Yonjuro

Well, in the backer beta, if you wander around and kill everything that attacks you and take possession of a dragon egg and an ogre's head you will not get very much XP (it used to be zero, but now there is bestiary XP etc.). You don't get the larger XP awards until you find the quest giver and (in those two cases) turn in the item. Compare that to, say, the map in BG1 where you find Bassilus (the insane cleric with the undead 'family'). You get a large reward (gold and some XP) for turning in the quest, but you get a lot of XP just for killing Bassilus and his undead minions (and whatever else you do on that map). You can still do an exploration focused game in PoE (I think) but you need to be careful about finding quest givers and turning in quests to get to a reasonable level. I don't think that's a disaster, but I can see how it might not be the preferred play style of a BG1 fan.

Cleaning a house is drudgery - never cleaning it will, at some point, show that it still has some value. Also, games need enough complexity to be interesting at all. So I'm going to have to reject that as a general statement. However: Well, in BG2, you would always want to cast chaotic commands on your whole party. It protects against charm, domination, confusion, fear etc. The problem is that you can't. Early in the game you can't cast it at all. Later on, you can cast it once per day (it protects one member of your party) and it doesn't last a full day. You cast it only when you've scouted and found particular enemies. That's really the point. There is a strategic decision about which of a limited number of spells you are willing to cast at a given time. Some players find that interesting. A sequencer or other macro-like ability is an abstraction that keeps that complexity without having to repeat what you did last time you met, say, a bunch of vampires. You are, of course, free to argue that the spell system should be simpler, but I don't agree. I still play BG2, long after there is anything for me to experience in the story, because there is more to figure out about how to use the spell system. The complexity is the reason why it is still interesting. As I mentioned in my earlier post, leaving out the spell animations is a possibility. I would make that optional so that new players could see when they have made a mistake (that is, layering too many buffs means that some of them will expire before the last ones are cast; it's another reason why the process can be interesting to figure out). And, just to make things clear: The ability to 'pre-buff' just means not having artificial restrictions on when you can cast the spells that you are able to cast.

Yup, I didn't think it was intentional; more that you were 'talking past each other.' I think you do get a little, but if you were to play PoE like BG1 you would not level up fast enough to survive for very long (at least, that is my impression - based mostly on the BB). So, there you have it; a play style that a lot of people like that is not supported. That's the argument. I didn't really come to join the argument, just to point out what is being argued.

At that point, why not just have four different buffs? At a certain point in bg2 buffs become inevitable, so why have a character do 14 animations and was time when they could just do one buff. The former reduces drudgery (similar to writing macro commands in software); the latter dumbs down the spell system (similar to putting the round peg in the round hole in a pre-school toy). Big difference. Huge. The idea, in case it isn't clear, is to be able to assign the spells that you want to use to a button so that you don't need to manually do all of the casts each time. Your buff 'macro' could bypass the animation sequence (or not).

I don't agree with Sarex that kill XP would make PoE a better game, but he is making a reasonable point that you are not responding to. He is not saying he wants to go murder bears in the woods; that just isn't a fair characterization of his point. He is talking about playing the game as an adventurer exploring the game world. That worked well in BG1 where there were quests and even entire maps that you would never find if you didn't explore the game world. It is one of my favorite things about BG1 (and one of my least favorite things about IWD1 where you get marching orders for everything you do, especially in the beginning).

Certainly, but the main screen UI in the IE is kind of like a dashboard/windshield metaphor. The dashboard part looks appropriate to the game world but is separate from it. The NWN UI looks like you only have the windshield but a flock of birds has flown overhead and **** all over it. (It also takes up a huge amount of real estate as rendered but, of course, parts of it can be closed). That said, the PoE solid UI will be optional and I think that was a good decision (and I get your point about key commands).

Yes, they have special animations now. If you find the archive video for the live stream that Josh just did, you can see them.

As Karkarov posted, we don't know; but, there is a clue about whether companions will leave. Josh Sawyer did a video with a game journalist where he played the beginning of the game. He mentioned that one of the initial temporary companions (Calisca) will leave your party as you sleep if you rest in the first dungeon. So, I would guess that companions will leave if you do something they don't like but we don't know any details about it.

Probably NPC in Spanish. (Personaje No Jugador). Or "Personnage Non Joueur" in French. The OP meant NPC but forgot to translate from his native language. Very good. We should all start using that acronym - it seems more universal. I'll start: So, Minsc was one one of my favorite recruitable PNJs in BG....

Probably NPC in Spanish. (Personaje No Jugador).

Adding a small amount of randomness should improve pathing because it will make it less likely that two characters will get to the same place at the same time. There will be individual exceptions, e.g. a character that was further away that started moving earlier than one that was closer, but on balance, it should make pathing easier to get right. In The Infinity Games this made the ai bump in to each other in corridors and such. Then they either stopped or pathed the long way around, if there was one. (Whoops, I missed this before the thread necro.) I don't think so. I think you would see the same thing if the movement timing differences were removed. If you issue an order to the characters to go to a location, they will be less likely to get there at exactly the same time if they don't move in lockstep but, since the differences are small (just a few milliseconds), it isn't enough to really matter that much.

Oh, so that's the sound I hear when I write a bug report.

Fair enough, but that can be fixed easily. For example, the IE games had 'healing spells cast on rest' as an option. You could extend that idea and have additional spells when you rest or when you wake up, spell sequences (essentially macros, e.g., cast protection from fear on the PC and protection from evil with one button push etc.). That would remove the drudgery without removing pre-buffs. Remember, "pre-buffing" is really a misnomer; it just means being able to cast the spells that you have available to cast whenever you want rather than limiting some of them to 'combat mode,' an artificial distinction.

You might like the late game better if you're one of those insane people (whoops, was that out loud?), I mean, a person with different taste in games (yes, that's it) who likes IWD better than BG. My favorite thing about BG 1 and 2 is the 'player agency.' For me, both seem like an adventure where my character is in charge while IWD seems like my character is getting ordered around by some (incompetent) neo-fascist arch druid (who keeps sending me to dead ends). So, later in the game, BG2 becomes more linear. You might like that part better. For me it's exactly the opposite. I would be interested to hear your opinion about it.

I agree with this. I have mentioned several times in the forums that the negative comments have gotten really over the top. I'm not sure why people are compelled to act like **** when they are in a semi-anonymous forum but that's what we see. I would rather see people taking a deep breath and taking a moment to realize that OE is populated by reasonable and competent people who genuinely want to make the kind of games that they themselves will like and that a lot of customers will also like. Comments suggesting otherwise are just wrong and only serve to reduce the level of enjoyment that the devs take in their jobs. If anyone who is reading this comes here with that as a goal: do everyone in the world a favor (including yourself in the years to come when you have to look back at all of the things you've said in your life) and just shut up. I don't think we've seen any real game breaking compromises. E.g., the bestiary XP change was a compromise. It adds some kill XP but it doesn't turn the game into a grind fest and it works with the design of the game (that is, the "hard" difficulties don't become easier than the "easy" difficulties as they would with pure kill XP (due to the larger number of higher level creatures present when you turn up the difficulty slider)). Overall, it was a reasonable design choice in response to an issue that was important to a lot of people.

Ok, there was a lot here. I'll respond to a few points. I think that most of the feedback has probably been from the internal play testers. I would be surprised to learn otherwise. They have the whole game and the devs can watch anything and everything they do. My guess is that not much has changed based exclusively on feedback written here on the forum so I don't really think that OE has made detrimental changes or really any changes based on anything anybody has said here. I would guess that the forum feedback is mainly used to gauge what a larger population of users is most concerned about and little else. There is certainly a lot of noise in the forum about what the "true" IE experience is and isn't. I am not personally making a lot of that noise, so I don't really disagree with the spirit of what you've written about that. This is a new game and the intent is to improve upon the IE experience and to establish new IP. We'll see how it ends up. I am not personally planning to work on the PoE=BG3 mod and I don't think anyone else is either. I wouldn't be surprised to see a mod adding combat XP (I would be surprised if that mod was an improvement, but I will never find out ). I also expect to see a mod to turn off engagement which I might try depending on what the combat feels like by the release date (and whether there is an AI upgrade released with the expansion that makes engagement more interesting).

Sure, I'll buy that. If you (and others) like the engagement mechanic for whatever reason, that's also a good argument for keeping it in. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. When I posed the question about whether or not Sensuki's mod breaks the game for you, my point was that your ability to lock enemies in place in PoE might be due entirely to the AI. I know this is a tangent, but you can make them stop by moving another character into place and attacking while your first character fades back (behind the new attacker). At that point, if there isn't a big mob, your first character can attack again because your second character will be drawing the attacks from the enemy you retreated from. In some ways this is easier without engagement because your second character is free to move to the right place even if already in melee with other enemies (who will usually follow the second character to the new location). It's also a way to deal with a heavy hitter like Taugozs in BG (in the bandit camp) or Sarevok. Switch off one tank for another by retreating behind the second tank. For the record, I haven't personally accused anybody of not liking the IE combat due to their liking of the engagement mechanic. You are, of course, free to like whatever parts of the IE games that you actually like and to have the opinions about how the experience can be improved. I'm not in the business of determining who is a true IE fan.

We had an interesting discussion about this with Sensuki elsewhere, and I think I finally get where you guys are coming from. ..... But... you guys have convinced me that something of value was lost as well, and I now understand what you mean when you say that P:E combat does not have the "feel" of IE combat. This sums up the perceived issue pretty well. Engagement is reducing combat movement and tactical movement was a large part of the IE games for a lot of people. That's the downside. This is the (potential) upside that I haven't been seeing. I'll have to mess around with this some more - I genuinely haven't seen the upside to engagement as currently implemented - perhaps there is something worth saving. That said: Is it possible that you are experiencing the way enemy AI is implemented more than the engagement mechanic? Another way to put this is, if you used Sensuki's mod that removes engagement, would it break the game for you? That might be an experiment worth trying. If your play style is no longer supported with the mod, that would be a great argument in favor of the engagement mechanic. I suspect that it's possible to get the best of both worlds (assuming world 2 has a best part; I reserve judgment until I explicitly try the tactics you mentioned): more tactical positioning plus tactical use of engagement by making some changes to how engagement works. Simply put, engagement adds an additional movement penalty (above the opportunity cost) - the penalty can be applied selectively or reduced and you end up with more movement.

Suppose, for example, a rogue had the innate ability to avoid disengagement attacks (or perhaps a modal ability called "move deceptively" or something). Does that address your concerns about adding spell like abilities or do you mean something else? Well, I'm more worried about how these abilities would not really obey the same rules as the rest of the game. ... Like I said, with the original ruleset you would have a pretty obvious framework where the spells are a bit more dynamic ..... That's the d&d sickness that PoE actually solved with the ruleset initially. But which OE decided wasn't such a good idea to keep, for whatever reason. Ok, I think I understand your point now. You may be right, but I think a lot of the system design necessarily ends up being redesigned/finalized during play testing. On paper, a designer puts together something using logic and probabilities that has enough complexity to be interesting, but when users get ahold of it, only then do you see if your sufficiently complex ruleset turns out to be fun to play. So, I tend to think that OE played with the new ruleset and added new things and jettisoned old things to improve it incrementally. I don't personally design games but I have experience in the UX process for other software and that's usually how it goes (somebody's brilliant vision gets dashed on the rocks of real users' experience with it). YMMV.

Yeah the biggest thing they could do to fix engagement (and it might be enough by itself) is to just make it so you only trigger an engagement attack when you actually "leave" an enemies engagement range, not when you simply move after being engaged. That might do it. At least, there is probably a simple change (or a few of them) that would make engagement work a lot better. Mainly, it feels like movement is more constrained than it really should be right now. There is always a movement penalty, that is, if you move you aren't doing something else to help win the fight. Engagement, as currently implemented, is adding a second penalty that will sometimes hit you at the worst possible time, when you need to tactically retreat.

I'm not really following your point here. Suppose, for example, a rogue had the innate ability to avoid disengagement attacks (or perhaps a modal ability called "move deceptively" or something). Does that address your concerns about adding spell like abilities or do you mean something else?

Right. Engagement needs to have an upside rather than just fixing the downsides. Sensuki's engagement exploit was fixed but we still have a mechanic that, so far, takes away more than it gives back. Some ideas in no particular order: -- If your character has taken too much damage it is (almost) strictly better to heal in place than to retreat. If AoO worked only when passing an opponent that would not be the case. (Maybe this would cause other problems?) -- You can engage with a wizard, put up a protection spell, do some small number of in-close direct damage spells and then use the 'switch places' ability to switch places with a front line capable character. However, why would you ever do that? It uses up two additional spells/abilities, is much riskier and isn't better than just lobbing a long distance damage or CC spell and moving up the front line character to engage. Again, one is strictly better than the other. The melee range spells need to be really compelling to make this a viable tactic. -- I can think of a lot more examples but I'll just leave this here for now to see if anyone (reads this and) has ideas about engagement either for the release or for a mod.

The second is - argument from ignorance. .... No. The "argument from ignorance" fallacy means shifting the burden of proof by doing this: <X> is an explanation of <Y> because your interlocutor can't provide of an explanation of <Y> For example: "The Big Bang was the result of the universe being sneezed out of the nose of a supreme being afflicted with a respiratory infection. Since you don't have an explanation for the Big Bang the preceding must be true." (Bzzzt! Fallacy.) That would be an argument from ignorance fallacy. The post you quoted was (correctly) expressing ignorance about what will happen to the animations. It was not an example of the argument from ignorance fallacy. Yes. This part is correct.

You're asking for that in vain! What's the point? (Sigh) We're all doomed.

Description: "Total enemies defeated" on the party section of the character sheet is less than the sum of "enemies defeated" for each character. (Trivial bug? Serious Mutex problem? Other?). E.g., after killing Medreth and Co. on Easy, "Total enemies defeated" = 0, sum of "Enemies defeated" over all characters = 3 (which is the correct number unless the ranger's animal companion is supposed to be counted). Expected behavior: The two numbers should be equal or, if enemies killed by summoned creatures are not counted for the summoner, the sum could sometimes be lower than the "Total." Both the sum and the "Total" should be the actual number of enemies defeated so, of course, the "Total" shouldn't be zero after defeating three enemies (as mentioned above). (And, program should crash with an assertion failure if/whenever those two numbers are not equal.) To replicate: 1. Load any save (or start a new game and get into some fights) 2. Hit "C" to open the character sheet. 3. Look at "Total enemies defeated" on the party section on the right. 4. Click the "personal" button. 5. Cycle through all of the characters in the party and add up their "Enemies defeated" 6. The sum (computed in line 5, above) will be greater than the "total" (read in line 3, above). The sum is correct at the beginning, though I haven't verified that it is always correct. The "total" is clearly wrong. Note: "Total enemies killed" used to be too high (that is, it was definitely higher than the actual number of enemies killed) instead of too low. Between August and now there was probably a bug fix that attempted to fix this problem: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/67863-total-enemies-defeated-not-calculated-correctly/?view=findpost&p=1491857