Lephys

Random encounter/scripted event during over-sea world map travel?

I'm more inclined to feel this way as well. Huge, dense cities full of quests and the like just feel cramped and overwhelming. And when you're in the same place doing the same things, seeing the same places... There's very little feeling of progress. I think that might be because most of the progress is typically occurring within your characters' stat sheets/inventory screen. That and there's often not very good pacing of the quests in the city. In regard to quests and progress through the narrative, it feels like the exact same quest-hug environment the whole time. It'd be great if consequences of choices and actions largely impacted the city itself. Buildings burn down/get destroyed, different people/factions take ownership of different areas and build new things as you go. Shops close and change into other shops, etc. A poor housing district gets torn down to build a convenient highway, or a noble's new estate, etc.

If this is too extensive to feasibly implement, then what about carriage-to-carriage combat?! 8D

Strongholds and choices and tactics, oh my!

Show me a hoodie that comes down to your ankles and can be removed with a single flourish, and I'll admit cloaks are obsolete.

For the record... He didn't say the damage was chump change... he said it was chump change "compared to his marks and status effects he carried around with him." I think a lot of these notions about what classes are good at and what they aren't so good at are getting a bit misconstrued. I don't think any of the classes are going to be incapable of dealing damage. They're not gonna do like 5% of some other class's damage. It's a relative difference between classes. One class can do OODLES of single-target damage without being OP. Why? Because they can't really do anything else. So, where other classes are dealing with the situation, that class has to run away, or reposition, or go get some protection buffs, etc. It's like the Rogue versus Fighter. Sure, the Fighter does less direct damage, but he fights way better and can wade into far more foe-riddled situations. The Rogue has to hit-and-run, more or less. The Ranger's cool as long as he's being covered. But, if 8 skeletons are charging him, to quote the film 300, his "numbers will count for nothing." In other words, you can't assess the AMOUNT of damage a class is capable of dealing in isolation from the ability to effectively deal that damage. The very simple example being weapons. If a hammer does 700 damage, but only swings once every 10 seconds, it's still doing "the most damage." But, a dagger might only do 50 damage, but attack every single second. The dagger has a lot more opportunities to attack than the hammer. And that's just a single factor. You've got all the other factors governing when and how effectively you can deliver your attacks. Doing the most damage doesn't mean dealing the damage isn't trickier.

I believe you took more specifics from that than I intended. I wasn't vying for a very smooth, gradual/stepped difficulty that ALWAYS correlates directly to your newly-expanded scope of abilities. I'm all for varying difficulty. I only mean that, in general, you don't give people 7,000 potential combos of things they could encounter at level 1, and 500 different abilities, or the game's ludicrously overwhelming at first. You have to build up to that. And, secondly, I just wanted to say that the difficulty doesn't need to increase at a steady-yet-exponential pace the whole time. You know, "Now you have to worry about enemies with immunities, AND all enemies have like double the hitpoints, AND you're going to need to be 3 levels higher just to even have a CHANCE against any of them!" Some games do that, and it becomes a bit ridiculous. As the amount of stuff you have to deal with increases, the difficulty naturally increases (more possibilities to deal with/keep up with/overcome, etc.). So, there's no need to make it mandatory that the RELATIVE difficulty increases at a hard rate, as well. That's what I was trying to point out. It's very similar to the aspect of Halflife and other games that you pointed out. You get armor-piercing rounds, and now all enemies can only be harmed by armor-piercing rounds. Basically, it starts saying "these things you've been able to do for a while are now OBSOLETE! You can only use the NEWEST subset of capabilities you've gotten!" It narrows the field of possible strategies and factors, rather than expanding upon what's there. Another related thing is the "your early abilities never gain effectiveness as you go" thing, where you've got a level 1 Firebolt that does 10 damage, and enemies in the 2nd half of the game all have 700HP and a resistance to level 1 spells. Instead of making the Firebolt viable for the duration of the game (even if it's still never the strongest spell at your disposal) and allowing for strategies that utilize it, it's rendered obsolete.

Agreed. Well... to be clear, there's nothing wrong with the word epic, I don't think. If it's applied to something of a grand scale. Frodo's travels from his little hobbit hole all the way to Mt. Doom? An epic journey. His (well... Bilbo's) mithril chain mail? Not epic. Cool and protective, but not epic. It doesn't level mountains, or produce something equivalent to all the events of Frodo's journey that whole way. So, epicness, in a narrative? Fine. Epicness of an object? Meh. That's been a pretty crap application ever since it was first applied in an official manner (I blame MMOs, even though I don't know that they were the first). Epicness is what you DO, what you ACHIEVE with what you have. It's not the stuff you have that inherently achieves great things. Like JFSOCC said, taking down (as an actual mortal with limited resources) 15 combatants that COULD all potentially kill you is far more epic than waving a Sword of God-Killing to deal enough damage to slay a god.

Are you kidding? I hacked the game, just so I could have a full party of nothing but Garrick. Yes, even the main character was replaced with Garrick. Nah, but, in serious response, I haven't actually played more than about 10 hours through BG1 (well, enhanced edition) yet. But... I THINK Garrick is Lady Silke's man-dude? In which case, I know what you're talking about. I believe he was in my party for a brief period. He might still be, but... maybe not. Basically, I don't have enough empirical evidence of his crappiness yet, one way or another. Or of bards in general, for that matter (2E bards, at least). Of course, I think enhanced edition is kind of a bastardization of 2E? Maybe? *shrug* I should stop typing now.

By that same token, all the time spent in pre-production designing and figuring out exactly what areas they want and how many they want was time that wasn't spent actually grunt-forcing out quantities and quantities of areas. That means we get fewer areas than if they had just started building areas from day 1. And the time it took them to actually post the position... that's all environment-building time, wasted. See, without further actual criteria/bases, EVERYTHING not spent on environment building is technically going to result in less completed environment art for the final product. But, less than what? We don't even know why the position is going unfilled, do we? What if they have a plan? They posted it earlier than they'd actually NEED the artist, and they're just considering lots and lots of applicants in a very careful fashion before choosing? So many unknowns. I don't know that jumping to the conclusion of "Omg, every day that someone doesn't get hired actually detracts from the quality of the final product we WOULD'VE had if they had hired someone infinite time ago!" is a healthy or necessary decision at the moment. That kinda just brews arbitrary worry.

A cape, or a cloak? Because cloaks are so much more practical/awesome. Just sayin', u_u...

I wish we warned and banned members for misteruse of the English language.

As this is pretty much being indie developed, I most certainly hope the game doesn't end up feeling like Obsidian... "souled out" on us. But yeah, people do tend to go a bit overboard with something like soulpower. Obsidian seems to be pretty good at remaining pretty grounded with such things, though. Maybe that's just me. Everything we've seen so far leads me to believe that they aren't just going to take a medieval fantasy RPG world and hit every single thing in with a soul-magic stamp. "Trees?! SOUL POWER! Water? SOUL POWER! Shoes? DEFINITELY SOUL POWER!!!!!!"

The difficulty really doesn't need to stray at all, relative to your toolset. It's kind of like puzzle games. If you get a new tool, then a new need for that tool presents itself. It can still be pretty dynamic, but, if you've got 3 tools at level one, the difficulty should be pretty moderate as long as you're considering the use of all three tools. If you've got 25 tools at level 5, then the difficulty should remain the same, so long as you're not still just trying to use the same three tools. You don't have to require players to react even faster, or use an even smaller selection of tools in a given situation. You just have to engage them with things that say "Hey, this is pretty tricky when just tackling it blindly, so you might want to puzzle out, for just a brief period at least, what types of things work the best, and which tools to avoid using in this particular situation." It's easier said than done, I know. But, the idea I'm trying to get at, specifically, is that you don't need to increase the relative amount of player skill involved (reaction time, micromanagement, etc.) as the difficulty goes on. You don't need to have someone master juggling, THEN stand on their head while they juggle, blindfolded. You just need to let them get a little used to juggling 2 things, then add a third. Or change what the objects are. Not add a bunch of extra things to worry about simultaneously. "Okay, now you're going to juggle, AND count to 1,000 in increments of 13. GO!"

Yeah, I'm another person who kinda has to see who's who before I pick. Same thing with any set of options. I'm that weird person, who, when someone talks about a game and says "Yeah, the such-and-such class sucks," or "this character is useless," I kind of think "Challenge: ACCEPTED!". Haha. Now, sometimes the rumors were true. But, I'm naturally drawn to the things that typically get labeled as inherently crappy or just sort of avoided because they're strange/different. Either way, no matter how much I end up knowing about the classes and the game at large before I play it, I can't decide until I know the personalities and such of the characters.

Further ideas, the more I think about it: Wanted posters (maybe the sketchier versions, rather than the painted masterpiece artworks), paintings and such for the stronghold, paintings in notable NPCs mansions/estates/quarters or throughout castles and palaces (portraits of noblefolk and whatnot), pictures in a museum or some kind of House of Curios, etc.

Temporary elemental damage that's dependent upon a spell that must be actively cast by (per example) a Wizard? Of course it shouldn't be adjusted. It's not coming from the weapon. It's coming from a spell. That spell is fundamentally no different than a DOT, only with the dynamic of the hits with a weapon determining when and how often it damages. The source of the damage is the spell, not the weapon, so the damage is balanced against the spell's cast speed/resource-requirements. Not the weapon's. Is a temporary weapon-burning spell cast by a Wizard really the ONLY thing you can possibly fathom as constituting an on-hit effect? I guess I just MUST be a nonsensical person? So, when you think "Hmm... it would really only make sense when applied to permanent enchantments on weapons, etc., just like the permanent base damage of the weapon," you immediately think "but he couldn't have been talking about that. He must have been talking about when a Wizard lights a sword on fire." Why do you think I made examples citing a weapon that "does X lightning damage"? Don't you think I would've specified if I meant "only temporarily, because a Wizard made it so with his finite magic ammo"? Seriously, man. For realsies. I'm gonna get you a Jump To Conclusions Mat, from the film Office Space. It has conclusions on it... and you can jump to them. 8D

True. "Soldier" would probably be a step up, as it's at least more specific. Although, it's still just a general militarily-trained person, even though your Fighter could be much more of a lone wolf. Considering how few good words there are to describe exactly what a Fighter is and not what it isn't, I think "Fighter" isn't too bad. *Ponders*... I dunno. Warrior really works a ton better, probably. You could say all the classes are warriors (even a Priest could be seen as a divine/holy warrior), simply wielding different weapons and tools. But, it still better describes the class, I think. Names are tough, though. Seems like often a different word always works better in one regard and worse in another.

^ Just put 'em in lore books through the game, like encyclopedia entries, depictions of events, etc. That'd be a pretty awesome use of all the art that doesn't go directly into character models and in-game assets. ^_^

It would be rather interesting if there was at least one other facet to aesthetic equipment customization. Maybe you can find trophies and/or etching patterns, etc, to place on your armor. Just one additional factor to add some personalized flavor to your look, so that your red Wizard's plate can still look a bit distinct from your red Paladin's plate. It's not necessary, of course. But, I think one more factor beyond a primary and secondary color selector works wonders in many a game. Especially if it's something pretty clever and variety-rich (such as the application of trophies and/or patterns/textures, etc.)

That's just as much of a factor for consideration as the number of abilities each class has and their casting duration. Also, I was merely addressing the concern of uniform "casting" times somehow forcing two classes (such as Fighter and Wizard) to function the exact same way in terms of cast times. Technically, one class could hav e nothing but instant-cast abilities, while another had nothing but long-cast abilities, with the effects and other factors balanced accordingly. That's HORRIBLY unlikely, but just points out how far the spectrum can possibly go as far as differences between classes. Surely, all classes will have at least a handful of instant, short, AND long abilities, or there wouldn't be nearly as much benefit from establishing standard casting durations. But, the specific ratios can still vary drastically.

I was only being silly. I meant no harm. 8P

Fine, fine. I digressed a byte. Happy?

Is the concern over the Rogue being "significantly better than a Fighter" at single-target, spike damage stemming from the idea that the Fighter's going to be inherently inferior to the Rogue? Because damage, alone, is meaningless without also observing the method by which the damage can be dealt. What I mean is, you're not going to just have a Fighter and a Rogue, side-by-side, each auto-attacking another enemy, head-on, with the Rogue doing significantly more damage, and the Fighter doing way less, with all other factors exactly the same. If the Rogue isn't used differently, he'll die. The Fighter is supposed to have better means of taking on opponents (even if he isn't necessarily slaying them the fastest). He can easily survive head-on conflicts while still dealing damage and whatnot. Whereas, the Rogue, while wielding higher damage numbers, has to actually deliver that damage to the enemy. That's probably why he's better with spike damage, because you're not going to be standing around consistently dealing more damage than the Fighter with a basic, head-on auto-attack. And the reason he's better with crits than the fighter isn't because he's that much better trained with weapons. It's because he gets the jump on people, as opposed to blatantly engaging them. That's what's silly about Rogues having passively high crit chances and still just standing around attacking people, like in MMOs. They don't just magically stab people more precisely despite being in direct conflict. They attack more intelligently/efficiently, avoiding head-on conflict as much as possible. The role difference isn't formed from crit chance and spike damage values. Those are just results of the difference. The difference encompasses how the class plays/behaves/functions.

They should totally do live-action cutscenes, like in the entire Command and Conquer series. Ooh! Or live-action slideshows like in Betrayal at Krondor!