Lephys

Single-weapon really should get something really nice, since you're giving up a whole second-hand's worth of offense/protection to use it. It would be like if you had a "Fighting Armorless" talent. If you're going to give up armor JUST to get any effect from the talent at all, then you'd better get something nice in return.

Eeeeenteresting. Thanks, ^_^

I thought so, but couldn't remember off the top of my head, and forgot Google existed.

They're working on a finalized solid UI. That may not be as much "like this" as you're hoping for. I'm not sure. But they're not not-working-on the UI frame. I just couldn't tell you exactly how it's going to come out. Maybe it'll be more like Grotesque's than we suspect. *Shrug* As nice as his is, I'm not going to assume Kaz's is going to suck just because it probably won't be exactly the same.

What if they were all citizens in your Stronghold? I mean, not like full custom characters, but, just names/a roster of the people in your stronghold.

Diversity isn't a problem. Precision is. You could take all the different weapon focus grouping talents in PoE and have an Accuracy bonus with every single weapon in the game. That's not really something that needs to be a goal, because it's pretty infeasible (especially for all the talent options you're giving up, and the fact that you don't get a greater bonus to anything... just the same Accuracy bonus to all the weapons, of which you can only use up to 2 in any given combat encounter, because you can't have selected the additional weapon-slots talent). The problem I'm seeing is that, in the earlier games that used proficiency points, for example, you could hit level 5, and have 3 points in one weapon (of your choosing), 2 points in another, and maybe one in a third, etc. I don't know the math on how many points you got when. The point is, you got two things at once: A) Proficiency in multiple weapons (because caps prevented you from spending all your points on the same weapon every time) B) Different levels of proficiency in different weapons. To put it simply, why does 1 talent's worth of talent points = good with 5 weapons, but to be good with the only-2 weapons I actually want to be good with (for example), it requires TWO talent points? With two talent points, I could be good with TEN weapons. But that still doesn't help me be good with two weapons I want, then even better with those two (or at least one of them) weapons. When it comes to character customization, it's a little restrictive in a sense. It's not armageddon. It's just unfortunate, is all. "Just pick a bunch of talents until you get the weapons you want, even though people who happen to love all 5 weapons in one talent grouping win the lottery" isn't really a perfectly-reasonable "solution"/response here.

Yeah! Or even, what if you tell them "Yeah, don't worry! I'll TOTALLY handle this horrible situation!", and you know it's time-sensitive, and you don't make it in-time. Instead of "you fail," that person is all "I got really worried, because these goods needed to be retrieved within a week, and I hadn't heard from you in like 5 days, so I found someone else to do it." Like you said, resolved by third-party intervention, OR turn into a new problem. But, you suffer a significant reputation consequence, which in-turn effects even more things down the line.

Not that I'm saying "HEY, WE SHOULD CHANGE IT!," but, I kind of like how Evolve (for example -- I'm sure plenty of games have done this before) does it. You only have 1 Health bar, but, if you're downed, you can be gotten back up for a duration, until you "bleed out." Of course, in Evolve (a shooter), you pull out a pistol and can still aim and fire for minor damage. You simply can't move. You can even be healed while in this state (as "bleeding out" is a "health bar" to represent how long you have before you actually die). But, anywho... every time you're downed, even if you're gotten back up, you get a "strike" on your health bar -- your maximum health is lessened. That's actually an interesting way of doing it, and I think it could be adapted to a game like PoE. Maybe there'd be some rare circumstances in which you could "heal" the max-health modifier. And maybe there'd be ways to suffer those strikes to your max Health without running completely out of health, etc. Annnnywho... /ramble

^ Yeah, I'm usually VERY interested in Wizard, and then significantly less interested in all the other classes, but still somewhat interested to varying degrees. But, with PoE, I must say that I could see myself maybe replaying the game as each and every class. MAYBE minus a couple. Not sure really.

I kinda hope he never gets up, and just had his "royal" (or whatever) animancers animancipate the throne from its stony, stony prison. (JETPACK THRONE!)

Pro-something vs. anti-something is almost always a preposterous dichotomy. "ARE YOU PRO FOOD OR ANTI-FOOD?!" Well, you probably want some varying degree of food, and have more specific feelings about different kinds of food, amounts of food, etc.

I didn't realize that. That's... pretty strange, conceptually. That's like being a Monk, and being able to go without abilities that use Wounds. Or being a Wizard and going Grimoire-less.

The Memento thing isn't really THAT crazy. Anyone who's thinking of an interesting story about an amnesiac (of any kind), who gets the idea "Maybe he figures out how to leave himself notes, since he knows he's going to forget later on." What's one of the most permanent ways in which you could write a note to yourself? A tattoo. You can't misplace a tattoo, and it's not going to get wet and wash away, etc. That's pretty much just simple reasoning. "Hey, what if a guy has amnesia and doesn't ever leave himself clues" isn't as interesting of a thing, and "What if a guy just leaves post-its all over the place, but they all get stolen and he wonders if HE actually wrote them?" isn't very interesting, either. *MASS EFFECT SPOILER ALERT* Also, I can't comment directly on Star Control, but the whole "precursor race with giant technological secrets" is pretty much 70% of all space games ever made. I sure hope Mass Effect's story wasn't directly copied from another game, because, if it was, I feel bad for that game. "This race of cyborg beings are the culmination of all consciousnesses of the last bajillion years, but they can't come up with a better plan to ensure the continued prosperity of all living beings than 'brutally mutilate-and-repurpose all the races I can find into giant death machines that will periodically annihilate a bunch of stuff and brutally mutilate-and-repurpose a bunch more living beings so that the cycle can continue forever." Honestly, before I got to the end of the game, I kind suspected "Okay, I get it... to stop these civilizations from just building up to nukes, then destroying all the planets through the escalation of war, they're giving them a collective enemy, so that they must band together and develop unity. Also, some of the technology and war-waging resources are lost in the conflict." But, instead, it was just like "*shrug*, I just figured we'd very convolutedly cull people every so often. But, now that you happen to have made it into my central chamber, I guess I'll just let you decide a new course, arbitrarily. That's probably an awesome idea." *END MASS EFFECT SPOILERS* In general, I don't know what else to tell you, though. You've said "Hmmm... maybe all these coincidences are, at the very least, inspired by the previously-existing-similar-instance?". To which numerous posters have replied "Maybe, but not necessarily. We can guess, but we can't really know that without more information." To which you're like "Yeah, but it seems to me like they are." Cool. I mean, if you like guessing, by all means, go ahead. You could be right. Or, you know... they could be coincidence. Here we are with a couple of possibilities. We can pretend there's only one, if you'd like. Or we can just go "Okay, it could be either. Not sure with the given information." You're acting as though we've told you that it can be nothing BUT a coincidence. You're also acting as though "strong female character loses husband" is somehow a ridiculously specific detail (for example). The examples you've pointed out throughout the thread could easily be coincidences. Easily.

By far THE worst kind of advertising. u_u

Waiiiit a minute... I think I've seen another thread before, in which someone suspected things of being ripped off of other things. THIS THREAD IS A RIPOFF!

Luckily, we need not speak to type, so we actually get to convey how awesome these screenies look.

Yeah, I've used it, but, truth-be-told, I don't pay much attention to what my Fighter does, since I'm all about some Wizardry. I figured it used attack resolution, just like everything else, but I wasn't sure. Dunno. Just never really thought about that one ability before. I think in an earlier build, it was 1/encounter, so I just kind of assumed "maybe that can't fail," since having pretty much your only active ability as a Fighter fail three encounters in a row thanks to bad luck would be terrible. But, now that it's multiple uses per encounter, the only way I could see it being even possibly overpowered would be if it couldn't fail.

^ I think actual mechanics-by-profession just replace it with a new one, 'cause they never find it. 8P

You don't need more than one save for that. You just need it to save often. Like the new XCOM game. In Ironman Mode, it saves after every single thing you do, pretty much. So, if your game crashes (I've had that happen), then you've only missed out on like a minute of gameplay that you have to redo, because you've still got your last save. The only remaining threat I can think of is save file corruption. But, it may be that games nowadays doing Ironman Mode actually retain the information of 2 saves, only 1 of which you can ever get to. They could leapfrog each other, and always show up as "THE" save. So, if one got corrupted, you'd still only have to replay minimal content.

*Insert comic of Dr. Sensuki leading anthropomorphic 1's and 0's into his exam room, and tapping their knee joints with his little hammer to check their nerve reflexes* Today we salute you, Mr. Extensive Eternity Beta Testing Modder Guy... Mister Extennnsive Eternity Beta Tes-ting MODDD-ERRR GUYYYYYYYYYYYY!

*shrug*. I'm not telling you "nope... no one ever decided to intentionally rip off anything." What I'm saying is, it's an awfully strong assumption to make, that anything that happens to be similar to something else was obviously intentionally based upon that other thing. I can think up some magic system right now, and someone will tell me "That's just like how it is in (insert book series name here)." To which I'll say "Oh... I had no idea!" Similarity does not = rip off, is all I'm saying. More information is needed to confirm something is a rip off.

That's the biggest problem I have with the current weapon talents, too. If you want to use some really simple groupings of even just two weapons, you have to either take two talents, or suck with one of the weapons. I really think the talents should maybe just have you pick X weapon types with which to gain an Accuracy bonus. If you want that to be Staves, wands, and maces, then so be it. If you want it to be wands, bows, and swords, then so be it. Then, you can have different tiers, so that the more weapons you pick in a specialization talent, the smaller the bonus. Want to mainly use wands? Take the next tier of specialization in Wands (maybe +10 instead of +5). *shrug*. I dunno. In that way, the points kinda work a lot better. I mean, even if you don't just outright copy D&D proficiencies, a points system still does a lot of things that "you're good with these 5 weapons" doesn't. Especially when we're only going to get, what, 5 or 6 talents if we max out a character, and something as simple as "I want to have a character that's good with these two weapons, but nothing else, really" requires TWO talents?

Time limits are annoying because the representation of the flow of time in-game is different. Story-wise, "Oh noez! This thing happened! It must be dealt with like RIGHT now!". But, gameplay-wise, "Oh no, I was going to go buy some new armor, because the game kind of requires me to increase my DR rating as I go at certain intervals, so now, just because I hadn't decided to do that yet, and because realism, there's a timer ticking down AS WE SPEAK that leads to failure! But I really need that armor, even though it's kind of ambiguous and insignificant whether or not I go to town to buy some different armor, because I actually could've done it earlier, but I was saving up so I could outfit everyone with at least one new piece of equipment!" That's the thing... it really shouldn't matter how many seconds I take to do something, just as long as I don't decide to do something else that clearly takes time and is significant to the narrative. Or, to put it better, something that would be story-jarring if it did not force game world time to pass. If you go rescue kids from the woods, then the townspeople have to acknowledge that you didn't do that instantaneously. It was a day away, so it had to take you at least a day to get there. Who cares if you fought 17 wolves on the way, or only 5 wolves on the way. It's a fluid story. That, and, what do you set the time limit to? "You have 72 hours." Well, if it can be done in 8, then where's the real urgency? "You can only dilly-dally for 63 and 1/2 hours!" And if you set it to 8 hours? Now it's a friggin' speed challenge. "Aww man, it took me 15 more in-game minutes than most other players, so I failed." Punished for your margin of difference in player skill = not cool. So, a countdown timer is just a very heavy-handed way of handling things. A Wolf Among Us has a very good example. You're investigating murders and such in that game, and yeah, you only get branching choices of where to go next at several points. But, you know if you go interrogate such-and-such, that that's time spent you're not seeing what you can find at the old warehouse or something. So, you know that if anyone's going to cover anything up at the old warehouse, you need to go there immediately to have the best chance of finding more evidence there. But if you do that, you can't go interrogate such-and-such right now. You can jog around on the screen for 73 hours if you want, before actually leaving that place and making that choice. The game doesn't care, because... why should it? There's only so much time you're feasibly going to take jogging around there before making that decision. So, who cares if you take 30 minutes instead of 10? No one. And if the time limit isn't tight enough for that amount of time to matter, then why should any amount of time matter? It shouldn't. Your choices of "I'm going to go affect the narrative in a clearly-time-sensitive manner (not just going to the market for an extended period of time, which might as well be time spent browsing my inventory menu for all its significance toward the story), but not by doing that thing that needs some amount of urgent attention."

Because science.

Not really the same thing. In fact, it practically is necessary for you to equip weapons, unless you make a party of Monks. Can you still attack things? Sure. Will you actually make it through the game? Probably not. MAYBE on Easy?