15/1/14 Stream Impressions and Feedback

[Stun]

Sensuki it's 2015 friend.

Clearly a time-based oversight. He actually wrote this critique a year ago, then forgot to change the date on the title before hitting the submit button. Happens to me all the time. Damn metagaming!

 

Anyway, I don't really understand the "sterile city" gripe. It felt fine to me. Athkatla wasn't any more "bustle-y" and Baldurs Gate certainly wasn't. So maybe the ambient sounds *do* make a difference in the way of perception.

 

Edit: I'd suggest they steal the excellent soundbytes from Trademeet. Because those were the best. (If your parents don't buy you a pushy stick, they don't love you!" And "I always have been suspicious of clean shaven men!" etc.

Edited January 16, 2015 by Stun

[Stun]

And forgive my literary ignorance, but what's that annoying semi-circle over every "st" in the text of this game?

[Stun]

 

weird line going from the letter "s" to "t"

 

That's not a bug, that's called a Font Ligature.

 

Aaah. And here I thought it was part of the engagement mechanic. Anyway, they should get rid of it. It's annoying.

[Leferd]

 

 

weird line going from the letter "s" to "t"

That's not a bug, that's called a Font Ligature.

Aaah. And here I thought it was part of the engagement mechanic. Anyway, they should get rid of it. It's annoying.

It's optional in the settings.

[BlueLion]

Stun. I think maybe the ambient sounds are causing people to critique the towns. I too feel like there's 'something' missing but whether the ambient sounds will solve that we will see soon no doubt. Loving the game progress, so incredibly excited for March. Fortunately have Darkest Dungeon early access to keep me occupied in the mean time.

[Lephys]

Yup, I've had the same opinion on wood textures for lists being too light / noisy to be used against text. We already have new assets for that and will be replacing the old list assets soon.

Just change the wood to a rich mahogany. Darker wood... problem solved.

[TobyM]

First post here. 

 

Cool feedback you gave, Sensuki.  

 

I just wanted to add about the colors of the text against the wooden panels in the Stronghold menu. 

 

I really have a hard time seeing what it says, and to me it kind of blurs together. I don't know if it is because it was a stream, and it might be different to actually be 'in game', but I just wanted to add that I find it kind of hard to read, and to separate the colors. 

All the best

[Guest 4ward]

just got a look at the latest gameplay demo from Josh Sawyer on youtube (missed the stream and twitch doesn't load for me) and wanted to ask about scouting/hiding in shadows. On what does the chance to be detected depend, is it difficulty setting, number of enemies, type of enemies, distance to enemies, your skill points, or all of that? I’ve to say that i like that you cannot sneak up on enemies, you don’t really have a big advantage with using scouting. I think that’s good and also i guess it makes me miss prebuffing from earlier games less.

 

Also another question re encounter/combat. Does the amount of enemies units depend on difficulty. If yes, i’d rather have them not, rather i’d prefer if on harder difficulty settings (and perhaps on party level) the enemies would do greater damage and/or be a higher variant/version of enemies you’d face on normal/easy setting. There should imo be a min number of enemy units and that number should increase depending on how many chars you have in your party (but not on difficulty setting). Too many units are bad for pathfinding and the combat melee system imo (you should have the room for moving).

 

Also re pathfinding, can you compute AI controlled units to not occupy the doorway area so that if there’s two of them one unit moves away (i noticed on one occasion a unit with ranged attack stop in the doorway and another unit with melee being stuck next to it in a loop). Can it also be programmed that units pass through doorways in a line as opposed to next to each other? Even with wider corridors and doorways that seems to me an issue in PoE. I understand, the game is in the tuning, but just wanted to comment. That’s all, thanks.

[PrimeJunta]

The stealth system is pretty straightforward: each character (yours and theirs) has an invisible "noise circle" and "detection circle." The size of the "noise circle" depends on your stealth skill. If a character's "noise circle" intersects the "detection circle," its selection circle will start to fill up, first with yellow, then with red. The speed depends on your stealth skill and how close you are to the "detecting" toon. Once it's full, you're detected.

 

I.e. there's a "grace" period within which you can retreat back to the shadows when you risk detection.

 

And you most definitely can sneak up on enemies. I've done that in the Skaen temple with BB Rogue (and rogues of my own) a quite a bit.

 

The difficulty settings affect the number and type of enemies. Only Path of the Damned also affects their stats.

Edited January 18, 2015 by PrimeJunta

[Guest 4ward]

thanks a lot, PrimeJunta. I though that the battles in the latest gameplay video were a little bit repetitive and i hope that'll change as you progress in the game. The priest in the dungeon wasn't really that much of a threat and Josh wasn't really having much trouble on hard difficulty, he wasn't required to use his abilities/spells that much. I wonder if Obisidian would consider to 'inverse' their melee system and delete the disengaging abilities and instead add engaging abilities to non-caster classes only (fighter, monk, paladin, barbarian). Consequently, i think that then they could make status effects be more dangerous; the paralyze effect of skirmishers from the latest gameplay video doesn’t scare me as much  as paralyze from BG2. Just a thought.

[PrimeJunta]

That would be a major change as I believe the AI relies heavily on tracking who's engaged with whom. I would be extremely surprised to see something that big this late in the process.

 

Status effects in general are much less scary than in the BG's as (1) the durations are shorter -- like, WAY shorter -- and (2) they can be universally countered with Suppress Affliction. (Personally I prefer it this way, except that I'd like countering to be a bit more complex. It's not 'game over' if you get slapped with an AoE status effect, like could happen with Horror/Confusion/Chaos if you were a bit unlucky with your saves etc. You usually have time to do something.)

 

That said, in the earlier BB builds there were some seriously scary status effects; there was a spider which inflicted Petrification which meant that all your damage went straight from Health, which meant that unless you got really creative really quick, a Petrified character wento to zero health (=maimed or dead if permadeath is on) in no time flat. It's no longer there in BB392 at least on Normal difficulty; may still be on Hard or PotD.

[Sarex]

From what I have seen the AI is so dumb that making it from scratch would not be that much more work.

 

Edit:Still can't believe that they couldn't make an AI at least as good as BG2 (let alone IWD2).

Edited January 18, 2015 by Sarex

[Bli1942]

From what I have seen the AI is so dumb that making it from scratch would not be that much more work.

 

Edit:Still can't believe that they couldn't make an AI at least as good as BG2 (let alone IWD2).

 

I just try the beta again and I gotta say, the AI really is terrible. I hope it is not the final game. One guy was just standing stuck behind one of my guys because he was wanting to attack someone further away...

 

I find the game is pretty hard even on easy, in the backer beta. But it looked easy for Josh on hard in the stream. Maybe I just suck, but I barely finish any fight. Maybe it will be alright once i start from beginning of the game

[Cluas]

 

 

Aaah. And here I thought it was part of the engagement mechanic. Anyway, they should get rid of it. It's annoying.

 

Well, it is an option in the menu. Just turn it off

[Guest 4ward]

@PrimeJunta, as far as i’m concerned this current implementation of engagement is crowd paralyze already. It’s like you stunned the chars and the disengaging abilities are the counterspells. I’m not really sure that Obsidian needed to put in cc at all, and consequently adding counterspells isn’t necessary either. Methinks they’ve thrown in things like paralyze for good measure but necessary it’s not. As far i understand the KS update re engagement, again, i believe they could just have given knockdown and the other abilities for ENgaging instead of DISENgaging. Disallow those abilities for enemy melee classes and make them dangerous by giving them more endurance, offensive/defensive power. And then, you can proceed to add cc and counterspells and protections. But you’re right that the ship has sailed for PoE, perhaps it’s a thing to consider for PoE2.

[MReed]

That would be a major change as I believe the AI relies heavily on tracking who's engaged with whom. I would be extremely surprised to see something that big this late in the process.

 

I'm fairly confident that this is incorrect technically, but is correct functionally:  The AI doesn't track who is engaged to whom -- it assumes that any target engaged in melee combat is both engaged by and is engaging its melee partner.  It may, although I really doubt it, assume that a target is engaging / being engaged by all targets in melee range.

 

On the other hand, the above assumption means that removing / limiting engagement will hand a massive advantage to the player, as the AI will play as if engagement is universal while the player will play based on what is currently implemented.  Fixing this would indeed require a major overhaul of the AI.

[archangel979]

 

From what I have seen the AI is so dumb that making it from scratch would not be that much more work.

 

Edit:Still can't believe that they couldn't make an AI at least as good as BG2 (let alone IWD2).

 

I just try the beta again and I gotta say, the AI really is terrible. I hope it is not the final game. One guy was just standing stuck behind one of my guys because he was wanting to attack someone further away...

 

I find the game is pretty hard even on easy, in the backer beta. But it looked easy for Josh on hard in the stream. Maybe I just suck, but I barely finish any fight. Maybe it will be alright once i start from beginning of the game

 

Josh was playing a newer version where damage was scaled down for everyone.

[BAdler]

Wanna hear something funny?

Those light wooden panels with white text on them was the very first thing I reported in as bad and almost unreadable in the earliest beta, and they are still in.

 

I just can't wrap my head around why.

 

Voice of Reason: *Pst! It's because you're just a backer, and not a game dev at Obsidian*

 

The truly honest answer is not because the dev team is ignoring you (by you I mean backers, not specifically you). We see things like that and it gets put onto a list that we are constantly reprioritizing based on what we feel is most important to the player experience. I know there are many people that would disagree with how we prioritizing some of the items, but the reality is that there is a TON of stuff that needs to get done and not a lot of people to do it. Sometimes things will get left out until we feel comfortable with some of the core features/UI/gameplay.

 

For example, our UI is done by Kaz (Art/Design) and Brian (Programming). All of the UI in the entire game is done by those two folks and we have an enormous amount of it. Keep in mind that every decision we make has consequences that ripple throughout the game. We could take Brian and Kaz off what they are doing, but then we would be getting fixes to the combat log, HUD, extra portraits, etc.. It is always a give and take.

 

The Stronghold UI definitely needs some extra love, but it is just lower on the list of items right now. I'll promise you, though, that some of that screen will get revised over the next two months before launch.

[Zeckul]

Didn't watch all of it, but was happy to see combat evolving at a tolerable speed and without tons of micromanagement - as it should be, even on "hard" difficulty.

 

Environments are beautiful and I'm very excited to explore this new world.

 

Perhaps it's not fair to compare any dungeon level to Durlag's Tower or Watcher's Keep - those were the highlights of the entire BG series, but most encounters in BG weren't remotely as interesting as these. Lots of random packs of hobgoblins and wolves and xvarts. These dungeons also shipped in expansion packs and reflect a degree of mastery of the tools that Obsidian may not have time to acquire during PoE's development but may reach in future installments.

Edited January 21, 2015 by Zeckul

[Yellow Rabbit]

Perhaps it's not fair to compare any dungeon level to Durlag's Tower or Watcher's Keep - those were the highlights of the entire BG series, but most encounters in BG weren't remotely as interesting as these. Lots of random packs of hobgoblins and wolves and xvarts. These dungeons also shipped in expansion packs and reflect a degree of mastery of the tools that Obsidian may not have time to acquire during PoE's development but may reach in future installments.

Just to highlight variety of opinions here, as much as I love BG1 (not so for BG2) Durlag's Tower from ToTSC expansion was, to put it mildly, thing that should never have happened to the game. Well, maybe with exception of Aec'letec encounter. It'd be nice if PoE wouldn't have dungeons designed like that one. Nice for me, that is.

 

Sorry. Just got turned a little on by that "highlights of the entire series la-la-la"

[Luckmann]

 

Perhaps it's not fair to compare any dungeon level to Durlag's Tower or Watcher's Keep - those were the highlights of the entire BG series, but most encounters in BG weren't remotely as interesting as these. Lots of random packs of hobgoblins and wolves and xvarts. These dungeons also shipped in expansion packs and reflect a degree of mastery of the tools that Obsidian may not have time to acquire during PoE's development but may reach in future installments.

Just to highlight variety of opinions here, as much as I love BG1 (not so for BG2) Durlag's Tower from ToTSC expansion was, to put it mildly, thing that should never have happened to the game. Well, maybe with exception of Aec'letec encounter. It'd be nice if PoE wouldn't have dungeons designed like that one. Nice for me, that is.

 

Sorry. Just got turned a little on by that "highlights of the entire series la-la-la"

 

 

Yeah, I really loved BG1, and I think that Watcher's Keep in BG2 was really well-made, but Durlag's Tower from ToTSC, I always considered terrible.

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

Wanna hear something funny?

Those light wooden panels with white text on them was the very first thing I reported in as bad and almost unreadable in the earliest beta, and they are still in.

 

I just can't wrap my head around why.

 

Voice of Reason: *Pst! It's because you're just a backer, and not a game dev at Obsidian*

 

The truly honest answer is not because the dev team is ignoring you (by you I mean backers, not specifically you). We see things like that and it gets put onto a list that we are constantly reprioritizing based on what we feel is most important to the player experience. I know there are many people that would disagree with how we prioritizing some of the items, but the reality is that there is a TON of stuff that needs to get done and not a lot of people to do it. Sometimes things will get left out until we feel comfortable with some of the core features/UI/gameplay.

 

For example, our UI is done by Kaz (Art/Design) and Brian (Programming). All of the UI in the entire game is done by those two folks and we have an enormous amount of it. Keep in mind that every decision we make has consequences that ripple throughout the game. We could take Brian and Kaz off what they are doing, but then we would be getting fixes to the combat log, HUD, extra portraits, etc.. It is always a give and take.

 

The Stronghold UI definitely needs some extra love, but it is just lower on the list of items right now. I'll promise you, though, that some of that screen will get revised over the next two months before launch.

 

No worries, Brandon. It was all tongue in cheek, basically hinting at light text on light wood is a bad idea to begin with.

[Lorfean]

 

Just to highlight variety of opinions here, as much as I love BG1 (not so for BG2) Durlag's Tower from ToTSC expansion was, to put it mildly, thing that should never have happened to the game. Well, maybe with exception of Aec'letec encounter. It'd be nice if PoE wouldn't have dungeons designed like that one. Nice for me, that is.

 

Sorry. Just got turned a little on by that "highlights of the entire series la-la-la"

 

 

Yeah, I really loved BG1, and I think that Watcher's Keep in BG2 was really well-made, but Durlag's Tower from ToTSC, I always considered terrible.

 

 

Interesting. For me, Durlag's Tower has always been a highlight of the series. IMO the dungeons in vanilla BG -- with the possible exception of the Nashkel Mines, which was a decent low level dungeon made better by the plot / player's motivation for exploring it -- were terrible! So when TotC was released and gave me this amazing, complex dungeon crawling experience (that Ice Island was **** too, though) I loved it. Watcher's Keep was great too, but for me Durlag's is right up there with the series' most memorable moments.

 

Of course, my favorite IE dungeon crawling experiences are in IWD, and that's what I am hoping for in PoE.

[Nonek]

Sorry for being late to the party, however did anyone else notice how vibrant and responsive the fog of war shadows were when Josh was playing in the city? I'm currently re-playing Torment and watching this stream imagined the fog of war shadows stopping reacting to me, and then streaming in like thin tendrils of darkness towards the character. Are there shadow like creatures in Poe, and perhaps if so this would be an easier method of conjuring them up than the traditional pack of monsters, each animated and acting seperately?

 

Anyway toodles.

[Falkentyne]

I agree with the wood panels.   The grain on them makes the text a bit dififcult to read   If the noise could be darker or the entire color of a different contrast....