[392] Prio Issues for Obsidian to Fix

[Osvir]

Sorry for messing a bit with the quote but, in the Beta, I could only think of these three, in the Village too.

-Add a greater combat readiness to all encounters Medreth/Nyfre/Tryndil. The ability to position your entire party around any soon-to-be-hostile Medreth/Nyfre/Tryndil encounters, places them at a serious disadvantage.

This is hm, well, a lot of meta. The very first time you played the Beta (if you can recall), did you position your party around every person in the Village as if preparing for combat?

The whole "I can position myself around Medreth as I please" is a thing that started happening on the forum as people had played the Beta several times. Though, I think Medreth should react to you coming back, a trigger or a region-area that you can step on if approaching him/returning to him (post-talking to Nyfre) and then pause the party's positions wherever they are (like meeting the adventuring party at the Crossing).

Something like "So... how did it go?" or "Did you find anything?" or "Ah! Our friend returns! What have you uncovered?" or whatever. Because at the moment, whoever you send in to talk to Medreth will instantly be surrounded by the rest of the Cowled followers. As a Player, after having saved Nyfre, it's a rather poor decision regarding positioning to even talk to Medreth, it's better to engage with a Fireball right away (because, if saving Nyfre, you kind of get the idea that a fight will begin).

It is a poor encounter, and it has mostly to do with how Medreth & cowled followers are positioned. The adventuring party is more exciting, and does exactly what I mention above (Pause party as you step over a region/trigger, into dialogue, into fight).

Though, I think maybe that, if the Player chooses to save Nyfre, why do you have to fight Medreth? Wouldn't it be more interesting if Medreth raised his eyebrows, looked at his followers, turned back to you, smirked "So be it" and simply left...? Why does there have to be a fight? House Deomel, who are they? And could random encounters start popping up on the worldmap travel sequence? Could it affect reputation as well as interactions later, when you encounter the House again?

[Lord Wafflebum]

Open with a fireball without even talking to Medreth!?

 

That's cold blooded murder, yo. Even though you know he's going to attack you, that wouldn't be considered self defense until he attacks you. FOR SHAME. 

[Osvir]

The best defense is a good offense.... so.... offensive self-defense?

[IndiraLightfoot]

Sorry for messing a bit with the quote but, in the Beta, I could only think of these three, in the Village too.

-Add a greater combat readiness to all encounters Medreth/Nyfre/Tryndil. The ability to position your entire party around any soon-to-be-hostile Medreth/Nyfre/Tryndil encounters, places them at a serious disadvantage.

This is hm, well, a lot of meta. The very first time you played the Beta (if you can recall), did you position your party around every person in the Village as if preparing for combat?

 

The whole "I can position myself around Medreth as I please" is a thing that started happening on the forum as people had played the Beta several times. Though, I think Medreth should react to you coming back, a trigger or a region-area that you can step on if approaching him/returning to him (post-talking to Nyfre) and then pause the party's positions wherever they are (like meeting the adventuring party at the Crossing).

 

Something like "So... how did it go?" or "Did you find anything?" or "Ah! Our friend returns! What have you uncovered?" or whatever. Because at the moment, whoever you send in to talk to Medreth will instantly be surrounded by the rest of the Cowled followers. As a Player, after having saved Nyfre, it's a rather poor decision regarding positioning to even talk to Medreth, it's better to engage with a Fireball right away (because, if saving Nyfre, you kind of get the idea that a fight will begin).

 

It is a poor encounter, and it has mostly to do with how Medreth & cowled followers are positioned. The adventuring party is more exciting, and does exactly what I mention above (Pause party as you step over a region/trigger, into dialogue, into fight).

 

Though, I think maybe that, if the Player chooses to save Nyfre, why do you have to fight Medreth? Wouldn't it be more interesting if Medreth raised his eyebrows, looked at his followers, turned back to you, smirked "So be it" and simply left...? Why does there have to be a fight? House Deomel, who are they? And could random encounters start popping up on the worldmap travel sequence? Could it affect reputation as well as interactions later, when you encounter the House again?

Hehe! Overall, I agree with you. And yes, there are but a few of these encounters compared to wandering baddies, as it were. Still, I hope for some remedy for it, as you will very soon learn/guess/evilly assume which NPCs are about to be turned into fair game, so some script that keep your party at bay from breathing down the necks of these NPCs would be welcome.

[Guest 4ward]

 

Hehe! Overall, I agree with you. And yes, there are but a few of these encounters compared to wandering baddies, as it were. Still, I hope for some remedy for it, as you will very soon learn/guess/evilly assume which NPCs are about to be turned into fair game, so some script that keep your party at bay from breathing down the necks of these NPCs would be welcome.

Personally, i’d say that it’s important to design combat around metagaming. Btw, i don’t mind reloading. Ideally, imo, encounters are designed so that they’re still fun even with you knowing about it beforehand, that’s why people replay BG2 for the x-th time because of encounters only. In the old games like BG2 the Medreth encounter would probably be setup so that Medreth faces you with a mage upon your return. When you choose to attack and dialogue ends, his mage would have sequencer and immediately cast protections like vs normal/magical weapons, mirror, stoneskin, spell turning etc. At the same time, Medreth would let’s say drink a potion which enhances his stats or better yet hastes him while e.g. a rogue would appear at the door of that building behind and another mage/cleric would teleport in while a ranger would appear coming from the forest, so his goons would be spread out and you’d have to spread yours too.

[IndiraLightfoot]

Gnoemli just pointed out something important that's missing so far in all item info UI:

 

Attack speed info on items:

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69943-attack-speed-in-item-info/

 

"Is it just me or is this really missing?

 

Cause the way i see it (just by the informations show on the info page of the items) i got no advantage at all by choosing a Huntingbow over a Warbow.... the Warbow does more damage, so I'm never gonna use a hunting bow.... am i missing something?

 

This is something they really should add..."

 

Sensuki added that he has been dogging them about this all Autumn, and that he should be presented in seconds/milliseconds.

 

4ward: Good point, especially about designing combat around metagaming!

Edited January 7, 2015 by IndiraLightfoot

[Lord Wafflebum]

Does anyone else miss Josh Sawyer in these forums? His soothing reassurances help me hyperventilate less.

[Luckmann]

Does anyone else miss Josh Sawyer in these forums? His soothing reassurances help me hyperventilate less.

Pay $10 and catch him on SomethingAwful.

[Sensuki]

Or you could save $10, and ask your question here and I could copy paste it for you. He also answers questions on tumblr and twitter ...

 

Personally if I was a dev, I'd hate it if the company required me to only post/post the most on the company forum. Most of Josh's posts on this board focus on correcting misinformation and responding to big issues (delay of the game, engagement exploits, problems with combat legibility and pace, etc). At present, what misinformation or 'big issues' is there?

 

As the person who probably complains about the game the most, since they don't agree with / probably don't care about most of my largest concerns - other than that there's lots of moderate and minor issues.

 

FTR, Engagement is still exploitable. Not quite as much as before, but you can absolutely still do it. Pull melee enemies into your party and run around behind a melee character or two equipped with two-handed weapons and you'll get 2-4+ nice big 2H hits, free of recovery time without having to make a single move. Do it with some Barbarians for extra laughs (Carnage hits on everything from each hit).

Edited January 7, 2015 by Sensuki

[PrimeJunta]

Priority issues, other than just plain ol' bugfixes? 

• Broaden the wizard's and priest's spell selections with stuff like the Charm sequence, Hold Person, and Rigid Thinking, with suitable counters for these.
• Give the Rogue and/or Barbarian (at least) abilities that let them scoot through enemy lines to a high-value target, gank him, and scoot back out of trouble. Or, alternatively, make these single-target short-duration buffs or spells. This would reintroduce an IE tactic while keeping the stable battlefield given by the engagement system (which, I must remind everyone, I like.)
• Rethink and redesign the Ranger class. I'd go with a light fighter who has a limited selection of single-target priestly spells, animal companion optional with no shared health pool.
• Last but not least, get the numbers to make sense. Currently there are trap choices in weapons (anything light/fast with no DR bypass) and the armor system with flat DR and flat DR bypass makes armor entirely useless against enemies that punch particularly hard, which is both stupid and counterintuitive.

[Sensuki]

Main priority for me is fixing the animation glitches

When characters get hit and play a non-interrupt hit reaction, they slide across the ground. Also characters often glitch out after Engagement ends if they are chasing a moving character and they are in recovery time because the combat stance and run animation don't blend properly with eachother.

Other than that there are BUCKETLOADS of general functionality issues with the game that make it frustrating to interact with

• Change the Inventory controls for double-click equip (very annoying, needs to be shift or control click or something) and splitting items - which needs to function the same as it did in the IE games (which was double clicking an item stack).
   
• Fix Action Cancel - you can't cancel actions before the hit frame anymore which is really annoying, so if you start casting a spell and you misclicked the spell you want to cast or you changed your mind based on a change in combat, you can't cancel your action anymore, as of v392.
   
• Build an action cancel into RMB please, so that RMB functionality is exactly like the Infinity Engine games
   
• Remove the TAB switching between characters in the inventory and replace it with TAB removing tooltip delay of items, which is how it functions in the Main HUD. The code handling how that works is also really strange, and makes it difficult to mod in.
   
• Improve Weapon Set switching (probably needs to be hotkeyable, like an ARPG or something - I consonantly go to press W to swap weapons from playing Diablo 2 and Titan Quest hahah). Weapon Sets also work sub-optimally in the inventory.
   

• Visual Clutter - still quite a problem in combat (VFX, Occlusion especially)
   

• Pathfinding - while improved a bit in v364, still pretty shocking. Units have severe trouble pathing around other units. One of the problems is actually caused by the size of the movement indicators being smaller than the size of unit selection circles, but there's also some calculation issues in there too. Characters take strange vectors to locations / don't take the shortest path around other units.
   
• Auto-attack really needs to be cleaned up, it's cancelling character actions and auto-attacking when it shouldn't
   
• Tooltip delay really needs separate sliders for unit and ability tooltips, among other things
   
• VO needs Always, Seldom and Never options like the IE games for selection and commands
   
• Sound slider really needs to be split into multiple ones, because it's super annoying having one slider for music and one for EVERYTHING else
   
• Performance and Hitching is becoming a major problem for me. Every patch it's getting worse.

 

That's just off the top of my head at the moment but I have several text documents of issues that I'll go through and paste in later. Back to bug reporting.

 

Edited January 7, 2015 by Sensuki

[Sensuki]

 

Hence, this topic. Here you get to post your prio issues with the current PoE BB, and only those, so please try to refrain to include pet peeves like kill xp, no disengagement mechanics, and such

... guys

 

[Cluas]

the trap-bug is annoying me the most right now...

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

 

 

I used nutty to avoid the more obvious "rude". Not nice when someone comes to your work and tells you how to run your own schedule. There's a difference between input, which they do see, I've seen them sit in a thread for hours, and armchair quarterbacking their job.

 

 

Ah, I see. I guess you're right. It's pretty rude, come to think of it. I'd say it's the tone of it all, isn't it? Here, on the beta forums, I mean; that demanding and self-entitled ring to the comments and criticisms? When I was new to these forums, it bugged me much more than now. Scarily enough, I've let some of my civility go, and instead become accustomed to this veritable onslaught of opinionated prickles which we disguise as forum discussions. I'll take more heed in the future. We'll see how long it will last. This rumbustious bickering is very contagious.

[Sensuki]

Without this "rumbistious bickering", PrimeJunta wouldn't have been able to see the "grognard" point of view / understand our Infinity Engine playstyle  

 

[PrimeJunta]

Not to mention, I would never have learned to play the IE games properly.

[Lord Wafflebum]

I guess more or less I would like to see a full fledged kickstarter update, kind of along the lines of what this last leg of the journey is going to involve.

 

I realize this is only their second day back. Maybe an update at the end of the week would be sexy?

[Sensuki]

I guess more or less I would like to see a full fledged kickstarter update, kind of along the lines of what this last leg of the journey is going to involve.

Lots of PR speak.

[Quantics]

Yeah I couldn't care less about a KS/backer update personally.

 

Fix the game instead. Lots of good suggestions in this thread.

Edited January 8, 2015 by Quantics