Pillars of Eternity Beta Discussion [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Hormalakh]

This would be shit, you don't control 6 characters in Dota clones, and they don't have potentially dozens of abilities like say a priest does.

invoker, meepo, chen, et al all have multiple units being controlled with multiple abilities and spells. in any case, certain units are fairly passive anyway like the fighter. you'd be spending most of your time on the wizard an other spell casters anyway.

besides josh sawyer's insistence on good mouse over support and building a shitty ui to fit that should have clued him into the fact that nothing beats keymapping and using the keyboard.

hoykeys are not the future, this is design 101 from 1994.

 

[Sensuki]

Josh on movement pausing recovery, just as I thought - turn based mindset

2nd and 3.X editions of A/D&D's standard rules are both more punitive to ranged characters than melee characters when it comes to moving and continuing to fight. Pausing Recovery while moving was implemented both to account for movement being something of value that you're trading off with other actions (as it is in A/D&D and a lot of other RPG systems) and to address what became a default easy mode tactic in most of the IE games: fire bows at melee opponent, kite backward until they all drop dead, repeat. Range gave the advantage of removing your characters entirely from harm at virtually no cost.

Some creatures work best as melee only enemies, whether in a tabletop or CRPG environment. A/D&D tabletop rules generally give melee characters better options for moving and attacking because they lack the positional flexibility that ranged characters enjoy.

It may well be that this implementation needs to be adjusted to allow for slower recovery instead of no recovery, but I don't think the basic premise that movement costs something is bizarre or unique to this game system.

My suggestion after he posted was:

Why not just make it so that movement slows recovery for bow and crossbow users and pauses/resets it or whatever it is now for arbalest/gun users?

Movement doesn't need to stop recovery for melee at all.

 

[Sensuki]

Josh's reply was

That could work but there are some potential logic issues: e.g. fire bow, switch to melee weapon set, move until Recovery expires, switch to ranged set, fire.

My reply was

Not if the bow recovery was considered a "reload" like the gun/arbalest is.

That way if you switched weapons, when you switched back to the bow, you'd have to finish the bow recovery just like you have to finish the arbalest reload animation.

 

[Shadenuat]

I don't think people would micro the recovery so much, and I don't see why kiting should be useful in this sort a game.

 

[tuluse]

That doesn't even address the real kiting problem which was have monster follow one character while the other 5 pelted it with arrows.

BTW this is how I fight the Ogre ^_^

 

[Sensuki]

Throwing out the logic bombs today.

That's an AI issue. You can also do the same by surrounding the aggro'd party member with your other party members and screw up the enemy pathing

 

[Blaine]

Yeah, "kiting" is a tough nut to crack regardless.

I suppose it's tough because in the context of an RPG, you're trying to cram various absurdities (large quantities of "hit points," etc.) and abstractions together into a coherent whole.

You know what would help immensely? That's right, a turn-based system.

 

[Sensuki]

Great Swords are like the only weapon that doesn't have a special property, which is strange. Rope kid ?

Great Swords are also supposed to be Best of Slash/Pierce but it looks like that wasn't set up on them.

Do disengagement attacks ignore the normal cooldown period?

They should. Disengagement Attacks are effectively "free".

 

[Lhynn]

If you can "kite" in real life, you should be able to on the stupid game. That said a charging mechanic against a selected target as a melee attack would solve that problem.

 

[Blaine]

If you can "kite" in real life, you should be able to on the stupid game. That said a charging mechanic against a selected target as a melee attack would solve that problem.

Well, you can't, not really. Shooting a bow, firing a crossbow or gun, throwing javelins, etc. is immensely more inaccurate if done while moving at a decent clip, let alone a jog.

It's why some tabletop systems have a "step" rule, as in, you can move one square/hex and shoot/fire, either without a penalty or with a small penalty.

Realism arguments always get poo-pooed on the Codex though, and with good reason. We're already dealing with wizards, monster-sized beetles, and women actually participating in close-quarters combat here. This is clearly fantasy.

 

[Lhynn]

If you can "kite" in real life, you should be able to on the stupid game. That said a charging mechanic against a selected target as a melee attack would solve that problem.

Well, you can't, not really. Shooting a bow, firing a crossbow or gun, throwing javelins, etc. is immensely more inaccurate if done while moving at a decent clip, let alone a jog.

It's why some tabletop systems have a "step" rule, as in, you can move one square/hex and shoot/fire, either without a penalty or with a small penalty.

Then you can, really. Just with a penalty, which with a decent enough level of mastery shouldnt be very important, especially against big and/or slow targets

 

[Blaine]

Then you can, really. Just with a penalty, which with a decent enough level of mastery shouldnt be very important, especially against big and/or slow targets

The level of mastery required to reliably hit anything smaller than a pile of elephants while jogging is "computer-assisted gyrostabilized robot."

 

[Sensuki]

SRS BUGNESS (not my screeny)

 

[Lhynn]

Then you can, really. Just with a penalty, which with a decent enough level of mastery shouldnt be very important, especially against big and/or slow targets

The level of mastery required to reliably hit anything smaller than a pile of elephants while jogging is "computer-assisted gyrostabilized robot."

Yes, or better.

 

[Sensuki]

Dedication:

On the first day of the beta there were a fair few people with 50-60 posts, but not this time.

Our newfag has been doing a good job bug reporting as well

 

[mutonizer]

Sensuki, you were right holy crap. Doing a Hard play-through and everything and their brother have DT15-22 against pretty much any damage type and some spells as well.
On the plus side, I'm loaded with exceptional armor now...but on the bad side, smith's so poor it's a pain to sell anything

That and frikkin Deep Wounds is just murder. If THAT's the fixed version, can't even imagine what it was before, geesh.

On a related note keybinding is borked because you can't assign the mouse.

You can, check this, the HINT part of it.

Our newfag has been doing a good job bug reporting as well

I'm just so bloody tired of playing BG/BG2/IWD/IWD2 over and over and over every year. Need something new for the decades to come, need something good!

 

[Sensuki]

Yeah from what I've seen - DT values can get pretty high, so 1H weapons are just plain bad unless you use Stilettos or Maces and Bows are terrible as well.

I mentioned this issue on Something Awful and explained the mathematical reason behind it, so I'll leave that one up to Josh to fix.

 

[Invictus]

So sensuki; when it is all said and done with the patching I guess thet pathfinding and AI isssues will be balance and all that good Sawyer shit...is this game going to be good? I mean will it scratch that IE itch or it will be one of those "yeah but" games which are good but dont seem to capture the magic of a great RPG (somehting D OS seems to have done in spades)?

 

[Sensuki]

I don't know yet. It's too early to tell.

At the moment I would say it will at least be a typical Obsidian game with good writing etc and bad combat design, but who knows, with another half dozen patches we might start getting somewhere.

Aside from bugs there's some system design and tuning issues. Depends which direction they go with those.

 

[mutonizer]

So far I'd say it's missing....that little something....

- Not starting from the beginning with whole story in front of you is probably a factor especially in something that's supposed to be very story/writing driven.
- Very, very foreign and sometimes totally incomprehensible system doesn't help. Really hard for me to get into the character creation and I find myself just "next next next", barely caring about anything during creation or levelling, while usually I'm ultra hardcore on that part. That's really worrying for someone like me who considers character building and progression as quite important, especially for long term.

 

[Zed]

We have nothing to go on to judge any meaningful story elements. No follower interactions, no villains, no central plot characters. That stuff could be bland á la IWD2 for all we know. It was a very big part of what made BG2 good, and could play an equally big part here.
BG2 had (relatively) fun and rewarding combat tho. As it stands, combat will just be in the way of making Pillars an enjoyable game.

 

[nikolokolus]

Mechanics and systems aside, the game is just far too much pause and not enough real-time. It feels like a turn based game would run laps around this in terms of pacing and action.

 

[mutonizer]

That's what you get when you try to inject MOBA elements into a cRPG where you control up to 6 characters. I mean, I get panicked playing LOL solo against the AI with the recommended newbie character, so you can imagine when I need to time EXACTLY multiple stuns and whatnot that will last nanoseconds and then manage "engagements" with pixel perfect accuracy or risk getting butt-stunned into oblivion.

Well, that and the balance is completely out of the whack just now. Without pausing/slowing, my party gets wtfpwned in seconds usually.

 

[imweasel]

I'm starting to wonder why the game is even combat oriented, because it encourages the player to always avoid combat.

I think it would be a better game if it didn't have any trash mobs at all TBH. A RTwP T:ToN clone wouldn't be so bad actually.

 

[mondblut]

SRS BUGNESS (not my screeny)

"Stam. Hlth. Acc. D.T."?

For a Greatest RPG Designer of our times, he sure could take a couple of lessons on making stats abbreviations consistent. Protip: STR CON DEX INT WIS CHA.