gkathellar

Go bare hands agains sword wielding guy and then talk about 'supposed realism' If I could punch through metal, as monks in PoE can, I would totally do that.

Right now IIRC, Deflection is based on class, shield, and various miscellaneous abilities. Attributes factoring in would probably be a better approach than adding bonuses to weapons based on supposed realism.

Not to speak for Sensuki, but I think you're misunderstanding. He's saying that it's clear, from even a cursory examination of the Infinity Engine, that its fundamentals were originally put together for RTS combat. And he's right that it does have all of the staples and geegaws. Disagree - NWN at its best (though pretty good!) never approached the weirdness and tactical sophistication of IE, mostly due to control's limitation to a single character. Even spellcaster duels in PWs ultimately came down to the repetition of several metagame tactics. Okay, but that definition is not the one that everyone else here (and also not here) tends to use. ARPGs place the focus on, as Sensuki said, constant player input - which is neither necessarily quick, nor necessarily shallow. Diablo, Torchlight, Ys, Jade Empire - these are ARPGs. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just not this. You could easily get the same kind of craziness without spellcasters. Thieves in particular had a great variety of tricks and ways to work around their opponents. Soloing had its virtues, but lacked the sheer complexity and back-and-forth sophistication of playing with a party. Rule #1 of talking about NWN: Ignore the OCs. Modules and PWs are the only things worth talking about (and they could be very much worth talking about).

You must not have played much with high-level casters. The spellcaster micromanagement in BG2 was absolutely fantastic, and absurdly technical - for reference, the person who started the Solo Ascension challenge used the Limited Wish spell's rabbit summon as one of her primary tactics. Oh no you didn't. I don't know that rounds or the lack thereof are really the issue, considering that the IE games only really had rounds in the most abstract sense. I'd say the confusing nature of recovery time is the largest thing here. The solution that I want, for me, is auto-pause on recovery from non-repeated actions (i.e. anything other than basic attacks). +1.

FTFY.

Adding a general deflection bonus based on weapon type steps dangerously close to the sort of simulationism that seems intuitively realistic, but actually has little or nothing to do with reality, and has even less to do with a universe where people punch holes in metal. To be clear: if you want "realistic" deflection bonuses, you'd make polearms and the two-handed sword the supreme defensive weapons, because they were.

Emphasis mine - in such an abstracted system, what would that even mean?

This is generally very astute, but I do think the issue with combat feeling fast is more complex than you suggest - I've played BG2 with full mage parties and this still feels like I'm pausing more often and spending more time trying to figure out what's going on (even though I have fewer abilities, in many cases). I'm not sure about all of these, but I feel like contributing factors here are: Lack of visual combat feedback - as you say, the IE games are great on this, with the little flinch animations and whatnot. Tracking both health and stamina is hard on the player, and it's something I find myself having to do every single fight. Stamina can go up and down really fast during the course of 10-15 seconds (possibly because attacks basically never miss). The visual indicators on recovery give a player six little bars they're trying to track all at once, which makes for too much pausing. This could be eased with improvements to ... Auto-pause, especially with respect to spells/recovery, is currently just bizarre. "Spell cast" doesn't apply to your own spells (thus allowing you to respond to your character completing an action), but instead to enemy spells, which borders on useless since the spell effect won't even have played out yet. The timed autopause is basically nonsense - it's clearly meant to reflect the "per round" option from IE, but this game doesn't have rounds - it has per-character recovery times, which are already difficult to track. GUI issues - the ability selection buttons are tiny, etc.

Because those people would like to play a game that is fun. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

My biggest problem with the lack of combat XP in a BG-esque environment is the sense that the areas are full of all these pointless fights that I'm generally much better off avoiding. I could fight these random homicidal druids hanging around ... but fights in PoE are slow and eat into my resources, so why would I? IE games were rewarding in part because of the constant stream of rewards - from combat in the form of XP, and from exploration in the form of more combat and quests and gear. I understand the thematic decision to remove kill XP, and the reasons behind it. But there's got to be a solution that maintains some kind of XP rewards for things other than quests. Specific rewards for high value enemies, perhaps. Combat does have an on/off switch - what about XP for completing (or surviving/avoiding/whatevering) encounters? What about exploration XP, including for moving through (stealthily or with facestabbing) enemy-controlled areas? These are all ways to give that sense of encouragement back to core gameplay that seems missing with no combat XP. (Or just go all Rune Factory and give XP for absolutely everything, including bathing, and fill me with delirious joy.)

In fairness, some people might want maxed out stats to fully explore dialogue trees. Also, there was a "no-rerolls" challenge back on the old Bioware BG2 forums, where you made all six party members and took what the machine gave you. I never tried it, myself, but apparently around the midgame it could make Solo Tactics Ascension look like a cakewalk. Not that either of these are really important, but it bears noting that rolling stats for roleplaying or for challenge is not strictly absurd.

It was a staple part of the BG experience, but it's not one that should be replicated. Different era, different style of game.

Not 100% sure I'm in the right place in asking this, but is it presently possible? The how-to topic says there's a zoom function attached to the mouse's scroll-wheel, but someone on a laptop (like me) doesn't have that option. Is there any way to address this at present?

Mm. Part of the reason I started to think about it was because most of the conversation options require 14 in a stat, and if you actually invest evenly, you get 13 all around. FYI Intellect covers the Barbarian's AOE for fury-wotsit attack and also the duration of Wild-Sprint etc. Currently attributes only have a small effect (according to beta testers - 2nd hand info from me ) - dump away. Hopefully this'll get looked at through the beta phase. It does, but I'm not super-impressed by either of those. Presumably, when there are more and better abilities post-beta, Int will be less dumpable. Dex also seems fairly non-negotiable, at least if you intend to contribute any offense whatsoever.

The more I look at character creation, the more I feel tempted to leave one attribute all the way down at 3, so that I can have the others at reasonably high levels. I'm not expressing an opinion on this, just trying to get a feel for it. Obviously, there are no true "dump stats" in PoE, although some are easier to drop than others, at least for some classes. But if one or two of my scores is already going to be pretty low - say I'm rolling a Barbarian, and I'm probably not going to invest much in Intelligence or Perception, for instance - why shouldn't I drop the attribute entirely? Is there any particular benefit to having an attribute at 8, or 6, as opposed to, say, 3? And, as a secondary question - which attributes do you think are most dump-able, and in which circumstances?

The one with the best writing. All of these types of game narratives have their virtues, and I'm happy to partake of any of them. The only thing that really matters to me is whether those virtues are successfully brought out or not. Although, in practice, I find linear or halflinear stories tend to be the best-structured. But that may just be tautological - people who can write good stories want to tell at least partially linear stories.

Nnnnot really. In real life, two shields would be generally worse on the defense than a weapon with a shield, since you'd lack the ability to constrain, counterattack, and threaten at a greater range that a weapon provides. Much of the defensive efficacy from the combination of weapon and shield comes from the ability to defend at multiple different ranges simultaneously, or to defend at one range and attack at another (thus why the buckler, IRL, was the most advanced shield and the last to develop - it's the most active). The second shield doesn't offer you much additional protection, mostly covering angles that are already seen to by the first shield. But hey, it looks cool, and in video games, that's way more important.

After thinking about it a lot, I think Might is kinda non-intuitive, but not for the same reasons as some other posters - the problem, in my mind, has more to do with Dexterity and Constitution than the difference between Might vs. Strength. As a player, I'm used to seeing Str, Dex, and Con as a set. Sometimes Dex will by Agility, or Con will be Vitality, or whatever - but the three are usually seen as a set of "physical" stats, often with 2-3 mental stats accompanying them. So when I see Might, Dexterity, and Constitution coupled with Intelligence, Perception, and Resolve, it feels familiar, and I reflexively start looking for how the six stats go about playing to their archetypal roles. When they fail to do that, because Might really isn't Stength, it can be jolting, like a cognitive "skip" in a record. I may want to ignore it (not sure); I may like the new status quo (I do); but it still forces me to adjust. And I don't think this is a unique experience. I get that the game designers don't necessarily intend me to, and I understand that I should approach PoE as something fresh, but that is what it is. I have some limited experience with tabletop RPG design, and what I've learned, overwhelmingly, is that even things which make perfect sense can be problematic. For instance, my group had a system where any stat could be used to attack or defend (subject to class limitations), which led many people to question how that could be. To us, and to most of the people we explained it to, this made perfect sense - but it still put off some prospective players, even ones who thought our reasoning made sense. When something is non-intutive, even for really objectively silly reasons, it can break verisimilitude, or the feeling of realism (which is far more important than actual realism). Personally, I'd be inclined to either repurpose the Might stat to be more like Strength (keeping the name or otherwise), or to at least change the names of Dexterity and Constitution (possibly to something more abstract and more "mental" in tone). Either would allow things to be more intuitive. I don't think it's that there's anything inherently wrong with that approach, but for a certain number of people it just doesn't feel "right," so to speak, for their Medieval European fantasy. You could give all kinds of reasons - it breaks form, it feels "too anime" ( ), it's not what they felt they were signing up for, etc. I'm not 100% sure of where I stand on this, myself. On the one hand is the universe and its internal logic - it does make sense with PoE's notion of "spirit" as the power source of all characters. Fighters and barbarians and so on are ultimately a kind of mage in PoE, so it's not much of a leap to think that wizards and cyphers might benefit from well-conditioned bodies just as their counterparts do. I love this kind of internal consistency, and the sense of a very cohesive world that can often come with it. But on the other hand, making these kinds of radical shifts away from what's expected seems to be at odds with having such archetypal divisions as "fighter," "wizard," "cleric," and so on and so forth. I get that PoE wants to simultaneously invoke a feeling of the familiar while also going its own way, but when people hear "wizard," and they have certain expectations for what that means, especially when they hear it right next to other terms that it's often paired with. Veering away from those expectations can be offputting, even for someone (like me), who really wants to like the direction things have gone in. In fairness, the current approach is no more or less simulationist than the alternative - just different in a way that can be jarring.

[Obligatory complaint about lack of combat realism] Good, now that we have that out of the way, yeah, that would be cool. While I wouldn't want it to get in the way of developing other things (which makes implementation of something like this unlikely), I wouldn't mind being able to play out that scene from Jack and the Spartans in-game.

The mention of "live instrumentation" seems to cover it, though, since that is a Thing You Pay People To Do. So, the promise is, in essence: "at $4M, we guarantee to Pay People to do Additional Things, which we might not have been willing to shell it out for previously." That seems fairly simple.