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

[Jasede]

Feels like whiteknight central over at the Obsidian boards.
Also feels like the mods are going easy on the Codexites and turning a blind eye here and there.

 

[Vault Dweller]

I don't think that the issue is minor though. As I mentioned before, this particular example from BG2 isn't the entirety of the problem. There's just too much stuff that instantly and irreversibly kill you in that game.

Only if play casually, responding to threats when they appear and bite you in the ass, instead of anticipating and preparing for them.

And that I can wholeheartedly agree with. I'm absolutely ok with having my party decimated by clever strategy that move by move defeats mine. What I'm not ok with is figuratively speaking "stepping on that random land mine".

And that's why I referred to it as bad design, which should be fixed by toning down the damage (ninja assassins should be a threat that distracts your mage and preoccupies his attention, not insta-kills him), not by adding force shields to hps.

From the Sawyer's explanation it doesn't seem that stamina is going to have any shielding qualities:

"Here's an example. Bob the Fighter has 32 Stamina and 30 Health. He gets hit by a number of attacks that subtract 25 Stamina and 5 health (leaving him with 8 Stamina and 25 Health). He is a fighter, so he chooses to use one of his abilities to regenerate Stamina. He does this and quickly bounces from 8 Stamina to 15. Unfortunately, he gets smacked again for 20 Stamina and 4 Health. He is knocked out (effectively 0 Stamina) and at 21 Health. The guys who knocked him out move to other targets.

Francine the priest casts restore stamina on Bob when combat is over. He recovers to full Stamina quickly, but is still at 21 Health. Depending on how the next few fights go, they will either have to retreat to rest or find a safe resting spot up ahead."

Both stamina and health are damaged simultaneously, and while health is damaged less, that damage doesn't seem to be connected with the amount of stamina left.

Just because some damage gets through the shield doesn't change the fact that it's a shield that can be restored fast.

As for the example, it's unclear. How does health get damaged? He says "a number of attacks". Does each attack take away a point? Does one get through and do five points? Is it a special attack that gets through the shield?

As for the shield thing... The stamina points (SP) prevent and reduce damage to HP. They can be quickly restored by abilities, regeneration (from the KS page), and spells, which can instantly revive you. It's a fast paced "modern" system with health-regen and party members getting up after fights. The casuals would love it. Underneath it, we have a more traditional and less forgiving system, which seems less important, as long as you manage SP well, and a skilled player would probably have no problems doing so.

Well, let's say it (random blunder) is a problem. It makes more sense to reduce the "blunder factor" by reducing critical hit damage in your BG2 example than by adding a force shield to your health bar. Nobody should be able to kill anyone with a single attack. See? Problem solved.

But wouldn't that in turn create situation when no spell or ability is particularly efficient and you need to literally bomb your opponent with fireballs...

You go from one extreme to another. Insta-kill attacks are bad. Attacks that barely do any damage are bad. Let's find the middle ground.

You can start by determining the avg damage and figuring out how many attacks it should take to kill someone. I'd be happy if a rogue could kill a mage in 3 attacks, if the mage is unprotected. The first attack gets the mage's attention. Then it's up to him.

What I see health/stamina system trying to accomplish is retaining serious damage of spells and abilities from IE games, but reducing randomness of engagements at the same time. In other words they would rather you lose battles as whole instead of instakilling individual characters in your party. And if you do lose characters, this got to be clearly your fault, not just concatenation of circumstances.

You don't need a fancy new system to do that.

 

[Jasede]

The stamina / health system is neither new nor is it unusable for this kind of game. The only way that happens is due to the combat / abilities / encounters / damage numbers being poorly designed around the system. You can make most systems work well; nothing says a stamina/health system would be worse than alternatives.

As to Sawyer's example, we'd have to ask him to clarify on formspring. It looks like 20% of the damage is applied to Health. So all the Stamina-restoring in the world won't prevent you from dying, especially if you consider that health is supposed to be extremely difficult to restore. I welcome this, excuse my lack of the proper word, more video-game-y system but I don't have faith in Obsidian to design the numbers/encounters/abilities and so on properly around it. KOTC is a pretty decent in this regard.

I can see you'd be worried about the fact party-members get up after each fight. Don't. The challenge simply shifts. Instead of death being the limiting long term factor it'd be health (and therefore, death by extension). It simply means that the difficulty should be focused on keeping HP up or not being able to finish a zone if you don't. Encounters should be more difficult and meaningful to compensate, providing a real threat to the HP bar, unless you manage them perfectly. It's different but not worse.

What especially gives me confidence is the fact that party members optionally perma-die. I am hoping for something a little more challenging than Baldur's Gate 2 or NWN 2 or ToEE because for a D&D vet like me there's really not much challenge left once you start casting all the long-term buffs. You can basically just auto-attack everything to death without resting, especially if you bring some healing potions.

NWN 2 is especially bad so far in this regard. It's a simple matter to cast every single extended/persistent/long-term buff in the book on every melee character, tell the casters to stay back and decimate everything without a moment's thought. People always think wizards are powerful in these games. They are, but if you're not resting nothing is more efficient than buffed-up fighters destroying everything in seconds. And that's on the hardest difficulty. I'm too good at this shit.

...

Of course, by extension this also means they could have simply stuck with a hit-point system, Vancian casting and limit resting / healing / potions / gold to give us a more traditional experience. I'd have welcome that even more. Sigh.

 

[Tigranes]

Sawyer's example sounds great to me, but as Jasede says, the art is in the balancing. It would be stupid if it was easy to stay on 90+% health all the time and just expend stamina (which, for example, what happens with skilled players in Halo, but that's exactly how the game was designed. Losing health as a veteran player is meant to be a rare and thus stinging event.)

I'm hopeful that expert mode + higher difficulties offers situations where you have no resurrection but you're regularly facing the real prospect of 0 Health, as well as low health / 0 stamina knockouts.

 

[Jasede]

I'd hope that from normal mode already. Games being too easy just makes gamers expect even easier games in the future. I wouldn't mind them having to slog through a stiff breeze. Because I know they can step up to the challenge if they put their minds to it. There's always easy-mode if they need to struggle with actual disabilities, lack of time or personal preference.

 

[Jaesun]

Agreed. Are they trying to make a "Mass Accessible" cRPG that happens to have a Hard Core mode?

 

[Tigranes]

Well I certainly hope it's better than F:NV, where they consciously made 'Normal' the 'Piss-Easy' (though the worst here is K2) and Hardest + Hardcore was the actual 'Normal'. They need to not be afraid to have gamers play on normal and then find that if they fuck up or run into a difficult opponent they might end up having someone die. If they reload-scum, that's their problem.

 

[Jasede]

Oh mean, Kotor 2. If that game didn't have Avellone's writing and the amazing work on the camera angles and symbolism and music and voice acting (KOTOR 2 is the one game where acting actually made the game better, or at least not worse. But I'd say better.) it'd be garbage. But somehow, it's a masterpiece. I'll never forget that game and the Let's Play that showed me everything that was missing.

But the combat! Good grief, it was so dreadful. Nobody remembers it even had combat because it just finishes anyway. It's not possible to die.

 

[The Bishop]

Just because some damage gets through the shield doesn't change the fact that it's a shield that can be restored fast.

As for the example, it's unclear. How does health get damaged? He says "a number of attacks". Does each attack take away a point? Does one get through and do five points? Is it a special attack that gets through the shield?

As for the shield thing... The stamina points (SP) prevent and reduce damage to HP. They can be quickly restored by abilities, regeneration (from the KS page), and spells, which can instantly revive you. It's a fast paced "modern" system with health-regen and party members getting up after fights. The casuals would love it. Underneath it, we have a more traditional and less forgiving system, which seems less important, as long as you manage SP well, and a skilled player would probably have no problems doing so.

Sawyer's example doesn't indicate that damage to health is getting through any kind of shield at all, but rather that for every 1 hp you lose 5 sp in addition. The only thing that stamina does to you is knocking you down when it runs out.

You go from one extreme to another. Insta-kill attacks are bad. Attacks that barely do any damage are bad. Let's find the middle ground.

You can start by determining the avg damage and figuring out how many attacks it should take to kill someone. I'd be happy if a rogue could kill a mage in 3 attacks, if the mage is unprotected. The first attack gets the mage's attention. Then it's up to him.

I'm not sure that this problem is solved by simply picking a number in the middle. Most likely you just going to get the system which is not quite as bad as either of extremes, yet combines shortcomings of both of them. Separating "stopping power" of attacks from their "lethality" looks as a promising way of both retaining immediate effect that strong spells can produce yet without insta-killing co-effects.

You don't need a fancy new system to do that.

Sometimes you need fancy new systems. People spent two millenia trying to find perfect ratio between sound frequencies to make a perfectly harmonized musical scale. It turned out division isn't capable enough to accomplish that.

 

[Grimlorn]

These systems being combined are interesting. I'm skeptical too about it, but I think I'd have to play it first before I could judge it. So far it's either going to be a great system or fail terribly. If it fails, then the game will have it's story, characters, dialogue, etc to fall back upon which I'm confident will be good.

 

[Sam Ecorners]

How the fuck are there so many pages today? They haven't even had an update. Oh codex, it was better when i lurked and didn't post retarded questions like this, wasn't it?

 

[oldmanpaco]

Feels like whiteknight central over at the Obsidian boards.
Also feels like the mods are going easy on the Codexites and turning a blind eye here and there.

I have separate PM dialogues with 3 different mods going right now. In all of them I try to tell them to lighten up and let a more free wealing atmosphere prevail.

Anyone who gets a warning or has a thread closed should so the same. The mods are not really assholes (maybe Tale) they are just misguided.

BTW Tigranes responded with the most in-depth followup. He was still wrong but at least he had his reasons. Also don't believe him when he says he is from Philly.

 

[Excidium]

Official forums are always bound to be shit.

 

[Grimlorn]

Feels like whiteknight central over at the Obsidian boards.
Also feels like the mods are going easy on the Codexites and turning a blind eye here and there.

I have separate PM dialogues with 3 different mods going right now. In all of them I try to tell them to lighten up and let a more free wealing atmosphere prevail.

Anyone who gets a warning or has a thread closed should so the same. The mods are not really assholes (maybe Tale) they are just misguided.

BTW Tigranes responded with the most in-depth followup. He was still wrong but at least he had his reasons. Also don't believe him when he says he is from Philly.

 

[Shevek]

I think the stamina/health can work very well if they manage to implement a decent rest mechanic and limit health recovery.

 

[Shannow]

So how long before this thread peters out? Can we get to 500 pages? 600?

Dare I say it - 1000!

Only 18 more months until the game is released! Only two years until the expansion!

Another level of the mega dungeon for every 100 pages after 400 !

 

[Mrowak]

Oh mean, Kotor 2. If that game didn't have Avellone's writing and the amazing work on the camera angles and symbolism and music and voice acting (KOTOR 2 is the one game where acting actually made the game better, or at least not worse. But I'd say better.) it'd be garbage. But somehow, it's a masterpiece. I'll never forget that game and the Let's Play that showed me everything that was missing.

But the combat! Good grief, it was so dreadful. Nobody remembers it even had combat because it just finishes anyway. It's not possible to die.

That's what irks me most in Obsidian games - that elements in them feel so disconnected, e.g. the combat cannot be considered fun in any dimenshion, and has nothing to do with what the game actually does well, but they feature it because an RPG *must* have one. What's worse, you cannot take just combat away because then you'd end up with huge patches of "nothing" in the game. Also the fact that character progression is largely unimportant outside of combat.

It's like watching an excellently written opera with magnificent actors pouring their souls into their characters, but the music is such an abysmal abomination you just can't bear hearing it (but you have to, in order to hear the actors).

I just cannot trust them they'd balance things out right in PE, judging from their past achievements and lack of anything substantial in the Kickstarter campaign.

 

[J_C]

Not being a combatfag, I think the combat was OK in their games. Not good or memorable by any means, I also don't remember anything about them, but I think you exagerate when you say that it wan unbearable. It was just....there, not good or bad. Average. Of course the combatfags might see something in it, that I don't.

 

[RK47]

it's not shit guys, cause i don't mind shit.

 

[Mrowak]

Not being a combatfag, I think the combat was OK in their games. Not good or memorable by any means, I also don't remember anything about them, but I think you exagerate when you say that it wan unbearable. It was just....there, not good or bad. Average. Of course the combatfags might see something in it, that I don't.

And it shouldn't be just there - as a major feature of the game (around which all the skills and abilities are built) it is supposed to add to the experience, as opposed to detracting from it. Simply put, Obisdian may be successful at telling the story through text but it struggles to tell the story through gameplay. Which makes the criticism that their *games* are lacking pretty valid, even when levelled by a Bethdrone.

Edit: Not to mention how much potential of telling the story through goddam gameplay they waste. For example, watch the following piece of gameplay impacting the story in popamole Deus Ex HR:

http://youtu.be/aDNPGAYkvzI?t=7m52s

A main gameplay mode impacting the story! :mindblown: Do you remember Obsidian doing something similar ever in their games?

 

[Hegel]

Wait, are enemies getting the stamina/health thing as well? If so it's going to be

 

[Excidium]

The combat in all Obsidian games is p. terrible. Well, except for DS3 which I kinda enjoyed.

KOTOR II is probably the biggest offender, I don't even know why this game has combat because you just steamroll through everything.
NWN2 is clunky as fuck. And most of the time encounters consist of throwing a lot of the same shit on you which just makes it worse.
AP is, well, popamole.
FNV is that horrible combination of FPS and RPG with Bethesda's trademark clunkyness.

But, to be honest, it's hard to blame Obsidian for the combat being shit in most of those games. How would you make combat good when you're working on top of garbage like KOTOR or Fallout 3?

 

[Hegel]

NWN2 SoZ was pretty fun combatwise, so was Dungeon Siege 3 (Katalina's and the fire chick were good). As for Kotor II I didn't really care.

 

[serch]

As it's been said, stamina is an encounter resource while hp is an adventure day resource that control when you have to retire or rest. It will work ok.

 

[Hegel]

Did you play it with mods shrek?