Resting doesn't work, ditch it

[IndiraLightfoot]

Radioactivelullaby: It has been mentioned. Just 26 minutes before your post I wrote this:

 

 In PE, I'd imagine the dream part of sleeping is somehow weaved into the soul and into magical forces that are pivotal to the fantasy setting itself, so that means sleep is not only a good time for untimely encounters, but also for soul-searching and personal choices on behalf of your various characters. You know those wonderful drawings where we get to do a choice, almost FF-style in PE? Well, imagine those kinds of sepias popping up for certain characters while sleeping at irregular intervals!

 

I really hope Obsidian go all-in on the resting. It should be important, story-sprinkled and potentially dangerous and deadly.

Edited June 17, 2013 by IndiraLightfoot

[Sensuki]

It's not about simulating reality, it's about crafting an experience for the player. In Dark Souls (the only game I've ever played with a resting mechanic where I thought it actually worked) you get back your spellcasting and your estus flasks (used to regain health) at campfires. The game world is filled with a foreboding, lonely atmosphere where the fires are the only safe places, and the world is dying because the fires are going out. In this way Dark Souls uses its mechanics to create meaning: Without it the First Flame would be a pointless MacGuffin.

You do realize that in P:E you can only rest at 'campfires' in Wilderness Areas and Dungeons right ?

[Valci]

You do realize that in P:E you can only rest at 'campfires' in Wilderness Areas and Dungeons right ?

 

 

I didnt know that. Really? ... and if so, can you build a campfire for instance?

[IndiraLightfoot]

I'd like to add that I want to see generous and varied random encounters while resting (I have no problem getting a run-in with a monster not previously seen in a rest encounter - the element of surprise is often a good thing), but also the places for rest should vary in their alert factor. At certain areas, it's almost certain there will be an encounter, whereas in others it's a rare thing. Finally, character- and party-based story tidbits should always be a possibility - they could be based on where the party and its members are in various quests.

[Nonek]

 

In general i'm against features being jettisoned for the simple sake of streamlining and ease of use, it certainly hasn't produced better games over the past few years, so i'd have to disagree Pony.

 

I think resting could be a brilliant mechanic if it's rationed and balanced, say by the amount of water, firewood or vittles you are carrying. Even in the most crowded of dungeons one can imagine that there are entire abandoned wings that the party can barricade, defend and use for recuperation. Dungeons after all do not have to be linear corridors, with combat placed every few feet, personally i'm hoping for big sprawling maps where one can easily get lost in the darkness and interesting little features abound around every other corner.

And features added for the sake of features hasn't been working out either. There's brilliance in simplicity: If you have to keep adding more and more layers of simulation to make a mechanic work, then maybe you're better off just dumping that mechanic.

 

 

I'm sorry Micamo but i'm afraid that I have to refute that statement completely, games have not been adding features. There's been a culture of streamlining, content ripping and feature pulling in most every game for the past twenty years. All it has produced is much shorter campaigns, less alive gameworlds and far more padding through endless trash mob slaughter. As well as utterly inconsequential WOW like sidequests, that serve no purpose but to erode time and generate small amounts of xp and gold.

 

Look at Dragon Age 2 where you can't even speak to your companions and supposed family, where npcs are ghosts that you can walk straight through, where every dungeon is re-used again and again, where quests are alternating corridors of combat and conversation, and there is no answer to any problem other than mindless slaughter, where you get sidequests by picking up hats and returning them to a stranger. This got many 10 scores from the corrupt gaming press and was hailed as innovative, that's what this blind urge to whittle down and pull features has produced. Significantly sub par games.

 

I personally donated to the kickstarter because: 1) Obsidian have proven with every game that they still have that ambition to innovate and expand. 2) It promised an old style game from when features and complexity were not so looked down upon, though in truth even the Infinity engine games pale in comparison to Wizardry and Ultima. 3) I humbly admit that i'm a reasonably intelligent gentleman who's able to handle a fair amount of complexity and tasks, I do not need everything simplified or made so accessible that even single cellular life may understand it.

[Gfted1]

From what I currently understand of PE, the one and only way to replenish Health and remove "disabilities" is via resting. In the PE universe that makes resting king of all other mechanics and cant possibly be removed without a complete revamp of PE lore. By having Health and ability replenishment and spell replenishment tied to this lone mechanic they have really painted themselves into a corner.

[decado]

Resting has been used successfully in plenty of games.  In fact, one of the best computer RPGs of all time -- Betrayal At Krondor -- had a terrific resting system, probably the best one ever implemented in a CRPG.  It had several components:

 

1) Food was required to rest, otherwise your guys would starve eventually.  Managing food resources was perfectly balanced to be just interesting enough to make you care, but not difficult enough to make it a micromanaged chore.

 

2) Resting in the wilderness only restored your health/stamina to something like 85% of its maximum, and I've always felt that this was the true genius of the system.  It acknowledged that resting could work in the wilderness, but it wasn't perfect.  The only way to recover all of your health/stamina was to pay to rest at an inn.  Constant resting in the wilderness was sustainable, but you paid a price for a it.  Which leads me to the next point . . .

 

3) Prices at inns were high enough to put a dent in your gold supply, but not so high as to be ridiculous. Now that I think of it, the economy of BaK was also pretty nicely balanced (unless you cheated).  The inns were extensions of an already nicely-designed system.

 

4) You could apply herbal packs before resting in order to speed up your healing.  Again, nice and simple, with another added resource if you cared to use it.

 

5) Failure to rest would result in penalties and, eventually, death.

 

6) Resting did not eliminate status effects -- it could actually make them worse!  If you tried to rest while poisoned, your health would drop until you went unconscious.

 

7) Which, finally, was another neat part of the BaK system -- there was a penalty applied to recovering your health if it had dropped to zero.  So let's say you had a really nasty fight with some Quegian pirates.  If Owyn did something dumb and got KO'd, even though you manged to win the fight with Gorath and Locklear, it would still take Owyn almost twice as long to recover the first chunk of his health (I think 10 percent? Not sure, though).  This system is great because it penalizes laziness.  It forces you to care about all of your team members, because even if you win the battle you still have to pay the piper. 

 

Anyways that's my long and boring post on resting in BaK.  But it's important because resting can work, if it is done properly.  The devs just have to make it more than "rest/recover" and voila everything is okay!  I'm replaying NWN2 right now and the resting system is exactly what I would like to NOT see in PE.  Why not just refill all my spells/health after every battle?  All I'm doing is hitting the "R" key after every fight anyways.  What's the difference?

Edited June 17, 2013 by decado

[Morgulon the Wise]

My idea how encounters while resting should be settled:

When and how an encounter happens and who it is should depend on:

 

- Who did you battle in your last fight

- The type camping site (there should be different types derived from their security)

- The environment

 

This should give the player some time if he recently fought a dragon and prevent camping overuse (penalty encounters). Sleep encounters should also count as the last fight.

[motorizer]

Resting should be in, but you shouldn't be able to spam it,you can't sleep if you're not sleepy

[Jarmo]

Not what I was talking about at all. Game mechanics are tools. When designing a game the proper way, you start with an experience you want the player to have, then ...

 

The problem with rest mechanics in P:E ... they're being included for the sole reason that it's what the IE games (and by extension D&D) did. 

 

Partly answered your own question there.

PE is about giving players the kind of experience IE games did. Resting is part of that old skool thing they're going for.

 

Not only as a game mechanic mind you.

The whole camping for the night, seeing bad dreams or having premonitions. Talking for a while with teammates and getting to know them.

 

DA:Origins was clearly reaching for the same feel, despite going the other way about it and just giving camping lite, only on the world map.

And it was kind of a lost opportunity, when we didn't camp in any dungeons, ruins or the.. dwarven underdark... whatever it was called.

Would have been great chance to stop and reflect on where you're going and what dangers might lie ahead. Build up the mood.

[Sensuki]

 

You do realize that in P:E you can only rest at 'campfires' in Wilderness Areas and Dungeons right ?

 

I didnt know that. Really? ... and if so, can you build a campfire for instance?

 

Nope designated safe resting zones only

[Lephys]

Nope designated safe resting zones only

Of course, I'm not sure that we know, for a fact, that the designation between rest-enabled space and rest-prohibited space isn't whether or not you can build a fire there, 8P.

 

Technically, we could still be able to build campfires. But, if so, the ability to do so would directly correlate to the ability to rest or not, in a given place. Most likely.

 

@decado: I totally forgot Betrayal at Krondor had all that! I LOVED that game! Yeah, I remember occasionally not having enough gold to stay at an inn, and having to go sleep outside in the woods, and kind of muttering "crap" at the reduced stamina. But, that didn't make it impossible to complete whatever lay ahead. It just made you that much more careful. Also, the 0-HP thing! It was great! You could still simply revive your character with enough restful healing, but it gave character death JUST the pinch of spice it needed to make you think a little harder about how to make sure your characters didn't actually "die" in combat. I distinctly recall having to move people around a bit more and swap targets and adaptively change tactics so that that last enemy wouldn't pick off one of my people before someone took him down. Instead of simply thinking, every single time, "Well, there's no chance my whole party's going to die, so... EVERYONE! FULL AGGRESSION WITHOUT A CARE IN THE WORLD!"

 

In a few other threads, people have mentioned how silly it is that, in a lot of games, the AI has pretty much any enemy just going balls-to-the-wall at you all the way down to 0 health, rather than stuff retreating/regrouping/changing tactics when it's circumstantially outmatched. I think to not expect the same (to some degree) of the player's party is a bit silly, isn't it?

[Sensuki]

As far as I know you don't build campfires, they're a location on the map that indicates a Rest Zone, like Dark Souls, Dark Sun: Shattered Lands and Knights of the Chalice.

 

There is one on the Project Eternity first screenshot.

Edited June 18, 2013 by Sensuki

[Lephys]

It's just that they could simply be campsites, with weathered firepits in them, but you might still actually get the option of whether or not to build a fire in that pit or simply set up bedrolls at that site and have a fire-less camp. Most likely, it's all just tied together, and for all practical purposes, the decision to rest and the decision to build a fire are one in the same. But, it could still actually be a separate factor in resting, for all we know.

 

That's all I meant. I just didn't want to tell Valci that there's definitely no way the player has the optional ability to construct a campfire.

[Sensuki]

But the thing is there isn't? At least not at the moment.

[Lephys]

Since I haven't heard any official word, one way or the other, I personally wouldn't deduce anything one way or the other.

 

For example, I'm sitting in the interior room of an office right now. So, if you ask me if it's raining here, the answer isn't "No" until I find out otherwise. The answer is "I haven't the slightest," until I find out otherwise (travel to an exterior window and check).

 

Let me emphasize that I, personally, haven't heard any official word. I'm not claiming such word doesn't exist. If you know something I don't, then I'm not telling you you're wrong. I'm just going on the information I have, at the moment.

[Sensuki]

 

This good enough for you ?

Edited June 19, 2013 by Sensuki

[Lephys]

This good enough for you ?

Unfortunately, it isn't, as this only tells me that, if campfire construction is an actual option (as opposed to inherently accompanying the use of a campsite or not in the game at all), it will only be an option at designated rest sites, rather than functioning as its own "this allows you rest" resource.

 

I do believe it's quite likely that Valci was wondering, specifically, if we'd be able to build a campfire anywhere, and we simply couldn't rest without building a campfire. But, as he actually just asked if we'll have the ability to build campfires, the official information we have so far doesn't actually allow me the certainty of knowing whether or not my character will ever have the option of either lighting some logs in a pit, or not doing that, when you do rest.

[Sensuki]

We'll likely get a demonstration video of resting this weekend, but man, I would bank on the fact that resting will be handled this way:

 

A model (such as a tent or campfire) will be highlightable by the mouse and will change the mouse cursor to the "rest" icon cursor. When a player clicks on the model when the "rest" icon is shown, the game will probably then check if all party members are within range and then the game will either proceed to the rest screen or rest resource screen (if there's any strategic elements to resting such as potion use on sleep or anything).

 

Actually building a campfire sounds like a pointless endeavor. In The Witcher you have to light a campfire at a campsite (circle of stones on the ground) by using the fire spell igni or using a Flint, but they did away with it in the second game.

 

[Lephys]

I agree that it most likely won't be a factor, and that's all well and good. I simply don't like telling people an absolute "yes" or "no" on something based on likelihood. That's all.

 

I understand that I'm being frustrating, and I apologize. I wasn't trying to simply be finnicky with you. It's just, we don't even know what all will be affected by/will affect resting, because we don't even have any info on some of the specifics in the game that could or could/not involve resting decisions. So, I'm not trying to simply say "You never know... within the confines of the current rest system, they could just toss in fire-building for no reason." But, they could very well have whether or not you build a fire affect how well you rest (maybe in a cold area) and/or how easily you can be spotted by nearby outposts, etc.

 

Josh said he wasn't too fond of the idea of using a "rest resource" to limit the very ability to rest. That doesn't mean we can't have resources and/or options within the decision to rest, itself, and still always be able to, at the very least, rest in some capacity no matter how much of any resource we have.

 

A fire is just a very common thing in the whole "what all should be involved with camping?" mechanic brainstorm, since it plays a very important part in camping in real-life (which is where we get the idea for video-game camping in the first place.) *shrug*

[Sensuki]

I would like a strategic element to resting a la Expeditions Conquistador, don't think they're included at the moment though.

 

Everything I've read indicates that resting is currently a very simple mechanic. Resting = Full health, stamina and regain all abilities. I would like it to be more complex, but it probably isn't going to be anything beyond that.

 

That formspring discussion also indicates that there is no portable resting at the moment.

 

One of the reasons for lack of concrete information is because resting is not finalized yet. They may make it portable, they may add things to do. Currently however I think it is as I described.

Edited June 19, 2013 by Sensuki

[Chilloutman]

Do someone think about 2 stamina bars? first is 'short term' stamina that is exhausted by using abilities and getting hit, second should be 'daily stamina'. Each character will have 'Daily stamina' degen during lets say 24h ingame time from 100% to 0% and then he need to rest. Also maximum 'short term' stamina cant be greater then actual 'daily stamina'. And character cant rest unlest 'Daily stamina' is under 50%

 

now we dont have/cant spam resting but its still there is reason to rest because maximum stamina is still lowering and then hindering amount of spells/abilities which can be cast. Also its quite simple and easy to understand and I think quite easy to implement.

 

Just idea but I would like to hear your opinions on it. 

[curryinahurry]

@ Chilloutman

 

They're using Stamina and Health bars that work in a fashion to what you're describing.  Stamina replenishes quickly but Health only during rest.  It's unclear how quickly health will replenish at rest.  As Sensuki states above, it depends on where resting occurs and if they differentiate resting in  dungeon from camping in the wilderness to recuperating at an inn.

Edited June 20, 2013 by curryinahurry

[Chilloutman]

But health didn't degenerate over time as 'Daily Stamina' would. And Daily Stamina is not affected by casting/taking hits

[Morgulon the Wise]

maybe "daily stamina" should only be a limiter of how much of your maximum stamina can be regenerated. Maybe your group just cant get up to 100% but 50% after a long day without sleep?