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

[Hormalakh]

melnorme asked: "Combat is the time when it makes the most sense for every character to move as fast as they possibly can." Simulationism? In my Pillars? It might make sense for _them_, but for the player it makes sense for them (and everything else) to be slower, because it's during combat that he needs to be able to see what's happening as clearly as possible. Meanwhile, outside of combat, he wants to zip from area to area as quickly as possible.

If your problem is with the speed of movement (or anything) else, that’s why the Fast and Slow modes exist. You can explore in Fast mode and it will automatically drop to normal speed when combat starts. If that’s still too fast, you can drop it directly into Slow.

The faster characters (monks, Wild Sprinting barbarians, animal companions) all move fast enough in combat that it makes more sense for them to be running than power walking. If characters are slowed down, the game does have a threshold where it knows to switch over from slow run to fast walk.

Completely missed your point I think. I've never known a real-time game where units only speed up in combat. Pathable space is generally limited unless you're in an open map and movement after the opening is penalized during combat due to the engagement system and slowed recovery for ranged users. A run animation and fast movement speed only facilitates a full speed melee clash at the beginning of combat, which is completely different to how most Infinity Engine encounters played out.

Movement in combat in this game should be abstracted, not fucking simulationist.

It's abstracted in engagement, simulationist in speed

 

[Sensuki]

The interesting bit of that is

If characters are slowed down, the game does have a threshold where it knows to switch over from slow run to fast walk.

It might be possible to fuck with the code so that the walk animation is always used. Although it would also require changes to speeds and stuff in the prefabs to not look silly.

 

[Hormalakh]

Set threshold to infinity, easiest way.

 

[Jaesun]

That would be cool, but are there actually any RPG's where enemies do what you describe?

Yes. It is called having a great Dungeon Master.

 

[Sensuki]

Here's the DT and DR scoop and some related stuff

enverxis asked: What's the scoop on the DR and DT changes in tomorrow's patch ?

The stat currently called DR (percentage damage reduction) is being removed. Even though DR helped ameliorate big hits (which is why it was a part of the Fallout games along with DT), it was confusing for a lot of people, especially across six party members.

Damage Threshold itself is actually being renamed Damage Reduction (DR). Tim and I used Damage Threshold because Fallout’s DT does most of what PoE’s DT does. Many of PoE’s designers are also F:NV designers so they were familiar with DT and no one really questioned it.

We were surprised to find that a lot of people didn’t know what Damage Threshold was, didn’t recognize the abbreviation “DT”, and did not quickly determine that it was subtracted from incoming damage. People seem to intuit DR/Damage Reduction more easily, so we just changed the strings over.

With these changes, the overall damage of weapons and many spells has also been reduced.

Tangentially related, but we’ve made a lot of changes to the character sheet and the creature tooltips that make them much easier to read. The combat log is also in the process of being updated. A few changes should be in the update tomorrow, but there are many more coming.

 

[Shevek]

I hope one handers are still worth it.

 

[Sensuki]

Statistically, one handers have always been sub-par to 2H for DPS. Dual wielding is only really good on Rogues (multiplier stacking, DoTs) and Barbarians (Carnage). They need to alter the actual damage ranges to change this fact.

 

[Infinitron]

If they really want to cater to fantasy popamole masses who don't know what DT is, they could just call it "Armor" like in Dragon Age. Though that could confuse people who think it's a Deflection-like stat like D&D's Armor Class.

 

[Abu Antar]

I personally didn't mind DT+DR on paper. The implementation wasn't working in a good way, though.

 

[Sensuki]

I wonder if they solely removed it because of confusion, instead of because of how it actually felt mechanically (dot)(dot)(dot) which is apparently now ...

 

[Kem0sabe]

Here's the DT and DR scoop and some related stuff

enverxis asked: What's the scoop on the DR and DT changes in tomorrow's patch ?

The stat currently called DR (percentage damage reduction) is being removed. Even though DR helped ameliorate big hits (which is why it was a part of the Fallout games along with DT), it was confusing for a lot of people, especially across six party members.

Damage Threshold itself is actually being renamed Damage Reduction (DR). Tim and I used Damage Threshold because Fallout’s DT does most of what PoE’s DT does. Many of PoE’s designers are also F:NV designers so they were familiar with DT and no one really questioned it.

We be removing it but changing the name of another skill to it, to help with confusion.

We were surprised to find that a lot of people didn’t know what Damage Threshold was, didn’t recognize the abbreviation “DT”, and did not quickly determine that it was subtracted from incoming damage.

And why were they surprised by this? Not everyone playing the beta has played Fallout or New Vegas, Obsidians assumption that everyone will understand their convoluted systems is probably one of the problems with the design.

 

[Sensuki]

Obsidians assumption that everyone will understand their convoluted systems is probably one of the problems with the design.

Ironically, I think this is true. They certainly did make a hoot about transparency while actually not doing very well to achieve it.

 

[Hormalakh]

What really did me in was when I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to split items and couldn't believe they hadn't implemented that feature.
So I put in a bug. And it's "solved."

Still can't split items so I ask the devs. You know how you split items? You left-click on them first, and then right-click while left-clicking. o_0
Who would ever think that's intuitive?

 

[Athelas]

Remove DT because it is confusing for the masses.

Keep a system where characters suffer invisible attacks for moving around.

 

[Infinitron]

What really did me in was when I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to split items and couldn't believe they hadn't implemented that feature.
So I put in a bug. And it's "solved."

Still can't split items so I ask the devs. You know how you split items? You left-click on them first, and then right-click while left-clicking. o_0
Who would ever think that's intuitive?

It's not intuitive because no game has ever done it that way, but maybe it should be. It's a hell of a lot nicer than getting the window for splitting every time, or having to reach for a keyboard hotkey, as practically all RPGs have done, for some reason.

What happened to their left click only design, though?

 

[Hormalakh]

I agree Athelas, though I suspect that this has to do more with how pervasive engagement mechanics are throughout the whole system (talents, etc) and that DT is probably very easily removed.

Though I could be wrong. I don't know what to think about game-dev anymore.

 

[Infinitron]

Uh, hello. They didn't remove DT. They renamed it.

 

[Hormalakh]

What really did me in was when I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to split items and couldn't believe they hadn't implemented that feature.
So I put in a bug. And it's "solved."

Still can't split items so I ask the devs. You know how you split items? You left-click on them first, and then right-click while left-clicking. o_0
Who would ever think that's intuitive?

It's not intuitive because no game has ever done it that way, but maybe it should be. It's a hell of a lot nicer than getting the window for splitting every time, or having to reach for a keyboard hotkey, as practically all RPGs have done, for some reason.

What happened to their left click only design, though?

do you play the beta? the left-click/right-click opens a "split item" window. It's not nicer in any regard.

 

[Athelas]

Uh, hello. They didn't remove DT. They renamed it.

DR then. Though I don't really have a problem with that either (having more variables doesn't necessarily make a system better, contrary to popular belief), I just wanted to bitch about engagement some more.

 

[Hormalakh]

Uh, hello. They didn't remove DT. They renamed it.

Fine DR. Same difference.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Change for change's sake is always a bad idea, often the more intuitive user interface design is not what you think would be "easy" and "make sense" but what people already know and are already used to.

 

[Infinitron]

do you play the beta? the left-click/right-click opens a "split item" window. It's not nicer in any regard.

Uh, of course it does. What were you expecting it to do?

A lot of RPGs of the past, when you click on a stack, open the "split item" window every time. EVERY TIME. Even when you don't want to split. It is one of the most annoying things.

Others require you to reach for a hotkey on the keyboard to do it. CTRL-click or whatever. In PoE you can do it with the mouse only. This is good.

 

[Starwars]

Gotta say, that switch from DT and DR and removal of the "original" DR seems weird to me. At least in light of the rest of the rulesystem. While easier to understand than D&D in BG, it will still take a bit of time to understand PoE for a newbie and I don't see how the DR and DT thing would make a huge difference in that. Stick an explanation of them in the glossary instead so people can read up. It doesn't really seem harder to grasp than many of the other systems in place.

That's just weird to me.

EDIT: Also, agree with Infinitron with the stacking thing. Once you get used to it, it's actually rather good. But I mean, it'd be nice to have it documented somewhere. It'll probably be in the manual but it'd be cool if they had it in the patch-notes so people could actually, you know, *know* that it's there in the first place (unless I missed it myself).

 

[vivec]

DT is more confusing and obfuscating than DR by any comparison. I am not getting very suspicious that PoE is a vanity project of some sort. Someone in the hierarchy **sawcoughyer** has just too much trust in their own ideas.

 

[Infinitron]

DT is more confusing and obfuscating than DR by any comparison. I am not getting very suspicious that PoE is a vanity project of some sort. Someone in the hierarchy **sawcoughyer** has just too much trust in their own ideas.

The concept of Damage Threshold in RPGs was popularized by one Tim Cain in a game called Fallout and as such is quite popular in these parts