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

[Shadenuat]

Infinitron, IMHO you probably would get a better answer about class abilities if you'd asked if Josh has any ideas on how to help players use them all in RTwP combat tactically without constantly staying in "P" mode and hitting themselves with keyboards because of crappy pathfinding. How hard will it be to get rogue in a position for a backstab? Will there be automated scripts like in DA? And if characters will execute lot of abilities automatically, what will be player's place in all of that?

 

[Infinitron]

Infinitron, IMHO you probably would get a better answer about class abilities if you'd asked if Josh has any ideas on how to help player use them all in RTwP combat tactically without constantly staying in "P" mode and hitting themselves with keyboards because of crappy pathfinding. How hard will it be to get rogue in a position for a backstab? Will there be automated scripts like in DA? And if characters will execute lot of abilities automatically, what will be player's place in all of that?

He'd just say "don't worry, it'll be okay". Look at his response to my other question. Better to ask for more specific details, not stuff that basically boils down to "will the game still be fun if you do X?"

 

[Brotherman Bill]

It's easy to justify the surge thing with it being an adrenaline surge as well, or a kind of sprint or flurry or anything really. But of course, bringing these reality arguments into play is kinda tarded in the first place, unless it's really blatant.

 

[Shadenuat]

"will the game still be fun if you do X?"

Why does most of, if not every question about design I want have answer to boil down to that...

 

[Hormalakh]

Are you serious?

Look what I meant was that obviously they'll be looking to implement details to make the game challenging - he might put it in, he might not. I gauge this from his responses to other things like"ranged attacks use a slight aiming time buffer when you attack with them, and make movement interrupt reloading." Obviously, he's thinking of ways to make the game not be too streamlined or making any ability obviously overpowered. It isn't hard to think of a surge acting like a heal spell. Those spells cost action points and you couldn't heal while fighting. Or maybe you can: it's really too early to say which will play better. I can't be sure either way and I don't think it much matters at this point.

 

[tuluse]

Infinitron, IMHO you probably would get a better answer about class abilities if you'd asked if Josh has any ideas on how to help player use them all in RTwP combat tactically without constantly staying in "P" mode and hitting themselves with keyboards because of crappy pathfinding. How hard will it be to get rogue in a position for a backstab? Will there be automated scripts like in DA? And if characters will execute lot of abilities automatically, what will be player's place in all of that?

He'd just say "don't worry, it'll be okay". Look at his response to my other question. Better to ask for more specific details, not stuff that basically boils down to "will the game still be fun if you do X?"

Ask him why we should trust a studio that's never made a mechanically interesting game

 

[Hormalakh]

A few quotes from Josh. Regarding the monitor resolution display size:

4:3, 16:10 and other aspect ratios will be supported and will not have "black bars". Our main challenge will be making sure the interface adjusts properly.

When it comes to ultra-high resolutions, we will likely do the same "zoom out" of the environment up to a certain point and then pixel double the high-res backgrounds. When the pixel density is as high as it is on a laptop or desktop screen (that 2880x1800 display is for a 15" MacBook Pro), a pixel doubled image won't really have much of a loss of quality, IMO.

However, I feel I should point out that these two sets are only accounting for screen DPIs in the range of 100-120 and 200-240, which leaves quite a large "black hole": all monitors with 130-190dpi, and there are a lot of laptops in this range currently on the market (far more than there are Hi-DPI/"retina" ones). On these monitors, the "regular" resolution is going to look too tiny, while the high DPI assets are going to look too large. Have you considered creating a third set of assets at 1.5x the resolution of the regular one? It would cover this middle ground very well, formed by fairly common 13" 1600x900 to 15" 1920x1080 screens.

It really shouldn't be necessary to generate a third set of intermediary assets. Planescape: Torment, IWD, and BG were designed to run at 640x480 and people played those comfortably at 1024x768. Doubling those sizes takes us to 1280x960 and 2048x1536. Going from 1280x720 to 1920x1080 is a proportionally smaller jump.

Pixel doubling would only be required if displays moved outside of the realm of the sane, e.g. running at double current Retina display levels with current monitor/display sizes. A 27" Thunderbolt doesn't even run at the highest current Retina res; it runs at our high-res target, 2560x1440, and that's on a 27" monitor. Those displays are remarkably clear and smooth. If, for some wacky reason, we continue to inflate resolutions while keeping monitor sizes the same, I do not believe the player would benefit much from rendering out 4x as many pixels as our high-res target.

Just to keep this in perspective, the original games were 640x480. We're at a 16:9 aspect ratio, but 1280x720 is roughly double the size as a base resolution. 2560x1440 is four times as many pixels for the same scene and would be sixteen times as many pixels for a 640x360 scene. An environment rendered out at 5120x2880 would be sixty four times as many pixels as a 640x360 scene. That seems like overkill on displays that will likely range between 11" and 30".

Regarding piercing/slashing

Piercing is best when the target's armor is good but not great, i.e. when the DT bypass of the piercing weapon is negating more of the armor than the equivalent slashing can power through. Slashing weapons, especially the single-handed slashing weapons, start getting inefficient very quickly when armor piles on. The piercing weapons continue doing all of their damage up until the point where the DT exceeds the bypass. When the DT is so high that it is effectively negating all of the piercing weapons' bypass AND damage, that's when crushing weapons emerge as the best choice.

All that said, more protective armor always protects you against more damage, regardless of what the source of the damage is. So at the high end when guys are pounding away with mauls, war hammers, and maces, they're doing proportionally much more damage than slashing or piercing weapons, but they're doing much less damage overall than weapons of any damage type when the target has no DT.

 

[tuluse]

Someone should ask Josh if there will be weapons that can deal multiple types of damage. Like a sword that can deal 1d6 slashing or 1d4 piercing, or something like that.

 

[Hormalakh]

He's also got some quotes in SomethingAwful regarding inventory.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=410736042#post410736042

Here's another question: why are you using an infinite stash of field-inaccessible loot that you fill with a button that somehow magically whisks loot away to the most convenient places in all the land instead of town portal scrolls and spells that provide you with a degree of control over what you do with your inventory, such as where you store items and where you sell them? You said the problem you're trying to solve with the send-to-stash function is the inconvenience of having to travel back and forth to unload your inventory. Were there any alternatives that the team discussed? Why were they suboptimal? Why wouldn't town portal scrolls and spells work?​

The team did not discuss alternatives because no one objected to anything in the system Tim and I proposed. Also, we were trying to solve two problems: forced marching back to merchants and also continual inventory shuffling. Your individual character backpack that was large enough in BG to carry three suits of armor, five longswords, 200 arrows, eight stacks of potions, five scrolls, and assorted gems is now a shared backpack that can hold all of that and more. I'm not going to come up with a lore reason for why it works that way because I don't think the majority of players care. Additionally, I think any lore explanation I would come up with would be absurd. I'd rather just say, "This is how the inventory, pack, and stash systems work," and spend our narrative/world building time on designing interesting areas, characters, factions, and choices for the player to interact with.

Guess beasts of burden are out.

More here.

 

[Roguey]

You don't even know the mechanics of a game your precious Sawyer headed? Sneak attack in NWN2 = Another ally attacking the target, you're invisible/hidden or target is flat-footed. No positioning involved - your position in all these cases is irrelevant. And thanks god for that. Positioning mechanics in RtWP is horrifying generally speaking, and it was in DA too, as much as I like the game.

http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Sneak_Attack
http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Flank

I often attacked from behind. I'm sure there will be ways to negate the "have to be behind" check just as there are in NWN2 and DA.

Actually Grunker is correct. This just sounds like a poorly designed and retarded catering to casuals in OMG!!!!111 I GOTTA KEEP ALL MY LEWT! AND MAGICALY WISK IT AWAY INTO MY MAGIGICAL BOX!!111

Instead of the many times where you need to actually think when your packs are full and what items to keep or not.

Actually he's wrong.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/sh...=3506352&userid=17931&perpage=40&pagenumber=7

We said we were going to give you three things: a great story with mature themes and meaningful choice, RTwP party-based tactical combat, and the exploration of fantastic environments. Weight- or slot-based inventory management for things you aren't using isn't part of any of that. There is no significant player challenge to shuffling inventory items around outside of combat. At best, the strategic challenge becomes figuring out how to make the fewest trips to carry all of the loot you want out. That's really not much of a challenge and I don't think most players enjoy bouncing off the ceiling of their carry limit every time they find a new piece of gear.
...
This really sounds like you're picking your personal flavor of verisimilitude. You don't like having an infinite stash of field-inaccessible loot, but you're fine with having IE-style weight limits even thought that typically means characters can carry a dozen weapons and/or two, three, or even four full suits of armor -- and you're also fine if a bandit who wields a longsword and wears leather armor can't be looted for those items after he or she dies.

This is awesomely designed. Fighting against player desires is stupid when you're trying to make a good game. Give them what they want and design accordingly so their actions don't hurt their enjoyment.

And Grunker just because it's called "top of the pack" doesn't necessarily mean it'll be presented in the form of a list. You're really reaching with all these knee-jerk conclusions you're drawing.

 

[Kirtai]

I admit I feel better about the graphical stuff now

 

[Grunker]

Roguey: You link to a source you haven't even read?

Whenever the character makes a successful attack against an opponent who is flat-footed, cannot see them, or who is in combat with someone else

I.e. exactly what I said. You DO NOT gain sneak attacks from standing behind your foe.

There's even further gameplay notes explaining that I'm right. Beyond the fact that I just played through it.

You're really reaching with all these knee-jerk conclusions you're drawing.

Says the poster who insists on something so blindly she doesn't even check the source she links to that confirms the opponent's argument. That is the essence of knee-jerk. But let's make a post count bet! I say list, you say classic. Someone neutral can judge

 

[mediocrepoet]

I actually liked the sound of the inventory system. Besides, there may be limits in the first equipment and pack categories (in fact, it would be weird if there weren't since except maybe to avoid cluttering the place, you wouldn't necessarily stick anything in stash ever) and then everything else can go to stash. You don't have to screw around with inventory tetris necessarily. The pack idea struck me as being reflective of the adventurer's gear being stowed away so you can only really dig through it when you have a chance to sit down and encumbrance doesn't really matter for it since you could just drop your pack when you went into combat. I know that some tabletop players would do exactly that... round 1: drop pack and draw weapon.

At the end of the day, inventory systems are always going to be an abstraction of some sort. They don't all have to be the same and they don't all have to be a pain in the ass. The system Sawyer is describing sounded to me to be a nice solution that would allow some sort of simulation regarding where your stuff is and how hard it is to get at without bogging the whole thing down in unnecessary details. Is it important to have to trade an item to a character's general inventory so that they can then equip it? Or is it alright to make an abstraction from that where they can equip it from the pack inventory? Does individual encumbrance for the stuff you can't equip in combat matter? If it does, should there be an option to turf your pack before combat? Would you use it or otherwise move stuff around so that the individual's encumbrance never comes into play in the first place? I don't know how everyone plays these games, but having recently re-played a few of the Gold Box games and currently making my way slowly back through IWD2, I basically never have anyone heavily encumbered. If I do, it's for a very short period of time as I trudge back to some merchant and generally don't have to fight anything anyway. I suspect others play more or less the same, so given that, why is it important to keep that type of inventory system as opposed to just abstracting it a bit to assume that you're moving stuff around so no one's over-encumbered? Note that encumbrance could still potentially be introduced through the equipped items category. He hasn't said that it will be, but I don't think he's said that it wouldn't be either. It strikes me that if it were, it'd be part of the hardcore rules options.

 

[Roguey]

Roguey: You link to a source you haven't even read?

Whenever the character makes a successful attack against an opponent who is flat-footed, cannot see them, or who is in combat with someone else

I.e. exactly what I said. You DO NOT gain sneak attacks from standing behind your foe.

The target is being flanked

To flank is to be directly on the other side of a character who is being threatened by another character. A flanking attacker gains a +2 flanking bonus on attack rolls against the defender. A rogue can sneak attack a defender that she is flanking.

The Eternity description:

Sneak Attack - This damage bonus applies whenever the rogue "flanks" an enemy or when the rogue is hidden from an enemy. Flanking means that the rogue is within a short distance of the target and on the "opposite" side of that enemy from an adjacent ally.

Same thing. Note that "opposite" is in quotes which suggests to me that you won't need pixel-perfect precision. And even if that is the case, you're also assuming that Sawyer isn't one to change something if it's not enjoyable when he's someone who holds enjoyment above all else (and gets criticized for it by loonies).

Says the poster who insists on something so blindly she doesn't even check the source she links to that confirms the opponent's argument. That is the essence of knee-jerk. But let's make a post count bet! I say list, you say classic. Someone neutral can judge

Fine, but I also I think it may be an icon/list hybrid since it's not really important to view the icons of things you'll only be messing with at camp or in a store. NWN2 (oh and the IE games come to think of it) used a hybrid system (icons for inventory, list for bags of holding and stores).

 

[Grunker]

Same thing. Note that "opposite" is in quotes which suggests to me that you won't need pixel-perfect precision. And even if that is the case, you're also assuming that Sawyer isn't one to change something if it's not enjoyable when he's someone who holds enjoyment above all else (and gets criticized for it by loonies).

Flanking in NWN2 works no matter where the character is placed. The wiki quotes the faulty manual.

Fine, but I also I think it may be an icon/list hybrid since it's not really important to view the icons of things you'll only be messing with at camp or in a store. NWN2 used a hybrid system (icons for inventory, list for bags of holding and stores).

That's why we need a judge. Anyway I hope you're right that it won't be a list.

 

[Roguey]

Flanking in NWN2 works no matter where the character is placed. The wiki quotes the faulty manual.

And this Kickstarter update can't also be "faulty" because...?

 

[Blaine]

It's been many years since I read a Babby's First Role-Playing Game rulebook (probably 3rd Edition in the early 2000s), but from what I remember of the grid combat rules, characters have no "facing" in D&D. It's abstracted. I think it's always been that way.

Ergo, I would have been surprised if facing had anything to do with "backstabbing" or whatever in NWN2, or any of the IE games for that matter. Then again, it's been awhile since I've played any of them.

Edit: Great Googly Moogly, Roguey's even more stubborn than I am. At least I can eventually be backed into admitting I was wrong.

 

[Grunker]

Flanking in NWN2 works no matter where the character is placed. The wiki quotes the faulty manual.

And this Kickstarter update can't also be "faulty" because...?

I have nothing but the KS update to argue based on, and neither do you.

 

[Grunker]

Blaine: Characters have no facing. Flanking is still, as Roguey said, when two characters stand opposite of each other. No facing needed. But NWN2 doesn't obey 3.5 rules in many instances (like, it's not turn-based).

 

[Roguey]

I have nothing but the KS update to argue based on, and neither do you.

And I pointed out that "opposite" is in quotes. I'm sure those quotes are there for a reason or it just would have read "and on the opposite side of that enemy from an adjacent ally."

 

[Hormalakh]

We will likely have specific locations that are designated rest/camp sites.

there it is.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3506352&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=321

 

[Blaine]

Blaine: Characters have no facing. Flanking is still, as Roguey said, when two characters stand opposite of each other. No facing needed. But NWN2 doesn't obey 3.5 rules in many instances (like, it's not turn-based).

From memory, flanking is simply a situation when two or more enemies are adjacent to you. I'm pretty sure all eight grid squares (including diagonals) count, so they can even be standing right next to each other. I'm not 100% on that, though. I guess you're probably right, maybe it has to be opposite.

Even so, I've impressed myself with my ten-year-old recollection of a ruleset I don't particularly like.

 

[Grunker]

I have nothing but the KS update to argue based on, and neither do you.

And I pointed out that "opposite" is in quotes. I'm sure those quotes are there for a reason or it just would have read "and on the opposite side of that enemy from an adjacent ally."

I assume "opposite" doesn't mean "anywhere next to".

 

[Grunker]

Blaine:

From memory, flanking is simply a situation when two or more enemies are adjacent to you

From playing 3.5 at least montly, no, it isn't. It's directly opposite of each other.

 

[Blaine]

Oh yes, here it is:

http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Flanking