Ffordesoon

@OP: I'm a mod on the Wasteland 2 boards (please do stop by, BTW! We've cast Turn Undead on most of the shouty I-will-stab-you-if-you-like-any-RPG-made-after-this-arbitrary-date crowd, and it's become a nice little community), and I'm in the beta. It's cool having the game (which I do like, even in its current jank-filled state) on my computer already, it's nice to be part of a community dedicated to improving it, and watching the game get better has been an informative and intellectually stimulating experience. That said, the process of beta testing itself is excruciating. If you're expecting a long paid demo full of quality-of-life improvements like no crashes to desktop, a consistent framerate, most features working as they should, etc., allow me to disabuse you and any other starry-eyed romantics of that notion post-haste.

I've been thinking about how the Ranger's pet fits into things for a little while, and I have a couple of questions: 1) If all Rangers get pets, and the Ranger's pet is more or less an extra party member, what's the drawback to being a Ranger? Even if Rangers and their pets share a pool of health, starting with two characters instead of one seems like a distinct advantage the Ranger has over every other class. What's the disadvantage that balances that out? In other words, why would I take another class over the Ranger? 2) Related to that, if Sagani (who I'm assuming is the Ranger companion, but swap out the Ranger companion for her if I'm wrong) has a pet, too, why would I want to take other party members before her, especially if I'm a Ranger with a pet too? It seems like you're getting three or four party members for the price of two in that scenario, and eventually having a party of seven or eight instead of a party of six would seem to make Sagani a "must take" character, no? I suspect I could correctly guess the answer to both of these questions without too much trouble, but I'd be interested in an official response nonetheless.

@KaineParker: Yeah, that's the thing. I actually started with 4E before moving on very quickly to Pathfinder, and the reason I chose to switch is because 4E is an amazing design document for an unmade video game that was mistakenly published as The New D&D. I've been delighted to see Sawyer taking so much from it, despite not being a fan of 4E proper. It's a shame there isn't a Pathfinder equivalent for 4E, because a lot of the design choices in it were sound ones that didn't go far enough. The changes to casters in particular were very smart. I sort of wish Wizards would rebrand 4E as D&D Basic Edition - that's the role it ultimately served for me, and probably for a lot of other players new to tabletop. Then they could call D&D Next AD&D 5th Edition, and have people graduate to it. As to the update: The Rogue sounds like my kind of class. The alleged lack of roguishness displayed by this take on the Rogue is not, in fact, a lack of roguishness, but a lack of thiefishness. (Which, er, may not be a word, but shut up.) The common portrayal of "rogues" is, in fact, a concatenation of at least three archetypes: Assassin (or Ninja, if you balk at the idea of your good character being an Assassin), Thief, and Bard. PE has its Bard-type already in the Chanter, and a Thief who's useful in combat (which every class in PE must be, seeing as how the game is theoretically soloable and full of combat) is no longer an archetypal Thief, and is instead closer to an Assassin. The Thief is effectively a non-combat class. Add to this the segregation of combat and non-combat skills, and that PoE will be home to multiple classes which can perform the actions the Thief archetype is known for. Given these restrictions, focusing on the Assassin part of the equation and making the Rogue the class that's the best at Thief-y stuff if players want to roleplay a Thief-y Rogue makes the most sense if the Rogue is to feel distinct from other classes. The Front Liners next, please. Or the other two. As long as we get all three eventually, I don't care all that much.

Seeing as I backed at the $1000 tier, I probably would not up my pledge, but the folks who paid a halfway reasonable amount might want to.

Fair enough, then. I do agree that it's an interesting idea, and I am all for anything that makes the content the point.

This seems to me like a solution to a nonexistent problem. I mean, if there are really people who don't want to see their XP gain for some reason, it seems easy enough to implement a toggle for that, so I'm for pleasing those folks. But wasn't the whole point of lashing XP gain to quest completion to prevent metagaming? Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you get the same amount of XP no matter how you finish a quest? If that's the case, where's the temptation to metagame? Literally the only reason for this I can imagine is to discourage completionist behavior, and I'm not sure it would accomplish that goal. Inveterate completionists will be completionists no matter what, and I'm not sure folks who aren't completionists would act any differently than they already do. If non-completionists feel the need to do quests they don't care about just to get XP, either they're attempting to beat optional encounters earlier than they should, or the difficulty of the main quest isn't balanced correctly. If it's the latter, the main quest needs rebalancing. If it's the former, there could be an error in player messaging, or there needs to be another way to earn XP (e.g. New Vegas' repeatable challenges), or the design is working as intended and the players have decided that beating an optional encounter is worth a little metagaming. In none of those cases would hiding XP gain solve any problems. Again, I'm abstractly for this toggle. I just don't see what having it would accomplish. EDIT: That being said, hiding missed XP opportunities from the player is absolutely a good idea. I can't be the only one who was a little bit irritated by all the "Quest Failed" notices that appeared when you killed someone important in New Vegas.

Argumentum ad populum is never the best choice, but is particularly ineffective when it's meant to discredit a creative decision in a game none of us have played. As a rule, I find it's better at this stage to say you don't like something, explain why, and see what the response is. Acting as if you speak for others is bad news all around, especially when you elected yourself spokesman in the first place. Not directed at anyone. Just saying.

Steven Heck. I love Steven Heck to death. But, really, this may be where PST shone brightest of all. The amount of minor NPCs in Sigil who felt like they deserved their own games is staggering. Reekwind, Coaxmetal, the Crier of Es-Annon, that archer dude who used to travel with you that you can only talk to if you use Stories-Bones-Tell, Hargrimm, Pharod, the girl who's scared to go through any door, the guy who wants his name to crack the obelisk in two, Mebbeth, the fishwife, Jumble Murdersense, and on and on and on. It's not just the companions who are brilliantly drawn, it's every single character, down to the repeating NPCs that threaten to cut you if you don't leave them alone.

You folks who don't like achievement popups should know you can tell Steam not to notify you when you get an achievement. As for notifications within the in-game UI, yes, those should always be toggleable. The frequency of those notifications can also be a pain in the ass. If you're getting notified every time you kill five enemies ("5/75 Enemies Killed With Spear!), that's too much. On the other hand, some players seem to like that constant reinforcement. I suggest a toggle that allows you to turn achievement notifications on and off. If you have that checked to on, a small menu that allows you to set the frequency of achievement progress notifications should appear. Dunno how feasible this is, but what I'd like to see at that point is a super-granular set of options that messes with more than one factor. I'd like to see a drop-down menu that goes from "never notify me of my progress" all the way to "notify me of my progress every single time I progress towards an achievement." So, running with my spear example, if I pick "never notify me of my progress," I will recieve a popup notification only when I get the "Kill 75 dudes with a spear!" achievement, and will never see a popup informing me of my progress. If I pick "always notify me of my progress," every single time I kill a dude with a spear, a popup notification will appear. In between the two extremes, there's "notify me every five times I progress toward an achievement," "notify me every ten times," etc. That's my pie-in-the-sky pitch, but I understand if that level of sand-grain-counting hyper-obsessive-compulsive granularity is more trouble than it's worth. In that case, just let us set it by increments of five and turn it off entirely, just like we can with the achievement popup itself. ...Good lord, I sound like a maniac in this post. I'm not even sure if any of what I just said made sense.

It probably says something rather curious about me that I found the UI mockup more exciting and heartening than anything in the Big Update. Sure, the gameplay trailer was pretty neat, but seeing the way the systems interlock under the hood confirms for me that the folks at Obsidian are making the game I wanted Dragon Age to be. The fact that the Detailed Stats tab is not the one that's clicked makes me giddy with excitement.

After pondering this for a good long while (ever since the idea was originally introduced, actually), I have come to the conclusion that the new stretch goals are well-planned enough that scope creep seems mostly - if not entirely - avoidable. As such, I am for them.

@Jobby: I've... never actually played BG2. I started BG1 recently, and I've seen the opening of BG2, but my hope is to carry my BG1 character into BG2. Could you describe what you mean? @Lephys: Those are fair points, clearly. Although I would recommend looking at it from the opposite angle: if I'm a designer, and I've spent months designing and balancing all those complex systems around a single value, why would I want to spend the same amount of time - and, therefore, money - doing the same thing for a second value that's distinct from the first? It's not just "one more thing"; it's the foundation upon which all that other stuff rests. I'm adding twice the complexity to the system for little return and a lot more headaches, when I could be working on other things that would make every player's experience better, like encounter design or adding reactivity or whatever else. I understand your complaint, and I certainly understand the irritation of watching developers cut features you like out of a system for efficiency's sake. But sometimes you need to turn off a few people to do what's best for the work as a whole.

Yeah, my thought was, "Everyone can be sneaky, but only the Rogue has specific moves designed to take advantage of sneakiness." That would make more sense than only Rogues being able to stealth and/or everyone being able to do Rogue stuff.

Popping in to say I think the attributes are terrific. In re the Might controversy: I understand the idea that separating physical and magical damage gives you more roleplaying options in highly specific situations where that could matter, but I frankly can't bring myself to care. It sounds like there are ample opportunities for roleplaying in every other area of the game, and if the choice is between more dev focus on that and the hard work of balancing another attribute for the sake of a few people who cannot accept what is ultimately a small abstraction, I'll gladly take the former. Also, couldn't they tie the content of the Might checks to specific classes? Like, if you're a Wizard (Harry HA HA BECAUSE MEMES), you get Wizard-specific text on your Might check, but if you're a Barbarian, you get Barbarian-specific text? To wit: Versus: Granted, scripted interactions are always going to be more prescriptive than systemic ones, but that sort of thing seems an adequate substitute to me. Oh, and since my examples are inevitably interpreted as being at the level I'd want to see in the game if I don't tack this disclaimer onto them, the examples above are deliberately simplistic, because they are examples. Although I would rather like to see that "bearkiller" thing in there, I must say. Anyway. Just my two cents.

I don't think it has as much to do with the graphics as it does the coherence of the aesthetic used. Mass Effect, with its swooping camera angles and close-ups of NPCs' faces, would need to be substantially redesigned to work as a text-based RPG, because its chief mode of storytelling is cinematic in nature. Watching the mouths of such hyperrealistic faces move up and down over and over again like a suffocating trout would look patently ridiculous. By contrast, attempting to portray the vast concatenation of details that a single paragraph of description in Planescape: Torment communicates would break the rendering budget of a "cinematic" game ten times over, and you wouldn't get the lovely prose that went with it, either.

@OP: I think anyone who pledged money to PE has faith in Obsidian on some level, but there's a difference between faith and blind faith. Raising any concerns we might have on this forum is eminently reasonable. Some people here have perhaps gotten a bit too negative in the heat of passion, but in general, talking about the fears (and hopes!) we have about the game is good for everybody.

Summary of this thread so far: You can't please everyone, but let's try and figure out how to please everyone anyway.

Well, I wasn't saying the demon negotiation mechanics were perfect. There's a lot I would change about them, including some of the things you said. I'm just saying that it's a system I wish more cRPG designers would try to improve on, and that for all the crap people give JRPGs about focusing on combat, there's a famous and venerated series of JRPGs that has non-combat interactions built in at a systemic level. I will say, though, that I recall finding the demon negotiation mechanics in Strange Journey a bit lacking. I think the ones in SMTIV are great. It's simply a more fleshed-out system. I do like the RNG responses, however. I'm pretty sure increasing a certain stat improves the likelihood that your response will be the right one, and from an in-fiction point of view, it creates the illusion that the enemies aren't interchangeable without forcing the devs to do a huge amount of work. The problem with not having it be random is that the system (as it is in SMT, anyway) becomes boring. You just pick the three responses you need to pick and that's it. There are ways around that, but they involve putting more work into the system than Atlus can probably afford. Which is not to say someone shouldn't try it. I'm just saying that I see why they don't.

Perhaps because the majority of players finds combat fun on its own right, and if the game would only contain "meaningful" sequences, it would be woefully short? I think length is a big problem for cRPGs, actually. Most of them are too damn long, and I'd include a lot of my favorites on that list. I wish players didn't expect a certain length out of their cRPGs, because that's really hurting the games as experiences. I'd love to see a cRPG that's five to seven hours long, but has the depth of interaction to support 80+ hours of playtime.

I think making the combat tactically interesting and strategically interesting, instead of just strategically interesting (which is the problem with most cRPGs) would solve most of your problems, Micamo. One thing that's interesting to me that is rarely done outside of the Shin Megami Tensei series is building negotiation in at a systemic level. I've been playing SMTIV lately, and one thing that keeps the combat interesting is the ability to negotiate with the demons you fight every round, and maybe even recruit them (which is the mechanic the series is based on, so that's not surprising). The basics aren't that in-depth: they ask you a few questions and usually force you to give them something - money, items, HP, or MP. If you pass their quiz, they'll join you. However, the developers keep it exciting in several ways. Some demons don't speak your language, for example, so you have to learn a certain skill before you can talk to those demons. Other demons will get so impressed with you that they'll get scared and run away. If you already have a certain demon in your lineup, any subsequent demons of that type you face will be like, "Hey, you're hangin' with my buddy!" and walk away from the fight. Sometimes they restore your HP and MP, and sometimes they don't. Finally, no answer you give is a guaranteed winner for all demons of a certain type. One Pixie might join you if you say demons are stronger than humans, but another one might get mad at you for saying the same thing, at which point she and her party are allowed to skip your turn and attack your party. And if you do successfully negotiate with a demon, you may not get any XP, and even when you do, it's peanuts compared to the amount of XP you get from fighting them. These are entirely text-based interactions, simple as hell from a technical perspective, but the controlled randomness of it does a lot to create the illusion of depth in fiction and mechanics with only a relatively small amount of work having to be done by the developers. I haven't mentioned the SMT combat system itself, which also has a lot of interesting mechanics I think are worth looking at. All of which is to say that I agree with you, but that I don't think it's by any means a problem with RPG combat specifically, even in JRPGs. Even Dragon Quest gives you the option to run away. It's a problem that's pretty common in Bioware games, but that's because Bioware has always been kind of crap at integrating combat into their games, and they've only gotten worse at it as the combat and non-combat parts have been more strictly segregated from one another. I actually like the combat bits in Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, but they do go on too long and rely too much on mowing down mooks. And Dragon Age's combat has always been dumb WOW-esque garbage, give or take a few encounters. It's interesting that they later made TOR, since DA:O's entire combat system feels like them asking, "How can we sell Baldur's Gate 2 to WOW players?" That bit about an RPG being a series of questions and answers is awesome, by the way. I've always thought of RPGs like that, but I've never had the words for it. Mind if I borrow it for use in other discussions?

This was my point, basically.

Be annoyed. RPGs that start with fighting tend to suck, and that opening scene always sucks.

@Kjaamor: Heh, well, I was bored. Is it any shock I wrote a boring post? For the record, I don't necessarily disagree with any of your arguments, though I do obviously disagree about PST (and Icewind Dale, actually). You do have valid points, and you've argued them well. I just think your fears will be unfounded. I think what it comes down to is what works for each game and each player. PST is not the game for you, clearly, and that's fine. But I would argue that the way that game did things worked very well for that game, and that it worked very well for those who were willing to accept its idiosyncrasies (both deliberate and accidental). Question, BTW: did you like KOTOR 2? I ask because that was another distinctive Chris Avellone piece. If you didn't care for that game either, I would suggest that you probably just don't care for Avellone's work in general. You seem to be more of a David Gaider fan - you even liked DA: O's companions despite not liking the game! (Full disclosure: I'm a fan of both.) If that is indeed the case, then I would suggest you probably will not care for the Avellone-written companions in PE, of which there will be (I believe) two. Seeing as how you won't have to take either of them, I think you'll be okay.

Sigh. From the looks of things, I didn't make myself clear enough. Or it's not going to matter how clear I am. One of the two. Either way, now that the term "PC" has been used, this is going to turn into a Circular Logic-a-thon From Hell, and I do not have the emotional or mental capacity to deal with that right now. Maybe I can construct a rebuttal that doesn't involve me coming across as the stereotypical Shrill Liberal later. We'll see. But, for right now, I'm out.

I gotta say, I hate the idea of any playable race having bonuses or penalties to attributes, unless there is a specific physical or mental difference within the lore that would affect them - and even then, I would rather they start out better at certain skills (e.g. Halflings are smaller than humans, and thus have a bonus to Dodge and Sneak), or have skills exclusive to their race (e.g. natural Waterbreathing for Argonians in TES). But I hate all that -2 to INT junk, because there's something so horribly phrenological about it. You're basically saying that orcs can never be as smart as humans, because they're orcs. No matter what they do, they will always be two points behind a human of otherwise equivalent intelligence. Which poses a problem, because you then have to either impose limits within the fiction to justify the stat difference, thus automatically casting characters of certain races into certain molds and limiting creative possibilities, or you have to ignore the stat difference entirely, which leads to an unresolved schism between mechanics and fiction. This is to say nothing of the human-centric way these scores are always plotted. Why should the human standard for intelligence be the only standard?