Lephys

Yeah, I mean, they built all this from scratch in Unity, so I think scouting is about as far as they got with a framework for that sort of thing. But, I don't think that they so much actively decided "Yeah! This would be GREAT if Stealth and this were just the exact same thing and game state!", as much as it was just either that, or have a really crappy individual Stealth system in, or no Stealth system at all, or have something else in the game suffer really badly (maybe some areas were missing, or a character, etc.). There are plenty of dev comments about things they kept trying, but kept having severe problems with, so that they went with something else. So, I think it was one of those things. "Okay, we spent a month trying to do this, but we haven't even gotten off the ground with it. That's obviously going to take us a lot longer to get functional. Should we go with something lesser, or nothing at all? Okay, something lesser, then." Not ideal, but they did what they could, I think. They were working with relatively few resources for a game of this scope.

Yeah, as long as you read about the spells first, it's not TOO bad to figure out. You can usually kind of err on the side of caution, and (with Fan of Flames, for example) miss one out of, say, 4 foes, rather than make sure you get all the foes but hit your ally as well. Also, I'm almost certain now that, if not exact, the regular-size (not giant creatures and stuff, just people) character selection circles are very close to 1 in-game meter. So, you can use that to kinda gauge distances/areas with your spells and abilities. I've had pretty good luck with effectively hitting my foes and not my friendlies. As for the "some party setups make everything super easy" sentiments described in here, I don't think the enemies need to be toned UP, necessarily (although nicer AI would be welcome), as much as the player's party capabilities need to be toned DOWN. For example, Eder doesn't really NEED to be able to have 120 Deflection before even buffs, maybe. If he can have circumstantially high Deflection, then awesome. If you have to actively make that Deflection happen in the midst of battle, then that's cool. But, when passive numbers can climb so high like that, that makes things drastically easier, because a passive Deflection rating (for example) just means you have to deal with fewer hits and way less incoming damage. I think Deflection's job in the balance of things just needs to be to steer your general incoming hits into different ranges. Beyond that, it should be the job of DR, crowd control, etc, to actually make sure you aren't dying even to the higher difficulty stuff. Or, to look at a simpler scenario, the fact that your tank pretty much never gets hit shouldn't really win the fight for you. And, I guess a lot of that is really the AI. Your tank isn't single-handedly taking out the enemies at that point. He's just "absorbing" all their attacks for you, because they'll pretty much just go after the first/closest thing they can. Annnnywho. I think maybe the things that become super-easy on Hard are a good indication of things that could use a little tweaking. Things should be more incremental. A party of 6 LvL-2 Class X's should have roughly the same amount of difficulty handling most encounters on Hard as a party of 6 LvL-2 Class Y's. There're always going to be exceptions, because of how the different classes work and the specifics of the enemies, etc. But, it shouldn't be "With this group of only 2 people, these 5 consecutive fights were a breeze. With this other group of 5 people, these fights were all still really hard." And something should only be a breeze when active effort is involved. I mean, for a pro tennis player, acing a serve is "a breeze," but it's not because his racket gives him +50 to Acing.

Haven't made it to shades yet. Wichts were a bit tough when there were 5-6 of them at once, unless I burned some spells just for each group (I have two Wizards at the moment, but I'm trying to be pretty conservative with spells. Maybe a little TOO conservative. I'm still feeling it out). I bumped into some skeletons, and had to "NOPE" my way on out of there. They were running 14DR, and even more against anything but crush, I think. /cower. But then, I'm also only Level 3, with 3 people. JUST got my 4th party member. I was about to try and hire an adventurer, but I couldn't afford a Level-2 adventurer. T_T

Well... I mean... I'm fairly certain it was a deliberate design choice under the circumstances. I don't think they accidentally ended up with group stealth. But, I don't think it was their ideal choice. I think that was how far they developed a stealth system before having to move on to other stuff or let the game suffer in other areas.

What do you suppose is a reason for this game to be buggy? Sincere question. I'm not suggesting that the mere fact that other games are buggy IS an excuse. But, perhaps the reasons why some other games are buggy is an excuse for this game to be buggy, because actual reasons. *shrug* So, we have two choices, then, do we? 1) Baselessly conclude that there's absolutely no reason why any video game ever made should ever have any problems, or 2) Baselessly conclude that, since Obsidian made it, it's solid gold? I choose option 3: Understand how extensive the process of making this game really was, then decide things from there. All things considered, this game is more finished than many other games that have had even fewer excuses to not-be finished. You can stick with option 1, if you'd really like to. That's fine. You have the right to any opinion you'd like. I just thought I'd provide my perspective on things, in case it's actually deemed at all useful in your mind. My posts are merely a resource. You can burn them in a fire for all I care, but I won't know what you're going to do with them until I make them, now will I? Hahaha... You don't remember correctly. All I ever said was, it'll be really nice to see how the game turns out with Obsidian in full control of it, rather than someone else saying "Nah, cut that character and put this character in, because SALES!" The lack of a publisher (who funds your project and has final say over it) brings with it pros AND cons. I knew this was going to be a much smaller project, and that they'd have far fewer resources at their disposal, so I kinda foresaw some shortcomings. I wish there was more extensive crafting in the game, more extensive stealth, etc. But, I understand why there isn't. You say they failed at all those things (I'm fairly certain they never said "this game won't be buggy," but... *shrug*), but what was the other option? Are you playing the game? Because, if you are, would you rather there just wasn't a game? Is it SO bad that you wish the game didn't exist, and that Obsidian weren't getting to continue making games? There are things in life called "limitations." You can't just bypass them because you will them to be gone. They only had so many resources at their disposal, so they couldn't just go "Hey guys, let's master Unity first, THEN make a game, 8D! *high fives all around*". So, yeah, they failed to master Unity. Understandably so. Oh, maybe they should've just used the Infinity Engine to make this game? Oh wait... they don't own that. So, what else were they gonna do? Will a magical engine into existence that they had already mastered and would perfectly serve to let them make a modern game? Yeah, you're being awfully reasonable here, Sharp_One. My goodness... humans estimated a timeframe for something, and it wasn't EXACTLY precise and flawless?! HUMANS PLANS' CAN ONLY BE SO ACCURATE?! *hyperventilates* WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?!!!! Do better, or point to someone who's done better. Then, you at least have data that suggest a team of humans could've done better.

Here's the problem I have with this whole "Is This Offensive®" game: Even if it wasn't a joke... it's just the brief tale of a person doing something. It is not somehow a message brainwashing all of mankind into thinking negatively about certain people. If it had said "He found out something that made him angry, then over-reacted and killed the guy" but in a joking, rhyming fashion, would that warrant a whole thread about how Obsidian's allowing anti-life messages into the game? Or, look at it another way: If the poem was about a transgender person finding out another transgender person they just slept with was the opposite gender than they expected, and was very upset by it. THEN would it be "anti-trans"? Or would it finally be an okay joke?

I must apologize. I was under the impression that Expert Mode was supposed to do away with the combat tooltips showing you enemies' defense and DR values, etc. It does not do that. So, yeah, it's barely an effect on actual difficulty at all. You can't see AoE circles when targeting, and a few other things. Other than that, it's more just "immersive" stuff than difficulty stuff. Not seeing flags for which dialogue responses earn you Dispositions, or which ones are affiliated with which stat values, etc. So, my mistake. Sorry about that.

Yeah, that happened to me in the last few fights. I didn't even give him Defender Mode, and he's still holding off like 4 enemies at a time while my PC Wizard and Aloth tag-team stuff from afar. MY PC Wizard actually switches to a 1-handed Rapier to help out once the enemies are thinned out a bit (that and I like using as much short-range magic as possible... just my style, 8P). I think maybe a few tuning passes are in order, to make things a bit less swingy? I don't have an issue with party setup A making things easier than party setup B. But, there are some things that seem way easier even on Hard difficulty than they're meant to be. I get things being not uber-hard if you do it right, but... some stuff's been just passively unworrisome (such as 4-5 things clawing at Eder, but don't worry... he's fine for like the next 6 attacks with me not actively making him fine). Really, the only thing that's been HARD hard were the first bears I fought. They pretty much laughed at Eder's armor and Deflection values. Of course, that was at Level 2. *shrug*

I've played several games on Steam, and knowingly lost my network connection in the middle of playing them, and still haven't had that occur. That's rather odd.

Really, the only thing I can agree with is that I think the in-the-player's-face numbers could've/should've been a bit more intuitive. The biggest example I can think of is the percentage-based stat effects, like Intellect increasing your AoE size by 12% or something. You read an ability tooltip, and it's all "Radius: 1.79m (Base: 1.41m)". I think it would've been best to deal with integers and whole units that make more sense for a lot of the stuff. BUT, that's a pretty minor thing, really. I mean, with that AoE radius example, you can use AoE indicators, so you can always intuitively see the size of your AoE targets, etc. And it does clearly list all the final values, as compared to their base values. So... *shrug*. It's just a little bit harder to grasp, at a glance, the exact impact something is going to have until you really stop and look at the numbers and think about it. The system's not perfect, but I don't think that makes it "bland." There are some things I'd like it to do better, but it's far from doing them the worst a system could.

Probably the lack of 20 million dollars and double their team size, if I had to guess. You're rolling with a pretty huge fallacy here. Just because they still had problems under this completely different set of circumstances, doesn't mean that the publisher couldn't possibly be causing any problems in the typical publisher scenario. Or, here's an easy example: If they had a big publisher, but everything else was the same, do you think they would've allowed the game to be pushed back to March? Or would it have released in December, in time for Christmas, with half the stuff that IS in it missing from it? Riddle me that, Batman. And yes, I'm even going to play the "YOU found your own studio, raise 4 million, start with an engine you've never used before, and do better in the same amount of time, u_u" card. You can't properly deduce things with fallacial comparisons. You've got to gather relevant data first.

I do agree that it probably would've been more prudent to simply limit where you can rest, and/or even adjust the amount to which resting heals you (maybe Survival could augment it? And/or foods you have prepared, in place of camping. The thing is, that's how it WAS designed originally, and enough people moaned about that that they changed it to "camp anywhere, but only so many times". There were basically checkpoints at which you could rest. Which is no different from any other game in existence. In Mario, you don't restart after every single spike pit you jump over. In Call of Duty, you don't kill 2 out of 40 enemies, and start over with only 38 enemies. You have some section of the game (no matter the specifics of the gameplay) that you've got to make it through with limited resources. That's basically an inherent part of games. If we're going to go with "you should always be full health after every single combat encounter," then why stop at that? Why not just make every single encounter involve a single creature, so that you never have to take on differing numbers of enemies without being fully rested and healed? And no, that isn't a silly question, because, in PoE, some encounters are one creature (like a forest troll I just fought recently), and some are like 17 foes. Some are relatively tougher fights, and others are easier, etc. So why allow such variance if you're not going to allow any variance in the resources at your disposal at the start of any given fight? That's ludicrous. Someone up there scoffed at "limitation" being part of design. Limitation is what makes a game a game: You have limited health, limited damage capability, limited party size, limited move speed, limited action speed, limited stat points, limited skill points, limited equipment access... I could go on. And regarding the sheer ability to travel back to town and rest for free... what, are you supposed to just be screwed and have to start a new game when you're too low on Health to continue, but out of camping supplies? You can save anywhere, then reload until you get better rolls and stuff. Should we remove traps and ambushes from the game because "you can always just reload and know what's coming"?

Unfortunately, That's why I save like... every 2 minutes (of actual "doing stuff" play, not every 2 minutes including reading things, etc.) in this game and games like it. At the first trap I encountered, I accidentally clicked when I didn't want to and walked straight onto the trap. Luckily, I had saved just before that. In another instance, I accidentally hit "A" instead of "S" to toggle slow-mo, then left-clicked to select a different character, sending Eder to attack my main character. Heh. Just silly things. but, I never know what I'm going to accidentally do when it really matters, so I have like 15 leap-frogging save files -- I just always save over the oldest one. It's actually kind of nice, because the list of your saves always comes up at the same location it was last. So, I don't even have to scroll all the way down every time (like I do in New Vegas and other games).

I really do hope it gets fixed. I kinda hope that, since it's doing really really well (or seems to be... Metacritic score of 92/93?! I know that's not the best thing to go on when judging a game, but it usually means really good things for sales, statistically), they get to do sort of what Shadowrun did with Dragonfall: Director's Cut, and give the engine an overhaul. I realize that they couldn't spend more time on the whole design of combat/stealth states, but I cannot believe that this was their ideal concept for Stealth and combat. They should, if they get the chance, make the whole "combat state" thing much less of a significant game state, and separate stealth from a game-state, as well (and just make it a character state). You should be able to initiate combat whenever you like, and pre-buffing is fine, even in their current design, because buffs don't really last that long anyway. If you wanted to, you could have enemies with scouts around the room/area, so that the first "outer ring" of foes you encounter are those scouts. Then, if you alert the scouts, they can basically give a simple "ENEMIES!/TO BATTLE!" signal, and any casters in the rest of the group can pop off their own "pre-buffs." Boom. Odds evened. Even then, you could still very craftily probably handle the scouts without alerting the rest, if you were careful (and the stealth system allowed it a bit better). But, yeah, the game is pretty friggin' fantastic, all things considered, but I do hope that they get to overhaul some of the systems, whether it be in the expansion, or just in spare time, etc. You're right about Survival, . Although, I will say food items are pretty useful in this, in general. Feels like they could be a bit better fine-tuned, though. And I'd like to see Survival be a more significant choice than just "you'll get some dialogue/scripted interaction options" and "food buffs last longer." Maybe it could affect your travel times between places (just as something off the top of my head). Or maybe it could affect how many camping supplies you need to camp? Something like that. I dunno. It'd hafta be something that you don't really NEED (like Stealth... you CAN just be loud and obnoxious and go all Rambo on everyone if you want to), but that's still actually got a really good reason to put points into it.

Um... I don't see my title under my username... Is that normal? Sorry, SinForged. I am the one to blame. When you post in here, I pass these on to Fionavar, so that he doesn't have to try and check this thread all the time amid his already really-busy schedule being a High Drag... I mean, Moderator, and stuff. I've been sending him batches about once per day, but there've just been so many coming in (now that everyone's getting the game and stuff, and has kinda been all "Oh yeah! Forum title! Forgot about that!") that, a few often come in after I've been able to monitor the thread for the day. Anywho, I shall get you situated. Worry not,

It's either on its way to you (and you'll have an email confirming that it has shipped), or it hasn't yet shipped to you. You may want to double check your junk/spam folder to make sure you didn't get an email from Paradox. If you're in the US and you haven't gotten a confirmation yet, you might want to shoot a message to support just to make sure everything's smoothed out with your order. If you're in Europe, it seems they haven't shipped out yet (or haven't sent out the confirmations yet, at least.)

Look, you've got some valid points, but, really, if your party isn't working out, you should be able to figure that out before 2 weeks of playtime have elapsed. The game is just not built that way. You're not going to get to one fight or area that's like "UH OH, IF EVERYONE IN YOUR PARTY DOESN'T HAVE 18 CONSTITUTION, YOU'RE EFFED!" The Talents are designed in such a way that, if you find you're lacking something (attack speed, constitution, damage, etc.), you can pick a Talent to compensate at your next even level-up. You're exaggerating the restriction of a lack of respec, and its impact upon your build choices. Also, the amount of free time you have is going to be somewhat proportional to the amount of time-intensive experimentation you plan on doing in the game. I will use Pokemon as an example, again. There are like 1,000 pokemon to acquire, now, to "catch 'em all." If you enjoy Pokemon, but don't have a ton of free time, you're probably just going to play through it with whatever Pokemon you can muster. You're not going to say "Man, this game really needs a way to just try out all the Pokemon in the whole world, but still only spend about 30 hours playing." You always get to choose from all the Talents available to your given character/class, as you go through the game, so you don't really need to choose every single one of them, unless you're just trying to test every single build in the game. I am sorry you don't have tons of free time, and I have no intention of belittling your situation or anyone else's, and Stun can be quite rude/venomous... BUT, the game still does not owe it to people with little free time to be a game with a billion build combinations, all of which you can try in as little time as possible. It is perfectly legitimate for the game's design to simply say "Meh, we give you all the options, and you get what you pick, and lack what you don't pick." Especially if the game has basically made it impossible to ever wind up useless because of your build, unless you just blindfold yourself and pick a bunch of stuff that doesn't work together at all (Like "I have the slowest attack speed ever, and I keep picking things that decrease my attack speed but grant me other things, but my goal is to have a fast-attacker" or something.)

In all fairness, we won't know if it "goes for" $800 until it actually sells at that price, But yes, if anyone's buying them at such prices, I should've pledged for like 10 Collector's Editions.

The only way I'd want to see encumbrance used is in place of something like Quick Slots. What I mean is, instead of "You can only use 3 things at a time," maybe, for example, you can only put SO much weight on your belt, or cloak pockets or what-have-you. So, you're limited to 3 lb. Maybe Potion X weighs .3 lb, and Potion Y weighs 1 lb. So, you have "infinite" quick slots, but you're limited by weight. You can either take 10 Potion X's, or 2 Potion Y's and 3 Potion X's, etc. It's an interesting way to limit items that actually matter when and where you've got them. But, other stuff? It's too much annoyance-to-benefit ratio. The only problem I have with the unlimited stash in this game is that it's not really well-explained/handled. I'd've either had some kind of bag-of-holding explanation for why it holds so much but you cannot access it freely (how do you reach into a bag of dimensional compression and just pull out the one item you want out of 100?), OR maybe have some kind of portal into your stronghold's stash room that you can summon and toss stuff through, etc. In other words, if you can just take all the stuff anyway, and the only significance of its weight management is that you cannot feasibly carry it all on your person in one go, then it's not a very useful thing in a game for more than SHEER simulation for simulation's sake. So yeah, immediately useful stuff should be cleverly limited, while immediately-doesn't-matter-if-you're-carrying-it-around-or-not stuff shouldn't be, really. Whatever explanation is needed for the ability to "loot" this stuff (even if your 6 party members aren't actually physically carrying it around -- interdimensional storage, and/or packmule, etc.), just go ahead and implement that, so that we don't have to go "Oh, there're 1,000 gold coins here in this treasure pile behind this dragon, but I can only carry 100 at a time because they're so heavy!", and go back and forth to that treasure pile 10 times, OR just leave 900 gold coins there (why would you do this unless you were already filthy rich?). Heck, I honestly don't even care if it still takes 10 trips. Just don't make the player have to actively partake in those trips. That isn't fun gameplay. Maybe you could have an option to mark things you want to take, and leave things unmarked that you don't want to take. Then, once you've cleared out a cave/dungeon/area, select "take all marked loot to stronghold." Boom. One click, it happens. Maybe time passes in the world because of that, and that's significant? I'm even cool with that. Nothing wrong with that at all. But there is no joy to be had by having no reason to leave stuff where it is and come back to get it beyond "I just can't carry it right now." And "Oh, you can carry it, but everyone's going to move 10 inches per hour, and you won't be able to fast travel" is just silly, too. I mean, another option would even be to simply have encumbrance grant combat penalties that aren't movement-speed related (worse chance to dodge, increased fatigue, etc.). Boom. Significance to the decision to not just pick up everything all the time, while simultaneously not having to deal with the simulation-for-its-own-sake of "you'd have to make lots of trips for that stuff, or you'd move really slowly or be unable to move." We're creating entire worlds out of 1's and 0's, here. I think it's about time we acted like we weren't restricted to "Oh no, but if things had weight, we'd just have to simulate that in the most basic way possible and make looting and inventory management really lame."

^ Ahh. Just curious.

Are you sure it's on Hard? There's another thread in which people are noticing that, even though they started a game on a harder difficulty setting, their game is actually set to Easy or Normal for some reason. I don't know how prevalent that is, or how easy to notice it is, either. I just figured that, if that IS going on a lot, then it would be understandable to select "Hard" at the beginning of the game, and assume the game is set to that, even if the game for some reason reset itself to an easier difficulty setting without notifying you.

Maybe that ability isn't targeting Will. Have you moused over the line in the Combat Log that involves that fampyre's ability usage, to see what math is going on there? It may be that he's just too much for your at the moment. If he's rolling 80's, and the highest defense you can put up is 50, you're either going to need to become more powerful before tackling that, or you're going to need to Interrupt or otherwise incapacitate the ever-living crap out of that guy.

------------------------------------- This isn't Pokemon. The nature of the game isn't "COLLECT ALL THE OPTIONS!" Also, that people are lazy and don't try things out because optimal build strats are available online is irrelevant. People will be lazy no matter what. Even if you can respec, you STILL have to actively try out your new choices, right? So, yeah, if you're cool with completing each section of the game with a completely different build until you're satisfied, you're golden. Otherwise, there's not much difference between simply starting a new game or reloading that save before you "spent" your level up, then trying a fight or two to see how you like that talent. Shy of providing you some kind of practice fight zone, you can't really try out your decisions without actually progressing through something in the game. ------------------------------------- ------------------------------------- That's equally as good of an argument for the game to be shorter. Either you care enough to spend the time required to try out all the talents for a given character/class (in which case, again, you're going to have to go fight something and do stuff to try them all out, which ALSO takes a lot of time, respec or no), or you don't, and only care about a specific subset of talents. It's either a prudent use of your time, or it isn't. And you either have the time to do it, or you don't. You don't have to replay the entire game 100 times just to test out different talents with a given character/class, and you don't need a magical respec ability to do that either. ------------------------------------- ------------------------------------- The "no one wants such-and-such, even though I have no proof or evidence whatsoever" argument is pretty weak, too. Again, how can you "try out" your respecced talents without actively using them in a combat encounter? So how is "the stupid thing" of strategically gaining a HUGE advantage against particular groups of foes not going to happen? Do you deny the effects of options on a player of a video game? You don't think an inherent part of the design of a game, and the gameplay experience, is what the game does and does not allow you to do? o_O Because, that's what I'm pointing out, and you seem flabbergasted at why I would even observe such a thing.

---------------------------- Ahhhhhhh. That makes sense, now that it's explained, heh. Nice detective work,

@Abloec: If you aren't still running with a single character, you should have multiple people to tackle any given situation. If a fampyre is freely casting the same spell/ability over and over without a care in the world, you should probably give him other things to care about. And if wolves are tag-teaming you and consta-knocking you down, you should use another character or two to give the wolves other targets to either attack, or ignore and get freely clobbered by. Etc. That, and you can do things like boost the given defense (Probably Will versus that fampyre charm?) of the character who keeps having problems, and/or any combination of these and many other tactics. Like some people said, though, sometimes there's just a place you can't really tackle without either: A) becoming an UBER-BAMF, or B) leaving and leveling up a bit first. *shrug*