Ineth

Well if someone wants that they could just click it and then cancel attack mode (using right-click or, ideally, ESC), right?

Wait. Dear Esther has a story? I thought it was one of those "art hipster" non-games, where you're supposed to just walk around the virtual world and enjoy how "artistically meaningful" and "deep" the experience is.

That completely kills exploration. Showing off beautiful background art is good, but shouldn't take top priority. PoE is supposed to be a game, not an art show.

Redundancy detected

Well, from playing Badminton, I know that if you're in a 1-on-1 game and starting to get exhausted, and the opponent gets the upper hand and delivers powerful shot after shot that you can just barely defend against & recover from, it can take some determination to keep blocking them no matter what it takes until he makes a mistake that allows you to turn things around. (Rather than, having a moment of weakness and deciding to "give up & let him have the point".) Now I've never been in a sword fight (let alone a sword fight to the death ), but I can imagine conceptually similar situations arising there... So, I don't think Resolve increasing Deflection is problematic. I know this rationalization does not realistically explain why Resolve is the only attribute that increases Deflection (i.e. failure of the attribute system to represent things like physical strength or dexterity contributing to evading blows), but note that: It's no worse than tying weapons + spell damage to the single attribute Might (i.e., failure to represent things like physical strength affecting one type of damage but not the other). If we're honest, it's also no worse than some of the D&D rules in the Infinity Engine games -- we're just more used to those. E.g. how melee Thac0 was only affected by STR (i.e. failure to represent things like dexterity/speed/perception affecting to-hit chances). The attribute system is only part of defining your character's abilities -- even with +1 Deflection bonus per point of Resolve, the biggest factor for determining your character's Deflection will still be your choice of class (e.g. "25 + bonus" as fighter vs "5 + bonus" as barbarian). I actually complained about the lack of "realism/intuitiveness" of parts of the attribute system myself in earlier threads, but I've since made peace with it. It's meant to be that way. (In line with Josh's "gamism over simulationism" design principle, which Sensuki and Matt are also supporters of.) As long as they make sure the end result is fun and allows interesting choices, I can live with some impure rationalizations...

But they're still a bonus on top of the (class/level determined) base value, right? Whereas for defenses, the attributes are actually the main input for determining the base value itself. (Or maybe that's a distinction without a difference...?) Anyhow I've left them as dashed lines for now, but updated the captions to reflect that they are not percentage increases: BB278 attributes SM attributes Btw Matt516, are you sure that nerfing the Concentration bonus from +3% to +1% is necessary to balance the additional +1 Deflection bonus to Resolve? Wouldn't +2% Concentration still be fair? After all, Concentration fits really well with RES conceptually (and may even be what the attribute was invented for), so it should have a noticeable impact. I do like your proposal overall; Accuracy and Interrupt will go really well together I think, and I agree that MIG/CON/INT are fine as they are, mechanically speaking -- although a little grating from a simulationist perspective (but that's something we'll just have to live with, given Josh's design principles), and in need of some overall boosting compared to other things that influence the same derived attributes.

Since the game mechanics are complicated/unfamiliar and Sensuki&Matt's PDF is pretty wall-of-text'y, I found it difficult to get a good "feeling" for what the proposed changes would mean, or how the attribute system was structured in the first place. So, to help with that, I made some diagrams from the information I could find (from the PDF, and in-game in the backer beta, and the forums/wiki). Enjoy: Attribute system of the current backer beta: Attribute system proposed by Sensuki/Matt516: Solid-line arrows mean that a stat's base value is derived from the attributes in question according to some formula; dashed arrows means that a stat is increased by a certain amount (relative to its base value) for each point in the respective attribute. Green annotations name the most closely corresponding BG2 stat/concept, but do note that they're not 100% identical (in particular, note that Speed/Accuracy/Deflection affect all offensive actions, not just weapon attacks like the corresponding BG2 mechanics). I'm sure there are still some errors in those diagrams (do point them out if you spot one!), but it's a start.

Well if you were to use the isolated word "Muslim" as a stand-in for the violent extremists when wording your criticism, then the resulting misunderstanding would be your fault and peaceful Muslims would have every right to be upset with you. Same when journalists use the isolated word "gamer" as a stand-in for the minority of gamers who do harm.

@BruceVC Admittedly I haven't looked at how things went down in places like reddit or 4chan, but in the confines of what I have seen, my perception matches that of TrueNeutral: For the record, I don't consider abuse acceptable on either side of this (or any) conflict. @BruceVC But don't you see a problem with taking a descriptive term that an entire subculture made up of a diverse set of people have chosen to positively self-identify with, and trying to overload it with a narrow and negative meaning for rhetorical purposes? Even when sincere (rather than just an excuse for demeaning the whole group), I would call that "negligent lack of clarity" at best, and "intolerant dismissal of other people's identity" at worst. Imagine if someone started a campaign of rudely lashing out against "LGBT people". Or "members of hip-hop culture". Or "Muslims". And when confronted with backlash, said "What's your problem? I consider that label to only refer to bad people!" ...Would you respond with "Oh, okay, carry on then"? I wouldn't...

which don't mean anything. seriously. define what qualities make for a spiritual successor? Simple. You extract the spirit from the original game using Animancy, then +1 it, and then put it into the body of a new game...

To be honest, I'm not very convinced by the alleged "corruption everywhere!!!11" evidence. So, a game reviewer and the dev whose game he reviewed can be seen in the same photo, which was taken at some gaming industry event? Another reviewer may have had a romantic relationship with a dev many months after he reviewed her game? So what, I don't see why I should be outraged based on any of that kind of stuff. The only part of the 'corruption evidence' that I found somewhat interesting, was the stuff relating to Fez and the IGF. But even here, I wouldn't draw the conclusion "OMG the IGF is a racketeering conspiracy!!!!11" but rather, "the IGF contest seems to have ****ty rules that benefit those who are part of the cool-guy 'clique', and is missing safeguards to ensure fairness and transparency". Dunno maybe I'm wrong; If a respectable outside journalist would properly investigate that stuff and interpret & present the findings in a professional way (rather than patching together hyperbolic youtube videos based on fragments of evidence), that would probably make for an interesting read. --- What I did take away from the whole drama though, was the sheer viciousness of the social justice warriors on twitter and on gaming sites. Until now, I experienced SJW's in gaming mostly as: Sometimes annoying but well-intentioned gaming community members with a little bit of a white-knighting complex, and the unshakable belief that they're helping to create a better world by "expanding other gamers' consciousness" on social and gender issues. Like BruceVC on this forum - he's pretty obstinate in his sticking to the social justice worldview even when it collides with reality, but he's also polite and seems to be genuinely interested in peaceful discussion. Game magazine journalists who keep coming up with "important gaming culture issues" to write about (usually ending with some kind of emotional appeal or collective guilt-trip), instead of writing more about games. Probably to make their own jobs feel more meaningful and important. Those I can live with; might even miss them a little if they weren't there... But the anti #GamerGate and anti #NotYourShield attack squads were something else. It's not even like they went after that tiny minority of #GamerGate tweets that said stupid or potentially misogynistic things, or after the people who had something to do with threatening and hacking Anita Sarkeesian and whatever that other women was called. They went after random casual twitter users who used those hashtags in any non-negative way. Gamers who just wanted to voice support for transparency in gaming journalism. People who just asked both sides to calm down. People who didn't even understand what's going on and were just asking questions. Those users were crudely insulted out of the blue ("misogynist neckbeard scum" was one of the more restrained phrases), told to "shut up" and "**** off", told that they must hate women (even though some of them were women), told they were worse than ISIS terrorists, subjected to ridicule and attempts at public humiliation, in some cases threatened with violence, and in a few cases doxxed (which is a really ****ty thing to do). Not to mention the intentionally mean-spirited #DescribeAGamerInFourWords meme started by the same SJWs. The irony was that many of those SJWs justified their actions by claiming they were merely "fighting people who aligned themselves with a movement that is guilty of harassment". Yeah, way to gain the moral high ground... Even more mind boggling, was that some gaming journalists and devs (you know: professionals, the kind of people who ought to know better) joined in on the undifferentiated and potty-mouthed gamer-bashing "fun". So yeah, I think I'll stay away from twitter and online gaming magazines for the foreseeable future, for my own sanity... I'll try not to become guilty of their "sweeping generalization and intolerance is OK if you believe you're on the 'good guys' side" mentality myself, and won't let the experience cloud my judgment of the peaceful and usually positive-minded SJWs on forums like these. May they be a positive influence on their radicalized brethren, at least as much as they hope to influence the rest of us...

Yeah, it's easy to forget that PoE is supposed to be a low-level adventure and not a BG2-level one; I'm guilty of that myself in some of my comments... The upside is, that there is still hope that for the expansion/sequel, the designers will come around and add the (hard-counter based) epic mage duels... (Though ideally using BG2 + SCS "Smarter Mages" as a model, rather than the cheese-encumbered vanilla BG2 mages.)

Imo 1280x720 (via widescreen mod) on a 22'' monitor is a good compromise between crispness, character size, "authentic feel", and "modern player expectations". At least that's how I like to play the Infinity Engine games these days. I've seen people play them at the native resolution of their modern gaming monitors, and it looks ridiculous. Half of the map fitting on one screen at the same time, with tiny characters running about - feels more like an RTS than an RPG... Otoh, I don't think I could bring myself to go so far as to strictly stick to the small resolutions (with 4:3 aspect ratio) that the games where made for, which unless I'm mistaken was 640x480 for BG/IWD and 800x600 for BG2/IWD2.

The arguments over the last 2 years have always had people arguing about whether something in real life is implemented or not in a video game. Similarly, you'll have people justifying why something is in the game due to something comparable in real life. Personally, I'll take fun over realism any day. For some people (not me), this is immersion breaking and they need the realism behind it to justify something. I think RPGs should try to have at least some amount of simulationism. There's a reason they are a separate genre from e.g. puzzle games.

Yeah that's a general problem with polls on this forum (and online forums in general). If I was a moderator, all polls that fail to include an appropriate "I don't know / don't care / don't feel strongly either way" option would be immediately closed or deleted. PS: As would polls that present a false dichotomy or otherwise try to unfairly railroad poll participants.

I don't think Josh's "degenerate rest spamming" complaint against the IE games is about having to rest too often due to low health. On the contrary, I think he just dislikes that fact that players could (and were in some ways encouraged to) game the system by resting arbitrarily often even when their health didn't require it, just to get back per-rest spells and abilities. His solution was to introduce camping supplies as a limited resource (which makes rest spamming less feasible), and make more abilities per-encounter (which makes rest spamming less tempting). At least that's how I understood it...

Not when it comes to melee fitness, for example. In Baldur's Gate, a fighter wielding warrior-only weapons with grandmastery, was probably 20 times as deadly as an un-buffed mage who joined melee combat with one of the few weapons that mages were allowed to wield and only a single proficiency point in it (and crappy Mage base thac0 and attacks-per-round). In PoE, that distinction is all but blurred. And class differences aside, what PoE lack the most is real combat-relevant differentiation between different characters of the same class. Right now, two characters with different attribute distributions will still be able to viably do all the same things (at best, one of them may do some things a little better than the other), and it looks like every character can viably wield any weapon regardless of chargen choices. If Obsidian rejects... classes with significant impact on melee dps attributes with significant impact on anything weapon specialization weapon-style specialization thieving skills specialization etc. ...then character build customization will have to come from elsewhere. And I'm not convinced that the talent system will be able to fill that gap by itself.

It shouldn't be an option, they should always be ordered like that.

Maybe there should be an "auto-pause when a party member's recovery time is over" setting. Simultaneous turn-based, so to speak... :D

Merging discussion threads is good, but you didn't have to close the poll after only 16 people got a chance to vote... :/

Last time I played IWD1, I always filled my inventory with bullets/bolts/arrows in Kuldahar before leaving for one of the big dungeons (like Dragon's Eye), and yet I usually ran out of bullets and bolts before the end of the dungeon. And I think the only reason I did not run out of arrows as well, was that my bow-wielding character was a mage, and thus a) had a low attack-per-round, and b) was often preoccupied with casting spells. I also remember running out of fire & acid arrows in De'Arnise Keep when playing BG2 with Stratagems, which made the experience a little more... memorable . Shuffling stacks of arrows in the inventory might not have been the most fun part of those games, but it did add some pacing and diversion in between combat, and the greater game mechanic that it was a part of did add some more strategy to the game. I don't think it needed to be removed; making the inventory slots' maximum stack sizes bigger would have been enough to fix (or at least minimize) the annoyance factor. Too much streamlining in the name of simplicity, can lead to blandness.

You need to fight a dire parot to get it A Greater Ferocious Dire Winter Parrot, at the very least!

I love the look of this. Much better use of that space than the current UI.

IIRC, you get XP for clearing each level. I think it'll be fine. For example In BG2's Watcher's Keep, I usually rested at the end of each dungeon level -- and because so many level-up benefits (like new spell slots) only become useful after the next rest in BG2, that meant I received most of the benefits from the dungeon level's accumulated XP all in one go at the end of the level. Might as well have gotten all the XP in a big chunk at that point.

What's this? A "Backer Beta Discussion" thread that has remained constructive and respectful for two whole pages? That's just... unnatural! Quick, someone make an opinionated comment on combat XP, attribute systems, or the extent to which this game should be like BG2! Joking aside, I do particularly like the idea of metamagic talents like: ...but I fear it's probably too late (at this stage in development) to consider talents that may require additional UI features.