Fearabbit

But the damage roll isn't dependent on your skill, it's an attribute of your weapon. And actually it's more realistic to have the % of damage depend on your skill and not on your weapon type, so I could imagine that they take out the randomness in the weapon base damage and put it somewhere else (e.g. that hammers have a higher chance of glancing than swords). Concerning the fire shield enchantment, that's actually a good point. At least if such enchantments exist in the world of P:E.

But nobody said anything about actually "sucking up" the souls. Maybe the sword just has an aura that lets sentient beings instincively know what it's done. You know, an orc looks at your Orcslayer sword and, without knowing anything about it, gets shivers running down his spine. I kinda like that idea. You could argue that some people can also feel the aura of a person's soul but that you have to be very susceptible for that, while a sword's aura is right there on its surface. It would be a neat way to make that one weapon you're using special. On a completely different note, soul-eating weapons are especially interesting in a world where souls are usually in a cycle of reincarnation. It's the one fate that's worse than death - knowing that your soul will be gone forever or maybe even in eternal torment. But you don't need mighty demons to create these weapons. In the Vlad Taltos novels (which I love very much) there's an interesting twist to this: The Serioli, a very advanced race, built these soul-eating weapons a long time ago because they wanted to make wars so horrible that nobody would want to fight them anymore. As one of the main characters tells this to another, both with soul-eating weapons in their sheaths, the latter replies "well that was a stupid idea, everyone knows it doesn't work that way". The first replies "why, it worked for the Serioli". What I like about that scenario (other than the fact that the writing's so much funnier than I could do here) is that it immediately puts the humans who now rule the lands in a very bad light. And if you think about modern weaponry... nuclear bombs weren't created by fiery demons from hell. We created them, and some of the people who did might even have had noble intentions.

"The system they are using has the potential to be great. [...] There are better and more tactical mechanics we can put in video games games then what we seen." Yeah, what could he be talking about... I like being able to dodge, since I like to play rogues. But just looking at it from a mathematical point of view, the glancing system has advantages especially in the early levels. But anyway, the system with BOTH glancing and missing seems pretty much perfect for me. You can miss, not hit the enemy right or deliver a good hit. Seems realistic and interesting to me. And that way my rogue is happy, especially if there's a special ability that further increases the chance of dodging.

@Dream: So what you're saying is that basically you just want to "win" this conversation by any means. Look, I didn't give you reasons why the developers should listen to what I say, I gave you reasons why I'm interested in this project completely regardless of the combat system it is using. And as I have said before, I have no problem with having both options, and I am in fact not proposing anything. I would, personally, prefer a game where the AI does even more than it does nowadays in RPGs (and that does NOT concern combat so much that it would turn into a different genre - combat is mostly fine the way it's usually done nowadays in "IE inspired games" like NWN2, the AI is just not good enough yet), but even then it should always be optional. Just keep in mind that while a game might be catered to certain hardcore fans, developers rarely want to alienate other potential players. And the hardcore fans, they do not need to be represented anymore on this forum. Finding out what "casual RPG players" want can be very important for developers. Especially if what they're interested in isn't something that can't be done with the game they're doing for the hardcore crowd. This isn't an either/or, if it was, I wouldn't even talk about it.

*sigh* Is it really that difficult to understand? Okay. Not that I owe any explanation to anyone here, but let's see. 1.) I like RPGs. I've played a lot of RPGs, and I generally enjoyed most of them. I like the old ones better because they usually have more solid rules and more interesting worlds, better characters and great customization options for my characters (not in the way they actually look, but in the way the game makes me imagine my characters). When I heard about P:E, I was completely freaking out. Obsidian is one of my favorite developers and now they're making an oldschool RPG. Couldn't get any better than that. 2.) Arcanum is probably my favorite RPG of all time (despite all its flaws). It is also one of the games that was used to advertise this Kickstarter. It is nothing like the IE games in many, many ways. Yes they said the feeling would be that of IE games. But clearly they change a lot of stuff. I don't see why "bad AI that you can't rely on" should be part of that "feeling" they mentioned, when clearly they tried to go a different route with Arcanum (even though they pretty much failed, but you can see the effort). I mean: You could (and many people do in that other thread) argue that a chance-to-miss system is one of the defining elements of an IE game. It's also one of the things that Josh Sawyer didn't want to implement in P:E because he felt that it had certain disadvantages. Clearly the "feeling" of an IE game is not a hard natural constant. For me IE games are about great stories in cool fantasy worlds with complex systems. And recreating that feeling has nothing to do with following all of their exact design choices to the letter. Also: Those old IE games, they didn't start out as "IE games" as a trademark of its own, they started out as projects that wanted to bring the D&D experience to your computer. In doing so they did some things differently than D&D did, for example allowing you to control the whole party and not just one member of it. That's not the typical D&D experience. Despite that, many people liked it, but I always wanted an experience that was closer to playing D&D: One player character in a large party that I don't control myself (at least as much as possible, because saying that the player is anything other than the leader of the party is pretty much impossible and, I think, not really desirable anyway). I disliked several things about the old classics and if they will be done in the same way in P:E, I'll dislike them again. So of course I'll try to raise awareness to the issue. Now please stop being so rude, nobody's taking your candy away. @Faerunner: NWN2 did a lot of things right, but I still found myself having to do a lot of micro-managing, for example if a certain character was able to craft certain items, but my main character wasn't - I would have to switch to that follower and create the item, and I'd constantly lose grasp on who can do what. There was also the problem that nobody ever used loot items by themselves even if e.g. Neeshka was the only one who could use that crossbow and it was vastly superior to her current one. Managing all that was, to me, very tiresome and not fun at all. The combat was pretty good though, yeah. (Certainly better than Dragon Age in that regard.) I think it was mostly outside of combat that managing my party became a chore.

I typically create sort of sarcastic, wise-cracking antiheroes, if possible. By antihero I don't actually mean a bad guy, just someone who doesn't always care if what he does is right or wrong, as long as it serves his purposes. But at his heart, he is a good guy and eventually he will do the right thing, though he might act as if he's doing it only reluctantly. So basically, my character will act like he's an ****, but he's loyal to friends and eventually he grows on most people. I know, it's basically the "lovable rogue" archetype. I usually just start with very basic concepts and develop the character more thoroughly while I'm playing him.

AGX-17, please point out to me the paragraph where I'm saying that "because I personally don't like to have control over companion tactics and actions, everyone else should be denied that option". This here is a simple poll/thread about what you like in a game and what options you want. Its purpose is both to satisfy my curiosity and to sensitize the developers to this issue if it turns out that there are more people who don't like the micro-managing. As Odglok said, it's easy to have the best of both worlds, but for that to happen, the developers need to know that people actually want it. Why am I interested in a role-playing game in a unique fantasy setting where I can be whoever I want to be and experience a fascinating story that focuses not only on combat, but also on interesting characters and exploring a huge world, even though the combat might have one tiny mechanic that I really don't like? Dude, I don't know. It's totally inconceivable. @Ieo: You're probably right, "control" would have been better. I'm German, so my English isn't perfect sometimes.

I would like to get some opinions on this topic, although I'm guessing that there won't be any consensus. Followers are NPCs that you can add to your party. Typically, in this sort of RPG you have a pool of followers that you choose your current party from and I believe it has been said that that will be the case in Project Eternity as well. Now, my question is: How much influence do you, as the player, want to have over these NPCs? Basically, it comes down to how much micromanaging you want in the game. I think the poll covers the two most important aspects - gameplay and stats (I left out inventory managing because I see no alternative there, but I might be wrong). To elaborate, the gameplay part of this concerns the following actions: Managing their movements through a dungeon Making use of their abilities (lockpicking, detecting traps etc.) Looting chests Ordering them around in combat These are all things that they could do themselves if they have powerful AIs. There's no reason for the player to tell them this. But is it feasible to have them do it themselves? Is it fun to order them around? My personal answer to that last question is a definite "no". I hate micro-managing and I especially hate having to juggle 4 different classes at the same time. Every time I start a D&D based CRPG, I'm thinking "I won't play a wizard, wizards are too complicated for me to handle right now". Then a couple of hours into the game, I get my first wizard in the party and I realize that no matter which class you choose at the beginning, you usually have to play all of them at once. The followers often don't have AI of their own or they have only the most basic AI, forcing you to do most of their moves. I also do not want to concern myself with their level-ups, which fortunately isn't necessary most of the time. But here there is another reason: in my mind, I think of these NPCs as characters with their own will. I am in control of my own character and I have no right to tell them which skill to increase next. They're not my characters. But of course, having to level-up followers of sometimes 8 different classes is also way too much micro-managing for me, especially if I don't know and do not want to know their classes very well. In my opinion, playing a CRPG should be like playing a Pen & Paper RPG with a group of friends with me being the dedicated leader of the group. They all have their own characters and they do with them whatever the heck they want, and while my character can give them orders, I cannot. So what do you think? How much influence should you have over your party, and why?

I don't quite know where to put this, but it certainly has to do with the story and how to make you care about it, so I'll post it here. I want to talk about dialogue and choices. In the update, it has been mentioned that a story can be made in different ways - that it can be an emotional, personal experience or highly political and that the difficulty is in making the player care about it. However, in my experience there's a very simple solution to this: The player will always be interested in the story if he's interested in his character. And in order to achieve that, you simply have to give him choices that don't actually affect anything in the game, but are simply there so that the player can choose what kind of hero he wants to be. Now this seems very obvious, but many games simply don't do this, or worse, they connect it somehow to an alignment system or to undesirable consequences. Or they don't make it clear enough when you're actually making a decision that will affect the game in a certain way so that many players shy away from "crass" lines of dialogue because they don't want to screw up their game. (I remember laughing heartily at some of the dialogue options in Dragon Age, wanting to use them but then thinking "but if I say that the game is going to assume something about my character that's not true" or "but if I say that, Alistair will hate me because he will take it the wrong way and for SOME reason there's no way to rectify that".) Don't do that. Don't mix my "decisions" with stuff I just want to say because I would like my character to be the kind of person who says that. Imagine this: An NPC asks you if you will rescue his village from an evil dragon, and a choice pops up - you can either say "No" or you can say "Lol wtf herp derp okay I guess I'll help you rofl". These are your only options, and they are displayed exactly like that. (The NPC will react accordingly and, if you help him, treat you like an imbecile.) Now as a player you're in a horrible situation: You DO want to help the NPC, but you do NOT want to say that stupid line. You're suddenly forced into a very specific character that was never what you had in mind. The same thing goes for the main story, in a way. If the main story uses emotional hooks which don't work on my character because he's a sarcastic smart-aleck, that doesn't mean that you have to think of a new main story. It's actually a very cool role-playing opportunity. When my supposed best friend comes to me because he urgently needs my help, give me lines like "I'd rather drink the urine of an orc than to help YOU again". When the king explains to me that his country is in danger of being overrun by the evil Empire, give me lines like "To be perfectly honest, I couldn't care less". And then let the NPCs convince my character somehow to still help them. The reluctant hero and the antihero are great archetypes, and I would love to play them out without having to fear undesirable consequences. The game has to help the player be the hero he wants to be, because as an effect he will be completely interested in the story. After all, it's a story that has his ideal protagonist. A very good example of this is The Witcher 2, even though its hero is a "reluctant hero" by design. Within the confines of that basic archetype the dialogue allows me to play the character however I want, and when there are choices that majorly affect the game, it's perfectly clear that they are choices. Playing the game felt good because I didn't worry that I'd say the wrong thing. I played this character the way I saw him and the game encouraged me to do so, whereas your typical RPG encourages you to either play a politically correct goody two-shoes or a quipping villain. And while this might not seem like the biggest problem to worry about in an RPG, it's probably the main reason why I haven't finished many Bioware games and generally just don't like them. My main characters are almost always the sneaky types, thieves and rogues, and very much influenced by characters like Vlad Taltos (of the Steven Brust novels) or Han Solo. They basically have to quip nonstop and be sarcastic and kind of annoying to everyone all the time. It's what makes them fun to play. However, the games don't allow that: In Dragon Age for example, I simply wouldn't have any companions if I did that. Even Morrigan, who enjoys quipping herself, gets offended if you try joking around with her. Instead of embracing the (in my opinion) great story of the annoying-but-somehow-lovable Grey Warden whose companions slowly get used to his constant sarcasm, the game makes them betray me. So, to me, this is the single most important issue, and I really hope that Project Eternity tries something new here. It obviously depends on the other features the game has: Is there an alignment system? Will your companions have a "trust meter"? If neither of them is the case, then you're almost done; just put in enough flavor dialogue and make it clear (not by outright saying it, but by implying it somehow) which dialogue choices are actually decisions that affect the game and which aren't. If alignment system and/or "trust meter" are in, do them carefully. Alignment should be something the player decides for his character, and doing something good or evil should be a conscious choice, not something you just stumble over because the game interpreted something you said differently than you did. And trust shouldn't be something you earn by sweet-talking somebody - quite the opposite, in fact, reasonable NPCs should start trusting you when you prove your worth to them and they should start distrusting you when they notice that you're behaving in a certain way to get them to do something.