Lephys

Okay, so a few thoughts... What if the out-on-the-battlefield (floating above your peeps) indicators were streamlined down to JUST that little circle with an icon that indicates the current action? Then, recovery time could simply be the "rim" of that circle. It could "fill" with light in a radial fashion, until it came full circle, at which point you would know that your character is currently performing the action shown (whether it be a sword, or a spell icon, etc.)? I know it's not strictly necessary to see what each person is doing and when, but it is pretty handy when you pause in the middle of some chaos. Especially since everyone isn't on round-timers in this game, so they could all be at any given frame of a given action/recovery duration. That, and it would still be toggleable, like pretty much anything. There's no reason you should HAVE to look at it if you don't want stuff floating above your characters at all. Also... what if there was a button you could press-and-hold to simultaneously pause the game AND bring up an at-the-cursor quick-menu of the given character's spells? You're watching the action, and WHOA! "I need my Wizard to do something else because of what just happened!", you think to yourself. So you press, I dunno... Spacebar (just for example). You hold it down. The game pauses, and the selected character's abilities pop up around your mouse cursor (wherever it is on the screen). You simply pick a spell, pick a target, and let go of spacebar. There might even be some easy way to switch characters while in this pause-mode (mouse scroll, perhaps?). Again, not necessary, but it could be pretty handy. *shrug* Also also... regarding the little "current/currently-queued action" circle above characters, if the enemies had this, too, you could possibly use small lines between these indicators to indicate engagement. This is a VERY rough-draft idea, but it would be pretty intuitive at a glance who was engaged with who at any given moment. These things and/or some kind of press-and-hold "show me extra info" button, like I think Sensuki was suggesting. Something like engagement lines could be only shown in that mode, perhaps. Another possibility with recovery time is to have the selection circles show it. Same radial "fill" effect, but on the selection circles. Of course, that could get ugly, depending on what all other indicators they're used for (selected versus not-selected, engagement arrows currently, etc.) Regarding the IE games being easier to know, at a glance, when people were waiting to perform another action, I think a big component of that was also the fact that everyone always acted at exactly the same time, due to rounds. It's one thing to see the guarded pulsing and know "Yeah, they're in recovery," but, it's entirely another thing to know exactly when someone's going to finish recovering and do something. Especially when Beetle A has .7 seconds left, Beetle B has 1.1 seconds left, Steve the Fighter has 1.4 seconds left, Sarah the Wizard has 1.7 seconds left, Susan the Rogue has 1.8 seconds left... etc. Being able to see when people are going to get to act is infinitely more useful in this game than in "everyone goes every 3 seconds" IE combat.

Indeedibly!

You could spend it on dues to the Over Ree Actor's Club. If you're into stage stuff, that is...

Good find(s), Cubiq. *thumbs up*

Maybe they can make a loot item called "combat." Then, you could collect it, and turn it in to someone for an XP reward.

I think you mean MINUS one, right? I WILL END YOU I WILL BEGIN YOU! ... Wait... o_O

I'm fairly certain Josh has specifically addressed the fact that PnP ideaology must be "translated" into cRPG video game form. In fact, it was in response to a lot of "WHY U NO MAKE GAME BASED DIRECTLY ON AD&D LIKE OLD IE GAMES, SAWYER?!" sentiment. If you'd like to judge people's final product, then fine. But if you're going to judge people's intentions and thought processes, you might want to invest in some accuracy, first. Otherwise, you're just being rude/disrespectful. You might as well just say something like "I'm pretty sure Josh Sawyer can't read, but thinks he can," or "I'm pretty sure Josh sawyer loves to kick puppies."

Because trolls are people, too. Really, though, I don't think he's trolling. I just think he's arbitrarily obsessed wit his own opinion, and is allergic to objectivity. He's like an advanced graphic zealot or something. "Why should there be advanced graphics in the game? BECAUSE ADVANCED GRAPHICS!"

OK, let's pretend for a moment that you're serious. The last time you were making a cake, and you saw a bowl of mixed cake batter, did it look exactly like what you expect a finished cake to look like?

I don't think it's too long. I'm fairly certain there are longer titles in the list,

Ahh, you're right. I was mistaken. It wasn't summer. It was April, as per the "Estimated delivery" listed on even the physical copy tiers on the Kickstarter page. Last time I checked, you couldn't plan to give someone a copy of your game BEFORE you actually plan to have the game finished. I might have actually watched the Matt Chat, even. I don't really recall, because it was readily available information that the release date had been changed, quite a while back. I think it was right around the time the vertical slice came out? Either that, or approximately when pre-production finished up (six months in?) Even if the Matt Chat was the original source of that, it was at least in an official update, if not in a couple of articles around that time (and/or forum posts by Josh & Co.). Yeah, a lot of people somehow missed that info, but not because it was a secret, only to be found in a single video interview across the entirety of the web, that only an elite few known as the Matt Chat Watchers were privileged enough to witness. I didn't watch the movie Titanic. Doesn't mean I don't know what happened to the ship. And no, Hiro. What I'm not acknowledging is the OP's claim that the game is being rushed, because (insert his reasons here). Not that the things he mentioned are made up, but that they aren't accurate in their support of his claim of the game being rushed. The release date WAS originally earlier, until the team went "Hmm... no, the game won't be done by then," and changed it. And DA:I isn't the reason the game isn't coming out before December. It's simply a concern they had when considering exactly when the game would be released. If A) they were trying to rush the game, and B) the only reason they changed the date was because of DA:I, then, when they found out DA:I wasn't coming out until October, they would've simply gone "Oh..." and moved the release date back to summer 2014. So no. The sky isn't falling. That, and you haven't even said anything about his claim that the beta isn't really a beta. You should really be a politician, you know.

I realize this probably won't be occurring the majority of the time, but... what happens if you're BOTH moving? I mean, what if you decide "to hell with this guy! My people need me elsewhere!", at the same time (not the exact same instant... just "same" enough so that you both are moving at the same time) that your foe decides to move away? I don't know how the game technically deduces who gets a free attack and who doesn't. You know... how the code does it. The code criteria.

I didn't have to watch the Matt Chat. The release date was listed as "summer" ever since the Kickstarter ended. Then it was later changed to winter, and explained that the change came after the re-evaluation of the project's extent after all funds raised and stretch goals, etc. No, May isn't summer. But "summer" also isn't a specific date. It's called an approximation. Lots of films come out at the end of May, and are still called "summer blockbusters." Why? Because spring doesn't get blockbusters. So they approximate to summer. And no, it (summer) doesn't not include July and August. And no, I'm not still in denial of something I never denied. There are your answers to your irrelevant questions. Also, explain to me how pushing a game's release back to a later date (skipping an entire season, in this instance) supports the idea that the developer is hellbent on rushing the game. Since you favor the OP's claim so much. They don't seem to be rushing this game at all. Hell, look how big-budget the Call of Duty games are, and those things are made in like... a year. That's how you rush a game. Not to mention that Josh has pointed out oodles of times just how much extra emphasis he puts on pre-production than the norm. Not sure where anyone's getting a feeling of rushedness.

I dunno... he didn't really say when Dragon Age 3 is coming out. He just said that they wanted to release before December, but Dragon Age 3. So, they're not releasing the game until December, because Dragon Age 3. Obviously. And the game was planned for release in like May or June, originally. But then, they pushed it back like 5 months, so as to better facilitate the rushing of the game to market. Then, Dragon Age 3 was all like "Hey, I'm gonna come out around then!" So, for no other reason, and also to better rush the game, they pushed it back yet another month-or-so. Heaven forbid DA:I somehow keeps getting delayed... PoE will never release, then, and will clearly be even more rushed. u_u

^ We could call it "Damage Rejection." Haha. It would sound pretty terrible, then, though.

What are you talking about? You're correct. What, you can't accept facts, now? Back for more what? Discussion? When did I leave? o_o

I don't understand. I just accepted the facts above. Weren't you reading my concession of defeat? Clearly, Obsidian's only goal is to release the game as early as possible. The only thing that stopped them was DA:I. Also, the beta isn't a beta. Past yourself on the back, Hiro. You knew that from the get-go, and didn't need to reluctantly realize it like I did. 8D

So... you're all about some role-playing value, but you think all Wizards, for example, should all be geniuses? You don't find RP value or interest in that one guy who's strangely good with magic, but isn't a super genius, resulting in his lack of complete ability to control stuff? Isn't that kind of the basis between Wild Mages and regular Mages? Is that not an interesting dynamic? "Hey, I can intuitively USE magic just fine, but other people who can very quickly crunch all this information and recall it all perfectly and read tomes and tomes and tomes in a week can go about magic DIFFERENTLY than I can. I can't do things they can, and they can't do things quite like I can, but we both still use magic." How is that bad? Was making a Gnome Fighter a terrible thing? Obviously, Fighters need to be huge and burly, so Gnomes just shouldn't even be allowed to be Fighters, right? I think that's kind of the epitome of roleplaying. The fact that you can make a 7-foot-5 Rogue, and have him take on being stealthy differently than someone who's inherently "optimized" for the task. The fact that you can have a pretty-ripped Wizard, who catches people off-guard when he handles a concealed weapon with surprising proficiency, because they expected him to be incompetent when it comes to physical capabilities. Etc. If everything's so constraining that everyone must fit a rigid cookie-cutter, what's the point? Role-playing is about what you can do in a given role, as opposed to what someone else can do in that role. That's why MMO's suck so badly now: your options to differentiate your given character from any other of the same class are ridiculously minimal. "Do you want bonuses to ice magic damage, or bonuses to fire magic damage? YAY! You're totally unique, because you and a million other mages can all pick from one of THREE distinct options! 8D!" Roleplaying is a tango between similarities and differences. Not a guidance counselor who says "You've got big muscles and aren't a genius? You're gonna be a Fighter."

I agree, at this point. He also seems to think that Team Eternity are sitting around in their offices, picking their noses, until someone comes along and makes a big enough deal about something on the forums. THEN, they spring into action, implementing whatever it is that "loud" forumites wanted, without even evaluating it with their own brains, or comparing it to anything they've been thinking of (because they've just been sitting around picking their noses, of course).

In a well-balanced system, if you graze too often, you're doing something wrong. That's kind of my point. If you're not doing something wrong, and you're grazing too often, then the system needs some tweaking. Not the removal of the thing that happens to be occurring too often. Miss or graze, it matters not. Either could be out of whack, and either would need to be brought back into whack, rather than outright removed, in response. Oh, definitely. I just whip examples up to convey the basic idea of the change. Actually changing the spread would require a lot more thought and calculation, and almost definitely changes to other factors/values in the system, to make it work. Really, though, just dropping the graze threshold, while not the perfect solution, would probably show some huge improvement in regard to this issue people are having. I mean, with the current spread, when ACC-DEF = 0, you're grazing almost half the time, and hitting almost half the time. I don't mind going up against a tougher enemy that means I graze a lot more often, but grazing almost half the time even against just a perfectly average foe is basically just half-as-frustrating as missing 30+ percent of the time (which was the original thing they implemented grazes for). Or, to put it another way, if grazes were thought up in response to the frequency of missing in the older games, and the frustration that caused, then you wouldn't think leaving the whole not-hit range at a whopping 50% (5% for miss now, and 45% for graze) would be the way to go. I mean, even in the IE games, you typically had better than a 50% to hit, right? Unless you were attacking dragons in melee with your untrained Wizard. It was probably more like 60-70%, at least. So, really, you should be splitting up something like 30% into misses and grazes. That, and you really want the base frequency of something like not-hits to be relatively low in your exact-middle/average scenario (my Accuracy is exactly the same as the foe's Defense). That way, you can STILL decrease it (with higher Accuracy/bonuses) to maximize actual hits (not to mention crits), but you're at least still hitting more often than you're not-hitting, be default. Then, if the enemy has high defense, or your character just has crap Accuracy, you'll run into more grazes (and misses). But, doing half-damage is pretty frustrating, even though it's way better than doing no damage. So, I don't think 50/50 is really the baseline to use, since grazing half the time is not what someone wants to be doing just because they don't have far-above-average Accuracy. And yeah, I definitely think Accuracy bonuses need to be more significant. *shrug*. There are all kinds of adjustments that can be made there, depending on the exact goal desired. I don't know how you would do it, exactly, with an equation (off the top of my head), but maybe misses stay locked at 5% for a 10-point stretch, instead of just ticking away the second you start gaining an Accuracy advantage. Basically, you could have a reduced chance to Graze, but STILL have a 5% chance to miss. Maybe every THREE points reduces your chance to miss by 1%, instead of every point? Same with crits. Maybe your ACC is 7 less than your enemy's DEF, but you actually still retain a small crit chance? *shrug*. Seems like the shifting scale of attack resolution works quite well in general, but it could use a little finesse, perhaps. Again, I'd have to check the effects of those actual changes to tell you "this would be a good number to use," but the general idea remains.

Hmm... sounds like an unintended bug. Now that I think of it, though... how does the game determine who's disengaging and who gets a free attack? I mean, if two people with the exact same engagement radius (dunno if that's even variable anymore) were fighting, and one of them ran away from the other one, wouldn't they both technically breach each other's engagement radii at the exact same time? How does the game know who's "breaking" and who's just standing there but happens to now be crossing the other's circle? Is engagement one-way? Can Fighter Steve have engaged an Orc, while a Goblin has engaged Fighter Steve? So if he moves too far, the Goblin gets to hit him, but if the Goblin runs away, he suffers no extra attack because Steve's engaged with the Orc? I'm sure that's all been explained already, but, I can't recall hearing an explanation of how that actually works.

^_^ 'Tis the Great Green One's doing. He's level ??.

Lephysland, where people jumping onto forums and saying "OMG, the devs are super deceptive and have horrible decision-making priorities!" is ridiculous. Buckle up, folks.... it's a scary place. You always make my day, Hiro. ^_^ You win. The author of this thread was just trying to sensibly inform the public of purely factual things, and had no interest in suggesting anything that wasn't definitively true, while claiming it was definitively true. And as long as the devs ever said the words "summer release" and talked about Dragon Age: Inquisition, then everything the OP said was 100% true and accurate. My mistake. I emerge, enlightened. Bless you, Hiro. *chuckle*

The thing about the attribute math is this: You don't have to DO the math just to understand how it works. I know how addition works, so even if I can't tell you what 7,328,508.027 plus 1,427,195.297 is in a mere second, I know that it's gonna be more than 7,328,508.027 + 5. I don't have to sit down and crunch the actual numbers to know that they relate. So, with Might, for example, the OP says it's unintuitive? But, +X% damage is about as intuitive as you can get. It doesn't even break it down into physical damage, or ranged/melee damage, etc. It's just damage. Did something get hurt as a consequence of your action? Okay, take whatever number you made, and multiply it by one-point-whatever_your_damage_bonus_is. Now, if you mean "How come I put like 5 extra points of Might on my Fighter than my Paladin, but I don't really notice the difference in damage output while playing?" That, as other pointed out, is due to a lot of different factors. Maybe the % bonus per point needs to be higher. Maybe enemies, in general, need to have lower Deflection, so as to reduce the number of grazes you see. Maybe base damage values need to be higher, etc. But, none of that has anything to do with the intuitiveness of something like Might. Might = extra damage. That's it. If you make damage, you make more damage than you WOULD have made, had you had less Might. I very much agree with Sensuki, though, in that they ought to really show you how your points are affecting things. That would help. ESPECIALLY at character creation, but, even beyond that, I don't think it would hurt to always show you what your modifier is accounting for. When you view your character screen, it could show your base damage, according to the weapon you have equipped, plus your modifier damage in parentheses or a different color or something. Kind of like D&D character sheets. You saw your AC total, but then you also had a box for your Dex modifier. That way, when something was all "your Dex modifier doesn't count, foo!", you just looked at that. You didn't go "well, I know my AC value's LESS than it would be if I had my Dex modifier, but by how much?!" and be really confused. It's just nice to see that. When you look at your 7 Might character, and he's got "(-1.4 damage)" beside his total base damage value, and you toggle over to your 18 Might character, and he's got "(+6.3 damage)" beside HIS, then you'll know, right then and there, exactly how much of a difference your attribute choice is making, instead of having to extrapolate that information from combat data.

Except he's compressing them all into one "little known fact": The "fact" that the game was going to be released earlier, but they wanted to not release it near Dragon Age: Inquisition's release (implied as the SOLE reason the release date was at all affected), AND that the beta is really just an alpha in disguise so that they can make their early release... is suspect to say the least. Now, if he has proof of this, I'm all ears. Accuracy... If the fact is that Feargus expressed concern over having PoE release at the same time as DA:I, then that doesn't make that the reason we don't have a release date. It's just a factor. Suggesting otherwise is suggesting that that's the ONLY thing affecting the decision upon a release date. Besides, DA:I has a release date, if a pushed-back one. So, what exactly would prevent anyone at Obsidian from scheduling one at not-the-same-time-as-DA:I's? o_o