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

[Mrowak]

I'm still butthurt, but I'll wait to see; they already have my money anyway...

However, I am strongly against awarding experience points for "ways and means". I.e. killing monsters, picking locks, scribing scrolls, etc. Not only is it extraordinarily hard to balance for designers and QA staff, but it inevitably leads to nasty metagaming that, in my opinion, runs counter to some of the guiding principles of many RPGs. Unless combat is the sole focus of the game, we need to keep the player's focus on achieving a goal in whatever manner he or she sees fit. The accomplishment of the goal, not the method itself, should net the main reward. The reward for "ways and means" is usually self-contained. E.g. monsters drop monster bits, opening locked rooms gives access to otherwise unavailable equipment, hacking a computer gives some interesting data that can tie in with another game system. And really, the biggest reward has already been granted to the player: you allowed him or her to play the game in the manner he or she wanted. There's an idea I don't subscribe to -- that players need to be given tiny rewards for everything they do. If your gameplay is actually fun, you shouldn't need to bribe them! When gameplay simply becomes drudgery motivated by a desire to gain a bonus that makes the gameplay easier, I feel that we have failed as designers.

Sawyer

(Your thoughts on Pathfinder you can stick up your bunghole though )

I really don't get it why he is so afraid of having the game be unbalanced. And while I can sympathize with the metagaming complaint, in that part of the resources you are doing your decision making over are abstract things in the gameworld, which kind of breaches the illusion. But his solution is worse than the problem in my view.If one really wants to address that, you can have experience be something more concrete in the gameworld, so that it stops being metagaming and begins to be in game thinking.

You don't even need to go with more "realistic" systems like learn by doing or training or what have you. You can imply have something simple like 1xp for each piece of gold worth of treasure looted (the logic being that the more you manage to bring back in an expedition, the greater of an adventurer you are). Or even more ephemeral stuff, like fame or class accomplishment. Actually, now that I think about it, even quest XP could fall into this category, as long as there were clear guidelines of what a quest should be worth, instead of being a percentage of how much the player needs to get to the next level for the assumed level of the party, like they seem to do in most games.

Actually what Josh stated does not deny the approach you are advocating. Sawyer clearly wants to reward the performance of the player as opposed to the performance of PC. I can clearly see how, after finalizing some economic questline, you are rewarded XP proportionally to the amount of gold you earned due to your actions - that's valid and logical in his approach. That's cool because that rewards gameplay. I can't see why you should be given XP for stuff your character can already do, like opening locks, making an item and such. That hardly can be called gameplay.

 

[Alex]

Actually what Josh stated does not deny the approach you are advocating. Sawyer clearly wants to reward the performance of the player as opposed to the performance of PC. I can clearly see how, after finalizing some economic questline, you are rewarded XP proportionally to the amount of gold you earned due to your actions - that's valid and logical in his approach.

that wouldn't be bad at all as a design philosophy, but I really doubt those are Obsidian's plans. If players got rewarded by their performance in the game, those who did poorly early on would start falling behind, which would mean they would have an even harder time doing well, which means they would keep falling behind the expected XP by a larger and larger margin, which seems to be completely against the stuff Sawyer has been talking about. I mean, I expect that at least sometimes the options you take may lead to further quests, or better quest rewards. But from all that has been said, I think this will be infrequent enough that it won't break the balance of the game.

That's cool because that rewards gameplay. I can't see why you should be given XP for stuff your character can already do, like opening locks, making an item and such. That hardly can be called gameplay.

It is assumed in games that do have those things that taking these actions involve some kind of risk, or at least the consumption of important resources. Making a magic item in P&P AD&D used to require that the mage gathered all kinds of strange, hard to find baubles. Opening a certain lock could very well involve puzzle solving, situation analysis and, of course, getting to the damn thing. Then again, in a computer game, all that is involved is touching a button, which is why learn by doing systems there usually are problematic, or at least with a few hicks.

I think a big paradigm split between what I want and what Obsidian (well, mostly Sawyer) has talked is how we see experience. As you said, Sawyer wants to reward the player's performance, that is, he wants XP to be proportional to what the player has accomplished. I don't think this, by itself, is such a bad idea, although I do think it shouldn't be done in such a way that the player would always end up with enough XP for the next area, which I am inferring from his balance comments.

But more than that, I think the game can be made more interesting if XP is an actual resource, instead of simply a recognition of "how well you played". That is, in some situations, you might have to weigh the possibility of getting more XP against other concerns, such as gold, or fame, or good will, or even just role playing concerns. I was trying to argue in my last post that if you make what XP means something more or less solid in game, this can be a valid in character decision. Although, hopefully, this would be made with a little more care than, say, D&D 3e, where XP was so much of a resource it actually had a basic exchange rate with gold pieces (1 to 5, if I am not mistaken). Interesting enough, some parts of 3e also assumed a specific rate of XP and GP gain for games, so they had a table relating how much wealth a character of each level should have and what challenge a monster would be to him, which is the complete opposite of what I would want.

 

[Arkeus]

that wouldn't be bad at all as a design philosophy, but I really doubt those are Obsidian's plans. If players got rewarded by their performance in the game, those who did poorly early on would start falling behind, which would mean they would have an even harder time doing well, which means they would keep falling behind the expected XP by a larger and larger margin, which seems to be completely against the stuff Sawyer has been talking about. I mean, I expect that at least sometimes the options you take may lead to further quests, or better quest rewards. But from all that has been said, I think this will be infrequent enough that it won't break the balance of the game.


I think a big paradigm split between what I want and what Obsidian (well, mostly Sawyer) has talked is how we see experience. As you said, Sawyer wants to reward the player's performance, that is, he wants XP to be proportional to what the player has accomplished. I don't think this, by itself, is such a bad idea, although I do think it shouldn't be done in such a way that the player would always end up with enough XP for the next area, which I am inferring from his balance comments.

I am pretty sure you are inferring wrong, and that this is where come the difficulty scale: the higher you push the difficulty, the more you -need- to have done everything perfectly beforehand, or else you can't keep up.

So, yeah, on normal you would just need to finish most quests and play decently, but on hard you would need to finish almost all of the quest decently and play well, and on very hard you would need all the quest done quasi-perfectly, and on expert the same but with optimized character, etc.

 

[Alex]

that wouldn't be bad at all as a design philosophy, but I really doubt those are Obsidian's plans. If players got rewarded by their performance in the game, those who did poorly early on would start falling behind, which would mean they would have an even harder time doing well, which means they would keep falling behind the expected XP by a larger and larger margin, which seems to be completely against the stuff Sawyer has been talking about. I mean, I expect that at least sometimes the options you take may lead to further quests, or better quest rewards. But from all that has been said, I think this will be infrequent enough that it won't break the balance of the game.


I think a big paradigm split between what I want and what Obsidian (well, mostly Sawyer) has talked is how we see experience. As you said, Sawyer wants to reward the player's performance, that is, he wants XP to be proportional to what the player has accomplished. I don't think this, by itself, is such a bad idea, although I do think it shouldn't be done in such a way that the player would always end up with enough XP for the next area, which I am inferring from his balance comments.

I am pretty sure you are inferring wrong, and that this is where come the difficulty scale: the higher you push the difficulty, the more you -need- to have done everything perfectly beforehand, or else you can't keep up.

So, yeah, on normal you would just need to finish most quests and play decently, but on hard you would need to finish almost all of the quest decently and play well, and on very hard you would need all the quest done quasi-perfectly, and on expert the same but with optimized character, etc.

I am not talking about difficulty settings, just how well you do in quests. Like, suppose most quests in PE have several optional reward parts to them. Like, the rescue princess could give you 500xp for rescuing the princess from the dragon. I gives you 200 extra xp if you ensure the dragon won't attack the kingdom ever again. You get 100 extra xp if you uncover the connection between the dragon and the duke. And you get 200xp if Chuckles the court jester is alive by the end of the quest. Now, all these extra objectives are extra challenges. Saving Chuckles require you to protect him during the fight against the dragon. Or be extra sneaky when rescuing the princess so you can rescue him too. Or maybe finding a way to slip the dragon a sleep potion. In other words, the game doesn't care how you accomplish these, but accomplishing them is a challenge of sorts.

Now, my point is that Josh's comments led me to think they don't plan something much like this. If a player ignores optional objectives early on, and if they are important enough that the player would be really disadvantaged, it would be harder to accomplish optional objectives later on in quests, so you would have a snowball effect, so that the player would eventually be underlevelled. Which leads to the QA nightmare thing in the comments above, I suppose. Besides, some of these objectives also make assumptions about the player's behavior. Maybe the PCs would like nothing more than to see Chuckles roast? In which case, you have to consider whether you want to see him fry or earn 200xp, which I think Mr. Sawyer would consider a metagaming issue.

Of difficulty levels, I expect they will be built without affecting the xp balance. Of course, in higher difficulty levels, you will probably want to get as much xp as possible,, but I think winning fights will be much more about managing your abilities you have at a certain point well than making high level decisions such as "well, Craig's Keep is too hard for me right now on impossible, so I will got to the Shadow forest to get better gear and level up first".

 

[J_C]

However, I am strongly against awarding experience points for "ways and means". I.e. killing monsters, picking locks, scribing scrolls, etc. Not only is it extraordinarily hard to balance for designers and QA staff, but it inevitably leads to nasty metagaming that, in my opinion, runs counter to some of the guiding principles of many RPGs. Unless combat is the sole focus of the game, we need to keep the player's focus on achieving a goal in whatever manner he or she sees fit. The accomplishment of the goal, not the method itself, should net the main reward. The reward for "ways and means" is usually self-contained. E.g. monsters drop monster bits, opening locked rooms gives access to otherwise unavailable equipment, hacking a computer gives some interesting data that can tie in with another game system. And really, the biggest reward has already been granted to the player: you allowed him or her to play the game in the manner he or she wanted. There's an idea I don't subscribe to -- that players need to be given tiny rewards for everything they do. If your gameplay is actually fun, you shouldn't need to bribe them! When gameplay simply becomes drudgery motivated by a desire to gain a bonus that makes the gameplay easier, I feel that we have failed as designers.

Sawyer

 

[RK47]

Good work. It's nice to remove that gamey concept out of the way. I really felt bothered when I started getting so much EXP from just hacking every laptop I see in DXHR, it became almost automatic for me to just hack every single terminal I see, not because I'm curious of the content, just because it gives EXP. Even if I have the password, I'd just hack it. Cause it rewards the player more.

 

[Arkeus]

SNIP

My point is that doing every quest with every secondary objectives would overlevel you in 'normal', but not in hard or very hard.

E.G, it's "assumed" that you do -everything- with all the objectives (of course, sometimes there are choices on what 'all' means, different choices and so on) if you want to play in the harder modes.

So, yes, you couldn't play in harder difficulty if you don't complete the paths you take perfectly.

 

[Blaine]

Not ever giving a shit about XP and doing the content because you want to do it is, perhaps, the mark of a great RPG/game with RPG elements.

I've played through Fallout approx. nine times, and Fallout 2 approx. fourteen times, and I can't even remember how much XP rats, radscorpions or geckos confer. Yet I remember the layouts of both games in near-photographic detail, including where containers are and what's in them. Example: In Klamath, in one of the buildings to the right of center in that group of buildings with the inverted "U" shape, there's a Guns and Bullets, a knife... and something else, maybe a flare. In Vic's shack, there's the radio, the canteen, a rifle, and some ammo. In Vault City, there's a Metal Armor in the locker with the mouthy black guard, who himself is wearing Metal Armor Mk II. I remember plenty of dialog, too.

You can pickpocket a Power Fist from the Super Mutant in the bar outside NCR, and fight him too, IIRC. Pretty sure his name was Lenny.

I haven't played either in 4-5 years. Don't remember the first thing about XP. Couldn't even hazard a guess. It was never important in any way.

 

[Arkeus]

Not ever giving a shit about XP and doing the content because you want to do it is, perhaps, the mark of a great RPG/game with RPG elements.

Ok, that's a very good point.

 

[kris]

J. Sawyer: "The destination is more important than the journey."

YA GODDAMN RIGHT IT IS

Depends on where you are going and how.

 

[Alex]

SNIP

My point is that doing every quest with every secondary objectives would overlevel you in 'normal', but not in hard or very hard.

E.G, it's "assumed" that you do -everything- with all the objectives (of course, sometimes there are choices on what 'all' means, different choices and so on) if you want to play in the harder modes.

So, yes, you couldn't play in harder difficulty if you don't complete the paths you take perfectly.

I see. I still think the difference between doing only non optional content and doing everything will be kept small, so that higher difficulty levels will rely much more on tactical choices (that is, what you do in battle) rather than on strategic ones (such as which quests you take and which you don't). I would be glad to be proven wrong, but his comments about metagaming make me think this will be the case.

 

[Rake]

SNIP

My point is that doing every quest with every secondary objectives would overlevel you in 'normal', but not in hard or very hard.

E.G, it's "assumed" that you do -everything- with all the objectives (of course, sometimes there are choices on what 'all' means, different choices and so on) if you want to play in the harder modes.

So, yes, you couldn't play in harder difficulty if you don't complete the paths you take perfectly.

I see. I still think the difference between doing only non optional content and doing everything will be kept small, so that higher difficulty levels will rely much more on tactical choices (that is, what you do in battle) rather than on strategic ones (such as which quests you take and which you don't). I would be glad to be proven wrong, but his comments about metagaming make me think this will be the case.

Sawyer said that the only parts of the game that there will be some kind of encounter scaling will be in some of the main path encounters so that players don't feel forced to do all the optional content and can stick to the main path.

 

[Kem0sabe]

So instead of grinding monsters and picking locks for exp... you will have to grind every little sidequest to get those levels. Still grinding, but as long as those quests are well written and fun, don't mind.

 

[Arkeus]

For those like me who don't have a account at somethingawful, it seems it's back to open viewing again.

EDIT:

Procs have their own voodoo math for calculating damage vs. DT. Procs are always a percentage of the weapon damage, so the proc damage is compared to the same percentage of DT, modified (if necessary) by special damage type resistances.

N.B.: While we will typically show damage and armor values in integers, we will actually track them as floats.

E.g. if you hit someone with a sabre that does +20% Shock damage, you would calculate the base (Slash) damage -- let's say it's 20 -- then the Shock damage, 4. The target is wearing armor that has 8 DT, no special modifier for Slash damage. It takes 12 damage from the sabre itself. The armor has -30% Shock DT, so that goes down to 5.6 DT, which is then reduced to 20% its normal value (because the proc is 20%), or 1.12 DT. The target takes an additional 2.88 damage from Shock, for a total of 14.88.

...

??

 

[Grunker]

I thought Sawyer was a fan of transparancy

Roguey, Infinitron

 

[Infinitron]

I think that was already posted in this thread

I thought Sawyer was a fan of transparancy

Roguey, Infinitron

What?

 

[Grunker]

I think that was already posted in this thread

I thought Sawyer was a fan of transparancy

Roguey, Infinitron

What?

You seem to follow this closely. Maybe you'd have some idea about how Sawyer plans to make such a system transparant (so that you always have a clear sense of what you're doing when you pick DT-related items/abilities).

 

[Infinitron]

I think that was already posted in this thread

I thought Sawyer was a fan of transparancy

Roguey, Infinitron

What?

You seem to follow this closely. Maybe you'd have some idea about how Sawyer plans to make such a system transparant (so that you always have a clear sense of what you're doing when you pick DT-related items/abilities).

I'm not sure what you mean by "transparent" here. The rules seem clear to me. You know what a "proc" is, right?

 

[Grunker]

I think that was already posted in this thread

I thought Sawyer was a fan of transparancy

Roguey, Infinitron

What?

You seem to follow this closely. Maybe you'd have some idea about how Sawyer plans to make such a system transparant (so that you always have a clear sense of what you're doing when you pick DT-related items/abilities).

I'm not sure what you mean by "transparent" here. The rules seem clear to me. You know what a "proc" is, right?

Of course. But how is that process transparant? He actually says the display the values in one way and track them in another. GURPS is considered a complex system and in some ways its DR-system is more complex than that, but it sure is easier to track.

 

[Infinitron]

Of course. But how is that process transparant? He actually says the display the values in one way and track them in another.

Uh, he has no choice. Stamina and health are integers. You can use floating point numbers when doing the math, but in the end you can't lose 11.2 hit points.

 

[Grunker]

Of course. But how is that process transparant? He actually says the display the values in one way and track them in another.

Uh, he has no choice. Stamina and health are integers. You can use floating point numbers when doing the math, but in the end you can't lose 11.2 hit points.

lol, I misunderstood, nevermind. He's pretty much doing it exactly like GURPS then.

 

[Spectacle]

Since this thread is now considerably longer than the BTE, I propose renaming it to the "Worst Thread Ever (part 1)"

Seriously, what the fuck is going on in here!?

 

[Blaine]

If a weapon deals +20% Shock damage 100% of the time, I wouldn't call that effect a "proc". A proc isn't simply an added effect; it's an effect that sometimes activates, and sometimes doesn't. Using the term elsewise dilutes its meaning. On the other hand, perhaps Josh failed to qualify "does +20% Shock damage".

Anywho, the math for damage + Joshproc vs. DT is straightforward and seems transparent enough to me, but what rounding rule will be used? Nearest? Down? Up?

 

[Roguey]

For those like me who don't have a account at somethingawful, it seems it's back to open viewing again.

Good ol' Josh.

There are only two games I've worked on in my career that did not have some sort of multiplayer planned: Fallout: New Vegas and Project Eternity. I am so, so glad to work on a single-player only game again. It immediately eliminates dozens, if not hundreds of problems in a game of this sort.
...
I strongly believe that player desire for multiplayer is often a "free ice cream" choice in questionnaires. "Do you like mashed potatoes?" "Sure, yeah." "Would you like it if you got ice cream after your mashed potatoes?" "Yeah, that would be cool."

If you ask someone one if they want a free thing (from their perspective) and the idea of it sounds even remotely appealing, they will almost always say yes. In reality, very few people ever played the IE games in multiplayer, much less for any significant length of time. In fact, the turnarounds on IWD2 builds were so fast that even the QA team was never able to complete a multiplayer speed run between builds.

I get why the idea appeals to people but... man, it is a huge pain on projects like this.

Larian, on the other hand, continues to remain stupid.

Aedyran humans and elves remain physiologically distinct because they cannot reproduce.

Nice, "half-non-humans" are dumb.

Practically speaking, NWN2's combat rarely requires much tactical thought.

Yesssssssssssss

Actually, good game design for pen and paper is completely different from good game design on the computer, because they are played entirely differently.

They aren't completely different, but they are different in some obvious and not-so-obvious ways.

For example, in 4E, the designers clearly made an effort to allow every character class to have a roughly equal number of things to do. In most D&D tabletop games, one player controls one character, so it's important that every class feels like it has the same amount of active choices. This does not necessarily apply in a CRPG where one player is controlling up to 6 characters concurrently. While certainly the traditionally "passive" classes from the 1st/2nd/3.X era could stand to have more active-use or modal abilities, it is not necessary for them to literally have the exact same number of active-use abilities as other classes (e.g. wizards).

I have the best memories from 2nd Edition games, but I think the system was mechanically less interesting than 3.X, which in turn was not as well-designed as 4E. Pathfinder does address some of the larger 3.X problems, but it's really patching over them, not addressing some of the underlying mechanical issues.

That said, I'd play in any of them (or 1st, or BEMCI) if the group was good.

Truly brilliant.

We're probably not going to talk about story/theme stuff for a long time (if ever).

If you've been checking updates hoping for story stuff, forget it, move on.

 

[Grunker]

4E being well-designed is true hilarity. Every class was almost indistinguishable from each other mechanically, which leads to more "balance" which leads Sawyer to say it is well-designed. The reason everything is so homogenous in 4E is that every asset in the system is built from the exact same template and even often consist of the variables. Want to make a new asset (a new class for example)? Simply but in whatever fluff you want in the template. Perhaps create an overall theme to the set of mechanics.

Ultimately though, every set of mechanics will play almost identically.

The man demonstrates once again that he has done the research but that his conclusions are oft-times laughable.