Lephys

Or could it be because I'm actually simply defending my own stance, and you keep taking even that as an attack on your own (like that time you thought I said I didn't want any armor embellishments or coloration or tabards to even exist in the game). *siiiigh*... You know what? I like you, and I like OODLES of your other posts in other threads, even when you don't agree with me (Like the Weapon Familiarity thread, where we debated things into thinking up entirely new awesome details. That rocked, ^_^). So, I'm gonna actually implore you one more time to actually just read my point, and not apply random context to it as if it were the primary point. I'll even summarize: I also want armor to remain simple and functional in design. And I agree that there are oodles of visual options (the key word being "options") for making your armored character models not look too much alike. That's splendid. It is. But I also quite simply feel that you shouldn't NEED to have 5 different-colored armors with different types of cloaks just to not be prevented from visually discerning your characters on-screen. You're a proponent of RP, right? What if you want to play a group of "uniformed" plate-wearing warriors (and/or a mix of plate-wearing classes)? "Oh, you can do that, Mr. Player, but have fun figuring out who's who, because we made SURE not to visually represent physiological differences in the armor models in ANY WAY shape or fashion! 8D" is not a very RP-supportive stance on that. Is it necessary? No it isn't. I already said that. Is visually discerning your party members useful? Yes. Which is why they don't all look exactly alike by default (among other reasons). Is a slight difference in the armor designs of genders as seen in the posted character concepts (to account for the fitting difference of a standard female Human and a standard male Human, JUST like your example of the difference between a stocky, wide Dwarf and a lithe Elf, regardless of gender) a "butchering" of the character models? Is that armor not still plain, simple, and functional? Why yes it is. There are no boobs on it, and it's not 70% different or anything. Boom. Then why not do it? Just because? Which brings us to fitting. I like fitted armor in games. I already said that, too. But, there's a reason most games have abstracted character sizes (Tiny, small, medium, large, etc.), and not individual fitting measurements. At some point, you're GOING to have to abstract it, obviously, because maintaining the realism of armor fitting/crafting factors just no longer benefits the player and starts SEVERELY detrimenting him (i.e. "I found this steel plate on an Elf, but my chest measurement is 4 inches smaller than his, and he's 6 inches taller than me, so I have to go to a blacksmith and get it fitted to me. But then, when I want to get new armor, and I hand-me-down this perfectly good steel plate to the OTHER Human in my party, we'll have to get it fitted again, because he's kinda muscly. But, due to the economy in this area, the fitting of that armor will take weeks. So, it's gonna be about 10 hours of in-game time, doing other stuff without quality equipment before I can get my quality equipment. But, by then, I'll probably have the resources to get even BETTER armor made."). I know that's ridiculous. That's the point. Eventually, you say "Well, let's just abstract the amount of time it takes to fit armor, or the cost, or let's just say that if you're a Human male, armor that fits any other Human male fits you, too." Alas, we're not going to have a 100% fully realistic fitting system for armor. It's just not worth that much accuracy, in a video game. It would STILL be really cool, in a way. But, it gets abstracted. And as for the whole graphical scaling thing... you're just not really getting my point there, I'm sorry to say. Maybe it's my fault for not being clear enough, but you're misunderstanding me, big time. It has nothing to do with "So we put boobs on the armor." That's an exaggeration of visual features, sure, but that's more than what I'm talking about. And it's not about making sure things show up at maximum zoom. Maximum zoom is NEVER going to be a 6-foot monitor, so it's never going to be life-size. It was a simple point about dealing with very tinily-represented aesthetics. Lines, shapes, contrast, etc. When you get things all close together and made out of significantly fewer pixels like that, you have to find the subtlest ways possible to exaggerate features enough to say "this is a curvy line instead of a straight one," or "This character has a ponytail," or "this staff has a figure-eight on its head with a green gem in the middle." Because, if it doesn't show up like it's supposed to, then it's wasted effort modeling it in the first place. That's why they're not giving us things like eye color in our character customization. Because there's no possible way to exaggerate that enough to make it visible without screwing up the character model. But there ARE ways to do that with a figure-eight staff (make the head slightly proportionately larger than it would be), or a ponytail (maybe it's 15% larger/longer than you wanted, or it's shaped ever-so-slightly differently so that the player can see it and say "Ahh, a ponytail"), or a rapier (I've used this example like 15 times, but trying to make a rapier or estoc as thin as it really should be, on-screen, in proportion to the character model, would result in it almost not even being visible at all). The POINT of my bringing up the scaling thing is that, you're suggesting we should simply have 100% accuracy on the armor of a like 1/32-scale person on a screen, where all these little exaggerations are having to take place so we can tell what the hell things are (2 pixels could be 3 inches of width difference on a chest or collar or waist of a breastplate). What I'm saying is, even if you try, you're not going to achieve that. No amount of effort in that area is going to produce models that make you say "Ahh, yes, now THAT'S exactly how that armor would be in real life!", because you can't really tell, because of the scaling. The breastplate could actually be too big for that person, or too small, or too wide, or bear the wrong curve of convexity, etc. You'll just be assuming it's not different from actual armor proportions, as best your eyes can tell. That being said, I'm not saying "We might as well go CRAZY with it! 8D!". I'm just saying, if you've got a 10% margin of error there, then 10% in the other direction isn't really going to hurt anything, but it WILL help some things that are ONLY factors because it is a video game. It'd be really nice to simply ignore those factors, but they exist nonetheless. So, do with that what you will. If you're cool with the concepts Obsidian presented in the last (or 2nd-to-last?) update, then awesome. Maybe you'd like for armor to not be different, ideally, but you don't feel that the extremely subtle difference is hurting anyone, and that the armor design is still well within practical and simple? If so, awesome. That's literally my stance on all this. If not, then I dare not try to comprehend your priorities, but I'll leave you to them.

I don't mind them being magnificently grand, so long as they're actually full of reactivity and happenings. I don't want to explore an entire city for an hour, only to find that there's ONE event that occurs in an alleyway at night, and about 10 total quests, and that's it.

What you don't want is a bi-polar bear. u_u That guy would be SO uncontrollable! I almost laughed. I almost expected you to.

I beg to differ. Crafting is a different direct action to achieve your different goal (acquiring a useful object/item). I don't think anything inherent to the process of crafting makes it feel like a distraction. I think the piddly "Go grocery shopping, then click a button" treatment of it is what does that, strengthened by a "Meh, or you can just find stuff on dead peeps or buy the exact same stuff with all the money you'll get spending all the time you WOULD'VE been crafting on going out and doing other things." @Iyanga, I like your style.

It's a good use for concept art, really. And it IS really nice to see the "life-size" details of objects in the world, in a game during which you're mainly viewing everything from the same sky angle the whole time. Gives the items some character, ^_^

I shall not rest until only those who don't want it have the option, and only those who do want it have no such option! u_u... . Silliness aside, yes. Romance being forced upon the player would be just as silly as the entire game world being devoid of romance.

I didn't think we were ignoring the mechanics almost always attached to resting: 1) Healing/Recovery 2) Replenishment of spells/abilities And I get what you're saying, but I don't think we're making it more complicated than it needs to be. If one purpose of resting is to show that your characters are human enough to become weary/fatigued from remaining awake for too long, then the other end of that spectrum is to show that they're human enough to be incapable of sleeping for 8 hours every 3 minutes. SOMEthing needs to make finite the ability to gain the benefits of resting. Just like something has to allow you to die/lose at combat (reloading and trying the combat over again isn't any fun, but the player isn't OWED the ability to never have any consequences to not stepping up your game to the challenge at hand... especially with varying difficulty settings and proper game balancing). I think the passage of time during rest actually occurring for the rest of the world is a good start (because only certain things would be time-sensitive, anyway. I'm not talking "everything's a damned water chip quest" here or anything). A limited number of rests outside of civilization would be nice, too. You could simply represent however much food/water/bandages everyone can carry, and have those things simply restock whenever you make it back to town (the point being not that they cost oodles of money, but that they are not infinitely small/heavy). But, again, that would just be one factor, if it were used. I think it's best kept simple, though. Again, while I'm not opposed at all to more suggestions/tweaks, I'm pretty fond of the "you can only rest in specific spots while out in a dungeon/cave/dangerous region, etc." approach. You can ALWAYS backtrack to a rest spot, or push on to the next one. The odds of you always running out of Health at a point dead centered between two rest areas is pretty slim. And, as long as they're decently close together, that just prevents you from resting after every single rat you step on (because resting that often is just plain silly and negates the limits on your abilities-per-day AND your health, for all practical purposes). And the time-passing thing could be made to have minor adverse affects once you pass too much time in a given area, even if your current endeavor isn't time-sensitive. OR, you could simply have some amount of gameplay time before you could rest again (like... 5 minutes? *shrug*). That way, you can always wait that amount of time if you so choose (again, if the player wants to inconvenience himself all day long, just to heal back to full every time he gets down to 90% health, then let him). I don't really see any blatant problems with that, other than "I want to always have full health, always, and never want to have to worry about possibly getting really low on health because I don't give a crap about putting effort into combating anything to any standard of effectiveness."

*________* ... Finally, guards that will eye one person's party suspiciously and question almost everything they do, just looking for an excuse to arrest them. Then, in another playthrough, if you kill a man in the middle of the street, the very same guards might approach you and say "I'm really sorry to bother you, because I know you're busy and all, but, I really kind of need an explanation as to what that was all about, if you wouldn't mind." Thanks to reputation! 8D Shady party versus "They don't hurt people who don't deserve it!" party. 8P What would I like to hear more about? Really, all the little details you can think of that seem unimportant or too little to be an update or news bit. It's really interesting to hear what design attempts caused problems, and what those problems were. Also, what kinds of things are you guys currently pondering a full-on solution to? Obviously you have all the expertise, and we are but humble forum-goers, but... it seems like, if there's some mechanic you're torn on, maybe our knowing about it and the main options you're between at the moment would produce some surplus brainstorming on the matter that would be helpful to your endeavor.

Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but isn't that simply a reason TO rest (or travel even farther "out of the way" to rest/heal properly)? Consequences for resting serve the purpose of discouraging and/or preventing unlimited convenient resting or resting too often. Also, just for what it's worth, I don't see the problems with "you can't rest here for long enough to recover these injuries because it's understood that your party feels exposed to random dangers here and/or doesn't have any wood nearby with which to make a fire because you're in the middle of a cavern and/or lacks the time and resources needed to properly bandage and treat your injuries and/or just plain isn't tired and therefore can't sleep, etc.". Any more than I see the problem with "You can't set up an alchemy table here and brew more healing potions, in the middle of this cave. You only had a certain number of healing potions, and you'll have to travel back to town to a proper laboratory/alchemy shop in order to brew proper potions." As they've made mention of wanting to have limited typical "rest spots" in the game, I think a good alternative would be something like "makeshift camp," where you could take a 1-to-2-hour breather in a not-immediately-dangerous location and treat some major wounds and rehydrate and recover your strength, resulting in an abstracted maximum of something like 30% HP replenishment (keep in mind the P:E difference between HP and Stamina) and the removal of certain status effects, but not others. Then, when you get to an actual safe place to make a proper camp, you fully recover and sleep for 8 or 10 or 12 hours or so while poultices and such do their work. And the example for healing items would be that you can only produce makeshift pastes out of ground up herbs/fungus found in the area, in order to restore a fraction of what a proper healing potion would restore (in a game with proper healing potions). So, basically, you can't fully recover unless you're at certain rest spots (granted, certain entire areas would probably be safe to make full camp at, and you'd always have the option of an inn and/or hospital or something in a town or city. The specific spots would be reserved for consistently dangerous areas, with very few secluded, easily defendable areas). End of story. You can makeshift-camp a certain number of times, perhaps, or maybe use some healing items (which are also finite), but, ultimately, everything's limited. The full-rest areas could be unlimited, but they're "limited" in availability to not usually being very close by. But, you can always run back to one and use it again, maybe (I still think there should be some kind of timer worked in, representing your inability to rest again so soon or something, or at least a "you wasted too much time and now lost the opportunity to handle this quest situation before it escalated!" factor)? Don't want to run all the way back to the rest spot, or don't want to wait 'til you can rest at it again, or don't want to lose the ability to get a certain outcome in your current quest because you took way too long? Well, maybe not wasting all your HP and wading into foes and randomly clicking ability buttons is starting to look pretty tantalizing, or maybe you need to tune down the difficulty a bit. THAT'S rest consequences. And, to clarify, I'm not talking quest "failures," specifically, but merely time-sensitive quest factors that change when you take too long.

Haha... You don't think I'm crazy. You just think that literally the opposite of everything I've said so far is the truth. For what it's worth, there are better and more immersive ways of realistically representing character armor than displaying it on a 100-pixel-tall character model. And yet, here we are. But, scaling (a person down to a tiny character model) obviously has nothing to do with anything here (but also I'm not a buffoon), and there's absolutely no reason realistically fitted armor would work better than colorful tabards with sigils upon them (such as when your party was trying to keep their identities discreet), and no one should even HAVE a party that's all wearing steel plate (even though you can, it's wrong), and if they DID, they should just turn on floating UI names and be cool with that. Because... having fitted armor in a fictitious world in which we know not the factors that would affect the availability of fitted armor (or how the production of female armor would differ from that of it in historical reality, in which .000007% of the armor-wearers were ever female) would obviously be a much larger detriment to players of the game and the game's functionality as a piece of computer software than would forced tabards and other blatant armor markings and/or mandatory floating names, etc. Apparently it's not a big deal, but how little of a deal it is is a HUGE deal. You win, Trashman. I realize the folly of my ways. I'm sending a petition to Obsidian, as we speak, to beg them to make sure the breastplates aren't subtly different, like in their character concepts, so that the game can be so much more enjoyable and functional than it would've been with that HORRENDOUSLY eye-burning 15% difference in breastplate fitting to the female physique. Also, I'm hoping they'll make it so that shops only sell very specifically-sized (down to the inch/centimeter) breastplates, so that if your character is 5'3" and the only one for sale is sized to a 5'8" person, you have to have one specially made, or have that one re-sized to your character, but heaven FORBID that during that process, they change its shape because your character's waist is abnormally narrow as the people of their race go, or their chest abnormally large, etc. Also, we'd better be able to tell the difference between that broad-chest breastplate and that narrow-chest one, even if the difference in the chest is only 2" in game-world distance. Because, if we can't, then it might appear as though they went with the subtle-differences approach after all. Who will sign my petition, so that our character models will not be "butchered"?! Save the character models! Down with armor being abstractly customized to actually fit your character's person!

Yeah. I think there's definitely a way to do it without spoilers, at the cost of having to rely on in-house testing for the story-specific content (making sure this quest works right, etc.) But, they could test almost all non-specific mechanics and such, and even set up dummy quests to test quest completion triggers and the technical aspects of their quest structuring, without giving anything away.

It's not so much a matter of "There's no need for romance in the game" as much as it is a matter of "there's simply no need to build a world devoid of romance." That's the problem with most of them, is that they're artificially injected into the world. What with friggin' romance quest lines, and progressively tiered like-o-meters and "I hope that this response will increase your like points so that we can eventually procreate" chains of dialogue options in between each main quest, at the campfire. There's no need to specifically put in a brothel or something that can be used just for "hehe"s, and there's no need to have "(Try to do him/her --- CHA)" dialogue options in the game, or a "Seduce" skill or anything. And yet, the notion that sex exists in this world, and that people can develop stronger bonds than friendship, over time, in this game world, can still be easily represented without harming anyone. I think it does more harm to be all "None of these characters going through all this crazy stuff and saving each other's lives EVER develop fondness for one another" than it does to include that in the game, and simply moderate it in a natural fashion. MAYBE by the end of the game, you've gotten to the "love" point. And you don't need a cliche "There might not be a tomorrow" point right there to illustrate via pre-potential-apocalypse sex to illustrate that two characters have, indeed, developed such a strong relationship. If it's done correctly, then you know that by the end of the game. Hell, you can even do an off-screen "use your imagination, if you want" thing that's subtle and doesn't actually blatantly suggest anything. That way, it could still affect quests and such. Maybe at a certain point in the game, you stay at some tavern, and someone sneaks into your room, thinking your alone, and tries to assassinate you. But, since you've gotten so close to another character, the two of you share a bed/room in that tavern. That's it. No sex scene necessary, just "you guys literally sleep beside one another." But, SINCE you share a room now, you actually catch that guy (your companion catches him by surprise, since he doesn't know the companion is there, or just because there are 2 of you and one of him, etc.) instead of merely narrowly avoiding being killed and alerting the rest of the party to come in to aid you, which scares off the assailant while you're powerless to prevent him from fleeing. OR maybe your close companion gets injured or poisoned or something (or magically "poisoned" with some paralytic?) whilst injuring the attacker (or cutting a ring off his hand, or an amulet from his neck, or some other clue as to who he is, etc.). So, now you have a different situation. You have to deal with your injured companion, but you ALSO have more information to go on regarding your assassin than you would've if you were in the room alone. (Who knows? I'm not a professional storysmith, so these examples are pretty lacking.) See? The point isn't sex scenes and saying lovey-dovey stuff. The point is how characters will react differently, and even create different situations to which to react. Then, what the player must deal with, accordingly. But, that should be the focus. A LONG-term, very trust-earning road. Not a "wow, you're cute, LOLZ!" switch you flip, or a "give her like 5 gifts over teh course of the game, and she likes you more each time until you guys are lovers." Romance should be treated like ANY OTHER relationship, and integrate with the rest of the game, affecting situations and happenings alike, rather than simply affecting the player's entertainment value in watching those two characters and enjoying the fact that they are in virtual love.

Well said. I think that's the important thing. Obviously, if resting has no consequences (even if it's technically only the consequences of limitation -- i.e. "You've rested, and now you can't rest again for a certain amount of time," or "You only had 24 hours to stop this conflict from turning into a battle, but you opted to frivolously rest 3 times when you were down to 70% health, so now there is a battle you must deal with."), then you might as well just have everyone automatically get all the benefits of resting after every single fight, and just cut resting out all-together. So, it needs to have consequences, and the player needs to deal with those. Again, unless you have some kind of "Easy/invulnerability/infinite ammo" mode. I'm talking normal play here. I suppose a mode like that would really be up to the devs. But, I don't want to see Normal difficulty have infinite, consequence-free resting by default, just because a handful of people hate consequences and limitations for the sake of actual gameplay challenge and depth. (To be clear, if you want that, then to each his own, but please don't insist that everyone else's game be made into "your" game, lest I become irked.) But, with the consequences (and/or limitations, if they're a part of the consequences) bit... you just can only go so far before it's infeasible. I mean, there's gotta be a better way and a worse way of doing things, or it literally won't matter how efficiently you preserve health and dispatch foes and handle situations, etc. (and the game will be lacking the consequences associated with effort). BUT, you can only have so worse of a way. At a certain point, you hit that "all you can really do is reload" point. And, what you DON'T want is some kind of limitation system that let's you go really far, thinking you're just going to have a tougher time of things, then suddenly give you a wall that you literally can't get past because of your detriments. You know... that "You can't really go back, 'cause you have no more rests to use, but you also can't go forward and finish/complete this situation/area." If the consequences of resting too much are that a quest situation changes, then you find a way to rest less. You make it clear to the player that resting IS going to pass time, and that things in the game world will be affected accordingly. Or, if you want to limit individual rest-area usage, you could put it on a timer. Maybe that rest area becomes 50% less effective each time you use it, for 10 minutes. So, if a player wants to run back to it and use it after every fight, and he wants to sit there and wait for "rest-area sickness" or whatever to wear off so he can use it again to heal to full, then that's totally within his power to do so. But, no one's making him use the rest area that often, so he has no one to blame but himself.

Agh, I was kinda thinking out loud there, and I didn't really elaborate much at all, heh. Sorry about that. When I said I was iffy, all I meant was that I'm not sure a playable build would really function properly for something like P:E, until they get a little farther along. I guess I was only iffy on the timeframe. As in, I kinda felt like saying "It's probably gonna be a while," but then I stopped myself with "Well, you never know how early of a build could benefit from testing." That's when I thought of my "Make sure you just give us test scenarios, rather than test-actual-segments-of-the-game" point to emphasize. So, yeah, I don't know that it could quite be what an alpha-release could be, but I really don't see a reason why they COULDN'T provide quite early alpha builds and allow testing, for the things I made example of above (purely mechanical aspects of the game).

End of the world... Project deadlines... roughly the same thing, sometimes.

True, but only the "important" NPCs need such things. All the "unimportant" NPCs who just make the city feel like more than 10 people live there could simply return to a set of apartments or something. You're not looking for them for quests or trading during the day, so who CARES where they sleep at night? I think the most value in some type of time schedule for NPC activity stems from conveying the idea that this is a real city, much more than from the fact that, if you dig deeply enough (follow that random carriage around all day), you will find out that it is, in fact, a fully functional city with a fully functional populous. Without putting 1,000 quests in each city, or having a need to otherwise interact with every single person you can see, for some reason, you're already accepting the fact that some of them are purely for looks and atmosphere, even if only by simply neglecting to actually check to see if they go anywhere or what they do all day.

Ehhh... I'm iffy about this. BUT, I will say that, with the alpha/beta testing/access aspect of this whole backer thing, I definitely think they should present very specific test builds that are in no way just sections chopped straight out of the complete game. What I mean is, I'd love to test combat mechanics by just running around in an arena, fighting different things, using different shrubs and obstacles as cover (if a cover system affects your detection chance, etc.), and testing movement and damage values and abilities and stuff like that. I'd do that ALL DAY LONG! BUT, I have hardly any interest at all in playtesting each 10th of the actual, finished, coherent-storyline of a game, 50 times. By the time the game comes out, I'd be like "Psshhh... I already played all that. I even tested EVERY SINGLE outcome of EVERY SINGLE character build in EVERY SINGLE situation in the whole game. I don't really want to play it, now that it's finished."

Ahh, but when was the last time you were pulled into an adventure that resulted in saving the world, with a female companion at your side the entire time? o_O

I'm glad it's something they're giving so much consideration to (the decision of what, exactly, to do about it, I mean). Here's my take on stuff: Is it perfectly reasonable (not to mention pretty much the fundamental basis of challenge, itself) for resources in a video game to be limited? Yes it is -- Health potions, money, armor/damage/hitpoint/stamina values, mana, ammo, time-sensitive quests, etc. If everything were infinite, there wouldn't really be a challenge at all. You'd just be... I dunno, playing through an interactive... I dunno... deity story? So, you limit things in a very natural, reasonable fashion (for example: you can't buy things without money, but then, money comes frequently enough for you to be able to buy things when you might need them, but not ALWAYS when you could use them). If you give the player 1000 gold an hour into the game, and the player purchases absolutely no equipment whatsoever, and instead blows all the money on magical fireworks, or parchment, or some other useless-in-excess thing, then do you worry when that player says "Ahhhh! This is ridiculous! There should be infinite money, because I need equipment, but don't have any, thanks to myself! AHHHHHH !"? The answer is no. No you do not. That's really unfortunate, but, at some point, you've got to accept the limitations of the game, and play accordingly, or you don't have a game. So, I don't see any need for the "artificial" discouragement of resting, when all that does is replace a sensical limitation with a nonsensical limitation. Example: Well, you can rest every 10 seconds, back to full health, but if you do that too much, your maximum health will start lowering by 10% each rest." See, the problem is, you still allow the player to dig his own hole, and now it's a MUCH bigger hole. Because, if the player isn't going to manage finite resources, then the player isn't going to manage finite resources. But, now, you've got him able to rest as often as he wants, but he can't comprehend the severity of the detriment of eventually getting only 10% of his maximum health, total, to utilize to take on combat encounters. So, now he just ragequits anyway, because it's even harder to take on subsequent encounters with such a small pool of health (without dying and having to reload, sparking no progress) than it is to take on those encounters with much, much more health per-attempt that you simply can't fully restore more than a certain number of times. So, not advocating any specific implementation here (as far as the details, because there's still plenty of room for analysis there), putting something in like "You can only use this rest area twice in a 72-hour period (gameworld time, not real world time)" already accomplishes everything you can reasonably hope to accomplish. You've set a limit to health replenishment (so that you don't basically just have infinite health), AND you've given people the opportunity, if they need to, to go back and use that rest area again (even if it might not be entirely necessary to get through the area). But, it has to be worth it to them. The detriment is natural: If you're 5 minutes away from that rest area, and you feel like you should run all the way back to it to use it AGAIN to heal, instead of making it to the next one, then awesome; that's up to you. No one's forcing some extra penalty on you for wanting to use that again. There is no "You're going to move 30% more slowly now because you want to use that rest area more times than I wanted you to," or anything like that. No definite penalty (since you don't know how far away you'll be when you need to use it a second time, so that's not even a guaranteed "run really far back to use it again" penalty). So, I say, whatever they do, it should be either completely unlimited use, or simply limited use. Honestly, if they want to put a toggle in for that, and it's ultra-easy and not time consuming, then whatever. As long as I can have the game actually impose challenge, and the integrity of the game isn't blown on unnecessary effort and development resource usage on such an option, I don't really care if someone else plays on "I can heal to full between every single fight" mode. Just like I don't care that someone else can set the game difficulty to Easy and get past encounters more easily than I can on Normal or Hard. *shrug* But, is it an "We OWE our players a lack of challenge imposition?" matter? Not at all. Again, a person is either going to acknowledge the fact that they have to deal with finite resources, or they're going to demand that they never have to do so. You can't make someone be reasonable. And your game's design need not bend to the irrational desires of the irrational few.

What you don't want is a bi-polar bear. u_u That guy would be SO uncontrollable!

A) I didn't say tabards/insignias/decorations shouldn't be available for use. I said they shouldn't be necessary, as in mandatory, as in "I can't distinguish between my plate-wearing characters without color-coding their armor and/or giving them different tabards." B) You're grasping at exaggerations of everything I say. Do you comprehend how scaling works when dealing with artwork? If I draw a slightly wavy vertical line on a huge dry-erase board, then scale that down to a 3-inch-tall line, you're not even going to know it isn't a straight line, really. You're going to basically think it was a crappy attempt at producing a straight line, but you're not going to say "Oh, I see, it curves out a bit here, and in a bit here." So, you're also not comprehending that if you don't exaggerate the finer details of shapes and edges and proportions and such (to some degree, not to whatever extreme degree you'd like to use to counter this argument even though I didn't specify that extreme of a degree, nor am I even suggesting anything but subtlety in the slightest), the result is not realistic breastplate proportions and realistic subtle differences between male and female character shapes. The result is "now those two character models just look like 2 very bland, androgenous humanoid things." You see, what's subtle at tiny character model size becomes bad at blown-back-up-to-real-life size. So, IF you took the finished, subtly exaggerated character models and scaled them up to life-size, you would need to UN-exaggerate them or they'd look goofy. Do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind... Open up Microsoft Paint, and draw some fancy symbol, like 8 inches tall, on the canvas. Then, go to Image -- Size -- and resize it down by 50%. Just keep doing that, and tell me that, when it gets down to like an inch tall, it maintains all the realism and detail of your original. THEN come back with your empirical evidence and tell me how stupid it is that I'm talking about the nuances of designing tiny people while keeping them detailed. Or, you know... just respond with "Lolz! So all the wemenz should have like 7-foot wide hips and gigantic boobs, so that we can tell them apart from the manz?!" some more, in an effort to make my argument look that much more ridiculous via misrepresentation. I grow weary of pointing out the difference between what I said and what you keep arguing against, simplybecause you'd rather read the cliff notes and bend them to make you seem that much more 110% correct than actually make a mental effort to comprehend my point in the midst of its surrounding context. All I can figure you mean here is "I challenge you to word things in such a way that I cannot simply claim that it is YOU who is doing what you're accusing me of doing, then pretend that that's true." In which case, I don't accept that challenge. I've been responding to you and re-clarifying umpteen times all because your taking the time to analyze my argument seemed to convey a desire to verify your understanding of my stance on this matter, when it seemed so crazy to you. But, I've done all I can. If you still just think I'm a crazy moron who doesn't make a lick of sense, then I find it amusing that you'd waste so much of your own time rebutting every single quote of mine you could, knowing the whole time that I had no sense to present in return. For what it's worth, I don't think you're anything of the sort. I simply believe you're being awfully stubborn right now, and it's not in my power to cause you to be any less stubborn. So, if it helps you sleep at night, keep pretending everything I've said is ridiculous. At least maybe some other people got something out of our little breakdown of character-model-detailing tactics, and now we can stop flooding this topic with words that aren't serving any further purpose.

^ Yeah, and you could probably come up with some reasonable mathematical threshold for determining when someone's personal experience with your character(s) overrides their faction's experience/view of your character(s). Simplistically, something like "If Fear is 70, and Faction's Unwillingness To Cooperate With You is 50, NPC A's Fear causes him to obey you for the time being." So, basically, an NPC without a faction would have only their personal factor values to check. Whereas, an NPC with a faction would simply have an extra check on faction modifiers (which could be different for different NPCs -- maybe a new recruit in the Followers of Ciethe is less powerfully swayed by their creed than an elder member) to measure the difference between the two and see if it hits the threshold or not for that specific effect.

Clearly, there would be a range of opportunities, anywhere from "We don't really have a means of holding this door shut" to "We can bolt this door, and our burly tank can hold the door against being bashed open for at least 10 seconds" to "We actually have the means of barring this door against pretty much anything for a while if we so choose." And yes, when you happened upon a situation in which you needed to buy some time or get away from a particularly dangerous foe, and there happened to be a quality door there (or something you could use a Hold spell on, or an alchemical grenade-pouch of instant-setting JB Weld, etc.), it would be pretty convenient. I don't see a world devoid of happenstancical convenience being a very interesting or believable world. So, yeah, it's probably best to keep it somewhere between "nothing is ever convenient" and "everything is always convenient."

Indeedibly so, . I remember playing it at a friend's house when it came out, and thinking "THIS IS A SEQUEL TO CHRONO TRIGGER" quite excitedly. That excitement was rapidly replaced with a bucket full of "Meh..." But yeah. Always loved the Chrono Trigger soundtrack. They did an awful lot with pretty limited sound tools. Anywho, totally looking forward to your work! Especially after that demo, ^_^

^ *shrug*. I'm just not a fan of the whole "I can't believe you don't understand this, but I'm not going to take the time to explain it" position. So long as someone is willing to debate aspects of the topic at hand, I shall engage in that debate, in the interest of a greater understanding on both sides. It's only rude to waste all that typing they already did. 8P