Experience point system in the beta and onwards

[IndiraLightfoot]

I find it bewildering how beta hasn't been out even for week and people are already making doomsday scenarios, theories about Obsidian scamming backers and assumptions that they are dastards who don't listen fans <_<

Some of that stuff gets a bit rich, to be sure, but it also shows how passionate people are about some of the aspects of their beloved CRPGs. Obsidian, and Josh in particular, made it clear in some interview recently, how well aware they are of this. 

[Zombra]

MY FINAL POST (yeah right):

 

Obsidian: this decision was bad for IE fans, and wonderful for role-players like me.  I fully support this decision and look forward to a Pillars of Eternity in which I don't need to feel like killing is always a great idea.

 

Thanks!    

[Stun]

Hilarious (and alarmingly naïve) to think that Obsidian's decision to scrap kill XP had anything to do with trying to enrich the roleplaying experience. It did NOT.

 

Also:

I don't need to feel like killing is always a great idea.

Indeed. Now we have a system where you'll be forced to kill things anyway... even if you think it's a bad idea. Three cheers for "role-playing"!. Edited August 24, 2014 by Stun

[IndiraLightfoot]

The point Stun's making is spot-on: It's not improving one jota. It's not getting deeper. For that, they would go down the route InXile's planning for T:ToN, for instance, but from what we've seen so far - this is indeed an IE-inspired game with the combat-trap-lock-puzzle-xp missing.

Edited August 24, 2014 by IndiraLightfoot

[BrokenMask]

Hilarious (and alarmingly naïve) to think that Obsidian's decision to scrap kill XP had anything to do with trying to enrich the roleplaying experience. It did NOT.

Umm, so are you saying they purposely sabotaged game then? The way that sentence is structured makes it sound like you are saying that reason Obisidan decided to get rid of kill exp was to make roleplaying experience worse on purpose. Logically thats the reason they did it was that they were attempting to enrich the experience, it just failed horribly so far...

 

I mean, why are you saying something that illogical? I'm confused here <_< Same way I'm confused about people who are like "Obsidian won't return to kill exp no matter what happens", logically they will switch it back if the feedback they keep getting is bad even if they improve current system.

[IndiraLightfoot]

BrokenMask: I reckon, they removed it, because they simply don't like it/care for it. Also, we already know, they won't switch back before this game's released, regardless, unless Feargus puts his veto in and gets the ball moving earlier.

[Stun]

Umm, so are you saying they purposely sabotaged game then? The way that sentence is structured makes it sound like you are saying that reason Obisidan decided to get rid of kill exp was to make roleplaying experience worse on purpose. Logically thats the reason they did it was that they were attempting to enrich the experience, it just failed horribly so far...

 

I mean, why are you saying something that illogical? I'm confused here <_< Same way I'm confused about people who are like "Obsidian won't return to kill exp no matter what happens", logically they will switch it back if the feedback they keep getting is bad even if they improve current system.

What? LOL no.

 

First off, contrary to the strange arguments being put forth on this thread, Kill XP and Role playing are not mutually exclusive motivators. They have existed in complete harmony since the inception of the CRPG itself. Can we please stop pretending they're at cross-purposes, already? It's insulting.

 

Second, Obsidian has decided to scrap kill XP because It's far easier for them to control and balance the pace of level advancement in an open world when they don't have to account for the XP of every enemy kill in every crevice of every room in every map...for every difficulty setting. Instead, they can simply hand place specifically calculated XP rewards where they wish and then add it all up and make sure the XP cap isn't reached by anyone when they still have 50% of the game left to play. (Example: what kill xp did to BG1)

Edited August 24, 2014 by Stun

[IndiraLightfoot]

Kill XP and Role playing are not mutually exclusive motivators. Can we please stop pretending they're at cross-purposes, already? It's insulting.

 

QFT! (especially in the tradition of CRPGs)

 

As for them scrapping kill xp in order to get an easier ride balancing their open world: Hmm, not so sure about that. Think about it. Most peeps at Obsidian have been making plenty of CRPGs, and most of them had such combat xp systems in. They would be capable, and they certainly have had enough time, to include one, if they wanted to. Moreover, IIRC, there will be area choke points in their precious quest lines, any way, which would have regulated that pace nonetheless. 

Edited August 24, 2014 by IndiraLightfoot

[BrokenMask]

Second, Obsidian has decided to scrap kill XP because It's far easier for them to control and balance the pace of level advancement in an open world when they don't have to account for every enemy in every crevice of every room in every map...in every difficulty setting. Instead, they can simply hand place specifically calculated XP rewards where they wish and then add it all up and make sure the XP cap isn't reached by anyone when they still have 50% of the game left to play. (see: what kill xp did to BG1)

 

OH, ok so THATS what you meant

 

Yeah I was confused because I thought you were saying they were purposely making decision they knew to be bad <_<

 

But yeah, I don't remember if I've ever said that they are exclusive, but I agree they aren't. I just think that kill exp encourages me to do gamey things like killing all hostile enemies even if I'm otherwise playing pacifistic or killing every enemy on sneak missions, so I'm curious at what IE style game without kill exp would be like and hoping they will improve the system. Plus I remember liking games without kill exp a lot for reasons I just stated, though granted, I also tend to kill enemies if I know there is non random loot to be found in areas which you can access only by not avoiding the hostile enemies

 

I agree that if they can't improve the system, they should revert back to kill exp since getting exp from killing is better than having bizarre unsatisfying pace at which you get exp

Edited August 24, 2014 by BrokenMask

[Elerond]

MY FINAL POST:

 

Obsidian; this decision was bad for IE fans, and bad for the potential of a poe trilogy. You shouldn't have gone in this direction.

 

I am fan (like I think most of people here are) of IE games, but I thought and still think that Obsidian did right decision when they decided to use widerscale objective xp instead of giving xp from specific tasks like killing enemies, using skills and etc. things.

 

I don't have anything against xp system that IE games use, but I don't think that it is any way superior than any other xp system and Obsidian had very specific goals what they wanted to accomplish in PoE, and they thought that they can achieve those goals better with objective based system and after playing beta quite lot I must say that they seemed to succeed with those goals with quite well, sure it is quite small sample of full game so any defined judgement is hard to give about subject, but at least inside of that small sample system seems to do what it is supposed to do.  

[PrimeJunta]

First off, contrary to the strange arguments being put forth on this thread, Kill XP and Role playing are not mutually exclusive motivators. They have existed in complete harmony since the inception of the CRPG itself. Can we please stop pretending they're at cross-purposes, already? It's insulting.

I have not experienced the combination as harmonious, much of the time. It worked well in Hordes of the Underdark, Storm of Zehir, and the IWD's. In the BG's I thought it was a somewhat uncomfortable fit, and in PS:T it was working against the grain of the game.

 

This is not because it was done well in the IWD's, SoZ, or HotU. It's because the IWD's, SoZ, and HotU are set up in ways where killing things aligns pretty closely with general progress in the game. The quests were more of a simple side dish. This was less true for the others, in which kill XP skewed the incentives, nudging you to prefer violent solutions in the expectations that you'd get better rewards. Attempting to mitigate this by giving nonviolent solutions bigger quest rewards only partly addressed the problem.

 

If P:E turns out to be structured more like the IWD's, HotU, or SoZ, then I agree that something of value will have been lost with the decision to drop kill XP. But if it turns out to be as quest-driven as BG2 let alone PS:T, then I think it'll work out fine... and perhaps even some of you folks in the kill XP camp will grudgingly come around.

[IndiraLightfoot]

Perhaps the best example of them harmonizing was Obsidian's own MotB, and the Spirit Meter. It could be annoying at times, but I can't recall any game that made it all fit so perfectly. 

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

If P:E turns out to be structured more like the IWD's, HotU, or SoZ, then I agree that something of value will have been lost with the decision to drop kill XP. But if it turns out to be as quest-driven as BG2 let alone PS:T, then I think it'll work out fine... and perhaps even some of you folks in the kill XP camp will grudgingly come around.

 

That is the question. If the story is just as deep, multi-branched and complex as in PS:T, it certainly would alleviate any grudging over the missing combat xp system.

[Stun]

and in PS:T it was working against the grain of the game.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Because I was going to cite PS:T as the perfect example from beginning to end.

 

That is - it's a perfect example of a game that grants rather large XP rewards --and-- it gives the player endless opportunities to XP-grind every dungeon (the Abishai endlessly respawn in Baator; everything in the Clerk ward sewer endlessly respawns; then there's the modron cube etc), yet at the same time the narrative was so powerfully presented that anyone with a drop of Role-playing in their blood was instinctively drawn to the non-violent, RP options whenever they were presented. (who the hell ever killed Cassius, when you could just pick his pocket and verbally shame him to his face for XP instead) I'd go so far as to say that PS:T is the only RPG you'll ever play where you felt like you were talk grinding for XP.

 

In any case, yes, The structure/pacing makes a giant difference in whether the absence of XP will feel alright or whether it will feel like you're looking at the Mona Lisa and the head is missing. PS:T would have been fine without Kill XP. And BG2 would have been fine with just encounter and quest XP. The Icewind Dales, on the other hand, would have been insufferable disasters without kill XP.

 

But you've played the PoE beta. You don't need our speculation. How did level advancement feel in it to you? To me it felt wrong. It felt exactly as I thought it would feel. And it wasn't just because I got nothing for killing lions beetles and cultist. Successfully Solving the Dragon Egg situation should have rewarded me XP. They presented it as a problem that required significant skill to overcome. XP rewards for it should have been 1) get the egg down from the next = XP, then 2) return the egg to the alchemist = quest completion XP.

Edited August 24, 2014 by Stun

[IndiraLightfoot]

Here's a tough one:

The impact of any lacking kill xp/low-increment xp rewards for accomplished tasks MotB and BG2, where your party is high-levelled and all, (you started in a lobby, and it was character creation paradise), must be much lower. In low-level PoE, where it will take our pc plus its party, from level 1 to a maximum of level 12 (off on a short tangent: Remember NWN2 OC - it was hard getting your pc to reach lvl 18 there, but hardly in PoE, since all is quest xp - they have full control of where your pc wil be at the end - no variation), without xp in tiny increments, won't it be very unlikely that you'd get as excited as you got when you finally reached a new level in BG1, for instance, when you were new at the game, I must add (not when you knew how to get xp in the best way)?

Edited August 24, 2014 by IndiraLightfoot

[PrimeJunta]

 

and in PS:T it was working against the grain of the game.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Because I was going to cite PS:T as the perfect example from beginning to end.

 

Be delighted to. It might get a bit wordy, but hey.

 

In my opinion, the main purpose of any reward system in a game is to incentivize players to play the game in the most enjoyable possible manner. It should reward activities that are fun, and not reward activities that are not fun (dull, repetitive, requiring patience rather than than skill, and so on). This applies especially to XP, since XP are an unqualified good: there is no downside to more XP, assuming that the player's goal is to become as powerful as possible. Everything I say about XP proceeds from this premise.

 

To achieve this goal, an XP system has to be predictable and it has to reward fun things and not reward un-fun things. 

 

By "predictable" I mean that when choosing to do something--fight something, explore an area, pursue quest objectives, pick locks, whatever--the player should have a reasonable idea of what kind of reward to expect. This creates a kind of a feedback loop: pull the lever, get the goodie.*

 

Now, PS:T. Let's tackle predictability first.

 

I experienced PS:T's XP system as utterly unpredictable. There was combat and quest XP there for sure, but there were gargantuan piles of XP dumped on you completely by surprise. Talk to a skeleton and if you had picked the right stats in chargen, ding! go up a level. Interact with an apparently half-random object, trigger a memory, ding! go up a level. The XP system didn't actually incentivize anything, I was just randomly rewarded at random times for doing what I would be doing anyway, i.e. interacting with the environment. So it fails my first XP system test, predictability.**

 

Second, rewards for fun and un-fun things. Because of the sheer randomness of the placed XP, there wasn't really any incentive system with the "placed XP" at all. You just got XP triggered by apparently random things. The only places there was a consistent reward system was with, yep, combat XP. And that was a complete disaster because of Modron Cube and Undersigil -- especially when combined with TNO's brilliant and unique ability to switch between classes at will and AD&D's geometric XP progression. That was a recipe for encouraging grinding if there ever was one, and boy did I grind. I bet I spent more time in the Modron Cube than in the rest of sigil, whacking those stupid automata, just so I could grind up XP so I could get my secondary classes to go up nicely. As gameplay goes, the Modron Cube was kind of tedious to start with; to make it a grind-o-mat was disastrous. I dig that it was actually a comment on the grind mechanic -- the 'research question' Modron had set it up to resolve -- but that did not change the incentives there at all.

 

So on the one hand we have the game dropping unpredictable, random loads of XP on you, and on the other hand, we have a predictable system rewarding kill XP... in a game where the whole point of the exercise is to decide and discover how you orient yourself to the world. It is crying out for an XP system that is as neutral as humanly possible to the choices you make, instead of having the only consistent system reinforce the "murder them all" behavior. It is exactly how you should not do an XP system.

 

*I believe this is in fact a major reason a lot of us like kill XP. See scary-looking beast: "Haha, big bag of XP!". Fight scary-looking beast. Beat scary-looking beast. "Ding, XP!" Rinse and repeat. These dopamine-reward pathways have gotten a pretty damn good workout in all the classics, and they're firing up again when seeing something that looks like the thing that tickled them before, and they're shouting when not being tickled as expected. 

 

**I'm not saying it was all like this of course. There were islands here and there where it wasn't; your interactions with Dak'kon for example, and you did also get XP for doing what the core of the game was about, i.e. peeling back the layers of your past and piecing together your previous lives, to discover how you ended up on that slab in the first place. But a big, big part of it wasn't.

 

But you've played the PoE beta. You don't need our speculation. How did level advancement feel in it to you? To me it felt wrong. It felt exactly as I thought it would feel. And it wasn't just because I got nothing for killing lions beetles and cultist. Successfully Solving the Dragon Egg problem should have rewarded me XP. They presented it as a problem that required significant skill to solve XP rewards for it should have been 1) get the egg down from the next = XP, return the egg to the alchemist = quest completion XP.

The level progression in the beta feels completely wrong. That's because I go up a level practically every time I complete a quest. There are, what, four questlines or so in the beta, and you can go up three levels. That is way, way too chunky.

 

But then we know that that's not going to be the case in the real thing. They said up-front that XP rewards in the beta are inflated precisely so that we get to level up a few times to see how it feels. It needs to be finer-grained -- and it is going to be.

[IndiraLightfoot]

EDIT: My last post was pretty hideous - What I basically meant was that praising high-level CRPGs or extremely story-heavy ones for them being able to withstand really stretched out xp awards is a bit moot: Most of the character development and progress, you get for free at the start of the game or while you pick yourself through all the convo options.

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

 

*I believe this is in fact a major reason a lot of us like kill XP. See scary-looking beast: "Haha, big bag of XP!". Fight scary-looking beast. Beat scary-looking beast. "Ding, XP!" Rinse and repeat. These dopamine-reward pathways have gotten a pretty damn good workout in all the classics, and they're firing up again when seeing something that looks like the thing that tickled them before, and they're shouting when not being tickled as expected. 

 

 

You can say that again! It bears repeating!!

 

As for what's fun or not is subjective. One thing I remember, you and I both replayed IWD2 this spring, and we couldn't bear ourselves finishing it off, since combat got so tedious in the mid-game and onwards. However, in the first fourth of the game, there were plenty of varied and fun and challenging fights. Imagine if all combat encounters in PoE was like that!

We would both find them challenging, exciting and not very grindy at all.

 

And we shouldn't forget that the entire build-a-party, take-on-combat-challenges, is a big part, even an essence, of what made the IE games great.

Edited August 24, 2014 by IndiraLightfoot

[Stun]

^well that's... a pretty darn well-written argument, Junta. You have earned another 'Like" from me.

 

Also, I'm suddenly conflicted on whether I should start a new PS:T playthough or throw the CDs in the trash. Of course, PS:T, whether it's a good example of anything or not, is almost always the bizzaro exception to every rule. On paper, it's the worst RPG ever made.

 

1) No Gender or race choices. A fixed protagonist, with only 3 class options (like Dragon age! But worse)

2) you can't wear armor

3) you can't use missile weapons of any type (in fact, no one can, save for 2 NPCs)

4) the weapons and spell choices you do have are ridiculously limited

5) Combat is horrendously, hideously, unthinkably, terrible

6) It's an exceedingly ugly game

7) It's filled to capacity with fetch quests

8.) the Modron cube <ugh>

9) The goal is to die.

10) The loot is silly

11) It's party based, yet aside from a couple of exceptions, you cannot equip your companions with anything, or choose their weapons, or customize them in any way

12) Nothing is tactical, nothing is strategic,

13) you can't die, and you can resurrect your party members 3 times a day if they die, but they never will because:

14) Healing charms are stackable to 99, and you can pause the game and consume as many as you wish. The effects are instant. Thus insuring immortality of your party members.

15) The Pacing is the worst of any game I've ever played.

16) It rewards unpredictablilty, as you just mentioned + the grinding (although that's purely optional, since even leveling is not of significant importance in the game)

 

 

Yet, somehow, PS:T manages to be the greatest RPG ever made. Art is intangible, I suppose.

Edited August 24, 2014 by Stun

[Helm]

I've been away for a day, and guess what I found in my in-box when I got home, a message from a dev (from Sking who did the first post about xp, saying it's quest only. In a reply to my wondering whether we'll get to have a more old-school, combat xp, in the game too (or even if modders like me can help them add one before it ships, Sking says:

 

"Once the game releases any mod you feel is necessary to heighten your experience, you should definitely do."

                                                                                                                              Sent 22 August 2014 - 08:22 PM

 

What this means, folks, is that OE isn't budging. We will have quest-xp only (their version of "objective xp"), so there's nothing to see here. Scram! Go home!

 

/Thread 

Well, I am not surprised.

 

But who cares, the game isn't very good anyway. I'll make a party of stealthy muscle wizards and take the shortest route through the game while avoiding all combat. 

[PrimeJunta]

Yeh, PS:T is the very definition of "more than the sum of its parts."

 

<snobmode>

I have long felt that computer games should, and eventually will, evolve into a serious art form. It's the trajectory theater, opera, cinema, and TV all took. They started out as entertainment for the masses, and all the time while remaining just that, also became something bigger than all that.

 

Planescape: Torment remains for me the shining beacon that shows that this can be possible. It wasn't quite there yet, perhaps, but it opened the gate and showed the way.

 

The sad thing is that nobody else yet has managed to walk through that door to what must lie beyond. And as much as I anticipated T:ToN, I'm not sure that a "spiritual successor" is the way to do that. It'll need another unlikely confluence of the right people coming together at the right time, with the means to do what needs doing.

</snobmode>

[Stun]

Indeed.

[BrokenMask]

But who cares, the game isn't very good anyway. I'll make a party of stealthy muscle wizards and take the shortest route through the game while avoiding all combat. 

Eh, you have your right to have your own opinion, so no comment on that besides that I do actually like beta if not for the bugs xP The exp thing IS bothering me since it makes leveling up pacing bizarre, but it didn't ruin the demo for me, the equipment disappearing bug did along with characters being unable to move bug and save reload corruption bugs

[Helm]

The bugs, UI issues and unfinished combat system aren't bugging me. That can all be fixed/improved.

 

I simply don't think that the design (mechanics and systems) of the game is very good.

[Immortalis]

Yeh, PS:T is the very definition of "more than the sum of its parts."

 

<snobmode>

I have long felt that computer games should, and eventually will, evolve into a serious art form. It's the trajectory theater, opera, cinema, and TV all took. They started out as entertainment for the masses, and all the time while remaining just that, also became something bigger than all that.

 

Planescape: Torment remains for me the shining beacon that shows that this can be possible. It wasn't quite there yet, perhaps, but it opened the gate and showed the way.

 

The sad thing is that nobody else yet has managed to walk through that door to what must lie beyond. And as much as I anticipated T:ToN, I'm not sure that a "spiritual successor" is the way to do that. It'll need another unlikely confluence of the right people coming together at the right time, with the means to do what needs doing.

</snobmode>

 

I have to say that games are generally held up to a much higher standard for what is considered "art" then movies are. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie I would consider art.. maybe Shawshenk Redemption? I dunno.. probably there were some I missed or forgot but most of the stuff out of hollywood these days is what we in the game industry call shovelware and they totally get away with it too.

 

I think it's good that games are held to that standard but you guys are gonna be waiting a long time if you expect to see a classic appear in a video game on the same level as some of our most recognizable literature and symphonies.

 

 

 

The bugs, UI issues and unfinished combat system aren't bugging me. That can all be fixed/improved.

 

I simply don't think that the design (mechanics and systems) of the game is very good.

 

PrimeJunta you may be right about those dopamine pathways but it changes nothing.. I still want kill -xp (so does Helm ).. I want to be rewarded for overcoming challenging fights in a predictable (as you stated and I agree) manner. I don't think getting xp for combat is a "boring" xp reward.. I think it's an interesting xp reward.. unless you mean picking off villagers in Beregost.. but even that can be interesting when the Flaming Fists shows up.

 

 

In a reply to my wondering whether we'll get to have a more old-school, combat xp, in the game too (or even if modders like me can help them add one before it ships, Sking says:

"Once the game releases any mod you feel is necessary to heighten your experience, you should definitely do."

What this means, folks, is that OE isn't budging. We will have quest-xp only (their version of "objective xp"), so there's nothing to see here. Scram! Go home!

 

Thats not what that means.. it means he doesn't want to give a direct answer because it's probably not his call and you could use the quote against him if it was later changed. All he said was what has already been said. When the game comes out you are free to mod it as you wish.

 

He is basically saying, no you can't mod the game before it is released.. and I am ignoring the other part of your question about xp.

 

That doesn't mean they are debating or even thinking of changing anything.. but your interpreting beyond what was said in that message.

Edited August 24, 2014 by Immortalis