Yonjuro

1.Why would difficulty change xp? There are more creatures. E.g., if you go to the wilderness area on 'easy' you fight 3 wolves. If you go there on 'normal' you fight 5 wolves and some of them are senior wolves. If you get 650 XP for a wolf and 1000 XP for a senior wolf then Hard mode will quickly become easier than easy mode for most of the game (except for the very end) because the player will level up much faster. I didn't explain this well. If a quest currently yields, say, 20K XP over two objectives in the current objective-based XP system then the sum of the events in the new event-based XP system has to be pretty close to 20K. If it ends up being 2K then the game will be too hard and if it ends up being 200K the game will be too easy. So, regarding point 2, if you grant XP for kills and don't count them towards the quest, then there's a lot more XP available right? The, let's call them, 'exploration kills' would mean that you can gain levels faster by killing more, right? If you assign event XP under the assumption that the player will use one of the two entry points for the quest, then they can over level by doing all of the events (kills etc.) for both entry points. If you assume they will do that, they will under level if they don't kill everything. The shared XP problem makes this harder to get right. ... 3.I don't understand your first sentence, you need to reword it. ... What I meant was that this problem would be easier if you had an XP number for each quest and you could populate the areas with whatever creatures you wanted in order to approximately match the XP number that you wanted. Still though, this is an optimization problem to solve (a variant of the so-called "zero-one knapsack problem", I think). The algorithm I mean is assigning XP to events in a way that doesn't make the game ridiculously hard or ridiculously easy. Doing that requires making an XP table that will approximate the current XP objective amounts without making changes to the creature/trap etc. placement, accounting for differing number of creatures at different difficulty levels etc. If you think carefully about how to implement this, it really does seem like a bolted on hack. It can be done, with a lot of attention to detail and a lot of play testing, but doing it between now and the end of the year (or even into next year if Obsidian can afford to delay the release and can afford the extra money to add a second set of XP rewards) in addition to making the game work as designed? I think it would be better left as a mod. If the game is brilliant except for that nagging feeling that the XP rewards are unsatisfying, someone will make the mod.

... See not that hard, when you are not looking to make it sound complicated. No, I don't see. Show me. Suppose you were making the mod. Start with these decisions: Use the example from above, the Lord's "daughter" quest. 1. What's your decision about the difficulty slider? Less XP per event on harder difficulties? If that's the decision, it doesn't sound very different from the objective XP system. 2. In that quest you have two entry points into the dungeon, one has overlapping creatures with another quest. You need to divide the XP somehow. What assumption will you make? Do you require a player to kill/disarm/pick locks etc. on both routes to get the full XP for the two objectives? If so, they will underlevel by doing the quest as intended and need to kill everything everywhere to level up. If not, they can become overleveled by always killing everything. 3. Remember that the job here is not to place creatures/traps/locks/quest rewards etc. to get a number that's close to the original (btw, that sounds like an NP complete problem already). The task is to do a global assignment of XP for events so that the XP numbers are close to the originals everywhere. Do you have an algorithm for that that will finish running by the launch date? If you do have one, it is ok that harder creatures get lower XP values than easier ones (which they will in many cases if you run a matching algorithm? Remember that we aren't arguing whether objective XP vs. (let's call it) event XP (where 'events' are kills, traps etc.) is better here. The question is: Is adding a second, bolted on, XP system a good use of Obsidian's time and money? (And the answer is: no, leave it to modders).

Agreed. It would be a lot of work to do a second XP system (and test it) even if if the game had been designed for it in the first place. Amortizing the quest XP over kills/disarms/lockpicks etc. is a messy problem and getting it right isn't a small task. It's just the sort of thing that modders can do if they want to. I'm not in charge of Obsidian's money (not even the tiny fraction of it that I donated to them for PoE), but if I were, I wouldn't want them to spend it on this. As thought experiment, suppose you were an intern at Obsidian and were given the task to add kill Xp to the Lord Soandso's "daughter" quest. You have, I think, two major objectives (i.e., two places where you currently get XP), confront the cult leader and circle back to Lord Soandso to do whatever you need to do with him. How do you divide the XP for these two objectives over the enemies/traps etc. in the dungeon and in the wilderness area? What happens when you change the difficulty slider from normal to hard? There are more enemies - do you grant less XP per enemy for hard mode? (And, if you do, do you want to listen to the screams of outrage about being penalized for for playing on harder levels?) Also, you're constrained that killing a wolf on map A needs to yield the same XP as killing one on map B - this is beginning to sound like a difficult problem (obviously the solution is to take up the slack in the boss fights, but that's a huge hack, so don't tell anyone). Somebody needs to make these and a bunch more decisions and then evaluate them with play testing to make sure it doesn't break the game. I don't think that somebody (actually that's a lot of somebodies to get that done by the release date) should be an Obsidian employee. Leave it to modders.

If you kill him, he drops a soul vessel that you can loot and take back to the previous area. It will become an infused soul vessel when you place your two characters on the floor runes and walk up to the dais. At that point the urn in the room will have a blue circle that you can click on. When you click on it .... err... nothing happens as far as I can tell.

Description: Currently the UI for choosing spells etc. on level up has icons in the left window and titles and descriptions in the right window. The (too large) distance between the two windows means that you can't see the icon and the title/description without looking back and forth. It would be easy to select the wrong spell if you inadvertently move the mouse pointer when you move your eyes. Expected behavior: We should be able to see the icon of the spell and its description without looking back and forth (by, e.g., putting the windows next to each other or over-and-under or using a pop up...).

I was seeing all of these problems. In most recent play through I didn't save as often, only when something bad happened (like a character getting stuck) or when I was taking a break. Then, I always quit the game and stopped the steam client so I was doing a clean start to load the save file. This seemed to help a lot. I was able to finish all four of the quests without too many bugs.

Oh, and if you haven't been doing this, you probably need to start a new game. The save files will have gotten corrupted.

If you haven't tried this already, try quitting the game and stopping the steam client wrapper and then restarting **any time you want to reload a saved game**. This made the game a lot a less buggy. Apparently, there is a bug that is not updating the game state correctly when you reload without restarting the game. The symptoms include disappearing loot, doors that won't open etc. This should probably be in flashing red letters somewhere. Quit when you need to reload. Make sure that the steam client is not running before you restart the game (blink really fast when you read this so it looks like it is flashing).

The plot thickens. During a real level up, the garbled character sheet appeared. Cycling through the characters with the arrow keys allows level up to happen for one character followed by the game freezing. However, going to the 'next' character with the arrow button (which goes to the first character, the PC) and hitting the 'personal' button in the upper right ungarbles the character sheet and allows level up to succeed. To reproduce: Remove '.txt' from the name of the attached savegame file Load game Push the Character sheet button - you should see a garbled character sheet c17b27d38aa04d0c911ff9c88efebf5a DyrfordVillage 7901479.savegame.txt

At least the deer isn't hostile. I agree though that the lions and wolves should be hostile automatically. They should be like the bears from BG. If you go near them or attack them they'll go hostile, but if you keep your distance so do they. That would really help make the game pace more bearable. Maybe make that the next Sensuki Suggestion. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the general sentiment, but you can use the stealth mechanic to avoid the lions entirely if you want to.

Hi Derek, In my most recent game items started disappearing wholesale. I'm not sure if it is related, but the dramatic gear loss happened after another bug that I reported in a different topic: My main character got frozen in place. To work around this I used F5/F8 which unfroze my main character (and stepped on some memory??). Some time after that, I noticed a lot of things going missing including when I moved an item from one character's inventory to another or when I dropped a second item into a quick slot. I can try to recreate this with a new game if it will help.

my workaround for this is to save and reload, using quicksave (F5) and quickload (F8) after reloading i can move the "locked" characters again This worked for me too. Sometimes I have to do it more than once to 'unlock' the character.

It turns out that the problem is the level up button being active when it isn't supposed to be. The symptoms are the ones I described previously.

Currently, the characters seem a bit insubstantial in combat - it's hard to know who is doing what or who killed who I think some changes to combat sounds could help a lot. E.g., playing as a ranger, arrows seem to fly off to who knows where due to the 'whistling arrow' sound. In contrast, the BG games had a satisfying 'loose' followed by a an even more satisfying 'thunk' when you hit. (At this point I should also mention that music, ambient sounds etc. are fantastic.) I think this is a 'big deal.' I'm going to mess around a bit more and see if I still think so. Does anybody else notice this? Am I imagining things?

I got a similar crash twice in the dungeon to the left on the Stormwall Gorge map. Both times I started with a PC chanter, stealthed over to the dungeon killed the two whatevers on the outside and the spider near the entrance. Then while fighting the ghost-like guys I pushed the chant button and hit pause - both times the game froze. The first time required a hard reboot to get the machine back but the second time left an error.txt file (attached along with a dxdiag.txt). The output_log.txt was too big to upload mostly because there were a large number of lines like this: NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object at PE_EmissiveAlphaMesh.Update () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 (Filename: Line: -1) followed by a large number of these: Couldn't extract exception string from exception (another exception of class 'OutOfMemoryException' was thrown while processing the stack trace) (Filename: Line: 257) (Error: 268818143 Filename: Line: 14021608) DxDiag.txt error.txt

After doing a few quests I get get the level up indicators (in other words, this doesn't happen during the initial level ups). When I hit the level up button, the character screen is garbled (the text is unreadable). If I use the arrows to move between characters I eventually get readable text. After that, when I complete the level up, the screen goes black and the game hangs. I will be happy to attach the save file if someone can tell me where to find it. My OS is Windows 8.

Welcome to the forum. Let's hope that PoE will be the beginning of something big.

I think that's why the waterwheel was so huge (24 pt.).

Why don't you think it should be sped up? Every IE game I've played has had much shorter durations between attacks. The recovery time between attacks in IE games is 6 seconds. To attack more often you need to either reach level 7* or specialize in a weapon (only few classes can). And of course, two weapon fighting gives you an additional attack per round. The IE games had extra animations that didn't correspond to actual attacks to make it look like the characters weren't just standing around. I always thought that was a bad idea but maybe it wasn't. It looks a bit weird to swing a weapon and then stand around for several seconds until it's time to swing it again (compared to the IE games where it looked like the characters were missing more often than they actually were).

Nope, not a big deal to me as a player. It might be a big deal to a game designer (or to the therapist prescribing the OCD meds of the aforementioned people). Sure, I agree that there are other ways to do it. My point, if it isn't clear, is that Obsidian decided, for better or for worse, to use objective XP and so constructive feedback during the beta will be to tell them about places where the XP awards are encouraging people play the game in a way that isn't fun for them.

By 'grinding' I don't mean killing things, I mean things like in IWD where the yeti respawn in the vale of shadows. If you wanted to, you could hit the level cap by resting there and killing yeti. Do you agree that it wouldn't be fun to do that? If someone likes Diablo or IWD that's fine with me and I never said otherwise. Ok, great, when you get done with that, pick your ass up off of the floor and we can continue the discussion based on what I actually said (see above for what I meant by grinding). Why would I 'clarify' something I never said? You might be confusing me with someone else. The only comment I've made about this issue is that there may very well be problems with how/when objective XP is handed out in the game and it will be good feedback for the devs if people can identify those cases during the beta test. You seem to think I am arguing exactly the opposite of that.

This is a fair point. Let me me rephrase this a bit. Objective XP is supposed to make the objective of having fun and the objective of in-game rewards line up as closely as possible. It will be useful to give feedback to the devs during the beta test if the fun objective function is out of whack with the XP rewards objective function. The intent of not including kill XP is to prevent (unfun) things like grinding. An unintended consequence could be to make a game that rewards you for running away as often as possible (by 'rewards' I mean that you might be better off running than, say, using up a limited resource such as camping supplies) which, one could argue, might not be the most fun way to play (the Brave Sir Robin method of adventuring). It is a real issue, let's not turn it into a oneupmanshipfest and lose the point.

From what I understand...characters should stand back up as long as no enemies are withing x many yards(or LoS). So as long as you aren't in "danger" characters will come back and then you can rest. I think that's right. In the video, it seemed to be the 'patrol spider' (or was it a beetle? - in the upper right) preventing the character from getting up. If you had characters down, you would need to kill whatever was near them to be able to rest. Good question though - a deadlock like that would break the game.

You can finish the chapter without killing anybody on the bandit camp map inside or outside of the tent if you make good use of capabilities and/or resources in the game. The solution is left as an exercise for the reader. (Of course, as Stun mentioned, it is usually better to kill everyone on the map for the XP and loot.)

Careful, that is the good path. If you get the good dream (that is, the dream you get if your reputation is 10 better), it assumes that you pretended to join the bandits (which is what Drizzt advised you to do if you helped him). The evil dream assumes that you killed them. I don't remember the dreams having anything to do with how the bandit camp went... The dream you get depends on your reputation. 10 or better gets you the 'good' dream 9 or lower gets you the 'evil' dream. The good dream assumes you joined the bandits the evil dream assumes you killed them. The game doesn't force you to. You can finish that chapter without killing anyone in the bandit camp if you want. EDIT: Looks like Stun already said this.