Lephys

Well, they've said that even 1/2 a point of damage will be kept up with, so... OHhhhhh, FAC-tions... Sorry. In seriousness, I believe factions will play just as important of a role as in any other fantasy world with groups of people in it. We DO know that individuals amongst the ranks of a given faction will still have their own reactions to you -- based on their own mindsets and personality, etc. -- despite/in addition to their faction's view of you (or at least what they've heard of you.) So, basically, entire factions may encourage everyone in their ranks to think a certain way about you, but that doesn't just override their own individual minds and make them a bunch of robots who are all going to react the same way no matter what you do.

@ People super worried about Obsidian "deliberately lowering the scope of the game"... Lowering it from what point of reference? How can you say "less than X is WAY too little!"? X is undefined. Besides, they can only produce SO much content no matter what. Cramming all the stuff in the three Mass Effect games into a single game wouldn't have made it any better. I mean, obviously you can't make a 50-hour game about leaving Candlekeep and getting to the Friendly Arm Inn. But, seriously... how can it be inherently bad to simply set the scope of your game, in your freshly created entire world/loreset, as small-ER than just the largest possible scope they can make? Is a game that forces the story to cover about 90% of the world and such not be just as silly as one that ONLY covers about 5% of it? How silly is it, really, to say "Hey, it's probably reasonable for a whole friggin' world to provide a few stories' worth of gameplay."?

New look! Same great taste! Now with 20% more Sawyer?

Are you speculating as to whether or not this thread is 12 pages of speculation?

That's hitting below the belt.

They definitely don't need to hold back on their bag of tricks or anything. But, it's still possible to simply consider where your game could go if a sequel/expansion were to be made. As opposed to just making a single game, and, in only worrying about that one single story/gameplay experience, not even leaving it open for continuation in any way. Then, finding out that it was really successful, and you really want to make an expansion/sequel.

Didn't know that. Didn't think of that, but yeah. That and the Mistborn Trilogy, I suppose. Didn't know that, either. Is that a book series? Also, to be clearer: A) I just haven't seen it done, in an RPG. I wasn't meaning to say it's never been done. And... B) What I'd particularly like to see is a Fallout-style, survival-y type approach, as opposed to a "well, technically an apocalyptic event destroyed 95% of the world before now, but everyone's more-or-less doing okay now" approach (like Mistborn or WoT, for example). Again, not saying that that hasn't been done, either, but I just wanted to be clearer. I think it'd be awesome to be roaming around surviving, Fallout style, but in a land of swords and magic, when everything's kind of broken/salvaged/scarce and the population of the world is quite low. I just haven't seen anything like that in a game I've come across. If there's a game like that already, then awesome! 8D

@Primejunta: If you simply can't bring yourself to overlook the irrelevant specifics of my example to see the relevant ones, then I'll use a different example. Camouflage. You can't say that a particular camouflage pattern is "inherently bad" because it depends solely upon where the immediate surroundings. The idiocy of traveling to a pool of molten lava within a volcano JUST to grant function to some lava camouflage has nothing to do with anything, since the point is merely that IF you were near lava, and IF you wanted to be camouflaged, then you'd want to look like lava. IF you had a game in which there was something to be gained by having a bonus to swordsmanship, and something to be lost by a lack of macemanship, then an "I'm better with swords but suck with maces" perk would not be pointless. Now, kindly stop trying to argue with me about how bad you think a swords-vs-maces perk would be only in the specific cRPG designs you're thinking of, because I'm not even disagreeing with you. And, since that's not even the point I'm making, you're not even disagreeing with me. You're just flooding this thread with an arbitrary argument, all because you think I'm arguing in favor of some specific perk that was literally whipped out of my head in mere seconds, solely so that I could have an example where there once was no example. I guess I could've said "say there's a perk that does a thing, in a game, and that game doedoesn't have a lot of stuff that matters from that thing that that perk does... well, then it's a pointless perk. But as long as the game has lots of stuffs that change things because of the things the perk changes, then everything's great! 8D!".

I understand why you're saying that, but if we applied the same reasoning to, say, Constitution (typical, DnD Constitution), then your CON would decrease as your HP did. "Down to 1 HP? You're now really bad at resisting poisons and all other Constitution checks." Not that you can't have Strength penalties, but I don't think it should go so far as to practically function like a pool or something. "Oh, you're really tired? Your Strength is 2 instead of 15." In other words, I don't think a stat is a measure of the quantity of a given aspect you can muster at any given moment. It's more a measure of your all-factors-aside rating, for the purposes of relating it to someone else's. So, if you have 18 Strength, and you're suffering from food deprivation, you're going to be better off than someone with only 8 Strength suffering the exact same deprivation. Which is why such penalties are typically "-1" or "-2". Basically, I agree that your actual given "battery" of strength-juice should be variable (and represented in some way), but I don't think just deriving your given stat value at any point in time from dozens of variables is the way to go. Look at it like Intelligence. If you get a bunch of knowledge out of books, your Intelligence doesn't go up. But it doesn't go down just because you lack knowledge. You simply can't utilize the extent of your Intelligence to great effect if you lack any knowledge. Like a riddle in a different language. Maybe you're clever enough to solve the riddle, but not if you can't read the language. Or, a better example would be if you're stunned. Your agility doesn't decrease, because it's a measure of how agile you are capable of being, not how much you can move at any given instant. As for Deflection and how to handle characters who are quite skilled at parrying and the like (or really anything beyond just the sheer passive deflection rating of armor/shields, etc.), there are a lot of ways to do that. Something like "Parry" can be an ability, much like the Rogue's "Reversal," that you activate, but doesn't work 'til the next attack, and it could add some bonus to Deflection against that next attack against that character. Then, it could have a cooldown, essentially (as they could only Parry so often successfully). This way, it could either be something AI can use to parry every 10th attack or something, OR it could be intentionally timed whenever you see some Ogre Lord rearing back to strike. Or, it could even be a % chance to gain +X deflection against an incoming attack. Not that it CAN'T be a hard bonus (a la "You've got this Parry Master Feat (talent), so you get +10 to Deflection), because Deflection already affects the opponent's % chance to hit you. I guess a percentage change to alter a percentage chance might be a bit much, heh. Maybe not, though. It'll be very interesting to find out the details of this, when they're ready to tell us about it.

... Unless disabling traps doesn't provide free XP. And infinitely? Really? How ever did you even bring yourself to play a game with traps in it, if traps made it infinitely less enjoyable? You'd think that would make it the absolute least enjoyable game ever. Or, you know... at least tied in last place with every other trap-bearing game there is. I'm sure this will be meaningless, but I'll say it anyway: Just saying "to hell with traps" because other games could've improved upon the system isn't nearly as constructive as saying "How about we look at what those games did wrong, and better consider how to do traps right?". I dunno about you, but I'm not particularly enthusiastic about limiting PoE to only whatever other games have already succeeded at. If we gave up on everything anyone ever failed at, we'd all just be playing Pong 2014 now, and there'd be no gaming industry.

How about a soul that's somehow manifested itself into a structure/some ruins? Animancy gone wrong... Almost like Alphonse Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist. But, instead of a suit of armor, a site/house/keep/etc. Not a haunted house, but a house that does the haunting.

You know what I'd love to see? A high medieval-fantasy post-apocalyptic RPG. Why does the apocalypse always only happen in the present/near-future, while it's always STOPPED in fantasy-500-years-ago?

A gun is essentially nothing more than a hand-held metal tube with an opening at one end to allow the exit of an explosion-propelled projectile. Heck... it's just a step up from a crossbow. "Hey, what if we used a tiny explosion instead of released string-tension to propel a small bullet instead of a bolt?" It could even be considered a combustion-driven sling. There's hardly reason to treat the mere inclusion of firearms in the game as if it's the same thing as the introduction of lasers and circuitry or something. 8P

No worries. Those were valid points regarding my example. I try my best to come up with examples that address only the one thing I'm trying to point out, but I find it difficult to do so. Mostly I was just thinking about the layered aspect to something like that. A good example would be if some people initially built the place, but died off due to something. Then, some time later, a different people moved into the "ruins" (still structurally sound, but abandoned and ill-kept) and used them to their own end, not comprehending everything in there (maybe some altar to a specific deity became a meeting table/dining table, etc.). So, there's old, still-unknown stuff about the place now, PLUS whatever the new people bring. Hell, there could be some treasure room that's hidden, and the people living there now never even discover it. Then, they all get killed by some cult/group following some dark-magic users (cliche, I know) who are after the power of that altar that the current people know nothing about. Etc. Now THOSE people move in for a bit and try summoning some dark thing at that altar that taints the... ehh, energy there. Or, maybe people set up experiments there that backfired, resulting in all their deaths and some "mutated" (for lack of a better word) souls ended up forming and populating the place. I guess the point I'm trying to get at is that, unlike with a much simpler location (like a cave), to which it would be mildly silly to tie a bunch of other stuff into ("Oh, it turns out 17 different world quests/stories throughout the game center around this one cave!"), there's a lot more room for something like a 15-level ruin to actually have affiliation with various other things in the world, from various sources and various time periods. Which is pretty awesome, to me.

Then I'd say we're a bit overdue for one, eh?

No no, I see your point. I'm sorry for being unclear. I was referring to the strong possibility of something like Trailblazing being a skill with a value scale. Again, like Lockpicking for Rogues. If Rogues could just unlock all locked things, and no one else could unlock ANY locked things... well, that makes Game a dull boy, . So, for example, if magically-sealed things weren't few and far between, then "Magical Unsealing" would probably have to be a skill, so that SOME Wizards could unseal certain things, while others' (who hadn't spent as many points in Magical Unsealing) could not. Or... to put it another way, I was just kind of saying that, for what it's worth, PoE's design doesn't really like a lot of hard class restrictions. So, anything that's going to work like a skill (that could be feasibly used by anyone of any class -- such as knowledge/skill-based Trailblazing and/or weather prediction/Survival-related stuff) is probably not going to be specific to a given class. I wasn't really trying to say what must or must not be a skill. But, that was why I initially put "abilities" in quotes, since stuff like Trailblazing seems highly susceptible to existence as a skill, even though it doesn't actually have to be one.

Ahh... you learn something new every day. I knew OF that, but didn't know it was called a string raise. Points for the string/thread relation, and ALSO for the (inadvertent?) relevance of spider "silk" technically consisting of strings.

The main thing to keep in mind is this: Just because games that aren't old have had pathfinding issues doesn't mean that pathfinding issues are still unavoidable in game design. Just as the fact that technology now allows for the avoidance of a lot of older games' pathfinding issues doesn't in any way guarantee that a given development team working on a given game will successfully avoid such issues. Stun's point was that, back in the day, it was pretty much unavoidable and tricky. Nowadays, we have much more industry experience at our disposal, and much better hardware/software capability for handling such things. Therefore, it's now much more possible/easy to have good pathfinding. Doesn't mean it's any less possible to have crappy pathfinding (no effort/crappy AI budget = still bad pathfinding). But, there's nothing we can look at now to just predict whether or not Team Eternity is going to execute awesome pathfinding design or not, until we simply play the finished game and/or see evidence of the finished pathfinding system at work.

Let us, then, be thankful that this game is being developed by whom it is, and not by the development team of either Dragon Age game.

#"string" raise. ...Amateur. Tsk. I'm so confused, I'm casting hostile spells at random upon my own allies, as we speak! (Really, though, I don't get it. )

Well... I don't think the "Abilities" we're talking about here are restricted by class (the best example being Rogues and Lockpicking -- in some games, only Rogues can Lockpick at all, while in others (like PoE), anyone can, but Rogues simply get a hard bonus to the skill). I was mainly referencing stereotypes, really, just to not be saying "some given character" every single time. You could have a very survivaly Wizard, or a very survivaly Cipher, and a Ranger with almost no survival skill. *shrug*. I'm more interested in the what the skill could offer, gameplay-wise, than who could and could not use the skill.

I don't understand why you're arguing a hard "nope" here. They're still munchkiny non-trade-offs... under certain circumstances as you yourself just stated. I'm also still baffled by the astounding amount of importance placed on the specifics of existing games. As if the most important factor to publishers in making a new game is simply the logical/functional feasibility of design decisions, and not "How can I make people want to by this, irrationally or otherwise?" For the third (? and final) time, my entire point is that the badness of a design decision is pretty heavily, if not solely, dependent upon the context of the rest of the game's design.. Having a choice between mace effectiveness and sword effectiveness is only bad if the game doesn't make you miss one or the other. It's not just some inherently problematic choice. And just because a bunch of games repeat crappy design choices doesn't make crappiness the only possibility for those implementation goals.

Josh has said (sorry, can't remember where - was in one of the recent update interviews) that you set your points at character creation and they don't go up [much] from there. It's the [much] part that I wasn't sure on - perhaps there's an additional point or 2 to spend at level-5 or maybe there'll be 'tomes of smartness/agility' like in the first Baldur's Gate. I think that "much," while vague, basically rules out the typically seen "when I level up, I'll just spend my universal Character Improvement Points (CIP) to will my Charisma and Intelligence to increase, rather than increase my weapon skill!", or "Oh, every other level I gain a stat point!", or "This is Fallout 3, so I can just take an 'Increase a stat however you want' perk like 7 times in a row!" I think basically, it's to distinguish between RPGs in which its normal for stat-improvement to be directly (and somewhat frequently/regularly) affiliated with mere character progression (aka leveling-up), and RPGs in which it isn't. So, it most likely means that there will be ways in which to increase a stat here and there, but at most a handful of times by the end of an entire playthrough, and not as an integral (or at least frequent) part of progression. @jamoecw: I'm with you on that. I'm not trying to suggest the devs are idiots, but we can only discuss this based on what we know and what we don't. All I know is, the sheer stat-effects we've been shown seem a little out-of-whack, and Strength seems to be contradicting itself, regardless of whether or not Intellect and/or various other stats also play a part in damage output. The prototype stat list presented to us was presented in a "obviously this isn't the finished product, but this is a complete prototype" manner, not "Some of the stats will obviously do a lot more stuff, and some of them will ONLY do what we're showing in this list" manner. So, I can only rate the list provided. Doesn't mean I'm saying it's impossible that they're still considering things to have stats affect, or that they're actually putting effort into this and going to change it regardless of whether or not we somehow come up withe perfect design in this thread. Feedback and constructive criticism are simply meant to contribute to the pool of thoughts and knowledge drawn from in order to create the finished product. We don't have to doubt their ability to finalize a solid character-stat system just to critique the prototype. Hence my argument of "I think Strength should affect something in line with physical force, even if it's not directly just base damage bonus." Thus, if what you say is right, and there's something planned for Strength that we just haven't been informed of yet, then all is well. It's a conditional "if" point: IF the prototype list presented earlier in this thread were to be used as the finalized system, then here are problems that might arise. That's all. If it's useful, it's useful. If it isn't, it isn't.

If I'm not mistaken, the current design has the "bulkiness" factor of things like plate armor (that D&D has contributing to things like arcane spell failure chance and such) simply affecting "action speed." Which I believe is, simply put, "cast time" (or... ability-use time, for non-magic abilities). Seems they wanted the effects of heavy/bulky equipment to matter, but not to affect movement speed at all, because that just gets really annoying in all that simply-making-your-way-through-an-area-when-there's-not-even-any-immediate-danger. Not that there won't be anything that affects movement speed in the game, but there apparently won't be "Oh, you're wearing plate, so you travel at half the speed of everyone else...". But you'll probably swing your greatsword more slowly, and/or take longer to cast spells, etc. I'm not sure if the effects will be exactly the same across the board, or if your heavy plate armor will more heavily (see what I did there?) affect some factors while more minorly affecting others. I'm sure Josh can give you a much better answer, and in fewer words at that.

Again... it's actually a sub-race, to be fair. It's REALLY more like a trait. Like... being albino. You could call a collection of people who are all albino "Albino people," but they're not really a race of people. They're not a collective culture who share family lineages and geographical habitat, etc. You can have a godlike Orlan, or a godlike Aumaua. They're not brothers. They're pretty drastically different species at that point. I'm not telling you to like the word. Rather, I am encouraging you to evaluate it for what it is, rather than for something it's not. There's not like "The nation of godlike!", and "Man, I really love the architecture of the majestic Godlike people!". Just, for what that's worth.