Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity [BETA RELEASED, GO TO THE NEW THREAD]

Why?

 

I would say that this entire Finding good item in a pile of trash idea is not nice. Simply because it smacks of a mini game and a bad minigame at that. Removing such things completely is in line with reducing annoyance.

 

What if they called the stash a bag of holding [ETA: just saw Kirtai beat me to this and did it better. curses.].

Or they said you have a permanent, if small, one-way stash portal powered by souls or whatever.

Here's how you deal with the OCD looter problem; every piece of equipment held by enemies is dropped for looting, down to their underwear, but there's a very high chance its so busted up you have to repair it to sell it and it will cost as much to repair as you would get selling it fully repaired. Worth keeping if its useful, but not as a profit source.

After all, if you've just stabbed a dude to death, his armor is probably shit (if it wasn't shit already).

 

How about this:

Make it a dialogue/interaction option:

There is a pileand on encountering it, a dialogue tells you what you see and if you have the right spell/ability ready you make the right choice or else pick up the trash.

 

So, lads, if we really want to take on the Red Dragon, we should maybe take our fire resistant gear out of storage. So let's just stop for a few minutes and get it from the bags... guys? Guys?
*five minutes later*
THE FIRE IT BUUUURNS!

Oh shush, you!

 

BG1 couldn't be paused while looking at the inventory. I think all other IE games you could.

 

I'm not actually just trying to annoy you, I'm going somewhere with this.

Agreed, but I think something of his point still stands. When a bandit dies and you can actually interact with all of his equipment, it adds to the atmosphere of the game. Makes it less artificial. And the devs could do something with it, even though his example wasn't the best.

Removing less useful loot doesn't seem like a interesting solution to it and I still find it silly that anyone ever tried to loot everything in the IE games. Most of it was junk in the form of noob weapons. Essentially, this is a non issue.

 

Or have merchants not buy your trash like Arcanum did. Or maybe they run out of money. Like Arcanum did.

evdk "Dude we knew we were going to be in Dragon's cavern. We all already equipped our fire armor. Why are you so fucking slow?" ANY SORT of reason could work. If you need several armors lay them out in your top of stash. Otherwise everything else is going into the unholy cesspool and abyss of STASH.

Delterius I know you're trying to make a point. the guys at codex are pretty smart. they already got your point.

 

Sounds like the codexian solution to CRPG Romance, starve 'em to death. Sounds interesting.

 

This debate is a prime example of why fixing shit that ain't broken is a terrible idea.

 

Well, you do go through all their gear every time you loot their pocket for arrows, gold coins or possible jewelry. And I just think that people kinda expect that from the IE successor.

Are you sure? Its the internet, people only get your point when they agree with you. So you scream it in different ways until your superior intellect and taste is finally revealed.

 

You have not mentioned one that would not be dumb yet.
There is only one solution left now:

 

It's not "fixing." It's implementing game ideas.Strategy and tactics. C&C. Shit we want.

I really think that camping will be very different than in other IE games. I think he's going for a darklands approach. Camping will be a big deal with people having to stand watch, and people resting, and people memorizing spells, and going through your stash. There'll be a picture of a campsite in the background and you'll get a list of options of things to do.



Like I said, I don't think the actual reason is important. Shrek doesn't care about realism. evdk does. Who the fuck should Sawyer listen to?

The way I see it, it gives a good "perk" option for players later in the game. Something like "be able to open stash outside of camp."

 

Dreaming are we?

 

Are you not changing the argument? First you argued that this is required for immersion. When pointed out that this does not hold, you put up an argument that it is justified from IE games. I think it was wrong in IE games too but much less wrong because of the dearth of magical items.

 

Nope, he's said stuff to this effect already. Roguey can you help me out here? I need sources. I know you got them. he's talked about goign this approach, hasn't he?

Edit: I sent him a question on Formspring. He probably won't answer, but it's worth a shot.

 

That would work too. The key point is the hight chance of the equipment turning into trash via breaking in the fight, which I don't think I've seen used to discourage OCD looting (I was inspired by my recent IW2 game, where there's a quest involving returning some bracers to a goblin. If you kill the goblin afterwards the bracers end up broken. [actually they break as soon as you return them, as I learned through pickpocketing])

Merchants running out of money works too, which leads to the cash/barter combination which I think was referred to earlier in the threat. Nethack and Fallout jump out as games that used this pretty well too.

 

Not really, I'm still arguing that it adds to the game's atmosphere, but there are far too many ways for the developer to detail the gameworld. Meaning that not one of these ways should be held as special or necessary, especially something as small as this (which is where I agree with you, immersion arguments rarely hold water). However, I wonder if its not a basic funcionality that people expect from a IE successor.

As far as I know, he wants to improve the resting mechanics. But nothing so detailed.

 

*refreshes forum every two hours*

*2-3 more pages of arguing about inventory with each refresh*

 

You disagree with the "we don't wan't to put a big blinking 'Important!' light over things" concept or if you prefer a rephrasing, you believe that we should not have to worry about incomplete information [Or is it just the scale of the incomplete information that you don't like - certainly, it isn't an all or nothing choice]? Is that only in regards to inventory, or does it apply to the other aspects of the game as well?

Fundamentally, the problem of sifting the good from the bad is a representation of the problem of incomplete information. My specific example was merely a sample of a system I enjoyed (I liked that aspect of the Gold Box games.), and certainly may not be perfect, but the basic behaviour of figuring out what is important remains unless you get rid of the incomplete information problem - essentially, an inventory parallel of the "this is the important path(s)" solution to the incomplete knowledge about locations problem.

 

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=407551559

Incidentally, the idea for this new system may have come from one of Sawyer's YCS chucklefuck friends. They're unanimously praising it over at their SA off-site forum and sneering at all the 'nards who are crying over their verisimilitude/immersion.

I feel like rubbing more salt in this wound so have some random quotes:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=407549939

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=407880942

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=409114825

And this was quoted earlier in the thread but I must emphasize certain aspects since it looks like some here overlooked them
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=410740776

Your beloved poof and Chris Avellone have forsaken you.