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

[Roguey]

Josh is posting up a storm today and has revealed what he would have done differently had he any say

Many of the decisions on PoE are driven by nostalgia, including but not limited to the game being class-based, having six attributes, a six character party, and RTwP combat.

What would you have otherwise done with the party size and combat style?

I think 4-5 characters is much more manageable for RTwP. If we're just speaking about "Hey what kind of game would you make?" I'd develop something turn-based.

E: Even if it were some sort of Darklands spiritual successor, I'd still go with turn-based.

Obsidian does it again.

 

[Sensuki]

Blame that on all the crybabby WL2 shitheels who didn't understand what a beta was.

TBH I think a lot of the crybabying done on WL2 on the Codex was pretty valid. Even if I am merely justifying my own complaints

 

[Mangoose]

Josh is posting up a storm today and has revealed what he would have done differently had he any say

Many of the decisions on PoE are driven by nostalgia, including but not limited to the game being class-based, having six attributes, a six character party, and RTwP combat.

What would you have otherwise done with the party size and combat style?

I think 4-5 characters is much more manageable for RTwP. If we're just speaking about "Hey what kind of game would you make?" I'd develop something turn-based.

E: Even if it were some sort of Darklands spiritual successor, I'd still go with turn-based.

Obsidian does it again.

What a cargo cult.

 

[Orma]

Crybabying is valid in a sense that, one might be worried about how fargo and co. are going to release something complete and finished in like a month(a few weeks?), after seeing the current state of the game.

 

[Sensuki]

Min & max stats

8 is currently the standard minimum, but they can go lower than 8 with racial penalties. Currently no race has -2, so the lowest possible is 7

The standard cap for stats is 18, modified by racial bonuses, so no

 

[Volourn]

"I think 4-5 characters is much more manageable for RTwP."

What a fukkin' idiot. How is 4-5 characters magically more manageable than 6 in RTWP? Are you a retart? if you had a hard time managing 6 characters in the IE games you are an idiot. THANK GOD that Sawyer is simply an Obsidian employee and not an actual boss. FF His brainpower is so small he can't handle 6 characters at once. HAHAHAHA!

 

[Hormalakh]

My point is proven about sawyer and design. Like I said before, he has strict limitations in the design if this game. I would be very interested in seeing his "game"

 

[Perkel]

Min & max stats

8 is currently the standard minimum, but they can go lower than 8 with racial penalties. Currently no race has -2, so the lowest possible is 7

The standard cap for stats is 18, modified by racial bonuses, so no

I will never understand why they got main stats in 8-18 form. Let's hope they won't go into stupid 18/xx territory and to hit/damage bonuses for reaching 18-18+ and other stats will be valuable to classes. Like having high dexterity will give you more duelist, two weapons fighter without D&D 3,5 finesse trait shit mumbojumbo.

 

[Mangoose]

Min & max stats

8 is currently the standard minimum, but they can go lower than 8 with racial penalties. Currently no race has -2, so the lowest possible is 7

The standard cap for stats is 18, modified by racial bonuses, so no

I will never understand why they got main stats in 8-18 form. Let's hope they won't go into stupid 18/xx territory and to hit/damage bonuses for reaching 18-18+ and other stats will be valuable to classes. Like having high dexterity will give you more duelist, two weapons fighter without D&D 3,5 finesse trait shit mumbojumbo.

It has to be like IE man.

 

[Sensuki]

Yeah 8-18 is the "sensible" range of IE stats.

 

[coffeetable]

Crybabying is valid in a sense that, one might be worried about how fargo and co. are going to release something complete and finished in like a month(a few weeks?), after seeing the current state of the game.

fargo and co. are going to release something complete and finished

fargo and co. are going to release something in like a month

pick one

 

[Roguey]

What a cargo cult.

I've already been over why this isn't the case fairly recently.

My point is proven about sawyer and design. Like I said before, he has strict limitations in the design if this game. I would be very interested in seeing his "game"

There will always be strict limitations because he makes games for an audience and not himself.

 

[Orma]

pick one

I don't care if they delay the release, I want a finished game.

 

[Rake]

My point is proven about sawyer and design. Like I said before, he has strict limitations in the design if this game. I would be very interested in seeing his "game"

I would not.

Spoiler

Sawyer is a designer that knows his trade, and i would trust him more than most others to spearhead the projects i like because i believe is good at objectively recognising the spirit of the games and what the target audience wants. So as long as the target audience includes me, i trust him.
My problem is that i think his tastes, and his "dream game" would be something i have zero interest in. It would be a waste of his talent

 

[Roguey]

Pretty sure Wasteland 2 is going to be content and feature complete. It just won't be great and more time isn't going to make that happen.

 

[set]

Pretty sure Wasteland 2 is going to be content and feature complete. It just won't be great and more time isn't going to make that happen.

I've not played it since my initial first impressions, but yeah, once you've got a game in a "playable" state and you've let some of your consumers play it in that state, the game is then pretty much fixed in being a certian way. I've never seen a game do a 180. If a game is good in 0.1 release it gets better by 1.0. If it's shit in 0.1, it stays shit.

 

[set]

Yeah 8-18 is the "sensible" range of IE stats.

It's extremely common in other types of cames, but I think they could have lowered the lower end to 5 and made it like this:

5 in any stat makes you PAINFULLY bad in that stat, to the point where you will have severely bad shit going on (like, having 5 str means you can be randomly knocked out by a fist to the face, 6 str means you have reduced crushing resistances, etc.). I've played a few games in the range of 0 to 20 for the primary attributes that let you obtain negative attributes (eg -1, -2, -3 str) and although that sounds silly, it's fun when you come up with builds that actually take advantage of having negatively-impacting modifiers.

 

[Roguey]

I've not played it since my initial first impressions, but yeah, once you've got a game in a "playable" state and you've let some of your consumers play it in that state, the game is then pretty much fixed in being a certian way. I've never seen a game do a 180. If a game is good in 0.1 release it gets better by 1.0. If it's shit in 0.1, it stays shit.

Nathaniel Chapman sez games don't actually get fun until the last couple of months.

Though I think when Wasteland 2's beta was released Fargo was confident they were only months away from release.

 

[Whiran]

I will never understand why they got main stats in 8-18 form.

Isn't that just from D&D legacy?

3 die 6 rolls for a nice distribution of possible rolls with the most common being 10 or 11. Making the average 10.5.

With 4d6 drop lowest you wind up with 13 being the most common result.

Going further into average roll results with 4d6 drop lowest for six attributes you typically wind up with:

16, 14, 13, 12, 10, and a 9.

Once you know those numbers you can then design a system that mimics those results via a point buy system. Usually point buy systems allow for that exact distribution or something very close to it. Then the game system balance is designed around those results.

From there the evolution of point-buy systems (which remove the randomness that many people dislike) wound up having, typically, 28 points to use or 25 points if it was a 'pathfinder' (in pathfinder the price of an attribute increase goes up as the attribute goes up so to go from 10 to 11 is one point to go from 11 to 12 is 2 points meaning that to raise from 10 to 12 is a total of 3 points) system which limited how low you could drop a stat in favour of extra stats.

And... from all of this we wind up with the attribute generation systems that we find in many games.

 

[Sensuki]

I hope weighted buying of attributes is not used in PE.

What we've seen so far, one point in an attribute = +2% to the combat stats that the attribute governs (or +5% for Durations/AoE size). This is now likely a lot different, and may even wind up using completely different values, but it's a linear progression as opposed to D&D's skewed progression which is sort of linear.

If you get the same thing every point, then I don't think point buy should be weighted, but rather something like - Every char starts with 10 on everything, and you are given X points to distribute.

From the Mock Update 70 Char Screen. Pallegina's base stats (with the current attribute bonuses) would be 18, 14, 14, 12, 12, 8. That looks pretty good to me. That would give 18 distribution points from a base of 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10.

In theory, having middling stats in everything should actually be pretty good in PE and this makes the system kind of "noob friendly" as well.

We'll get to find out soon enough how the point buy works.

 

[Sensuki]

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-looks/

Going by this it looks like we'll get at least 15 mins of gameplay, if not more.

 

[Abu Antar]

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-looks/

Going by this it looks like we'll get at least 15 mins of gameplay, if not more.

I really hope they show off character creation, even if we'll get to play around with it in less than a month.

 

[WalkinDude]

So I finally logged into the backer portal and upped my pledge to $140 after I decided I'm not going to buy WL2. Come on Obsidian you got this

 

[uaciaut]

"Death spells do damage, in the sense that they take your HP from x to zero. That's damage."

No. death spells kill you outright. That often means taking you down to -10.

Death spells mean death. If they don't mean death then don't refer to them as death spells. Because it means theya re no different than a fukkin' fireball.

I'm feeling the stench of autism again.

 

[Volourn]

"From the Mock Update 70 Char Screen. Pallegina's base stats (with the current attribute bonuses) would be 18, 14, 14, 12, 12, 8. That looks pretty good to me. That would give 18 distribution points from a base of 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10.

In theory, having middling stats in everything should actually be pretty good in PE and this makes the system kind of "noob friendly" as well."
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Looks boring. Might as well just have it all be 10s.