Ontopoly
Disco Hitler
They also ditched their publisher which most of the time is the reason games release too early.
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Pathfinder Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]
- Thread starter purpleblob
- Start date
CaesarCzech
Scholar
- Joined
- Aug 24, 2018
- Messages
- 445
So unbugged monk gurantee.
Luckmann
Arcane
I'm sorry but no, we've all agreed on Ratfolk.Wait Kitsune.... Similar to pic related?
If so that would be very epic.
Preferably of the ysoki hamster variety.
Heroic Liberator
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2018
- Messages
- 19,861
Luckmann
Arcane
Because Deus Vult, m'lady.
Why are you so sure that Tactical Battles would even be real-time? Owlcats have very special relationships with HoMM series so going for some kind of TB mini-game is not out if the realm of possibilities here.
After kingdom management in Kingmaker, a mini-game in an Owlcat game is an obvious ptsd trigger
The real issue is here isn't going to be well explained in the game or not. If yes it may not be that triggering. The problem with Kingmaker is that it's management system had a very very poor tutorial and on top of that some feature were basically hidden from the player. So you either had to play a guessing game and experiment taking large penalties or look shit up on the internet. I hope they learned their lesson.
BarbequeMasta
Learned
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2020
- Messages
- 511
Do you guys think flaking should be position based rather than just fighting 2 enemys in melee from the front? might annoy TB fags but who cares?
There shouldn't be a Monk companion. A good Monk doesn't rely on others to do what should be done. He will sacrifice his own welfare and health to do what must be done himself and to follow his deity creed.
It always seemed pretty intuitive to me in "learn along the way" type of system. Owlcat probably thought the same thing.
And were wrong. Most RPGs now balanced around lowest common denominator (mostly intellectual) and they had now idea what lows it could hit.
I didn't have any problem understanding what to do and how to do it (I might be a genius, but a couple of months on this forum showed me that I am actually a complete retard), but to me the kingdom management part had two unforgivable flaws:
- in the beginning I had a lot of fun finding the best way to organize towns and guessing which projects could be useful, until I undestood that it's all pointless. Either you fail at kingdom management or you succeed at it, with no in-between. For the amount of time that you spend playing the minigame, you should get sensible effects and rewards in the main game, but the entire campaign can go on without seeing anything. After you find out that it has almost no effect on the real game, the minigame becomes a boring slog;
- it has been implemented by monkeys (and by stupid ones), with an interface that is clearly not designed by humans nor for humans. Cards without any meaningful order, ammassed in a single horizontal line to the point that you can't see the names and you can't precisely click the one you want. The only way to gather information on a card is to click it, which opens a new interface where you can no longer examine other cards. There is no easy way to know at a glace which advisor is busy on which activity. You have to sit through three loading screens everytime you want to go from one gamemode to the other, what the actual fuck, I can't fathom what kind of testing process approved this abhorrent piece of design.
For most part it was. But also there were some kinks that weren't explained at all. For example most decisions during audiences had a BP cost assigned to them. But some of them didn't. And while most of the time I feel it the context of the decision would speak for itself (rebuilding the slums will cost you money even if the game doesn't tell you how much). But there were times when it wasn't that clear - you could get his with hidden cost go into negative BP and get hit with lowered stability which in this game can be very punishing.
I wish in cases like this game would dip into your gold and transform it into BP (cause they are bought with gold anyway) or if this seems like too much spoon feeding give some warning.
And I get it C&C, but even then you have advisors that should serve a system that helps manage finances at least a little.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 100,354
Origin Story: How We Create the Companions
When you play a CRPG, the level designers play the part of your dungeon masters, throwing monsters and traps at you, giving quests, and rewarding you with treasure. Your companions, on the other hand, take the place of your real-life party members—except they mostly do as you say, and never touch your rulebooks with pizza-stained fingers. So how do we create these characters who are going to accompany you throughout almost the entire game?
We begin by asking ourselves three questions.
Looks great! Let’s see if we can have them all in the game... (Pathfinder Adventure Path #74: Sword of Valor (Wrath of the Righteous 2 of 6) by Neil Spicer)
Question 1: What Do We Already Have?
Since the game is based on an existing Adventure Path, we start off with a treasure trove of characters to work with. We carefully comb through the source material, looking for characters to expand on as either NPCs or playable companions. Some characters are obviously crucial to the plot: you can’t have Wrath of the Righteous without the demon lord Deskari or Queen Galfrey. Some have whole pages dedicated to them either in the AP itself, like Sosiel the cleric of Shelyn and Arueshalae the redeemed succubus, or elsewhere, like Seelah the iconic paladin. Some, however, might play a small role in the AP, but have so much potential that it would be a crime to let them go to waste. That’s how Jubilost, who was just a minor encounter in the Kingmaker AP, joined the player’s party in the CRPG, and that’s why Lann the mongrel archer will join your crusade in Wrath of the Righteous.
Question 2: What Do We Need?
Unless you’re doing a “six dwarven barbarian sisters walkthrough” challenge, you probably want some variety in your party. That’s why we need to create both a versatile pool of characters you can use to win battles, and an ensemble of memorable personalities who can add something to your main character’s story no matter who you play. Tanks and controllers, healers and killers, cheerful and grumpy, kind and cruel, love interests and hate bait... We put everything—races, classes, genders, alignments, backgrounds, personality types—in one big chart and tweak it until we’re sure we have enough variety to cover all our needs, both mechanically and story-wise.
Question 3: What Do We Want?
Every character is curated by one of the narrative designers. Every member of the story team gets a golden ticket to put a companion of their own into the game—not just develop one of the concepts the team came up with while meditating over the chart from question 2, but give life to their own special brainchild.
Which one would you kiss? Kill? Marry? Most importantly, which ones are you taking with you to fight the boss? (Pathfinder Adventure Path #74: Sword of Valor (Wrath of the Righteous 2 of 6) by Neil Spicer, cover art)
Crusaders, Assemble!
Of course, every character, even that precious brainchild, needs to somehow fit into the table, so concessions need to be made. Once we have our roster, we go through a meticulous process of putting together every piece of the puzzle until we know exactly how every party member fits into the big picture. Sometimes we need to sacrifice really cool ideas in the name of playability. Sometimes, on the other hand, mechanical needs dictate the plot, giving the character some details their creator never even thought of.
Doesn’t look like your regular witch.
For example, Ember was initially envisioned as a child crusader, a barefoot preacher whose blessed innocence would allow her to lead whole armies. That sounds like a divine spellcaster, right? A cleric, or, maybe, an oracle with low Intelligence and high Charisma. Except we already had characters of both those classes. In fact, the only slot in the chart she could fit into was the witch. Yes, the Intelligence-based arcane spellcaster. We checked the source books for class archetypes, and, indeed, found a Charisma-based witch archetype, called... seducer—not the best fit for this character. So our mechanics designers came up with a new archetype we called the stigmatized witch—Charisma-based, and bearing a curse borrowed from the oracle (Ember, of course, got Blackened to reflect her burn marks). We need to run mechanical changes like this past Paizo, which sometimes takes time—thankfully, they loved the concept. Meanwhile, the narrative designers changed her personality and backstory to reflect the mechanics, and got a living paradox—an atheist preacher of Good itself, disillusioned with deities, and preaching love and kindness in the face of despair. As a result, we got a more original and nuanced character than the devout follower of some deity we were thinking of originally—and we need to thank our cold, formal chart for this development.
A companion’s personal dialogue. The sight of it slowly scrolling on my monitor makes me hear the Imperial March.
Anatomy of a Hero
In game design, nothing ever goes exactly as it was planned in the beginning. Sometimes this leads us to happy accidents and cool discoveries that allow us to expand our vision in unforeseen directions. Sometimes, unfortunately, it means we need to give up some parts of that vision in order to save the whole, and deliver a game with complete features, not a sprawling mess of never-quite-finished ones. Some parts of the original AP never make it into the CRPG, some storylines get cut, some plot points become footnotes.
But how much does it really take to create a companion? Let’s see. First come the design documents. The character’s appearance, voice, backstory, personality, place within the party, opinions on the events of the story, relationships with the player character and the other party members... These documents are the roots that the players won’t see, but they are necessary to produce the actual text that appears in the game. This includes the character’s personal dialogue (changing over time as the story progresses), calls they make in the battle, and other interface text. Then comes their questline (which includes additional NPCs and events) and possibly a romance. Finally, there are their interactions with the player (the interjections they make during dialogues with NPCs) and the other companions (campfire banter and their responses to others’ interjections). This is one of the most expensive parts, because with every added companion, the amount of interaction grows in geometric progression. All in all, a companion costs at least 2.5–3 months of a narrative designer’s work time. And that’s only the writing—that doesn’t include the inevitable edits, and approvals, and the work done by other teams.
The more there are, the more they chat!
If You Love Them, Let Them Go
A writer can be very possessive of their precious brainchildren, but the reality of developing a videogame is that it’s a massive group effort. You need to be good at your job, but you also need to trust others to be good at theirs. It’s scary, sometimes frustrating, sometimes absolutely thrilling to see a character you’ve created grow in the loving hands of others. Narrative designers describe the character’s appearance and speech, but it’s up to the artists and the sound director to give them an actual face and a voice. The character’s story is revealed over the course of writing their personal quest—and then rediscovered when a level designer tells you that no, this Really Cool Thing you wrote won’t work in the game, but there’s a Different Cool Thing you had no idea existed. Even within the narrative team, we need to trust each other to be able to write every character’s voice. Sometimes you read some banter or a dialogue cue another team member wrote for your character and it makes you want to pull your hair out. Sometimes you read it and realize it’s way better than what you would have come up with. In any case, what’s done is done. Eventually, we hit the release date and let them out into the world to finally meet you!
To arms!
Owlcats
From what I have seen in EE, most problems mentioned above already fixed:
- decision costs in BP are shown in adviser dialogues now
- Projects are categorized by smaller group
- Adviser portrait is shown over a card he is assigned to
- Crisis points to mitigate bad random
- Buying BP from kingdom screen (at last!)
etc etc
There were a ton of work put into interface parts of Kingdom Management and I'd say that in current EE state it is very... manageable. They also buffed Artisans even more so they are now #1 source of good items in the game.
- decision costs in BP are shown in adviser dialogues now
- Projects are categorized by smaller group
- Adviser portrait is shown over a card he is assigned to
- Crisis points to mitigate bad random
- Buying BP from kingdom screen (at last!)
etc etc
There were a ton of work put into interface parts of Kingdom Management and I'd say that in current EE state it is very... manageable. They also buffed Artisans even more so they are now #1 source of good items in the game.
BarbequeMasta
Learned
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2020
- Messages
- 511
Yeah when i replayed EE for first time and was surprised by all the little tweaks they added here and there, thought it would be just bug fixs but it was more than that.
Aw she lost her big boobies... 
Aw she lost her big boobies...
True, but she also lost the retarded overdesigned look. So at least that's an incline.
Unfortunately still not all of them. But yeah not any indication before was really bothersome.
Yup, but it is still hard to read what actually you have in your hand when like 30+ cards are bunched really close together and are of the same topic (for example to strengthen an advisor). Color coding them, or adding some sort of icons, maybe placing the cards differently. This is what was needed. The current state of it is more of a band-aid approach.
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