Lephys

Don't sweat it. IMO smaller, demi-human characters with big weapons simply look kick-ass. I believe that by "small character size," he meant the smallness of characters (and the weapons they're wielding), in general, due to the player's viewing distance. In other words, they made sure that, seeing your characters "in the distance" as you'll be doing, you can say "Ahh, looks like a guy with a warhammer" and not "Ehh... there's a person... and I think they're carrying some sort of stick-like weapon?" He said a similar thing about rapiers and stilettos and such. If they just made them perfectly realistically proportionate to the characters, at the given view distance, then the weapon blades, themselves, would show up as like... a quarter of a pixel. Best case scenario, you'd think your character was fighting with well-starched piano wire. Nice. I REALLY hope that includes 2 handed flails like the heavy flails in NWN. I immediately thought of a large, double-headed flail with metal, spiked "hands" for heads, rather than typical flail heads, so that your opponents would get slapped by deadly palms as you flail them. ... Does this make me strange?

^ That got me thinking: It might be cool if, in heavily nature-y areas, a Druid provided a sort of aura-like proximity bonus to sureness of foot, etc. Maybe their presence coaxes the foliage and such in their vicinity to contribute to a lack of tripping and an ease of movement. 8P Positional-tactical bonuses, FTW!

I fear you have missed the intended point. The differences between feline ears and human ears are, in reality, absolutely significant. Regardless of reality, they're different. They function in different ways, and to different extents. P:E lore can do whatever it wants, true. But, what is it feasible for it to do? "Oh, feline ears actually aren't any different than human ears in P:E world." Okay, so cats suck now? How are they even an existing animal? They can only hear as well as Humans? Do they have any other significant differences in senses? Also, at what point do you just have a bunch of races who are all functionally Humans, but with slightly different aesthetics? "These Aumaua have about 3 times the body mass of the average Elf, and yet their physiology doesn't offer them ANY kind of strength difference that increased muscle mass offers, as compared to an Elf." What I'm getting at is the nature of racial variety in fantasy lore. As for the 2nd point, methinks you missed that, too. If the world reacts differently to you, but the mechanics (which are part of the world to some extent) do no such thing, then where does that leave you? How does that not result in simply a bunch of different factions of the exact same race? "Oh, you're an ORLAN... well, you're no different from a Human, but I'll react as if you are, because of the man-made association with the label of 'Orlan' as opposed to the label of 'Human.'" It's not about arbitrarily making sure the mechanics offer racial differences, because that would mechanically be neat. It's about the coherency between lore and mechanics. Again, if cats hear better than Humans, and Orlans are fundamentally feline in their physiology/DNA (yes, obviously living things are still living things with DNA and such, in P:E world, with cells and different organ structures and everything), then depriving them of some pseudo-feline aspect that Humans don't have directly clashes with the lore. Just because there are differences doesn't mean they HAVE to come across in the game as stats. They could simply be skill bonuses, etc. "Orlans get a +4 bonus to acrobatics and a +2 to listen checks," etc. Or, the typical DnD application of things like lowlight vision and infravision are perfect examples of this. If you have infravision, you don't get increased accuracy with a bow, or a bonus to Escape Artist checks (like increased DEX -- a stat -- would provide), yet you still are inherently different, for the race that you are, from a member of another race. Variety is the spice of life... AND fantasy races are alive.

I think the point, Tsuga, was that, even when your party is already optimal, you just get a free heaping dose of extra-character tossed out onto the battlefield. In other words, we should find a way for summoning to be able to be of great significance in certain situations without having it always be of the same significance.

I do think it's actually pretty clever/interesting how they worked Miranda's (ME2 and 3) attractiveness into her lore. Was she fanservice? Maybe. But it fit the lore, first and foremost. Her father created her, and he's the type of person who wanted to create the perfect specimen. He's not going to create an ugly, physically un-fit daughter-clone. Basically, her being "hawt" was part of the game world, and not part of the regular world stuffed into the game (i.e. "Hey, players... check out this hottie while you play!"). I'm also a big fan of the ME characters, in general. I think they did a pretty good job with all of them, even if some were still more intriguing than others, and even if the games weren't perfect (and were a little more action and less RPG than is relevant to something like P:E, etc.). -- EDIT -- Your talk of the effects of voicing versus text-only made me think of something slightly crazy: What if, even in a non-voiced (or little-voiced) game, you used the dialogue interface's visuals to signify how things were being spoken? I mean, real-time. Obviously that's already done with bolding, parentheses, italics, etc. But, what if, in main dialogues, the words were actually displayed sort of in-rhythm, as if being visually spoken onto the dialogue frame? Bah... this is probably a job for a separate, unpopular thread.

So, the poison was in both glasses? You've just built up an immunity to it by taking trace amounts since you were a child (developer)?

The response is much appreciated, Josh. ^_^ Although dialogue depth and variety, in general, is splendid and sought after, the root idea here was, I think, an effort to brainstorm regarding a more organic approach to people's initial reactions. I don't really know about it being a thing "Obsidian always does," but many an existing game (regardless of developer) does it. It's not that no one should ever wish to engage you in conversation until you've saved their first-born child from an evil dragon. It's just that, well... sometimes too many people seem far too happy to just arbitrarily spout out information that, private or not, doesn't really seem to be stuff people would respond to "Hi" with. I recently started to replay Arcanum ('cause I never did finish it, fully, way back when), and I noticed that that game did a pretty nice job of handling this. At least in what I saw so far. You can stop almost anyone in the street and speak to them, but it feels like an actual conversation. They might say "Yes, can I help you with something?", or "...What do you need? Hurry up!", depending on reaction and Charisma and all that jazz. But, you then ask them if they can tell you about the town, or area, or specific things. Sometimes they tell you things, and sometimes they don't. Also, BG's system of hearing rumors over tavern drinks (though a little crude -- can you blame it for having been made so long ago?) handles this pretty well. And, while you can certainly run around in inns and in people's houses, they're usually not very happy to speak to you. They speak to you as if you've just entered their house, and/or are a random stranger, and not as if they are robots whose only reason for existence is to present you with useful rumors and tidbits. This could even be a nice facet to the whole persuasion thing (and it not just being a stat/skill switch). Are you just walking up to a guy's house and asking him about his business? He might not want to talk to you, under the circumstances. You catch that very same guy in the market, perusing materials and wares, and you strike up a conversation about prices and availability of goods coming into town, and how it's affecting business, and he might happily tell you about how his own business is being affected. *shrug*

Are you suggesting that the physiological differences in perceptive capability between an Orlan (feline-type humanoid) and a Human are insignificantly small? Partially feline ears and human ears are pretty much the same thing, and that shouldn't affect Perception/hearing, even if they're modeled by the mechanics already? That seems like a pretty stiff stance on things. Besides, even if the differences "only affect dialogue and story," how is that going to work? "Hey guys, since I'm an Orlan, and this is story dialogue, I actually hear stuff other people didn't, and people recognize that distinction of Orlans, as opposed to other races, and yet, my Listen checks, in the in-game mechanics, are actually no different from anyone else's. u_u..."

... "If"... (I still like your alternatives, though.)

Agreed. I'm currently playing (enhanced edition) as a Mage, and I'm constantly having to reposition people, switch targets, and move around just to fire off my OWN spells (like color spray) to actually hit more than like 3 out of 10 foes AND make sure I don't hit my own people (core rules).

@anubite: Just in case you were interested, the Shadowrun PnP ruleset actually does include racial attribute bonuses/detriments. And, as for racial traits, etc. Iucounu has a very good point. Give different races different aspects of betterment (and possibly detriment, too), as opposed to different levels of betterment, and you don't have "OMG, this race is the best Warrior, but a terrible Mage! OBVIOUSLY another race makes a better Mage, u_u." In fact, the "universal" attributes help in this. If one race gets +1 to Accuracy, then that helps their accuracy in any class. Or Power. If you make a healer, you get more potent healing. If you make a Mage, you get more potent magic. If you make a Warrior, you get more potent weapon strikes. Still plenty of variance, it's just not as restricted as usual. It might even be interesting to have some kind of subset for racial bonuses, to choose from. I mean, Orlans have Wild Orlans and Hearth Orlans, right? You'd think they'd be a little different. Whether one inherently gets +1 Agility and one gets +1 Potency, or you get a different set of traits to choose from as an Orlan (of any kind) than you do as an Aumaua, some dynamic to the racial bonuses aspect of the mechanics might be interesting.

^ True that. The way I see it, every dev post that goes unmade on these forums is time spent ferociously toiling over something directly related to the game. 8P It's not exactly a negative that they've been a little radio silent lately, as it most likely represents an increase in their activity. Just not their forum activity.

The internet is a bit like a megaphone. People are a bit enamored with the idea that little-old-them can say something and have it boom out to an entire crowd. I mean, you could just make something completely up that goes against everything else that's been said about P:E so far by the development team, and watch how many people will jump into that thread to join in on the "discussion" as opposed to people actually evaluating it for what it is and being reasonably skeptical in the least. Or, look at how many comments on internet posts are basically "Yah me too!", and not actual contributions to the matter at hand. Combine that with the "people are more compelled to make noise when something negative happens than they are when everything's fine" thing, and you get an easily exaggerated group of negativity in response to almost anything. I'm confident Obsidian are up to dealing with this. I'm sure it still weighs on you a bit at the end of the day (we're only human, and we take in what's around us), but I think they know that you can't just read 100 internet comments complaining about things and start overly worrying "Oh no! Our design sucks! We're doing a horrible job!", or "Man, everyone seems to not appreciate us!" I think they know how much we appreciate what they do. Even most of the complainers appreciate what they're doing. That's just often drowned out by their need to voice the "problem."

@ Merlkir and Jarmo: Just to be clear, this face ( ) means joke/sarcasm, and/or "the above is my being silly." Maybe you knew that, and I missed it. I just wanted to make sure.

I'm sorry to say that that is false. I know to what you're referring, but it is simply a statistical occurrence and not a factor of causality. If I decide I'm going to paint things, but all I decide I'm going to paint with is blue paint, and I decide I'm going to use the same style every time I paint (simply because I like it), then no amount of additional paintings (beyond 2) is really going to increase variety by any significant amount. I could make 50 paintings, instead of 2, and they could all be of the same perspective, made with the same style and same blue paint. On the other hand, if I decide "You know what, I'm going to use a different style and different paint every time I make a painting," and only paint 2 paintings, I've increased the amount of variety between all available paintings by FAR more than any number of all-blue, all-same-style paintings from before. Therefore, the quantity of something never causes variety to exist. What you're getting at (methinks) is that, once you've got the factors of variety in-place, the quantity of items within a given set (in this case, companions) is directly related to the quantity of variety. However, as your problem with the PS:T companions seems to be a lack of variety, no amount of additional companions designed in the same manner as the others would've eliminated your displeasure with their design, as, by your standards, there was not a great enough SOURCE of variety. If all the PS:T companions had been sufficiently different for your tastes, then the quantity would've, I'm sure, been plenty. To put it another way, if you make and sell furniture, and you build 8 chairs, and 7 of them fall apart when people sit in them, and the last one's mildly comfortable, you don't fix that by simply building 5 times that number of chairs, and hoping that this increases the number of them that don't fall apart, statistically. You change the method by which you build your chairs. My point exactly. Again, no amount of additional PS:T characters would've helped anything at all. It was the basis of their design -- the common element between all of them, and tied into much of the rest of the game's design (narrative and creative style, not mechanics) -- that you had a problem with. I'm not trying to be a **** when I say "maybe you just didn't really like that game that much." Think of it like music. Plenty of people all like Rock music, and yet some of them hate a given Rock band, and some of them LOVE that same band. All within the same genre. Such is the way it goes with creative design.

expect it from Hollywood to see a show glorifying a homicidal sociopath Hehe. For what it's worth, I wouldn't say it's exactly glorifying him, per se. But, that isn't to say that isn't at least SOME of the execs (or other people's) intentions. Beyond just an exploration of a "wouldn't it be interesting if" scenario. Well... you SORT of have this same thing on the side of good, with the "robotic" type person who doesn't comprehend the human psyche/social inclinations. You know, "I told her that her son was most likely dying a gruesome death right now... she asked! I don't want to lie to her!" Many would argue that a "good" person would spare another the suffering thoughts of imagining their son being ripped to pieces. But, then, what happens when they find out their son was actually being ripped to pieces, and you knew that, and you lied to them? People would also view that as terrible.

If every dish is served with asparagus, then it doesn't matter how many there are. You can change any number of dishes from asparagus dishes to non-asparagus dishes, without having to change the total number of dishes offered at all. That's literally the entire point. Whether they make 2 companions, or 7,000 companions, has NOTHING to do with whether or not those 2 companions are the most varietous mofoes you've ever seen, or those 7,000 companions are just a big clone army. Increasing numbers doesn't increase variety. Increasing variety increases variety. Also, the more characters you put in, the less room there is for uniqueness. If there are 5 of each class in the game, then you're going to run into a lot of parallels. I.e. "Oh, this guy is just this other guy, but a Wizard instead of a Monk." I'm not saying that if they put more than 8 companions in, the game's instantly ruined. It's simply a factor. The more characters you have, the less elbow room for unique styles you have. I dare say that if the PS:T companions were so intertwined with the core themes and such of that narrative, then there was just something, in general, about PS:T that you weren't particularly fond of. I can't say too much about it, because I haven't played it. But, it sounds like the fact that all the companions were so thematically tethered to the narrative of that game (which has its own style scope, etc.) was one of the strongest points of that particular game. So, would it have been the same game if they had just said "Hey, let's make all the different companions drastically different, thematically!"? So, at that point, should they really have made a game filled with companions you did like? I mean, if I play Battlefield 4, and I think all the characters in that game are too serious and soldier-y, and too worked up about war... maybe that whole game and everything it's about is just not my cup of tea. I don't know how prudent it would be to suggest they mix it up a bit. They're obviously going to be all encircling the same themes there. Bah... those last 2 paragraphs are mere speculation, though.

Exactly. Silliness of food metaphors aside, the point was that, even though I hate asparagus, I don't tell the chefs to spend less time making their dishes, and simply offer more dishes. Sure, if a restaurant only offered asparagus, they should probably offer a little more than that, but, if that's all they were offering, why would I even eat there if I hate asparagus? Of course, getting back to P:E, they're in no way suggesting that they're only going to be offering one type of character. But, my point remains what it is: They could make even less than 8 characters, and it's possible they'd be to your liking, based on their design style. So, it seems to me that suggesting increased quantity (inherently lowering quality) is just a big dice roll, as it has nothing to do with style. They could've put 50 characters in PS:T, and maybe they all still would've been of the same style. Clearly, the style of the characters and the quantity and quality of the characters are completely different factors. That was my point. I don't like asparagus because it's asparagus. Not because of how much time and effort was spent preparing it, or because there weren't enough other dishes. If you have 3 comm towers, with a dead zone in the middle of them, and you only have so much power, then what good is it to put up a 4th one in the dead zone and divert power if that takes everyone's signals down to 20%, so that call quality is ultra-spotty and calls drop frequently? Yayyy, at least people in the dead zone can get crappy cell service, too! 8D

You know what's even more interesting to me? Being able to start out as an evil character, and actually roleplay being affected by unfolding events throughout the game in such as way as to come to realize the value of good, or simply a reason to change how you were. And vice versa. To be able to start as a pure-of-heart hero who just wants to save/help the most people, but who falters more and more along the way, to the point of getting to the end and kind of snapping. Deciding there's no point, in the end, of having good intentions, because other things override them, and people will always exist who are just out to screw you over, and have your character end up seizing power rather than destroying it for the good of all. Kind of like Frodo at the end of Lord of the rings, only minus the active effect of the ring. But, yeah, just a whole shift of perspective by the end of the game. A gradual one, of course. Not sure if it fits neatly into P:E, but that's more interesting to me than "can I be an evil **** the whole game or a super-good-guy the whole game?" OR, even a character like Dexter. "I brutally murder people because it's fun, but I'm choosing to make sure I only brutally murder people who deserve to be brutally murdered, even though, technically, according to pure goodness, I simply shouldn't murder."

This is quite true. To put it simply, though, even if you can't merely ask "Who was/is your character?," you can still ask "How/why did your character get here?" Maybe he can't get somewhere else, and there are only so many valid reasons for his being in the given situation. That's all we need, though. Scope. There's more than one way to skin a narrative.

@McManusaur: That reliance upon DPS is easily solved by allowing the seconds to distinguish themselves from one another. You can always perform math to come up with an average DPS value. The question is, is that simply going to be a statistic, or is it going to be a predictive tool? Or, to put it another way, the importance of a simple DPS value in most "RPGs" nowadays is one of the things I hate the most. But, I think it comes from your DPS value passively dictating how well you will do in combat, rather than how well you actively do in combat deciding your average DPS value. It's an easy fix, in principle.

^ *shrug* With oodles of things in reality, we use science to study HOW they work, more so than WHY they work the way they work. I mean, we'd LOVE to know the answer to the latter question, but any answer we get is generally based upon something else we already hold true, despite not knowing its very own "why." I mean, we know that splitting atoms releases oodles of energy, but do we know WHY atoms have so much energy stored within their bonds? Even if we do, the point is that even the scientific method is little more than extremely well-documented/organized trial-and-error. If you found you could manipulate things via magic, you could practice and discover plenty of things, without ever figuring out WHY you can manipulate things via magic, or "how magic works."

That's simply preposterous. Everyone knows that all historical combatants, ever, simply wore the absolute heaviest armor they could possibly get their hands on, and that's that, u_u. They actually just ran through fields made out of sharp edges, so any spot not covered by full steel was instantly gouged out/severed. And the people who made it all the way across the field without dying won the battle. It had nothing to do with their ability to engage opponents and move freely, or stamina, or any of that malarky...

Sounds to me like he was a conmancer.

Ya know... valuing the depth of PS:T characters doesn't mean copying them into doppleganger characters. Even if they draw heavily from PS:T's character design style, you could still end up absolutely loving the P:E characters, because they're going to be completely different characters. And, as far as liking all the characters... it's kinda like food. You can make the most gourmet ice cream in the world, and someone whose taste buds tell their brain "... VOMIT!" when the eat ice cream isn't going to like it. That doesn't detract from its intrinsic value at all. And the ice cream disliker has no reason to objectively rate the ice cream as valueless or low in quality. Its quality and the fact that this person doesn't like it are two completely separate issues, here. I don't like asparagus. Hate the stuff. Doesn't make it bad, or lacking in some way. The problem stems from my taste, not with the properties of asparagus. I'm not at all saying that your dislike of something can't be due to factors that WERE within the control of the development team, but, it can just as well be due to factors that aren't in their control. It comes back to quantity versus quality, though, in the end. Since the characters aren't going to be copies of ones you know you don't like, then that means there's just as much of a chance you'll like them as there is that you'll DISlike them. And, since diluting their overall quality simply increases the chance that you'll dislike them, even if you would've liked them were they not diluted so, it doesn't seem very reasonable to me to voluntarily vie for a decrease in quality and an increase in quantity, just to get to toss that many more coins against "probability" inaccurately applied from merely-related existing character designs. This isn't simply who likes PS:T characters vs who doesn't. They're designing the characters the way they are because of a lot of factors. Not just hypothetical poll results. I compare this issue to a hypothetical "I really didn't like the 10 classes in this other game, so let's just put in 30 classes and give them all like 4 unique abilities, shall we? So that we basically have DOTA heroes. That way, I'll like the game more" situation. That would be pretty ridiculous, since giving all the classes only 4 class-specific abilities, total, would water them down TREMENDOUSLY, no matter how much anyone liked them for their style/design specifics. There's no point in definitely diluting something's quality just because you might happen to not like its flavor.