Lephys

This argument is so, so overused. Great fact. How does that help us? Fun is subjective, so everything is correct? So game designers should just do ALL things? Nothing is wrong, because nothing is not fun to someone. News flash... getting stabbed in the leg is subjectively fun to some people. Objectively, we know it to be fun for very few people. There's probably a reason for that. There are very few things that we form opinions about that aren't based on some kind of objective reasoning to arrive at that opinion. What's your favorite color? That's probably purely subjective, as it's basically happenstance that your brain prefers one color over others. But, what's the best way to design system X? That's partially subjective, but largely ob-jective. There are core values for everyone's opinion of gameplay. Puzzle games and fighting games are "completely" different, yet people still want the same basic principle of challenge out of both. So, if you want a pure simulation, that's fine. You can want that. But you can't want a game that's about a story at its core, but then is also about simulation at its core. One has to support the other. Basically, people can make a game that's about your favorite color, OR they can make a game that's about something else, in which your favorite color will not be the only color used because different color choice better served the goal of the game's design. Very few people subjectively like the idea of losing in a game. However, they tend to like the idea of winning in a game -- of overcoming something. By the very nature of this, the ability to fail to overcome something must be in the game, or you don't have a non-overcoming state, and therefore do not have an overcoming state, either. So, that's fantastic that fun is subjective. But the world runs on objectivity. Subjectivity is just some randomized variables thrown in that we have to deal with. You can't make a whole game based on subjectivity. "How much health should this guy have? I dunno... I like the number 7 billion. So he'll have that much health." What he was saying was that you can't have simulation just because you like it. That's not a good enough reason to put simulation mechanics into a game. They have to have an objective reason for being in the game, within the context of the rest of the game.

*shrug*... There's a reason that tabletop DMs/GMs will keep checking monster manuals and roll up encounters that actually challenge your party in each play session. Sure, it's nice to occasionally obliterate something because you're powerful, but how do you really test your power if you're not going up against something powerful? Eventually, it's no longer fun to slice through the 1000th piece of tissue paper with your katana. With the exception of certain encounters, there's absolutely no reason for a set group of wolves or kobolds or what-have-you to permanently occupy a certain space. Your encountering of things in the wild is essentially completely random. You don't want to just happen to encounter 7 dragons roaming around 1 hour into the game, so why would you want to encounter 7 rats roaming around 70 hours into the game? It just doesn't make any sense, fundamentally. "I like to steamroll stuff later" doesn't logically work, because you could just have an optional place to go to slaughter deer all day or meteor strike all the bunnies to death. Unless you actually like for your opponents to present no challenge to you (in which case what is your power proving, once again, against something that wouldn't even require HALF your power to best?), there's no reason not to make some degree of adjustment to the foes you're facing throughout the game. Especially against sentient/intelligent foes, one would think they'd adjust their force to your party. Some syndicate or something, for example, who wants to send assassins after you. Why would they just plan a year in advance who they're going to send, then send the same people no matter what? They'd probably go "Oh, it's a party of 5 mages... better send some people equipped for that." Or "Oh, they took down several ogres, I heard?! They're pretty serious... better hire 5 more men than usual." Etc.

It's probably taken people more effort to type these posts opposing the walk toggle than it took for Obsidian to implement it. It's not as if they had to create walking animations.

Agreed. Now, if they were animated portraits, then sure, maybe 3D would do best. But just a still shot to capture a character's... ehh... "essence" sounds really artsy, but essentially that for lack of a better word... 2D cannot be beat, as you're purely creating the image for that one shot, and not creating it for full 3D animation. Man... how cool would it be to get animated sprite portraits like the main character (what's his name... Blastowitz?) from the original Wolfenstein 3D? You know... the more damaged he got, the more it showed on his portrait. And he cringed when he got damaged, etc. Hehe. Infeasible, I'm sure, but that would rock!

Eothas should have to slowly heal from his initial encounter with you. o_o

No no! You must summon forth a bolt of pure pommel from the heavens! It's the new Wizard spell for Wizards who don't like lightning. OOH! Or what if it was a sword made out of lightning that crashed down pommel-first into the target's temple?

YES! A solid victory, my noble walking supporters. Now we move on to Phase 2! We won't rest until characters not only move as slowly as possible, but also move a negative amount of distance every time they move! *Scary agenda*. Turns out the anti-walkers were right to fear us! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

"You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Montoya

So we can walk the walk. But, without a Speech skill, how can we talk the talk?! (Oh... with all the other factors that are checked and aren't as restrictive as "Speech." Okay)

There are no stat problems! Only Zul!

I sure hope all the lack of seeming scaling or lack of scaling in the descriptions is just temporary. I can't think of very many reasons you'd ever want something to NOT scale with your power.

@Sannom: For what it's worth, the initial multi-class system design was different from the current one. Many of the changes to that, methinks, affected the decision to restrict companions to their thematic classes.

Not at all! I would NEV-er! Of COURSE the bronze handshake you get would be a hand-crafted replica, u_u... Lephys -- crafter of artisanal bronze handshakes. It's a niche market...

@Sakissarugi, You may want to post this in the beta subforum, specifically in the bug-reporting area (sub-sub-forum?). If anyone else has had the problem, they'll know there. AND the dev team will be able to log your problem.

All I know is, when it breaches 9,000, NPCs begin crushing their own scouters in outrage.

Oh boy! I'm gonna have that handshake bronzed for posterity, then display it as the table's centerpiece at my dinner with FlintlockJazz. Hmmm... so I'll need you to scan your hand in a hand-shaking gesture, then I'll do the same to mine. Then 3D print both, put them together, and bronze them. Boom. Bronzed virtual handshake. The future is NOW!

I would rather they just put in things like surcoats to let you optionally layer "pretty" stuff on top of equipment you don't necessarily love.

It's likely they don't have all the portraits in yet. Maybe they're still working on a bunch of them? *shrug*

As others have said, something with a smoother gradient than "3 strikes and you're out" wounds would be preferable. As I mentioned before, in Dragon's Dogma, all damage you take gradually reduces your temporary maximum health (you can restore your maximum health by resting at an inn). So, you may get hit, and now you can only heal back up to 97% of your health. Get hit again, now 95%, etc. Obviously the rate can be adjusted, and to get some of the niftyness of wounds-type stuff, you can have certain attacks or conditions alter the amount of max health you lose, so that not every hit drops it the same amount. Anywho, the result is that you go around fighting and getting hit a bit, then, after a few fights, you look at your health and think "Ahh, I've still got like 87% max health. I should be good." As opposed to "Aww man, I got a wound. There goes a big chunk of my health. Better get rid of that."

I have yet to make a single dev stream for an in-development game, and I've backed approximately 85 Kickstarter games and followed some other big titles that weren't crowdfunded. o_o... Why am I so bad at stream-watching?

I called it! What do I win?!

Honestly, Iiked the idea of Health + Endurance. It's possible it could've been executed better, maybe? I honestly really like Dragon's Dogma's system, which is very similar. Every time you take damage, your maximum health gets reduced (so you've got a green health bar, and when you get hit, a portion at the end turns "empty"-clear, and the rest of your damage shows as a grey bar at the end of the green). The green part is always your current health, the grey part is the health that's healable and the clear part at the end is the portion you cannot heal. I don't know what the ratio is, exactly, but that's a pretty fun variable to play around with. You could even have certain types of abilities/damage reduce your current maximum by more than other types. But, this way, you can ALWAYS heal up after battle, it's just a matter of how much. I want to say that smaller hits take very little off your max health, so as long as you fight smartly, you can last quite a long time without having to go back to a town and rest. Annnnnywho...

Fair enough. Didn't know that detail. I only noticed that even the people who CAN do it couldn't do it as a fetus. They had to grow up and gain discipline and knowledge, etc. Essentially, they had to get better at controlling magic. If they have a potential ceiling, they have a potential ceiling, but they still have to climb up to it, IF it's high enough. That was the comparison I was trying to make; the advancement through levels of need for focus tools. But I appreciate the correction/info, @Gromnir and the Pew-Pew Staff: Depending on how it works, I don't think the very fact that a staff can let one pew-pew is a terrible idea. In my eyes, it's overly rigid to think that one can conjure a massive meteor storm of cosmic fire, but one cannot simply break that down into, say, a temporary enchantment that puts one spell's worth of resources into a weapon of choice (not necessarily a staff, but the point is that the magic comes from the wielder, not the tool) to allow that caster to spread out the magic, as it were. Like "Oh, look, a bunch of enemies who know I can summon a massive meteor storm if they clump together, so they're all spread out and surrounding us! I'd better charge my staff with my magic so I can use it to sling a little bit of spell out at a time to a whole bunch of different enemies in different directions." Essentially, you could have a per-encounter spell, just like all other spells (so it actually takes up a spell slot, etc.) that makes your staff do ranged magic attacks of a given type for the next 10 attacks or something. You get these enchantments all the time with melee weapons/attacks. Why not ranged? If I can put magical lightning into a sword, why can't I hurl bolts of it out of a weapon? Maybe only the Wizard can do this on his own weapon because arcane control is necessary to actually discharge the enchantment in the form of bolts, whereas enchanting a bow or crossbow actually just transfers the enchantment onto a physical vessel (the bolts/arrows), which then deliver the enchantment to the enemy.

... +10 to stomach cramps while running?

They could be placeholder system requirements? Also, I don't know if they take this into account or not ("they" being the gaming industry) when they generate system requirements, but if a game install is, say, 14GB, then you really need about 20GB of free space for it to run optimally. If your hard drive has 14.5 GB left of free space, and you install a 14GB game, the drive doesn't have any wiggle room to move stuff around, etc. I think this is less of a problem with SSDs as they handle things differently and don't use a page file, but, they ultimately still have to have a bit of breathing room. Just FYI for anyone whose hard drive is rather full, if they're considering installing this or any other game in the last bit of space.