Lephys

I don't blame people for not being fans of turn-based games. I like turn-based combat, and there are still a lot of examples I'm not very fond of. I feel like it's overdue for a make-over. That being said, I genuinely believe that T:ToN's combat will surprise us all. Mainly because it won't be as simple as just combat. The simpler the component that's being broken up into turns, the slower everything seems, because the less you're accomplishing each turn. But, there'll be a LOT more potential represented by each turn in that game. And, hopefully, they'll do some very interesting stuff with the whole turn-based aspect, to make it not as clunky or rigid as a lot of other games have been. Only time will tell, I suppose, but, from what they've said regarding their approach, it sounds like it'll be pretty exciting, really.

I don't even think that it isn't fun. It's fun to kill something instantly. But it's also fun to have infinite hitpoints, or cleave mountains in twain with a giant laser beam. My core argument is simply that it isn't as unique as almost anything else in the system. Thus, since the decision has already been made for such effects to be absent, the system isn't really suffering from its loss as much as people think. I feel like some (not all) people advocating insta-death-type effects sort of forcibly twisted everything around into "there's absolutely no reason to have such things, at all, ever; they're not fun, they don't do anything different at all, and they never should've been in any game ever in the first place," and just pretended the argument was simply attacking such effects for no apparent reason and somehow trying to get them removed from the game. But, *shrug*. It's clear, in here, that if you don't get the exact same ideas, down to a T, from everything that's been typed, then you've obviously got sub-par cognitive skills and deserve to have everything you've ever said picked apart as nonsense, rather than simply being corrected on some individual mistaken note in the midst of a lot of other notes. Honestly, I feel like Stun and Hiro justify their spiteful moves by just assuming that everyone else is intentionally being spiteful from the get-go, and trying to win some battle or something. I mean, you suggest that some detail was misunderstood (in toneless text on the internet -- how could that be?!), and they act like it's a personal attack and retaliate. And you point out "I see that you're saying A, but I'm saying B, and I don't think you're considering B," and the response you get is "LOLZ! Oh, so I guess A doesn't exist, and B is the ruler of the universe?! WHAT NONSENSE!" I don't know what to say anymore, and I think that just warrants further derision on their part, rather than any amount of constructive effort, whatsoever, in co-operating on finding the disconnect. That is not a personal attack. I realize you guys may really be trying, but that's how it comes across, for what it's worth. And, when I go out of my way to clarify the tone of what I'm saying, and you just tell me that you know better than I do what I meant and what I didn't, that's just... not cool at all, really. I mean, what can I possibly say to that? I've seen both of you make excellent, excellent posts... in threads where no one's really emphatically presenting an opposing perspective. It seems like the second someone just sees something from an angle you don't, it's all of a sudden some Thunderdome situation.

I thought that was only when resting at the stronghold. I could be wrong, though. Also, I think everyone gets to rest, when you do it at the stronghold, and you get a passive bonus (based on what kind of training, etc, you chose for that person at the time) that lasts until the next time you rest. That might be the case for any resting/camping, but, I was under the impression that that's what differentiated resting at the stronghold from resting at not-the-stronghold. The training bonuses, at least. ^^ Sorry, I missed the one post about that being the Darklands resting mechanic. My bad. I excitedly thought I had missed info about the PoE resting mechanic, heh. I was like "CAMP GUARD DUTY?! YEAH!!!!"

If you're interested in work, I could use some help around the forge.

Where did I say you said they HAD to be pretty? You specifically said they shouldn't have beards. Then, when we questioned that, you said it isn't sexy. In direct response. Then you made a huge deal about emphasizing just how sexy it isn't, even after we pointed out that other female humanoids in fantasy games aren't sexy, and it makes perfect sense that they aren't. Yeah... so crazy of me to somehow figure that you're suggesting female dwarves should be sexy. How could I possibly have gotten that idea? And, for future reference, if someone's clearly misunderstood your point, and is arguing against what they think it is, and you know this... waiting until the 7th-or-so response to say "lolz! You're not even arguing against my point!" doesn't make them look any crazier than it makes you look. Because, who the hell does that? "I could've corrected you 7 posts ago... BUT I DIDN'T, LOLZ!"

Ahh. Sorry. Wasn't sure. Replied just in case. Either way, I also just wanted to clarify that my little mini-rant up there was basically "the line gets drawn in the wrong spot oftentimes, but that doesn't mean there isn't a right spot." In case I seemed to be getting at something else.

I'm trying. I kinda fell of the grid of drawing, and now I'm SO rusty at it, it's not even funny. Also, the only thing I ever "mastered" was the pencil. 8P I'm trying to do some kind of weapon sketch, right now. Since I figure I'm more likely to actually complete something like that than a whole person, until I get back into the swing of things. I think my new printer has a decent scanner, actually, so I'll post it when I'm done.

How dare you negatively comment on someone else's posting behavior, Tajerio. Gyah... your posting behavior is abhorrent!

I only saw it in 2D. You can still 1-up me.

That film was pretty amazing, by the way. Just in case anyone was curious.

^ Well, yeah, but I addressed that. I mean, the "Honey, could you get some milk?" example is exactly what I was talking about above. The only thing I meant by the "managing illegal behavior" example was that, I don't think the sheer existence of DRM is somehow bad. The sheer management of digital rights is totally fine. It's a matter of extents. CD key? Awesome. It's like a car key. If you hand that key to a friend, now your FRIEND can drive your car, but you can't. Still, only one person's using the car. You didn't somehow replicate the car and allow two people to have a whole, free, functional car, and get 48-hours of usage out of that "one car" (that's now two) in a 24-hour period. That can be done with digital stuff, while it can't with physical stuff, like a car. That's all I'm getting at. I guess put simply, it's not as if they have absolutely no basis, whatsoever, to "tell you what you can and can't do" with digital content. It's your individual instance of their product, but it's still their product. Granted, they go overboard almost every single time, even if only by a little. But that's a whole 'nother story.

^ Yeah, unfortunately, Frenzy-kun, from an objective standpoint, there are only two possible ways in which the developers could satisfy your desires: 1) Work on the game forever, and never ever release it, because every time they thought of something extra, they'd have to delay the original game to put it in (extra races, locations, story, etc.) so as not to ever split the game into a primary game, then separate expansions. 2) Just never make any extra content for any games, ever. This would include sequels, if they expand upon anything from the previous game. I'm not trying to judge you. It's unfortunate that you feel the need to buy expansions like that. I'm simply trying to point out that it isn't very feasible to expect them to somehow make sure you never feel that way. I'm not saying you are demanding that they do this or anything. It's just a for-what-it's-worth comment. Unless the original game includes the entire history and future of the entire fictional world, there's going to be something in the world that wasn't in the first one. It's the same reason you eat only a portion of all the possible food in the world, every single night, for dinner. Maybe tonight you have a salad, and tomorrow night you have a sandwich. Why didn't you have the sandwich the previous night? Because you can only eat so much food at any given time. You can only cook so much different food in a 24-hour period, and any food you didn't get to cook must be cooked/eaten in a different session. Same with a game. Or any story, really. That being said, there are many specific examples of story expansions being kinda gimmicky, and/or warranting the "why didn't you have this in the previous episode?" question. But, the sheer continuation of a story in any capacity is not a narrow enough criteria to actually specify what reasonably warrants that question and what doesn't.

A) I remained silent, and still Hiro found a way to pick apart even the way I did that (apparently you aren't allowed to continue to read a thread and like posts if you've declared you're done responding to certain people in it, and the only reason you could be liking the posts is to somehow spite said people, and not simply because you like the content of the posts.) B) I'm dead serious. If there's no such thing as an effect that's too extreme, I want the functional equivalent of balefire. If I see a spider queen, and a bunch of spider soldiers, I want to be able to balefire the spider queen, and all the spider soldiers cease to exist, too. It'll be a really high level spell, and you'll probably have to soften up the target's willpower for an actual success, so it'll be perfectly reasonable. It'll also be just as tactically deep of an option as actually killing all the spiders to death via conventional means and a lot more actions.

I thought that was only when resting at the stronghold. I could be wrong, though. Also, I think everyone gets to rest, when you do it at the stronghold, and you get a passive bonus (based on what kind of training, etc, you chose for that person at the time) that lasts until the next time you rest. That might be the case for any resting/camping, but, I was under the impression that that's what differentiated resting at the stronghold from resting at not-the-stronghold. The training bonuses, at least.

I actually move that they put Balefire (from the Wheel of Time) into the game. It's not an insta-death spell. It's a "you never even existed" spell. Thus, any damage and/or effects that target had inflicted upon anyone previously in the battle would go away. I think it'd add a lot, tactically, to combat, and shouldn't even have a chance to fail. And I definitely want to see enemies using it.

It's a shame our voice isn't something that'll be throwable. Just imagine a Chanter ventriloquist, I imagine that's how they "cast" ranged effects.

The thing is... if your character is paralyzed or stopped, your character is paralyzed or stopped. As opposed to just damage having been done, or simply being knocked down (and he can just get back up but was delayed a little), the tactical effect is that you have to go without that character for a prolonged period of time. Whether or not its permanent isn't really going to change that. And if you're a man down because an enemy instantly paralyzed/petrified you, then the added challenge of dealing with that given situation with only 5 out of 6 people is there, no matter what. Now, sure, if you only ever got paralyzed for 2 seconds, it'd wouldn't have much of an effect. But, as long as it lasts a significant amount of time, it doesn't really matter if it's forever or not. Whether or not the effect ultimately obliterates your character has no significance, whatsoever, on the difficulty of the remainder of that particular encounter. The only difference is, you actually have a chance of fighting your way back from that state, instead of being absolutely screwed. Sure, it's a little "easier," potentially, in the long run. But, the cost-benefit ratio is pretty crazy. If 3 of your 6 party members get petrified, for example, in the beginning of a fight, and they're automatically permanently petrified and dead, then the fight's difficult all right. Most likely too difficult to win. So, what do you do? You reload. I'm not even talking about save-scumming or meta-gaming here. I'm talking "I literally don't have the means of beating this combat, so I'm going to skip the next 2 minutes where I slowly struggle until we're all dead, then I'm forced to either reload the game or never play again." BUT, if you're just going to have to fight without all three of them for the next 15 seconds, but THEN they can possibly break out of it and have them back, then the fight just got harder, and yet still not hopeless. The ability to come back from something, as opposed to being absolutely removed from the fight (given characters) might be "easier," but easier than impossible isn't really hurting anything. Honestly, I'd much rather not even have a hard counter for petrification (for example), and simply have the good possibility that it won't be permanent, and have to fight my way through a whole battle even after some people got petrified, than simply have a "Nuh-uh, basilisks!" button that I push every time I see basilisks. I mean, objectively, casting "protection from that nasty effect" and then winning with relative ease really isn't more difficult than actually having to deal with the effects of very un-fun spells, but not having those spells be so extreme that you just automatically lose if their effects befall you.

I'm with you in failing to comprehend the basis for people's desire for this. Because... The thing is... you can already do that. Firstly, you've got your limited inventory for each character. THEN your actual equipped/ready-for-quick-use equipment and items. And they've talked about weapon-swapping and such in combat, so you've GOT to be able to at least carry one extra weapon, minimum, in the limited space of your not-immediately-equipped inventory for a given character. Secondly, when you've got Weapon A equipped, and you're carrying Weapon B, and you come upon Weapon C in the form of loot, but your inventory's full... if you want to have Weapon C at your disposal because it's better or something, you can simply put Weapon C in place of either A or B, and send the replaced one to the stash. There is absolutely no reason to have to send that weapon to the stash, then, 2 minutes later, need to retrieve it from the stash to equip it. Plus, you already get to access the stash at campsites, which have to be placed frequently enough for the game to not be on Impossible Mode with regard to making your Health last to the next campsite (rest spot). Yeah... in a small way, it's like wanting infinite ammo/infinite health potions (not infinite health, because you still take damage in combat, but people apparently want to never ever not be at absolutely full health immediately after every single battle, which is a bit strange, since almost every video game ever, that utilizes health and damage, has some sort of limitation upon when and how often you can heal back up, for very good reason. Our Stamina will already replenish to full, automatically, after every combat encounter. It's not the sheer desire to wipe away limitations that I fail to get. I get that. It's the "that's just wrong; thank goodness someone will 'fix' such injustice with a mod" attitude that some seem to have. I'm always amazed at how, apparently, it's perfectly fine for someone to say "I don't understand why people wouldn't want to be able to rest anywhere; thank goodness for mods!", but the second someone says "I don't understand why people would want to circumvent that limitation," they're apparently being "pissy." Double Standard, much?

Villains don't play the game either, so we shouldn't care about their desires and motivations to do horrible things for the sake of good lore. OH WAIT. Yes, there's actually more to a game than sheerly appealing to the human players with every single aspect of the entire game. Sorry man, but the definition of "straw man argument" is not "an argument that I both do not comprehend and also just plain don't like." So, negatory, Ghost Rider. See, the point was, Lizard people (thanks for emphasizing that, Fluff, ^_^) are attracted to other Lizard people, and thus they look like that. There's nothing to stop female lizard people from being appealing to human players. If the player's opinion is all that matters, then what reason is there for lizard people to not be attractive to you? See, you're deciding whether or not female Dwarves should be attractive to the player (and not just male Dwarves, in the lore of the game). Lizard people are no different. They COULD be super-sexy, slightly lizard-like people. Why? Because the designers are the ones making the decision of what their appearance will be in the first place. And you're saying that the only thing that need be considered at all is what the player wants to look at. Thus, all humanoid anythings should be attractive. Why aren't orcs attractive? Better yet, why aren't MALE dwarves more attractive to all females humans? Women play games, too. They're players. So, all lizardfolk would be ultra sexy, by "conventional" human standards, if we just followed your unchecked line of reasoning. That's what I'm getting at. You either need to produce a check for that, or realize that you can't and it doesn't work. I don't know which is true, but it's not neither. And "Nah dude, lizard people are inherently unattractive, so I don't care about them" is not a legitimate thing, because... no they aren't. They are whatever they're designed to be. It's too bad I'm not arguing with your original point at all. I'll not debate the statistical occurrence of female Dwarven beard precedent. You're absolutely right for all I know, which is why I'm not even arguing that. I'm only arguing with your one-dimensional line of reasoning that doesn't make any sense. Namely, "None of this is subjective, which is why my subjective opinion is truth here." It's either your subjective opinion (in which case you're wrong about it not being subjective), or it's an objective reason (in which case it should be able to answer a question like "Why don't female lizard people need to be pretty, but female Dwarves do?")

Your work inspires me to actually get to work on something, so that I may one day soon post a lame pencil-only drawing in here that pales in comparison to your lovely, 3D-rendering-based portraits. 8P

. Sort of. But, it sort of is a new goal. If you're raising money for a buffet dinner, and you expect to have 10 dishes for everyone to eat, and you want to set a goal for improving the whole buffet, you'd still have to specify where the ceiling would be for that. I mean, sure, if they give you 20 extra dollars, you're going to spend it on SOMEthing. But, you can't just evenly distribute that between all 10 dishes, necessarily. So, that's the purpose of the goal at that point, as an actual "goal" marker. Sure, functionally, and relative to the previous stretch goals, it says "money after this point will be spent on general improvement of what we've already got at this point, rather than on raw new features/components," but the specific money value serves the purpose of saying "Ideally, if we got to this point, we could improve all 10 metaphorical dishes, instead of just some of them." Basically, if you get 5 more man-hours worth of funding, and it takes 5 man-hours to add in some more weapons to the existing weapons categories and such, then you can't take that funding and improve BOTH the weapons AND the stronghold AND the dialogue/quests. You have to pick one. Whereas, if you get two "blocks" of funding, you can pick two out of the three (I realize it's not perfectly equal in cost for each component improvement... it's just an example). So, telling people what it would take, budget-wise, to make a significant improvement to all of them, that's useful information. And it's a goal. It's just a slightly different goal. It's not a "if we don't hit this number, we can't do anything" goal.

I get the exaggeration, but, for instance, that Varric-versus-horde scenario is already exaggerated beyond the rest of the gameplay/combat. That, and it vastly fluctuates with difficulty settings. So, even if it's supposed to just be due to exaggeration, I don't think it was well executed. I mean, you spend 5 straight minutes getting some commander unit down to 15% health, and not dying in the process, and he just instantly downs a potion real quick, and is now full health. On tougher difficulties, he could do that multiple times, WHILE it was even harder to ever get him from just-above that potion-drinking mark down to 0HP before he got to drink a potion. And 15 enemies spilling down into your personal space feels at home in a game like God of War, or Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, but in a "tactical combat party-based RPG," the tactical aspect is a little lost when, no matter how well you do in 90% of the combat scenarios, halfway through them, you're always going to be surrounded by dudes. Kinda wipes the whole "approach and placement" aspect away from combat, a bit. Anywho... Yeah, you are right on that. Hmmm. The time-warp spell should work / be castable only if a given time has passed after the last time-warp spell was cast in the vicinity of the area. Years / hours .... this depends on the particular area. Aaand.... let's put a code into the AI script that limits the use of this type of spell depending on the real-life hours since the last time-warp spell was cast. So, the player encounters this type of spell at most once in every X real-life hours. How does that sound? Still too annoying? Hmmm....... Ehhh... I dunno. It's hard to say for sure, but I think anything but limiting those spells to affecting just the enemy caster(s) and their kin would be overbearingly annoying, no matter how much I wanted to like the interestingness of it. It's just... almost the entire aspect of progress through the combat facet of the game would simply be undone, merely because someone cast a spell. I WILL say this: in one way, it might be interesting, at the very least, to have one encounter that does this, in which the successful casting of the spell is "combat failure." So, maybe the spell takes like, a minute and a half to channel, and you're fighting away all the while, and if it gets cast, the player's in no different a situation than if he had lost the combat, his whole party were killed and he had to reload the last save before combat began. Otherwise, I think it's best to restrain time-control magic a bit. As I mentioned above, I think it's more interesting if it JUST affects the "team" casting it (and/or just one target at a time... instead of just turning back time "for everyone"). You could do a lot of interesting-yet-reasonable short-term effects with it, though. Maybe your buddy gets debuffed or DOTed, and you have a spell that reverses time (only so far as effects are concerned -- it wouldn't heal any hitpoints or damage done) for that target by 10 seconds (game time -- the spell lore could say something like "the past several minutes" or something, *shrug*). Thus, anything cast on that person in the last 10 seconds would be gone. So, to combat someone you know has that spell, you'd probably want to stagger your debuffs/ailments, so that, at the very most, they can only remove like one at a time, instead of clustering them all together in a 10-second window and allowing them all to be removed at once. Also, this could work pretty well with the Rogue, and his reliance upon ailments (were they called Afflictions?) for maximum carnage. Maybe the enemy team stacks up 4 afflictions on you pretty quickly whilst their Rogue makes his way towards you for a Sneak Attack or Lethal Strike or whatever (because of all your afflictions), and you cast that spell, reversing time back to before those afflictions were on that person. Thus, the Rogue gets to that character, and is suddenly surprised that all he can do is make regular strikes and/or use regular abilities. That could be cool. OR, it could simultaneously work in an offensive fashion, if you target an enemy instead of a friend. Did that enemy Paladin just bestow some manner of awesomeness upon that Barbarian who's now charging your arse? REWIND that Barbarian back to his un-booned self, at the opportune moment, and he strikes expecting to be awesomer, but he's actually just regular. Surprise. . Of course, such a thing would, methinks, need to be regulated pretty well. Otherwise, if you could just replace 6 of your spells per day with an Undo button, especially with 2 or 3 different characters, you'd just use that all the time to negate everything your opponents were doing. Whether it be a cooldown against your target, or a long cast time. OOOH, a channeled version might be cool. It reverses time by 1 second per tick, up to 10 ticks, so, if you get interrupted at 6 ticks, it's only gone back 6 seconds. *shrug*. I dunno, though, 'cause it'd just get crazy to actually have to try and figure out exactly what point at which you needed to reverse time for a given character to result in the desired state for that character. It is very interesting, though, functionally. I like the possibilities. But, like I said, you'd probably be best working it into the tactical combat system with more in-encounter boundaries on its effects, rather than actually resetting like 15 minutes of gameplay for the player. Even with limited ways of avoiding that, a lot of it would be luck, and it just plain sucks if you have to redo a bunch of gameplay just because an enemy AI got a single spell off, no matter how tough it is for that to actually occur. Making it tough to pull off just makes it a lot less likely, but it doesn't mitigate the sheer annoyance of the effect whenever it DOES get pulled off.

*shrug*... I mean, what is us not-owning something, and what is the simple regulation of our behavior with things? We own a car, but we aren't "allowed" to run people over with it, or turn it into a bomb. I know it often oversteps its bounds, either intentionally or unintentionally, but I don't quite understand the whole "DRM is just-plain evil" thing. Here's what gets me, though. If you buy a game, it shouldn't matter WHO'S using it. Only that it's only being used by one person. The logic of that, I understand. What I mean is, I have the ability, with a game and a CD key, to play a game 24-hours a day. I can install it on 73 different computers if I so choose, so long as I'm only playing it on one at a time. Thus, if I play a game for 12 hours, then give it to my friend to install on HIS computer, and HE plays it for 12 hours, I'm still only using ONE game, to the same extent that I, myself, could've used it. According to some of the EULA's and such, it's technically illegal for your friend to sit down at YOUR computer and play a game while you sit out. How ridiculous is that? Like anyone would ever enforce that. It's a bit silly. Sure, you shouldn't make 27 copies of a game and pass them around to all your friends, but, if you all want to share one thing, one at a time, who cares? It's like when restaurants say "Oh, you bought that plate of food, but TWO people are going to consume it, instead of one? That'll be $10 extra, u_u...". WTF?! Really?! Because... you're out WHAT, exactly, when two people eat the same quantity of food, instead of just one eating all of it? One person comes in, orders a whole plate of food, eats none of it, then leaves, and that's fine. But, heaven forbid an extra person wants to partake of your food. I mean, I guess they could be charging for the seat/table space, but then... why not just charge a cover? "That'll be $5 per person to be seated." There. That'd be less annoying than "we're not going to charge you at all until you start trying to eat your friend's food."

Finally got to watch the update video clips. I've gotta say, that's a pretty great (as well as hilarious) simulation of isometric perspective for the Animation Team (aka A-Team... someone get those guys a black-and-red van), haha. Good movements, too, . I likes their shambles, gallops, and trudges. And the animation reels on the creatures were pretty great. If I'm not mistaken, those are simply raw, transition-less toggles between animations, right? The animations themselves look pretty good, and I won't judge the transitions that weren't there, because I'm pretty sure they weren't intended to be there in these snippets. The only thing I'll say is that, from that angle (which is not the angle from which we, the players, will be viewing things in actual gameplay, I realize), the Druid-Cat (aka "Drat") looks a bit bobby when it runs. Maybe a little too much vertical motion there in the strides? *shrug*. Again, it might look fine from above. So, maybe that's helpful, and maybe it isn't.

Now you know why I officially gave up on him, Jarrakul. A valiant effort, though. What's worse... he reads something like this, and just thinks "Lolz, they think they're right and I'm wrong!", like the discussions's just as simple as one big "yes or no" question that we're all debating the answer to. No effort, at all... Then, of course, Hiro has to jump in with his game of "I WIN!" from the Adam Sandler film Big Daddy. "I had that same hand last game! Why do you win?" "Because... I WIN!" Then he just tells Ffordesoon, in answer to his accusation that he's baiting people, "So what... now you're doing the same thing! And also I'm not and never was doing that, u_u..." Some men can't be reasoned with. Some men just want to watch the thread burn.