Gumbercules
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Posts posted by Gumbercules
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The Byzantine armor could work quite well for the Ixamitl people, since their normal clothing seems to be a mixture of Mesoamerican coloration/decoration and Balkan dress. You could easily incorporate elements of Aztec eagle and jaguar warriors, for example, into the Byzantine designs without it looking out of place.
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Possibly. It works in my mind, but it might not work in real life. I hope they try it at any rate.
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I'm against desaturating magic, because if PE world is full of magic, then you will find many areas in black and white, including your local shops or street lamps maybe? Purple can still be mixed with any colors and retain its vibrance, but desaturating simply make all colors bleaker and bleaker. To comply with this lore, the magical world will have to be bleaker in color.
True, but it could just be used for some types of magic, or in combination with other effects. For example, leeching spells could travel from the caster to the target as a desaturating effect, then return as an oversaturated effect to represent the "essence" being sucked out.
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It seems to me like one is an abstracted representation of the details of combat, while the other is an abstracted representation of character growth through overcoming challenges?
Yes, and I'm coming from the POV that characters can't perceive their growth in "experience". Though, if you have a different interpretation of "experience" and "levels" then you may disagree.
Wait, so do you want levels to be hidden as well? At some point, you inevitably run into a reminder that you're merely playing a game regardless of how much information is hidden. IMO, a zoomed-out isometric perspective and control of six party memebers at a time isn't particularly conducive to full immersion anyway, so I'm fine with just making my imagination work overtime to smooth out the discrepancies. If it were a HUD-less first person game I might agree with you, but since it's not I'd rather just have as much info available to me as possible.
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Still don't see how seeing XP is any more immersion-breaking than any other aspect of a cRPG interface.
There's a difference between ingame (like damage rolls) and meta-game information though.
It seems to me like one is an abstracted representation of the details of combat, while the other is an abstracted representation of character growth through overcoming challenges?
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Still don't see how seeing XP is any more immersion-breaking than any other aspect of a cRPG interface.
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Fourth wall breaking within the story is mostly bad and should be kept to a minimum or avoided completely, but as part of the interface it's not even really fourth wall breaking. The game has to convey a variety of complex information in a way that's quite different from how the characters would experience it, and the player likewise has to tell the game to do things that characters would carry out in a completely different way. I don't see how displaying XP or clever quest completion messages is any different from having a UI with icons that you select to perform actions. Talk of "immersion" is silly in that context.
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Agreed, I really like that touch.
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I don't mind the use of pink and purple in the game. Unlike the Diablo series, which was meant to have a very dark, gothic feel to it, Project Eternity seems to be lighter and more balanced, so the artists should feel free to use whichever colors they feel work the best.
Purple is a fairly rare color in nature, and when it does appear it tends to be in small amounts. That makes it a good candidate for representing both magic and royalty/wealth. That said, one of the previous times this topic came up, someone suggested not representing magic with a specific color but using effects such as desaturation/oversaturation, negative colors, etc. instead. I would definitely like to see Obsidian's artists experiment with such effects, but if they end up not working, purple is still a pretty good standby.
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As a side note, while Glanfathans are dominantly elves and orlans, Engwythans apparently had a strong representation of every race in their society.
Do the Glanfathan elves not have the same prejudices against wild orlans as the other main civilizations? Also, are aumaua a majority or sizable minority of any main civilization, and if so how advanced is it?
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Welcome, Brandon!
Not much to comment on in this update, but the animat looks great! I'm loving this trend of showing the various concept thumbnails along with the final/near-final design.
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I imagine that holy warrior, smite-the-undead customizations could be added through Talents, and those Talents could be based at least partly on stuff like philosophical or factional alignment as well as how the character acts. Hell, it wouldn't even need to be restricted to paladins. Maybe you could develop a fighter in such a way that they earn faith-based or anti-undead Talents.
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Paladins do not work well as islands. They work well with one or more allies around them. They don't have to be holding hands, but they can't be on opposite sites of a battlefield. Yes, a wizard, ranger, and rogue in the party could spread far out from the paladin (I don't really think most of them need to), but in many cases, a full party will likely have two more melee-oriented characters in the party (most IE parties have 2 or 3). A paladin standing 10' in front of a ranger and wizard can provide the same Zealous Barrage benefits to shooters and casters that he or she would if he or she ran up alongside a monk and a barbarian. Even if a ranger or wizard are on the other side of the battlefield, if they are the closest ally attacking the paladin's current target, they'll gain the benefit of Coordinated Attacks.
Paladin Talents will unlock more offensive capabilities for them, but the bog-standard paladins won't hit like wet noodles just because they don't have Abilities specifically dedicated to smashing in faces. It makes sense that in a tabletop game like D&D, a "buff beacon" character should be avoided because the player experience can be boring. That's why 4E buff abilities are often minor actions or they are side effects of attacks (e.g. Healing Strike). In a party-based CRPG where the player is controlling up to six characters, every class doesn't need to be a self-contained murder machine with the same number of active use (or even offensive) abilities.
Now I'm afraid that a paladin could be replaced by a street lamp.
Or a scabbard of blessing. Or a familiar.
Or a low level D&D mage that after casting a spell stands around looking at the sky or pretending to hit things.
I do not expect everyone in the party to be a killing machine, and I'm not against a buffer/squishy standing back.
But I hope that no one in my group will become completely forgettable and ineffectual after casting a single buff.
Take a closer look at what you've quoted. He says that paladins won't hit like wet noodles, meaning they'll be perfectly capable in close combat. I expect they'll be significantly sturdier and better at fighting than any of the ranged or spellcasting classes, they just won't be quite as good at dealing damage as the other close combat classes.
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Something just occurred to me: does Inspiring Triumph count assists, or does the paladin have to be the one actually delivering the killing blow? I'm not sure that last-hitting has a place outside of esports. If the paladin is engaging that particular enemy when they are killed, it should count IMHO or else things might get too fiddly and meta-gamey.
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I understand the wild orlans being hirsute, but why is their skin so wrinkled, too? Did great-to-the-Nth grandma Orleanna have way too much hard cider at the harvest festival and wake up next to a Shar Pei?
I've seen multiple complaints around the internet that the wild orlans look wrinkled or scarred rather than hairy, but I think it's just because we're seeing a zoomed-in, colorless Z-Brush sculpture of what will be a quite small in-game model. If they want to get across that the wild orlans are hairy, they need to exaggerate that hair a bit, and it looks weird when viewed up close.
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Very nice update! The paladins sound interesting and sufficiently different from the other classes. I like how this update also gave us a better look at the difference between Abilities and Talents.
Both types of orlans look great! At first, the fact that the urban orlans just happen to be less hairy than the wild orlans seemed Lamarckian, but actually it makes sense that the prejudices of other races and cultures would sort and segregate the two types even if such separations initially weren't as clear.
It looks like the last remaining piece of the race puzzle is the difference between coastal and ocean aumaua. I wonder if it's just different skin colors/patterns, or if there's more to it like with the orlans.
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Thanks for the new info.
I think I value the languages appearing appropriately distinct more than I value getting the pronunciations right immediately. That said, if there's a pronunciation guide somewhere in the game or enough voiced dialogue to give context, that would be nice.
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For the boreal dwarves, they should look into Inuit throat singing. It's usually a duet/competition between two women standing face to face, and it can produce some very unnerving rhythms and sounds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnGM0BlA95I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QuNdfb-Yw
Although, for all I know it might be difficult to find performers of this type of music for a game made in southern California for a $4 million budget. If you cast a wider net and include Tuvan (Siberian) and Mongolian throat singing, you get a wider range of possible sounds and maybe a greater likelihood of finding a performer:
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In general i'm against features being jettisoned for the simple sake of streamlining and ease of use, it certainly hasn't produced better games over the past few years, so i'd have to disagree Pony.
I think resting could be a brilliant mechanic if it's rationed and balanced, say by the amount of water, firewood or vittles you are carrying. Even in the most crowded of dungeons one can imagine that there are entire abandoned wings that the party can barricade, defend and use for recuperation. Dungeons after all do not have to be linear corridors, with combat placed every few feet, personally i'm hoping for big sprawling maps where one can easily get lost in the darkness and interesting little features abound around every other corner.
I'll agree that they haven't worked in the Infinity engine games, but in my own opinion that's because not enough time and detail was spent implementing them, and wringing every last bit of potential out of them. And there is a massive amount of potential there, so many ideas and great roleplaying features, as we've shown in many other threads.
I'm not really suggesting "streamlining" at all, but questioning how it actually impacts the game. If you just change "wood, water, whatever" to "bandages" in terms of words, it's the same exact thing in terms of actual game mechanics, but you don't have to pretend you've just slept for eight hours or are making camp inside the middle of a dungeon.
Again, are you going to ask people to get all this stuff in the middle of a dungeon? "A cheery campfire in the middle of the pits of hell!" Seems rather silly, or restriction on where you sleep? Again, that just makes people backtrack all the way to where they can rest, and then backtrack all the way back to where they were, for no real difference in the end except annoying people.
This, to me, seems to be an argument that leads down to what's already been discussed to death in several threads with no good solution ever coming of it. "Resting will work if we just think of something!" But it's been months and thread after thread, and no ones thought of something yet. I'm suggesting the opposite of going down that route, that maybe it's past time to give up the notion and think of something else.
I don't think you did a very good job of refuting his post, or mine for that matter. We've both provided solutions that have lore justifications and eliminate problems like excessive backtracking, so unless you can do a better job of picking apart our solutions I consider the problem solved.
There doesn't need to be a cheery campfire, there merely needs to be a comparatively safe spot. Even Sam and Frodo were able to find shelter in the middle of Mordor, so that's really all that's required as far as mood and scenery goes. You could be restricted to only using the safe spot once, after which point your party begins to make noise about moving on before you get discovered. That way forward momentum is preserved and backtracking is eliminated.
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Maybe it could be done away with and replaced with a different mechanic, but I kind of like the combination of limited rest areas + limited uses of resting (either only 1 rest per given time period or 1 rest per rest area within a certain amount of time). It's fairly simple, prevents rest abuse, allows the devs to balance each dungeon with a certain amount of rests assumed, and can be explained away fairly easily in the lore. Watch:
- The party wants to pick the most secluded and defensible area within a dungeon to rest in without attracting the attention of enemies
- However, even such a place will eventually be discovered by enemies if you stay there for too long or keep going back to it
- Furthermore, after a certain point more sleep + bandages just isn't going to help any further
- Therefore, you can only rest a limited amount (1?) of times in a limited amount (1?) of places per dungeon.
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Great thread! I don't think I had ever heard of the nyckelharpa before. Very interesting instrument.
Given the Renaissance feel they're going for with many of the cultures, the intermedio/intermezzo, which was the predecessor of the opera, would make for a good fit.
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Josh Sawyer said that they're balancing the game for a high difficulty first, then adjusting it down for easier difficulty levels (http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/468894358070905795). I'm wondering if this can apply to strategic considerations like resting besides just individual tactical battles.
It's a tricky balance, because for this type of sprawling, story-heavy, choice & consequence RPG, you can't just take the game-punches-you-in-the-face approach of shorter, story-light games like Dark/Demon Souls, FTL, or the various roguelikes, and tell players who suck at the game to nut up and deal with it. Beginning from that position and then scaling down for the storygamers sounds appealing, but in this type of situation it might mean just getting rid of a game mechanic, and I wonder if that would be perfectly acceptable to those who want an easier game, or whether it would make it seem like the game was too shallow? Given that this is a sprawling game meant for a variety of RPG players, is it best to have a "Limit Rest Frequency, Y/N?" checkbox to toggle, or does that run the risk of making the game unbalanced or under-designed for one or both types of players?
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Of the two options, I think I would prefer limiting the amount of rests to respawning the enemies. It's less busywork for the player, plus it's probably more realistic since there comes a point where additional sleep doesn't fix anything. And it helps maintain forward momentum inside a dungeon, rather than turning into Groundhog Day.
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What's the difference between being able to rest anywhere or being able to rest unlimited times in a nearby designated rest spot? It just takes a bit more time. There needs to be a harder limit.
Oh, OK. Yeah, in that case it's probably best to go with a default of one of your two suggestions, with the option to disable it in the difficulty settings. Or the reverse, if they think it'll lead to too much outcry.
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Higher Quality area maps, color grading time of day
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
Do the advances in simulated lighting mean they can have environmental shadows change according to the time of day, or do they still have to stick with static shadows?