Real time with pause was cumbersome as hell...

[mickeym]

While I guess it doesn't have to be the case, it just is in some games. I think my own opinion of games regarded as classics such as BGII differs from the mainstream in some ways, two of them been the way that it handled time and special effects. First of all, I didn't think it was cool or awesome to have most of the people in a high level battle to be buried underneath a heap of persistent protection spells and area of effect magic, in fact I found it extremely irritating and I have no desire at all for Project Eternity to make it harder than it has to be to observe the tactical situations. The other problem was the fact that unlike turn based gameplay, it's kid of difficult to keep track of how much time has passed between the start of the battle to the present moment. This can make it really difficult to manage high level battles in which there can be several short term persistent magic effects counting down to zero simultaneously so I'm kind of hoping that we won't have to keep a stop watch handy just to get a rough idea of how much longer that timestop (or whatever) is going to run for. I believe that this is the kind of info that the game should make easily accessible at a quick glance.

 

Anyway, just hoping that PE will let me opt out of these two pitfalls which I believe other RTWP games (BGII) failed spectacularly at.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

While all of that spell layer criticism is valid, PE isn't going to be BG2 and I don't think they're going to make the high level spells have huge graphical effects that cause problems with gameplay.

[SGray]

There should be a limit one protection spell active

Wut? Newer! Magic part was one of my favorites in BGs battles.

 

Anyway, just hoping that PE will let me opt out of these two pitfalls

Partially agree with first statement - sometimes fully buffed chars looked too sparky, but can't imagine other way to quickly visually distinguish separate buffs. Hadn't much trouble with aoe spells also.

And again, partially agree with the second one - it was difficult to track round end visually, it was helped by togglable automatic pause on the round end, but it would be good if there would be some visual representation of rounds passing (rotating smth in the corner of the screen, where PS:T timer was), if there would be rounds at all.

[Sabotin]

Well I guess it should not be too hard to show time remaining when you mouse over a buff icon or something? I think the Drakensang games did something like this.

 

I also dislike to buff a hundred buffs, but I think I wouldn't just want to remove them, maybe just order the stacking a bit, so that you're using the strongest version instead of all of them? For me it's part of the fun to know what protections an enemy has and how to remove them instead of just whacking away and conversely what kind of protections I need for a certain battle.

[Sedrefilos]

The problem was that they put pen n paper rules into a computer game. imho that doesen't work well. DA:O did a very good job imo in real-time+pause battle and it used mana/fatigue and cooldowns and stuff so you could manage your tactics quite well.

 

And i don't really understand why people bring always the IE games and their flaws. OK the game will be a homage to those but it is going to be 2014 and the team has already made a lot of games since then... I believe we should wait and see more details about the mechanics before we start worrying and make comparisons with games 15 years old.

[mstark]

I loved the magic system in the IE games, even now as I am replaying them 15 years later. Everything about Baldur's Gate 2 & Planescape Tormet is what made me back this game.

 

This thread is strange to me, since just recently there was one discussing how awesome mage battles were in the IE games (something I agree with), and it seemed the general consensus was to implement a magic/fighting system that brought this back. Mages cause you to constantly have to pay attention to them, and re-think your approach to encounters. This was inherent in their design, they are technically the weakest foe on the battlefield, but without the right means there's no way of stopping them. There's even been talk about giving the same form of micro-management to every class in PE (eg. giving fighters a number of abilities to match the number of spells a wizard can have).

 

I think one important thing that the IE games did was allow this kind of mad spell stacking, why? Because underneath all these high level wizard spells was still just a fragile human, with no more (likely less) hitpoints than anyone in my own party. This is extremely important to maintain in order for a game to keep a consistent challenge curve throughout, but to never allow the player to entirely out level the content. There's been many discussions on this, too. (eg. don't start at 100hp and end up with 5000hp at the end of the game, and don't let enemies follow that formula either, keep it a fairly constant 100hp for the entire game and design challenges/difficulty differently)

 

Of course there are areas that can be improved, but that's the key word, improved, not changed.

 

And what are those high level spells with only short term persistent effects? You have indicators on your characters to show you what effects are currently active on them (these could have a cooldown timer added to them, if that helps? I don't really see the difference it'd make). Take this to its extreme and suddenly you have World of Warcraft style fighting, with an endless array of cooldowns and timers before you can make your next click. Part of the immersion is getting a feel for it, and none of the IE games ever needed that form of precision.

Edited November 20, 2012 by mstark

[Alexjh]

Well one solution to the status effect thing would perhaps be for the status effect icons to gradually fade out of view in line with how long they are going to last. That way, you have a vague idea of how things are going without having to have loads of timers cluttering up the place.

 

As for spell layers, I don't really have a problem with that as such, what I'd say perhaps might be worth doing is that protection spells might have one weakness, I think it was already mentioned that some sort of mage-armour spell was vulnerable to gunfire, but if each spell had a specific weakness to it you'd avoid the problem, say, a certain high level protective shield might be broken by cold magic etc, even though admittedly I've never been bothered with dispelling that often and tend to just wait spells out/try random other spells that might go past it.

[mickeym]

Try it with Sword Coast Stratagems It was when I played BGII with Sword Coast Stratagems mod that the millions upon millions of magic spells on the battlefield simultaneously with no real cool down timers on display became massively frustrating. Couldn't see **** half the time, and I think most would agree that the IE system of "okay, so I unpaused for 2 seconds here, then 1 second here, 3 here and another 3 seconds there" is too convoluted for keeping track of how much longer you'll be protected from magical weapons.

 

(yeah, I know SCSII is designed for highly experienced baldurs gate veterans, and I used to be one of those. My days of been able to throw down precision lightning bolts from the other side of the map have been and gone since around 2005 however, so I'm at a point where I'm knowledgeable enough that original BG is totally unchallenging but have forgotten too much to have a good enough feel of the gameplay for gameplay enhancements.)

[mstark]

Also, by what right should a player always be able to easily make out every protective spell on the enemy you're fighting!? They're our enemies, and as such will likely do everything in their power to hide any tricks or protective advantages they may have!

 

Don't remove the fun of discovery and learning by giving me all the facts for free, thank you very much.