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

[Liston]

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

Regarding the kill xp, he was the first one to mention it and he defended it in Q&A updates of kickstarter and during reddit ama. Also he wrote update about monks last weak iirc.

 

[Infinitron]

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.

Great fucking post. Quoting so people see the edit

 

[Hobo Elf]

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?

Make the rewards for other paths (stealth, diplomacy) equally appealing, but different? Giving the player the same reward for out talking your enemies or just murdering them is stupid. At that point the player is just going to go for the option that requires the least amount of effort for the same reward, usually being combat since any simian can hit with a sword until things stop moving.

 

[tuluse]

There are literally dozens of PnP systems that don't have kill xp, as well as a smattering of cRPGs. I don't see what the problem is, and I don't see how it's a problem that Sawyer has when he's just copying the exact xp mechanics of other games.

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

He is doing design with Sawyer. He came up with the idea for cyphers and recently wrote the update about monks.

 

[Grunker]

^ Hobo Elf

You can differentiate paths via treasure or progress or whatever. XP is the general player progression currency, differentiating that means whatever path gets most of it will be preferred.

 

[General Maxson]

I'm just glad Tim Cain is also working on this, and the more I hear and see, the more I look forward to the game.

 

[Alex]

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.

And, in my opinion, they are worse for it.

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?

Put enough XP for the other uses? If you get enough XP as being a diplomat the game doesn't turn impossible, or into a boring slog, later on, that is enough, don't you think? But my point is not even that much for kill XP. If Obsidian felt it was better to just throw away kill XP, but add in other ways to earn it dynamically, I would be cool with it. Or have ll the ways of earning XP be limited, but add very interesting trade offs about them.

For example, suppose you have a quest to rescue a princess from a dungeon. The quest needs to be completed in 7 days, or the cultists sacrifice the princess. If you go and rescue her right away, you get some xp, you get to impress the royalty and you get to have crushed the cult. But if you take your time, the princess will be tortured, so that when you return her she will be nothing but a husk. the king will hate you, and may even send guards at random to take your party down. On the other hand, you can use those days to infiltrate the cult and do side quests for them, gaining more XP than the above method.

The point here is that, rather than being simply a story marker, a mechanic that enables you to have access to the abilities you need to solve a determined stage of the game, XP is more fun as an actual resource. As something that you may get more or less of, depending on what kind of choice you make, but with consequences for going one way or another. Even better if this means that an over-leveled party has options and challenges that a normal party wouldn't get. For instance, defeating the cult in the first day might be something that only someone who had focused on XP could accomplish.

Now, of course combat XP doesn't do all this all that well. Frequently the only benefit of getting a lot of XP is that the game has no challenge anymore, but reducing variation in XP levels is hardly going to make it a more interesting mechanic.

 

[tuluse]

Alex I don't see why removing kill xp would make a game easier. If they're going to make it easy without kill xp, it would certainly be just as easy with kill xp. Just look at Bethesda games.

 

[Alex]

Alex I don't see why removing kill xp would make a game easier. If they're going to make it easy without kill xp, it would certainly be just as easy with kill xp. Just look at Bethesda games.

Uh? Sorry, I think I expressed myself badly. I am not at all talking about difficulty in my post, only about how open the game is, and whether XP is an actual resource or just a marker of how far along you are in the game.

Edit:

When I say XP would act as a game marker, I don't mean to say the game would always leave your character with enough power that encounters would always be easy. Only that you wouldn't be able to, through your own decisions, be completely unfit for a certain area or be so powerful it is no challenge at all.

 

[sea]

And, in my opinion, they are worse for it.

So... what? You want Obsidian to make an Ultima-style game? Elder Scrolls? Baldur's Gate? One has to accept that although they are making a game in the vein of Baldur's Gate and other Infinity Engine titles, chances are the biggest similarities are going to be in UI and combat design, not in the overall game structure and progression mechanics and systems. Might as well complain that Fallout doesn't have enough racing mini-games in it.

As for your cult example: uh, cool quest idea, but what does that in any way have to do with per-kill XP gain? Are you trying to say you can do one or the other options, but not both? And are you going to design every possible scenario in the game like this, where you can pick option A, B or C and they are all truly mutually exclusive?

I do like the idea of using time as a quest component, but what if the player is good at the game or is using a walkthrough and can do the cult's quests fast? Does that mean they get double XP? That they've earned it and deserve it? Or is that game-breaking? The only way I could see you preventing that is forcing every quest to have a time component, and even arbitrary waiting times forced in between like "you must pass 2 days before the merchant shows up in town, then you can deliver these rat butts to him and claim your just reward!", which isn't necessarily easy to do once you've used up your handful of good ideas.

 

[tuluse]

Uh? Sorry, I think I expressed myself badly. I am not at all talking about difficulty in my post, only about how open the game is, and whether XP is an actual resource or just a marker of how far along you are in the game.

Edit:

When I say XP would act as a game marker, I don't mean to say the game would always leave your character with enough power that encounters would always be easy. Only that you wouldn't be able to, through your own decisions, be completely unfit for a certain area or be so powerful it is no challenge at all.

Actually, I think I may have misread your post. So uh, nevermind.

 

[Alex]

And, in my opinion, they are worse for it.

So... what? You want Obsidian to make an Ultima-style game? Elder Scrolls? Baldur's Gate? One has to accept that although they are making a game in the vein of Baldur's Gate and other Infinity Engine titles, chances are the biggest similarities are going to be in UI and combat design, not in the overall game structure and progression mechanics and systems. Might as well complain that Fallout doesn't have enough racing mini-games in it.

Why? If they are not going to use BG's progression mechanics and game structure, I would prefer they did something more to my tastes, like say, Arcanum's or Fallout's, than to what they have produced up to now, which in my opinion is worse (in those aspects, at least).

As for your cult example: uh, cool quest idea, but what does that in any way have to do with per-kill XP gain?

Nothing, it has to do with having XP as an actual resource. XP could still be limited to quests, but if quests were open enough we could still game and unbalance the system, and better yet, be rewarded for it, I would still be happy. My point is that I don't care about kill XP per se, but how Obsidian seems to be regulating the rate with which you can level up.

tuluse

No problem, man! If some part of it doesn't make much sense and you want me to clarify what I meant, I will be happy to!

 

[Arkeus]

And, in my opinion, they are worse for it.

So... what? You want Obsidian to make an Ultima-style game? Elder Scrolls? Baldur's Gate? One has to accept that although they are making a game in the vein of Baldur's Gate and other Infinity Engine titles, chances are the biggest similarities are going to be in UI and combat design, not in the overall game structure and progression mechanics and systems. Might as well complain that Fallout doesn't have enough racing mini-games in it.

Sawyer pretty much said he was looking to do something more like BG1 than BG2 when it came to exploration, though individual areas would still be a bit 'fuller' than in BG1.

 

[felipepepe]

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.

I don't like pure use-based sytems, I think they limit the player and encourage/force grinding; and not only they are exploitable, but it's boring as hell to exploit them. And they are usually cold and unrelated to your actions. I like the feeling of seeing a powerful creature, facing it in a hard battle and feel better both as a in-game character and as a player after defeating it; use-based system are usually disconnected to the weight of your actions, you'll gain 1 skill point after dealing 1k damage to anything anytime, it doesn't matter if it's the killing blow on a dragon or a 1 damage hit on a chicken, so it feels very "gamey" and unrelated to your actions...

Some games like Grimoire fuse them with skill-points allocation, so you can tailor the character to your taste trhu points and still get some more points on battle & use, and I think it works really well, as your main upgrades are still on customizable levelups, but you get little rewards of your actions as well, avoiding that feeling of no progress between levels.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Fuck balance, and fuck the story fags holding this game hostage.

 

[Infinitron]

Sawyer pretty much said he was looking to do something more like BG1 than BG2 when it came to exploration.

Source?

 

[Arkeus]

Source?

Dammit. I don't keep a txt of quotes... Roguey to the rescue?
But yeah, He is looking for something like a mix between BG1/2, with a heavier emphasis on quests. When there was talk about lack of exp in random areas, he said something about having micro-objectives that didn't need quest givers. IIRC.

 

[Mrowak]

It's a lazy approach, he "broke a rule" instead of adressing it's consequences. If the system encourages me to kill everything just for meager 10xp, he should provide me a reason not to do it, add some weight to my decisions, not just remove rewards from what I shound't do.

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.

Now instead of killing an NPC and facing the consequences, people will kill them and reload since they didn't gain nothing from it. This is dumbing down and streamlining a game to fit the creator's idea of "playing it right", nothing else.

I think you extrapolate too far. For one thing the kind of far reaching consequences you wish for occur extremely seldomly in any RPG in existence, so you can't really begrudge Josh on not implementing them at each and every corner. Moreover what Josh stated really does not prevent such consequences from happening.

Actually the approach Josh endorses mirrors my approach in GMing - I do not reward players for killing stuff; I reward them for quests (which, admittedly are often culminated by slaying the evil dark draconic overlord). The reason for this is simple: players should be given rewards for their actual performance and ideas in the given context as opposed to rolling lucky numbers on dice and having slaughtered X mooks (as in most jRPG). I cannot really say why cRPGs should be any different.

 

[Tigranes]

Sawyer pretty much said he was looking to do something more like BG1 than BG2 when it came to exploration.

Source?

Pretty sure he always said a mix of the two, a little less 'tight' than BG2 but nowhere near wandering as BG1.

 

[Infinitron]

It's a lazy approach, he "broke a rule" instead of adressing it's consequences. If the system encourages me to kill everything just for meager 10xp, he should provide me a reason not to do it, add some weight to my decisions, not just remove rewards from what I shound't do.

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.

Now instead of killing an NPC and facing the consequences, people will kill them and reload since they didn't gain nothing from it. This is dumbing down and streamlining a game to fit the creator's idea of "playing it right", nothing else.

I think you extrapolate too far. For one thing the kind of far reaching consequences you wish for occur extremely seldomly in any RPG in existence, so you can't really begrudge Josh on not implementing them at each and every corner. Moreover what Josh stated really does not prevent such consequences from happening.

Actually the approach Josh endorses mirrors my approach in GMing - I do not reward players for killing stuff; I reward them for quests (which, admittedly are often culminated by slaying the evil dark draconic overlord). The reason for this is simple: players should be given rewards for their actual performance and ideas in the given context as opposed to rolling lucky numbers on dice and having slaughtered X mooks (as in most jRPG). I cannot really say why cRPGs should be any different.

What I think Alex believes is that letting you hunt monsters for experience points is the only way a game can let you "grind" and reach levels that are higher than what the game "expects". Without XP for kills, you find yourself locked into pre-determined "level bands" as you progress through the game.

Thing is, if the game is open enough, with enough quests and micro-objectives, that's totally not true.

Personally, I don't think it's such an important issue even if it is true. I'm fine with experience points as a "progress marker" as he describes it.

 

[felipepepe]

Actually the approach Josh endorses mirrors my approach in GMing - I do not reward players for killing stuff; I reward them for quests (which, admittedly are often culminated by slaying the evil dark draconic overlord). The reason for this is simple: players should be given rewards for their actual performance and ideas in the given context as opposed to rolling lucky numbers on dice and having slaughtered X mooks (as in most jRPG). I cannot really say why cRPGs should be any different.

Is all about GM & Players style. Say you've planned and entire quest line, but instead of helping the Paladin save his friends, they decide to kill him, ask for a reward from the Dark (Under)Lord and then masscrate the village in tribute. Should they not get Xp and stuffies from doing those things? "No", says the man at Obsidian, "only my premade quest and ideas should reward players"! I know games have their resource limitations, but I'm not asking for this new plot, just that killing the Paladin is interesting and rewards my effort/idea. Probably huge quest will have this outcome, but I like to be able to do it at any point in the game, with anything... if not the items & subplots, at least some goddamn XP for killing a paladin, ffs.

And games like Baldur's Gate allowed both playstyles, you could follow quest happily and Mr. Designer would be very pleased, or you could go on a rampage and kill everything and still get interesting things and no one would shout "you're playing it WRONG!" Long story short, Sawyer would ban me of his P&P game before I've even made the character sheet.

 

[Arkeus]

Actually the approach Josh endorses mirrors my approach in GMing - I do not reward players for killing stuff; I reward them for quests (which, admittedly are often culminated by slaying the evil dark draconic overlord). The reason for this is simple: players should be given rewards for their actual performance and ideas in the given context as opposed to rolling lucky numbers on dice and having slaughtered X mooks (as in most jRPG). I cannot really say why cRPGs should be any different.

Is all about GM & Players style. Say you've planned and entire quest line, but instead of helping the Paladin save his friends, they decide to kill him, ask for a reward from the Dark (Under)Lord and then masscrate the village in tribute. Should they not get Xp and stuffies from doing those things? "No", says the man at Obsidian, "only my premade quest and ideas should reward players"! I know games have their resource limitations, but I'm not asking for this new plot, just that killing the Paladin is interesting and rewards my effort/idea. Probably huge quest will have this outcome, but I like to be able to do it at any point in the game, with anything.

Except that you would be rewarded for killing the paladin and destroying the village.

What you would NOT be, however, is killing the paladin, destroying the village, and then wanting to get double the exp by killing the overlord.

Edit: Well ,there WOULD probably be a whole quest about killing the overlord to be the overlord, but you know what i mean.

 

[Infinitron]

And games like Baldur's Gate allowed both playstyles, you could follow quest happily and Mr. Designer would be very pleased, or you could go on a rampage and kill everything and still get interesting things and no one would shout "you're playing it WRONG!"

>implying that annihilating every living being was actually a viable and rewarding way of playing Baldur's Gate

 

[Rivmusique]

>

 

[Alex]

What I think Alex believes is that letting you hunt monsters for experience points is the only way a game can let you "grind" and reach levels that are higher than what the game "expects". Without XP for kills, you find yourself locked into pre-determined "level bands" as you progress through the game.

Thing is, if the game is open enough, with enough quests and micro-objectives, that's totally not true.

I actually gave out examples of ho you could have the game be open enough you would still be able to have experience be an open value. I know xp for kills is not the only way to do this, and alone is actually a crappy way of getting the effect I was trying to describe. I just don't think, after all that has been said about this game, that this is what they are going for.

Personally, I don't think it's such an important issue even if it is true. I'm fine with experience points as a "progress marker" as he describes it.

Well, I have played very closed games before, and they can be fun, in some ways. I still think it is a waste of talent, though.

 

[Mrowak]

Actually the approach Josh endorses mirrors my approach in GMing - I do not reward players for killing stuff; I reward them for quests (which, admittedly are often culminated by slaying the evil dark draconic overlord). The reason for this is simple: players should be given rewards for their actual performance and ideas in the given context as opposed to rolling lucky numbers on dice and having slaughtered X mooks (as in most jRPG). I cannot really say why cRPGs should be any different.

Is all about GM & Players style. Say you've planned and entire quest line, but instead of helping the Paladin save his friends, they decide to kill him, ask for a reward from the Dark (Under)Lord and then masscrate the village in tribute.　Should they not get Xp and stuffies from doing those things?

Logically, why should they? What kind of experience would one gain from backstabbing one paladin and hurling a few fireballs at some filthy peasants who could not, under any circumstances pose any threat to you. There's little to learn from that.

The best, most logical reward would be giving the characters access to "evil" skills, spells, prestige classes and whatnot (because they are the Over Underlord's servants now) they could attain after learning something. But that's beside the point because...

"No", says the man at Obsidian, "only my premade quest and ideas should reward players"!

Actually what you gave above is the very example of a "premade quest". Nothing past killing the paladin would have taken place, unless you larped it would. You couldn't ask the Underlord for reward and he wouldn't give you any quest if it had not been scripted (i.e. premade). In other words, if we stick to your take to the letter, this would be a broken questline and little more.

And, as I mentioned, there is no reason to give your PCs xp for something so trivial, anyway. I don't think the example you used supports your point well enough.

I know games have their resource limitations, but I'm not asking for this new plot, just that killing the Paladin is interesting and rewards my effort/idea.

As I said - in such scenario the quest has to be premade regardless.

And games like Baldur's Gate allowed both playstyles, you could follow quest happily and Mr. Designer would be very pleased, or you could go on a rampage and kill everything and still get interesting things and no one would shout "you're playing it WRONG!" Long story short, Sawyer would ban me of his P&P game before I've even made the character sheet.

I cannot really see how Sawyer would even ban you, or tell you - "you are playing it wrong". In fact his design philosophy does not really differ so much from the philosphy adopted by the designers of BG2.