Lephys

I think one of the best things to do, in that respect, though, is linking, like the Ranger and his animal companion. I mean, there's still room for the summoned thing to be instrumental in taking hits in place of the summoner, etc., via differences in armor/defense values, etc. (summoned creature gets hit less often and/or takes less damage, but that damage still translates over to the summoner). You can even further balance that by having percentages. Maybe if you have one summoned thing out, then 25% of the damage it takes goes toward your summoner's health/stamina pool. If you have 3 summoned things out in combat, the percentage increases. Blagh, it's hard to make an example there without getting into the balancing of the specifics, which is kind of beside the point at the moment. I'm just pointing out the sheer method. If you want to summon a huge army of things, the number of things you summon produces a direct cost to your summoner, etc. That's just another potential factor, but I think it's a really good way to go along the stamina-drain lines. Between that, and some kind of cooldown on your other spells (summoned something? Can't cast a spell for 7 seconds, etc.), and the aspect of direct effort on your summoner's part to use any of the summoned creature's abilities beyond basic attacking, etc., there are plenty of ways to make summons a tactical decision in a variety of situations, even with a variety of specific summonable things.

It's not about the sheer ability for you to reload and get a different outcome. It's the effect of the chance on things, and whether or not that's the best way to do it. The fact that you can save-scum to a huge benefit simply points that out. Besides, with a chance like that (of a summon turning on you), you're basically tossing a coin between making combat EASIER or making it HARDER. Thus, when it lands on "harder," you're encouraging the player to either reload and retry, or simply avoid the risk in the first place. Neither of which is a desired goal of the design. The only goal of the design is to provide a cost/limitation on the benefits of summoning, so that it isn't purely some benefits. It would be akin to trying to balance healing by saying "the more often you heal someone, the greater the chance that it will HARM them instead of heal them." If you play through a combat and get really unlucky, you're going to actually lose faster than if you hadn't even tried healing at all. Save-scumming, in-and-of-itself isn't "bad." There are ways to eliminate it, but they're unnecessary. If you save before a dialogue, and pick an option, and it doesn't produce the result you wanted, so you reload and try a different one, then more power to ya. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the dialogue design. However, when you get things like "there's a chance this lockpick will jam in this lock, and you'll never be able to open it," then the game's encouraging you to reload if your lockpick has a 1% chance to jam and does so, because you inadvertently made the situation worse than if you had not acted at all. Obsidian's not trying to prevent anyone from save-scumming ever. They're trying to avoid designs that encourage/support its use rather than just it's allowance.

Agreed. Really, you should be able to figure out in a few minutes of play whether or not you like playing with hidden experience or not. Boom... you just accomplished something and got XP. Do you feel the huge urge to know how much that was and how far from the next level you are, or don't you? There ya go. *dusts off hands*

Of course. I just think a lot of it was a bit primitive, design-wise. I mean, at the time, it was pretty un-primitive. But... *shrug*. I'm not against the way things were done and what was allowed in general. I'm against very specific aspects. For example: See, I'm not against stacking effects. I'm against specifically stacking a bunch of passive effects before going into combat, just to counter active effects within combat. The devil is in the details. I just think it's silly to have to give everyone +3 AC, +4 Fortitude, Fire immunity, and Poison Resistance as some kind of extra, temporary gear going into a fight. That, versus giving the player active "counters" to such things, is a bit primitive in scope. Especially since there's so much room for more than just passive number values and stacked effects to present tradeoffs in spell utility and/or tactics in combat. I'm not saying "Do away with buffs!", but, I just don't think we need to rely on a boatload of passive effects to form the gist of our exciting combat factor countering/preparation. There's room for passive effects and their utility, but we'd be remiss to ignore more tactical, active approaches to things in combat. For example, having the ability to strike your ally to awaken them from a Sleep effect is, in my book, a far superior means of handling such a thing than "I'll cast this spell that's the opposite of sleep, and/or is designed to remove effects." I don't want to see the whole effects aspect of stuff heavily reduced to passive values trumping each other. And I'd like to see something preventing the effect-stacking from getting a bit preposterous. I don't want to win combat because I had more positive effects on my party than the enemy did, and/or countered their dispels before they could counter my buffs, etc. Buffs have their place, and dispelling has its place, but it needs to be strategic/tactical, rather than just supplemental effects and counters that strive to keep them in check. Buffs can easily augment already tactical aspects, rather than simply boosting a bunch of passive values/allowances for entire combats/hours at a time. I think much more interesting stuff can be done with buffs and the like, is all, beyond "this boosts your AC and/or immunizes you against things, etc." Stuff like "The next three hits against you will be grazes." Now, you have active control over how the effects of that actually play out and help you, whereas with "you get +3 to AC" you don't, really. And it's more specific of an effect. Less globally "temporary, but you're just-plain better for a while." Well, the tradeoffs just don't need to be purely a choice between a direct action and a passive boost. Just because you're not hitting something doesn't mean you have to boost damage or speed or armor or something, or just counter some other specific action. I think the tradeoff should be between producing an actual action, or altering a factor. I say that because that actually still covers passive value-boosting buffs (attack/defense/resistance values, for example, are combat factors), but it allows for further application to more factors. Also, my idea about the skill (if you mean the spellcraft/lore example to identify spells for disruption) wasn't meant to address that. It was kind of a standalone thing that could be in or could not. Then, another standalone was simply the idea for active disruption of spells, rather than nullification. Interrupts don't do that, nor do saves or counterspells/dispels. TL;DR version: I'm not saying buffs are dumb, or even that stacking them is dumb. But, I think they're worth a lot more than we give them credit for. More than just becoming sunblock and bug repellant. "Oh, we're heading into a swamp... better put on your buffs. You don't wanna get bitten." Their approach has been a bit bland in most games. ESPECIALLY MMOs. MMOs are the epitome of the mentality toward buffs that I'm talking about. Not saying the IE games are the same as MMOs. But, MMOs are an extreme case of primitive buff design.

In a way, I think a good idea might be to (not exclusively, mind you, but generally) have the spiffy, found "upgrade"-type equipment loot simply be augmentative components, kind of like materia in FFVII. Basically, you COULD just find better relics/magical artifacts that you could then "socket" into your weapon to improve it or grant it strategically useful capabilities (give it water damage in an area heavily populated by fire-type enemies, to use a horribly simple example), etc. You still wouldn't want to find them every 5 feet or anything (Diablo/Borderlands style). But, the whole aspect of finding unique magical power (versus a mundane item) would be separated (mostly) from the finding of weapons and such, in general. And, you could still have reasons to use a different weapon, at some point, without having a flat-out weapon progression (dagger -- dirk -- kris -- DEATHKNIFE). Anywho, I'm just observing the potential use of that aspect. Not any particular quantity frequency (as can easily come to mind from other games' implementations). I think that's kind of how Torment: Tides of Numenera is doing it (with a lot of your most powerful stuff being constructed out of lesser relics/devices/items).

I remember that exact mention of "4 spells/level," but I can't remember exactly what it was referring to, and I cannot for the life of me find the quote anywhere. I think it may have been one from Josh, quoted on these forums from its original location at SomethingAwful. *shrug*. Because I can't find it in Josh's post-search. Going on fuzziness here, I think that was in reference to some sort of baseline they were working with currently. I think it might've been the default grimoire, or the one they're working with at the moment. *shrug* It may very well be that they've simply changed it to that. But, I certainly hope not. Or, if that IS the case, I hope that grimoires can still vary in some fashion. I'd hate to see an entire item type like that have absolutely no variety. That would make it pointless to ever discover/loot/craft new grimoires, etc. There'd just be one item in the game: "Grimoire."

Agreed. I think using a single factor like that as a counterweight, so to speak, is not a very good idea. (Especially chance, in this case). Basically, you're having a chance that the summon's addition to your fighting capability will be balanced by something, rather than a direct effect ratio (the more things you summon, the less you can do such-and-such, etc.). I think looking at how the Ranger animal companion's being handled is a good way to look at summoning. I mean, basically, you just don't want it (if it's an ability/inherent part of the class's capabilities) to be just some pure freebie construct with HP and damage running around. In some way it needs to function as a part of the summoner's capability "pool." And, of course, if it's not an ability (figurines and such/ limited consumables), then there are different factors to consider. But, you still don't want it to just be "FREE FIGHT-MADE-EASY!" or anything.

I'm 99.9% certain that's what he means. The only other thing I can think of it meaning is "by certain people in the party," which makes very little sense, since you'd think the super-tough fights would require the most party cooperation, rather than being defeatable by just certain people within your party, alone.

I think I can do one better: Bastion-style sports-commentary-type narrator. None other than Nicholas Cage!

I believe sibakruom has the right of it. If you got charges per day, AND the spellbook governed charges per day, that'd be a bit redundant. *shrug* There could always be bonuses or something. Modifiers on different spiffy grimoires you find. "+1 to level-3 spell charges! (per day/encounter... whichever you're at at your current level of power). And you can keep going with that, with various specific details, to get it however you want it. I suppose, but... you still have to make the strategic choice of spending all 4 charges (from siba's example) on fireball, or spending one or more on haste (or even none on fireball). The only difference is that you're not limited to all-or-nothing ("Oh, you put Fireball into all 4 slots of your spell book? Then you have 4 charges of Fireball... nothing more, nothing less." Which I always thought was CRAZILY rigid of D&D, to be honest.) All you're really "missing out" on, with the current design, is the limitation. PLUS, you could potentially still have some kind of a bonus/effect from basically sacrificing a spell slot -- by putting a spell into your grimoire twice, as you described it. So, if you had 4 slots, and 2 were taken up by Fireball, 1 by Haste, and 1 by... I dunno, Charm. Well, now, at the cost of only getting to choose between 3 spells instead of 4, maybe spending 2 slots on Fireball could beef it up in some manner (maybe you even get to choose... almost like metamagic feat functionality in D&D -- do I want a bigger AoE range on my Fireball, or more burn duration on the foes affected, or just more straight-up damage from the impact? etc. My point simply being that there's room for such things. If the grimoire's kind of a conduit, then it's limited because it can only handle so many different, ehh, "circuits" at once (for different spells). Thus, you'd think it might be possible to dedicate multiple circuits to a single spell formula, to focus even more energy through the book for that particular spell. As a video game ability, I'm sure there'd be limitations and such to make it not ridiculous (you can only devote SO many slots to a single spell before the book can't handle that much energy flow at once, etc.). This I'm not so sure about. I could've sworn there was a quote somewhere about being able to find various grimoires with various spell slots/level. Some might have an extra LvL-4-spell slot, at the cost of fewer LvL 2 and LvL 3 slots or something. That's really the main thing the grimoire is governing -- it's kind of like your magic quiver; you can only launch whatever types of ammo you've got in it. So, it seems a bit weird for most stuff in the game to have variety, while all grimoires in existence are exactly the same. *shrug* Not that it couldn't be that way. I need to try and find that quote... I always vaguely remember things. Stupid defective brain. *punches own brain*

Hear hear!

Where, when, show me even one of the thousand. *Points to OP of this thread* What... you said "one." Yes, exactly, today's eurogamer news is the first time Obsidian has said April is no longer a launch window. No, you see, you said "show me even one of the thousand." I pointed this out as being one of the thousand. No information was provided that somehow warranted a "yes, exactly, this is literally the only time it has ever been said." Also, as Hiro pointed out, the backer portal listed the Winter release date when it went up, AND I'm pretty sure the update thread from the backer portal launch addressed that fact. AND, I'm pretty sure it was mentioned at least once prior to that, in an interview, or another update thread, or just a Q&A, etc. I'm not really sure, and it's not really a big enough deal for me to take the time to go dig it up, because I'm totally fine with the chance that I'm actually mistaken, because I'm a human being with imperfect memory, and that's okay with me. I'm not trying to somehow win against you or make you look bad, but, it simply was stated prior to now, so there's no need to attack people who claim that and call them liars. If you missed the previous instances of release date change info, then that's unfortunate. It's not like someone else is better than you just because they saw that info first. And, again, I'm not sure they ever tapped a wine glass to get everyone's attention, then specifically announced that the release date was changing. And if they didn't, they probably should have. Either way, to a lot of people who've kept on top of things, the information was made available on many (but, admittedly, not an exaggerated "thousand") occasions. For what it's worth.

Fair enough (that you just don't like this style/design), but, in regard to assassin-ry, I urge you to consider that the way in which PoE Rogues do damage is simply about exploiting advantages, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sneakily dealing huge bursts of damage without being discovered. An assassin doesn't really take the time to engage someone in open conflict, create fortuitous circumstances, then boost the effectiveness of his own combat until victory is achieved. He's sort of all about some undetected deathstrokes. *shrug*. For what that's worth. I replied with way more words than I should've. Sorry. I got carried away, 8P. Sorry for the confusion in there, too. It's kinda hard to comment on the dynamic between specific Rogue/party usage and the design of the Rogue's abilities/class without going into a great deal of detail with examples and such. I tried to do it in fewer words, and it was a little ambiguous.

I'm pretty sure Sneak Attack is exclusive to the Rogue class. The infliction of conditions supporting its "firing," however, are not. Flanked, for example. That was the specific example given in the update for how conditions aren't only fulfilled by the Rogue class for the Rogue's own Sneak Attacks. ANYONE can flank a target, and that target is then Flanked, allowing that to contribute to Sneak Attack. Then, there's, what... Deathblows. Upon re-reading, it simply says that they constitute additional damage on Sneak Attacks for "2 or more" of the Sneak-Attack-worthy conditions. So, I dunno if it's just that 2's the effective limit (17 conditions still gets you the same amount of bonus damage as 2) or what... but, anywho... I'm getting side-tracked. Sorry. The point I was making is that, if one player uses party member A (not the Rogue) to knock a target prone, and party member B (not the Rogue) to flank that target, THEN has the Rogue come in and attack, he's going to be in Deathblow territory (the target is Flanked AND Prone -- that's 2 conditions) from the moment he gets within attack range. Versus just having your Rogue run in and directly try to rack up 2 SA (Sneak Attack) conditions on his own, against his own target. Now, before, I wasn't thinking about the specific "2 or more" bit on Deathblows. I had forgotten that detail, so I was thinking it was kind of "the more the merrier." Which, it COULD still be. I have no idea. It doesn't specifically state that more than 2 conditions will have no effect. I would think if you're able to get a target with 6 conditions on it, you'd get something out of that. *shrug*. Anywho, either way, it's just a matter of how much effect, at that point. The Rogue who takes advantage of conditions he didn't cause/create, himself, is going to be dishing out statistically more damage than the Rogue who's been designed to directly take on his own opponents and create those SA conditions on his own, regardless of whether or not the rest of the party's offering healz and armor buffs and stuff (which they can still do to the Rogue who is indirectly running around scoring deathblows on everyone who's already been condition-smitten by the rest of the party). Also, carrying a shield and heavier armor is going to slow your action (attack, in this case) speed, thereby causing your accumulation of conditions upon the enemy and subsequent sneak attacks/deathblows on that enemy to be even slower, not to mention the fact that the Rogue's being placed more directly in harm's way. So, yeah, you can build a more direct Rogue, versus a less direct one, but, the point is simply that it's not just going to be all the benefits of Rogue without all the detriments or anything. It's not like you just get a more survivable Rogue who attacks head on, but with the freebie of awesome heavy-hits worth of sneak attack/deathblow damage. This isn't about "You can't build a certain type of Rogue because it'll suck" or anything. It's simply addressing people's concerns that the Rogue, by default, is some kind of shock trooper who just runs straight in and gun-katas everyone to death, head-on. Which isn't really the case. By design, the PoE Rogue exploits the conditions of the battlefield and the status of their target, which Captain McSmashyPants doesn't do. Captain McSmashyPants runs straight in and smashes, without regard for silly things like battlefield conditions and/or target status. Captain McSmashyPants does lots of damage because he's a powerhouse, not because conditions were fortuitous. That's the whole "heavy-hitter doesn't necessarily mean what we're used to it meaning" bit I was getting at a couple of pages back.

^ I think it's mildly unreasonable to get such an impression, since "you haven't exactly elaborated a lot on this, even though you claimed its a goal of yours" doesn't mean "you obviously don't care about this/you lied." Or, rather, it's one thing to consider a possibility, and another thing entirely to arbitrarily label it a probability. I get people thinking "maybe there's not going to be much emphasis on this goal?", but I honestly don't get "I'm going to go ahead and decide that's probably the case, since I don't really know one way or the other but have reasonably exposed the sheer possibility." 8P I mean, meh... we're human. It's not the end of the world. Doesn't make you bad to do such a thing. I just think gathering sufficient info before deciding something is always the best decision. For some reason, as humans, we're prone to some need to be able to decide something before we really have enough information to do so. I dunno if you'd call that impatience, or what. It's kind of human nature, though.

Where, when, show me even one of the thousand. *Points to OP of this thread* What... you said "one."

Plus, they get even greater bonuses to their sneak attack damage (the heaviness of their hitting) with greater numbers of supportive factors in play (prone, hobbled AND flanked guy takes more damage from Rogue than just-prone guy, for example). And since many of these factors are bestowable by not-just-Rogues, the Rogue who simply charges in to handle things directly is always going to be at a heavy-hittingness disadvantage in comparison to the Rogue who relies on the rest of the party setting up as many factors as possible in addition to the ones he himself is setting up, THEN taking advantage of them all (indirectly).

And to be quite honest, this is how a dev cycle works. We were just "lucky" enough to be able to see the cogs in motion. This does not make them better or worse than any other dev team. True that. Most big publisher-made games don't even give such a precise estimate of their release, simply going with "look for it, 2015!". Then, when they get closer, things end up getting more precise, and sometimes STILL get pushed back, as in "well, we thought it'd be December of 2015 at the latest, but it turns out it's going to be like February of 2016, so..." So, yeah... this whole "pushed back" thing gets an unnecessarily assumptive negative connotation. As if the game was somehow inherently supposed to be finished by April of this year, rather than simply being an educated guess based on the limited empirical knowledge of development time at the time it was made, then a more accurate one being made later on that's closer to the actual amount of time it'll take to do what is objectively required to complete the game's production (which just so happens to be later than the initial estimate).

I dunno about you, but where I work, vending machines require money to function. Which is why they aren't called "beverage dispensers." (Mainly being silly. Nice assessment/breakdown, ^_^)

I approve! For the record (just for what it's worth), I was merely ranting about customization in general in many existing games. I wasn't specifically worried that PoE would be fraught with such snafus. BUT, it's still good to be assured of such things. Also, I know what you mean about going straight RGB. A lot of games don't realize that just because someone might want blue hair doesn't mean that same person no longer cares what shade of blue the hair is. Those RGB sliders often result in people failing, despite their best efforts, to actually pick a color that both: A) They want, and B) Doesn't look horrible Because not everyone studies color theory and such, and people often pick RGB spectrum colors that, halfway through the game, start blatantly looking really bad in relation to surrounding elements (shades of colors that eliminate all contrast/detail distinction, things that look really weird in lighting, stuff that just seemed to be a different value in the character creation screen than it really is later, etc.) It's kind of like when you pick a color to paint a room under a fluorescent light, but then you see it in sunlight through your living room window, and go "Ohhhhh... I didn't notice that's kind of purple instead of red... o_o"

That'll teach 'em to not-be wealthy.

Wow. I really like the idea of measuring "encumbrance" (weight AND bulk/density) rather than just weight. AND the idea of scavenging being a checkable task.

I think my biggest pet-peeve with character customization is when things are arbitrarily paired. Like, with heads. "Oh, you wanted long hair? Well we've got that... attached to this old wrinkley face! 8D! Oh, you wanted a young face? OBVIOUSLY you want short hair, then, u_u..." Or, you know, you get lots of super subtle variants of hair or something, but they're all almost the same style. 17 distinct hair options, but 15 of them are mohawks, and one is "no hair/bald." 8P If you're gonna have only-5 options (because of budgeting/resources/what-have-you), that's fine. Just, use as much of the spectrum as you can with those options. Only three colors, for example? Go with blond, black, and red, or something. Don't go with blond, white, and sandy blond. That's ridiculously lopsided. And don't arbitrarily pair different feature options together! Like face and hair, or eye shape and face age, or eye shape and color, etc. /endrant

^ Well-put, Ffordesoon. If I may borrow your Writer example to use it in regard to hard-coded class-checks, you wouldn't, for example, walk into a town and have people run out and say "Oh good! A writer! Come quickly!". However, if you looked really intimidating (be it from gear and/or stature/muscle tone/what-have-you), then someone might reactively beg your assistance with some conflict, regardless of your class. Of course, that's not to say that when someone needs writing/scribing related stuff done, the fact that you're a writer wouldn't easily come up (if you wanted it to, especially) and be pertinent. I'm actually really liking the idea of class checks sort of functioning as skill checks on sets of specific knowledge/ability. I mean, you could still have knowledge skills, separately, that overlap a bit. You could have Knowledge: Arcana without being a Wizard. But, a Wizard who first-hand wields arcane power would probably still know many things that some scholar who cannot/does not use such powers would not, and would definitely be able to meddle with certain things that someone with mere study-knowledge would not (ancient artifact built by a Wizard, for example, that needs to be stopped with Wizardly-channeled energy).

Yeah, I think April was the initial "if we meet our funding goal, our general game plan should be done by April" assessment. Then, when they got roughly 400%, and got through their pre-production phase with that new budget, they went ahead and pushed it back 6 months. I think it's still an estimate, but they knew it wasn't going to be April anymore. Granted, they didn't really announce it, specifically. But, the information was available to possibly be read/discovered.