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Eurhetemec

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Everything posted by Eurhetemec

  1. This is such a classic official forums response to a perfectly reasonable feature. First we have a guy assuming it's going to be online-only, despite the game explicitly having a DRM-free version, which means nothing can be "online only". Then after the reasonable people pointing out that this (obviously) need not be the case, we have people actively hoping for the Fig to not make money, so they don't have tolerate the presence of an ENTIRELY OPTIONAL feature. I mean good god people, get a grip.# Just because this is in the game, DOES NOT, I repeat, DOES NOT mean you have to use it. It is optional, and likely there will be a lot of different options, probably some of which you will actually like. I think it's nice that they're giving boost options, because some people will really enjoy that, but you are never going to have to take them, so why get upset? It's like going to the icecream parlour then throwing a fit or wishing to the employees that they go broke, because as well as having icecream, they have optional sprinkles to put on icecream.
  2. Is this explicitly confirmed? It seems like if only two Paladin orders, and only two gods, both out of several available, got subclasses, that'd be a little messed-up. Wouldn't it make more sense for the subclasses to be role-based, rather than order/diety-specific? I mean, that's how AD&D did it with kits.
  3. That does sound great, because replaying Pillars right now, telling what exactly is going on is challenging. The combat log scrolls at 1000mph but if you make it big enough to read properly it takes up a huge amount of screen real-estate! I'd rather not feel like I needed to read it, either. Oddly enough I didn't have this issue with the older Infinity Engine games. Anyway, it's "Most Improved", great!
  4. There's actually another good reason that I think will account for 99% of the 1/17 builds out there - that being that many companions have a fixed base class (or a small choice). For example, Aloth has to be a Wizard at L1, but you know someone out there is going to go "It'd be so much better if he was a Cipher..." and just leave 1 level in Wizard then go Cipher the rest of the way. Similarly we'll probably see Eders who are 1 level of Fighter or Rogue (his choice), then 17 levels of Paladin or Barbarian (or even other things like Priest), and so on.
  5. Given all the screenshots we've seen have been deserts or jungles, and they've been talking a lot about how excited they are to do that kind of terrain, I think you'll be okay! I doubt we'll see much actual under-ocean, as a 2D engine doesn't allow for swimming and they'd have to have special codes for all the spells, ranged weapons and so on. Buildings under the sea, maybe, but like, using magic or wearing diving suits? I'd be surprised to see that. In fact, I think this forum kind of has the opposite problem - I think a lot of people are assuming that there will be extremely elaborate sea-battles (a lot of people keep pointing to Assassin's Creed's sea battles, which is hilarious given this is an isometric party-based game!), tons of complex sea action and so on, and I suspect that there will be relatively little and/or it will get resolved by illustrated choose-your-own-adventure dialogues, at least until one of the ships gets boarded (or rammed by a sea creature). I will be pretty shocked if all four creatures the OP mentions aren't in the game in some form, and I think he's right to assume we'll end up inside a leviathan at some point (probably with some kind of twist, like it's undead or something - but maybe Dwarf Fortress' zombie whales have traumatized me so much I live in fear of them...).
  6. My math is correct and gives the correct results if and only if my assumptions are correct. That is, that: power level vs power source progression remains linear from power level 6 onward (the trend from 3->4->5->6 indicates this) and ratio between different power levels is a good (or even precise) indication of efficacy. The second assumption here being the greater uncertainty, which is what You are rightfully aiming at. However I will not believe any number that is just plucked from thin air, because it is just too convenient to come up with something, that fits the model producing a desired result. There are also two other crucial things wrong with your numbers. First one being, that the point was for each individual class of a multiclass character to perform at ~80% effectiveness, not 40%. The second one is, that effectiveness is almost certainly not a simple sum. The inspiration for PoE have been D&D games and much of the mechanics is based on D&D. In D&D encounter levels were in a quadratic relation with the number of opponents, which means, that a level 5 NPC would have been at 1/32 of effectiveness of a level 10 NPC. This is, of course, another assumption, which I did not make in my initial calculations. The efficacy numbers would have been even worse otherwise. Oh, you mistake my purpose with this post. I'm not complaining at all. As I've said, I'm just pointing out a potential problem with the model. And of course I don't have extra insight, nor do I know how things will look in the game, but making two not really intrepid assumptions and the numbers we do know, I am just hoping to constructively comment on the presented model. Waiting for beta will not help anyone and would not accomplish anything in this case. It is harder to change mechanics by then and I am almost certain, that we will not get an opportunity to play level 16-18 characters in the beta. As I've said, the potential problems described in my original post would be most prominent at higher levels. If you're seriously concerned about this, you should ask Sawyer about it on his Twitter or Tumblr. He answers questions of a similar nature pretty regularly. But I would suggest you are being silly in three ways. Firstly, you are making too many assumptions about both the precise intent of MC'ing and the precise indication of efficacy. You kind of admit that latter but I'm not sure you're really thinking about how big a hole it is in your knowledge. They absolutely are "intrepid" assumptions, contrary to your claim that they are "not really intrepid". Secondly, you're assuming that this is something the devs, particularly Sawyer, are completely unaware of this, which seems wildly, wildly unlikely, and could easily be found out by... asking Sawyer. It's not like he's in some sort of fortress. Man is answering questions every day. Thirdly, your claim that "by beta it will be too late and not help anyone" is a totally unsupported assertion that has significant evidence against it, given the massive changes Pillars 1 went through, and the massive changes virtually every AAA CRPG goes through. Still, why not actually go to Sawyer with this, if you're serious?
  7. I'd be pretty skeptical if it wasn't Sawyer behind this. He's pretty great at reasoning this kind of thing through, and people rarely give him enough credit when he makes a change that appears risky, assuming it's just a random bad idea like it would be with a lot of devs.
  8. It's day 24 of what, 29, 30, and this is on Fig, not Kickstarter, so is going to lose a huge bunch of people due to that. Plus Paypal isn't in yet. The interesting thing this time is that people are backing for a higher average. We have 16k backers and 1.7m, so over $100 average. With 77k backers and what, $3.9m or something, it was a much lower per-backer average. I expect the total will inevitably be lower than 77k, given this isn't Kickstarter and isn't 2012, and the market for trad CRPGs is no longer kind of starved, but I also expect there will be a big rush of people in the last day or two.
  9. I'm not against this, but that just isn't, even arguably, "an improvement". An improvement on something is similar but better. What you're proposing there is entirely different and essentially completely unrelated subsystem (which could actually co-exist with the current food system). It might be great. It's not an "improvement". Personally I think the whole "food as temporary buff" deal is kind of annoying to manage in Pillars 1, especially if you want everyone to have a food so have to carefully split the stacks and click them individually and so on. So I'd be happy to either see a big change like you've suggested (which could be an improvement or just tedious, pointless resource management, depending entirely on the precise design), or just an improvement to the way food is handled by the UI. Making the buffs last longer (even if they had to become smaller) would be good too (maybe "until rest"). The problem with your proposal, though, is that it overlaps with the current "camping supplies" design, which already (presumably) incorporates food, so that'd need looking at. The OP's suggestion isn't bad but it would seem like it was stretch-goal material, not merely a normal suggestion, as it'd have to be an entirely new and pretty big system, and require a ton of extra dialogue to be written and recorded. The most hilarious game for this is Fallout 4. A lot about the NPCs has been improved to make them seem less static, but with this they kind of went too far, because it seems to be triggered on area transition, so I've had bunches of NPCs want to have a serious conversation just as I zoned into a dungeon... Like, Piper, seriously, do you really want to talk about this in a radioactive storm-drain full of raiders?
  10. Aloth doesn't have one - his first level is always in Wizard. I suspect Pallegina will be the same way with Paladin.
  11. You do realize that the entire campaign for PoE was based on appealing to Infinity Engine "purists" and "nostalgia zombies", right? I could be totally off here, but I was under the impression that PoE was created to scratch that IE CRPG itch a lot of people have had for over a decade. The point was to provide us with more of that same style of game, not to break entirely new ground and change up the formulae. How can one "realize" something that isn't true? Why should one? That's a gross mischaracterization of the original Pillars campaign. They certainly said that they were adding to and changing elements of the formula, and more to the point, with Pillars 2's pitch, they explicitly said that they were changing stuff, for, in their opinions, the better.
  12. I think so, years have passed since PoE1, devs could have reconsidered about a lot of things since then, not just romances. And today devs are not in such dire straights as they were back then. And furthermore, I don't think writing a bunch of scripted text is as costly as you make it out to be. So yeah, this thread is valid again and one can hope devs will deign to comment somewhere about it. Afterall, they're stabbing at Baldur's Gate 2 glory now, and BG2 had romances, which were quite fine. Devs in general are in just as dire straits as they were back then. Kickstarter does not solve the long-term problem in this industry where independent developers have very few realistic paths to actually existing in not-dire straits. This is well documented. "Writing a bunch of scripted text isn't that expensive" - ask any game developer. By that logic anything that just involves a bit of code or writing should be piss easy to put out, yeah? --- Getting into more subjective territory: MOTB and PST had passable romances from what I remember, but they weren't the best parts of the character interactions and they didn't make or break those specific characters. I don't see a good argument for including romances, I only see an argument that sometimes it's awful, and at rare times it is just passable. Actually, you're wrong. A more valid argument has been advanced than "I like it". Upthread LordCrash pointed out that to have complex and realistic characters you pretty much have to allow for them to have some kind of sexuality, which depending on the writing, might lead naturally to something that some people would describe as a romance. And I can't see any rational rebuttal to that. Either you have to elaborately and unnaturally write around it - at which point you may be taking more effort to not write romance than to write it, or you acknowledge it's a possibility and don't intentionally avoid it, just see what happens with the writing. Equally it's fine if it doesn't seem right for any of the characters, of course. The only positions which are wholly opinion based are: 1) NO ROMANCES EVER! and 2) We need multiple romances, or every companion to be romanceable! Those opinions I agree are open to the same criticisms as each other. But there are more positions than just those.
  13. To be fair to him, the links you provided do not contain any particularly convincing or enlightening arguments, just a lot of ranting and opinion.
  14. Final Fantasy 12 was by no means the first game to do this - Baldur's Gate 2 did, for example - you just did the scripting out of game, and I know it wasn't the first. The gambit system in FF12 was pretty great though. Pity FF13's character programming system wasn't as good. I very much agree that it's a great feature. But I would be leery of it doing too much - FF12 was designed around the gambit system so the characters basically playing themselves was "gameplay as intended", but some BG2 scripting went too far, as did mod'd DA:O scripting. While I agree that it was possible prior to FF12 to edit scripts for games or even make custom ones, I'm not aware of any games besides FF12 and DA:O that let you do this explicitly in the game itself, which is what I wanted refer to. I'd be interested if you know other titles that allowed for this. It's a difficult thing to research, it turns out! I haven't yet found any one which had an in-engine tactic construction tool like that. They're all either out of game, or more limited. I still feel like I'd see it before FF12, though, because it was really unsurprising. Maybe it was just because of all the simple out-of-game scripting I'd seen.
  15. That's strange. Can you initiate combat with bystander NPCs in Copperlane, throw a few persistent spell effects and see what happens to your frame rate? It would be even more embarrassing and bizzare if weaker PCs run this game better than more powerful hardware! I'm playing through again and will do so next time I get to Copperlane but I seriously had no framerate issues there last time, and my machine is beefier now so... maybe it'll perform worse? I dunno...
  16. Huh, I'm basically anti-romance (in Pillars) but that's actually a very good point that I can't refute. Some people are inevitably all about that sort of thing and it's really part of the core of their being, so it'd weird to exclude it for the sake of excluding it.
  17. I wouldn't expect those until the game is within six months of release, perhaps later (some games wait until about a month before release to prevent disappointment if they can't optimize as much as they'd like).
  18. Final Fantasy 12 was by no means the first game to do this - Baldur's Gate 2 did, for example - you just did the scripting out of game, and I know it wasn't the first. The gambit system in FF12 was pretty great though. Pity FF13's character programming system wasn't as good. I very much agree that it's a great feature. But I would be leery of it doing too much - FF12 was designed around the gambit system so the characters basically playing themselves was "gameplay as intended", but some BG2 scripting went too far, as did mod'd DA:O scripting.
  19. Actually it's the other way round: Nobody has provided any kind of sound reason why the party must be capped at 5... What we have though is a range of very similar games from both the far and recent past that worked quite well with a party size of 6 rr less, if people wanted. So there is sound empirical evidence FOR capping at 6 while there is completely NO evidence or reason of any kind why capping at 5 would serioulsy improve this type of game... I don't think you understand what "empirical evidence" really means or it's role in logic, here. Obviously one cannot have a priori knowledge of a thing that has not happened yet. You might as well prance around in the early 1930 insisting jet engines are a bloody stupid idea and propellers are obviously better, because, yes the empirical evidence would support that obviously wrong and silly opinion! Essentially your "empirical evidence" here is tradition. Like this: I mean, we all love Fiddler, right, but that song is showing very well how tradition has it's ups and downs. What we do have are some very serious developers who are unusually and atypically good at balance and system design (like it or not, they are better than any other CRPG devs I can think of), who are telling us they changed it to five for a good reason, and have, contrary to your claims, explained that reason, just not in extreme detail. Would I love a detailed explanation? Sure. Do I prefer six naturally? Yes, but I've got faith in Obsidian to not make a weird change like this without a very good reason.
  20. Why shouldn't you be able to do just that if the next group of enemies is right there 10 meters away. Because being able to regen and reset per-encounter abilities while still having a wyvern active is a bit broken in terms of combat balance. Yep. If you can drag Chanter summons to a fight, you should not get your per-encounter abilities back. I mean, I'd be okay with that design - that encounter abilities came back and summons vanished maybe 10 seconds after combat ended, but you can have both your encounter abilities AND your summons.
  21. Well, they also thought they could create a better combat system than D&D back in the Infinity Engine days... And well, look at how that turned out... Successfully? Pillars' system is insanely better-balanced, more tactical and better rounded than AD&D 1/2E, D&D 3E, or D&D 5E. You could argue 4E is equally well-balanced and maybe even more tactical, though, I admit.
  22. It's not pointless. Devs are not always right on the decision they made. Sure they may not care, but if said majority of its fans are unhappy they'll reconsider their stance. It's entirely pointless. You're asking them to rebalance the entire game, top-to-bottom, and reverse a design decision which affects the design of virtually every ability in the game, essentially to please your whims. No-one has provided any kind of sound reason why 6 is necessary. We only have "Omg its traditional!" and "But I want more characters! :(" Whilst I sympathize with the latter - and would prefer six myself, oddly enough, I'm not silly enough to think I know better than Obsidian and I certainly don't want them to end up taking months extra on the game design solely to allow another character. Anyway, they won't do it, thankfully.
  23. Sounds like 2E or 5E's multiclassing when it worked properly, which is ideal, I feel. That's real multiclassing which works without being overpowered or underpowered (well, 2E could be OP at times but rarely and usually only for a level or two before single-classers pulled ahead again).
  24. Hopefully with a vastly less awful and clumsy interface than DA:O, and more intelligible options. DA:O was strong in terms of providing scripting, but terrible in terms of interfacing with that scripting, or explaining what stuff actually did. DA2 PC did a much better job with a scripting system that made absolute sense and was easy to use, but was slightly more limited than the DA:O one (though IIRC it had some options DA:O didn't have, too). Let's just hope they don't go to Dungeon Siege levels of scripting, where the game can effectively play itself with you merely clicking where to go!
  25. I think you might be a very rare person to think this. I personally found it a huge chore to try and round up all the companions in Pillars, and it's just annoying that some of them aren't even available until level 7-8-ish, by which time you could easily be most of the way through the main game. It'd be much better for Pillars 2 to give you all the companions in the first few hours, given they only have seven of them. The only times it makes sense to have companions available late in a game is when you have a vast number of them (as with some JRPGs), or when you can only have one companion at once (as with TES/Fallout 3/4/NV).
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