Ark Evensong

I'm not sure why limiting the number of weapon sets to 2 by default would be desirable. Especially if you're going to offer more with Talents. Weapon presets are mostly a player convenience, right? To use up character resources for UI convenience seems a little off to me. (Or can you only change between preset weapon sets during combat? I know you can't change armor, but perhaps the entire inventory is off-limits during combat. Hmm.) I imagine I'd want to deck out most characters with at least 3 presets - 2 melee and 1 ranged. (For melee, pick two : Fast / Slow / Defense) I can see how expecting everyone to be capable of switching between 4 different weapon sets easily and quickly is kinda ridiculous, and that someone who can do this should be considered special in some way - but if you want to simulate this, simply make switching to the 3rd or 4th preset have a longer cooldown before you can attack again. Then you can have a Talent that reduces weapon set switching time penalties across the board.

Now I wonder whether option 7 is gated by an AND or an AND/OR check. (As in, do you need to qualify for both, or is just one enough?) I'd be okay with either, just curious.

I can see the concern regarding the sameness of the attribute stat-block when you want to max out one stat. Looking at a bunch of 10's isn't very interesting. Sure, the player can drop one or two attributes below 10, and put those points in a secondary one, and it'll look much better. But there may be some threshold keeping the player from lowering attributes - "I don't have to be good at this, but I don't want to be bad at it." Solution may be as simple as giving the player 20 attribute points at chargen, but have the attributes start at base 8 instead of 10. Then again, that might skew the perceived average, and spending 3 points for little-to-no recognition may be worse than spending 1 point for little-to-no recognition, even if you do get almost 3 times as many points. (Assuming an 11 isn't going to open up a lot of options in dialogues.)

... There are no non-combat classes. Not-great-at-melee classes, sure. A L1 wizard still gets to pew-pew with his wand/stave/scepter, and should be far from useless once his 1 or 2 spells are spent. But yeah, going solo you'll have a harder time with a wizard than with a frontliner class that early in the game, I guess. Guess I'm tripping over semantics a bit.

I'm having a hard time parsing your question. I'm pretty sure there are no attribute minimums related to classes. Race does influence your attributes, but currently (soon to be revised) it's limited to -1, +1 or +2 to a couple of stats (totaling +2 in the end). The 'standard' attribute range seems similar to D&D. (Pallegina, in a screenshot from Update 70, has unmodified attributes in the 9-16 range.) Attributes are point-buy, but I don't know if they're weighted. If it's (very) similar to D&D, 8 is a likely minimum, with lower only possible if you take a penalty based on your race (sooo... 7?). But perhaps you can dial 'em all the way down to 1? I don't think it's been said.

Just an extra $25 should do it. From what I hear the portal is being finicky at the moment though, and once you've finalized your pledge you can't change/up your pledge any further at the moment. Once they get it working again (Hopefully around the time of the next update, or at least before the beta hits) you ought to be able to do just that. (What may be possible now, is make a new pledge for just the game at $35, and then add $25 for the beta. But you'll be paying that extra $35 for nothing. Well, not nothing - I guess you can give that extra download code to a friend. But adding an extra copy to an existing pledge only costs $25 as well, so ... ah. Still $10 'wasted', though.) EDIT: or uh, yeah, what Flow said.

This thread might be a little premature, considering we don't really know the nitty-gritty of character creation and progression yet. The beta is on its way, though, and Talents are something Obsidian is expecting a lot of feedback on. Give it six weeks, and we'll know a lot more. I'm pretty sure Obsidian said they'd shy away from (long) Talent-chains. (The "Requirement: [previous Talent]" part.) I think they're right in doing so - if Talents are mostly there to widen build options and sprinkle some customization on your character, it doesn't help to lock down half or more of your Talent choices because you want to be "Good with Shields". As another side note, why are your shield talents only available to Fighters? I don't see why it couldn't work on other classes. More useful on a frontline fighter than a wizard? Yeah, sure - but why should that restrict the wizard's options? I kinda want to nitpick a lot of other details in your examples, but I could be here all day, and it would kinda defeat the purpose of having fun with thinking up Talents and sharing them. So here are two of my Talent Ideas. (Which might already exist, who knows?) Look Ma, I'm a Wizard! Like a wizard, when using an implement (Wand, Rod or Sceptre) as a weapon, cause a small area of effect Blast around the target. Requirements: Not a Wizard. Specialized Defense (or you know, something more fun sounding.) Choose one of your Fortitude, Reflex or Will defenses. Increase this defense by 20, but decrease the other two by 5.

You'd like Steam specifically to do away with auto-updates, or the industry as a whole? Either way, not going to happen. It's only unfriendly to a small subset of customers. Those with stringent bandwidth limits and/or those grognards that want to keep control of everything themselves. I sometimes count myself among the latter group, but in this ever-more-so world of "it just works" computers, this is very customer friendly. Should the option to turn it off exists? Yes. Should you be locked out for not updating to the latest version of a single player game? Heck no. (Portal 2 is a bit of an edge case, considering it has co-op multiplayer. You're right that it's problematic that you're not allowed to play the singleplayer campaign without updating, though.) Do auto-updates fix more problems than they create? Yes, I do believe so.

Out of combat movement speed defaults to "slowest in party". (I believe there's an option to set it to free for all, too.)

Eh, doing that once is fine, but you'd have to do that a lot more often if being excessively protected is a regular merchant thing. Which ... would be really odd, I'd say. I'd much rather the game's consistency/verisimilitude break when the player breaks it first, than have it come pre-broken.

Mmmm? The way I remember Secret of Mana, as a single player you control the movement and weapon attacks of one character, and the other two were operated by the AI. You could even set their tactics in a menu somewhere. Didn't help that the AI was pretty bad/useless on just about any setting, but they were computer controlled. You, as player, kept control over item and spell usage regardless, through a ring menu that pauses the game. Didn't try multiplayer a lot, but I think you could only control your own spells and that of the AI character, not the other player's. Bringing up the ring menu still paused the game.

Yeah, I guess you are missing something. Not sure how to string whatever it is you're missing into something coherent, so I'll just address some of your points. One would imagine monsters and animals do have souls, but possibly lesser (or just different) than those of the sapient species. They might reincarnate into baby monsters and animals. No infinite zombie armies because they're expensive and/or hard to make? Oh, and to control. In PoE, you can't just take a dead body, shove some soul fragments in there, and hey presto, zombie! You need to tie the soul to the body, and from what I understand, this can only be done while the soul is still in there. (So, before death.) Then you need to starve the poor newly undead for a while before it becomes a full fledged zombie. Ti kill an undead, I'd imagine you simply damage the body enough until whatever process that tethered the soul to the body breaks. Alternatively, (and perhaps more horribly) you damage the body enough so it can't do anything anymore. This might involve grinding it down into a paste and setting it on fire. I dunno, I'm speculating here. Maybe people do reincarnate and come back as other species. (Maybe they don't, different kind of souls or something.) Won't do much good, they'd have to start at birth again anyway. There doesn't seem to be a (known) way to keep an already untethered/newly dead soul around or shove into something else.

Even with the Steam version, this should be possible. You can disable auto-updates on a game by game basis. Not sure about actually running the game without steam at the very least querying your online status, but depending on integration you might even be able to run it without booting up steam at all. (But you'll probably miss out on those steam achievements. Oh Noes!)

Right, should've known to check the wiki. "Igniting" still sounds destructive to me, though. Actually, checking out the references from that article, it IS destructive, and generally considered a Bad Thing. The memories don't end up in the steel, but are lost. Not much honor there. There may be ways to infuse weapons/armor with souls or parts thereof , but the result won't be called skein steel.

Regarding Skein Steel, the way I remember it, it's creation is powered by burning away a soul's memories. Not just trapping a soul into the metal. Destructive, as opposed to transformative. (Whether this burns up the entire soul, traps the remainder, or lets the remains of the soul continue on as normal, I don't know. Not sure this has been adressed.)

How? Poor word choice. I meant that having a closed-door demo at E3 with a weeklong press embargo is quite a departure of the sort of "Open Window"(?) style of development, with frequent public updates, and back and forth communication with backers, which is often seen in Kickstarter projects. There is an expectation by many backers that they will be the first to be let in on new information. I know it's not intrinsic to Kickstarter itself, which is just a funding model, but I figured it had become a bit of a shorthand for that. I'm going to assume those journalists in the video use it that way as well. (Yeah, also not going to watch that. Not really interested in that part of the discussion here.) I'd say Obsidian has done an admirable job with the "Open Window" (Is there a proper term for this?) model, with forum posts and 80 updates so far. If they feel the need to deviate from it now and then to ensure more/better media coverage, then I'm perfectly fine with that. (Except that it's still 2 hours until the embargo lift, and I have to leave for work in 2 hours. Hrnnng.)

And this ignores that what Obsidian did at E3 is a rather Un-Kickstarter like thing to do. Maybe even done to specifically address these concerns.

Yes, reactive, story based choice and consequence is cool. I hope there's a bunch. But if that's what I meant, I wouldn't consider it Scaling either. I am talking about the ghouls in Naughty Joe's sub-basement. (Not in the Mega Dungeon, because that's off the critical path, and thus not really applicable in this topic.) The expected level for this encounter is Level 6. Without scaling, on Easy difficulty, you'd face 2 Frenzied Ghouls(L6). On Normal, 4 Rotting Ghouls(L6), and on Hard, 2 Rotting Ghouls(L6) and 2 Frenzied Ghouls(L6). You're playing on Normal difficulty, and did a couple of sidequests, so yeah, you're level 6. You face 4 Rotting Ghouls(L6). It's the "Normal" encounter, and it was a fair fight. You're playing on Normal difficulty, but you've been putting off the quest to clear out Naughty Joe's sub-basement. It reeks down there, you see. So you did a whole bunch of sidequests first. Even visited the next town over. But you're here now, and you're Level 8.You face 2 Rotting Ghouls(L6), and 2 Frenzied Ghouls(L6). It's the "Hard" encounter, but it wasn't so tough. Your biggest worry is getting that stench out of your clothes. You're playing on Normal difficulty, but you've pretty much made a bee-line for Naughty Joe's since you heard the name. You probably thought he was the other kind of naughty. You're Level 3, and you face 2 Frenzied Ghouls(L6). It's the "Easy" encounter, but you're glad you made it out alive. You vow to only visit the reputable brothels from now on. Limit it to 1 difficulty jump. No "Easy" encounters while playing on "Hard", or vice versa. I guess if you're playing on "Hard", there'd have to be a "Hard+" encounter set, as well an "Snoozefest" one if you play on "Easy". But if you keep this kind of scaling to the Critical Path encounters only, that may not be too much work. And despite the messed up font sizes, using reputation instead of Level to scale encounters was more of a side note. Count all of your reputation points, both good and bad, faction or location doesn't matter. (Except maybe it does. Weigh it more or less, depending on your desired fudge factor.) This is your renown, or whatever you'd like to call it. How well known are you in the world? (With no judgement regarding which way you lean. Leave that to the Reactive Choice&Consequence encounters. This is the automagical encounter scaling part.) Set Expected Renown values for the Critical Path Encounters, and if you deviate beyond a certain limit, you get the Difficulty +/-1 version instead, just like above. It'll be tough to map Reputation to Renown and then that to Predicted Party Power, and is quite likely more trouble than it's worth. But I like the idea. It can extend beyond the level cap, it's more believable / natural than just reading off your Level, and you'd be able to game the system a little, and keep a low profile, or make a big splash, and have easy-to-implement consequences. It can also break horribly, so I'm not so sure about it all.

There's already Difficulty Scaling, right? Different encounters based on difficulty, not just number/level bloat. Couldn't that system be used to scale critical path encounters? If you're a certain distance from the expected level, grab the encounter set from one difficulty higher or lower. Heck, if you want some versimillipede, scale it depending on reputation instead of level, weighted to location perhaps. More reputation (Either "good" or "bad", doesn't matter. It doesn't cancel out anyway.) pretty much means more completed side quests, right? = More XP + Loot = More Powerful Party. Okay, reputation based is probably tricky/time consuming to get right. There'd also need to be crit-path encounters for "Easy Minus" and "Hard Plus". And maybe the jump between difficulties is too big? I dunno, but I figure it's less likely to screw everything up than most other versions I've seen.