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

Right, but making engagement that extensive would entail many other changes in encounter design. E.g. the conventional encounter design of peppering many-weak-enemy encounters & single-big-enemy encounters would need to be revised; the design behind such 'big lumbering hulks' would need to be modified, perhaps running the risk that they become phased out. Obviously, such extensive modifications would raise all hell on the Codex.

I'd be happy with a simple and sensible way of accounting for polearms so that they're more than just Big Axes.

Edit: Also, ironyuri ARCANUM LP YOU BASTARD.

 

I couldn't agree more with you ironyuri. The IE games were basically a bunch of "ok let's crush these peons" until i got to a mage battle and then I had to start getting creative. it always seemed that the unless the monsters had magic, the battles were pretty much "trash mobs". it would be greatly interesting to have melee become an actual consideration instead of just magic battles.

frankly, while I hope that the Obsidian crew does the AI right, I really don't think they'll get it right and we'll likely have to wait for a tactics/strategems mod to get it right, just like they did with the mages in BG2. Getting the mechanics right in the first place will definitely be a big step in the right directions nonetheless.

 

Hell yeah!

 

Certainly, I'm in agreement. One of the reasons I like AOD is that although it doesn't exactly 'revolutionise' encounter design, it does make some sensible decisions and make small things matter so that you think about some of these things. But there is scope for so much more here. I remember DA:O flirted with some of this with skill synergies, shield abilities, etc., until it turned out some of it was genuine, most of it just became diluted into MMO abilities.

One thing I would like to see is a slightly slower pace of combat, or at least, a very responsive and easy pause mechanism, so that you can actually handle such things going on. I've seen people play IE or NWN games by just selecting all & clicking attack, then casting spells or whatnot with individual characters while that was going on; I can't imagine that being conducive to such proper tactics. (Yes, turn based would be one answer, but not here...)

 

Oh look, and update from Sawyer. Decline, here, decline there, decline, decline everywh- ....... Wait.... Wut? Wut is dis?

Hmmm, this is good actually. Pretty darn good. Hmmm, no decline. More of this and then Sawyer won't have to pass out flyers for KFC after all.

 

So we can create a mad melee wizard who only uses his/her tomes for battle?
Killer Bookworm party on its way!

 

But if you Grimoire Slam an ooze, will it make the spells in it unreadable? How about Grimoire Slamming a fire genasi?

 

he sure does talk a lot about how those games he's supposed to revive and capture the magic of really just suck huh

in fact that almost all he ever talks about

 

I think he just talks about the problems those games supposedly had.

 

I'm with Grunker on this one. Name-dropping the living fuck out of classic (or 1990s, if that's too recent for your personal definition of "classic") cRPGs to sell his game, then going on at great length about their shortcomings and how he's the Chosen One who will fix everything... it's obnoxious. Unless you're Roguey, in which case it's great. I've seen the "we will fix all the shortcomings of our predecessors" speel before in computer game development—and in every case they either failed outright, or created an entirely new (and sometimes far worse) set of shortcomings.

The more I hear from Josh Sawyer directly, the less I appreciate him. It seems I liked him far better when he was little more to me than a name on a credits scroll, a picture of some nerd, and a general list of his contributions to various projects.

 

I see nothing obnoxious about the truth.

Dragon Age could have used something like this. Keep those enemies from just walking past the warrior "blocking" a doorway.

It was a temporary joke http://instagram.com/p/V5z1leJx8q/

 

And here I thought you wanted people to be critical

 

I'm happy that they are upgrading melee combat mechanics of "old classics". Combat was never their high point except some low level party vs party battles or caster combats.
But all these upates would be futile if we don't get some decent AI that uses right tactics against us.

 

It's just barebones, you can build a more active system around it after. Like there's already your charging, working in conjunction with AOO threat ranges.

 

Nuance my ass. Every single one of his "Here I talk about rules/mechanics" has been about what was wrong with the IE-games and how to fix it. Your nuance is a falsehood, and therefore not nuanced at all. Otherwise, link me to the videos where he talks about all the great things that IE did and how they're implementing it in their game.

Do you come into this thread with purposes other than to throw around tired, trolly one-liners directed at my arguments? I'll bite one last time: I love the IE-games, Obs made a pitch saying "we'll bring IE back". Why would I want him to spend a bunch of videos telling me why they sucked?

Sure, change things up a bit, change a couple of things you were critical of in the original games. Most of us agree non-casting classes were pretty boring, OK, so change that. There's a general sense that AD&D is outdated, fair enough. That's not what Sawyer seems to be doing. He is funding the game he wants to make - which is extremely different from the IE-games. That is bullshit.

I've reiterated a bunch of times that I think I'll enjoy this game, but I don't understand why that means I should just shut up like the rest of you and nod approvingly whenever Josh trashes some of my favourite games in his design videos when he originally said those games was what he wanted to emulate.

 

What part isn't being emulated? Looking at the next-to-last quote in my sig he believes they were enjoyable in spite of their ruleset (except BG2 which he hated) so he's making a better one.

 

Enjoyable in spite of their rule-set, enjoyable in spite of their lack of micro-management in combat, enjoyable in spite of having round, enjoyable in spite of having inventory-tetris, enjoyable in spite of almost all of their combat mechanics...

Sounds like Sawyer thinks the IE-games were enjoyable in spite of themselves entirely, so he's making an IE-game that isn't at all like one in order to compensate

 

They have already told us we can we can make "full reactive" and/or "click&forget" characters. Like a warrior full of activetable skills or a wizard casually wanding(or Grimoire Slamming ^_^) with 50 passives.

 

Maybe he enjoyed their stories?

 

You are grunking hard here.
First: Omg, can't believe codex is being so uncritical
Then: leave IE designs alone!11!! How can he trash my favourite designs?
I'm pointing out this inconsistency.


Oh, and it's perfectly fair to criticize something you like. In this case it's extra useful for a couple of reasons: First, he has to make a new system so why not improve it where he feels it can use improvement? And why wouldn't he want to justify these improvements? Carbon copying it wasn't an option anyways. Second, since this game is an IE-like, why not use it as a reference point?

Lastly - the very structure of PE is based on the IE games. Complaining that he "trashes" minor designs is like complaining about the paintjob. I mean we have here essentially slightly modified attacks of opportunity, it won't change the game into something else.

 

Well, it's not looking anything like NWN2 where everyone and their grandmothers get AoO when you get past them even they are battling with another. Now only trained fighters (or maybe other melees too with proper skills) can do that and only in a defensive mode.
And it happens only when you try to walk out of that engagement area, we can still do other things(drink potion, casting spells?) or even walk 1-2 steps by the looks of it. But my guts are telling me that they are going to add another skill/passive (probably for rogues) that gets us more AoO against any other move than close combat.

Also classes are getting some basic ways to get rid of it and even that fails we can always use crowd control effects on enemies. I know i will with my knockdown happy monk (if game allows it...)