"But it was made for us."

[teknoman2]

Most people buying this game will play it more than once. If there are two or three classes that are perceived to be 'weaker' and need a good knowledge of the gaming meta to solo the game with, then so what? The sky won't fall in.

 

The current design philosophy isn't very old skool. Old skool is flawed, sure, but new systems feel generic, dessicated, bland. I'd rather have a flawed gem than a plastic one.

the point is to look at the whole picture. in an mmo, first they make the world then they fill it with mobs, then they balance the classes in a way that all of them can kill all of the enemies in every area with as little difference in difficulty as possible.

in a single player game made for party combat, there will be places where certain classes will be favored and others penalized so getting through the entire game with one character will have variation in where you get to play god and where you get reminded of your first time playing dark souls. 

at least that is how i think it should be

[W.MacKinnon]

"Half-assed MMO clone" ... doesn't sound right, but never played one--yet ... still don't see the danger. Gonna go make some toast now, and ponder the veracity of that point where unstoppable presuppostion meets immovable expectation.

 

Oh, and I want in on this shoulder fad ...

 

*shrugs* 

 

Pop Dragon's Dogma into your console yet? Damn, that game is the most dull single player experience ever. It's like if they made an MMO and decided to make it singleplayer without changing anything - so all the quests are still lackluster fetch or slay quests. Really that's the best example of a MMO clone singleplayer rpg I can think of.

[IndiraLightfoot]

Another example of a MMO clone sp rpg is of course Kingdoms of Amalur, which have most of the faults you describe there too.

[Monte Carlo]

"Half-assed MMO clone" ... doesn't sound right, but never played one--yet ... still don't see the danger. Gonna go make some toast now, and ponder the veracity of that point where unstoppable presuppostion meets immovable expectation.

 

Oh, and I want in on this shoulder fad ...

 

*shrugs* 

 

If immovable expectation = reasonable expectation of the game meeting the KS pitch, then mea culpa.

[PrimeJunta]

@Monte Carlo, here's the substantive part of the Obsidian pitch for P:E from the Kickstarter:

 

"Project Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment.

 

Combat uses a tactical real-time with pause system - positioning your party and coordinating attacks and abilities is one of the keys to success. The world map is dotted with unique locations and wilderness ripe for exploration and questing. You’ll create your own character and collect companions along the way – taking him or her not just through this story, but, with your continued support, through future adventures. You will engage in dialogues that are deep, and offer many choices to determine the fate of you and your party. …and you'll experience a story that explores mature themes and presents you with complex, difficult choices to shape how your story plays out."

 

Which part, specifically, do you feel they're reneging on?

[SqueakyCat]

PJ, I don't believe Obsidian reneged on their KS pitch.  The problem is, we all read it and formed our own individual interpretation.  For me, it was, "Finally, another game just like BG!".  For others, it may have been for something more Planescape or IWD.  Our expectations just grew and grew and grew. 

 

To be fair, it was clear by the end of the KS that they would be creating their own system, and there would be regenerating stamina and quest experience, among other differences from the IE games.  They didn't hide that information.  We were free to pick up our marbles and go home if we saw fit.

 

I share some of Monte's concerns about how the game will actually play.  It certainly looks amazing, but how will it play?  I'm waiting for the beta before I voice an opinion.  I've never played a MMO or MOBA or even a MP game, so I'm unfamiliar with those systems.  Is that where this 'sticky' engagement thing comes from for melee players?  I can't remember playing a game with a feature like that.

[PrimeJunta]

@SqueakyCat, that's the point I'm making too. Monte Carlo is talking about reasonable expectations. In my view it's reasonable to expect what has been promised, and it is not reasonable to expect what has not been promised. There are so many things in IE games and so many gamers with so many different preferences that opinions on what "the IE experience" means are going to diverge very quickly the further we get from the core area explicitly defined by Obsidian.

 

I believe that they genuinely do want to produce a worthy successor to the IE games, and they're doing their best, within the constraints they have, to make that happen. Quite naturally that will follow their interpretation of what "the IE experience" is. It is, in my view, unreasonable to expect that that interpretation will follow yours in any specifics, unless they have explicitly promised something about those specifics.

 

It is, of course, entirely reasonable to argue about any of those specifics. Take Stun, for example – I disagree strongly with him on many points of his vision of "the IE experience," but I respect the way he's arguing it. He's not expecting Obsidian's vision to conform with his; instead, he's arguing why he believes P:E should follow that vision. That is in my opinion a whole lot more constructive.

[Sarex]

Is that where this 'sticky' engagement thing comes from for melee players?  I can't remember playing a game with a feature like that.

 

It's the opposite in fact, in mmos and mobas like Diablo 3 and League of Legend you have the opposite of a sticky engagement, you have orb walking (kiting), what that is is you moving your character away from your enemy or in front of him, between attacks. To further explain it, while you wait for you auto attack to reset, you move your character. Now what is the point of this? Well, every character has a range on his attack (or auto-attack as it is called), so with moving between auto-attacks you gain distance from them and take less dmg or no damage at all if their auto-attack has a shorter range then yours. It can also be used to stay in range of the enemy.

 

That is why I say it's the opposite in PoE, if you try to kite the enemy you will get smacked in the face with the disengagement penalty.

Edited May 4, 2014 by Sarex

[Monte Carlo]

Boil it down: do you really invoke the Infinity Engine games then announce no hit points, death, potions, class-builds and so on?

 

Not for me you don't.

 

That's why I feel a bit cheated. I'm also disappointed by the level of backer engagement. The updates are often too brief, material about the game is diffused all over the place (for example, why aren't we told about new interviews on this website or the backer's portal?) and so on.

 

I'm hardly Captain Internet Entitlement but this isn't what I thought it would be.

[BruceVC]

PJ, I don't believe Obsidian reneged on their KS pitch.  The problem is, we all read it and formed our own individual interpretation.  For me, it was, "Finally, another game just like BG!".  For others, it may have been for something more Planescape or IWD.  Our expectations just grew and grew and grew. 

 

To be fair, it was clear by the end of the KS that they would be creating their own system, and there would be regenerating stamina and quest experience, among other differences from the IE games.  They didn't hide that information.  We were free to pick up our marbles and go home if we saw fit.

 

I share some of Monte's concerns about how the game will actually play.  It certainly looks amazing, but how will it play?  I'm waiting for the beta before I voice an opinion.  I've never played a MMO or MOBA or even a MP game, so I'm unfamiliar with those systems.  Is that where this 'sticky' engagement thing comes from for melee players?  I can't remember playing a game with a feature like that.

Well said squeakmeister, well said

 

I can completely empathize with the sentiment that we all had our own interpretation of what PoE would be. For example when they said BG2 I assumed deep and engaging Romance options. But it wasn't meant to be, of course committed and loyal  promancers like you and me are disappointed but I still have complete confidence that Obsidian will deliver a very captivating and worthwhile RPG experience

[Volourn]

"Boil it down: do you really invoke the Infinity Engine games then announce no hit points, death, potions, class-builds and so on?"

 

But, they do have hit points (two different types actually! lol), death, potions (just not ones that 'heal' health0, class builds, and what the hell is 'so on'? Whatever it is, I'm sure they have that too!

[SqueakyCat]

Bruce, your incorrigible, simply incorrigible! 

 

Monte, I agree about finding information about the game at other sites first before someone posts the information here.  Then again, Infinitron is very good at his job.

 

Thanks, Sarex, for the information.  That feature just seemed a bit odd, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out.

[nipsen]

 

 

I share some of Monte's concerns about how the game will actually play.  It certainly looks amazing, but how will it play?  I'm waiting for the beta before I voice an opinion.  I've never played a MMO or MOBA or even a MP game, so I'm unfamiliar with those systems.  Is that where this 'sticky' engagement thing comes from for melee players?  I can't remember playing a game with a feature like that.

..it's not as game-specific as that. It's more of a game-mechanical problem that comes along with not very careful design, imo. "Kiting", is a thing in mmos, for example. Where you hit an enemy, walk backwards, and hit it again, then dodge, and so on, to prevent the enemy attack animation from triggering. Specially when soloing. It's probably seen as something that has to happen, even if some games avoid the entire "wear down the automatic mob that can't be interrupted" thing and then suddenly don't have that problem where kiting is necessary.

 

Other approaches is just to punish people when gaming the system. Adding a penalty when breaking combat, for example. NWN did that. So you couldn't really run away or place people differently - it just became a brawler with a turn-based system. Which was pretty good. But still, it wasn't an abstraction of the d&d ruleset - it was an implementation of it on a computer. And it was very obvious that the combat could have been done better had the hardware target been a bit better, but that this never would happen, until we saw some prototype designs for what would become DA:Origins, that then in the end didn't actually have that much of a different approach anyway because the game has to have a hardware target that is pretty low, and... this kind of seems like an endless loop, for some reason.

 

Maybe people are a bit nervous about this entire stance blocking thing, because no games really does path blocking or node-generation for traversal or ai all that well. Same with the IE games. But we rarely see even an attempt at something more than a "shortest path" travel, or for example AI that spots new openings or punches down a wall to get around, etc. And if we do see that we're talking about a game that locks up or becomes unresponsive while it refills the node tables. The AI gets stuck in games more rarely nowadays because the terrain is less narrow, and all the characters move through each other, for example. Also, there are fewer characters on screen most of the time.

 

Basically, when you create a defensive stance, an incoming ai warrior should detect it as an obstacle or a threat. How fast will it do that? Can you simply cheat the system and consistently kite mobs into the warrior's reach this way, with a bonus, and without the enemy ever retreating? Will you never see an AI group just stop, stand there and taunt you, while hitting you with arrows from a distance? What about having the AI moving around you, kiting you towards your mage, that sort of thing? Can the AI set you up, engage your defense with a tank, move a mage into the sphere behind the tank, and hit the archers in the back now that they can be reached? Will an enemy that had a chance to break through never do so, because he always tries to minimize the damage done to them in the short run? Will there be any sort of ai between the characters in groups of mobs? Will they determine a threat based on the ability to smell your stats and see your weaknesses instantly?

 

There's a lot of "probably not a great idea" going on back there if you've played games at all lately. So you probably wonder if this is a case of a good vision, but something that will inevitably fail in some way or other when it's implemented.

 

I am not completely sure there's a reason to be all that concerned, though. Because 1., the core engine and graphics probably don't need a huge amount of horsepower to run -- so there will be room for adding something on top apart from more graphics and shader operations. 2. Judging from DS3, Obsidian has discovered curves. Mobs move in not completely straight lines, and differentiate behaviour on the start of the engagement this way. Very sexy. They should copyright this "curves" thing, and probably 3rd degree equations as well, before EA does it. 3. They have people who program in things in the mob AI that has a troll stop, let a smaller minion go in before them while they wave the club as a taunt, before running in and attacking. 

 

It's stuff like that that makes games Obsidian make interesting to play, even if they're not technically polished. Obviously, no one in the games-media in general know anything about programming, maths, node-generation, threads, or logic of any kind. And have people literally complaining about the character in Shadow of The Colossus not having as good animation as Altair in Assassin's Creed. Because the only thing that matters is, of course, that the game is so simple mechanically, that you can get away with three different animations for the entire game. And that they can all be triggered as one-shot animations from what essentially is a quick-time event. After all, more dynamic and complex means less interesting and more confusing to gamers!

 

Anyway. Point is that from what they've shown us and from what it looks like, the core system is going to be advanced and complex enough to allow some simpler gameplay mechanics to be designed over it. That in turn will cause emergent gameplay that feels intuitive. That the **** you do makes sense, and that the game seems to respond to intentions rather than smaller minute mechanical changes.

 

But we'll see if that works out soon enough. I am sure that they actually have a studio that's skilled enough to pull this off, though. And that they don't have studio leads that will say: "yes, replace that complex thing that would have been great - with a simpler "placeholder" AI, because the other one causes response problems in debug - and go work on modeling some lifelike trees again". 

[PrimeJunta]

Boil it down: do you really invoke the Infinity Engine games then announce no hit points, death, potions, class-builds and so on?

Did they?

 

I'm hardly Captain Internet Entitlement

There's no polite way to put this, Monte, but I think a little self-reflection might be in order here.

[Monte Carlo]

You are right, it's not very polite. Having reflected on it, however, I've decided I'm still not Captain Internet Entitlement. I'm fair. I back Obsidian on the stuff I think they call right (look at my position on the fulfilment issue, for example) and am relaxed about a load of other stuff.

[PrimeJunta]

Fair enough, Lieutenant. :salute:

[Stun]

in a game where combat is the priority (and whatever you say, basically every RPG ever set to code is one of those) everyone should be just as good at fighting (though in different ways) because that's the way their contributions to gameplay actually matter.

I don't agree with this. In a game where combat is the main focus of gameplay, the only responsibility of the devs is to make sure that all classes can beat the game by fighting. Not that all classes are "equally powerful at fighting".

 

We can discuss the why's of this if you wish. Although this has already been discussed ad nauseam on other threads

Edited May 4, 2014 by Stun

[Monte Carlo]

* shakes head *

 

Do people really not see why beating a RPG with a gimped build is fun?

 

Maybe I'm last of a lost tribe, like a Japanese soldier on a lonely Pacific atoll circa 1980, refusing to accept it's all over. That people want to do One Awesome Playthrough with their Super Hero good-at-everything character.

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

Is that where this 'sticky' engagement thing comes from for melee players?  I can't remember playing a game with a feature like that.

 

It's the opposite in fact, in mmos and mobas like Diablo 3 and League of Legend you have the opposite of a sticky engagement, you have orb walking (kiting), what that is is you moving your character away from your enemy or in front of him, between attacks. To further explain it, while you wait for you auto attack to reset, you move your character. Now what is the point of this? Well, every character has a range on his attack (or auto-attack as it is called), so with moving between auto-attacks you gain distance from them and take less dmg or no damage at all if their auto-attack has a shorter range then yours. It can also be used to stay in range of the enemy.

 

That is why I say it's the opposite in PoE, if you try to kite the enemy you will get smacked in the face with the disengagement penalty.

 

Indeed, and this took me awhile to figure out in D3. Basically, this means that certain animations can be very time-consuming in the midst of combat, and thus effectively gimp your character, which isn't apparent unless you really dig up info like this. I really, really hope PE comes with extensive and clear combat numbers so that the combat log includes stuff like this instead of more or less hiding them.

 

 I'm also disappointed by the level of backer engagement. The updates are often too brief, material about the game is diffused all over the place (for example, why aren't we told about new interviews on this website or the backer's portal?) and so on.

 

 

This irks me as well. Any news from Obsidian should be posted here ASAP, as we would love to hear about them straight away.

[600lbpanther]

Some bars in the Caribbean have a live cam so you can see how much fun everyone is having in their bathing suits while it's snowing outside of your work window.

[PrimeJunta]

@Monte Carlo actually, I do see that. I've even mentioned that my favorite Storm of Zehir party leader was just such a character. It's a perfectly legitimate preference.

 

What I'm taking issue with is your expectation that it is so integral to the IE experience that Obsidian should share that preference. By all means argue for it; it's the, yes, entitlement that rustles my jimmies. If, indeed, it turns out that it won't be possible to gimp a build in P:E. Which is not a given.

 

However, I like Josh's design goal of making all abilities relevant to all classes. In the IE games you couldn't play a viable brainy fighter or muscle wizard. Your muscle wizard couldn't wiz; your brainy fighter couldn't fight. If P:E's system does allow that, and makes those choices matter mechanically, it makes for more variety, not less. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned, and trading off the ability to gimp a build is a price worth paying -- especially as there are any number of other ways you can handicap yourself if you want to. I wouldn't even mind if they put some of those new-fangled achievements in to support that. Get a shiny badge for never drinking a potion, never equipping a magic item, or never wearing armor, for example.

Edited May 4, 2014 by PrimeJunta

[Monte Carlo]

Entitlement - a commonly misunderstood internet concept, right up there with ad hominem.

[ManifestedISO]

Well then, I propose an entitled ad hominid strawman, because I don't understand. Is One Awesome Playthrough what we want? At least, I don't think I want that ... I would like to play a number of times with many different characters? Am I Bruce now? 

[Ffordesoon]

I always interpreted Josh's comments as more "Every build is gimped in different ways."

[Nonek]

Though i'm not at all against what Mr Carlo is hankering for, a system that is less tied to MMO/4th edition concepts, I do feel that we will be able to make gimped builds. In fact I believe it was Mr Sawyer himself who pointed out one: That of the Raistlin archetype, extremely physically deficient but of vast arcane power. With spell damage for some unknown reason being accrued from physical might, if one opts to try and make such a build then though of considerable skill and able to cover a vast area, the Wizard's spell damage will be truly pitiful. Thus this seems to be a gimped build, it seems a little unfair to my mind as one has allready accepted the lack of physical potency, but all rule systems have their shortcomings.