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

[imweasel]

Sawyer is so fucking annoying. So much self-important pretentious talk. Nothing to show for it. Somebody ought to run a tank over him while he is bicycling.

What about all of those canceled games he made. Sawyer's genius is uncanny I tell you. UNFUCKINGCANNY!

 

[ZagorTeNej]

It is BS, but I think the idea is that:

1) The disparity in that case is a bit too extreme.
2) The game has too many mage battles and not enough of other sorts of difficult battles that can help the other classes shine.

Mostly agree but I also think it's Bioware fault for not making thief encounters more dangerous, for example the Chosen of Cyric encounter (from Rogue Rebalancing mod) shows that an assassin that uses detect illusion (an underrated skill), poison weapon, gulfs potions of invisibility and smartly targets your weakest party members can be reasonably challenging, so it could have been done better.

Basically, if fighters and thieves have to work together really hard and use lots of magical items to take down an enemy mage, but a friendly mage can just go "LOL BREACH", then that's bad.

Thieves are decent against mages (especially non SCSed mages) with hide in shadows & backstab and traps but yeah fighters can have a really hard time but regardless I get your point.

If a fighter who is built a certain way is weak against mages (or certain builds of mages), but there are other fighter builds that might be more effective, then that's okay.

So, if you're unlucky enough to have built an entire party that's weak against mages, you might have some problems. But even so, since the game won't be as "mage-centric" as BG2, they might be good for something else.

Sure, but forget about mages for a moment, it's just an example from BG2.

What I hope is that Josh will not get caugh up too much in his "every party/class/stat combination should be viable" and design encounters in such way that there are multiple occasions where one "shines" while the other has a hard time (only for the situation to be reversed in the next encounter) and that that difference is noticeable, otherwise what's the point? I'm talking about expert difficulty obviously, I don't care if story mode difficulties allow you to easily brute force through anything.

For example, when you encounter a Giant who dishes out a lot of damage but has low accuracy (dexterity) you will be glad you have a fighter to keep him occupied and protect your rogues and wizards (while they wear him down), when you encounter an opponent that has low defence and strength (hitpoints) but excellent accuracy, damage and perception you should be glad to have a rogue who can kill him relatively quickly instead of your fighter having to go toe to toe with him, when you're faced with several waves of low hp monsters that slowly wittle your health down you should be glad to have a Barbarian to stomp them etc.

 

[FeelTheRads]

MAN IT'S LIKE THAT GAME CIVILIZATION WHERE AN ARCHER CAN DEFEAT A TANK IN THEORY

SUCH A SHITTY GAME

More like a shitty mechanic that most likely wasn't even intended.
What would be the purpose of making the archer defeat the tank... in theory? Undeveloped civilizations MUST be able to defeat developed ones?

 

[Gord]

What would be the purpose of making the archer defeat the tank... in theory? Undeveloped civilizations MUST be able to defeat developed ones?

Realism obviously.
Because what if your archer/spearman is called Rambo, dons a bandana, goes commando, and single-handedly defeats the crew of the tank/battleship?

 

[ZagorTeNej]

Swords probably illustrate this less (though again there IS a difference), weapons that have a different center of mass are probably even more affected by the strength of the swing - imagine a big mace swung by a wimp who barely lifts it and lets the weigh of the mace's head + gravity do the work vs a viking who's actually turning heads into mush.

I get what you're saying, I just don't like it when game so often portray two handed swords as slow, cumbersome to wield weapon.

Again i'm not obsessed with realism or whatnot and the system won't make or break a game alone but no matter how hard you wanna defend Sawyer on this one using Int as the only damage modifying attribute seems like a shitty, gimmicky superficial way of giving said stat a value in combat since it was the only stat that had no real use in fights compared to the rest.

Not really defending it, personally I think it makes no fucking sense to use intelligence as a stat that governs melee damage (with STR having no effect whatsoever), however I'm perfectly willing to overlook it if Sawyer CC system even partially succeeds in its intent and gives me ton of replay value with different builds (I just won't care at that point).

I'd rather have a system like Fallout2 for example when skills determine combat effectiveness and they're all affected by attributes. That way it's much easier to integrate Int into combat stats since you can just make it have a slight effect on ALL combat skills while keeping str/dex etc the dominant stats for their corresponding combat skill (kind of how luck worked in F2) and it would make much more sense in the context.

I don't want Fallout 2 system in an IE successor, to be honest I don't even like that there's so much overlap between classes in PoE as it is (for example I'd prefer if only rogue could disable traps and pick locks).

In an RPG I either want a classless system in the vein of Fallout and Arcanum or the one with many different classes that have little to no overlap between them, not a mish-mash of the two.

I also don't get how this can't lead to balance issues. Sure, having a dumb frontline before while having a Mage with high int perform as both the spellcaster and the spokesperson may not have been the best thing in the world, but in this scenario Mages have Str as a dump-stat while Fighters have no dump stat (unless resolves is near worthless for them) so they're a disadvantages class from the start. I'd say that a pretty unbalanced situation.

I agree, at the moment STR looks like the least impressive stat to me but there's still plenty of time for Josh to fine-tune his attribute system, the game will come out a year from now in the earliest.

 

[mondblut]

MAN IT'S LIKE THAT GAME CIVILIZATION WHERE AN ARCHER CAN DEFEAT A TANK IN THEORY

SUCH A SHITTY GAME

Shitty mechanic is shitty. Since all sequels and copycats introduced increasingly complex combat resolution mechanics to avoid repeating it, the developers themselves must be well aware of it, if only in hindsight.

Except Josh, of course. In his reality, an archer should be as good as a tank, otherwise tanks are unbalanced and archers are gimped.

 

[mondblut]

"str have 0 effect on damage, int affects it instead"

Is... that... serious?

Mindfuckingblown, really.

By now I could only wish that ranged damage will be governed by charisma. If you go making postmodernist parody of that silly thing called "RPG game mechanics", you're ought to go all the way to make it truly lulzy. Don't stop in the middle.

 

[Ravel myluv]

Are you people serious about Civilization?

Archers could ony defeat VERY heavily damaged tanks. A civilization still using archers would have 0 chance against a civilizaiton using tanks.
So yeah, OMG an archer destroyed a tank, how unrealistic! In the mean time the tanks destroyed 6 cities...

Anyway criticizing Civilization = blasphemy!

 

[ZagorTeNej]

Sawyer is so fucking annoying. So much self-important pretentious talk. Nothing to show for it. Somebody ought to run a tank over him while he is bicycling.

Sawyer is in his what, mid 30s? There's still plenty time to prove himself and he has an excellent opportunity do so now with PoE.

I mean sure he talks a lot of smack for someone who arguably has yet to make a great game (though personally I really like IWD2 and many on Codex swear on FNV) but really, who cares as long as he delivers a good (even great) game (it's not like RPG market isn't starved for good RPGs anyway).

 

[Oesophagus]

Doesn't making "every build viable" sort of defeat the point of classes? The fighter, as the name implies, does most of the fighting. But if he can be replaced easily by a dagger rogue, then what's so special about fighters?

 

[FeelTheRads]

the developers themselves must be well aware of it, if only in hindsight.

The downside, of course, being that you can't roleplay a civilization of cavemen successfully holding off a starship armada.

 

[tuluse]

Doesn't making "every build viable" sort of defeat the point of classes? The fighter, as the name implies, does most of the fighting. But if he can be replaced easily by a dagger rogue, then what's so special about fighters?

He can't doesn't, and he can't be.

Fighters are special because they can withstand punishment the other classes can't.

 

[Infinitron]

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3593502&pagenumber=30#post423402371

On Strength as a dump stat for mages:

Low Str wizards are extremely fragile. Even if they have a lopsided pair of Con/Str scores where Con is through the roof and Str is low, their derived Health (from Str) is still very low. They can take more damage before they need to heal Stamina, but the total amount of damage they can take before being maimed/killed (depending on difficulty) is really low.

The NPC wizard character that's in our default testing party has a low Str and it is not uncommon for him to dive perilously close to death in a single combat. I can keep healing his Stamina throughout the fight, but if his Health goes down, it's not coming back up.

I do think that it's an accurate criticism to say that Strength is currently more of a strategic concern than a tactical concern, but I definitely would not dump it on a wizard as-is.

Of course, you don't want your wizard in the center of the fray, but that doesn't always work out. And even in IWD we had ranged characters relentlessly target casters.

 

[SCO]

Fighters have special abilities that other classes don't from day one - in their case i think they can engage more than one person, 3 or 4 - this seems to be the way the game is going - much better approach than to try to make it all about equipment or stats, and fighters only had those higher level talents and weapon mastery on D&D2.5 anyway, which is the lazy coding/designing solution.

I can already see people trying to play this like BG2 with boots of speed and getting gibbed because of disengagement from 3 opponents. Once that fighter is engaged i guess it will be difficult to re-target unless there is a talent or something for that (summons will be very useful).

Formations in this game better work perfectly across maps.

 

[Akratus]

In Sawyer's world, you can defeat an Abrams tank with your fists, because a tank can't be 100% invulnerable to fists.

PoE confirmed for Anime then?

lol @ ending

 

[Sergiu64]

It is only logical for strength to let you put more force behind a blow. The amount of force behind for example a sword thrust could be the difference between causing a light wound or driving the sword through the monster's body.

You don't need to be a fucking superman to run someone through with a sword.

If you can do this already, what will extra str do? Will you push crossguard through the guy as well? Whole arm? Dive whole into the fucking wound creating massive tear as wide as your manly shoulders?

Once you have enough STR to use weapon with no penalties, that's it.
That's why you shouldn't have STR based damage bonus, but weapon based penalties for not meeting its stat requirements.

It would certainly help if the opponent is wearing armor. It might still not be enough to get a sword to go through full plate, but it might make all the difference if you're using a military pick. Kinda why I liked how Darklands handled it. Of course any kind of realistic system is going to make some weapons crap since they're crap in the real world.

 

[uaciaut]

I'd rather have a system like Fallout2 for example when skills determine combat effectiveness and they're all affected by attributes. That way it's much easier to integrate Int into combat stats since you can just make it have a slight effect on ALL combat skills while keeping str/dex etc the dominant stats for their corresponding combat skill (kind of how luck worked in F2) and it would make much more sense in the context.

I don't want Fallout 2 system in an IE successor, to be honest I don't even like that there's so much overlap between classes in PoE as it is (for example I'd prefer if only rogue could disable traps and pick locks).

In an RPG I either want a classless system in the vein of Fallout and Arcanum or the one with many different classes that have little to no overlap between them, not a mish-mash of the two.

I'll rephrase it then - what if int gave a small bonus to all the combat stats while letting the physical attributes (str dex) govern other combat/damage types.

You could further increase int's bonuses over a specific combat stat with other feats, etc to allow for more int-focused fighters or the traditional str-based ones without int being a dump stat if numbers are done right. Personally think it would work a lot better with the attribute system.

I also don't get how this can't lead to balance issues. Sure, having a dumb frontline before while having a Mage with high int perform as both the spellcaster and the spokesperson may not have been the best thing in the world, but in this scenario Mages have Str as a dump-stat while Fighters have no dump stat (unless resolves is near worthless for them) so they're a disadvantages class from the start. I'd say that a pretty unbalanced situation.

I agree, at the moment STR looks like the least impressive stat to me but there's still plenty of time for Josh to fine-tune his attribute system, the game will come out a year from now in the earliest.

This hinges on defensive stats being "weaker" from the get-go - players never look to have as much HP as possible, even with their front lines, they want their characters to have the minimum possible ammount of HP required to survive a fight and no more; meanwhile there really isn't a "cap" that people look for when it comes to offensive stats.
Add to this that Str will affect weight - probably more important since different weapons counter different armor types and it will be more "restricted" but still largely underwhelming (unless they want to FORCE people to get str to be able to carry the minimum ammount of items they need which would also be dumb) and number of weapon slots - also pretty underwhelming, if you have high Str you can carry lots of shit and swap it in and out anyway ffs.

They're basically turning Str into a dump stat, with different classes looking for different minimum ammounts to put in it. Even if they somehow translate getting tanky to being able to do more damage (say like monks do, but you'd argue they need more Con for stamina since they convert stamina wounds into damaging abilities, hope i'm not mistaken), it's not like you'll want to go in and take damage for 5 minutes before really dishing it back, your back line would have finished the job by then and if they haven't tanks will be boring and shitty to play.

This really isn't the way to go about making Int a combat-viable stat imo.

 

[uaciaut]

Really thought would it be too hard to have attributes affect multiple combat stats and let other class-specific feats improve attribute effectiveness to said combat stat.

 

[made]

New thread title made me click. :O

Could it really be...?

 

[Bilgefar]

Are you people serious about Civilization?

Archers could ony defeat VERY heavily damaged tanks. A civilization still using archers would have 0 chance against a civilizaiton using tanks.
So yeah, OMG an archer destroyed a tank, how unrealistic! In the mean time the tanks destroyed 6 cities...

Anyway criticizing Civilization = blasphemy!

Talking about Civ 1, son. Units don't have health, they either win combat without taking damage or get destroyed.

 

[Ravel myluv]

Are you people serious about Civilization?

Archers could ony defeat VERY heavily damaged tanks. A civilization still using archers would have 0 chance against a civilizaiton using tanks.
So yeah, OMG an archer destroyed a tank, how unrealistic! In the mean time the tanks destroyed 6 cities...

Anyway criticizing Civilization = blasphemy!

Talking about Civ 1, son. Units don't have health, they either win combat without taking damage or get destroyed.

Ok then. I hardly played the 1st one, mostly the second, didn't remember that.
Still a bit of a harsh judgement for such an innovative game! Not to mention they corrected it in the second instalment.

 

[Spectacle]

Are you people serious about Civilization?

Archers could ony defeat VERY heavily damaged tanks. A civilization still using archers would have 0 chance against a civilizaiton using tanks.
So yeah, OMG an archer destroyed a tank, how unrealistic! In the mean time the tanks destroyed 6 cities...

Anyway criticizing Civilization = blasphemy!

Talking about Civ 1, son. Units don't have health, they either win combat without taking damage or get destroyed.

Civ 1 doesn't have an archer unit.

 

[Bilgefar]

Are you people serious about Civilization?

Archers could ony defeat VERY heavily damaged tanks. A civilization still using archers would have 0 chance against a civilizaiton using tanks.
So yeah, OMG an archer destroyed a tank, how unrealistic! In the mean time the tanks destroyed 6 cities...

Anyway criticizing Civilization = blasphemy!

Talking about Civ 1, son. Units don't have health, they either win combat without taking damage or get destroyed.

Civ 1 doesn't have an archer unit.

Heh, true enough. Though the post that started this whole conversation was clearly trolling anyways...

 

[hexer]

I agree, Sawyer should stop posting on SA and haul his ass over to the Codex.

Only within the Codex can one achieve RPG perfection, not outside of it.

 

[Johannes]

Still a bit of a harsh judgement for such an innovative game!

Chances are, something you like very much sucks. Why? This is the RPGCodex.