Thieving skills ?

[Azmodiuz]

 

FWIW I don't think I've ever pickpocketed in the IE games. It's not like there's a shortage of stuff in them even without it.

 

Yeah, I was about to say that. I'm pretty sure I tried it once or twice, the enemies went hostile and I just never tried it again.

 

Pickpocketing is ridiculously useful in the IE games (Or rather, at least in BG2). It is a gateway to such profits that it's borderline broken, once you pump it up to ~240-250 (with potions). Primarily for five-finger discounts at stores, but there are also a lot of loot to be hand from pickpocketing the right targets. Not just specific targets (like Ribald, for his Ring of Regeneration) or for quests (which sadly often ends up with the quest becoming disjointed), but also more "randomized" targets (such as the Amnish Guards, who has a chance of carrying high-level spell scrolls, up to lvl .

 

Pickpocketing is awesome. And if you piss someone off, just fleeing often works, but really, just try to not piss people off.

 

I don't know how emergent the pickpocketing gameplay in the IE games was. All the goodies you could pickpocket had to be placed there by the designers after all.

Not very, although not all the goodies are pre-placed, but anyway, the point I was going to make is that the IE games isn't the end-all be-all measuring stick of well-implemented mechanics. Pickpocketing definitely has the potential to be better implemented than in the IE games, and I think that relegating it to "scripted only"-interactions is a sad cop-out.

 

Its not his ring of regen you want so much as the mage in the sphere to be pickpoketted before you kill him.. and encounters like that, where you can get inaccesible gear too. Course the +1 regen a round is nice, but the +2 regen is better !

 

Also, you don't just pick poket everything, otherwise the game becomes 3x as long ....  you just pickpocket those you are SURE must have something, by the way they talk, like payback... you don't like a someone who bad mouthed you, then, rob him blind that evenning

Edited January 27, 2015 by Azmodiuz

[Azmodiuz]

Anyways- if this is a spiritual successor then it should have some thieving mechanics. They were HUGE parts of  IE games in my opinion.
But, maybe make them meaningful. But stealth should matter. If your seen while in stealth - people would be VERY suspecting, but if your not seen and you stealthed around, it should be considerably easier to steal. Lighting and people directionally facing you always made a difference... but things like explosions and earthquakes wouldn't , which bothered me. Distractions should matter, and thats where I think, PoE can make scripted thieving encounters , possibly.
 

[Whipstitch]

I absolutely loathe pick pocketing. Even when the rewards are great I always felt like it was uninteresting busy work and completely skipped it if at all possible. Rare is the game where creative approaches for pick pocketing are really at all creative--all too often you have to make heavy use of only-in-video-games logic or save scumming to really get the risk-reward calculations working in your favor. Plus, I find treating every npc as a potential loot receptacle to be really immersion breaking, even moreso than compulsively rifling through every interactive container available or experience grinding.

 

 

Yeah, today it's important that it's all like some Skyrim catch-em-all cannot-possibly-fail everything-works-out-no-matter-what I don't know what I was going with that, honestly, but seriously, screw that form of design. There absolutely should be no-win scenarios or scenarios that are locked out because of choices made.

 

 

I have a lot of sympathy for this line of thought in general but ironically pick pocketing has historically been implemented so badly that it's practically a handy strawman for attacking that otherwise reasonable position. I mean, just think how dumb it is that so many games feature items that can be stolen from the npc while they're alive but are nowhere to be found if you loot them the violent way. Mind you, I understand that nobody is advocating for such nonsense in this thread, but I thought I'd mention it just to give some perspective on the sheer stupidity many gamers have been subjected to.