Lephys

Technically he just has a Fig "Backer" badge. I think he specifically means one for "Investor."

I genuinely don't know enough about the problems and necessities of it, and so was wondering. It just seems like it wouldn't be much different from musicians. There are TONS of talented musicians out there. There are 7 billion people on the planet, for crying out loud. Even if only one in 10,000 is capable of doing good voice work, that's still 700,000 people on the planet who could potentially voice-act and sound good doing it. I mean, you have stories of people working on animated movies, and just doing some placeholder voice work, and everyone goes "Wow, you're really, really good at that!," and they end up just using that person's voice for the character. You have tons of NPCs in the game who aren't super integral characters, but it'd be kind of nice if they were voiced. Do you really need Ron Perlman to record 10 lines of dialogue that you're only going to ever hear for about 1 minute, total, in the game? I'm not saying "Lolz, it's easy and everyone can do it and it takes no equipment or setup," but people act like you have to get planets to align just to have good-sounding voicework. Is it really that stringent, and why? Would a casting call be completely out of the question for even a bunch of the more minor characters? Maybe just have people submit sound files for evaluation? Then have people weed through them (most of the definite "NOPE"s are going to be easy to pick out) until you find someone who sounds really nice? *shrug* It seems weird that that's entirely infeasible. But it could be, I suppose.

If I loved infinite health, would that be reason to include it in the game? I love Clicker Heroes. Make PoE combat like Clicker Heroes, so I can love it.

"All builds are viable" is not an attainable or reasonable goal, and I think some of the terminology/wording gets mixed up in these discussions. Most people aren't rooting for that, and the ones who are are either confused or just haven't thought things out very well. All stats should be viable for all classes. What that means is, if I'm a Wizard, I shouldn't be incapable of utilizing Constitution, or Strength. It doesn't mean that ALL Wizard characters should want Constitution. But the class, as a whole, ideally, should have potential reasons to utilize the stats. You should be able to build an inviable Wizard, but it should be pretty difficult, to be honest. Like, if you pump Resolve and dump Strength, then use only summoned-weapon spells, for example. But that doesn't mean Strength or Resolve are bad stats for the Wizard class. Essentially, any character build options should be able to be built around within the rest of the character-customization system.

^ Seconded. Loot is always valuable (even if it's only a few shillings here and there, that's just being frugal.) If the game's gonna Skyrim the loot and give you no reason not to join every faction and gain unrestricted bonuses from becoming the Head of the Thieves' Guild AND the Archmage of the Wizards' Guild AND the head of the Imperial Guard, etc., then why should you restrict yourself? One of the only reasons to ever not loot everything and sell it was difficult to do so. Why should the game say "this is free money, but pretend like it's a bad idea, 'cause we're just gonna let you do it"? It's a bit silly. Again, you can make "trash" loot exist for the few reasons that it can actually contribute to the game world, but also make it useful in several different capacities (and not always useful yet annoying-to-pick-up). The single biggest problem with trash loot in games (and the reason it's known as "trash" loot) is that it's basically just a proxy for handfulls of coins. Inventory management isn't bad. Inventory management of a big Xaurip-spear-shaped IOU slip worth 3 coins is a hassle. The easiest thing to do is not simulate for simulation's sake (since the system isn't perfectly simulating things anyway... you don't ever find chipped Xaurip spears or need to swap out the hafts on your weapons, so why does it matter if EVERY Xaurip is technically carrying a spear, so you should technically be able to loot them?), and to simply make Xaurip spears rarer and worthless. If you really want a Xaurip spear for some reason (maybe its design could make it actually functionally different from any other spear you can find in-game, instead of just another piddly-level spear?), you can keep an eye out for Xaurips, kill them, and you will find a spear without much trouble, but you won't find 17 Xaurip spears after every combat encounter with Xaurips. Also, you won't be able to trade every single Xaurip spear you find for definite money, so there will be no artificially perpetual reason to want them in your inventory. That's the easiest fix. Not "INFINITE INVENTORY! 8D!"

Meh... I don't think it's unrealistic in very many games at all. Maybe the ideal is less heavy-handed on the flexibility in certain games as compared to others (like a Gauntlet-type couch-coop action RPG doesn't really worry as much about flexibility, because of how it's designed... or Street Fighter. The whole point is kind of that the characters are all very, very specialized, but all you're doing is fighting in the same exact duel, over and over and over, so the only parameters that are changing are the character distinctions.). The entire point of a robust stat system is to measure distinctions in stats and their effects on your character throughout a complex world of gameplay as a distinct factor from class choice. Classes are to distinguish your character a bit, but not necessarily to ultra-restrict your role. Everyone still has to survive hits, deal damage, etc. So, to say "your role is to have more HP" is awfully restrictive. There's plenty of room in an RPG's structure to allow for a tank with more HP, and a tank with less HP. To tank, all you really have to do is draw and mitigate damage. That could be via parrying, barriers, CC, etc. I just think people don't think outside the box enough in the over-arching approach to all this. We tend to assume certain things mean certain restrictions, when the necessary restrictions are actually broader than that. For example, you should theoretically be able to "tank" as a Wizard to uses cool spells and stuff to draw enemy fire and simply keep enemies occupied, be it by charming them to attack one another, causing all their attacks to miss you for the most part, CC them to take away their attacks/DPS output, etc. To think "No, we always need someone to stand there, take punishment and not die by way of pure defensive values, and attack people with basic weapon math really well, and also this should be the defining role of this one class" is simply narrow-minded, if you really think about it.

Hahaha... Sorry. This just makes me think of the MMO term "KOS", or "kill on-sight," which was typically used when a faction was so unhappy with you that the guards of their settlements would attack you immediately when you got into range (sorry, I know... over-explanation for a forum of gamers who probably already knew that). So, now I'm just imagining a bunch of merchants standing outside a town gate with the guards, wielding sacks of money and bull-rushing you, turning you upside down, shaking all the marked items out of your pack and pockets, and taking them whilst paying you for them.

I really don't understand why good VO is SO expensive. I'm not saying it should cost 5 bucks, but look at all the Youtubers with plentily-good quality audio setups that single-handedly produce their own video AND audio shows, with editing and everything, and have excellent voices. It seems as though part of it is just inertia to how it's always been done. I mean, I know it's changed a lot in the last 20 years, but I wonder if it's still kind of "Oh, we have to do this, this and this, and rent a recording studio, obviously, and we can only pick from these preset voice actors, etc...."

I feel you might have overshot my point. I don't mean that everyone's passive math should be identical, and all the differences should only be active, unique abilities. However, IF you were to go with either extreme, for example, I'd rather have all the classes with identical base math and different active-use abilities (even if they're passive modals, they're still things that you're actively choosing to employ and time within the tactical combat, etc.), than all the classes have identical active-use options and just wildly different passive math. Ideally, I'd rather have a combination of both, but the options at your disposal are an entirely different facet to gameplay, on top of just "Could I take 3 hits here, or two?" passive factors in the background of whatever else you're already doing. I've always found the traditional Fighter roles to be stupidly restrictive, "You stand here like a slab of beef and take punishment and cleave goblins in twain" notions, when really they should have all kinds of cool stuff to choose from and do, and not just "When you keep doing the same things, even more numbers get crunched!". That's not useless, but it is quite lacking. It's all about the approach. If passive math is intentionally supposed to be THE thing that makes a class a class, I find that to be a horrible idea, because passive math is already a part of/a difference between all the other classes. Whereas, "you can do all kinds of crazy elemental stuff, and other classes cannot" is an actual unique set of options to play with for an elemental caster, as opposed to any other character that isn't an elemental caster. Sure, he's still doing damage, and he still has health and armor and resistances and attack speed and recovery time, but he's doing actual different things with all that math. Axes and arrows are both made of wood and metal, but they're distinctly different ways to employ wood and metal.

Making a certain stat be THE stat for a given class is the most restrictive thing you can possibly do. You can have stats do something a bit different for various classes, but the answer is definitely not "Make it so that if you're a Wizard, you HAVE to want Intelligence, but you can maybe want some other stats if you're bored." The whole point is to get away from "correct" builds. There's no point in saying "here are a bunch of stats to adjust for fun, varied results in your characters!," then adding "Oh, but you're class X, so you need attributes Y and Z as high as possible. Having them lower is never a good idea." You want to be able to build lots of different types of Wizards, not good Wizards and less-good Wizards. Same for other classes. In this way, it's great that every class in PoE has the same power source, so there's no "But wait, my class doesn't have magic, so Stat X is a dump stat for them now!" So now the trick is to build things in such a way that each class can utilize each stat. Doesn't make all the stats necessary, but it makes them all useful. So if you want a high-strength high-con Wizard, you could have one, and be beefy. (I use Wizard as an example because it's so applicable to the problems we see and how classes are differentiated in RPGs). As long as the Wizard has weapon summons and self-augmentation abilities, etc., he should be able to tank, to a degree, and have it play out differently than if a Fighter or Druid or Barbarian tanked. Personally, I'm really sick of seeing RPGs over the last 15 years lock all the roles down for classes. "You're a fighter, so here's what you do, exactly. You have high armor, high health, and you taunt stuff." That's boring. Not that tanking is necessarily boring, but HAVING TO tank is boring. That fighter should be able to do all KINDS of different things, and just do them all in a very Fightery way. While a Wizard would do various different things, but in a very Wizardy way.

Honestly, if "you get bonuses with weapons" is your unique class feature for Fighters, the class probably needs some work. Everyone gets to fight with weapons, so everyone should be able to customize their weapon-fighting capabilities, at least somewhat. If the Fighter gets different/better bonuses, then so be it. But "here, have some numerical bonuses to some stuff that everyone gets" has never been a good class-distinguishing factor.

This stems from "This character is talking to your party, so let's use this time for out-of-place lore exposition!" syndrome. Ideally, there's a lot of dialogue to be had in the game, throughout the world, but if you want to find out all about Kingdom X's history or Lord AwesomeDude's reign, you have to get bits and pieces from many, many different people, all of whom are individually referencing bits of lore and history contextually and relevantly. OCCASIONALLY you should probably find a person who's willing to let you ask them for a history lesson. But just making all the NPCs be info repositories makes them feel less like characters and more like constructs in a game that are designed to provide info that the player might be curious about.

Yeah, that was why I ended that with a question mark. It was partially a stretch for me to justify my 2 favorite magic types still being the best even with necromancy (was mainly being silly), and partially that ice magic is often associated with any magical undead (freezing grasp, or just liches with their ice magic, etc.). I guess the whole lack of body heat thing means that they're naturally cold, so if they had magic, it would be more attenuated with coldness? *shrug*. It kinda makes sense, but doesn't really mean that if you're undead you HAVE to have ice magic.

For which you use electrical impulses to move the corpse's muscles, and ice magic because... liches?

Lightning and frost will always reign supreme.

Yeah, but it's more about proper usage than "More Strength = more damage."

But... but... if you set the AI, then you're still controlling your people. Just much more efficiently. And you can still manually tweak orders as needed. I can see being a control freak meaning that you'd resist giving up control of your peeps to someone else's AI parameters. But, if you get to set them in-depth...

Yeah. My only qualm with it was that you had to have the privilege of unlocking tactic slots. That was a bit dumb. Like "Oh, you can control your characters' thinking, BUT YOU'RE GONNA WORK FOR IT, DAMMIT!" Haha.

I still wish trash stuff would have more uses than just to make a couple of extra shillings per trip back to town. Limit the inventory and make people carry the stuff and the problem becomes "That's valuable stuff, because I can sell it to people!". Make the inventory unlimited, and the problem becomes "Now why WOULDN'T you take all the stuff and just sell it from your magical tardis stash when you get back?", as well as "now there are SO many things for me to sort through!" I think the solution should be two-fold: A -- Everything shouldn't always be valuable to everyone. In other words, there are valuable things to use wolf pelts for in the game, but everyone does not want to buy them or use them in any way. So, if you don't want them, you don't just get overruled by the fact that they're worth money and money is useful for hundreds of other things you do want. B -- There should be a use for things other than selling. Especially with your ship crew, maybe you just cleared a beach of raiders, and you send a message via bird or something back to your ship's crew, and they send a team out to the location and gather all the arms and armor, so that they can break them down and re-use the materials for ship repairs and/or to make new weapons for the crew, etc. And/or maybe various NPCs just need stuff. I don't mean "I really need 5 rabbit nostrils. Bring me 5 rabbit nostrils and I'll give you a reward, then I'll mysteriously never need any more rabbit nostrils ever again!". I mean that, in general, they just need stuff. Maybe you bring herbs to the herbalist, and they give you free tinctures or coupons or something. Maybe sometimes they just buy stuff from you. Maybe they just owe you a favor, which you can call in later on in a different quest. There are a lot more interesting systems to have than just "Here's stuff... like one time you might want to actually use this equipment, and the rest of the time, it's either pointlessly existing in the game world for verisimilitude, or it's basically just loose change you're leaving lying on the ground, but with the middle-man of having to tote it around and sell it."

I'm rather fond of the partial-voice format in which all the dialogue is well-written and you mostly read it, but occasionally the character speaks a voiced line. It's usually either the first line in a given paragraph (for example, if you're just meeting them, it would probably be the "Mighty strange seeing an Elf around here... name's Vincent" line that just sort of embodies their general demeanor in the whole greeting paragraph), or it's just a line that's not even written, but embodies the general emotion behind what is written. Like, if they're going off on you for something, the voice might say "UhhhhhGH! I cannot be-LIEVE you right now!" or something. (Just an example... I'm not a pro writer, haha).

I feel like you've got the wrong idea about logic or rationality, here. It's not a matter of what we understand and what we don't. There are rational rules to things we don't even understand yet, in the real world. Like... quantum entanglement. Before someone discovered that, it sounded like some made-up magical BS. But it's a real thing. Is it illogical for nature to work the way it works? I don't think it can be. Logic is just the relationship between reality and reality. Whatever you want to call it, if you have a thing, then another of that same thing, you have 2 of that thing. You can't have a 2nd thing and wind up with 3 things. You would have to first get a 3rd thing. So... creating a world from song isn't rational in our reality's rules. But, IF it were possible, it would have to make sense in its own reality's rules. It basically doesn't matter what those rules are, as long as they don't conflict with themselves. To look at it another way, "There aren't any rules" is actually a rule. It just conflicts with every other rule. Also, yes, we don't have to use existing science to explain all magic, but if your fictional world contains existing rules of nature, and you add magic to it, the magic is not existing in a void. It's co-existing within a world of other rules. Imagine fire didn't exist. Then, you decide to invent it, using magic. Well, what happens when fire occurs? It affects temperature, burns different things in different ways, sustains its reaction in different ways depending on conditions, etc. You can't just make up how it interacts with everything else, and contradict the entire world. Magic can bypass existing rules of science, but all that means is that there's a new rule involving the interaction of magic with things. It's not a rule-less wasteland of "whatever I randomly decide to happen, happens." You have to at least make it clear that the magic somehow avoided existing rules of physics, etc. This is kind of the main problem Might had. Even IF you decide that muscles generate magical power, they still also generate non-magical power, because they're still muscles from our world and contract to generate mechanical movement and force. So, what did Might measure? Your muscle power PLUS your magical power? So what was each, individually? Also, why can't anyone have muscle power without having magical power, since they're not the same thing? Things beg questions, and if there aren't reasons for questions (even if you don't learn all of them), things get REALLY uninteresting.

It's becoming hard to make sure it's getting differentiated. In an effort to be clearer, I'm all for magic not necessarily being explained. i.e., by the author to the reader, in some sort of classroom lesson. Hell, maybe most of the characters don't know how it works. BUT, when it comes to meaningful interactions with the magic system, it ultimately has to work a certain way. Like, you can't have teleporting just sometimes work, but other times not work, for no rhyme or reason. Maybe the characters don't yet KNOW why it doesn't work, but any instance of teleportation either working or failing, there has to be a consistent reason. "Ohhh, it turns out that the more ducks that are around, the better chance it has of working. That time it worked, the characters didn't realize that there was a family of ducks about 30 yards away in a small pond that they couldn't see." See? That "makes no sense," but really it does. It doesn't make sense to us why ducks would affect teleportation magic, but if they do, they do. You can't just have it have no rules. It has to have rules, whether or not we (the reader/player) or the characters know the rules. The rules have to exist to at least be able to be figured out, even if they don't all get figured out. I'm not saying you have to directly explain magic, necessarily. But it you don't even recognize its ability to be explained (on whatever level), you have problems. So, I definitely agree there should be a certain amount of mystery to it.

They must've had Frosted Flakes for breakfast... THEY're gggggggGGGGGGRRRRRAZE!

It could. I guess all I'm saying is that, IF you're trying to explain something that's occurring, you can't explain it with inexplicable magic and hope to achieve anything. Doing so is ignoring rather than explaining. You can have unexplained things in your fiction. Maybe some race of people vanished, and no one knows how they left or where they went, etc. Maybe you never find out. That's fine. But you can't have a situation in your plot that needs the how of that race vanishing to be important, and just ignore it with "Hah hah hah! INCOMPREHENSIBLE MAGIC! 8D!" This is all more pronounced in a video game like this, because almost all the lore coincides with mechanics, which are 100% "this is how things are functioning and interacting." So, "it's magic, who cares" doesn't fly when that magic is having its damage mitigated and/or bypassing certain affects or circumstances, etc.

Note: The idea that becoming more insane allows you to perform magic better is actually an organized, rational relationship. Also, if human minds can't grasp the system, then a human mind could not have devised the system. We can make up something that we pretend isn't able to be grasped, but we have to grasp it in order to invent it. In other words, in order for something to not make any sense at all, it would have to follow a fixed set of rules that we couldn't comprehend. You cannot invent those rules if you don't comprehend how those rules would even work, so you just have to go "Ehhhh... it follows a fixed set of rules that we can't comprehend." Which, again, you can do. But then, nothing at all can even question your system in any capacity, which doesn't make for very interesting or functional fiction. "Then the protagonist did incomprehensible things and won the day!" "Wait... what did he do? How did he win the day?" "Well, we don't know. He just did. It's magic, and it doesn't make sense." "Did the villain die or something?" "The villain had things occur to him and the protagonist, because of occurrences, was victorious!" In the end, all an "incomprehensible" magic system does is blatantly say "I'm going to ignore how or why any of this is happening, and just force it to happen because I want the results." It becomes almost the same thing as forced character writing in books and movies, when Character X does something completely out of line with their character or the plot/world just so that Y can happen. You know, "Oh, I want this character to dramatically die here, so even though they have the advantage in this fight, I'm going to have them hesitate, or have something preposterous happen, JUST so I can say 'see, that's why they lost the fight and died... because of that occurrence I just threw in there, when I could've just changed the context of the fight from the get go so that this character could reasonably die in this fight.'"