found that works best", nor can you say "I'm going to go with an all mage or mage heavy party because I enjoy the challenge".

 

See, you don't mind a class being "inherently weaker," but what do you mean by weaker? Would you want a class who, in ANY possible situation imaginable, performs 50% as well as ANY other class in that same situation? I should hope not. So, maybe you want a Wizard to be squishier, but you also want him to possess some compensating circumstantial factor that, say, Mr. Heavy Duty Warrior doesn't have, right? Like the ability to blast 15 things into particles once he gets to higher levels, from a distance. Can a Warrior kill 15 things in a single blast? Nope. But he can also take them on individually or in small groups, face-to-face, without dying to a sneeze.

A class is weaker if the party is more efficient, overall, if that party slot is filled by another member. Overall being the key word here, so no, it doesn't have to apply to every single situation; or rather, it should not apply to every single situation, because in that case characters of that class are a liability and a victim of bad design.

 

Some examples (at low levels): in BG, the average player will assemble a party of more non-spellcasters than spellcasters, because bows get the job done quite a bit more efficient than casters. This becomes clear to an experienced player (reading the manual is not enough, because the hit chance with a bow depends on the enemies' armor class). However, I've heard of quite a few people who like to make magic heavy parties on their subsequent playthroughs as a challenge and because they'd never take certain characters otherwise (like Quayle). This is not to say that casters don't shine, they do, but they can only fling so many Stinking Clouds and Fireballs before they've burned through them, and they die horribly easily.

 

Rather bad example: Icewind Dale (with Heart of Winter). Single class mages are almost always inferior to multiclass mages or bards; the latter can use better weapons and/ or armor, and while the single class mage could potentially cast spells of a higher level earlier, you're simply not going to find such powerful spells quickly enough for this advantage to work out. So, single class mages are real stinkers. Still, there are situations where someone may take one: 1) for flavor, 2) for roleplaying reasons, 3) because there is the very small chance that the few additional castings a single class mage with the same XP has over a multiclass may come in handy in a situation that may not come to your mind at the outset.

 

 

Because nothing dictates that being a front-liner is any better than being a behind-the-lines-er.

No, but there are reasons why you are a behind-the-lines-er, and in most cases this will be due to the fact that you're not as good at surviving [close] combat.

 

If you have a party of 6 Ranger archers, you should still be able to get through the game. In some encounters, things are going to be VERY easy, and in others, things are going to be quite difficult. A handful of the encounters in the game (like those epic, optional ones) are probably going to be VERY difficult, and often your path through even necessary encounters/areas will be mandated by your lack of effectiveness without first acquiring better equipment and/or more levels (where another party build might be able to tackle that tough fight/area first -- in a different order). But, that doesn't mean that you just can't take anything on because you're SUPPOSED to have some minimum number of tanks... some specific party makeup, or you just-plain suck across the board. Again, dynamic factors are the beauty of it. If you rock at dodging, but your damage threshold sucks, then you're going to LOVE lower-damage foes who attack really, really fast, and HATE high-damage foes who attack less often. It's a balance. So is the rest of the game's design. If 90% of the game just says "You really just need a crap-ton of damage threshold on your armor, because nothing really ever has high accuracy and/or attacks very rapidly," then you've blatantly imbalanced your game within your own design's context.

It's possible that better balance across classes actually improves the chance of many different viable party setups. It can also make things more boring. Trade-offs, I guess.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

You could just as easily argue that classes being equally useful is somehow bad

Yes you could and there are people who've done that. I can remember some posts where people expressed the wish that mages start out weak but have much greater power growth than fighters. At least, I don't find it horrible if a class is inherently weaker (i.e. less frequently useful than others), particularly if there are situations where they can really shine and that would be much more difficult without them. I find the quest for perfect balance to be unnecessary in many cases, unless the imbalance results in really derpy gameplay (like resting every few steps, or ranged weapons being useful in close combat).

 

The fact of the matter is, if you have more hitpoints, versus getting hit less often, each amounts to completely different reactions and tactical approaches to even the very same situation. Why? Because all the enemies aren't the same. The external factors vary.

Exactly. If let's say not getting hit is sufficient to keep a wizard alive behind the lines by dodging the occasional arrow, but damage mitigation is necessary on a front liner, then why should the latter not really be more useful, overall, than the first?

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

first you accuse the game of being silly because the statement: "if the X stat is responsible for 2 different types of attacks then the same defence stat should counter both (even if one is magical and the other physical)", is not true, and now you accuse the game of having this statement as true. make up your mind or go troll somewhere else

I adivse you to read my posts again because I said nothing of the sort. I was talking about two different stats responsible for mitigating two different types of damage but eventually both ending up being absolutely equally useful, i.e. blocking about the same amount of damage over the course of the game.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

 

Why would you have two attributes in a game that accomplish the exact same thing? If for example the output of magical and physical damage by enemies is about the same, and two attributes reduce their respective damage type by the same amount, that would seem silly, no? That seems to be their design philsophy though.

 

 

... I'm sorry? Come again? Could you please point toward some evidence that their intention is to have two attributes that perform the same function?

 

 

I am sorry, I didn't say they perform the exact same function, did I? They would both be defensive stats and each would protect from a different form of damage. What I just can't see though is Josh saying "hmm, Willpower protects you from magical spells, but there will definitely be a lot less damage caused by spells than by weapons. That's ok though, if an experienced player has a specific enemy or strategy in mind when he creates a high Willpower character, let him do that." He would try to make Willpower equally as useful as, say, Dexterity, for damage avoiding purposes.

 

practical example: I'm going to make a party that has 4 fighters in it, with all the health and deflection bonuses that come with it. So, physical damage distributed between these 4 won't be much of a problem. They're also carrying high DPS weaponry and are somewhat tweaked towards dealing damage, so putting out reasonable physical damage isn't a problem either. But let's say that particularly powerful spellcasters could be a serious problem. That's where the high Willpower rogue would come in.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

so you are saying that if i throw a knife that does piercing damage (i need strength and dexterity to hit accuratelly) and a molotov that does fire damage (takes strength and dexterity to hit accuratelly), a kevlar vest that would completelly nullify the damage of the knife, should do the same to the fire, because both attacks require the same stats to use?

Wut?

 

If "kevlar vest" was a stat, or a defense boosted by a stat, you could almost be sure that the damage you have received (i.e. the knife damage) would have also been blocked if you had invested your points in another stat that would have protected you from the fire damage.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

 

weaponry can be changed on the fly, so that's a poor/ wrong example

You only have two slots, the other one could be a ranged weapon for when things get hairy, and the rogue might be specialized in daggers.

 

Inventories will with absolute certainty be large enough to accomodate several weapons. Be sure of that. Also, while you can specialize in certain weapons, that doesn't change anything, as there are only two possibilites:

 

1) you do more damage with a heavier weapon even if you're not specialized in them

 

2) The specialization damage bonuses are large enough to overcome the fact that they're not ideal against this armor

 

 

Only a noob would make a fighter with 18 cha in NWN as well, however, we were all once noobs

 

Irrelevant. I don't enjoy it more just because I am one of the noobs. I don't want crutches.

 

 

Which may easily be offset by the rogue's ability to turn invisible for a short time (to get close), then the mage may be in a world of hurt considering his low armor and the rogue's high DPS output

Which may easily be offsett by the mage's grimorie slam. In addition, this assumes the rogue has invested in stealth instead of say traps and poison.

 

No, maybe check the updates. Turning invisible is an ability of rogues, i.e. they get it automatically. No need to specialize or neglect other skills.

 

The general point still stands though, you can make an inferior character

No you can't, at least not attribute wise. You can play that character like a retard of course, but that's not the issue here.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

This rogue is not going to be great in most parties. His daggers makes him a poor fit against armored foes

weaponry can be changed on the fly, so that's a poor/ wrong example

 

and his high phusical resistance is unlikely to be that usefull if you have a defencive fighter,

Even assuming that this is true, again, even a noob at the game can imagine that having a party with 6 high defense tank is a bit of a waste.

 

going after mages is risky with his low magic defence.

Which may easily be offset by the rogue's ability to turn invisible for a short time (to get close), then the mage may be in a world of hurt considering his low armor and the rogue's high DPS output

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

 

Character creation will be failproof insofar as you can't create a gimped character. To me, that's a downside. Another effect and another downside of this is that a complete noob can probably build a tank that's as effective as that built by a 100+ hours veteran. We have heard enough about the design philosophy here that we can even assume that, if Dex and Con are completely defensive attributes, a character specializing in Dex will be just as survivable as one specializing in Con. That seems to be what they're going for.

 

 

Are you suggesting that somehow the survivability of high DEX and the survivability of high CON will be identical in effect? Like, if you have 18 of either one, you'll just stand there and survive hits in all the exact same situations?

 

 

No, and I don't believe that you're stupid enough to misunderstand my post.

 

 

And if not, how is this a flaw? How is ANY difference in build not simply an alternative to something else?

 

Why would you have two attributes in a game that accomplish the exact same thing? If for example the output of magical and physical damage by enemies is about the same, and two attributes reduce their respective damage type by the same amount, that would seem silly, no? That seems to be their design philsophy though.

[What part of P:E has you the most excited for it's release?]

that I won't have to follow Josh on twitter anymore

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

I haven't played the game, so of course my many complaints about a game whose systems I know next to nothing about are extremely legitimate.

Actually you can only post in a thread like this if your legitimacy is over 9000

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

there will not be a melee skill. So, a character's melee viability will be pretty much set in stone as per his class, with minor adjustments due to equipment and attributes. That's how I understand it, at least.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

I don't really care about that 100+ hours veteran vs. noob thing. After all it's a singleplayer game and I don't draw my ego out of my awesome character builds.

Do you not care about building good characters or do you only care if others judge them? Mebbe make up your mind.

 

Personally, I care about the time I've invested in a game. There's also something very satisfying when you see that digging into the game has made you become better at the game, rather than systems that accomodate everyone equally from the get go.

 

 

Also I don't really care if I can't make a bad build, because... Who in their right mind would ever want to make a bad build?

 

It's the possibility that matters. See... it ties in with what I said about pre-assigned abilities vs. freely chosen talents. If the game decides to take you by the hand and slap certain abilities onto you and you just can't help it, with the sole intention of being noob friendly, that rubs me the wrong way.

 

I came into P:E with certain expectations, which were based on Sawyer's promise that this game won't require you to have one of each class in your party, as it usually is in D&D. What I took away from this was, hey, if I want to roll with a 6 ranger party I can do that. That may have been a little too enthusiastic on my part, but still. I figured that this approach would require some metagame knowledge about enemies, talents etc., but could be pulled off by an experienced player via the right selection of 'feats' and attributes for each character according to their role. Now it seems that for the sake of class distinction, a party with 6 of the same type may not work well, with characters largely defined by their abilities. The fact that no experience with the game's attributes would make me better at building i.e. tanking rangers and scouting rangers is just salt to the wound.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

Did you? "An attribute system that's failproof just isn't my cup of tea."

 

Failproof means failing is not allowed. Meaning if you want to be the most accurate mofo in the land, you can just close your eyes, and allocate all your points into random attributes (because you can't fail!)

"This game doesn't have easy combat! If I close my eyes it's actually getting challenging!"

 

Character creation will be failproof insofar as you can't create a gimped character. To me, that's a downside. Another effect and another downside of this is that a complete noob can probably build a tank that's as effective as that built by a 100+ hours veteran. We have heard enough about the design philosophy here that we can even assume that, if Dex and Con are completely defensive attributes, a character specializing in Dex will be just as survivable as one specializing in Con. That seems to be what they're going for.

 

This is assuming that even that noob does RTFM and possesses basic reading comprehension.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

I'm summoning all my willpower (see what I did there? We're talking about attributes, *snicker snicker*) for this to be all I say on the matter, but... why do people STILL not comprehend that there's a difference between your stat allocation not mattering at all and no stat ever failing to POTENTIALLY support A good build for a given character?

did you even read what I said?

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

 

I'll go with the obvious ones

 

 

The attribute system, probably. + standard abilities instead of more player chosen talents, if I got the terminology right. I started out thinking that character building would make this my favorite game OF ALL TIME, but probably not.

 

Care to elaborate?

 

Not really. An attribute system that's failproof just isn't my cup of tea. As for player customization vs. abilities that are picked for you - shouldn't be hard to relate to why I prefer the first.

[The bad things about Project Eternity...]

I'll go with the obvious ones

 

 

The attribute system, probably. + standard abilities instead of more player chosen talents, if I got the terminology right. I started out thinking that character building would make this my favorite game OF ALL TIME, but probably not.

[What would PE look like if Obsidian catered to the worst of us?]

But what I can't wrap my head around is, why remove/disable those kind of things, it's just taking away some of the freedom from the player. I mean no one is forcing you to play the game that way, but whit those changes they are forcing us in to their mold. I guess it's their game to make, but my opinion is that they really didn't like the mechanics of the IE games.

In the case of resting, you're wrong. The IE games were designed with resting in mind, and completing them without ever resting should be very hard/ impossible unless attempting a speed run. The game gives you no indication that there is any downside to resting, with the possible exception of monster spawning in unsafe locations, which can easily be circumvented by saving/ reloading or backtracking and resting in inns. There is no other intuitive way to play the game so that's what all kinds of players will do. Give me a true alternative to rest spamming and I'd use it.