Lephys

If they BOTH say it, then we have a paradox. Seriously, though, good example. And also... BETRAYAL AT KRONDOR!!! ^_^

Well, he did say "change the looks of your armour, weapons, and other items." Color could be included. *le shrug*

^ Heh, yeah, I personally always tried to push the class bounds in 2E when my friends and I played. It was pretty tough. But, in the pen and paper games, the DM had the power and liberty to allow for tweaks to the system. Sort of on-the-spot modding, if you will, to allow for more versatility. So, he could allow my Mage to be slightly less useless in melee combat. Or, I'd pick skills like Climb and Hide, and he'd match my creativity by adding in little things here and there that would allow something other than my Intelligence and Magic to be useful. But, cRPGs can only have so much hardcoded into them, so, if the devs don't design the system to support variance from the get-go, you run into the severe-restriction dilemma. It's just not fun to be strictly penalized for trying to be creative with the options provided for you in character development. It's like they've put out a buffet table, with 100 dishes, but only one of them is actually edible. The rest of them are rocks and bits of scrap metal and shards of glass... chemicals... Heh. "Oh, you can totally eat ANY of this stuff, but if you pick anything but the mashed potatoes, you'll suffer from internal bleeding the entire night."

Basically, they just need to follow the rules of the DragonBall universe: No matter how powerful you become, someone will always come along whose power is literally your own power mathematically squared. And also the world never gets destroyed, even though the gentle bat of your eyelashes as you blink, at this point, should be capable of leveling a solar system, MINIMUM. u_u

Haha. I get you. But if this forum was for discussion of mechanics purely in the event that you believe Obsidian will fudge them up, then you wouldn't ever hear from me at all (Well, you don't, because I type, ) I'm merely breaking down what I can think of regarding how escaping should function in a cRPG, based on analysis of how it has functioned in previous games and how it might be different in future games, namely P:E. Although, I DO have to exercise my verbosity skills, unless I want to stay a Novice at Verbosity for the rest of my life. Plus, gotta put that Speech to good use before Sawyer takes it away, right?

(EDIT: You guys totally beat me to most of what I was saying, haha.) ^^^@Quadrone: I think he only wants to get away from the design of classes that can only accomplish certain, necessary tasks. Example: Mage's shields. In a lot of prior RPGs, if a Mage is using a barrier to render 99% of your party's attacks useless (if not 100%), then the ONLY thing you could do was have a Mage cast the correct spell to un-invulnerablize him (totally a word... don't look it up, it's... really new?). Well, in P:E, the blast from a firearm can pierce the Mage's barrier. And, since they mentioned something about "close range" (which makes sense, because the blast/bullet constantly loses velocity the longer it's out of the barrel), I'd guess that taking on that Mage with just a gun-wielder in your group will be different from simply casting "DE-BARRIER!". You might have to get someone close to the Mage, or fire several shots that crack the barrier before its pierced. There's a difference between accomplishing the same goal and doing the same thing. As for the negative impact, I think the only thing that'll be is that "Awww, I'm kinda nostalgic about how I used to have to use one class to do this this certain way and that was it. He felt super uber important because of that!". Which, I'm not mocking that nostalgia, and it IS something that we can't really feel to quite the same degree without relying on specific class roles. BUT, we'll still be able to feel that our classes are important, because they're still doing useful things, and how we build/use them will be very important. In the example above, you can STILL have a Mage who de-barriers that enemy Mage, and think "Man, I sure am glad I built my trusty Mage like I did. He sure is trusty and handy. I don't really want to have to crack shields with firearms." So, it basically says "Hey, look at all the customization you have with your characters! And don't worry, because many skills/builds are quite useful across a range of situations!", instead of the previous "Hey, look at all that character customization! Oh, but you might not wanna pick that ability, or raise that skill, or your character will be too weak to perform his appointed task, u_u".

I understand that a video game is essentially just-for-fun, but it is not a single mechanic. I only meant that a mechanic, within a game, that must interact with and make sense in the midst of a field of other mechanics, needs to contribute more than pleasantry in its existence. Also, that, by designing a game that doesn't figuratively put class-specific obstacles in your way (completely optional stuff like locked chests with 50 gold and a potion in them, aside), you have to address the fact that those class-specific abilities have been drastically reduced in purpose. Otherwise, it's sort of like taking a headphone jack off of an MP3 player, but keeping the headphones. You can still put them in your ears, if you just like headphones, but they don't really serve a function within the system anymore. In other words, if you remove the necessity for dedicated healing to remove the restriction of party builds to need one, then, by definition, you're no longer taking more damage in any single battle in the entire game than is able to be managed by a party simply relying on their base health pools and other combat abilities. Therefore, if you take THAT scenario, and toss in a healer, everyone's immortal. So, you'd have to address the healing skills in some way, or remove it as well. You couldn't just leave healing exactly how it was when the game was designed around fights needing healers or you'd have a problem on your hands. That's all I was getting at. You take a weight off of one side of the scale, and the other side moves as well. It's understandable that you thought of that scenario, specifically, because that's how it's been in so many games. But that was Josh was trying to point out, I think. That, you can still have a heavily-armored tank who soaks up damage without relying upon a healer for the damage mitigation. Having heals reverse incoming damage is only one way of mitigating damage. I'm not even saying get rid of heals (which, I know that's been talked about, but I honestly don't know if they just mean Health, or if they mean for Stamina, too) completely. But, like you said, design that eliminates unnecessary class restrictions is a good thing, and eliminating those restrictions requires touching up related mechanics. But, healing isn't the only thing that can allow a full-plate knight to survive a battle. We're just in the habit of relying on it, thanks to long-standing RPG design.

Totally with you. It's one thing to say "Based on the only possibilities I can imagine up right now, I'm not super sure they'll be able to make that work." But, it's another entirely to say "THAT IS DEFINITIVELY STUPID!" to something that's simply a different system. Most of the objectioneers just mentally slap the proposed change into an old game (that's obviously designed with-OUT the change in mind) and use that as a basis. If you're lucky, some of them might actually toss a handful of new possibilities out there before then deciding that they've spent more time working out possibilities than the entire development team has thus far.

This is a very good point, but one thing overlaps the other a bit. If no situations require a certain class, then that class must either not possess drastically different utility skills (like healing as opposed to non-healing) from other classes, or it must possess skills that are essentially useless. Stealth is a good example. If you never need the stealth of a Rogue to overcome anything, then his ability to be uber-stealthy when other classes cannot is basically reduced to a just-for-fun mechanic. Same with dedicated healing. If you put dedicated healers in a combat system designed for groups without healers to be perfectly viable, then the healer's role is going to range from nothing all the way to "make combat ultra-easy, because we could've done this without you." Unless the system is designed so as to allow the player to rely upon the mitigation of incoming damage (through dodging, blocking, and disabling of the enemy dealing the damage). Obviously it could be done crappily, but it's just a matter of balancing a different set of factors that happens to not include healing numbers.

^ I never suggested any special mechanics. I just don't want the game to be designed such that 90% of the things you fight simply require you to select the whole party and click far away on the minimap. I think all the existing mechanics should be designed to add more depth than "Well... did you issue a move command?" to the process of actually escaping your opponents. Here's the problem with the simplified "If you travel X distance, they'll stop chasing you" method applied in a great many games... If the enemies aren't faster than you, then the decision to run is pretty much automatic success. Okay, so now SOME enemies are obviously faster than you. Well, now, it's harder to get away, but, for some strange reason, DESPITE the fact that they keep catching up to you every few strides and taking another chunk out of your torso (most likely a creature that's faster than you, as opposed to a humanoid character), they just decide that they're tired and don't want to finish you off because you've sprinted for 250 yards. Maybe the creature thinks that if it doesn't turn back now, it won't get home in time for book club? I have no idea. So, when I say there should be a challenge, I mean that you should have to employ tactics (ranging from extremely simple to quite involved) to successfully deter something from chasing you, or get off its radar. Tactics that are already available to you, such as enhancing people's speed, or increasing evasion somehow, or decreasing visibility, or incapacitating the foe. Obviously some things are still going to be quite easy to run from. But then... the things that are super easy to run from are generally not going to give you much reason to run (like large rats, or some goblins.) I don't want to see escaping be LITERALLY as simple as traveling a certain distance, every single time. This is where awesome illusionary magic (and giant-size effects) gained utility in pen&paper games. Even if a pack of wolves could easily slaughter you because you were down to one character who was bleeding to death, if you could make them THINK they couldn't slaughter you (becoming rather menacing-looking, or throwing fire everywhere that's only threatening the wolves if they try to progress through it, etc.)

Yes, but how much of the option of looking badass? I joke. I know it's a game, and part of the reason we play is to get to experience things that we don't get to in our daily lives. Running amok with a battleaxe in each hand is one of those things. So... *makes scale gesture with hands*, haha. The only thing I don't want is for looking badass to become more of a priority than not-breaking the weapon system. I'll accept that fantasy-guy Steve McSlaughterStab is somehow powerful enough to wield two greatswords, but I don't want him to literally just be 12-times as effective as anyone else with any other weapons in the game. There should be a con to one-handed greatsword wielding. Maybe they transform into prettygoodswords? *shrug*

I like the idea of critical hits being more than just extra damage. If you allow Rogue-ish crit builds (where you get your chance up to about 20%), then you wind up with critical chance essentially passing for part of the class mechanic, even though it's literally just a matter of attack frequency and damage calculation. But, if crits are too IN-frequent, you pretty much ignore them. "Oh great, once per 10 minutes, someone does 100 damage instead of 50. Woot..." So, keeping them pretty rare while allowing them to alter one's status would give the crit system more purpose. If you allow the player to affect the percentage chance within a slightly larger range (for finesse builds), then instead of sacrificing damage (STR and feats and such, traditionally) for a chance at extra-damage, you get sacrificing damage for a chance at more status effects. In the example of Rogues typically getting up to 15-or-20% critical chance while the other classes typically stay down at 5% or so, simply making the crits more about effects and less about extra damage (don't necessarily have to cut out the extra damage all-together), your Rogue would now function differently in combat with one build as opposed to another. Whether or not to let the player affect the chance that much or not depends on a lot of other factors, but, either way, I think critical hits with effects would provide a greater dynamic than sheer damage bursts. And obviously the effects would have to depend upon the weapons/character. I don't think the 10-STR Mage is going to go around shattering people's weapons and concussively bashing their skulls with his dagger. I'd also love to see critical hits in magic, to some degree. There are more effects in-place with magic, already (as compared to standard physical weapon strikes), so you have more for the critical to affect (Chance/duration of burning from a fire spell, blind/paralysis on a lightning spell, extra jump on chain lightning, larger radius on frost nova, etc.). As for critical misses, they'd have to be VERY, very minimized, almost to the point of just adding very occasional flavorful occurrences to combat. A critical hit is a chance for what someone's doing to be a little more effective, so the rest of the time it's simply as effective as you'd expect it to be. A critical MISS, on the other hand, is purely a chance that something will be LESS effective than it should've been. This tends to inherently make your strategic choices less reliable. I mean, what if your character just had always had a tiny chance of tripping and falling? How could you get anything done in combat? "Well, I'd tell him to flank these guys, but I don't know if he's gonna fall or not." Failing to score a critical hit doesn't negate a strategic choice (i.e. attack this enemy, move here, cast this spell), whereas failing to NOT-score a critical miss does. And that's on top of regular misses. u_u

Wow... that was an amazing article, 8D. I definitely think any game's combat animation would benefit from the knowledge of how the weapons are actually wielded, as in that article, even if the artists are straying from absolute reality. The simple matter of the efficiency of anatomical movements would provide a huge benefit for the animators, all by itself. One thing I never understood is why, for so long, we've been prone to standard auto-attack systems as a foundation for characters engaging in combat, with special abilities thrown in on top of that, but most of the time the auto-attacks don't look like they're even engaged in combat at all. They just become overly tense looking (gripping their sword hard, maybe flying like a butterfly so they can sting like a bee) and occasionally swinging their weapon, pausing in between each swing as if they keep needing to sneeze or something. What's even worse are the systems that give you the 3.5 second weapon speeds, so your character successfully begins and finishes a crude thwack in less than a second, then stands around for 2.5 seconds before swinging again. I always thought "Why not just make them attack more often for less damage per strike (same DPS) and actually have 3-5 variant attacks, with accompanying animations that make them appear to ACTUALLY be actively combating one another?" You could even work in the dodges and parries, instead of having the exact same animation with a "*miss*" popping up, it'd do the roll at one of the neutral states in between attacks, and if the evasion was successful, queue the next animation to be the actual dodging (or blocking) of the weapon strike.

I simultaneously love dual-wielding and hate how it's always implemented as simply "the ability to deal more damage more quickly where you once could not." As long as it provides an actual difference in fighting style (complete with trade-off detriments, 8D), I'm all for it. And while I'm not 100% opposed to the dual-wielding of full-sized weapons, this typically begins at a point a lot closer to the "this is just plain ridiculous" threshold (i.e. dual-wielding greatswords or polearms) and hardly ever serves any other end than the "I totally do so much more hardcore damage now, because I've multiplied my awesome weaponization by 2!!!" idea. I'm not saying it's impossible to implement it well (regular full-size weapons, not the greatswords/polearms thing), but I don't know how much we could reasonably expect to gain from that as opposed to the much-more-feasible small-weapons-in-off-hand approach. *shrug*

Well, with the way the importance of souls seems pretty prevalent throughout every aspect of the game, I'd say they've got a pretty good framework for any sort of crafting system. Perhaps it will literally be "both." Master smiths will do the physical smithing, whilst your character has to attune his soul to the metal during the smithing process to achieve the customization/imbuement effects. They've got a lot of room to work with is all, since almost every single soul in the world seems to have supernatural capabilities, to some degree (as opposed to a world in which there are master craftsman, plus a handful of wizards and magical components).

Pssh... only a luzer would use such a hammer, u_u

Haha. Not quite what I had in mind -- you were spot on with that -- but still pretty awesome. AND they're polearms! It's like a win-win! I don't think it would be too big of a leap, for style's sake, to go with the reaping scythe design and still allow martial proficiency. If you train with a potato your entire life, you can probably become quite skilled with it, and it doesn't even have a blade. The scythe is already ahead! 8D

Whoa whoa whoa... easy does it, there. You misunderstand me. I'm not even suggesting that magic exists in reality. What I'm saying is, in a fantasy world, there's still gravity. There are still humans, and they walk around on the world, because gravity holds them. So, to say that the existence of things that don't exist automatically throws any and all realism out the window is incorrect. Gravity alone proves that false. You're not creating a completely unrealistic world. You're mixing realistic and unrealistic things, so you can't just make no effort at realism, or you'd have to not even attempt to emulate ANY real laws of physics. The laws of physics do not allow for a fireball to be woven out of magic. But they DO provide a ball of fire to burn your foes, and light wooden things aflame. So, the ONLY thing that isn't based in reality about a magic fireball is how it was created and controlled. In other words, I can't will a sword into existence. But, if I COULD, it would still be a sword, adherent to all the laws of physics, now that it exists. It would behave in a perfectly realistic fashion, even though I wasn't behaving in a perfectly realistic fashion by creating it with my mind. I'm just saying that it isn't moot to discuss realism when dealing with fictitious elements. You're always going to be dealing with some degree of realism.

I'm highly in favor of the majority of puzzles being optional. Also, I think it works very well when optional puzzles are integrated into other optional aspects of the game (exploration, lore, etc.). Some examples made in this thread already have touched on this. Maybe you COULD buy a book (in-game item) on the history of some ruins, or talk to some certain NPC and learn all about stuff (both completely not required for any reason whatsoever to get through the game in a variety of ways). The mandatory story might actually take you through these ruins, but, if you've read the book or gotten info from the NPC, you'll notice certain markings on the wall, or you'll know to look behind some specific column (something you really couldn't notice, and instead have to know exactly where to look). The complexity of this could range anywhere from "Oh, there's a secret door to a treasure room" to "Oh, there's a secret door to a gigantic puzzle room with a treasure at the end." I'm even all for the rock/switch to that door/room not being interactive (even though you, the player, might know where it is) unless your character knows about it (from using the book or talking to the person.) Obviously, that's all got to be done properly, but, it just seems reasonable that the person who doesn't mind taking their precious time reading about lore in games and exploring the nooks and crannies of their environments would be the same person to not mind (and rather enjoy) taking the time to solve in-depth puzzles. Everything already co-exists peacefully (secrets in dungeons are already there, whether you're an explorer or not, and lore is all part of the game world whether you learn about it/put it to use or not), so those who'd rather not "waste time" on such things can go on about their business without a care in the world, and those who love such things get actual, in-depth implementations of them, and it all fits like a glove. Maybe even a mitten. (EDIT) What I'm against is the "let's put puzzles in that you have to do, but let's make their simplicity and lack of time requirement a priority so that they don't annoy people." That's just literally self-defeating. The people who want puzzles get "technically a puzzle" excuses for puzzles, and the people who don't want puzzles are still having to put up with puzzles. So, in that respect, I would definitely say that IF they're going to decide that mandatory puzzles are a good idea in any capacity, then they need to go ahead and make them solid puzzles and not worry about making sure they only take 15-seconds. That isn't to say they SHOULD take 30-minutes and an advanced knowledge of 15th-century European Literature to solve. But, that's a balancing concern that's in place even without arbitrarily lowering the complexity threshold with no regard for how complex the puzzle even needs to be purely to serve its purpose as a puzzle (as opposed to just some switch on the wall or something that takes time and effort to get to). Also, I just want to point out that I actually rather LIKE the notion Skyrim used of inspecting inventory objects and finding information on them that may be pertinent to puzzles and optional quests and such. The problems in Skyrim were not that method, but that implementation (Skyrim did not invent the "inspect items to find clues" mechanic). The "clues" in Skyrim were basically just door codes, so there wasn't any figuring out. There was only the middle man of having to get the door code off the claw, then input it on the door. The other main problem was that you couldn't find any information that helped you in any way on ANY other items in the entire game. Just those claws, and just for those doors. That's like implementing changeable equipment in a game (as opposed to fixed equipment the whole time), but only having 1 weapon and 1 set of armor in the entire game. Or buying a refrigerator, then simply filling it with ice and using it as a cooler.

I'll see your polearms, and raise you one scythes. I know they aren't the most practical weapon, but that doesn't make them any less awesome. 8P

They should bearly be able to catch you, as opposed to barely being able to catch you?

I beg to differ. PLEAAASE, pleeeease differ! T_T (Sorry, I've just always found that phrase a bit funny.) Regardless of how imaginary a fantasy concept is for a game, it's still designed to be experienced by humans, who dwell within the realm of reality. If imaginary concepts weren't designed with realism in mind, then we wouldn't comprehend the game at all. The way souls and magic work in the world of P:E might be completely fictitious, but they generate effects within a set of rules based on real physics (such as heat, and lightning, and measurable kinetic forces). We sort of say "If this and this and this were real, how would they fit in with the rest of reality?" Logic and reason still fully apply to the design. That's why you get complaints such as "Why doesn't my fireball annihilate this ice elemental?", as opposed to people just saying "who cares... it's imaginary magic... it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever." Just because a person's hands can't really make a fireball out of mana and willpower doesn't mean that I should stop expecting it to behave like fire would in relation to realistic things like ice (the fact that the ice is apparently sentient matters not.)

Running away is actually just running toward, but via the longest possible route in the world. u_u . Seriously, though, it should just be SOME sort of challenge to actually run away. How they go about designing it is up to the devs, I suppose, but it shouldn't just be a matter of "Changed my mind... don't want to keep fighting... and therefore, we're all safe now and healing up nicely." Otherwise, groups of enemies would be pointless. You could ALWAYS just fight 1 or 2, then flee before anyone dies, rather than ever having to take on an entire group all the way through.

Well, at the very least, if there are absolutely no speech skills, I don't think the point is to remove the dialogue options that those gave you from the game. Sawyer's goal seems only to be to allow you to have more than a single range (eloquent-to-uneloquent) characters, and to have the dialogue restrictions be more than just locked treasure chests. In other words, if they scrap the speech skills all together, then it'll only be because they decided that some other system made more sense to support their added dialogue depth. Worst-case scenario (as far as your worries are concerned), you still get access to your eloquent/passionate/compelling options but the character build is simply different to get to them (instead of "Oh, I just need to make sure I put enough points into Speech.) We'll obviously know more once we're provided with more details, but I whole-heartedly believe that the lack of details is causing the goal of the design to be very easily misunderstood.

There's got to be some limit to your power. It might be that you're quite powerful (as a Mage, for example), but that hostile creatures are relatively powerful as well. But, if you're going around as a god, deflecting swords with your skin and walking through lava and destroying mountains by blinking, then what could possibly be challenging your abilities? "This evil guy's causing ALL KINDS of trouble in the world!" "u_u... I just willed the world out of existence and built my own, where there aren't any evil guys... GAME COMPLETE!" I think it should be balanced in such a way that even the easy stuff starts out more challenging in the beginning, but by the end of the game, the hardest stuff in the game has dropped from impossible to fairly challenging (assuming the maximum amount of majestic power you can achieve is achieved.)