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

[Excidium]

You can fling almost any combat based low level spell at him and interrupt him...

He casts a magic missile iirc

 

[Clockwork Knight]

The mirror image guy? I got surprised the first time ("holy shit, four mages?") and forgot to pause.

 

[Dreaad]

You can fling almost any combat based low level spell at him and interrupt him...

He casts a magic missile iirc

Nah first he mirror images himself, then casts the horror spell

 

[Delterius]

An easy way to deal with Tarnesh is listening to the guards at the entrace of the Inn and just running from him. The guards will intervene. Interrupting the Mirror Image makes things even quicker, but you don't want to fall for the Horror spell.

 

[Lhynn]

I hope they dont dare to make non wizards just one trick ponies like it sounds they are...

 

[Infinitron]

And some of these jokers thought PE wouldn't have interesting spells. "Josh Sawyer is ruining wizards with cooldowns" they said.

What a lot of people thought is that wizards (in BG2, etc) were interesting because they were unbalanced. But IMO that really had nothing to do with it. Wizards are interesting because they have diverse abilities, irrespective of how balanced those abilities are.

Things like spell sequencers and resistance breaches are inherently cool. They don't need to be unbalanced to be cool.

 

[Excidium]

And some of these jokers thought PE wouldn't have interesting spells. "Josh Sawyer is ruining wizards with cooldowns" they said.

What a lot of people thought is that wizards (in BG2, etc) were interesting because they were unbalanced. But IMO that really had nothing to do with it. Wizards are interesting because they have diverse abilities, irrespective of how balanced those abilities are.

Things like spell sequencers and resistance breaches are inherently cool. They don't need to be unbalanced to be cool.

A lot of people truly are a retarded bunch. Specially since wizards being overpowered is not an inherent feature but a result of vancian spellcasting being broken by metagame knowledge or a simple reload.

I still don't like cooldowns. I'd like it much more if spellcasting was related to stamina, and mages basically just exerted themselves for spellcasting. Maybe even tapping into health for more destructive stuff. Cooldowns just feel artificial and arbitrary.

 

[Sensuki]

I've read accounts from other people who said they kept failing against that mage you run into near the beginning of BG until they turned on pause on enemy sighted. Interrupting a spellcaster can be a pretty big deal.

I would attribute this one to whether your first arrow/sword blow lands or not, not the 200ms difference (or slower I guess) difference between auto-pause and clicking pause to assign an attack. If you miss on that first shot, gg.

What I usually do instead is stick my PC around the corner, position Imoen down to the bottom right and send in Xzar and Montaron as cannon-fodder, once the first spell has been cast, run in and mop the guy up. Hasn't failed once

 

[DefJam101]

According to expert videogame designers making things feel arbitrary and artificial has no effect on the overall quality of the game

 

[DefJam101]

Can someone give me a tl;dr on why this game looks promising because I haven't been paying attention to it at all

Or am I gonna have to work some google fu

 

[Excidium]

Can someone give me a tl;dr on why this game looks promising because I haven't been paying attention to it at all

Or am I gonna have to work some google fu

It's BG 2 with TOEE graphics and MMO abilities

 

[DefJam101]

That was the opposite of what I asked, you sly dog

(except for the toee graphics part)

 

[Dreaad]

Isn't it more IWD hack fest than BG crossbreed.

 

[Sensuki]

GraphicsWhoreDex approves anyway

There's a trap behind that door, btw.

 

[Excidium]

Isn't it more IWD hack fest than BG crossbreed.

It's all the things that are good about D&D and its licensed CRPGs with none of the bad.*


*According to Josh Sawyer's definitions of good and bad

 

[tuluse]

A lot of people truly are a retarded bunch. Specially since wizards being overpowered is not an inherent feature but a result of vancian spellcasting being broken by metagame knowledge or a simple reload.

I still don't like cooldowns. I'd like it much more if spellcasting was related to stamina, and mages basically just exerted themselves for spellcasting. Maybe even tapping into health for more destructive stuff. Cooldowns just feel artificial and arbitrary.

Cooldowns have been out for a while.

Abilities are either at-will, per encounter or daily.

 

[Excidium]

A lot of people truly are a retarded bunch. Specially since wizards being overpowered is not an inherent feature but a result of vancian spellcasting being broken by metagame knowledge or a simple reload.

I still don't like cooldowns. I'd like it much more if spellcasting was related to stamina, and mages basically just exerted themselves for spellcasting. Maybe even tapping into health for more destructive stuff. Cooldowns just feel artificial and arbitrary.

Cooldowns have been out for a while.

Abilities are either at-will, per encounter or daily.

Yeah, same thing with a less offensive implementation.

 

[Sensuki]

Do you prefer D&D's per day only resources?

 

[Excidium]

Do you prefer D&D's per day only resources?

What do you mean? Vancian spellcasting? Or the spontaneous variety?

Either way the answer is no, vancian is a horrible fit for CRPGs, and spontaneous magic is basically just a dumbed down version of it.

 

[Lhynn]

What about ritual magic? strong spells with casting time that is longer than a single round.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

What a lot of people thought is that wizards (in BG2, etc) were interesting because they were unbalanced. But IMO that really had nothing to do with it. Wizards are interesting because they have diverse abilities, irrespective of how balanced those abilities are.

I don't think that's a fair representation. People, especially Sawyer-skeptics, don't think mages are cool because they are imbalanced but believe it's possible that what made mages cool arose from a design process in which balance between classes/approaches/spells/etc. was greatly subordinate to other concerns (variety, breadth of content, "cool factor", AD&D fanservice). Because balance wasn't a priority, the BG2 devs made a ton of effects and allowed the playerbase to do what they would with them with different psychographics deriving fun from all sorts of abilities and combinations thereof.

If the BG2 devs were focused on making all sorts of builds and character archetypes as close as possible to equally effective and/or mechanically deep as one another what do you think the odds of them having spectacular spellcaster gameplay would have been? Do you think mages would have been nearly as in-depth and interesting if the devs were constantly worried about making fighterd00ds as tactically rich as mageguyz?

 

[Dreaad]

^ this

Balance isn't some god rule of rpg's. Especially single player ones. Challenge is important yes, but unless you derive every ability and spell into statistical + and - concerns people will find cheese builds. No one forces you to make kensai/mage builds or paladin/sorcerer terminators. Unless the encounter's are designed really really badly a player should be able to choose for himself the level of balance they require to enjoy a game. Josh Sawyer seems to approach making single player games from an mmo perspective, where god forbid an item or spell is overpowered.

 

[Lhynn]

^ this

Balance isn't some god rule of rpg's. Especially single player ones. Challenge is important yes, but unless you derive every ability and spell into statistical + and - concerns people will find cheese builds. No one forces you to make kensai/mage builds or paladin/sorcerer terminators. Unless the encounter's are designed really really badly a player should be able to choose for himself the level of balance they require to enjoy a game. Josh Sawyer seems to approach making single player games from an mmo perspective, where god forbid an item or spell is overpowered.

And this is why i believe half the stuff they quote from him is retarded.
Balance isnt important, as long as its not broken dont try to fix it. People fucking up a build is not the end of the world, its the beginning of an interesting learning process that will probably end with your own recipe for sucess.
Ive yet to see a game that was as unbalanced as NWN with a variety of valid OP builds so big that you could pretty much spend years creating new and interesting PCs. And at the end of the day, it balanced itself out.

 

[Excidium]

Balance is important, the complete lack of it in IE games is a direct result of porting a tabletop game to computer form with very little consideration. Because character development in AD&D isn't linear, warriors at some point stop just getting more and more powerful and instead get to lead small armies of npcs, something that doesn't happen in IE games. Meanwhile the main drawback of mages didn't really take replays and game guides into account when it was designed for the tabletop game.

 

[DefJam101]

Would like to see a commercial (tactical/dungeoncrawleresque, of course) RPG take a similar approach to balance as DCSS. Design around variety and challenge instead of metagamey balance such that some builds are more effective than others overall, some builds outright suck, and even the best builds have severe weaknesses in certain areas. Make sure different character/party builds play significantly different from each other. Then add various extended win conditions on top of a basic win. Bam, replayability.