Kjaamor

*retches*

Enjoyable update showcasing a lot of encouraging ideas and good concepts for gameplay. Five stars; would read again.

Not everyone. Frrankly I think CRPG's are getting TOO loot-centric as of late and it leads to the entire experience getting watered down. I agree with this 110%. The more often you get better loot, the more watered-down the experience becomes. Eventually, and I'll dive in and accuse DA:O of this, it gets to the extent that equipment becomes something you sort through rather than discover. The experience can be, and has been, watered down to the extent that it actually becomes a chore rather than a reward. The BG model of 4 magical two-handed swords in the entire game was far better because when you discovered one it was a real reward! But that is not a supporting argument for the OP's suggestion. If you tie weapon upgrades to levelling, you're placing your rewards into the same place. The beauty of the BG model is that while the rewards of levelling are always a visible thing to chase, the reward of that 3rd Greatsword is unexpected. I think it is more, er...rewarding to have multiple paths of reward.

King of Dragon Pass is a game with much potential that I would dearly love to see a kickstarter project on, because I think a refined sequel of it could be a truly amazing game. In other news, King of Dragon Pass is essentially death by miscommunication and RNG. The idea of taking the emergent sections of gameplay from KoDP and using them in P:E also has potential, but it would need to have meaningful consequences and also provide a wide variety of scenarios that stay relevant to the story as it has progressed in the area in question. If P:E could achieve this, then I'm all for it. However it's worth remembering that KoDP, a game that dedicated itself to that system, did not.

Rolling stats made up about 20% of my gametime for the D&D games. Honestly, while I agree to a point about the 2E system being more enjoyable, let's not roll stats in this. The time it takes to create a character should not be measured in days.

I'm afraid I'm with Frenetic Pony on this one. The thrill of loot is a huge element of the reward system of cRPGs, and it would be counter-productive to make weaponry an extension of the levelling arm.

Ah, the good old 'Game developers flood their game with stat-boost consumables to undermine character creation' trick.

For the record, because there may be some doubt, I don't have the same objection to 'in-house' as I do to fan contributions. This is because; a) It's almost certainly all going to be done in the same recording setup with the same acoustics b) The quality control is there on the spot and requires no sifting through c) It allows direction So I'm all for that, though I appreciate that my direct references to voice actors may have suggested things to the contrary. Obviously the important parts would be best handled by quality voice actors, but I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that.

In the D&D games: Useful stat, poorly implemented. In the 2d Fallout games: Useful stat, well implemented. Like others, I've always hated the way that social options are tied in directly with magic stats. Personally, for P:E, I would('ve) like(d) there to be a magic stat simply called 'Magic' that was quite seperate from concepts of intelligence or sociability. If nothing else, it's always been a gripe that the party member leading the charge is inevitably the one with the poorest social skills.

It might come down to the whole immersion versus gameplay thing again, but personally I have never felt repair mechanics contributed positively to gameplay. Perhaps they have mildly added to my experience in MMOs, but that's about it. Ultimately, gameplay comes down to approaching situations with different chosen options or different levels of skill to a variable amount of success. To my eyes, repair simply comes down to "Either put stat points here or engage in multiple trips back to town". There's nothing skillful or tactical about it. P:E could be the game whose resting and saving mechanics genuinely make this a tactical decision, however. But if they are going to try and do this they should be under no illusions of the repair mechanic's failures in past games. Unless the team have a great concept to make this tactical, and are prepared to put the extra legwork in and risk player wrath by making repair a genuine concern, then I would say bail on it entirely.

Let's get personal! a) Do I feel that I'm getting the game I thought I would get during kickstarter? No, because I had my own assumptions and desires and placed unequal importance upon various elements of the spiel. In short, and I despite my head knowing the truth my heart still feels this way, I was looking forward to Baldur's Gate III. I'm obviously trying to accept that this game takes influence from three seperate game series, and even then is inspired by them and is learning not just their lessons but other lessons too. b) Do I feel that P:E will be similar enough to the Infinity Engine games to warrant the style of marketing at Kickstarter? Yes. I think that P:E will be the closest thing we have had to an IE game with anything like professional presentation. The isometric angle, in my opinion, has a great deal of impact upon the gameplay within. BG and IWD are both bordering upon RTS in their gameplay. It's worth bearing in mind the comparisons of Dark Alliance, Brotherhood of Steel, and, to a lesser extent, Dragon Age: Origins and Fallout Tactics. Those were games that rode on the promises of their previous rpgs and did not meet that expectation. I believe PE will be much closer to the games that inspired it. c) Do I have any concerns regarding the kickstarter? I have two, they both concern money, and to be honest they're quite opposing. Firstly, I can't deny that I am slightly troubled by the positive references to several more modern RPGs. With some ideas, mostly anything pertaining to difficulty or restrictions, if PE is trying to straddle both the generation (IE fans) who funded it and the people who play modern RPGs. Like many others here, I was delighted by the IE-inspired spiel because I haven't got on with modern RPGs for some time. Honestly, and I appreciate this is rather extremely conservative, I would in many ways have preferred if PE could have gone completely in opposition to the trends of modern RPGs, rather than adopting any of their ways. Then comes part two. I am concerned about kickstarter projects such as P:E more generally because they listen to the fans. Games inevitably end up as more than the sum of their parts, and it concerns me that Obsidian might listen more to shouting voices than their own game design instincts. I also, in this regard, find the whole process of 'Pay $1000' and design an NPC (not exclusive to P:E) to be very distasteful on numerous levels. I accept however, that from my thread on the wasteland 2 forums I may be in the minority with that. ... Tldnr: Whatever and ever, amen.

Good points. The only thing I could offer to this is that the Torment kickstarter became successful long before completion of the vertical slice of P:E, and perhaps that could've left greater scope to adjust issues like party npcs in light of this. Of course there is an argument to say that changing the original vision to accomodate other games only leads to bad design.

I wouldn't regard any of the BG battles I faced as 'click and forget'. Set traps, buff, then send tank running as mage goes AoE crazy was my general approach.

I liked the mechanic of having to gather your party, though I'll admit that particular line did grate.

Paradoxically, I can count the potions I used in both games on one hand. I, like many others, fall foul of the crippling fear of using a consumable now and then needing it later. So I deliberately didn't use them except in the direst of circumstances. Apart from when I fought Saverok and Irenicus, where I just forgot.

That's a very nicely written post you have there, but I'm fairly certain you missed the main point of their argument - or certainly my interpretation of it. The argument was that it is better to have more companions with less depth. It is evident that it would take more resources to make a hundred characters with the depth of the eight offered. The discussion is to whether or not this was the best use of the resources available. PS:T gets brought up a lot in this thread, but a) BG II was the more successful game, and b) There is a new Torment game coming out anyway. I think because a lot of people love Torment, it's easy for them to forget that many of us simply like it. For myself and others who disliked the npcs within PS:T, there was nowhere to run from them and it was a significant blow to our enjoyment and was a contributing factor on me personally stopping playing. In comparison, while the characters of, for example, BG II and KotOR inspire love/hate reactions there is enough of them that everyone can be happy. I might take Aerie, another person might take HK, but both of us will get an enjoyable experience.

Even if the submissions rate reached the heady heights of 1% being remotely useful, the time and resources needed to select and process that 1% would be more than was needed for studio voice actors, and the quality will be worse. As an owner of the higher end of said semi-professional equipment, I reiterate that it really isn't that simple. Even if I record something and someone else uses the exact equipment I do, there are still going to be large differences in the acoustics. To a lesser or greater extent these can be taken out in the mixing stage, but on the balance of probabilities even with good mixing there is going to be a noticible (and likely immersion-breaking) difference between the two.

Well, firstly object modelling tends to provide its own quality control, in the sense that most people don't even know where to start with such things and so aren't going to hand over their biro scribbles and then wonder why it didn't get used. With vocal work, people think the only two requirements are the ability to speak and to possess some form of microphone input. Even if accents and delivery weren't a factor (and let's be clear, they're a massive factor), the processing alone makes it wholly impractical. I don't know if you've ever tried recording your own soundsets for the IE games, but the vast majority of fan-made stuff sticks out like a sore thumb, even when its a purely media transfer thing and microphones aren't involved. Trying to reduce noise, preserve quality and get consistent levels and tones from hundreds of audio files recording by different people in different places through different crappy interfaces is an utterly thankless task and no engineer with a hint of honesty would attempt it without putting in a huge disclaimer at the start. Seriously, it would be awful - even for those handful of barks and one-liners. Just walk away.

It's a nice idea, but the reality is that very few people have recording setups anywhere near good enough to create workable sound files, and within those very few fewer still possess the necessary acting talents to give an audio that isn't immersion-breaking. Unfortunately most people aren't going to recognise that they're not meeting one or both of the requirements, and then you're sat upon hours upon hours of quality control work that probably makes it cheaper to just hire some professional actors and a studio. Sorry.

Uh-oh, a particularly disappointing bell is ringing.

As much as it disappoints me a wee little bit, this is what they are doing. I don't really mind in the end. Relevant and illuminating, though obviously disappointing. On the discussion with Sacred_Path, I think we're wholly down to different interpretations now and probably feel that the other's points support our own arguments. I'm not swayed from my original standpoint (although with the above quote I feel that Obsidian's position is unlikely to change), but I don't imagine any further nitpicking from myself is going to be of much interest to anyone, so I'll leave it there. I do fear the PS:T line the designers feel compelled to take, however, since I personally didn't enjoy the company of any of the PS:T characters I encountered, which directly contributed to me stopping playing. ...that.

In Warhammer, pink, purple and pastel shades are the colour of the god Slaanesh, and there is precious little cartoony about him. Er... her. It. The point is that it depends upon use and context, but as a general rule there is definitely a place for such things.

I think the IE D&D games had a nice progression in this regard. Big enough boosts to make you excited, some levels providing more rewards than others. Somewhere in that ballpark is fine for me. As a mild tangent from the initial post, can we level up as individuals rather than as a party? Recently been playing NWN2 and complaint number 57 with that game is the way everyone levels up at once. Aside from it being nice to spread out the joy of levelling, it's also nice when a mage levels and suddenly becomes much more key to the party than he was ten minutes ago.

The inelegance stems from the fact that the player is given the option to create extra party members up to a full party if necessary. Since, in all the IE (and related) games I can think of, recruitable npcs are never min-max munchkins, if P:E follows this trend then it will be more powerful to create a whole party than to recruit. While this is not in and of itself a problem (IWD & IWD2), by providing a superior option to recruitables it makes said recruitables less desirable. If recruitables become used less, then the time and resources used to emphasise 'quality' is rather wasted. Hence the system is inelegant, certainly in comparison to the BG II model. On options as a whole, there was a thread somewhere where this was discussed and it wasn't felt to be quite as simple as 'more is better'. That's not to say I disagree with it as a guiding sentiment, merely that it can, at times, be counter-productive. To throw out a very unrefined alternate idea to tackle the situation, I could suggest that the player starts with a party of two of three, consisting of the PC and one/two 'recruitables'. At character creation, the player rolls classes for the recruitables, but they possess their own personality, reactions, quests and story as any other recruitable. Think about being able to make Imoen a Cleric from the start of BG (although any characters handled in this way would need to have personalities that could straddle a number of classes). I suggest that such a system would be more elegant than what appears to be offered at present, but is still less elegant than the simple system used by the Baldur's Gate games. The die has been cast in such a way as to rule out the 1x fighter, 1x Cleric, 1x Rogue and 1x Mage or die system, but really no further. All the IE games offered a variety of party builds to succeed with, but the fact of the matter remains that 95% of playthroughs will demand party members who can, to some degree, receive damage and others with some means of restoring health. If a ranger can successfully tank to the extent of a fighter, and heal to the extent of a cleric, what point is there then in fighters, clerics or classes at all? Flexibility becomes something of an opposite end of the spectrum to diversity, and I think this would be a bad thing in P:E.

Again, I am not advocating "hordes" of party members, unless you consider the average numbers of party members provided by the IE games constitutes that. On the second part of your point, I reiterate that I am not suggesting that recruitable party members should in any way represent the exact number of options provided by the character creation system of, say, IWD. It is a straw man, because you are arguing against a point that I am not, and have never been, making. 60 does indeed fall within the bracket of 12+. In the context of the discussion, however, that is fitting it rather broadly, especially next to my two points of reference (BG & BGII) of 25 and 16. I may have asked people to read slightly between the lines there. For the avoidance of doubt my figure of 12+ referred to reaching 12 mark with around 25-33% more dependent upon need and design, and not the 500% increase you may have understood. Ah, my bad. Well, in that case I would only suggest that if all party builds are equally viable then party building becomes an ultimately cosmetic choice rather than a tactical decision. To my mind, this reduces challenge-based gameplay and is a bad thing. To what extent this will be in P:E is, of course, unclear, since at present we're dealing with broad statements by the developers that do not provide anything like a solid display of the end product in this regard. PS:T was rather different from the other IE games in this regard, to be fair, because it did not place anywhere near as much importance upon tactical combat as the rest, and was subsequently less dependent upon party members and the class system (which it practically eschewed from on the PC anyway). This isn't a bad thing, as PS:T had very different merits. Now comes the long debated variable expectation of P:E thing, but personally I see P:E's role as more being to carry the BG torch than the PS:T one. I do believe there is another kickstarter project rather more suited to modelling itself after PS:T. As for MotB, there is little I can say given that I haven't played it, and my armloads of criticisms with the Vanilla game may well not apply. Time will tell, but even if you don't think people will do this on the first playthrough, it certainly limits the replayability on the second or third. . As clarification of my wider point, I think the party recruitment was handled pretty much spot on in BGII, and to aim short of that is something I find disappointing.