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

[Infinitron]

Game isn't even half-done yet, we have nothing but Sawyer's quotes to debate, and they clearly say "No XP from quest-givers".

No, they say "no XP from killing as a general rule", not "no XP from quest givers".

Obviously, but Bioware designers weren't arbitrary on this. Drizzt has rewards and tons of XP, but so do all the high-level NPCs in the game, incluiding fucking quest givers.

Doesn't matter. It was still the designer's prerogative. They could have made Drizzt invincible, or made him insta-kill you. Remember Arkanis Gath from BG2?

Your problem is that you think of game design in terms of "let's define some rules that make sense theoretically, and let the game emerge organically from those rules".

That is a sandbox game design philosophy which neither Obsidian nor Bioware have ever championed.

 

[felipepepe]

I wonder felipepepe, do you kill every NPC when you play RPGs that give you XP for killing? If not, why?

Not much on the first playtrhough, but on the second I kill almost everything. Is a thing I got from my young days, when reading in english was hard, and killing easier. Some NPCs just BEG to be killed and looted.

Of course, it was someting way more doable in the 90's than nowadays, with immortal NPCs and no-xp quest givers... guess that's part of why I liked Age of Decadence and D:OS so much... AoD was extremely fun to kill the whole town.

 

[Alex]

Seriously, felipe, this sentence is wrong on so many levels. You're not supposed to kill people in games for the experience points. Experience points are a byproduct of progress, not an objective. Your objective in a game is to finish quests, have fun, and beat the game. Not to horde experience points.

Why does he need to define why I play his game for? If I want to kill everyone around to accumulate XP and then proceed to be powerful enough to just kill the guy who was supposed to beat me up and then throw me into the dungeon area where I would try to escape from, that is a strength of the game, as I see it, not a weakness.

I am not even really concerned with combat XP, or with the ability to profit from killing each and every NPC specifically. But as Josh handles XP in general, it seems you will have very few opportunities to go outside the "level band" the designer has prepared for a certain area. Which seems to only make the game less interesting to me. If you want to remove XP from quests, then fine, go ahead, but allow some way for people to earn them dynamically, rather than only by going through "the proper means" (that is quests).

If people abuse the said dynamic means to earn the XP, or if they don't use it enough and get somewhere with a level way under the designer planned for, then th game can be all the better for it. Specially if the combat system is varied enough so that winning when underlevelled is challenging and resource consuming, instead of impossible. Even better if you can use other systems to accomplish this besides direct combat, such as traps, lures, NPC faction relations and what not.

Better yet would be, I think, if the game didn't plan areas for this or that level exclusively, but rather have threats and challenges of very different difficulty sometimes, and then added means that allow you to escape or avoid dangers too great for you to take right now. So that an underlevelled character in a high level dungeon could still manage to explore it a bit, while even if you are more powerful than normally for an area, some of its threats could still challenge and maybe even outclass you.

(...snip)
Is like adding a heavily guarded bank to the game and leave the coffers empty, because you're not supposed to be rewarded from robbing it. Now I won't steal the game because I know it's empty, not because I don't want to or fear the consequences. Lazy and entitled as fuck.
(snip...)

Were you thinking of this by any chance?

 

[Kz3r0]

What about magic items you get from battles? Honestly, those are more important than XP, to me.

Grimoires from defeated mages 1d6 damage, depending on you agility you can smithe an opponent almost instantly, the best blunt weapon in the game.

 

[Infinitron]

Seriously, felipe, this sentence is wrong on so many levels. You're not supposed to kill people in games for the experience points. Experience points are a byproduct of progress, not an objective. Your objective in a game is to finish quests, have fun, and beat the game. Not to horde experience points.

Why does he need to define why I play his game for? If I want to kill everyone around to accumulate XP and then proceed to be powerful enough to just kill the guy who was supposed to beat me up and then throw me into the dungeon area where I would try to escape from, that is a strength of the game, as I see it, not a weakness.

I am not even really concerned with combat XP, or with the ability to profit from killing each and every NPC specifically. But as Josh handles XP in general, it seems you will have very few opportunities to go outside the "level band" the designer has prepared for a certain area. Which seems to only make the game less interesting to me. If you want to remove XP from quests, then fine, go ahead, but allow some way for people to earn them dynamically, rather than only by going through "the proper means" (that is quests).

If people abuse the said dynamic means to earn the XP, or if they don't use it enough and get somewhere with a level way under the designer planned for, then th game can be all the better for it. Specially if the combat system is varied enough so that winning when underlevelled is challenging and resource consuming, instead of impossible. Even better if you can use other systems to accomplish this besides direct combat, such as traps, lures, NPC faction relations and what not.

Better yet would be, I think, if the game didn't plan areas for this or that level exclusively, but rather have threats and challenges of very different difficulty sometimes, and then added means that allow you to escape or avoid dangers too great for you to take right now. So that an underlevelled character in a high level dungeon could still manage to explore it a bit, while even if you are more powerful than normally for an area, some of its threats could still challenge and maybe even outclass you.

XP isn't the only way a game can reward you. Even if there was no way to go outside the "level band", which I doubt will be the case, there will be other things to do in the game world.

Seriously, was there any shortage of fun stuff, challenges and exploits to do in Deus fucking Ex?

OMG DEUS EX HAD NO KILL XP HEAVILY SCRIPTED CONSOLETARD STREAMLINING DECLINE

 

[Mangoose]

Why does he need to define why I play his game for? If I want to kill everyone around to accumulate XP and then proceed to be powerful enough to just kill the guy who was supposed to beat me up and then throw me into the dungeon area where I would try to escape from, that is a strength of the game, as I see it, not a weakness.

Because that only rewards players that want to kill. It discourages people from stealthing past enemies, or choosing diplomatic means, because that results in less xp.

 

[Kz3r0]

OMG DEUS EX HAD NO KILL XP HEAVILY SCRIPTED CONSOLETARD STREAMLINING DECLINE

Implying that Pe wil be good as Deus EX.

 

[Cyberarmy]

XP isn't the only way a game can reward you. Even if there was no way to go outside the "level band", which I doubt will be the case, there will be other things to do in the game world.

Seriously, was there any shortage of fun stuff, challenges and exploits to do in Deus fucking Ex?

OMG DEUS EX HAD NO KILL XP HEAVILY SCRIPTED CONSOLETARD STREAMLINING DECLINE

Or VtMB in this case.

 

[Grunker]

Gettin' real tired of wuss wizards (hereafter referred to as "wussards") in RPGs in the name of balance.

In this game, an Irish cat-midget wielding a sharpened letter opener will be "equally attractive choice-ified" (thanks, Infinitron) against a sorcerer who's spent years studying forbidden arcane texts and performing eldritch experiments. This is at least one instance when the source material had it right. The wizard can fight a giant demon while en route to a sudden stop at the bottom of miles-deep shaft; the fat midget trips, falls on his face, and shits his pants whenever a goblin pokes its head over a rock in the distance.

Out of all the idiocy you've ever spewed, this bag of hyperbole-filled goodness is the worst. The amount of tension in your butt for this man clouds your ability to argue coherently, and it's pretty obvious.

 

[Lancehead]

Not much on the first playtrhough, but on the second I kill almost everything. Is a thing I got from my young days, when reading in english was hard, and killing easier. Some NPCs just BEG to be killed and looted.

What do you think of use-based systems? I think use-based system is very much suited (and makes a lot of sense) if you want to reward players for every action that's governed by the system rules.

 

[Infinitron]

Why does he need to define why I play his game for? If I want to kill everyone around to accumulate XP and then proceed to be powerful enough to just kill the guy who was supposed to beat me up and then throw me into the dungeon area where I would try to escape from, that is a strength of the game, as I see it, not a weakness.

Because that only rewards players that want to kill. It discourages people from stealthing past enemies, or choosing diplomatic means, because that results in less xp.

More importantly, it's likely to result in them stealthing past enemies and then coming back later to kill them so they can properly "complete" the area.

The area is not complete until all monsters are dead, just like how in DX:HR a map is not complete until you've hacked all the terminals in it. It's something that makes sense at first - "the player did extra work, so he should be rewarded!" - but in practice creates gameplay that just isn't very fun.

 

[Kz3r0]

Why does he need to define why I play his game for? If I want to kill everyone around to accumulate XP and then proceed to be powerful enough to just kill the guy who was supposed to beat me up and then throw me into the dungeon area where I would try to escape from, that is a strength of the game, as I see it, not a weakness.

Because that only rewards players that want to kill. It discourages people from stealthing past enemies, or choosing diplomatic means, because that results in less xp.

More importantly, it's likely to result in them stealthing past enemies and then coming back later to kill them so they can properly "complete" the area.

The area is not complete until all monsters are dead, just like how in DX:HR a map is not complete until you've hacked all the terminals in it. It's something that makes sense at first - "the player did extra work, so he should be rewarded!" - but in practice creates gameplay that just isn't very fun.

I have guessed all the passwords and codes in Deus EX, it was mighty fun.
Thea's the power of engaging mechanics, good luck to Sawyer to achieve that.

 

[CappenVarra]

No, that is not the point. The point, in case zealots want to ever accept it, is that your tastes are not the only tastes in the whole world. Really, I know this may be hard to believe, but if you like playing a turn-based game set in three counties of Utah in 2242, and you like miniguns but you don't like lasers, and you like the ratio of dialogue to combat to be about 4:1, and you like cars that look more like Buicks than Pontiacs, and you think 50s-style monsters are okay, but 50s-style aliens aren't, and you think that Max's jacket from Mad Max is okay but the football pad armor isn't, and you don't like when italics are used in dialogue but you do like it when boldface is used, and you want it to be longer than 100 hours but not longer than 120 hours, and like games to be non-linear but only to a point, and want big cities, but only two because four is too much BUT HEY NOT THAT ONE, and you like the desert but don't mind a little grass BUT HEY NOT THAT MUCH BECAUSE IT'S NOT FALLOUT... I am terribly, terribly sorry, because we are not going to make a game just for you.

We're not trying to make a game for everyone. Really, we aren't. But we're not making a game just for you and ten other angry guys with tastes that are narrower than a hallway in a camp of pygmy dwarves.

 

[Alex]

XP isn't the only way a game can reward you. Even if there was no way to go outside the "level band", which I doubt will be the case, there will be other things to do in the game world.

Seriously, was there any shortage of fun stuff, challenges and exploits to do in Deus fucking Ex?

OMG DEUS EX HAD NO KILL XP HEAVILY SCRIPTED CONSOLETARD STREAMLINING DECLINE

Deus EX was certainly a lot of fun, but still, it was a very linear game, in that the levels you must go through follow a certain programmed order with very little or no ability to change that order.

I am not saying you can't make good linear games, or that they aren't a better option for some things. But I don't think it is unfair to set Baldur's Gate as a benchmark for PE. And while Baldur's Gate was far from the perfect open ended game, I think it clearly tends more to that side of the spectrum than to the much more linear Deus EX.

Finally, while you are right that equipment might add back an element of uncertainty to power level, the XP issue is just one aspect of this game' design philosophy (for which Mr. Sawyer is given most credit (or blame) around, but which I think to not really be fair, as we can hardly know he inner workings of Obsidian). My personal interpretation of this philosophy is that having many open options in the game can't assure the player a good time. In fact, it will require the player to hit several blocks until he understands the principles at work below the game systems and design. Like in Baldur's Gate. People have finished BG with a huge variety of different classes, including soloing the game with many of them. But to be able to do that, one needs to know the game very well. Know what kind of enemies are around, what strategies will work against them, what magic items you will need, etc. By a combination of many different items, potions, equipment, spells and character abilities, there are many ways to play BG, but that also means that there are many (in fact, more) ways to lose BG, and while exploring these systems can be a lot of fun to some, it seems to be a big headache for others.

There is, of course, more to this philosophy than this. Like how the game seems to reject exploitable systems, that can allow the player to win in "unfun" ways, or that can cut through the min design the developers have prepared. But my point with all this is that, while it is clear that people will like the gameplay implied by this philosophy more or less, I still think it is worth discussing it. First, because arguing about what these limitations allow or not can make we get a better notion of their implications, something hard to do without specifics like this. Second, while I believe this philosophy to guide the development of Project Eternity, it won't completely define it, so that even if you much prefer your game to be as open and non linear as possible, there may yet be good features in PE that would be worth playing it for. Finally, I also like to argue about this because I hope to see a good argumentation for the pros of following this philosophy. I mean, I have an idea of what kind of game Obsidian wants PE to be, of what they are trying to accomplish. But since my own personal preference is on the other end of the spectrum, I think my view of the pros of such design philosophy is very likely skewed and lacking.

 

[aris]

I don't know what you are talking about, but I'm going to say this: Overbalancing a single player game can easily make it boring and generic as fuck. Finding the overpowered items is what's fun in this game. In BG2 there are many severely overpowered builds and items, and that's 50% of the reason why the game was so fun.

 

[Tigranes]

Without trying to cover anything, a simple question:

Why is this seen as a 'removal' of a feature that prohibits players from having an additional option? Why is kill XP seen as something that naturally should be there, and if it's not there, someone unnaturally took it out? Within a few years I suppose people will then say the same thing with achievements, "why did you remove achievements for killing x number of enemies? why are you removing rewards instead of adding new consequences?" Sometimes, not having something is just as positive and productive as inserting something; not every good solution is 'add more stuff'.

The actual question of whether kill XP is good or bad doesn't bother me much, I noticed that kill XP in, say, NWN2, especially the expansions, was negligible (hurr durr 8 xp, maybe 100 if it's a 'boss') and that didn't seem to change things a whole lot. If I'm going to do something like kill an entire town I'll probably do it either way for the sake of it. There is an argument to be made for the ability to farm XP (I wonder if having no kill XP means most players will end up with very similar XP ranges at similar points in the game, kind of achieving level scaling's purposes without using level scaling?), and for that reason it would be stupid to leave kill XP out of Gothic-style games or FFT/Shining Force games. P:E, if we assume for a moment it is BG/IWD mach II, not so much?

 

[sea]

I think kill XP is silly. It's harder to balance, it rewards players for one gameplay path over others, and it frequently tempts the player into just slaughtering everything to get the biggest reward. Goal-based XP is a better solution, but I also think you should have micro-goal rewards, like +250 XP for getting past a door or exploring a certain area, like in Deus Ex. This provides positive reinforcement of the player's actions without rewarding how the player did it.

Now, if your game is primarily combat-focused and does not have a lot of alternatives, then kill XP makes sense (Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, etc.). But we know Eternity is a game which will offer lots of alternatives to solving problems, and if you can get 1000 XP for a goal PLUS 1000 XP for slaughtering everything, what incentive is there for taking alternate routes? Sure, some players willingly role-play, and some try to break the game or min-max as much as possible. I think it's fair for a designer to say a game is intended to be played a certain way and provide disincentive for players who don't want to follow the rules.

 

[Lancehead]

Deus EX was certainly a lot of fun, but still, it was a very linear game, in that the levels you must go through follow a certain programmed order with very little or no ability to change that order.

I am not saying you can't make good linear games, or that they aren't a better option for some things. But I don't think it is unfair to set Baldur's Gate as a benchmark for PE. And while Baldur's Gate was far from the perfect open ended game, I think it clearly tends more to that side of the spectrum than to the much more linear Deus EX.

What exactly do you mean by linearity? Because I don't consider Deus Ex a linear game. It had non-linear level design, and combined with the tools the player had, it also had multiple solutions to any given level. That's not something I'd call "very linear". I think what you're saying is that Deus Ex didn't have a lot of optional content.

 

[Infinitron]

Deus EX was certainly a lot of fun, but still, it was a very linear game, in that the levels you must go through follow a certain programmed order with very little or no ability to change that order.

I am not saying you can't make good linear games, or that they aren't a better option for some things. But I don't think it is unfair to set Baldur's Gate as a benchmark for PE. And while Baldur's Gate was far from the perfect open ended game, I think it clearly tends more to that side of the spectrum than to the much more linear Deus EX.

What exactly do you mean by linearity? Because I don't consider Deus Ex a linear game. It had non-linear level design, and combined with the tools the player had, it also had multiple solutions to any given level. That's not something I'd call "very linear". I think what you're saying is that Deus Ex didn't have a lot of optional content.

No, I think what he means is that it wasn't an open world game where you could travel between different areas in the world with radically different difficulty levels.

 

[Gozma]

I don't even understand why this is a multipage thing. There have been many games with no kill XP. It's just some design choice like a million others.

Is it because BG didn't do it I guess? AD&D 2E has kill XP and they ported the ruleset.

 

[sea]

What exactly do you mean by linearity? Because I don't consider Deus Ex a linear game. It had non-linear level design, and combined with the tools the player had, it also had multiple solutions to any given level. That's not something I'd call "very linear". I think what you're saying is that Deus Ex didn't have a lot of optional content.

Even that isn't true. Deus Ex had tons of optional content, but most of it was just potential stuff that you could have done, instead of your sole critical path.

I do get the point. Deus Ex does not let you freely wander everywhere and everywhere; the argument is that in a game that does, you need to have some sort of way to reward the player on a systemic level, because what the designers created for you might not be enough. You could do this through standardized instead of pre-scripted game rewards (i.e. 100 XP for picking a lock). The problem with this is that when you have a diverse party full of many characters with many talents in a game like Eternity, there is really nothing stopping you from picking every lock, always acing the speech checks, and so on. Those sorts of limitations are only really relevant in games which don't let you have a party capable of doing everything.

 

[Alex]

I think kill XP is silly. It's harder to balance, it rewards players for one gameplay path over others, and it frequently tempts the player into just slaughtering everything to get the biggest reward. Goal-based XP is a better solution, but I also think you should have micro-goal rewards, like +250 XP for getting past a door or exploring a certain area, like in Deus Ex. This provides positive reinforcement of the player's actions without rewarding how the player did it.

Now, if your game is primarily combat-focused and does not have a lot of alternatives, then kill XP makes sense (Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, etc.). But we know Eternity is a game which will offer lots of alternatives to solving problems, and if you can get 1000 XP for a goal PLUS 1000 XP for slaughtering everything, what incentive is there for taking alternate routes? Sure, some players willingly role-play, and some try to break the game or min-max as much as possible. I think it's fair for a designer to say a game is intended to be played a certain way and provide disincentive for players who don't want to follow the rules.

Sea, being harder to balance is kind of the point here. Anything that makes the game more open makes it harder to predict the state the player will find himself in at any point. But if the designer is careful in making the game's challenges more open and far reaching, this also allows th player to make his own choices and live with their consequences.

What exactly do you mean by linearity? Because I don't consider Deus Ex a linear game. It had non-linear level design, and combined with the tools the player had, it also had multiple solutions to any given level. That's not something I'd call "very linear". I think what you're saying is that Deus Ex didn't have a lot of optional content.

It was linear in that one level followed another in a set order telling a story that you could influence, but hardly change. You go to China, France and wherever at an exactly set moment, not earlier or later. And while you could be more or less well suited for the are you enter depending on how you spent XP and upgrades, you will hardly find yourself with abilities so ill fitting for the current area it becomes impossible or even painful.

Now, of course BG 2 had a very linear main quest too, but the game had a whole lot of completely optional areas and content you could explore, making it far less linear than Deus EX, at least on this high level.

 

[sea]

Sea, being harder to balance is kind of the point here. Anything that makes the game more open makes it harder to predict the state the player will find himself in at any point. But if the designer is careful in making the game's challenges more open and far reaching, this also allows th player to make his own choices and live with their consequences.

It depends. I don't think Eternity is intending to be an open-world kind of game like the first Baldur's Gate, where 90% of gameplay consisted of wandering around through wilderness and caves slaughtering wildlife. In such a game per-kill XP makes sense, or at least "per dungeon" or "per area" or whatever, but generally speaking Obsidian games are more structured than that.

Fantastic example of XP in an open world game: Just Cause 2 and Chaos. Chaos is basically the way you gain progress through the game. It's your currency and it's used to unlock new missions (side and main). You also get it for engaging with the game's primary mechanics: shooting shit, blowing shit up, etc. The Chaos curve is set up so that you get the same Chaos for basically everything regardless of where you are in the game; only the required thresholds for progress continue to increase. By virtue of the GTA-style enemy alertness system, the player is in direct control of his/her challenge level for most of the game. It's all one large, entirely mechanics-driven progression system, and it works phenomenally.

Now tell me, does this system make any sort of sense in a game built around hand-designed scenarios instead of open-world anarchy? Project Eternity is not a game built around abstraction and around perfectly coherent, balanced mechanics and systems, at least not to our knowledge at this time. Furthermore, by having detailed NPC dialogue trees, it has to be able to have enough limits to properly recognize player actions, motives and so on; you can't mesh two completely different levels of abstraction across narrative and mechanics, it just does not typically lead to effective results, and can come across as very dissonant for the player.

See Skyrim for a very bad example of this - quest rewards are typically player level x 100 gold or similar, but this leads to the player completing simplistic fetch quest and earning thousands of gold from rag-wearing merchants selling leeks. Sure, you can make 5, 10, or 20 "quest reward formulas" depending on the quest. At a certain point it just makes more sense to do everything by hand, though.

 

[Grunker]

Alex, you seem to be arguing a lot about how you like Kill XP, and very little about the issue it causes. How do we reward all play-styles equally in your opinion, if Kill XP stays?

 

[General Maxson]

Does Tim Cain have any input on the making of this game, or is he just programming it?