Lephys

Well, I agree. But, before I even look at the priority list, I ask "was this implementation even worth the time and effort spent on it?" I mean, using some of the examples already cited in this thread, if Pickpocketing draws from the same pool of points as the other skills, and all it lets you do is basically get more free money the more points you put into it (even if you're stealing items, if they're pretty much just useful to sell because keys and the like could always be obtained in other ways and/or bypassed), then why was that even in there? I mean, if you have 5 whole NPCs with all their own flavorful dialogue and animations and voices (for example), but all they do is ask you to fetch a few things, then give you money, wouldn't it have been easier to just put 5 more locked doors/chests/containers in the game, with that money within them? So, yeah. I guess I'm looking at it from principle; Is it even worth "keeping the same," or should simply be either improved or removed? If it's in just so you can feel thiefy, I think it's already a waste of resources. If it's just as viable of an option for skill points as any other skill, then, yeah, at that point we can say "Hmmm... okay, improvement would be nice, but let's put it at the bottom of the list." But, first you've got to decide whether or not it should even go on the list, in whatever spot. Haha... what if you could build up a pretty decent level of heat/suspicion in the area, and, to cool everything down, you just plant something easily noticeable on someone else, to make it look like they're the thief, so the locals would switch to "YAY, WE CAUGHT THE THIEF!" mode and lose their suspicion/worry? Obviously you couldn't do it with pants. "Wha- I wasn't wearing these a MOMENT ago! How in the...!!!"

I demand a giant sloth form. 8P

pausing is the essence of tactics? (IOW you have a real time game, not a turn based one) Pausing is the top hat of tactics? See. I can blatantly misrepresent people's quotes by arbitrarily changing out words, too. ^_^

What if, instead of the whole "you're more powerful, but you go berzerk and attack people at random" thing, a weapon gave you increased power at the cost of occasionally using firing off an ability at random? I mean, it'd be against the target that character's currently fighting. But, maybe you use Rend Armor or something, on something with no armor, depriving you of the ability to use that on something else against which it would've been highly effective. Sort of an interesting power-for-precision tradeoff, I think. Also, I'd like to add that crossing the combat/non-combat effectiveness threshold is probably a bad idea. Like that Longsword of +5 Charisma. You carry it around all the time, so that you can get freebie bonuses to dialogues, but then, when combat hits, you switch to a much more effective weapon. OR, even worse, that sword that's +5 to hit/damage, but reduces your Charisma by 5. Easy... you don't carry it around, and you equip it whenever the shyte strikes the fan. Unless it's one of those Dyson Airblade fans, in which case the shyte just gets wind-tunneled through the center of the hoop and strikes something else. 8P I think the detriments just need to be rather interesting. You know... something you might not really want to happen, but that just would alter the way you get to tackle things, rather than being a hard numbers-detriment to your ABILITY to handle things. Like the weapon firing off your abilities. You still get to use them. Just, one factor of their use is beyond your control now. Also, I think the Mass Effect reference was a good one, earlier in the thread. (Mass Effects 2 and 3, at least). The weapon switching in that was so easy, it wasn't really a chore. It just made sense. Plus the fact that you had limited ammunition for every weapon, so it was a matter of using your ammo more efficiently/effectively, rather than using the correct infinite damage supply against the correct enemy/defense at all times. That, and you're not often going to have a full party all using the exact same weapon, and then going "Oh no, a group of enemies who are weak to axes and not swords!", then switch them all to their axes. The same happened in Mass Effect. If there were 2 armored enemies in a group, and 2 shielded enemies, and 1 biotically-barriered enemy, then I'd have the person who's already rocking a good anti-shield weapon target the shielded enemies, and the person already rocking an armor-piercing weapon target the armored foes, etc. Not to mention you had various abilities that dealt various types of damage. So, even if I had a Heavy Pistol, and I wasn't attacking something's armor yet (which Heavy Pistols were especially good against), I could use mine and other companions' abilities to take down the shield/barrier without having to switch weapons, then use my pistol mainly against the armor to take it down effectively. OR, vice versa. I could switch to an SMG to lay into the shield, THEN utilize abilities more specifically tailored to anti-armor once I got to the armor, instead of switching back to a pistol. But, I'm getting away from myself a bit. The points were this: Weapon swapping being quite easy and streamlined handles the vast majority of all this " 'tactical' weapon-swapping is a chore" business, and the fact that your party will most likely be defaultly toting differing weapon types, along with the fact that your ability sets can be used in drastically different ways to support each other somewhat dissolves the rest of the concern. It relies on good design, sure. It's not just automatic. "Oh, your party has abilites and different weapon types, thus IT CAN NEVER BE A CHORE!" Haha. But, yeah... it sounds like a lot of the concerns are being made from a bit of a vacuum, and drastically exaggerate the need to swap weapons, as if targets and tactics cannot be much more easily swapped most times.

Josh said a character's detection radius will be affected by a character's actions. It wouldn't be too crazy to think that "wearing full plate" might be one of those actions. Or, to put it another way, "by a character's actions" might not cover all possible factors that affect the detection radius. Also, your Rogue will have an inherent bonus to sneaking, while your Paladin, most likely, will not. So, if you voluntarily beef up your plate-clad Paladin's sneaking skill, while leaving your Rogue's slightly unbeefed, then I guess you'll have the recipe for lulz at your disposal.

I like where your head's at, anubite. There's no need for 18 Charisma on a Mage to be as useful as 18 Intelligence, necessarily. But, that doesn't mean raising Charisma shouldn't still be useful. And so forth for other stats/classes.

^ Very much so. No need for more/less, better/worse absolutes. Just pleasant differences, really.

Meh... I think I know what you mean by "generic," but I wouldn't use that word, really. They're going for a pretty realistic/practical/functional approach. More of a "this is your character's personalized look/style in his selection of equipment that he actually wears and uses all the time" than "this is your character trying to look really cool." I mean, it's kind of like his work uniform, really. As for the corset... Heh, I see what you mean, there, too, but I'm pretty sure it's just a harness. I'm sure it serves as a bit of light armor, too, but he's really not designed to take people on in direct combat, so, again, it's more for utility than for "this is supposed to be armor." And I think the functionality of it was much more important in its design than the intent to show midriff. That's probably more for mobility than for visuals, as a solid leather torsopiece would probably be much more difficult to ultra-crouch in and hide as effectively as possible. Plus, I think he uses it as an actual harness-type thing for grappling hook lines and such? I'm not really sure, though. But, like I said, they actually made this and had a real-life person wear it, to see if it effectively held all the equipment props in actually-accessible locations and such while still allowing the guy to move around stealthily and dexterously. So, for that, I commend them. And, it's pretty low-profile, as far as being easily spotted goes. 8P As for the eyeliner, I don't rightly know. That could just be something they thought was cool, or it could have something to do with reflected light around the eyes. I mean, sports players use that blackout stuff under their eyes to reduce glare and such off of their cheeks/face. Maybe they did some research, and found out that black around the eyes actually helps retain better vision in darkness when lights strike the face? *Shrug* I haven't the faintest. 8P

Yeah. I just mean that there are objective reasons for rating even a video game character as good, and there are SUBjective reasons for this. And they combine to form our total opinion. This isn't just Pick Your Favorite Color: The Thread. I get mildly irked when people throw out the "Well this is all completely subjective, anyway," especially when they, themselves, have been including objective reasoning in their evaluations. That, and it usually gets tossed out when some kind of dispute or disagreement strikes. *shrug*

Adam, if I may suggest an injection of literal humor... Upon examining the exact title of this thread, you should totally just round up the team, take a makeshift group photo on a cameraphone, and post that as an update. "THIS is how they look, at the moment. Oh... Steve just collapsed from development fatigue. GET THE COFFEE!"

You think they just hire 100 people, at the beginning of the project, and then roll with that for 18 months, until the game's done? They don't do this. More time can be spent on things before they even hire more people to kick production into high gear. Time equals Money. However, 1 Time does not equal 1 Money. Therefore, "take your time" doesn't mean "take your money, and multiply that by a lot more units of time." It means "intelligently don't rush this into expensive production." There are a lot more factors that can rush the production of a game than just "our money supply is running low." Obviously, oodles of us trust in Obsidian to already spend their money wisely, and take their time where it is highly beneficial. We're simply encouraging such decisions, and expressing our support. But, yeah, taking "Hey, no need to rush" statements and acting like the only thing they can possibly mean is "just add a bunch of months of payroll onto the end of your project schedule" is mildly silly. There are methods of spending more time on certain things, to great benefit, while, overall using the same amount of money. As Josh said, he considers pre-production the hard part, focusing as much time and effort into that as possible (with a much smaller crew, since it's heavily concepts and designs, instead of manpower pumping out content quantity), so that the latter portion -- production -- is actually as easy as can be. They don't get done with half the animations in the game, then go "wait, I think we've found a flaw in our animation design! We're gonna hafta change it a bit!", and have to figure all that out with a team of 50 now instead of 15, for that month, while half those people can't produce more animations until the changes are made by the design crew. Etc. That's pretty simplified, and probably full of inaccuracies on a technical level, but it's things of that nature.

Your stat-talk got me thinking: Regardless of whether or not non-typical stat values had a direct effect on combat capabilities (damage, attack speed, etc.), what if stats like INT and CHA served as prerequisites for different sets of talents (feats of old)? I mean, you already have that with DEX and STR in D&D feats. If you have 18 DEX, you get access to pretty different feats than if you have 12 DEX, and the same goes for Strength. I mean, just as an example, what if Strength supports more aggressive/offensive capabilities, and INT supports more defensive/strategic capabilities? *shrug*. I just hadn't thought about the potential for the feat system before, related to the whole "what if all stats do nice things for classes" notion.

It definitely doesn't need to be a completely separate aspect of gameplay. Like a minigame, almost. "Here's the stuff in the actual world, OR you can just roam around in this black fog and find things." Like, you can play the game, OR take part in an easter egg hunt. The exploration should fit within the actual world, complete with clues and potential motivations for exploring a given area, in a given direction. Sure, sometimes a little area's going to be a complete mystery, but there should still be rumors (however inaccurate, are generally based on SOME truth), notions, etc, as to what you might find and roughly where you might find it. Basically, "there's probably something interesting and mildly pertinent to the immediate world around you over here, in this unmapped area," rather than simply "this is a video game, so the more square footage you uncover, the more monies and XPs you are going to uncover, serving only your advancement and being essentially disguised as actual world content, on the technicality of it being loosely styled after the game world's lore."

Slightly off-topic, but related: I think a system for traps would be a lot more interesting if different types of traps were more/less effective on different bits/types of terrain. Like... a stone corridor? Maybe you can't really hide a bear trap that well, so enemies are more likely to spot it. But, if you find a little mound of crypt dirt or something, you get a major concealment bonus to your trap. It could even affect functionality. Same stone corridor? You can rig up a trip wire (trigger) to activate some kind of trap, but you don't really have any way of anchoring an actual trip wire (that trips people) in stone walls. But, if you find two statues across from one another, you can tie off an actual trip wire. Etc. I think traps often get simplified to just "make this square/spot on the ground bad now." Then you have maybe a detect traps chance for enemies. And when they see them, they instantly hive-mind communicate their location to all their friends, so that no one steps on them. Of course, if we get lots of position-affecting abilities and such in P:E, you could always force people backwards into traps, etc, even if they aren't concealed. Back on-topic, fully, I'm not really a fan of kiting. Not silly game kiting, at least. But, I DO like tactical "kiting." Have this fast/agile person draw this big, slow-moving Ogre (who's INSANELY strong and you reallllly don't want hitting anyone, not even your "tank") around the corner and into a snare, or hit him with Entangle or something. Then have people keep their distance with ranged weapons. Maybe even have people hide behind him, in the room he was initially drawn out of, so that he gets snared/trapped at a distance, facing away from everyone. *shrug*. I like taking advantage of range, and speed differences, and disablement, but I prefer to actively produce advantages for me and disadvantages for my enemy, rather than jog around using passive ones all day. It gets a bit drab. And with something like kiting, I like when it's not really feasible against just all enemies ever. I use the above tactics on ogres in BG. I even have my tank-y Fighters switch to bows and slings and such. And, I think that's nice to be a really good tactic against something like an ogre. But not against just a bunch of kobolds or something. "Just run and occasionally turn and shoot!". I'd like if enemies would actually catch on to such tactics, decently quickly, and could do things to keep people who are trying to use such tactics on their toes.

I can see this being good in Mass Effect (closeups on you a lot of times in a lot of conversations) or The Old Republic (since those art developers turn out the ****tiests of helemets, I'm not sure there's a good one besides Revan/Nihilus, which aren't even theirs) I don't really see any added value for a IE-type game. I never played the BGs and ever thought 'I wish I could remove the helmet from my character', and I doubt I will for PE if they provide some nice looking headgear. This is pretty minor, but it would be quite lovely if they could do it: helmets with visors (not all of them would forcibly just have visors, of course). When you're in town, if you don't remove your helmet and stow it on your pack or something (etc.), or enter non-hostile conversation, your character could actually raise their visor, or Rogue-types could remove masks, etc. Pretty much any piece of face-covering equipment that people would have actually needed to remove to speak to each other via the sounds of surrounding battle and such, then put back on. I think a lot of those type of things had methods of easy removal (in the case of visors, they typically just swung up, MAYBE locked in place, in both the upward and downward positions). Anywho, I'm not trying to get too detailed and technical with this. I just tend to ramble. But, that would functionally solve the "My guy's talking through a friggin' helmet all the time!" problem, without having to magically allow you to wear an invisible helmet. AND it would be pretty cool, from just a really-nice-animations/detail perspective. It strikes me as a bit weird that it strikes you so, heh. I realize there are significant differences between the two, but that doesn't change the fact that their overall visual style is very similar. A lot of their art detail tends to lose effect, due to the sheer quantity of realistically-hued fine details all over the screen. It's a bit like painstakingly painting all the individual stripes onto a bunch of zebras, in a game full of zebras. The details sort of become their own camouflage. I tend to suffer more eyestrain when playing games with art like that in half an hour than I do playing other games for 3 times as long. I know graphics have come a long way, but, when you throw lighting, distance, and perspective into the mix, video game tiny details still have nothing on reality tiny details. It's not QUITE as bad from a first-person view as it is from third, but... still.

@Hassat: I appreciate your elaboration. Quite muchly. And I apologize for being difficult. I realize I was kind of wording things crappily, out of minor frustration, and I didn't mean to be so difficult. I mean a lot of stuff I say quite literally, which is just odd, 'cause most people don't say and mean things so literally. Anywho, for what it's worth, I respect your opinion, and your evaluations. I think I was just thrown by your terminology. As I said, it sorta seemed like you were finding no value in even the idea behind any of the referenced UI mockup, or any of its elements, like it was just 100% wrong, rather than even 60 or 70. Since I was pretty sure you weren't being paradoxical (i.e. "No, aesthetics are fine, and all pixels aren't wasted space, but everything in this mockup that isn't necessary is wasted space and pointless aesthetics!"), I was very curious as to the specifics of your evaluation. So, again, thank you for that. Personally, I feel like the BG UI was forcing me to look through a little window. Like nothing really had any breathing room. I'm not adamant about completely separate floaty panes (a la MMOs), but I'm open to a well-done not-necessarily-just-a-solid-rectangular-frame UI. And those butted-together portraits are still fine, but, they're also larger than they "need" to be, etc. Which, so are the oval ones in that mockup, I suppose. But, I still very much like the general idea behind that mockup, even if some things could be tweaked. It's by no means perfect. I am a pretty big fan of slightly more organic edges on the UI. They make the transition from game to UI a lot less... window-y. To me, it's a little like a forest. Even though a forest is a forest, and a plain is a plain, and they may technically border each other, they feel a lot more like they fit together in a world if you gradually transition from forest to plain, and vice versa. If you're entering the forest, you start to see some trees, then you see more, and the tall grass of the plain starts to vanish (because of blocked sunlight, etc.), and you start to see forest floor. If it was just a straight tree line everywhere, in a rectangle around the meadow, it'd be pretty jarring. It would call attention to the actual dividing line, rather than the transition itself. *shrug*, I know a lot of that is subjective, too. But some if it isn't. Just some of it. Also, I agree with you about the DA interfaces (although I played it on console, instead of PC, so it was probably even worse). Although, I DO support well-done radial menus (there's some kind of name for that, and I can't remember it, and it's bugging me... rose bloom or something? Rose... Rose petal menu?). Not that it was put to the best use in DA, but the foundation was there. Such things are especially evident with console controls. When games give you 4 friggin' quick-slots (D-pad cardinal directions), when they COULD give you 4 different radial menus of 8 slots a piece (hold a d-pad direction to open a quickslot radial, then use a stick to select). But, the usefulness of that translates quite well into mouse/keyboard controls, too. A button can open a radial around the mouse cursor, wherever it is on the screen, and the mouse has the exact same amount of distance to move to get to a very large number of icons/buttons before they become too small/distant for the benefit to remain great.

Yeah, and that's a fair point, I suppose. It's just a bit strange. The OP suggests that pickpocketing in previous games has been far from interesting because it is lacking in what is needed to make it interesting. Then, Kjaamor disagrees, suggesting that pickpocketing, itself, is just lame, but backing this up with "previous games have not made it fun, so it's probably the case." That's kind of like telling someone that bullet-proof armor probably won't do you any good when wandering through a war zone, because all the other people who've wandered through warzones without bullet-proof armor died to stray bullets. Or... building things out of wood just causes fire, because all the people who threw torches at the things they had built out of wood ended up with fires. *shrug* I don't see how lacking oversimplified pickpocketing implementations provide us with any evidence that pickpocketing just can't be fun. If most games made combat so simple that it was no fun, would we be saying the same thing about it? Or would we think "You know, I bet this COULD be much more exciting than it is, if stuff had more than 1 hitpoint, and there were a variety of attacks."?

While this serves as a useful tool, I think it can easily be tied to quest/event completion, instead (like in Mass Effect). I've never really seen any detriments to the way that was handled, while still providing the benefits. If you run around town for 3 days straight, time kind of doesn't really pass, in-so-far as the NPCs and world show. Successfully explore a cave and find a quest thingy, and return it to the person seeking it? Now, that person reacts to you in a different way (to acknowledge both the completion of a task/event AND the passage of time that always accompanies such efforts), so why shouldn't other people? Of course, if it was simple enough (Go and fetch this item from down the street, and come back with it, for example), then other people wouldn't react as though significant time had passed. This could easily be controlled by having different groups of NPCs react after different quests/events. Annnywho, this also (in Mass Effect) provided advancement/progression in the reactions and dialogues of companion characters to both your recent actions AND the relevant goings-on of the world around them, in the down-time areas of which you speak. And, for what it's worth, I don't think the resting mechanic needs to advance time, as far as the narrative is concerned, when all it's really doing is serving as a limitation on spell/health resources. Also, it seems like it'd be a lot easier to handle the logistics of when and where companions feel the need to dialogue with you about what events if you link this to specific locations. i.e. "When you reach campfire A, you've obviously traveled through area A, so downtime interactions should trigger potential dialogues regarding all previous things + area A." The time thing works the same way. If you need to fall back to campfire A, after passing it, purely for health/spell reasons, there's no need for the world to react to that, since that's not really a representation of narrative coherency, anyway. In other words, in the game world, you're not playing along the lines of HP and spells per day. In the narrative, your characters either overcame an obstacle, or didn't. They didn't go rest up for a few days, then clear up some more goblin groups, then travel back and rest up and mend wounds for a few more days, then come back, and repeat. They just traveled through the bloody forest. So, even though the resting mechanic can and does serve the purpose of time passage, it generally only serves one or the other role at any given time. If you've traveled all the way through a given forest, then clearly that took a decent amount of time, regardless of how efficiently or inefficiently you did it (like a minimum time). So, if you entered at morning, then it might now be evening when you arrive at a camp at the end of the forest that mechanically allows you to rest. So, even if you rested a thousand times in getting through the forest, the narrative would be silly to say "And then the group rested a thousand times, and they all died of old age, and the rest of the world fell to ruins because they didn't do anything about it." Because, again, they'd have absolutely no reason to do this, if not for the abstracted mechanics of healing and replenishing spells. Annnnnywho, I'm getting a bit wordy now, and a bit convoluted with my words. I shall stop for the time being.

At least without inevitably producing a scenario that involves the death/subjugation of all human life.

I wouldn't say that an unknown destination suddenly makes exploration a chore. Heck... exploration, by its very nature, involves uncovering unknowns. I think the important thing is to give you interesting things to find along the way, and lead you via clues. You don't need a road to everything (a literal direct line to things), but you also don't need to have absolutely no clue what's anywhere at all. That's kind of part of the fun of exploration: Going somewhere you don't need to, that's a complete mystery, and discovering useful/interesting things there. I think there's something beyond just unknownness that's required to make it a chore. I do think exploration's a lot more fun when it's not so simple as "If you cover enough ground, you'll find shiny things about." When it's more about exploring possibilities and uses/interactions than it is purely burning away fog of war. Uncovering secret/hidden things, rather than just uncovering already-uncovered-but-currently-out-of-sight things.

I believe the lacklusterness of pickpocketing in most existing games is specifically the point of this thread. Not, "Since pickpocketing is so great in existing games, we should overhaul it and make it even greater!" You seem to be suggesting that only things that can benefit the least from improvements (things that are already oodles of fun) should be benefitted, and that anything that seems like it could use a lot of improvements isn't really worth improving because it probably inherently sucks. Seem...

That means the aesthetic is doing its job, by transitioning so well between fantasy world and computer-screen buttons that your conscious mind isn't really prompted to even think about that transition at all.

*Shrug*. Fair enough. I just... unless you butt all the portrait rectangles right up against one another (which actually starts affecting functionality), you're going to have space between them, either filled or non. Granted, maybe the referenced layout can be further optimized. I'm hardly saying that's an impossibility. Just... it seems like, subjectivity aside, your bases for analysis are a bit lacking. It just seems very much like you're suggesting that every pixel not covered by the UI is a huge benefit, and that every pixel covered by the UI, and/or designed with some concern for not running into "this is where the game world aesthetics stop, and the blatantly, clashingly simplistic UI starts" is an abomination and a huge detriment. There wasn't any "These might need to be rearranged, or put closer together, or maybe this design takes up a bit too much space." In fact, you had to be specifically asked just to say more than "that's complete crap." And, even then, all you came up with was a list of things that were apparently crap. And why is it so bad that something "float"? The ovals can be connected along the edge. What, it's inherently bad that, instead of being blind to all things along the vertical edge of all the ovals, you can actually see the spaces not immediately covered by the portrait ovals? I just don't get what WOULD work, in your eyes, shy of a minimalistic, robot-designed UI. "No unnecessary graphics or pixel-waste. Objective, complete." Next we'll start deciding that the sounds and music in the game don't need to sound nice at all, as long as we know what's going on. All weapons will have the same hit-sound, and all characters will be voiced by Text-To-Speech programs.

Except Lyrium, in DA, actually played a part in the lore, beyond "It was worth a lot of money and its name fibbed a lot." Lyrium was tied to magical functionality, as well as The Fade. But, they are both pretty similar,

A dream would make for a good tutorial, if you really wanted a tutorial that remained within the game world/narrative. It could be a vision of some scenario, with a full party, and you control them, and no one's really getting hurt. Makes sense in a dream. Disconnects are pretty abundant in dreams.