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Ffordesoon

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Posts posted by Ffordesoon

  1. "but you don't prevent the dice from failing unless you eliminate any and all chance of failure."

     

    What's the fun in it?

    There isn't. That's his point. The fun is in dealing with adversity, and the most fun is in recovering from adversity as it happens, rather than putting on the Special Robe Of You-Can't-Touch-This after a death and a reload. That's what Sawyer is trying to prevent; he's making the game more difficult while making the systems less obtuse and removing the exploitable loopholes. It boggles my mind that clearly intelligent people don't understand that his intent is to make the game consistently difficult instead of having it spike up and down wildly due to factors beyond the player's control.*

     

    Nor do I doubt that there are people who like that level of randomness, but any delusion that it's the majority of players who feel that way is exactly that - a delusion. Having talked with many of those folks, I think they will end up being pleasantly surprised by how much fun they're having with PoE. And if I'm wrong, us beta backers will fix it, believe me. :)

     

    * - And yes, I'm aware that sounds like "He's making it easier," but that's only because people have been lied to about balance and what balance means in recent years. Balance for a mass audience is in no way balance for a hardcore audience. They're wholly separate. We're looking at Dark Souls-style balance, not Dragon Age-style balance.

    • Like 7
  2. PoE doesn't have to do insane numbers to be a success. Paradox makes grand strategy games that sell two million copies, and they're much bigger successes than AAA games which sell three times that. Tomb Raider just recently became profitable despite being the fastest-selling game in the history of the franchise, and Resident Evil 6 was considered a failure despite selling something like six million copies in its first week of release. Success is about net profit from sales, not sales. If less money is sunk into the thing, profit is far easier to achieve.

     

    That said, I seriously doubt this game will move less than 500,000 copies, especially in the long run. Same with Wasteland 2 and Torment, for that matter. Games like these are everlasting gobstoppers; BG2 and the rest of the IE games (along with Fallout) have been at the top of GOG's bestseller list since they hit the service. New games in that vein will have stupidly long tails and a perfect marketing story. They may not sell as many copies as Manshoot XII: Exploding Duty (I couldn't resist, I'm sorry), but they don't have to.

    • Like 7
  3. Pah.

     

    The Oculus Rift is going to be a nice toy, but VR isn't going to be The Way We All Play Games In The Future.  The people who are convinced that Oculus will "save the industry" or whatever are just as mistaken as they were when they thought mobile and social would save the industry.  It's not the future, it's a future, one of many.

     

    They are doing some staggeringly impressive work, there's no doubt about that, and they're absolutely on the cutting edge.  But you disdain developers of traditional television-based games at your peril.  VR will be a niche market for the foreseeable future, mark my words.  If they could do it without the headset, that would really be something.

     

    I also question the assumption that any team could do what CDP's doing (or rather, what CDP says it's doing; I question if they can accomplish their aims).  It might be true that any team of sufficient size and manpower could assemble something like The Witcher 3, but it's a rare level of talent indeed that's required to marry a true open-world structure with true choice and consequence.  I can, in fact, think of only one game that's accomplished that goal successfully: New Vegas.  And even that was not without myriad flaws.

  4. @Lephys:

     

    But you can say that about any Kickstarter.  "Help me make this thing that should exist but doesn't" is the pitch, but we're still talking about paying for a thing that doesn't exist.  I'm not diminishing the reassuring nature of more specific promises, but I could go to Kickstarter right now, start a campaign, and make up some highly specific promises I have no intention of living up to.  Kickstarter is based on trust, as I've said before.  If you don't trust inXile with your money, don't back their game.  Simple as that.

    • Like 1
  5. And there's the real problem. For one side, this is about save-or-die spells and whether or not they are in any way useful or fun.

     

    (My own answer to that question is "It depends," by the way. In fact, I quite like save-or-die spells, including many of those found in the IE games. My problem is with the AD&D ruleset, which was not designed with computer games in mind and thus didn't always translate effectively, especially if you weren't already a tabletop player. I also have a problem with the excessively obtuse and arcane nature of the ruleset's specifics - which, again, works in a tabletop situation, but doesn't work in a computer game. Neither objection precludes save-or-die as a rule.)

     

    But for the other side, this is about the struggle between the Filthy Casuals and the True Acolytes of Gygax. You can't win an argument when one side has prebuffed with a permanent Armor of Faith spell (heh).

    • Like 1
  6. I actually move that they put Balefire (from the Wheel of Time) into the game. It's not an insta-death spell. It's a "you never even existed" spell. Thus, any damage and/or effects that target had inflicted upon anyone previously in the battle would go away. I think it'd add a lot, tactically, to combat, and shouldn't even have a chance to fail. And I definitely want to see enemies using it.

    Stop goading them. I know it's tempting, but nothing good comes of it.

  7. "Yeah, after the walking speeds were modded. I'm talking about the Baldur's Gate games, not the other IE games, which had perfectly fine movement speeds."

     

    Um.. we're both talking about BG since Friendly Arms Inn is in BG. It did not  ever take 2minutes to walk from one end to the other.  That is with basic walking speed.

     

    People like to exaggerate the pathfinding AI in the BG/IE games and I simply don't believe them because it would mean they play a whole different game whcih is illogical.

    Unless the Enhanced Edition made the extremely weird choice to make the walking speeds unbearably slow, you are factually incorrect. It took at least a minute. I timed it.

  8.  

     

    I know its super late to talk about game design now, but this just ircked me so much playing through these games. Dungeon corridors. MY GOSH they are tiny. I would wait another year past this game's release date if they didn't have dungeons like that.

    Our dungeon/interior corridors have all been designed with full party navigation in mind. You won't find anything as narrow as Firewine Bridge in Pillars of Eternity.

    Thank you, thank you, thank you!

     

    God, those corridors. Irritating in the extreme, especially at unmodded walking speeds.

     

    Have you also designed the exteriors for this? Watching a dude take like two real-world minutes to walk around the entire Friendly Arm Inn almost broke me.

    • Like 1
  9. On the subject of save-or-die spells (and I haven't read the entire thread, so forgive me if this has already been said), the point isn't that luck==bad. The point is that, when one is designing probabilistic systems, it is very important to understand how different probability distributions affect gameplay. Save-or-die effects give really weird value curves, for two reasons. The first reason is obvious. They either work or they don't (sometimes with some minor secondary effect), and if they work they're amazing. So even if they have the same expected utility as another attack, they'll have much more extreme results in both directions. It's the difference between rolling 1d20 and 1d6+7. They have the same average, sure, but they have very different ranges, and lead to different sorts of gameplay. 1d6+7, for example, is far more affected by static modifiers, while 1d20 is more affected by the opportunity for repeated attempts. To go back to the subject of this discussion, save-or-die gameplay is all-or-nothing, and therefore only synergizes with effects that increase its chance of success. Normal damage, on the other hand, synergizes with all other sources of normal damage, because their effects are additive. This leads to very different sorts of gameplay (although I won't argue here that one or the other is "better"). Equally important, save-or-die effects are far more affected by random chance than damage effects are (because damage effects are are small, additive randoms that, together, become very strongly inclined towards their total mean, whereas save-or-die effects have a much weaker tendency towards their overall mean), and therefore they create a less stable difficulty curve. In fact, the same battle may have very different difficulties between reload. This is not totally without advantages, as it creates a certain unpredictability that can be fun, especially on repeated playthroughs. However, it also makes battles virtually impossible to correctly balance, and therefore severely damages the developer's ability to create any sort of pacing or growth effects in difficulty (do not take this to mean the developers lose all ability to do this; I only mean that they lose a large chunk of that ability).

     

    The second key difference is not actually been damage and save-or-die, but between straight damage and %-damage. Save-or-die can be construed as effects that deal 100% of the target's health in damage. Like all effects that deal %-based damage, these effects scale very strangely depending on the opponent. At their best, these effects give players a useful way to take down high-durability targets. Some spells should indeed work better against some foes. That's cool. At their worst, however, %-damage effects produce some very strange difficulty curves, especially at the high percentages and when percentages are the only effect applied (10 damage +2% is very different from 15% damage in how they each scale against different opponents). Certain characters now find high-durability targets to be just as squishy as low-durability targets, which is very difficult to balance for. Since save-or-die effects deal 100% damage, they are the logical extreme of this principle. If a group has a save-or-die effect, hit points and other conventional defenses become irrelevant to any party using save-or-die tactics (which, as noted above, synergize poorly with damage tactics, so a mixed-form party is at least somewhat unlikely). This once again makes it difficult to balance the difficulty between players, particularly between players employing save-or-die tactics and players employing conventional damage tactics.

     

    So, my argument is this: Randomness is not bad. Some degree of chance can be useful to add variety to encounters, particularly across multiple playthroughs. However, as with many things, extremes can become problematic, in this case because they can significantly alter the game's fundamental difficulty curve. Save-or-die effects are necessarily high-variance random effects, and therefore add a very large element of randomness to the game. Even when save-or-die effects are purely optional, their mere presence adds another layer to the balancing problem and takes developer time, and players who use these effects will still often experience a very strange difficulty curve that undermines the developers' original intent for the game. While I can understand the desire to add randomness to the game, adding the high level of randomness created by save-or-die effects seems to create more problems than it solves.

    36243-slow-clap-citizen-kane-orson-w-bJk

    • Like 1
  10. Ah, well, I misunderstood what you meant by "fair." Which may mean you're misunderstanding what some of us mean by "unfair." What I mean by "fair" in Dark Souls' case is not that every enemy is the same as the player. My point is that the game never sucker punches the player. Once you know The Rules, they're consistently applied in every case. They're very unforgiving rules, it's true, but there is no point at which a player's strategic and tactical choices aren't respected. Even in the most extreme case, there's never a moment where you feel like the game put one over on you.

  11. What people don't seem to understand is that games have to be unfair to be challenging,

    Pfftahahahahaha! Either you're the greatest player ever or this is some kind of weird Stockholm Syndrome thing.

     

    Ever play Dark Souls? Etrian Odyssey? Tactics Ogre? Thief? Deus Ex on Realistic? A mainline Shin Megami Tensei game? Hell, even Halo on Legendary? Or any one of the other countless games that play fair and are still pretty darn tough?

     

    "Games have to be unfair." Wow. Gimme a break, man.

     

     

    You should know enough to think "okay, this thing's probably going to have some really damaging breath attack that's going to easily hit a lot of people, and I'm going to need to be ready to figure out how that works and avoid it or mitigate it somehow."

    IT's A DRAGON!That's like saying 'You should totally warn people that necromancer has undead followers!, 'you should totally warn people a giant will do massive damage' or 'you should totally warn people a banana is yellow!'

    You misread what he was saying. His point was that, because it is a dragon, players' assumptions about how dragons work should be taken into account and "pay off" in some way, as opposed to, "Ha ha, you thought a dragon would breathe fire, didn't you? But this dragon has basilisk powers! Enjoy getting turned to stone and dying in a way you couldn't have reasonably anticipated, suckers!"

     

    Whereas, if there are a bunch of dudes turned to stone near the dragon's lair but before you get to the dragon, that would clue you in that it's not a typical dragon without holding your hand.

  12. I don't think there's a nostalgia factor so much as a trust factor. The big Kickstarter successes have all either been run by devs with a sizable fanbase that trusts them to put out good games, or devs who showed off enough of their game that people trusted they could deliver on their promises. The more people are already invested in you, the less you have to show to get them to trust you.

    • Like 3
  13. @Stun and Hiro:

     

    Personally, I think you two are just baiting Lephys. I don't see how you can be so relentlessly critical of the guy and his arguments without ever acknowledging he has even the slightest shade of a point. I don't agree with you on these issues, but I think you have solid points occasionally. You just argue in bad faith, which Lephys - whatever his sins - has never done. Not that I've seen, anyway.

     

    I'm sorry to backbench moderate, but as a third (fourth?) party who's been watching this little tete-a-tete play out for a while now, I have to say that I have only seen Lephys respond patiently to a bunch of baiting hogwash that completely ignores his points in favor of nitpicking his examples. If Lephys can be accused of using kettle logic or proof by verbosity sometimes, then I accuse you fellows of moving the goalposts and engaging in the continuum fallacy, among other things.

     

    And yes, I'm engaging in the psychologist's fallacy right now, the difference being that I know my own biases are biases. I a am also aware that using Wikipedia as a primary source opens me up to claims of false attribution, except that I'm only using Wikipedia as a source for the purpose of easy definition, not because I necessarily believe in every conclusion every Wikipedia page would seem to support.

    • Like 2
  14. Really depends... on how much foreshadowing there has be. The 'they are bandits, they fight unfairly' is relayed somehow, and thus that same way some rumours could go around the boss is really an ancient magical being.

    It's all in the setup. As much as 'this makes sense!' it might not if not relayed, and 'it makes no sense!' might not be true if foreshadowed.

     

    All in all, the key is in execution.

    Yes, but a suckerpunch by definition fails at execution.

    • Like 1
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