Petition : Make Looting functions optional.

[Gfted1]

Thinking about it, in lieu of a "sell all" button, maybe it would be a good idea to instantly convert all items that aren't quest/enchanting straight into gold. Id be okay with that. Who needs the verisimilitude of selling 25 wolf scrotum?

[Amentep]

It makes newer players lazy and unable to experience the kind of mechanics we all faced growing up when playing the older games.

Well I had to type in codes from the manual every so often in PHANTASIE to keep the game going. This is clearly the kind of mechanics that kids these days need to see since we all faced them growing up.

 

It also makes little sense, it just saves time, and it encourages a "you can not fail" attitude. It only helps make future games more mediocre.

We need to institution a 10% chance that at any time, doing anything the player character could drop dead of a heart attack or stroke. Because otherwise the players will think they can't fail.

 

I am sure others think the same, and will once they try it. I personally believe, this will make the game more boring, less adventurous, and more mediocre, it encourages running through an area quicker with less regard to what you will find, and just kill things and get it over with, loot, and move on.

Or, alternatively, it could make people pay more attention to the story instead of "did I collect 'em all?" hunt and peck minigaming.

 

 

the fans who all pledged for this game, would not have voted or agreed to make such a mechanic forced on you.

 

Speak for yourself (I for one don't give a fig).

 

Thinking about it, in lieu of a "sell all" button, maybe it would be a good idea to instantly convert all items that aren't quest/enchanting straight into gold. Id be okay with that. Who needs the verisimilitude of selling 25 wolf scrotum?

 

One doesn't just sell 25 wolf scrotums.

 

[damage991]

Thinking about it, in lieu of a "sell all" button, maybe it would be a good idea to instantly convert all items that aren't quest/enchanting straight into gold. Id be okay with that. Who needs the verisimilitude of selling 25 wolf scrotum?

no no no no no no no.

 

No.

 

Edited March 16, 2015 by damage991

[dorkboy]

Thinking about it, in lieu of a "sell all" button, maybe it would be a good idea to instantly convert all items that aren't quest/enchanting straight into gold. Id be okay with that. Who needs the verisimilitude of selling 25 wolf scrotum?

Why not just cut out the middle man, and have the enemies drop gold instead? Or is there some kind of alchemical significance to the conversion process itself?

 

(Personally, I'd be more in favour of having enemies drop 0 value items - with interesting descriptions/[emergent] narrative connected to them being the main attraction. No, I don't expect a lot of people to agree with me there..   )

[Azmodiuz]

@ Dork

on my first playthrough of anything, I always read all the descriptions and stories, this would be a welcomed change. in divinity original sin, theres non-stop jokes and humour about the world on nearly everything you find. Even items would steal, like the decorations around the house..etc. 

[gkathellar]

they made a promise to deliver a game that would be a spiritual successor, and be very much like the old games, aside from not actually being the old games. This was a mechanic present in ALL of them, that was fairly very very well understood, and had no issues, was well balanced, and had its place. merchants had limited coins too. 

 

Yeah, it was a mechanic that, increasingly, people have grown to despise. It added nothing to gameplay and made the whole experience of playing a lower-strength character slightly more obnoxious; there's a reason Bioware introduced containers in BG2. Hateful game mechanics are not identical to bad game mechanics, of course, but encumbrance had no meaningful effect on play or on balance anyway. "Golly, I can only carry 7 of these 12 bandit jerkins? Why, that might be a whole 10 gold pieces lost! Whatever will I do?" It was a pain in the ass, and more importantly, it was aesthetically displeasing.

 

And then you got the Bag of Holding, making your life easier and proving how completely and totally pointless the loot micromanagement was.

 

 It is no longer the same at all. We can loot all, loot an area, hold endless weight, have a huge storage, we can even craft in the middle of no where, currency has become almost meaningless, as we will have near infinite just like the merchants. In one small town alone, a party can come to and leave with 20,000-30,000 coins like in the beta. you have near nothing and a few short hours later after purchasing all the crazy gear you can find and all potions of value, your still filthy rich. 

 

Yes, it's true: after starting the beta with equipment that the devs said is already slightly above the level curve, and a bag loaded up with extra crafting ingredients so that you can test that feature, in one small town and three dungeons and two wilderness areas while completing several quests you can accumulate 20,000-30,000 cp, a number that has no objective value independent of how prices scale throughout the game. The beta is not a useful gauge for this.

 

I can't deny that the full game will be Monty Haul, for the same reason that I can't confirm it. I don't know, and neither do you. But you know what was Monty Haul? Baldur's Gate, where, in the course of the second and fourth areas you were likely to visit, you could find a diamond in a tree and one of the best rings in the game in a rock. Oooh, oooh, or BG2, where you could pickpocket a fence's goods and sell them back to him infinitely. How about Torment, which let you address your money needs with random grinding areas full of respawning hostiles? If you think money didn't become trivial in the IE games, you don't know them very well.

 

 

now, if merchants didn't have bottomless pits of coins, we would have to travel more to sell stuff, until everyone runs out everywhere or they get more, but it might get to a point, we no longer bother to pick up mundane armors off of corpses and small stuff like that. Maybe we would take our time looting and pick and choose instead of loot all, maybe even ignoring all the generic cut and paste guards and just try and loot the notable npc's.

 

... many of the IE merchants did have infinite money.

 

 

Its a downward spiral, the changes they made. And it becomes less and less like the older games, and more and more like the newer games that have becomes forgotten in much less time, more mediocre, more generic, more just like everything else. Look at Diablo3, which has many of the new features we're seeing being put into this game PoE.. area looting, maybe eventually autoloot...theres a loot all button so far. Both have stashes to hold extra, though PoE goes much further in that direction then Diablo. Both have no weight or size restriction to the items too. If you find a house, you can stick it on your belt or in your bag or in your stash, no problem. Maybe even more if they're made stackable. 

 

Hold on right there, I'mma get my waterboard because I think we've got us a slippery slope.

 

 

This also makes the more mundane objects less valuable. but in IWD and BG games, you could use and would use mundane items much more often. Unt il part 2 of either game, I would actually finish with characters still using non-magical gear, maybe not all gear but, some would have a non magical weapon or fullplate. Still used regular arrows.

 

It makes mundane objects exactly as valuable as they are. That is to say, you use an item until you have something better, just like in any other game of this type. Hell, I'd argue that mundane objects are more valuable, if only because the notion of +X magical weapons has been replaced with a mundane sort of Fine/Excellent/Superior model. Are you complaining about crafting or something?

 

(Confession: I could almost never bring myself to use my magic arrows, because I would sure I'd have a better chance some time later. Consumables have an adverse effect on my mental health, really.)

 

We do not even USE ammunitions in PoE. Guns even exist yet no ammunition exists.

 

 

Tracking mundane arrows in a video game is not a good use of time in a human being's life.

 

 

Also, maybe not entirely related, in PoE you can't wear an amulet and have the cloak visual at same time because cloaks and amulets take up the same item slot. This is annoying. It is also very unlike the original games.

 

So we've lost ... what, having exactly the same item slots as you did in BG1? Does that actually matter? (Obviously it has to be that, since the IE games didn't have animated cloak visuals.)

 

 

Its as if they wanted to piss the fans off.

 

No.

 

 

So you can be a douche and flame me with your sarcasm,

 

I honestly don't think this is an attempt to provoke me, and that you have chosen to attack me personally because you are passionate, because you really do care about your position. I sincerely respect that you care about it. And I ask you to respect, in turn, that I do not care enough about you or this argument to flame or insult you personally. If I attack your argument, then I am attacking your argument - not you, not your lifestyle, not your choice of flooring - your argument. If I contradict your position by claiming it's utter ridiculousness, it is because (as is the case) I find your position utterly ridiculous. Don't take it personally, babe; this just ain't your story.

 

EDIT:

Why not just cut out the middle man, and have the enemies drop gold instead? Or is there some kind of alchemical significance to the conversion process itself?

 

 

Remember, this is one of those things that people really hate about JRPGs. It also takes away the opportunity to use monster parts as crafting ingredients, which is just, like ... I dunno, that's integral to this genre in my mind. I mean, come on, are you telling me NOT to play some kind of wild-eyed murderhobo?

Edited March 16, 2015 by gkathellar

[Ohioastro]

In games like BG you had infinite storage. It was just tedious and clunky. Similarly, your character is always better off if they loot everything; so mechanics like individual corpse looting are really just a demand to make optimal game play dull and repetitive.

 

The unlimited stash is the equivalent of dumping your junk in containers, and area loot simply speeds up a mechanical task.

 

These are the sort of thing that make it not fun to replay old games, and mindless clicking is not skill.

 

More to the point, coding resources are finite, and I'd rather see bug fixes than nostalgia toggles.

[dorkboy]

Why not just cut out the middle man, and have the enemies drop gold instead? Or is there some kind of alchemical significance to the conversion process itself?

 

 

Remember, this is one of those things that people really hate about JRPGs. It also takes away the opportunity to use monster parts as crafting ingredients, which is just, like ... I dunno, that's integral to this genre in my mind. I mean, come on, are you telling me NOT to play some kind of wild-eyed murderhobo?

 

Well, I was responding to Gifted1's idea, which concerned items that weren't quest/enchanting related... [Edit: or is enchanting not the same as crafting? (No beta access)]

I will remember that about JRPGs, though! 

Edited March 16, 2015 by dorkboy

[gkathellar]

 

Why not just cut out the middle man, and have the enemies drop gold instead? Or is there some kind of alchemical significance to the conversion process itself?

 

 

Remember, this is one of those things that people really hate about JRPGs. It also takes away the opportunity to use monster parts as crafting ingredients, which is just, like ... I dunno, that's integral to this genre in my mind. I mean, come on, are you telling me NOT to play some kind of wild-eyed murderhobo?

 

Well, I was responding to Gifted1's idea, which concerned items that weren't quest/enchanting related... [Edit: or is enchanting not the same as crafting? (No beta access)]

I will remember that about JRPGs, though! 

 

 

Enchanting uses ingredients in the same fashion as crafting, so they can be generally grouped together.

[Azmodiuz]

(Confession: I could almost never bring myself to use my magic arrows, because I would sure I'd have a better chance some time later. Consumables have an adverse effect on my mental health, really.)

 

I think this is relatively everyone, but I did use my arrows and bolts on special occasions. Those arrows of piercing for instance are insanely powerful. same as those fire arrows you get from kobolds, they're really good with an extra d6 damage, but you get very few in the game, enough to not use it all the time. (unlike these kobolds of course, who have no idea the riches they are throwing away..)

 

guess this would be a good reason anyways, why ammunitions are gone. What if ammunition was just not depletable. Like you have quivers of <insert type here> and just make the effects less. Then we can use blunt arrows (if such a thing exists really..) or hollow pointed tips with poisons or serrated edges...  anyways off topic.

 

Something mechanically with looting does not seem right in PoE. Not to me. just doesn't feel as special or interesting when I'm looting. This detracts from how excited I feel about the game. If I load a BG game up or IWD, looting feels more exciting. Looting in PoE is abit more bland for me, relatively speaking, I feel, as though its generic, more random, less important, less meaningful. Maybe its more realistic, but it is certainly less fun then it used to be. I also feel it affects so many other things in a row too. In the end, it makes me feel different about my characters too. Loot seems so much more generic, that I no longer really fight over who gets what gear (though this is , again only in the beta, so who knows in the release what it will feel like)

 

maybe, if in the end I changed very little with my strong attitude towards preserving the older feeling, if I helped keep it important and fun maybe I will have  succeeded. This is after all, in my opinion, one of the core mechanics that separates it from any other game design, not just being isometric,and an rpg focused more on story then hack n slash (even IWDI/II, still had plot,regardless of HoF mode).

 

Three things I would iterate on keeping very old fashion  and old school are:

Theiving (at least create a mechanic for those skills),

Looting/equipment exploration/finding-stuff/economy and how it all fits together. (remember hunting down special equipment in the old games. Its not going to be the case in PoE if I guessed) and then,

being able to wear cloaks, and amulets together. 

[Night Stalker]

I wanted to stop by and say that I am the programmer that worked on the area loot. I have added the area loot as a slider option in the game options. Barring any issues, this feature should make it in to the release build. The slider will go from 0m (the previous single looting mechanic) to 8m. The current area loot value is 4m.

[vrapan]

You can argue about their realism one way or the other ad infinitum. It is easy to think of merchants being too rich for a limit to be meaningless, it is easy to consider that you get someone to help you haul all the gear back to your stash or you have a caravan waiting for you at the nearest camp. You have to make some abstractions when it comes to realism to make a game enjoyable.

 

What needs to be part of the immersion though is some sort of economy balance and all the features / decisions above affect the economy but are not the whole picture. The picture of the economy is complete when you consider things like merchants prices and item scarcity. It does not matter how many crappy axes you have amassed to sell if really good items are mainly found in battle or their prices at the merchants are extremely high.

 

The problem for me would be if the economy becomes irrelevant by the way of common high quality gear that is priced low enough to make decisions of buying it mute. At which point I would agree that the game has taken a big chunk out of what makes these games interesting and fun. What is the point of checking and rechecking what gear to buy or what a merchant sells if you can buy everything with gold to spare?

 

I guess we will soon find out what's the case!

[Voss]

Loot is a big thing in these sort of games. Being able to hold endless loot and loot really really easy, is removing the major obstacle that was present in the old games.

Except... it was never an obstacle in the old games.  Ever.  If you didn't have 100,000+ gp when you finished BG1, you did it wrong.  You can actually skip picking up actual gold, as long as you pick up and sell magic items, your cash stockpile vs. what you can buy is effectively meaningless.  Take whatever you like. 

Edited March 17, 2015 by Voss

[Azmodiuz]

I disagree, I think your relatively poor if you do not max out looting in the original BG/IWD games. Though, with tons of experience in 2nd ed. DnD and the right powerplaying character, guess you could forgo alot of equipment in the beginning and just take what you need etc...Instead of having a few characters inventory filled with breastplates and medium value things.

[Lephys]

So you can be a douche and flame me with your sarcasm, but they made a promise to deliver a game that would be a spiritual successor, and be very much like the old games, aside from not actually being the old games. This was a mechanic present in ALL of them, that was fairly very very well understood, and had no issues, was well balanced, and had its place. merchants had limited coins too.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why so many people have decided that "spiritual" means "mechanical."

 

Don't get me wrong... there are design decisions with PoE that I wish were different, for the sheer sake of game design and my preferences and all that. But, why does the phrase "spiritual successor" somehow disallow Obsidian from making the game mechanics as different as they so choose, so long as they're still makin a game "in the spirit of the IE games"? I can make a game "in the spirit of Tetris," and it doesn't have to involve eliminating lines, or square blocks comprising larger shapes. It could be another puzzle game that's still very similar to Tetris, but uses zero exactly-identical mechanics.

 

I think we should make a list of all the things that are almost identical between PoE and the IE games, and then have someone find a game that they're more similar to that isn't an IE game.

Edited March 19, 2015 by Lephys

[Azmodiuz]

Now you are taking the word as literally what they meant, mechanically. They have specified and described many times, what the intentions were for the game. They usually let us see or know about mechanics of game play though, in some cases even allowing us to vote on them. 

 

Its not singularily about being different in a single aspect, but trodding down a path metaphorically that leaves the old games concept behind by replacing them with endless "improvements". One thing leads to another. I didn't make a huge fuss about thieving being largely not in the game. That bothers me even more.. but one thing after another has worn patience thin, someone has to say something, about keeping all our options. If the play is largely customizable, then things are great. When improvements detract from being able to play as creatively as we could, why not just make small changes that allow to preserve and serve both functions, like in the case of this loot mechanic. 

 

now, keep in mind, I'm largely exaggerating to make the points seem silly. I do care alot though, and its not just my voice of concern but I speak up when maybe others don't too.

 

This thread is largely over with too, the Devs said they will make the looting a small radius  anywhere from 0m to Xm, something we could sleetc or change. Its not the entire screen, its not going to become auto-loot either. So things look good. 

[Lephys]

Now you are taking the word as literally what they meant, mechanically.

A) That's not what "literally" means. If they meant it literally, it would be an incorporeal version of the IE games.

B) They never suggested that they meant that. They mentioned much more general things that they wanted to "feel" like the IE games.

 

By all means, make all the huge fuss you want to about whatever you want to. But, you can have a problem with something without it being Obsidian breaking their promise. You're allowed to simply dislike the dissimilarity, without "spiritual successor" meaning "Exactly like the IE games in every way that you, yourself, imagine in your mind."

[Azmodiuz]

I'm making no fuss at all, the issue has been rectified, the mechanic that will be added will also be optional now, and adjustable. What more could anyone want, from this issue, if this is all true, then its perfect resolution. I don't think I've ever seen such a perfect resolution from a developer before, so soon. 

now if we're going to speak of ALL issues, then lets get thieving mechanics into the game with abit of spice and drama and lore to fit it in. nothing like being the bandit lord, as you tell your story...I wish, truely, that more games let you be the bandit that is robbing people as they leave one village to go somewhere. Even claim a rep for it, take care of your men possibly, like even derivatives like a classic "robin-hoob" for rp and motivation, with some complex story behind whats truely going on... i.e he came back from crusades etc..some war wtvr lord is missing and your taking advantage or fighting injustice your own way.

[Bryy]

I'm making no fuss at all

You're saying that video games will be ruined forever and that society as a whole will get dumb because of a game mechanic.

[Lephys]

I'm making no fuss at all, the issue has been rectified, the mechanic that will be added will also be optional now, and adjustable.

I wasn't trying to make a point that you are specifically making a fuss. You said:

 

I didn't make a huge fuss about thieving being largely not in the game. That bothers me even more.. but one thing after another has worn patience thin, someone has to say something, about keeping all our options.

Which, yes, does appear to be an amount of fuss greater than zero. But, more to the point, my response was simply meant as "feel perfectly free to make fusses. There's nothing wrong with the act of making fusses. Just make them for accurate reasons."

 

Aka, "I don't like that this is occurring and think it's bad because (insert reasons here)", rather than "I don't like this and also it's bad because they're breaking their promise to not do this, which was implied by them not being specific about this particular thing, and myself assuming that this particular thing was what they were talking about, specifically, when they didn't specifically reference it."

 

That's all. There've just been so many people who keep tossing out that "spiritual successor" broken promises argument, and it doesn't fly. Doesn't mean "LOLZ, YOU CAN'T DISLIKE ANYTHING FOR ANY REASONS! 8D!", or that Obsidian can do no wrong. But, they can't do any wrong by not-doing something they didn't promise to do. They simply made a new game with a collection of old games in mind. There are no criteria for exactly how they wish to allocate the similarities. It's not a blueprint. It's just an idea, "spiritual succession" is.

[Kal Adan]

Indeed. For some reason people think the "spiritual successor" = "same as X". I am pretty sure that Baldur's Gate III wouldn't be a carbon copy of Baldur's Gate II. Games do evolve, even within their own series. Unless your goal is to make same game, only with a few changes to be able to market it as a new games. Contesting changes for the sake of contesting changes is foolish just as well as keeping game unchanged for the sake of the past.

[Kjaamor]

Five stars! Would be trolled by this thread again!

[Azmodiuz]

I had to go and close that petition, but I declared victory ! Which is great, and makes me happy, is going to help a lot when playing the game. It might be such a small mechanic, but I feel it was worth it ! 

 

Five stars! Would be trolled by this thread again!

 

 

As you wish...

Edited March 20, 2015 by Azmodiuz

[kelticpete]

man, if I wanted to start a petition, it would be for the strange thing that you pay coppers when making a potion. it would make sense if you had to goto a workbench/lab--as if you were paying for the incidentals. But if I have all the ingredients and make it in the middle of the woods...who am I giving that money to?

[Valsuelm]

man, if I wanted to start a petition, it would be for the strange thing that you pay coppers when making a potion. it would make sense if you had to goto a workbench/lab--as if you were paying for the incidentals. But if I have all the ingredients and make it in the middle of the woods...who am I giving that money to?

 

It's a sacrifice to the potion God of course.