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Frenzy-kun

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About Frenzy-kun

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    Frenzy-kun
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  1. I think Obsidian should focus in what they excel, meaning CRPGs. I really like the Baldur's gate series, and a setting in forgotten realms or symilar always attracts me, but if I had to choose, I'd ask for some horror setting. Not in the direction of big shapeless monsters (not even cthulhu), but something more psycological oriented: Something that makes you afraid of going forward, but even worse when they ask you to backtrack. One example is the feeling in amnesia, where nothing really happens, but you really are afraid of the shadows. In a CRPG context, it could be something like being afraid of being wounded: Maybe your own wounds come after you? Maybe wounded characters become crazy with time up to the point where they attack the party by surprise in the worst moment? Leaving your wounded companion behind before he strikes the party badly and running short of power until another companion appears or risk yourself keeping a clock bomb next to you? Maybe leaving them to become crazy is the only way to know what's inside their minds, what are their deepest fears and how do they really see the world? I always dreamt of a game where a small group has to survive in a dark, lonely and dangerous world where any mistake counts, where companions are lost so easily that you are even frightened of making bonds with them, but somehow the game pops up with a lot of situations to create bonds, to understand them, and even when you know they are about to die, you can even empatize with them because they are finally showing their true faces, fears and delusions. The original group of survivors is slowly going down in numbers. When comming back to the basement after expeditions, you find out some of them didn't make it alive, but if you take them in your party, sometimes sacrifices are unnavoidable. Even if it's up to you to rescue new lost characters (some of them could be already ill, being a clock bomb in the basement), there is always a luck factor involved in who is going to die. Although as the player you have direct control over your character, it doesn't mean you have the control over the group. You need to gain trust and support from others to take the decisions: where to go next? should we sacrifice the suspect of being ill? Can you please obbey my commands in battle? Whatever you do make you earn friends and enemies, and if your friends die, you lose control over the decisions of the group and even your party, so better make new friends. How many will make it alive? And the best part is that each game is different. Your class, race, sex and age determines who likes and dislikes you, who ends up being ill, making it easier or harder to control the small crowd of survivors. Sometimes you will even be forced to team up with certain people you might dislike, sometimes forced to go with an enemy because he has to watch over you. Hell, even sometimes you won't even be able to team up with your lover because of that jealous crazy bastard who thinks he can take her from you. maybe you should let him die. Maybe if you manage to wound that roommate of him... when they go to sleep...
  2. During every game development there is always a limited budget. Which means, there is a limit to the quantity and quality of the content. In any game, the critical point is always the beginning because that is what is going to hook the player into the game or drop it for something else. That is the reason why the beginning is always much more intense and well done than the rest of the game. I know no game whose midpoint is better than the beginning. Quallity comes through the iteration and experience. That's why the beginning is the last part to develop, but also that's the party that requires the most work. And you could think, "then, reduce the content and improve the quality". Yep, you can do that, but you can also keep improving the quality of the beginning, and then, the mid part will be also of a lower quality than the rest of the game. It's always more interesting to focus in the early game than in the late, no matter how long the game is or how big the budget is.
  3. I will try to be a bit more constructive than the average. In my sense the problem doesn't come of the engagement, the lack of prebuffs or whatever. I believe any game design can be good if developed properly. In fact, act 1 is very good as you say, which means the problem doesn't come from the combat itself. One of the rules of game design is that when players learn the most eficient way to succed in the game, the downhill of boredom begins. Saying so, I think the problem relies there. Basically there are two points to explain this. First, is that most of the player comes from the Baldur's gate saga, which made the combat for this people much easier to predict. It doesn't mean it's simple because there is still many people who never played IE and they struggle to understand what's happening. The second is the one I would like to talk about: the lack of content. This game is a 40 hour game, which means, it requires enough variety of situations to do not get bored. And this game lacks of it. The proof? Check the wizard spells. When you see one of the spells you can really expect an improved version in the next level. This translates into higher level skills being like the lower level skills but improved. Since the game progresses according to your character level, it means that basically is just an up-to-date of a previously existing skill. So this skill plays the same. It also happens with the different controlling skills. Basically all the status effects works pretty symilar. They drain health or incapacitate. So at certain point I was just spamming status randomly. Then you go back to baldur's gate And then you see that yes, there are some upgraded versions, but the quantity of new spells is so overwhelming and the number of upgrades is so little that probably you already switched tactics when the upgrade came, forcing you to readapt. My solution would be to first, create abilities that are unique and combine. Not an easy task, but BG is full of those. But lastly but not least, make conceptual battles. Force the player to deal with a situation they didn't deal before by making some themes on every combat. Most of the combats are a bunch of enemies mixed together with more or less resistance. But I really miss battle themes where you really have to deal with unique situations in unique ways. What about some spiders that can paralize whatever gets closer and can attack and poison on distance? Try to engage it and you lose your character for several seconds. Get too close and even your ranged attacks won't work. And then, after the player learns how to deal with this, have the spiders protected against ranged attacks. Even more, bounce back spells. The companions that becomes agressive because of those huge mushrooms doesn't attack you. That would bring new situations as well. And what about an improved version where the parasited companion ends up exploding if you don't manage to deal with the one controlling him? What about some engage braking abilities. I can imagine for instance that maybe those lions could have a roar that forces any engaged enemy to drop to the floor and disengage. Then they would not be just an upgraded wolf. If you engage them, then your fighter could be screwed. You don't have to go for those complicated patterns. Just using several thematic battles it would be already very good. A fireball theme, for instance. Have 3 wizard enemies pointing fireballs around. Having fire resistant companions that synchs their pushing attacks to the fireball launching. As the wizards start casting the fireball, the warriors pushes your fighters to where the fireball is going to be launched. Hell, that would be crazy to win. THe player for sure needs new strategies. Even if it's about using fire resistance potions, it's already something. The next battle with the fireball mages and the fighters could have some paralysis attack that would make your team an easy target. I remember in the first baldur's gate, the boss battle in episode 4 where you had to fight a wizard that teleports and launches bouncing lightnings in the small alleys. Hell, I didn't know how to deal with that at first. It's not about having a bunch of well localiced enemies, it's about generating sinergies between enemies to create new situations that must be handled in a different way. And I don't know up to what point was done because I could not care less about what skills the enemies were using, but if tried, not achieved.
  4. Well. People have different tastes. The problem is people who believes the game should suit them and only them. Just take the game, take what you like from it and if what you can take don't deserve your time, then you have plenty of games out there.
  5. After the gamergate scandal, I trust no more the media. They follow interests, and I could believe that there are plenty of interests from some media to not to support this kind of games.
  6. As far as I played, it seems Perception, resolve and constitution are redundand. It improves your resistance to death. So in the end, somehow it feels like it's a matter of which defense to improve (and I think the root of the problem is having attacks that targets some defenses instead of defenses preventing effects). I can understand what they tried to do here. But I find it was not ver well developed. Basically what (I think) they wanted to do is a set of stats for the player to be able to make any combination of stats/class. In BG, you have only one dominant build. If you were a warrior, STR, DEX, CON to 18 (well, if you roll enough, everything to 18 except for dump stats, beginning by CHA in BG2). For instance, might could be a dps oriented build, while intellect is about status effects. So instead of having an Intelligent wizard or a strong warrior as dominant builds, you can combine any class with any stat: a strong wizard that deals great damage, a strong warrior that deals great damage, a controller wizard that inflicts a lot of status or a controller warrior that could hold enemies better. Those stats seems to work pretty fine. As well as dextery, which implies more attacks: you can have more combinations. A mighty intelligent wizard whose spells could break through the enemies defenses, but in exchange they are frail and slow. A powerful and fast warrior, making him a glass cannon, so he just attacks and deals as much dps as possible before dying. A rogue that could be oriented to dps, but he could be oriented to status, blinding enemies or poisoning them by increasing the intellect. But appart from that, it seems the other stats are rather redundant. One of the stats needs to be about tanking. Do you want a tanking wizard? Go for it. So it means that the concentration should be increased with this stat. Then you will create a wizard that can go in the first line and make a good use of the fan and contact abilities. Let's call it "resolve". But I think 3 stats for defenses is a waste. Want a tank rogue? Perfect, just add intellect to ensure blindness hits and lasts and then poison your foes and wait for their health to drop while trying unsuccesfuly to land a hit on you just to check your incredible resistance to the very few that does it. Then, perception and constitution seems like they have no room. How could a warrior be modified in order to be able to make a competitive build appart from tank, dps or controller? Probably then the game needs more mechanics in substitutio of the matching defenses (I don't like that the characters have several defenses, because then attacking becomes an obvious choice out of 4 possible target defenses, and when the choice is obvious, there is no choice). Of course, in the end some stats will synergice better than others, but the possibility of having different builds than the STR fighter will be there, and your team configuration will depend on those builds. I think that the mentioned stats works pretty fine. Still, pretty unbalanced (like if I make a rogue 20MIG 19DEX with cloth armor and dual wielding, I expect to kill anything in two seconds even if I die in three hits, but that never happens), but they have a clear purpose. It's not the case with perception, resolve and constitution. They seem oriented to tank. Since you cannot know what kind of attacks your unit can receive, if you want a tank you need to improve all of them, or stick to the most useful one (perception).
  7. Of course. Videogames is leisure, and the objective is to provide something people likes.
  8. Um. Okay, but you haven't actually justified why this limitation should exist, you've just spoken up in favour of limitations in general, which I don't think anyone's arguing against. Because every game is different. Why should I justify that in soccer you cannot touch the ball with your hands? It's the game rules. They could have done it differently? Yes, they could, and then, a different game it would be. They decided to go for static characters for some reasons. I am not part of the dev team so I cannot know. But, that decision makes a different gameplay. Or are you not going to agree that the feeling is different? Because we are the example. You like it so you can freely make your party as desired. I prefer built and unique characters and finish the game with the resources given. Two different profiles and luckily, we can have both choices.
  9. Let EoS be EoS, and let PoE be PoE. One of the things I dislike the most is when devs takes one of my favourite sagas and make a different game out of it. Why? firstly because changing it usually means never comming back to how it was, and how I liked it. If people asks for a sequel of a game is because they liked that game. If people gets tired of that kind of game and the sales drops, then let it rest. I think the culprit is the people. We, as consumers usually buy things with a name we know. Sales of Resident evil 26, Final fantasy 8.645.32 or new super new best mario bros N+1 sells much better than new saga with a super cool new system. That's why when a formula is over or another works better, the classic gets screwed. So, don't worry, you will have a new Elder of Scrolls and you will have a new Pillars of eternity, and certainly if PoE becomes more popular another developers will make a game that might suit your tastes better. But please, keep PoE as the PoE fan wants it. PoE is the spiritual sucessor of Baldur's Gate, and that's what the people who backed it wanted. As fans of the original saga, it was taken out of our hands once, do not ask for a second.
  10. From a gameplay and design perspective, having a set of characters makes perfect sense. A game is about reaching a goal following some rules. Rules are limitations. Having a defined and not variable set of recruitable NPCs is also a limitation, a rule and part of what makes the game. A game with no limitations is not a game. In fact, adding limitations to common actions makes them a game. Do not mix up your tastes with game design. Game design is never intended to please all the tastes but their target's one. And your tastes doesn't have to fit 100% the tastes of the target.
  11. There is a point here that you are forgetting. If you invest so much in INT, other stats are lacking behind. Yes, you can increase the area, but you could be increasing the damage, increasing the defenses, the stamina and such. According to the strategy you want to follow, you can choose. For a fighter that extra damage might be more useful than the extra second he gets. Or maybe you prefer to incapacitate enemies rather than dealing an extra dps. For glass cannon characters probably focusing on dps than in status is more interesting. In fact, if there is a balance issue, I'd rather increase the bonuses on other stats, because actually the damage bonus seems quite lame to my tastes. I love the strategy of kill before they can kill you and it's rather hard to do it when a character with an awesome might vs a mediocre character deals just a 30% more damage. If I sacrifice all my defenses to increase the damage output and attack speed, I expect some real differences. What I noticed when playing is that a more rounded character works better than extremely specialiced character.
  12. That is just your opinion man. Fact is so many people come on some thread they have nothing to do just to flame and arass other people, go get a therapist and be off. Walking/running as been in every RPG for a long time, you can't bear that ? We don't give a **** Well, the fact that inmersion is how the user is able to abstract from the real world and take the rules of what they are doing as if they were real is not an opinion, but the description of inmersion from a psychogy point of view. That walking and running has been in RPG for a long time and you want it to be here as well, suits more the opinion description. No one is judging you for having such an opinion, so no need to be defensive. But the inmersion argument is a falacy. No one needs to justify an opinion. An opinion is something that needs no justification. What I am pointing to is the justification, which is not valid. I am sure many people will be happy to see their loved mechanic in the game, but do not dress it as something it's not: You are not going to have a more inmersive game for being able to walk. That's not how inmersion works. If you want a more inmersive game, then just point that and I am sure the designer will think about it. If what you want is to be able to walk, then you want to walk.
  13. My conclusion in the subject is that if some people believes that the lack of walking in a game where walking is needless affects the inmersion, then the inmersion word has been completely distorted. Inmersion is not about being realistic, consistent or with x or y feature. Inmersion is about being abstracted of the real world. Tetris is a game that is most inmersive than many games and you cannot walk. If people believes that walking makes the game more inmersive, then think it twice and think if the reason you feel better is having a better inmersion or having a whim granted.
  14. I agree with the fact that there is not enough content. But not in the direction you are pointing. Actuall, the dungeons are pretty good. One of the things I disliked the most in BG series were the awfully long dungeons. The quantity is the key here. There are 3 acts. It feels like 3 chapters from Baldur's gate. there is only 8 characters, not well developed. It lacks of classes or sets as well as some magic or spells (some classes like cyphers has some levels where you can just select all their magics). I finished the game if 42 hours and I did a whole lot. I think that was impossible in BG. I still agree on maps being monotonous. Enemies here and there and lack of other contents. In the first BG there were some empty transition places, but at least they got some stuffs to explore, like the gnoll fortress. The cloak forest was a dungeon inside the worldmap and you had to face the spiders' traps. Something I felt here is that it didn't matter much what enemies I found, the combat was a bit symilar. In BG1 I remember the spider traps, the basilisks, the bandits... some places you just run away because of the creatures found. Basilisks are my nightmare and the sword spiders is something to be avoided until late levels. The mermaids that confuses you and stuff like that were really something. Now... well, let's say I care very little about status effect. I can die against a very strong and numerous enemy party but I really don't mind about status. Something temporal that usually doesn't make me stagger. I probably die more often because of getting out of spells rather than the enemy owning me. It feels like most of the battles are hard because of the numerous enemies or the difficulty to take them down rather than the enemy playing smart against me. But that feels like lack of content rather than bad quality content. There are many surprises everywhere. The dungeons seems mostly good for me. As I always said, I really feel that the levels lack of other kind of interactions to make each level unique and memorable, but tha would be an extra layer of work, much above BG series. For me, they needed to fill the empty areas of the map. On the bottom there is room for 2 more levels. On the top there is room for 5 more. With that you can always add 2 more episodes. And then, some "comming back" episodes like the last 2 in BG, going back to the first ruins to discover a new route in the dungeon and then going back to defiance bay to finish your business there. Then we could have a ~80 hour game. This could be enhanced with higer level magics, traps, enemies, missions and situations. And it would be great.
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