Randomthom
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Posts posted by Randomthom
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I was quite disappointed when I saw the default UI. This mod looks like a great start but until I can have my party portraits vertically I won't be truly happy.
Here's the thing, my screen is wider than it is high & I suspect I'm not alone in this. Therefore I'm more willing to give up space at the sides than I am space at the top or bottom.
I'm an avid WoW player and love the mod community and awesome customisability of the interface that has come out of that. I don't want this game to be like WoW but I'd love it's interface to have some of that flexibility. I also fondly remember (well, not 'remember' per-sé 'cause I'm still playing them) the BG/BG2 interface which looked (though not always acted) like I felt an interface for this sort of game should.
I'd also "borrow" the quick-spell menu from NWN2 which was excellent.
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Missing string on Ranger class creation screen when selecting special ability
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Regarding the vast number of quests in BG2, I love that, I think that's a huge part of what gives it the replayability for which it is rightly lauded. There are so many optional quests that you feel like you can ignore some and not be hamstringing yourself XP-wise for later in the game.
But at the same time, completionists or "OCD players," will feel the need to complete every little quest, which can be tedious and lead to the player feeing "overstimulated" with the bombardment of quests they have accrued. Some people enjoy doing this, other's do not.
For instance, when I go into a town, and this doesn't just go for BG2, I'm gonna pick up every quest I can, unless it really conflicts with my morals. I don't pick up these quests necessarily because I enjoy doing every last one, but because I don't wanna go further into the game and find out that I missed out on something awesome, so often times I'm compelled to pursue them for reasons other than enjoyment.
So if I come out of a town with 20 quests, then pick up even more while I'm in the process of doing said quests, I wind up feeling as I said earlier, "overstimulated." Like I have to take a break from the game because I just can't deal with all those quests right now. This was a big problem I had in MMOs, where the quests just felt "grindy," even though I was the one that overburdened myself with quests. The thing that made this more stressful in the BG games, was that a lot quests had time limits.
At the same time, spacing them out quests can also be a burden, because many players don't want to have to search high and low for quests, or feel lie there's not enough in general. It seems like there are numerous balancing acts at play here regarding the topic, and I hope Obsidian handle's it well from both ends of he spectrum.
I imagine, from a developers point-of-view, that this is just one of those things where they accept that they can't please all the people all the time.
I have played through BG2 more times than I care to remember, I've done the completionist thing but frankly I just got bored doing it. I've never been a completionist really, nor do I tend to rush to the end of the story, ignoring everything that might distract me. I'm probably what the developers might consider a 'typical' player so I'm probably quite easy to please.
I do know what you mean about being overstimulated though. Monstrous quest logs can do that to a gamer. BG2's quest log was especially tricky because it didn't hold your hand like many newer games now do.
How might a developer please both of us?
An arbitrary limit on how many quests to have active at any one time? That seems too... arbitrary, immersion breaking even.
One thought occurs that people in the game might insist on their quest being too important to wait. Nalia's Keep kind-of did this if she was in your party but not if you told her to meet you there. Other quests might give diminished rewards if there is a long delay between picking it up and completing it. Imagine if only two or one of the Dryads from Irenicus' Dungeon were rescued because you delayed getting the acorns to the Windspear Hills. What if Daleson was killed in Nalia's Keep and More Yuan-Ti roamed the halls because you took too long. Maybe you'd even be "waylaid by enemies" on your way there, perhaps a scouting party because they now hold the keep to such an extent that they send out scouting parties to the local areas. Perhaps Mazzy Fentan would just be another Shade in the Shade Lord's army.
Another good example (though this time in the main story) of this is in ME2 when the collectors capture the crew of the normandy. If you go straight away you can save them all. Delaying and completing one mission means that Kelly Chambers dies. Delaying for two missions means that all except Dr. Chakwas dies (iirc).
The things I suggested as what-ifs aren't anti-completionist but it forces your hand to focus on fewer quests at the same time. The ME2 example wasn't anti-completionist if you knew it was coming but it could damage a completionist playthrough if you weren't prepared to advance the story yet when it happened.
For me, the ME2 moment was great storytelling. It added urgency and made it feel like you were racing against time (you were). Far too often though, games try to give a sense of urgency without actually requiring any. Eventually the meta-gamer in us realises this and usually unless you're a very strong-willed roleplayer, means that we then proceed to amass items, XP etc. to prepare for the challenges the game has at whataver pace we like.
I personally feel like this lack of actual urgency is to cater to the completionist.
I'm not trying to set this up as a debate completionist vs others, it's just an observation that completionism flies in the face of urgency.
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Side note; I'd love to see the option for the "old friend" at the adventurer's hall that you don't have to pay for but you also get no choice in their customisation and get an entirely randomly generated character. You could limit it to just one per playthrough so you can't still max out your party size too early.
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The health/stamina system is PoE's THAC0.
It's not complicated per-sé but it is not intuitive.
I fully expect there to be a short tutorial built into the final release of the game that explains it better but right now (build 278) I'm finding myself suffering somewhat from information overload in combat.
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The problem I find is two-fold.
First, each character finishes their "turn" asynchronously.
Second, each character has "abilities" that require player input.
What you end up with is a battle that takes 20s in-game but about 20 minutes IRL due to having to pause every 0.8s for each character's next instruction.
Possible solutions
1. Ability queues such as in KOTOR.
2. Build characters with as few player-input decisions as possible (auto-attackers).
3. Complete overhaul of the combat system.
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Please, put the party portraits down the side, not along the bottom. We all play on widescreen these days, screen real estate is much more forgiving like that.
Obviously the UI isn't finished regarding the feedback it gives but the layout is a much more fundemental element.
Regarding feedback though, it would be great if the selected character portrait grew very slightly (~10%) when selected.
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Paladin's Fighting Spirit ability (when clicked)
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Oh, a side-note, this is a problem with the Unity 4.2.0 engine (which PoE runs on) and is not the fault of the PoE developers.
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Windows 8 won't allow you to gain access to the fonts folder as described above but it's actually even easier;
Hit the start button and type "cmd" then right-click cmd.exe and run as administrator.
It should now show "C:\Windows\System32\"
Type "cd .." (without quotation marks)
Now type "cd fonts"
Now type "del UNCL.ttf"
Just worked for me
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[Description of the issue]
Game launches & gets to main menu. I choose "New game" then choose difficulty option (Normal). The game then crashes to desktop. Tried in full-screen and windowed mode.
[Expected behaviour]
I was kinda hoping to get a bit further than this!
[Files]
dxdiag & Crashdump attached
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If they didn't some characters would be more disadvantaged than others.
I know this thought might come as anathema to some but why is this such a bad thing in a game?
The world isn't fair, we all know it. I know that a woman in the UK is less likely to attain the top jobs in corporate business and black people in New York are more likely to be the subject of police brutality. I know that I as a white male in my late twenties have many invisible advantages afforded me by the society in which I live whether I want it or not.
The game is not set in a utopia and as such there will be those who have more and those who have less.
The trick with regards to game balance is usually for it to either be offset by some other benefit but I'd suggest that the better way to handle it is probably to just keep the negative element to a very small (nearly imperceptible) value.
5% more expensive in some stores (only the ones owned by the bigots) isn't a huge price to pay, especially if there are other places you can go to buy or sell that don't have such penalties.
I think this makes it feel more like a roleplaying mechanic and less like a rule.
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It depends on how it is done.
Dragon Age 2 (rightly) received a lot of criticism for the absurd re-use of areas. Some of them were using the same designed area twice to represent two different areas and hoping the player wouldn't notice/care and some were actually the same location at different points in time.
Either way, it wasn't well received.
On the other hand, going back to a location that has people who have moved on in their life since the death of their son or the loss of their business or since getting married gives the world a real life and a sense of time passing. Or perhaps a keep that you cleared of undead might get taken over by the bandit group if you spared their leader when you raided their camp and made him promise to turn himself in to the authorities.
I'd love to have a reason for going back to the various locations but usually there isn't one...
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I'd love to be able to wear robes over armour. I think robes could look badass when the arms extending out the sleeves are heavily plated gauntlets grasping a mother-fudging huge greatsword!
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One thing I've never seen is sacrificing something from your character(s) to gain that kick-ass item. Say,loose 1 str permanently to gibe the life-force needed to create a totally disruptive lightsaber in this medieval world..
Blackrazor in BG2 says Hi. You become permanently evil (chaotic evil I think) if you choose to keep it (if you weren't already of course).
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Ok, here's my 5 & 5 (or perhaps 5 for fighting...)
Pros:
1.New IP. As much as I love the Forgotten Realms lore and environment it'll be good to have something new that the writers and developers have had full creative license over.
2. Ability Score redesign, I love that there will be no dump stat and every stat will be useful to every different class.
3. Scale, thanks to all the kickstarter stretch goals reached, this game will be huge, maybe not BG2 huge but still huge
4. Old-school isometric. CRPG-wise, this is my first love. I'm still playing BG2 after 15 years so there must be something right with it. Also ages very well graphically.
5. No XP for kills, I'm skeptically putting this in the 'pro' area in the hope that it means clever & non-combat approaches to challenges are rewarded as well as combat approaches.
Cons:
1. Bottomless inventory. I'm with the others who see this as molly-coddling the gamer. I'll retract this as a con if there are still weight limits.
2. Level cap. If it's possible to reach the max level then it's too low, at least by 1 or 2 levels...
3. Not really a con, more that we just don't know enough about it yet but I'm worried that the IE games will provide too much influence on the UI, definitely the weakest element of the IE games (it looked great but didn't play well).
4. Smaller number of companions. I know that they will be fully fleshed out characters and that I can create my own. I just think that there could have been a few more.
5. No MP. Again, not a biggie, these games are 99% single player focused and rightly so but I had some great experiences with some friends doing a weekly BG2 run on MP. I'd like to have been able to do that again.
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I don't really care if they use small or inflated numbers.
PoE marks a shift in the way XP is awarded, particularly regarding no XP per kill for monsters. This should have a profound effect on the way we play but also on the control the developers have on levelling speed. There will be no way to farm XP as far as I can tell which effectively makes being able to see how much XP you have/need to level irrelevant. That being said, I'd still like to know.
It does lead me to think though that levels are meant to represent an abstraction of 'power' and the meta-game thinking of "I need to kill twelve more goblins to level up" is very-much immersion-breaking. That doesn't necessarily mean that it breaks the fun but it breaks the player out of thinking about the tactics of combat or the story and into "where can I most effectively allocate these points".
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First, I'm hoping not to see weapons put into categories such as seen in MMO & ARPGs, it adds another level between the player and immersion.
There should, in my opinion, only be two "levels" of weaponry, non-magical and magical.
Obviously magical items will vary in their effectiveness but I won't want to be looting bodies saying to myself "pleasebeapurplepleasebeapurple..."
Semantics aside, I believe that the most powerful items should be placed where realistically they might end up.
e.g.
King's armour
Dragon's hoard
In a statue's arms at the bottom of a long dungeon filled with monsters and traps
You get the idea, basically not the 1/1000000 found in a barrel situation.
Personally I found it bad enough for beggars in BG2 to be asking for a copper (1/100th of a gp iirc) whereas opening the nearest barrel would usually turn up 3-4gp that nobody seemed to miss.
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Gromnir, your eloquent words have swayed me and also made me think, if I don't want a particular feature to be in, all I have to do is not use it.
As a long-time pen & paper player I tend to see these things coming somewhat and don't usually end up with weak builds. Consequently Dragon Age caught me somewhat by surprise (not having a pre-existing p&p ruleset that I knew back-to-front) but I still managed to muddle through.
I think respec should at least come at a cost to the player like it did in Mass Effect (I think it was 10,000 element zero in ME2, I can't remember what it cost in 3 or if it was even possible). I feel that it makes the game world feel less real if a character who has been... say an amazing archer all their adventuring career suddenly forgets how to do that but becomes a master swordsman instead. I'm sure there's roleplaying ways to justify such a dramatic shift in abilities but they don't sit well with me...
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Although, again, to be clear, there's a difference between making a general comment, and literally believing that every single member of a given race possesses some trait just because they're of that race. Again, if I were to say that Asians tend to be shorter than Westerners, I'm not walking up to a 7-foot asian person and telling them they're short because they're Asian, and "Asians are short."
I guess the reason I'm clarifying that is that it kinda bugs me how almost anything attributed in any way to ethnicity/genes nowadays gets pegged by some people as racist or somehow negative. "Oh my crap! You can't point out that it's rare in that gene pool to see teal-colored eyes!"
Yeah, I agree. It isn't racist though of course some people are more sensitive than you or I.
Prejudice (probably a better word than racist because it covers all the other forms e.g. sexism) is the projection of a stereotype or pre-formed opinion upon an individual and then the inability to detach them from that stereotype in the mind of the prejudiced person(s) when evidence is displayed contrary to it.
In fact, you could argue that recognising the way someone differs from the stereotype is how prejudices are broken.
For example, in the case of a physically strong woman
Truth: Generally speaking women are physically weaker than men
Stereotype: I expect a woman to be physically weaker than a man
Prejudice: That woman is physically weaker than men
Individual truth: This woman is physically stronger than the average woman and thus is probably as physically strong as or stronger than the average man.
Stereotypes are not prejudices, they are merely the way we manage large amounts of information about large people groups. The problem with stereotypes is when we expect them to work on an individual level. The other problem with stereotypes is in how we build them.
In my previous post I quoted Nigel Farage, the UKIP party leader. His comment about Romanians caused upset because he has taken some uninformed fears (possibly from biased news sources) regarding the purported prevalence of criminality amongst Romanians and applied it to all Romanians.
First, he has built an inaccurate stereotype and second, he has tried to apply a macro-socio-economic stereotype onto a fictitious micro-scale people group.
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There is a very key difference between the new PoE system and the old IE engine.
In the old IE engine character A would swing his sword then wait 6s then swing again.
In the new PoE system a character B will swing their sword then wait 6s then swing again.
In the new PoE system, a character C with faster attacks will swing their sword, wait 5s then swing again.
Thus, over the course of a 1-minute fight character C gains an extra 2 attacks (13 vs 11).
This becomes even more obvious and important with spellcasting. In IE, every character in the party (and the enemies) are locked into this 6s window. In PoE the window is per-character.
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I'd also add a question in here as it seems like a better place than starting it's own topic.
Is there any word on if weapons will sheathe when out-of-combat? It always felt slightly odd in BG2 wandering through the government district past nobles and VIPs with massive swords in-hand.
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Regarding the dragon thing... it's true that stating the results of an objective comparison between dragons and humans is not racist. What would be racist is if you deemed the life/existence of another race inherently lesser than your own.
...Racism is the justification of the idea that something not possessing the same traits as you (as attributed to "race"/genetics/culture/blood/what-have-you) is inherently less significant and/or is deserving of malice. At its core, it doesn't matter if it's between beings of pure energy and humans, or human-like races and humans, or just humans and humans... or dragons and slightly-different-types-of-dragons, even.
Regarding your final point, that's supremacism which is a whole category above racism though the 2 often go hand-in-hand.
Racism is the assumption about an individual or group of individuals based upon their race. It can even be what you might consider a positive attribute.
Nigel Farage (UK Independence Party leader) said in an interview "I was asked if a group of Romanian men moved in next to you, would you be concerned? And if you lived in London, I think you would be."
This is racism, it doesn't make direct comparison between your own status and that of the subject, just merely an assumption based upon their race (in this case nationality but race can also refer to skin colour or religion e.g. Jew).
Another example of racism might be "all black people are good athletes". Many might consider this to be a compliment but it isn't, especially to the black people who don't share this trait.
Supremacism is the belief that, for whatever reason, you/they are "better" than someone because of race, gender, age, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, belief system, culture or class and that this supposed supremacy gives you/them the right to dominate, control or rule over those who you consider "lesser" than yourself/themselves.
"Men should be in charge of government" is a supremacist statement.
Here's the crux: All supremacism is racism/sexism/ageism etc. but not all racism/sexism/ageism etc. is supremacism. It is possible to be racist purely by ignorance. For example, I grew up in a 99% white community and when I'm with people from different ethnic backgrounds I'm constantly fearful of putting my foot in it and saying something stupid because I don't understand their ethnic background and any cultural differences they may or may not have to me. I'm certainly not supremacist or racist but my ignorance might lead me to say something or do something that could be construed as such (hasn't happened yet I think... unless they were too polite/graceful to forgive me and not let me know). I'd like to clarify here, I'm somewhat fearful of the social situations that might arise from meeting people with different ethnic backgrounds to myself, I'm not fearful of the people themselves and it does not stop me meeting them, I just feel a bit on-edge at times!
Back to how this relates to games, I've recently started re-playing Dragon Age: Origins as a Daelish Elf. It's probably the best experience I've had of a game portraying racism both against your character and as your character (if you choose those options).
Many characters respond to you in a negative fashion based on you being an Elf, some merely surprised, some merely ignorant, some showing racist undertones in what they say and some that display full-blown racist/supremacist tendencies.
The game also gives you excellent dialogue options if you want to respond with some racially-charged hatred.
What I found interesting is that, while I would never normally choose those dialogue options, the racism directed toward me by some of the NPCs made me a lot more inclined to do so. Sometimes so-much-so that I did succumb to the odd retort that, in isolation would certainly be considered a racist remark. As a retort it serves to highlight their racism but it's certainly not the "I'm above that" response...
Racism is probably the 2nd thing on my list of things I'd like to no longer exist (behind greed) in the real world. Having said that, it IS a part of our world and it creates strife and strong emotions in many different people for a few different reasons and as such, I'd like to see it in the game in some form or another. These games are at their best when they make us feel something strongly enough to want to laugh, cry, shout, whatever.
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I like the OP's conceptual idea. It's probably a bit late in development now (well, it is too late really as features are closed now) but I still like it.
I'd probably say that class itself should be fixed/limited (e.g. a Priest NPC might be limited to Priest, Paladin, Chanter). Something that will not make a mockery of their backstory.
This could be built in as a toggled mode for advanced players so new players won't get overwhelmed when they pick up a new NPC (or worse, not realise that this new NPC is running around as a level 0 character, waiting for their input).
I often thought that cRPGs could do well with a modular personality. Imagine in IWD2 when creating your characters if, after choosing portraits, voices etc. you then could pick various personality traits that might surface later during gameplay. They wouldn't necessarily have to be voiced or even affect anything but it would be a great little addition to the character creation process.
e.g.
Pious
Law-abiding
Enjoys cruelty
Hates slavery
Fampyr Dominating Gaze Bug
in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Technical Support (Spoiler Warning!)
Posted
Damn, I thought I was doing something wrong when fighting fampyrs when this was happening to me. There is actually a much nastier fampyr fight than the cave on the island to the north and I've basically given up on ever winning it while this bug persists.
As far as I can tell, literally any targeted ability (but not AoE) will trigger the dominate gaze and it seems to work extremely reliably, perhaps 100% of the time but I can't be sure. Auto attacks don't seem to have the same problem so perhaps I can come back at higher level and just steamroll this fight with auto-attacks...