Answermancer
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Posts posted by Answermancer
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I don't understand you, sorry. I want to have physically weak old, very old wizard that can blast mountains with his spells. Or I want to have weak willed charismatic bard. Try to stat them in this new system.
The problem is that in D&D those archetypical characters you mention are the only mechanically effective ones. Only a Wizard with max Int is any good in combat, only a Bard with high Charisma. Your desire to have some validation for these cliché characters limits everyone else.
I like that I can actually build 6 wizards that will play completely differently with completely different strengths and weaknesses, I can come up with roleplaying explanations in my head if I want. In D&D you will not build a low-Int Wizard that isn't terrible, it just can't be done. They might be useful outside of combat if your DM gives them something to do but a computer game will never be as flexible as a real DM and won't ever be able to support every mechanically-gimped character type with roleplaying opportunities.
Still in BG2 there was no need to micromanage all party with redundant abilities. Just send your Minsc in the direction of enemy and focus on micromanagement of 1-2 casters in your team. Now... You have to babysit all of them!
Why is it so hard for you to understand that not everyone wants to play a Wizard? Why should Wizards be the only fun characters (sorry, I don't consider a character who spends his whole time auto-attacking to be fun)?
You get to create a main PC in these games, they are the only character you get to directly create at the start of the game and they will be with you for the entire play through. They will be the ones you control in dialogue. I would like my main character to be interesting and fun to play in combat, regardless of if he's a fighter, a rogue, a wizard, or a anything else. I also find trash fights that are trivial a waste of time, this game has a strategy game combat system, it should require at least a modicum of strategy to win any fight.
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Ok. Here is my constructive criticism:
1. Return classic intuitive stats (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma). Don't want to have dump stats? Just make sure that there is logical explanation why should Wizard take high Strength. Maybe there could be builds of melee wizard? Or maybe Strength could contribute to defenses vs. some kind of physical attacks (like knockouts). No need to actually use D&D system, just use classic stats that are self-explanatory.
2. Return classic IE inventory and add more filters/etc to it. Bring back item weight and encumbance. No more console-like infinite stashes! If you want more space - buy magic bags.
3. Remove at least 50% of abilities from non-casters and make others mostly in format of 'enabled / disabled'. This will greatly reduce amount of micromanagement that is required in combat.
Adding my feedback so that devs don't think that the people who want BG2.5 are a majority.
Dear Obsidian, please don't do any of the things this person says. Please keep the game as is and polish. The stat system is much better, the combat is much more active and interesting (and better), the classes are much better.
I disagree with anyone who wants to remove/change features for "immersion" which is a nonsense word that means something else to every single person who says it.
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Remember, these are trash mobs not bosses. This is not a special encounter, just a few foes meant to break up exploration. It's not that I can't beat them; it's that it requires too much effort. I'll put it this way:
I really don't like this argument some people are throwing around. If an encounter is trivial why even have it? Better off removing it at that point.
If you want to relax or whatever and not be challenged set the game to Easy, I'm pretty sure you can change the difficulty in-game (and if not they should allow you to).
As it is, I don't think most encounters are hard on Normal (playing a melee Rogue PC) as long as you pay just a little attention to your enemies. I strongly feel that there should not be any encounters (on Normal or higher) that you can defeat by just rushing guys in without any thought to engagement, positioning, or ability use.
And I'm not a guy who plays games for challenge, I rarely play games above Normal and extreme challenge does not appeal to me at all. But I also don't think that having a bunch of mindless trash encounters in this kind of game, especially one where you don't get XP for killing stuff, is good design.
All I really think the game needs is bug fixes, some balance passes, slower movement (but not ability use) and a whole lot of nice QoL stuff to add clarity (engagement circles, better damage/crit/ability feedback). Possibly a rebalance on the Stamina:Health ratio also, if the adventuring day ends up too short.
Edit: Also, even with the bugs, including disappearing items, I already find combat here more fun than say in the WL2 beta when it first came out.
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Hi Eric, thank you for the clarification, it definitely helps me understand what you guys are going for.
I do have kind of mixed feelings about this part though:
To that end, we've also tried to include a number of dialogues where the "optimal" outcome is primarily related to the player paying attention to the character he or she is talking to, and choosing to treat that NPC in a way that the NPC is able to relate to on some level.
While I agree that it's cool to reward the player for paying attention, I'm worried this sort of takes away from the idea of character skill being important, more important than player skill even. I would think that a character that is good at understanding people (good at Insight in D&D terms, perhaps, I suppose it would be Perception in PoE?) would have these sort of opportunities even if the player's not very good at reading people.
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People who are reacting negatively to you are doing so because your post is hyperbolic and ignorant of game development in a way that makes people roll their eyes. You say that they "opted to release the beta in a barely playable state" which is nonsense. They committed to releasing it at a certain time and did so, and plenty of people are playing it. There are some massive bugs, sure, and all it takes is one or two impactful bugs to make a game "unplayable" by yours or most people's standards. These kind of bugs, though they make the game barely playable, are not particularly difficult to fix (once you find the root cause) and they can easily sneak into a game that's undergoing rapid development between builds.
Imagine a full finished game like BG2 but add a bug where all your characters are reset to level 1 periodically. This would make it unplayable, sure, but it's also just one bug, and likely an easy one to fix (though perhaps hard to track down).
I have worked on games, and I've played a ****ton of early, alpha, and beta releases and I see nothing here that is out of the ordinary for a beta, particularly one that is only going out to backers rather than the world at large. They are wise, in my opinion, to only release it to us in this state (rather than selling it as an early access demo like many companies are doing), collect our bug reports and feedback, and concentrate on finishing the game.
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To me, if creating six ~equally compelling attribute choices is a primary design goal - recovery time, deflection and hostile effect duration reduction are the three best things I can think of to choose from.
Wait how are you spreading those out then? Don't you lose a stat assigned for Accuracy in the process? Or are you just saying choose 2 of those 3 to assign to Per and Res?
What do you think of the ones I favored here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/66950-combat-feels-activeness-speed-and-pace/page-2?do=findComment&comment=1483866? Evasion for Res not interesting enough? Too weak? Too powerful?
As I said in another thread I feel like Deflection is not interesting enough to base a build around or universal enough (just one of 4 defenses), for a defensive stat Con works because it affects all damage you take, and so would down-converting glances and hits.
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Sliding recovery time via attribute not only affects mechanics (and we all know how valuable attack/action speed is), but also the visual presentation of combat and many feel that actions in combat are already too fast.
It might just be me but personally I feel like movement speed and such is too high (too hard to engage in a sane way since as soon as you're noticed everyone is on top of you), but action speed is about right.
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Yeah I thought that recovery time and increased action speed would be quite noticeable and valuable but so far in practice I haven't seen that be the case, so I think having an attribute affect recovery time/action speed might be fine.
And I do like the idea of support a very "speedy" sort of character, in fact the threads I've been reading make my current preferrences something like:
- Make Dex give improved recovery time/action speed
- Make Per govern Accuracy
- Make Res give a chance at avoidance (convert glances to misses and hits to glances on the low end)
I like this setup because it opens up two additional archetypal "builds" that people can invest in, the speedy scrapper and the evasion tank.
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I think the problem is that often melee characters run out of health much quicker than casters run out of spells.
It's possible, but I suspect there's a degree of balance/tradeoff here though.
What I mean is, if your fighters are running out of health so much more quickly than others are running out of per-day spells then maybe that's because you're not using your big per-day abilities enough
. In other words, if you used those powerful abilities in every fight, they would end much sooner and your fighters would not be soaking damage for as long.I suspect there's some balance here where if you save up all your powerful abilities, your fights will take a long time as you whittle things down, and so your melee will take a lot of damage and need to rest. Whereas if you blow your load of spells more often you'll end fights quickly and have plenty of health left but need to rest to regain abilities.
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All joking aside, I do think an "all to Stash" button would be great. I'm visualizing the loot window in my head, and I don't even know how to intentionally send something to the stash if I still have room.
You can open the stash in your inventory and move things into it.
Also when looting you can click on character faces for who should take it OR there should be a button for the stash and if you select that before hitting Take All it should all go in the stash (I think).
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What if Resolve passively converted Glances into Misses and Hits into Glances at the lower end? The opposite of high Accuracy I guess, an ability to "shrug off damage", or dodge it in a way. It would apply to all damage the same way Con's health bonuses do.
Might still be too subtle to be interesting, or alternately too powerful, but it would make it easier to play an "evasion tank" type character. I dunno.
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Resolve, I think, is easier to solve: it needs an offensive bonus of some sort. Since its current bonus is to allowing you to cast when you get hit, something related to skills wouldn't go amiss. Perhaps a percent chance to make a use of a per-rest skill count as a per-encounter instead? Or maybe give all skill users an instant-use activated ability to treat their next per-rest skill as per-encounter, and have Resolve affect the stamina cost to do it (it might cost 50 stamina per spell level, for instance, and Resolve drops the cost by 4%).
Those sound way too fiddly, and potentially overpowered, also no other stat does anything like that.
I do think that Resolve either needs SOME sort of offensive use, or a more universally useful defensive one (like Con's extra health, relevant in every fight against every kind of damage) or Concentration needs to be considerably more obvious and powerful somehow.
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I think that because the map menu is not full screen, it would be weird if the game screen didn't move when you moved around in the map. The scrolling when you do it needs to be smoother though, and yeah I've always used double click in the IE games.
Ah, then yes, I agree. I just think the click-and-drag scroll needs to stay, it would be nice if it was smoother though.
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I disagree on this one, I think the current scrolling functionality is better and I would be really annoyed if scrolling that square did nothing on the main map. The current functionality is consistent with clicking-and-scrolling on maps and minimaps in many games so I think it's a pretty standard and good way to do it.
Adding a double-click to close and center on that location sounds like a good idea though for people who are into that.
Personally I am used to closing every screen with the same shortcut that I used to open it (so open map with M, scroll or click to where I want, close the map with M) so the double-click thing doesn't matter to me, and neither does how you close the screen, but it'd be nice for those who prefer that.
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As far as giving a stat just Deflection as its bonus, I don't think defenses are interesting enough to make a stat worth investing in heavily if that's all that stat does.
I mean in a D&D-like system would you give a character who otherwise didn't need it a ton of Wisdom and then feel satisfied that your character has "a badass Will save?" I wouldn't. I think few people would max Dexterity just for the Deflection/AC benefit, they'd put a few points into it for sure, but never really focus on it except for classes that get combat use out of it (Rogues and Rangers and the like in D&D).
I think 4e dealt with defenses best by just tying each defense (including AC) to the higher of 2 stats so each class would passively have 1-2 good ones.
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I don't necessarily disagree that this might be a problem (I don't feel confident enough to say either way yet) but some of you are really ignoring that plenty of the powerful ranged classes need to rest to get their abilities back.
SOME abilities are per-encounter, but most of the more powerful ones are per-day. So saying things like "an all ranged party with CC will be better because they can CC all the things, never take damage and never need to rest" is not accurate, because they will run out of decent CC abilities and have to rest to get them back.
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I didn't do a search for this, so apologies if it's been mentioned already.
When using AOE-attacks (f.e. fireball), the selection circles of affected characters and enemies should give an indication such as blink slowly. Right now it's hard to tell if you're actually going to hit someone at the edge of the selection area or not.
I agree with this. I think there should be some indication if enemies are within the AoE circle, personally I was going to suggest making the actual character model blink or rather pulse transparency if the target is within the circle.
Considering that AoE ranges in this game can vary significantly depending on the caster's Int, I really don't understand how anyone can be against showing AoE ranges and other such indicators but that aside it should at least be a setting I think to show if someone actually is inside the circle or not since with the perspective it's often hard to tell.
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Does he have a Grimoire equipped in his inventory (mine did but I heard some people had a bug where they didn't have one)?
Does the Grimoire have spells prepared inside it (right-clicking it should bring up the interface).
Go to keybindings and set hotkey for Grimoire, which will open the spellbook and let you assign spells. I'm guessing adding an interface button for it is still on the to-do list or they've just hidden it really well because I couldn't find it either.
You can have more than one Grimoire, so I'm not sure a button for it will work, unless it just edits the currently equipped one. Like I said above, right-clicking it in your inventory should work.
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I think Sensuki's ideas sound pretty solid, I also argued against attack speed a few months ago I think based on the idea that faster action speed improves too many things at once and would be hard to balance. But considering the speed of actions in the actual game, and how many things reduce it (in terms of armor) I think it might work okay.
I think Resolve still being purely defensive is a good point though, but I like the symmetry between Int boosting your durations and Resolve lowering enemy durations, so I have mixed feelings there.
I agree that Penetration would be a poor choice not only because it's just another form of damage like you said, but also because it seems like it'd be really weird to balance unless you can have fractional Penetration. I mean would 10 be the point where you get 0 Penetration? If so what's the penalty for making it lower than 10? If 3 is the 0 point then you could potentially make a character with 15+ Penetration? Considering that DT seems to have a pretty low range that would be pretty ridiculous.
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Yes please.
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There's a Slow-mo and Double speed. I'm personally not interested in either of those features, though - as it all scales.
What do you mean it all scales? It's definitely not a solution for people moving too quickly compared to how fast you can take actions and all that, I agree, but that's not what those features are for.
I'm pretty sure slow-mo is to make combat more manageable if you don't want to pause all the time and double speed is for running around places you've explored without waiting 5 minutes for people to run from one side of the map to the other. I like that they are both there, I do think that the overall speed of things needs adjustment aside from those features.
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I think the problem here is the Stamina to Health ratio. I think in order to make the length of the adventuring day "feel" more IE, the amount of stamina damage converted to health damage needs to be decreased - so that while encounters can be lethal, you can last a lot more of them throughout the adventuring day, and take on a lot more encounters and actually feel like you're getting to use all of your class abilities/dailies so you can actually get the feeling of being low on other strategical resources, as well as Health.
I think you're dead on here, having individual encounters be dangerous is cool, but only having enough Health to last for 2-3 encounters creates issues. They should either tweak the ratio like you said or add a limited way to restore Health without resting (maybe an ability for each character with 1 use per day that restores 50% health, sort of like 4E healing surges).
Or maybe a "short rest" ability that does the same thing (50% health restored, 1 use per day) but for the whole party so that if your Fighter gets low but not everyone else, you have to decide whether you want to use up your "short rest" while everyone else is still healthy or risk it and save it up. Short rests are a "thing" in both 4E and 5E so there's some precedent for ideas on how it might work.
I suspect that tweaking the ratio would be easier, but I'm not sure. I think the other two options are more strategically interesting but also maybe not enough so to be worth bothering with.
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Is the performance of the beta supposed to be at all representative of the final product? Because it runs so slow on my computer it's nearly unplayable. OK, this isn't exactly a gaming machine, it's an ultrabook. But it's only like a year old and has a Haswell i5 in it. And I had assumed that since this was a mostly 2D game it ought to still be able to run acceptably. But what I've found isn't acceptable at all. Just scrolling the viewpoint to see more of the map takes forever. Makes the whole game a chore to play.
How much RAM does that ultrabook have? The maps are enormous images loaded into memory and each one has several different version (for lightmaps and such) so any computer without a lot of memory is probably going to have issues, although they did say recently they are working on that.
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Not really, it depends on how they balance it and how many points they give you to spend. The limit is 18 one way or the other, so say Dwarves gave you +6 might, it would make it cheaper to max out Might and you'd have more points left over for other stuff, whereas with another race you'd get +6 to something else, or +3 and +3 to two other things and you could still max out Might at 18 easily it would just cost more points to do so but you'd have a buffer in two other attributes to make up for it.Ultimately it's just flavor at that point though, since you can probably min-max it however you want, it just gives those races a stronger initial push towards that stat.Nevermind, for some reason I thought it worked this way (I thought it did when I made my first character) rather than adding the points on top of the cap. Not sure why I thought it was working that way.
. In other words, if you used those powerful abilities in every fight, they would end much sooner and your fighters would not be soaking damage for as long.
More like BG2 please
in Backer Beta Discussion
Posted · Edited by Answermancer
My idea is of fun is for every class to have active things they can do, which I do not consider in anyway "the same playstyle," and for there to not be encounters you just walk over without any thought. I want a Rogue to have active abilities that make it more rogueish, but I still want it to focus on sneak attacks and hit and run maneuvers, I don't see how that's the same playstyle as a fighter or wizard.
I get that you don't like that, and that's fine, but your claim that it can't coexist with the feel of an IE game is not only false it's arrogant as **** since you are assuming that your personal idea of the "feel" of an IE game is the only valid one.
None of the things you mention make the game feel more or less like an IE game to me, because it's not what I liked about them. I never once while playing an IE game thought "Gee it sure is nice that I only have to micromanage one character" or "Man I'm glad I could just stomp those guys without any thought, so relaxing".
Clearly plenty of people feel the same way I do, so stop acting like you're some great moral authority on "how an IE game should feel" because it's completely subjective.