Lephys

I think I get what you're saying, Sheikh, but... it kind of is an experience, in ways. What you're pointing out are ways in which it isn't. Or, rather, the parts of it that are better described by emergent/"sandbox" choices, decisions, consequences, and experiences. But, cohesively, having a game be "an experience" is what differentiates it from just being, well... Skyrim. Skyrim was a great sandbox, but, honestly, it didn't really have enough of a cohesive experience holding it together. So, yes, all things in moderation. If you make a game 100% experience and 0% "gameplay," then it's just a linear story you're playing through. But, just because an experience has room for dynamics/branches/possibilities, and allows pretty free-form gameplay in its midst, does not mean it is no longer an experience. Everything kind of works together: The sheer gameplay elements are fun by themselves and allow you to partake in a lot of dynamics so that the story doesn't just dictate everything you do, and the cohesion of the story kinda keeps the gameplay, itself, from just being a bunch of minigames that you happen to be having fun with until you get bored of them.

Fine, fine... I shall keep my rrupting independent from that of others', so as not to collaborate at all in the rrupting process.

I'm with Sabotin. Ragdoll physics is always quite strange to me. Gravity and such never seems to work right, because everything's just too darned consistent. And you end up with those people who die and fall down in REALLY awkward poses that don't make any sense, etc. Very unnatural. A good example is first person shooters: a game that uses ragdoll physics versus, say, Call of Duty. Even though Call of Duty just has people go through death animations instead of actually being propelled by grenades and such (at least, the last one I played -- Modern Warfare 2 -- did), and sometimes that doesn't quite look realistic, the actual animation they go through is at least believable by itself. Whereas, sometimes in another game, when you die to a grenade, you just immediately go limp and flail about as you sail through the air like a dog's chew toy, crashing into a wall as though you're not even made out of human meat at all, but instead wood. I think well-polished specific animations are fine. With maybe a sprinkle of actual physics effects, for seasoning. It's always a nice touch when we kind of get the idea that physics is dynamically at work in the game world. But, it just seems like trying to simulate exact physics ends up failing.

I think "substance" is a pretty good word to use, 'cause I know exactly what you're talking about. No worries. And no, on the "sending them straight to the mods," I just meant for the purposes of going ahead and getting forum titles done. However, they could be collecting the titles via the management process to put on some memorial stone in the game. There's even been talk (mostly just rumor, I guess, based on the fact that Obsidian's done stuff like this in past games) that The Obsidian Order will somehow be represented in the game, if not by an entire faction with quests and all. More of an Easter Egg thing. *shrug* I'm not really sure, so I'm just as curious about that as you are. I'm pretty sure they have a reason for getting them through the pledge management process, though, even if most of those haven't been passed to the forum mods for forum titles automatically. But like I said, this thread will hopefully be seen by anyone who visits the forum and doesn't have their title.

What if you just fill your party with Wizards, and fill your Grimoires with Shrink spells? Then, you could just carry all the things. 8P

Hear hear! Just 'cause they don't think like people doesn't mean they're imbeciles (although some are, just like people. 8P)

I thought you would be able to access your "equipment" (what it's officially called, if I'm not mistaken), which is not only what you're wearing and wielding, but also what you have readied for quick-use (a pretty limited portion of that character's inventory, all-in-all). You won't be able to rummage through your backpack, no, but if you've got a potion on your thigh, or another sword on your back, you can access it in battle. With such items, I don't see how it matters what you're doing with it, if you can take the time to access it.

I'm sure if you do it right, he's easy, though. Because CHALLENGE!

Haha. "As always." I love it, ^_^. Methinks you missed my "inadvertently." I believe it was Gollum who was speared off the ledge by an encrazened Frodo. Thus, even though Frodo, at the time, wasn't actually trying to destroy the ring (even though his entire mission up to that point was to travel there TO destroy it, so, in general, he was "trying to destroy the ring") -- actually he was trying to the-opposite-of-destroy it and just possess it and selfishly hold it -- he still technically did the deed. Anywho, all of that is what I meant by "inadvertently." But, as a-lot-of-times-but-not-always, you're so hellbent on correcting people and feeling superior that you ignored that entirely. A) I don't understand what's an idiot request. Please clarify, if you don't mind. B) Rogue's do more damage... when? If a Rogue goes up against 17 kobolds, and a Fighter goes up against 17 kobolds, who's going to actually dish out more damage before they die? Every single second in combat that passes, the Rogue just produces an aura of damage about his person, and it's greater than the aura constantly emanating from the Fighter's person?

As I recall, Frodo ended up out-DPSing everyone else, entirely by (inadvertently...ish) dropping the Ring into the liquid-hot magma from whence it was forged, felling countless-thousands of shadowspawn in an instant, along with their all-but-immortal master. "Out-damage" is meaningless without context. Show me where PoE's design has a lone Rogue taking on (and felling) more enemies than a lone Fighter undergoing the same challenge, and I'll worry about the design. The combatant who can afford to spend the least amount of time confronting his adversary (to maintain a state of non-death) must surely make the most of that time. Is that not true? That's just plain false. Obviously balance is a real thing, as well as something that can be misused as merely a hype word.

The thing about something like DA:O is... it obviously has some good ideas, but most of them weren't executed as well as they could've been (and or finalized as concepts as well as they could've been). Narry a game is just total crap, or it wouldn't even have functional buttons or readable dialogue or anything. Sure, the end result is sub-par, but that doesn't mean if any other game does anything at all that DA:O did, we should all hit the deck. That's the thing about developers/artists, etc: You can easily take note of plenty of in-progress ideas/techniques/designs and still go "but I've got a much better use for that than they ended up with," or "but it should definitely be much more expanded upon," or "but this should be totally different or it'll end up kinda sucking, like it did in that game." So, I find it's a true statement that I also don't mind if it takes ideas from DA:O's battle system. It really just depends on the ideas and a lot of other particulars.

Might I point out once more, to the folks who seem to be extraordinarily worried about the limitation of only healing at rest spots, that you're not going to be playing BG with rest-anywhere stripped from it. BG did not have separate Stamina and Health pools designed specifically for a system that only lets you rest every so often (distance/progression-wise). The point of rest spots is to give you an incentive to actually manage your Health wisely, instead of always just recklessly thinking "as long as at least one person still has like 1HP at the end of battle, I'm good, 'cause after the battle I can just replenish EVERYTHING! MUAHAHAHA!". It's not to make sure you never ever get to replenish your stuff, and it's always troublesome. You're not going to constantly fight groups of enemies that require every spell you have, and 90% of your Health, but only find a campsite/rest-spot every 17 encounters. I can't tell you they're not going to fail to do it perfectly, but they didn't implement a whole separate Health resource as a long-term, multi-fight resource (if everyone hits 0 Stamina, then you're dead and it's Game Over, no matter how much Health you have left) just to approach the entire thing as if your Health is just supposed to last you one battle and you'll never need to replenish it. Your Health is designed to last you about as long as your per-day stuff is. This worry would be similar to worrying that they'll limit your Level 1 party to (example) 10 total spells/abilities per day, but each fight will require that at least 11 be cast, just to achieve victory. Just like how in the IE games, if you died before finishing the fight (the point at which you could rest again), it wasn't because they didn't allow you to rest often enough. It was because you didn't make your resources last until you could rest again. In this game, if you're just traveling through your run-of-the-mill cavern or dungeon or fortress or something, and there are 10 fights between this rest spot and the next one, and you only make it two fights before you're down to 5% Health with everyone, it'll be because you're failing at combat, horribly. Not because the combat's designed to take that much out of you, but you're somehow supposed to become a divine being and forcibly will those creatures who deal 80 damage per hit to deal less damage per hit and/or be less numerous.

You know what I miss? The Fallout-style context cursors. I think you had Move, Talk, Use Item On, Inspect, etc. I think it was click-and-hold, in that game, to bring up a list of different interaction choices? Not saying it has to be implemented exactly like that, but I LOVE that you didn't just right-click on a thing that, for some reason, obviously demanded inspection, and you just inspected it. And I'm not saying it necessarily happened (or at least to the depth it could have) in Fallout, but, such an ability sets up for things like gathering information from a deliberate focus on a person's visual appearance before actually speaking to them, or speaking to a hostile entity, etc. *shrug*. I liked them a lot.

The Dead Space games do this really well, too. Health "bar" is on your character's suit's spine. Ammo holo-displays in game-space above your weapon, etc. Even your inventory and map holo-display in an arc in front of your character, from your helmet. I know that exact same practice can't be applied to an isometric RPG, but... it's very nice design, in-context.

I'm pretty sure it means "able to be vied." Have we tried vying it?

Hello, Silenceborn! And welcome! As for that survey... I think that was the pledge management process going ahead and recording the OOoE pledge "add-ons" and your desired title, so it was recorded and all. I'm not sure, but I figure they began processing those by sending them straight to the mods, but there might've been more of them than they thought, or they could just have a few bugs in their pledge management process that doesn't always send the title through. Either way, we've had this thread going since pretty much the Kickstarter, I think, and it's stickied precisely with the hopes that people such as yourself will find it. I shall pass on your title recipe to the Master Title Crafter And Also Dragoneer, Fionavar, so that he may expertly craft your title.

If magic were real, and it just worked that way, I'd say "fair enough." However, the second I think "this process was completely invented in the context of 'we're making a set of game rules,' I can't help but find it a tad arbitrarily rigid. Just a little, for reasons I pointed out above. While they can certainly be used just as arbitrarily, I don't find the sheer notion of cooldowns silly at all. Essentially, they're just an abstraction of fatigue. Granted, when used in the wrong context, they make no sense. In systems in which mana is actually stored up in the mage's body (or wherever it gets stored), exerting yourself so much would result in short-term fatigue. It's just like maxing out in weight-lifting. You might can lift 300lbs, one time... obviously you can do so MORE than one time (unless your arms tear off and/or you die, in which case you've gone a bit impractical with the specific definition of "can," ), but, if you wait a short amount of time and rest your muscles, you can lift that 300lbs a second time. Again, since magic is completely made up according to the goal of the specific lore/system, nothing dictates that it wouldn't essentially work like an intangible muscle, much like mental fatigue, etc. The goal of "you have to prepare this 3 times to be able to cast it three times throughout the next day" is simply to limit the Wizard's spell access at any given time. However, that's already limited by like 5 things, and I don't think the extra layer (specific instances) was really necessary, especially considering that any other factor could easily be tweaked to compensate for the absence of that. I'd rather only be able to cast 3 spells per day, out of two different ones (in any combination totaling 3 casts of that spell-set) than to be able to cast 6 spells per day, but have to prepare, ahead of time, exactly how many of each I'm going to be able to cast later on, to be honest. Just constrain versatility as much as you want up front, and cut out the convoluted middle man of instance-based preparation. Each spell is some complex thing you've got to prepare after rest, that's fine. It takes a goodly amount of time to mentally do that, that's fine too. Why must each instance be prepared before hand? A Fighter trains to make sure he can muster extremely precise movements with his sword arm/body when the time comes, yet he just prepares that form. He doesn't prepare multiple instances of that form. Nothing else in the universe works like that. You just repeat something. A computer doesn't load a sentence into RAM 3 times just to post it to the screen three times. It just posts what's in RAM two additional times. So yeah, I don't buy that. Completely arbitrary, really. But yeah, sorry... digression.

Firstly, you are actually being quite civil here, which I appreciate. I'm sorry for being a bit overly snarky. It does become a bit irksome, though, when you basically point out "surely this isn't what you're implying with your words," but then argue against that as if it IS what I'm implying. I mean, if I say "yeah, that actually IS what I'm saying, and it's not ridiculous!", then, by all means, go for it. Otherwise, it just doesn't help things. As for the above, yes, that is balance. I'm not telling you it isn't. However, there's more to Roguishness than JUST "oh, you totally get lots of utility, so that's ALL you get! MUAHAHA!" Thing is, there's a Roguish way of fighting, too. Doesn't mean you'll be doing the same thing in combat, just because you're also dealing damage. Long story short, that IS balance, but that doesn't mean that anything else is not. Allowing someone to play as a Rogue AND actually be quite useful in combat is also balance. Making sure that Rogue is literally measured up against the Fighter class is still balance, but it's crappy/overdone balance. Simply allowing the Rogue to be quite combative is not. It's just another way of doing it. Besides, the mere allowance of this (rather than just "ROGUES ARE AUTOMATICALLY AWESOME IN COMBAT") is kind of the point of stat systems and all that jazz. Hell, in DnD, you can make a friggin' Charisma Fighter and such. Sure, he's still a Fighter, but he's a lot less combat-oriented than an 18-STR 18-CON Fighter. That's the whole point. The actual use of balance is to make sure the style/methods of a class do not get trampled by some particular role for that class (i.e. Rogue Skill Monkey). If you CAN have more skills/utility than any other class, that's awesome. That can be your class's strength without defining every character in that entire class. I'm not going to tell you allowing the Rogue to be skillful at combat is the right way to do it, and that balancing his skill utility versus the lack-there-of in the rest of the classes in a party setting somehow isn't balance. They're simply both two different balances. It's about making sure the Rogue's set of scales work the same way as any other class's set of scales. Not making one half of a scale the Rogue, and the other half some other class, and making sure they come out even. People are quite fond of pointing out instances when the latter is attempted, then crying "see? Balance is SO DUMB of an aspect to focus on at ALL! >_<" It's kind of a leap, really. Which is why I tried to point that out to Volourn.

It can be, I'll give you that. However, I will just say that I really don't think that by deciding "with another $100,000, we'll push ourselves to the limit by implementing, say, a stronghold! Which should cost a lot more than $100,000, but we're going to do it at that funding amount anyway!" I could be wrong, but I just always read the "stretch" in "stretch goal" to mean "we're reaching towards this amount of funding, and here's why you'd give us any more money than we've already reached." Not so much, "we're really pushing our existing resources further than we'd've done if you just stopped pledging at this point."

In a good quality PnP setting (with a good DM and such), the Sorcerer really feels that lack of spell selection. However, in a "heavily just combat" environment as in a lot of cRPGs, not so much. And yeah, what Junta said. That's actually one reason I think PoE's choice to simply limit the number of Level X spells you can learn upon level up, and the number of Level X spells you can cast per day/encounter is as amazing as it is simple. In PnP DnD, as a Wizard (I always played a Wizard), you almost ALWAYS end up not even getting to really use all your memorized spells to much effect at all, mainly just due to a lot of chance. It's not that they're not all circumstantially useful. It's just that, statistically, you almost ALWAYS find yourself wanting more of a different spell, under the circumstances, and less of some other spell you're hardly needing under the given circumstances. That was one thing I really thought was going a bit too far with Wizard limitations: having to fill each spell slot with an individual spell. Heck, even if you can freely buy/steal/learn a plethora of spells per level, so that when you're Level 3, you know 20 LvL-2 spells instead of like 4, you could STILL simply limit the spells at your disposal to a number of spell slots, but allow the free casting of X number of any of those spells per day. If you put Shocking Grasp and Grease in there, 'cause you only have 2 individual spell slots, you could still have an "ammo" count of 7 spells per day. Thus, you could cast 1 Shocking Grasp and 6 Grease, or 2 Shocking grasp and 5 Grease, or 7 Shocking Grasp and 0 Grease... etc. Any combination of the above. Not sure if that's what PoE is doing or not. I can't recall if you can basically fit a plethora of Level X spells in a tome, or if the per-level spell slots are limited to relatively small numbers (like 8-or-so, tops, when there might be 20+ spells of that level, total, in existence). Either way, it was always a bit silly to say "Okay, I've redundantly prepared Ghost Image in my head 3 times, even though they're all identical, but I can only cast Fireball ONE time today, because I didn't prepare 3 instances of Fireball in my head." You should just either prepare the spell, or don't. Then, you either have the capacity to cast another instance of that spell, or you don't.

I'm fairly certain it's been stated that this is in, though it's not going to highlight that tiny hidden lever/trap/secret door that your party comprised entirely of blind mole people isn't capable of spotting. Basically, anything your party is already capable of detecting but just isn't already being highlighted for you, the player, on the screen, can be highlighted with a button. Methinks.

I believe you are referring to the five-ums. u_u...

"Top left, side, bottom" they say... feh! Augmented Reality is the best place to put the UI! Everyone knows that! Then it doesn't take up ANY of your screen, and actually just appears "around" the actual screenspace, via your perfectly affordable pair of $130 glasses, ^_^ ... Maybe he's an Aumaua now? They appear to be mostly human in the face, but have a slightly strange-ish facial structure. Orrrr, maybe he's still, what... an Elf (can't remember what his initially-presented concept was), and he's just a snowflake. 8P

Yes. That's so precisely what I was saying, it's SCARY! 8D Just like in this: Considering the fact that (A)D&D did not invent a single arch-type...ever, I'd say, No. It's NOT because of (A)D&D. Tajerio, when simply asking "Is it because that's how AD&D did it?", is clearly asking "Is it because AD&D totally invented the universe?". I don't know how you interpret our cryptic, cryptic words so perfectly. I'll indulge you with this one, relatively brief (for me) response. Firstly, all the above here is sarcasm, just so you know. I don't have time to explain how that works in detail, but you can look it up. Secondly, here's what I was actually conveying (also via sarcasm) with the quoted response to Volourn: Yes, that isn't something he'd want, now is it? Why? Because it's clearly terrible. Guess what else it is? Horribly imbalanced. Thus, just because balance can (and often is) taken too far, and/or is overly prioritized as the driving force for changes/decisions does not mean that balance, itself (in whatever capacity) is somehow bad or no reason at all to do anything. Thus, saying what amounts to "balance is dumb and pointless" is, well, pretty pointless. And yes, Skyrim has a silly design. You're always getting onto me about extreme examples, so why on earth would you basically say "Ummm... look at Skyrim, and how there are basically no boundaries to what you can excel at. So, obviously, Rogues MUST suck at fighting, u_u..."? I don't understand why you can't simply analyze something for what it is, instead of trying to just shortcut your way through it. Is it impatience? I have no idea. Balance is not "Skyrim or bust!". Balance can be done wrong, or done fine, as with almost anything, ever. Anywho, this is getting a bit lengthy. I'd better stop here.

It's jawas, man. Those jawas will take ANYthing!