Delayed to early 2015

[Sensuki]

No it wasn't a good system.

[Elerond]

Yeah no reason to go back on that. If you're going to have XP for locked doors then you need to create an "obstacle XP" system of some sort, where you can only get one reward for completing the objective, and the others are then cancelled out.

 

They could use exploration xp for that, by awarding player xp if they reach the room/whatever is behind the locked door/trap field/etc..

[Doppelschwert]

I agree, lockpick and trap exp is a bad thing. The benefit of picking locks is getting loot and the benefit of disarming traps is not getting acid in your face, there is no need to further reward that behaviour.

 

Perfect example for degenerate gameplay:

In wasteland 2, I recently got to an area with three possible routes connecting to the same place. Every route had a minefield and I spent some time clearing all three minefields just for the exp, although I would've only needed one way to get where I wanted and although it's boring as ****.

The game even encouraged me to do so because all my other party members are way ahead in exp because they were able to use the skills more often than the guy with dismantling traps.

[archangel979]

No it wasn't a good system.

Why?

[archangel979]

I agree, lockpick and trap exp is a bad thing. The benefit of picking locks is getting loot and the benefit of disarming traps is not getting acid in your face, there is no need to further reward that behaviour.

 

Perfect example for degenerate gameplay:

In wasteland 2, I recently got to an area with three possible routes connecting to the same place. Every route had a minefield and I spent some time clearing all three minefields just for the exp, although I would've only needed one way to get where I wanted and although it's boring as ****.

The game even encouraged me to do so because all my other party members are way ahead in exp because they were able to use the skills more often than the guy with dismantling traps.

The game didn't encourage you, it was your choice. That XP is not needed to continue playing the game. It was only in your brain that you felt you somehow would fail if you didn't do it. Don't blame the system for your own needs/wants.

[PrimeJunta]

@archangel: would you be any less free to pick those locks or clear those mines if the game didn't reward you for it with XP?

 

If not, why is it better to get XP for it than not?

[Doppelschwert]

 

I agree, lockpick and trap exp is a bad thing. The benefit of picking locks is getting loot and the benefit of disarming traps is not getting acid in your face, there is no need to further reward that behaviour.

 

Perfect example for degenerate gameplay:

In wasteland 2, I recently got to an area with three possible routes connecting to the same place. Every route had a minefield and I spent some time clearing all three minefields just for the exp, although I would've only needed one way to get where I wanted and although it's boring as ****.

The game even encouraged me to do so because all my other party members are way ahead in exp because they were able to use the skills more often than the guy with dismantling traps.

The game didn't encourage you, it was your choice. That XP is not needed to continue playing the game. It was only in your brain that you felt you somehow would fail if you didn't do it. Don't blame the system for your own needs/wants.

 

 

I started the game with 4 characters at the same level. I took care that no one ever died in any battle. Still, there is a gap of exp between every two characters that is continuing to be so large that the largest gap is getting as large as a whole level. One character of mine has all the speech skills. She almost never gets any exp for using the skills because you can almost never use them. So I thought - you know, there are a lot of bombs lying around, maybe by letting her use the demolitions skill, she'll level up at a more even pace.

 

If i have the - imho - low standard that every character may contribute in the same amount to the game - then the game encourages me to do this, as the exp gap is direct feedback about how often you can use the skills of the char outside of combat, and if I want them to contribute evenly, then I should somehow equalize these values. Also, the way the game is designed I need this extra level in order to be able to have a low chance at the most skill checks in the first place, given how high they are designed in most maps I visited up till now.

 

If there was a little fluctuation of about 10% of the exp needed to hit the next level, I would ignore it, but this gap is way too high and even increasing over time. Imho, that is just bs gamedesign. Yeah, I confirm your point - that's only what I want. But that is also a stupid argument, as you can use it against any complaint towards any game.

 

I don't need to do that if I want to complete the game, but I can't really enjoy the game if I'm constantly reminded that I'm stupid for not using a guide when I tried to make a useful character and gave her all the speech skills. Games and their mechanics should be transparent.

 

TLDR: Bad designed systems feed into me feeling like I have to do this.

 

EDIT:

If you removed all the exp that is not combat exp, you'd still have the same choices, I'd have a party of even leveled characters and I wouldn't mind dumping all the speech skills on a single character. That is far superior to the way it is handled now IMHO, so I'd like to see an argument how the exp is helping in this case to make the game more fun. So basically, I'd like to know the same stuff as PJ.

Edited October 5, 2014 by Doppelschwert

[Tartantyco]

The game didn't encourage you, it was your choice. That XP is not needed to continue playing the game. It was only in your brain that you felt you somehow would fail if you didn't do it. Don't blame the system for your own needs/wants.

 

The game encourages you by having XP improve your character through leveling. Players having to police themselves is bad design.

[Benedictous]

 

 But if I'm forced to pick two of the following three: all promised features, high level of quality, on time -- "on time" is almost always going to be the thing I'd prefer to sacrifice.  On many of the projects I've been a part of "level of quality" has been the thing sacrificed, and I've almost never had a say in it.

 

That right there is all I needed to hear. After buying into the hype of D:OS and MM:X and being thrown into their buggy/confusing/pointless class nature, I for one am appluading delaying release.  You got to look at it like this: why settle for a dollar today (buggy mess) when you can get 100 dollars in a few months (actual finished game).

[archangel979]

 

The game didn't encourage you, it was your choice. That XP is not needed to continue playing the game. It was only in your brain that you felt you somehow would fail if you didn't do it. Don't blame the system for your own needs/wants.

 

The game encourages you by having XP improve your character through leveling. Players having to police themselves is bad design.

 

It is worse design if devs think they know how I want to play and railroad my choices.

[Quetzalcoatl]

 

 

The game didn't encourage you, it was your choice. That XP is not needed to continue playing the game. It was only in your brain that you felt you somehow would fail if you didn't do it. Don't blame the system for your own needs/wants.

 

The game encourages you by having XP improve your character through leveling. Players having to police themselves is bad design.

 

It is worse design if devs think they know how I want to play and railroad my choices.

Nobody is railroading/removing your choices, you just won't be able to exploit them for XP. So if you'll make a choice, you'll do it because you wanted to or because *gasp* it was simply fun to do it.

[Lephys]

It is worse design if devs think they know how I want to play and railroad my choices.

By that line of reasoning, anything the game doesn't let you do is "railroading" your choices. Can't cut a cat and a child in half, then splice them together to make your own cat-child chimera? Can't play as a sword instead of a character? Can't open a portal to a different planet and say "to hell with this!" to the whole main narrative?

 

STOP RAILROADING OUR CHOICES, DEVELOPERS!

 

In seriousness, though, there's got to be another criterion in place than "not-letting us do something is automatically bad." Again, if they didn't allow saving, then scumming wouldn't even be a choice that they could take away. And the only reason they put saving in the game is so that you can play a game in not-a-single-contiguous-sitting.

 

If they wanted you to be able to bypass failures at random rolls/checks, they could've just implemented a "disable check failures" toggle-option in the options menu. Boom. Done. WAY easier than forcing you to redo the same thing 5 times, just to "choose" your option (to bypass chance).

Edited October 5, 2014 by Lephys

[archangel979]

 

 

 

The game didn't encourage you, it was your choice. That XP is not needed to continue playing the game. It was only in your brain that you felt you somehow would fail if you didn't do it. Don't blame the system for your own needs/wants.

 

The game encourages you by having XP improve your character through leveling. Players having to police themselves is bad design.

 

It is worse design if devs think they know how I want to play and railroad my choices.

 

Nobody is railroading/removing your choices, you just won't be able to exploit them for XP. So if you'll make a choice, you'll do it because you wanted to or because *gasp* it was simply fun to do it.

 

I don't exploit XP, and even if I did that is my choice because I find it fun. Of course they are railroading me.

[PrimeJunta]

It is worse design if devs think they know how I want to play and railroad my choices.

 

Uh. If the devs didn't think they know how you want to play, how would they be able to make a game in the first place?

 

That's kind of the first and fundamental question any game designer has to figure out.

Edited October 6, 2014 by PrimeJunta

[Cantousent]

The argument I dislike the most, almost despise with an unreasoning depth of feeling, is the 'freedom' argument.  I mean, I'm pretty good about separating my view of the argument from the people making it, but... come on.  I'll cite the specific arguments from Lephys, PJ, and our local Mayan god.  Just take this post as supporting their base assertion about freedom in the game.

 

I will just make two points.

 

First, on one hand, denial of specific gameplay rewards for a particular action does nothing to prohibit it.  (PJ & Q)

 

Second, after we fight over that hill, it doesn't matter anyway because all meaningful freedom in CRPGs is illusory anyway.  Even the biggest, broadest, baddest sandbox game has boundaries.  (L jefe)

 

When we play a game, we enter into a sort of contract the designer.  Not with the publisher.  Not with the development house.  Certainly not with our friend who kept recommending the game that turned out to be a turd.  With the designer, we agree that we'll suspend disbelief and allow for certain boundaries set by the guy who writes the dialogue and contrives the puzzles and figures out the motives, desires, and methods of the PC.  In return, we ask that we are entertained by the experience.  Sometimes even moved by the experience in the same way as a good book or a great movie.  That's our arrangement, and we don't do ourselves any favors by insisting that the designer substitutes our vision for his own.  Your artistic vision might be better, but not the watered down version that any dev who designs by committee would be able to create.  There may be a great game in which a cat/baby hybrid plays some part, but certainly not one where the cat/baby hybrid is included solely for the purpose of placating an angry fan. (L jefe)

 

If this is all incoherent, I'm blame my diminished state, which is to say myself.

[Azrael Ultima]

I don't exploit XP, and even if I did that is my choice because I find it fun. Of course they are railroading me.

It doesn't matter what you, specificially, do or for what reasons you do it. What matters is what the majority would most likely do and why.

[archangel979]

 

I don't exploit XP, and even if I did that is my choice because I find it fun. Of course they are railroading me.

It doesn't matter what you, specificially, do or for what reasons you do it. What matters is what the majority would most likely do and why.

 

And how do you know what the majority will do? You can also speak only for yourself.

 

Also this majority wants Skyrim level mechanics and Diablo 3 level action combat. Should PoE have those? 

Where do you draw the line?

Edited October 6, 2014 by archangel979

[Gorbag]

When we talk about the possible exploits of lock and trap XP, I cannot help but feel the presence of the "combat XP" elephant in the room. Being a minor source and involving a lot of busy-work, grinding locks and traps is usually neglected in favour of the more lucrative combat and quests, unless the player is hellbent on obtaining every single point of XP in the game. When a major conventional source is removed, XP becomes a somewhat rare resource and "degenerative gameplay" transfers to all minor sources, out of fear of losing out. Therefore I believe that we are trading one form of degeneration for another here.

[Agremont]

I have no problem with this. This is a game that I want to be as good as it can possibly be.

[Tartantyco]

 

 

The game didn't encourage you, it was your choice. That XP is not needed to continue playing the game. It was only in your brain that you felt you somehow would fail if you didn't do it. Don't blame the system for your own needs/wants.

 

The game encourages you by having XP improve your character through leveling. Players having to police themselves is bad design.

 

It is worse design if devs think they know how I want to play and railroad my choices.

 

 

How exactly are your choices being railroaded in this instance? Also, aren't you being "railroaded" by the amount of attribute points you're given to distribute? Aren't you being "railroaded" by what Obsidian determines to be quests in the game? Aren't you being "railroaded" by the class design?

 

This is just a nonsense argument. You might just as well claim that your life is being railroaded by gravity.

 

 

 

I don't exploit XP, and even if I did that is my choice because I find it fun. Of course they are railroading me.

It doesn't matter what you, specificially, do or for what reasons you do it. What matters is what the majority would most likely do and why.

 

And how do you know what the majority will do? You can also speak only for yourself.

 

Also this majority wants Skyrim level mechanics and Diablo 3 level action combat. Should PoE have those? 

Where do you draw the line?

 

Not a valid comparison. We're talking about player behavior. You're talking about game mechanical alterations.

[archangel979]

I think we can at least agree to disagree. We obviously want different design from games. I don't care about "degenerative gameplay" and prefer if game let me decide what is good or not, instead of limiting my options through game design. 

Some of your here think differently. Lets leave it at that. You cannot change my mind and I cannot change yours.

[gkathellar]

 

D&D is a half-baked mess that usually doesn't know what it's trying to do with itself, Next no less than any of its predecessors.

I think it is partially because it is assumed that you play the game with a DM who can make judgement calls and tailor the adventures to the characters present.

 

It is supposed to only be half-baked, with the players shaping it as they see fit and then finishing the baking process.

 

No. D&D isn't intentionally half-baked so much as the devs stopped cooking in the middle because they weren't clear on the difference between dough and bread. It mostly suffers from ginormous QA failures, and then doesn't even bother to tell you so (like Mutants and Masterminds does, an approach that is either brilliant or lazy, depending on who you ask).

 

Having worked semi-professionally on tabletop game design before, my experience is that most problems in tabletop games are due to:

1. Lack of a coherent design ideology throughout the team, either because different devs have differing ideas of what the game should be, or because no one has any clear sense of it at all.
   1. Example: Exalted 2E, the game of flashy cinematic action where every fight just ends up being an endless, boring war of attrition.
2. Not having play-testers/copy-editors/QA other than the devs themselves. This is because good tabletop QA is not just about making sure intended things work, but about actively trying to bend the system until it breaks.
   1. Example: D&D3E.  By all accounts, playtesting was limited to the least creative, most stereotyped styles of play imaginable. As a result, virtually every other style of play is broken.
3. Confusing development for GMing - or worse yet, confusing development for writing fiction.
   1. Example: Pathfinder, where they don't need to fix the balance issues, because those are features, not bugs.
4. Math ****ups. These are easily fixed before release, but become a huge issue once out of the gate, where the only face-saving solution is to hastily patched them with non-optional options in later supplements.
   1. Example: D&D4E is a good one, since it actually tries to have working math but drifts off-target by about 3-5 points by later levels. All of the games mentioned above are examples of a different type, where no one bothered to do any numbers work at any point.

It bears noting that these are mostly TTRPG issues, not issues with games. Certainly they're unlikely to hound PoE through its full release. (1) is a larger possibility, but it's a mistake Obsidian has rarely, if ever, made. (2) isn't a huge issue for video games, and also ... backer beta. (3) just doesn't affect video games much, if at all. (4) is what patches are for, which are thankfully much easier to use comprehensively on core systems than errata is.

[Chaos Theory]

Glad it's delayed.  Also glad I didn't even try to play the beta...

[PrimeJunta]

I think we can at least agree to disagree. We obviously want different design from games. I don't care about "degenerative gameplay" and prefer if game let me decide what is good or not, instead of limiting my options through game design. 

Some of your here think differently. Lets leave it at that. You cannot change my mind and I cannot change yours.

 

We're clearly disagreeing, whether we agree about it or not, and yes, I agree that some of that is due to different preferences. 

 

We can still discuss the respective arguments on each of our sides.

 

For example, "I don't care about degenerative gameplay" means "I don't care if the systems in my game are broken or exploitable." That's about equivalent to "I don't care about design." 

 

That's a perfectly valid position to take, but IMO it kind of disqualifies you from talking about the subject to start with. It's a bit like someone saying "I don't care for music" but insisting on discussing the latest performance of Wagner's Ring at Bayreuth anyway.

 

Second, "limiting my options through game design." That argument is fundamentally nonsensical, as has been pointed out to you by several people already.

 

A game is a created artifact. It is defined precisely by the limitations it puts on your options through its ruleset. Remove those limitations, and you have no game left. It's like starting with a group of people playing a tabletop game and then throwing out the rulebooks and deciding to tell each other stories instead. That can still be brilliant fun, but it's no longer a game by any reasonable definition of the word -- and, of course, since things on a computer are made of rules -- programming logic -- that cannot, by definition, exist on a computer.

 

I.e., whatever your preferences are, your arguments are weak. If you really want to conclude the discussion, just say "I like exploitable systems." To that there really is nothing to add.

[Stormbold]

Obsidian has my full support in this decision.