amarok

I have a quite simple feature request: I want to be able to sheathe my weapons. It´s kinda ridiculous always to run around with sword in hand, the inability to sheath my weapons in the IE games bothered me. Be et just some automatic animation or a player executed function.. it would be nice to have the weapons be drawn before battle and sheathed after it ends.

Well, its hard to determine what "broken" is. There's always something which could be better, bigger or more diversified, no matter how overall good or bad the original game is. Take the BGs and the 'Sword Coast Stratagems' mods. They alter enemy AI significantly and make it react to the players actions, which isn't done that extensively in the vanilla games. I wouldn't want to miss that anymore. For me, an unmodded BG2 would be quite a 'broken' expierience because of bland/too easy/exploitable enemy AI, although the vanilla version is by no means a bad game. With a big and dedicated community a mod-friendly game almost certainly will improve through modding over time, no matter how good the initial product already may be.

I dont want the frequent use of health- and temporary stat upgrade potions to have a too important role inside battles. The unlimited usabilty of health-, invulnerability-, giant strength- and mana potions is a thing i despise in many rpgs, as battles eventually degrade to a resource war, in which a high number of potions grants victory in most cases. So, please limit the use in P:E.. the IE games already did this in the way that swallowing a potions actually took time. I'd like to see at least something like that, or maybe using potions get's kind of a cooldown, which allows swallowing a potion only every few minutes and thus the player usually won't be able to use more than one or two potions in a battle. Along the way, i also would like to see these potions to be something much more valuable than usually. I want them to be rare and expensive, i want their use to be an actually strategic decision, which could turn the tide in desperate situation every now and then - not the all-time-solution to everything and all we see in many games. The fact that these things are cheap and lying around everywhere in high numbers just feels wrong to me, it should be something only master alchemists could create in small numbers, and available only in the chests of powerful enemies and expansive magic stores.

Mh, did you ever have the urge to visit a place in Athkatla which wasnt accessable? Thats a real question by the way. I did not, but i assume others could have had a problem with the design of the city.

Yeah, thats my whole point. And Athkatla did this really well, because on one side it felt like a huge, sprawling city and on the other hand i never had an urge to visit a place which didnt exist in it, although it only had seven rather small accessable districts. I seriously hope to see something similar in PE. A higher degree of exploration though could easily be implemented into this system. Just increase the number of accessable districts, dont show the location of the accessable areas from start on and add between the major, quest relevant ones some smaller, rather hidden districts which dont necessarily have to be visited for the completion of major quests and only can be found if, for example, the big temple district is left through a small sideway instead of the big main road.

One last attempt. medium sized mediaval city in real world: This place actually is quite a bit bigger in the real world than it is on this miniature painting. I live in this place and the old mediaval city core still is intact. Half of the whole skyrim world, including every skyrim city, would fit into this single medieval city. Its just a whole other dimension of size, even if its a fairly small place compared to modern cities. But we should stop that now, we wont be able to agree upon this thing.

You dont get it :/ Some 10 to 20 huts with a few not-moving people standing around and without any involving, dynamic quests can neither be a big city nor a small one. Not even a very, very, very small one. I cant get over the fact, and i think thats a totally understandable thing to criticize on games like Skyrim. The size is not a bad thing just because its small, its bad because it should not be small. A place which is called "major city" and is supposed to be the center of a kingdom or something like that, than this place has to be big to some extend. If its supposed to be a tiny remote mountain village than its perfectly ok. But places like Riften, Whitehall or the Imperial City (Oblivion) are not supposed to be tiny remote villages. Yet they are. Thats the point..

Or like eliminating weight limits for your inventory, which already is confirmed for PE (in some way). I dont like things like that.

Well, you have a point. The fact because i still want food in RPGs is some restriction they force upon you, if its done well. You cant stuff up your party with food and survive in a dark cave for months, resting and healing after every battle. Because you need to refill once a week or whatever. Just one automatically consumed "food"-resource which needs to be refilled in a store every one or two ingame weeks because of its weight/date of expiery and i am perfectly happy.

Its ok to see things different. But stop your polemic ****. I clearly can see the advantage of a seamless world, like Skyrim. But i also look at these two "major cities" and just cant accept the right one to actually be a city. Whats so wrong with that?

Open map exploration fallout/darklands style, so that 99% of the regions you travel through isnt modelled ingame and abstracted. This not only is a solution to logic problems alá BG1 there the locations are much to small, it also allows for far more encounter variation and skill use while overland travel (traveling through wood areas gives a 10% chance to be attacked by wild animals every ingame hour, woodman skill lowers the chance; slaver caravans are encountered in dangerous regions while traveling on roads, with low diplomacy/wrong race they will attack the player, with fitting race/good diplomacy they will trade etc)

Well, you really dont get my point. Certainly detailed working industry and other stuff isnt necessary for a game like PE. Its all about imagining all the other things between the actually depicted stuff in a game. My proposal is to leave some space for all the unimportant things in a game and not trying to incorporate them and fail. Maybe a better comparison to illustrate this would be Darklands VS Arcanum. In Darklands a city consisted of some text, images and a few isometric streets when fighing occured. Arcanum had fully pictured isometric cities. Still a city in Darklands felt big and real, in Arcanum they did not. Because Arcanum put all the important quest locations, shops, inns and stuff on one 0,5 square kilometers wide map and said: thats a whole city. Darklands only gave you the opportunity to visit RELEVANT locations and blended out the insignificant ones - and thats the way it works. A whole city on a 0,5 square kilometers map is not just not realistic, its simply game breaking for me, because no whole city ever would fit on 0,5 square kilometers and a am not able to forget about this fact while i walk through it. Its really strange for me that no one else sees a problem with this, i always thought other people would be bothered by this too.

Wow, the armor mechanics sound like really good stuff. A real difference between light and heavy armor aside from one being better than the other is a thing i always wished for in IE games.

I really would like to see a need for food in the game, but in some non intrusive way. Mostly because need for food forces the player to act like he would in a real world - concerning resting. A six man party which dives into a dungeon will have to take an amount of food with them, which probably wont last for weeks and thereby naturally limit the ability to rest and heal (being able to spam rest almost everywhere was one of the few things which i consider broken in the IE games). Long dungeons could provide the player with some amount of conserved food or a fast travel option out of the dungeon so he can refill without too much backtracking, but the party always would have to carefully consider the need to rest. The easiest way would be to implement two supply resources (food and water) which are consumed upon resting. Without sufficient food/water the party wont recover through resting and eventually lose hit points. A choosable amout of water can be refilled in wells or on river banks, food can be bought or produced through character skills ("hunting" skill grants the possibility to make food out of dead animals, "foraging" skill will lower the need for food when resting outside because the characters are able to find some fruits and mushrooms near the resting area). Are there any plans to add food to the game?

I really like the idea of a complex crafting system, but i also can see problems with crafted items rivaling the ones from loot/stores. I also dont think a story driven singleplayer game is the right setting for weapon/armor crafting skills.. you know, for crafting such things you need workshops, equipment, workers who do the diry works and TIME. A lot of time. Time which would be in conflict with the time needed to complete quests and do adventuring stuff, what the game essentially is about. To make a long story short, please dont add skills which let the players craft superior weapons. Skills for improving found weapons with some magical stuff, less time consuming things like alchemy/herbology to some extend is fine. Although i really would like to play a game where in a complex, involving and difficult way i can forge master swords, i dont think that PE is the game where this should be done in.

And my point is that those are pretty much the same exact thing. The reason why settings are inconsistent and leave out realistic aspects are because the developers make a judgment call about what is relevant and what isn't, and they make the irrelevant stuff inaccessible. Which "seamless" worlds are you talking about? I've just assumed with all Infinity Engine games that the accessible areas are only a fraction of what constitutes the city, which is exactly what you apparently want them to be. And the good judgement of what is relevant and what is not is the actual quality of gameplay, i would say. Because computer games always only are a fraction of a real world. And yeah, the IE gemes actually most times did what i am talking about - except Baldurs Gate 1 and some rare places in the other games. "Seamless" is what U7, BG1, to some extend Arcanum and TES games do.

Well, i wasnt referring to the game quality of the depicted city at all. Tarant sure was really good considering quest mechanics and stuff. Its just the math that kills it for me. If all the people talk about the biggest and most industrialized city of the world but i actually can count the whole population that lives there and dont surpass the low hundreds my immersion is ****ed. And i really dont think that we have the technology to implement a seamless world in realistic scope. Just take your home city. Even if its a remote, uninteresting and rather small one, no current computer game can create a world as big, diverse and complete as that city. Herp derp. Realism isn't all or nothing. Different players may have different interests than you. You criticize Baldur's Gate for having a big city and leaving out the "uninteresting" but realistic parts, claiming that it kills your immersion, and then you say to include only a single relevant district of a larger imaginary city? I'm sorry, but I just don't understand how that's any different. I don't get how you're suggesting anything new. It seems that you're just arguing against realism not because it's not being realistic enough for you (and with current technology it can't be), but really because you don't want realism in the first place. Uhm, if you look closely at a game you always will notice a world where some essential things are missing, because they arent relevant. If you walk into a toilet room you usually dont get the option to use it. You cannot hack off your own hand on purpse. In most games you cannot pick up all the trash from the floor, and if you can, you cannot seperate all the different parts of the trash. We usually accept this without question, because its not relevant. And thats just the same way players usually accept that they cannot walk through every single street of Athkatla. My point is that i rather take a believable world which feels like it could be placed in a real world, where i get all the parts which are significant to me in a realistic scope with the nonrelevant parts inaccessible to me, than a seamless, but logically very incoherent world which obviously is made for a game.

Oh man, i really hope we wont see a map system like the one in Baldurs Gate, because it totally ****s up scale. If the west end of section A1 seemlessly is continued in the east end of section B2 that means that where is no space between two area screens. This, on the other hand, means that the player can explore the whole world/region. And this means that the whole world/region is made up of some dozen square kilometers and even "far away" places are reachable in a real life walking time of a few hours. Its a major complaint with many rpgs for me and similar to the things mentioned in my dont-make-a-whole-city-thread. Its a total immersion killer if the size of the gameworld just isnt logically correct, please dont do this :/ The best solution would be a somewhat improved Fallout worldmap system. The game world consists of sectors, which are accessable via an abstracted worldmap. On a sector there either can be 1) Nothing at all, in this case stopping at that sector isnt modelled at all in form of a game screen and the player instead gets one of these nice static art screens depicting the environment he currently is in (mountain range, plains, forest) and gets text options for camping and other stuff. 2) An already known place like a settlement which consists of one or more game screens 3) An unknown place, which has a chance to be discovered of 1 to 100 percent when trespassing the sector based upon its size and visibility (large city or tall fortress 100%, town which is someway off the main road 80%, military camp inside a forest 60 %, remote village 40%, forest grove 30%, overgrown ruins 20%, dungeon with hidden entrance 1%) This way the player can discover new places through quest givers which directly mark it on the map, rumors which only roughly tell where to find something and maybe raise the finding chance because the characters know what to look for in a sector, and freeform exploration. Random encounters also could be implemented easily, and lastly some wilderness skill could raise the finding chances for places/for positive random encounters.

I fear i wasnt clear enough with my point in the first place (and posting in kinda hard to decipher retard english didnt help too). I didnt to say "dont make whole cities because it failed in the past". With current technology it is not possible to produce completely explorable, realistically designed settlements with a population of >1000 in computer games. Neither is it necessary. Such places, no matter if they lie in the real or a fantasy world, have hundreds of streets where nothing besides normal dudes doing their daily stuff is going on. All these streets consist of different, normal housing blocks with living quarters, marketplaces, industry and commerce, infrastructure, trash bins and old women doing housework. There is no reason to design such things, which exist hundreds and hundreds of times beside each other, in a realistic scope by hand, because they are of no interest to the player. Maybe with future technology, complex algorithms and superior computer power there will be easy ways to produce functional and realistic worlds with ten thousands of buildings and inhabitants which the player has complete access to, but this still wouldnt have much significance because no player ever will want to visit insignificant places with rather little variation. Just like in the real world, where people usually dont have interest in all and every street and sideway of a city they visit. Regarding role playing games which depict big cities i wanted to say that i *hate* the cheap illusion of something which obviously is impossibly, because there are better ways to do it. Producing a completely walkable city sufficient for 100 people, while still missing essential things which should be there in a real city, and pretending that the scope of the place is a hundred or a thousand times larger than actually depicted is a very bad way of making a virtual world. I just walk through the original city of Baldurs Gate and constantly ask myself: "Where are the graveyards for all the dead relatives of these people? Where are the waste dumps? Who made the bricks for all these houses? Where do the food products for the inhabitants come from? Who brings the weapons into the weapon shops?", as i walked through all and every street of this city and couldnt find these places or persons. Its just like telling the player that he is going to visit a 10 man family and then finding a 5 square metre hut with one bed and three people in it which say "The whole family greets you". Things like that break a game for me, its a total immersion killer for everyone who cant disable his logic thinking abilities. A much better - and *easier* - way is to do it the Athkatla way. That said, showing an abstracted overhead map of a really big city and giving the player a handful of interesting spots in that place he actually can walk onto. Producing one fully mapped and explorable living quarter in an area which is significant to the story while simply not showing the other 300 neighborhoods, as there is no reason to visit them. This is escpecially easy to do in a top down 2D game, as there never is a need for invisible walls or stuff like that. Streets just go into the end of a map and upon walking onto them the player is greeted with the city overmap, where he can choose another significant area he wants to go to. I hope PE will keep this in mind, it would make me very happy. I posted the same thing on the ToN Forums before, so yeah. Yeah, Fallout Vaults do this the same bad way. Exactly that thing is my single biggest complaint with F1 and F2 which i otherwise love. In these cases i always have to trick my mind with things like "The elevator actually connects the vault with a dozen other floors, i just wont visit them because they are insignificant to me" to enjoy the game. It bothers me quite much.

Oh, i really didnt know that actually this kind of industry existed in U7 - i never really played this game. In that case, please replace "bakery" with your favourite among "tanner, saddler, barber, brick manufactory, doctor or carpenter" and add the phrase "per city" behind it.

Well, its problable to late now anythis, but maybe someone will give me a response and say, that this will be done the way i would want it to. Soooooo.... One of the MAIN problem i have with rpgs is, that they try to reproduce a whole, 100% explorable functional world (or a whole 100% explorable part of a world), as something like that cannot be done with current technology. Bad examples: Ultima 7, Baldurs Gate 1, Arcanum These games had fully eplorable major cities which should be huge and be populated by thousands of people.. but actually consisted of a few dozen buildings appropriate for a population of a few hundred. At most. Also these worlds, although they tried to be "complete", had no single bakery. No real, big forests. No animal farms. Almost no industry at all. They just were *much* to small to be considered a whole, functional world. That just breaks the game for me, i have a very hard time trying to enjoy games with such immense logical inconstincy. Please dont do this in ToN. Good examples: Baldurs Gate 2, Planescape: Torment Athkatla and Sigil were huge cities, and the player could visit some interesting *spots* in them. But never the whole city. Like, all these living quarters for all these thousands of people that actually live in huge cities. And thats fine for me, because it made sense and the places actually felt like big, sprawling cities. Please do this the right way in PE. TL;DR: A whole city is huge and there is no need to model every single common living quarter in a computer game. Make only some interesting areas be explorable and dont try to model a 100% accessable city, because this always ends like ****. Tarrant of Arcanum VS Athkatla of Baldurs Gate 2 for illustration.

Wow, this is exaclty what i wos hoping for. Besides the technological aspects i really love the style of art. Especially nature often looks kinda.. sterile in games, IMO. P:E seems to do it right. The bushes and that river in the demo scene there much more.. natural than any Skyrims or Witchers i know of.

Yay, is it that women? That character looks so awesome, i already can feel the story behind her. Also: second screenshot! But lets get back to were we belong. I so much hope for historically inspired gear.. medieval european master blackmiths designed pieces of art game developers of today really should use to draw inspiration. Because usually they can not come up with anything even remotely original themselves.

On of the things that bothers me most is the question about the amount of content PE will have. For what size of a game are you aiming for? Will the length be comparable to, lets say, BG2 SOA? Or rather BG2 SOA+TOB? Or simply give us a measurement of hours for a complete play-through. Thank you.

Oh man, i love you guys. The idea of Darklands-style static art encounters at some points is fantastic! It can add so much variation, if done correctly. I hope you will implement some form of randomness, like wilderness encounters on worldmap travel. Some easter egg encounters like in the old Fallouts would also be nice. Also, i second the wish for static screens in this style when entering new regions/resting/dying. I am aware that there i quite some effort needed to produce high quality art like that stuff, but things like these add immersion like ****. Keep the good stuff flowing guys.