Lephys

I don't think you've quite discovered the difference between a claim that the future will definitely play out a certain way, and a rational observation of probability. I'm honestly baffled by the fact that, if someone claims something is certain, you can point out that it isn't certain, and they decide you simply must be claiming that the opposite is certain. Just because I don't see any reason to believe that Sharp_One's worries are definitely true in no way means that I claim the opposite of those worries is definitely true. Carefully considered and logically thought out observations don't mean much when you simply observe a mere possibility and arbitrarily label it a probability. Show me evidence that suggests its probable that Obsidian are lying bastards and have not proven themselves reputable professionals over the years, and I'll gladly acknowledge your conspiracy theory as rational.

Are you asking for your title to be "Khango, In Memory of Genghis Khan"? Or are you asking to be "Khango of the Obsidian Order," and are simply pointing out that you chose "Khango" in memory of Genghis Khan? I apologize if this is a silly question. My android brain is but feeble and easily confused by literal meanings.

Fair enough. I'm not trying to get silly with this. Just, honestly, the typically accepted practice of a video game publisher nowadays is "I help you fund development, and you let me have creative control over this project," yet that's not always the case. That's kind of the core of everyone's assumptive, panicked responses to seeing "PILLARS OF ETERNITY PARTNERS WITH PUBLISHER!" Everyone instantly assumed that a publisher INHERENTLY gets control over the development of a game, and that Obsidian must've blown all our Kickstarter money and needed to trade creative control for more funding, etc. That sort of thing. So, that's the only reason I'm pressing this distinction. If you develop a game in your spare time, in your garage, and you want to distribute it to the public, you can either do so yourself (self-publish it), or get someone else to handle that for you. Sure, Steam has a store, but it's ALSO a distribution platform. With your newspaper example, the NEWSPAPER produces the copies of the paper, and has them delivered to a number of different stores/stalls for sale. So yeah, each store is not a publisher. They're just handling sales transactions once they receive the goods that someone else produced and distributed to them. But, with something like Steam Greenlight, for example, you just have a game, and STEAM "produces" all the digital copies of your game, advertises its existence and availability (to some extent), and distributes it to the public. Just because they do it in their own store doesn't mean "Steam is just a store." Hell... EA sells their stuff in the EA store. If they happened to publish a game, and sell it exclusively in the EA store, they wouldn't suddenly be [not-publishing[/i] the game. Right? Now... I think THIS is what you're getting at: With Pillars of Eternity, for example, Paradox is publishing the game. They're going to distribute it to Steam to be sold in the Steam store, sure. So, Steam, in this capacity is not publishing the game. However, if no distribution was taking place at all except through Steam, then it would be publishing your game. I'm not trying to say the actual definition of the word overrides the industry precedent/protocol for the process, but neither does the industry precedent/protocol somehow render irrelevant the actual definition of the word. A publisher publishes. There are a number of different specific ways in which that can take place. They can fund development, they can do extensive advertising in magazines and on TV, they can control development, etc.

It's powerful, but isn't free. As Josh pointed out, it's a trade-off. The more powerful you become via buffing, the more time you've spent doing it (while everyone else was doing stuff, too, whether it be killing you, or killing the rest of your party, or buffing themselves, etc.). So, it's not just "How much buff power do I want on meself today? Hmmm... *ponder*". Also, since you can only cast in-combat, the only thing quick loading after already experiencing an encounter is going to do is let you mulligan and try different buffs, or a different priority order/buff-nonbuff sequence, etc. This is correct. This makes sense, but what about armor? If you're wearing plate, and you shift into BearForm, does your plate armor type and DT and such just go into a waiting room somewhere while you only get your BearForm's very own, unique DT and armor type (magical bearskin?)? Just curious.

A "duration," by definition, is dealing with time. Whether it's indefinite (i.e. "lasts for 3 attacks") or specified in a time-based unit of measure, it's still "measured in time." And my "theories" aren't constrictive. I'm referring to relative things. You can either have something higher, or lower, in relation to any point of reference you'd like to choose. It simply cannot be BOTH at the same time. You're like an Irrationality hydra: Every item one point of contention is clarified, you raise two more. I don't know what to say.

For what it's worth, I have a feeling the problem lies in the fact that you're assuming that my intent is to say "there's no possible way that anything could ever be considered 'bad' copying/ripping-off." Which I'm not. If they copy the exact same spell name, and radius, and damage, and range, and explosive effect, for a Fireball spell or something, then yeah, they're copying. But... well, you keep citing spells, but what about an ability like "Kick" for a melee fighter? By the exact same reasoning you're using, if D&D has a Warrior ability that is essentially "Your Warrior kicks this guy, deals some damage, and maybe stuns/knocks them down," and PoE decides "I want a melee combatant to be able to kick someone, which will naturally deal some damage, and possibly knock them down or stun them or something," that they're maliciously copying D&d and stealing away all their creativity. To be fair, you can't really stop what you already weren't doing.

Does it make them a publisher down to a 'T' as far as the precedent for the term goes? No. But I think it makes them a publisher. I posted this in a different thread already, but... from dictionary.com: "pub·lish [puhb-lish] Show IPA verb (used with object) 1. to issue (printed or otherwise reproduced textual or graphic material, computer software, etc.) for sale or distribution to the public." Sure, big publishers nowadays typically provide a lot more than sheer distribution. That doesn't mean that Steam doesn't fulfill the service of "publishing" a game to the public. Again, if someone is meaning that Steam does all the typical stuff other publishers do, then yeah, they're mistaken. However, I'm not sure it's really valid to argue that Steam doesn't publish stuff. Greenlight is a very basic form of publishing. Hell, posting your EXE to a blog page is technically self-publishing. The only way you could not publish something is to keep it entirely private and never distribute it to anyone. Plus, Steam markets games to anyone who receives Steam emails and updates. Other publishers who market games in magazines only market them to people who read those magazines. What defining factor makes one legitimate and the other not? Is there a certain number of people marketing has to reach to be marketing? Does marketing even need to occur for something to be distributed? Technically, putting things on a shelf and marking them "for sale" is a very basic form of marketing. *shrug*

So either there isn't a "basic arrow" as such, or there is a standard hunting arrow (or sth similar), which is cheap, but those two war arrows are better. If the latter, and if the hunting arrow is infinite, can the war arrows at least be finite? ;-) Yeah, it's possible there won't be a "basic arrow." I don't mean to suggest that's impossible. I was just trying to clarify the actual "why" behind the stance on maybe abstracting some basic form of ammo into infinite quantity, and emphasize that it wasn't any kind of assault on your appreciation of ammo quantity management or anything. Definitely, all non-"basic" forms of arrow would be finite in that template, as the goal is just to make sure that you don't just hafta buy basic arrows to make sure you always have them, just to be able to fire ANYTHING from your bow (much less a situationally/particularly effective ammunition). To make one more emphasis, a lot of problems come with the word "infinite." For example, another option that's been mentioned is simply having any and all ammunition be decided on a per-encounter basis. In this case, the quantity of arrows for your bow that you'd have would be "infinite," in that, after an encounter ended, you'd always get a refill of +25-or-however-many arrows. As long as you used arrows and ended encounters, you would continuously gain another quantity of arrows to make up for the missing ones, abstractly. Thus, the supply of arrows would be unending. However, it still wouldn't really be as simple as "your character has infinite arrows." Because, for all practical purposes, you're actually still limited to that per-encounter amount of arrows. Within a given encounter, once you've fired your 25 arrows, you are out of arrows, until such time as the encounter ends and you abstractly acquire another allowance of your infinite arrows (+25 arrows for the next encounter). It's that practical aspect of the limitation that we're on about with having unlimited basic arrows. IF, for example, there are basic arrows, and they're cheap enough that you can feasibly buy 500 (and carry that many) every time you leave an area with a merchant (and enter a duration of combat-ridden gameplay that's going to use up your arrows), and you really only need about 100-200 during that stretch between town visits, then, the number of arrows available to you is already "unlimited" in practical terms, as in "you are never going to run out of arrows unless you just plain go out of your way to fire three times as many as you need to, or intentionally don't buy enough when leaving town, even though you had the means to do so." That's what we're talking about. If the game supports arrows being expensive, then sure. But, if they become so expensive as to rarify the usage of ammo-based weapons, then those weapons become more like secondary weapons than actual primary weapon choices. Which... isn't the end of the world in isolated game design, but it just doesn't seem to be what PoE's going for. Who knows... maybe they'll come up with something super spiffy that we haven't even thought of in here, and we'll have finite arrows across the board, but it won't feel like a tiny tax/chore to just buy arrows all the time and still never run out of them. We'll hafta see, I suppose.

^ I'm honestly just asking this (not to be snide), but, what does that make Steam Greenlight? Does it not essentially digitally publish games via that? Obviously, Steam isn't nothing-but-a publisher. And it may not be actually serving the function of publisher in regard to PoE's scenario. But, I'm wondering if it's really proper to flat-out say that Steam just is or is not, at all, a publisher. *Shrug*

I admire your concern for credit where credit is due. I dunno about others, but I, personally, was just quoting that bit because it was the most convenient reference to the idea, regardless of the idea's creator. Just for what it's worth, 8P. But still... I applaud your attention to clarity on that.

True. It's just that the "achievement" label is rather arbitrary at that point. I mean, I can look at a friend's Xbox Live profile and look at his Achievement list for a particular game, and it'll show me how far he's gotten. But then, I don't really care if I'm looking at an "achievement" list or if I were just looking at some kind of Game Progress page. The function would be the same, without arbitrarily lumping mere progress through a game to be in the same boat as specific "achievements."

In reality, sure. In the game, you get bigger and better fictional abilities as you go, that make you more and more effective. And the minimum quota of damage (mainly damage) effectiveness goes higher and higher as you go through the game. Meaning, if you have 15 abilities for your bow, and weapon specializations and such, but you only have like 2 abilities with a sword, and no skill/training whatsoever, then you're effectively useless with that sword later on. Again, it only needs abstraction because of game-ish factors. For what it's worth, I'm quite fond of all these real-world/simulationist aspects. For example, I honestly think it'd be great, too, if there were penalties for firing at a cluster of melee peeps that included your own allies. That kind of thing. BUT, that's also a lot more important in terms of tactics. Managing basic arrows isn't, really. It's the same reason Wizards are getting Blast with rods, wands, and scepters. So that even when they're out of spells (kinda like special arrows and such), they can still fire their magic (bow) in some baseline capacity. If you run out of non-basic ammo as a Ranger specializing in bows, and you WERE doing 15 + ability modifers with those arrows, and basic arrows only do 5 damage, then you can still at least do 5+other-stuff damage and keep using what it is you built your character to do. If you have finite BASIC arrows, too, then you're either going to run out of ammo completely and have to whip out a sword and be pretty-much useless (because you're probably ALSO not built to withstand the punishment that closing to melee range entails -- didn't even think of that before), OR you're just going to ALWAYS pay your basic ammo tax (pick some up for like... .01% of your party's wealth) to make sure you never run out of arrows. Again, unlike a survival-type game (just the best example I can think of... not the ONLY valid example), this kind of RPG doesn't really support making it HARD for you to hold onto ammo. Thus, making sure you always buy a bunch of arrows and carry them around just becomes a tax, because you're never going to NOT do it. No one doesn't want to run out of ammo, but also thinks it's too much trouble to just buy 200 arrows every time they're in town. In general (as in "I think it'd be cool if there were a game, and your character could use a bow as his weapon, and he'd have to keep up with arrows a lot"), the stuff you're pointing out is pretty awesome. It's not just inherently dumb or pointless or anything. Its significance is only diminished by the specific context of PoE's design. That's all. For what it's worth, this... ... is a great example of what I'm talking about. Whether or not you need to spend time reloading your quiver mid-combat remains a significant factor. Making sure you remembered to bring 500 arrows instead of only 60, so that you definitely have the quantity of arrows necessary to reload when you need to, is not so much. Keep in mind that I'm only referring to basic arrows in a system that uses lots of other/better types of arrows. You'd still either have to buy and manage the quantities of those, OR be limited in some other way (only so many per quiver re-fill, or per-encounter, etc.). The only situation I think it's prudent to avoid is "I literally have absolutely no way of using my bow now," because the game's got to make sure it's easily avoided (or focusing on ranged weapons would be inferior to using some other weapon). And if it's easily avoided, making sure it has to be manually avoided becomes rather moot, is all.

Yes, as much as Burger King has copied McDonald's by also selling grilled beef patties that go between buns. DnD didn't invent the concept of Wizards shooting fire, etc. Those "copied" spells are very basic concepts. Along the lines of what BrainMuncher said, if you made sure nothing in PoE duplicated anything from D&D, then we pretty much wouldn't have anything that's in the game right now. Bows? D&D did it. Longswords? We have to invent a new type of sword, because D&D had those. Druids? Can't have that... D&D had nature-based spell casters called druids. Inns? Stolen from D&D. Did Call of Duty copy Wolfenstein 3D by having pistols in it? Or are they both games that happen to involve shooting pistols? There's a difference between using something that someone else used, and copying or somehow nefariously taking from someone else. D&D doesn't hold the copyright on the very idea of Wizards who shoot fireballs, or electrocute people via touch, or categories of medieval weaponry. It's not sugar-coating. It's just fact. Better one useful form, than multiple weak1 and virtually identical ones (remember "Black Bear" and "Brown Bear"?) 1at least at higher levels... True, but, in case you missed it, that was mistaken information: You only choose one form at character creation, but you can acquire "others" (dunno if it's all of them, or just 2 more, or what) as you progress your Druid through the game.

Hey I'm pretty sure this isn't a thing they said. They said that rogues and rangers are the best damage dealers, that's all. Seconded, so hard... People don't seem to realize the nature of comparison: If you build a Rogue or Ranger, then any other character will do lower damage, relative to the amount of single-target damage potential the Ranger or Rogue will have. You could still build a Ranger that's like, as supporty and non-damagey of a Ranger as you can get, and a... I dunno, Paladin, who's as focused on damage as he can possibly be, and that Paladin is going to outdamage that Ranger. If you roll one of every single character, and build them to be as damagey as possible, your Ranger and Rogue are going to be at the top of the charts. Doesn't mean everyone else is at the bottom of the charts, or that they don't do any damage in regard to being capable of felling enemies.

Really, Stun. Your whole side of this is opposition to the approach they're taking with buffing. They didn't just copy D&D's buff list, then rip out the sheer capability to pre-buff. That's been the point this whole time. And yet, somehow, my commentary on how their approach to buffing is different, and how the role of pre-buffing, in tandem with this approach, is severely diminished, is somehow completely nonsensical and has nothing to do with this topic? And you still, still miss any point with your retorts. I didn't claim to know all the specifics of all the buffs that are definitely in the game, so my lack of such info is in no way contrary to what I'm talking about here.You implied that my analysis of PoE's approach to buffs, in general, was vague and inferior to your reference of specific, actual in-game buffs... of not PoE. So, I merely pointed out that it doesn't really matter how exact your info is if it's not actually about PoE's buffs. I didn't claim mine was more exact than yours. So, I don't know what you're calling me out on now. Why must you make everything so complicated? "Their CODING?!" Yes. Everything in the game is coded. Where did I actually analyze code, itself? Nowhere. Nor did I suggest we should. I actually placed no emphasis, whatsoever, on the process of coding. Ever. And now, you focus on that in a response. Such a mystery, where the confusion comes from. Buffs in RPGs are designed. The IE games had them designed one way. PoE's are designed another way. There's no pre-buffing. You're not happy with that, in isolation. PoE's entire approach to buffing is such that the ability to pre-buff would hardly be significant. It's not... that... complicated. If you disagree, then disagree, by all means. But please, for the love of all that is holy, stop arbitrarily spinning a wheel of words I've spoken, and selecting one to insist is somehow the nonsensical focus of my entire argument. Please. I'm genuinely asking.

*applause*. 8D

They've talked about how there will be oodles of non-combat stuff to be had. But, that specific information lives very close to spolier-ville, as it pertains to things such as how particular quests/situations play out, and what kind of specific options in dialogue will make themselves available depending on factors like class and skill/stat levels, reputation, etc. I'm with you on desiring more info about all this, but I think they'll probably update us on that whole aspect by itself, separately, as there's not really an easy way to say "And here's how playing a Wizard/Druid will alter all your non-combat experiences!" They've definitely mentioned that there will be a LOT of what they call "scripted interactions." I even asked about specifically what circumstances would support these in the game (in what situations/aspects of play would you usually find them), to which I was told that they'd pretty much just be littering the entire game. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if meeting certain conditions in the midst of a particular combat prompted a combat-pausing scripted interaction, that could then affect, say, whether or not the enemy surrendered, or some device was activated, etc. It certainly wouldn't be impossible, I don't think. But, the best I can really give you right now is the encouragement not to fret. I don't think the focus on combat-related info regarding classes and character facets is because there just isn't any non-combatness to be had. I think they just haven't really talked about it in a lot of specific detail, yet, and part of that is because they want most of the story-related stuff to be a surprise. They're just being very careful about that. That, and the game's still in development, so they might still be tweaking things like the dialogue system, reputation system, scripted interactions and stat/skill checks, etc.

No worries, werik. Seems like some of those surveys have gone straight through to the forum system, and some haven't. *shrug* This thread was up since the Kickstarter, I believe (or a previous iteration of it), so it's kind of spotting for the surveys now, heh.

I'm willing to donate extra money for Sharp_One to get a Jump To Conclusions mat added to his physical rewards package. It's a mat with conclusions on it... that you jump to. 8D (Office Space reference, for those who are boggled here). Seriously though... again I say, at the start of this project, you say "Yeah, Obsidian, I totally trust you to competently make this game. Have my money via Kickstarter." But now, you suddenly feel they're horribly incompetent, and probably actually ran out of money and sold their souls to an evil publisher and are lying to us about it? Gyah. Reality. It's here. Accept it. You either trust them or you don't. You can't do both. And you already made that decision when you pledged. Assuming they're actually some horrible, incompetent group now and are liars, to boot, isn't really going to change reality. They either are, or they aren't. Just sit tight and find out, like everyone's going to have to do. Unless you can somehow divine the future. I dunno... how many people are naive enough to invest their money into a game project purely on the developers' word and description of intent, before the production has even started? Oh, that's right... 75,000, give or take. Are we really that naive? Is it that preposterous that a publishing company would stake their time, effort, and resources on a cut of some profits from a game project that's being developed by a proven-competent team, with a solid year-and-a-half worth of game to show them? It's not like they're blindfolded. They sure as hell have a lot more assuring evidence than we 75,000 backers did, and we gave them 4 million dollars. Paradox isn't even giving them money. They're just performing a service, and getting compensated for it. Insane, I know...

Yes, because, if we don't speculate, the world is DOOMED, I say! Also, I'm betting it's 100%. Rest assured, backers... all creative license for PoE's design rests firmly with Obsidian. They're just going to go bankrupt after they finish the game, is all. They probably promised all the profits of Stick of Truth (retro-active) to Paradox, as well. Seriously, though, who are we to decide how they run their business? The profits of the game don't even have anything to do with any obligation they have towards our backer funds. They can sell their company to Paradox, if they really want to, and it's no business of ours.

A) You don't get to dictate what "we" were discussing. Only what you were. And you'll hardly find me insisting you were on the same page I was. B) Did I miss PoE's completion and delivery to us? As well as a plethora of specific references you made to PoE's own buffs and their details? Because... I could've sworn I was talking about what PoE's doing with buffs, as compared to what it isn't doing with buffs, and you were talking about other, existing games buffs as if PoE is somehow obviously restricted to those templates when designing buffs.

Hey, if being a balla' is good, then imagine how badly people want to be a hyper-balla'.

"Blind" faith?! So... lemme ask you this: When your best friend in the whole world -- who you've known for like 15 years -- asks for a ride somewhere because his car's dead, is it blind faith to trust that he isn't going to shiv you and steal your car so he can sell it at a chop shop? Now, I realize you haven't personally known Obsidian for 15 years, but... you either trusted them enough to back the project, or you didn't. Why does it matter if they're doing everything themselves or not? If anything they're not explicitly handling themselves is worrisome, then let's start worrying about the people they ordered their office supplies and desks and computers from. Let's start worrying about where they store their sourcecode. THEY didn't personally hand-craft those drives and systems. What if they all fail? What if Paradox actually starts World War 3, because Obsidian just picked the first people they happened to bump into in a dark alley and said "*shrug*... here, publish our game! 8D!" Either everything is blind faith, or there's actually some amount of caution/aptitude that can be deemed trustworthy. Feel free to pick. The even better question is: how do you know people aren't just lying? What amount of information would leave you content? Assurance in the form of text? A could-not-be-the-actual-box-they're-going-to-send-out photo of the product? When could you truly rest assured that bad things weren't going to happen? Hence, the purpose of trust/faith. Not blind faith. Reasonable faith.

^ It is rather nice when they're challenges in some form or fashion. A perfect example of achievements that irk me are like "Play the game for 25 hours!" Left the game paused and turned off your monitor for a day? ACHIEVEMENT! Or, better yet, a worst-offender from FTL (Which I love, btw... just not this achievement): I can't remember what it's called, but the achievement is "Fail to dodge 5 shots in a row with maximum engine (dodge-boosting) upgrades." ... So, the achievement is basically "Congratulations! Something completely beyond your control happened to occur!"

Half of the game is inspired by/ripped from dnd. I think intentionally so. Half of the entire video game industry is ripped from dnd. To be fair, I don't think D&D invented the simple concepts of magic. If I think putting crackers in soup will probably be tasty, it doesn't mean I'm ripping off everyone else who's ever put crackers in soup. If you take a time machine back to when D&D was created, and kidnap the creators so it never existed back when it did, someone else would still think "Hmm... what if there were wizards, and they could like... spray fire out of their hands to strike multiple foes?" I mean, if concepts that simple are ripping off D&D, then D&D is just ripping off the inventor of the flame thrower, or physics. *shrug* I don't really consider something to be "ripping off" something else (in a malicious/negative connotation) unless they're presenting someone else's exact same idea as if it's not only their own, but as if they thought of it first. To me, it's like Obsidian is saying "Thanks, D&D, for providing us with a lot of experience and ideas upon which to build a foundation to build a spell system. Cone-area spells of various elements are a pretty useful/solid idea."