Pillars of Eternity

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rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Sensuki posted:

Durations and AoEs are best together. Intellect is most beneficial for caster classes. Priests and Druids (perhaps Ciphers too?) moreso than anyone as they have lots of duration based spells, and lots of AoE (duration based) spells. If you separate Duration from AoE, this makes it much, much harder for these casters to get the most out of their build, as they will be wanting to ideally pump the attributes that give these things, but because the bonuses are now split over these two attributes they have to sacrifice a lot more of their attribute points just to get the bonuses.

If INT is so good that every caster should always max it, I don't think that's a good thing. For any class, I think an easy experiment is to ask "Would you ever trade a point of X for Y?" Not would you always, but would you ever. Building a character's Attributes should always involve a series of trade-offs.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2014 03:30

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 06:09

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Diomedes posted:

With regards to stickiness on front-liners, would it be an improvement if the engagement attack actually stopped the opponent in their tracks and forced them back into engagement the fighter/whoever?

A successful Disengagement Attack should cause re-engagement.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2014 03:32

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A Catastrophe posted:

Some weapons do better interrupts already, but 'heavier' weapons don't by default because they're balanced against the speed of lighter weapons. Slower weapons do more interrupt, but IIRC only to offset they're slow rof.

I don't see why interrupt shouldn't have its own attribute, and it seems destined to be marginalized if it doesn't have much design space.

The fewer inputs a value has, the more weight each input actually has. There are three elements that currently go into Interrupt: Base Interrupt (large effect, on the weapon or attack), Perception bonus (smaller effect), and the attack results (large effect). Putting an Interrupt bonus on the Attribute that also affects the attack result wouldn't change how anyone would build their character and it seems redundant/unnecessarily obfuscating for a relatively minor difference. I think Interrupt-oriented Talents could grant larger bonuses and produce a more obvious difference.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2014 03:39

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Fighters currently have Crippling Guard at higher level, which automatically inflicts the Hobbled condition when they land a Disengagement Attack.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2014 04:53

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Resting should completely get rid of Fatigue, but otherwise it's just the lapse of time that generates it (combat generates it much faster).

# ¿ Sep 14, 2014 05:05

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Sensuki posted:

Now what could be done to make other attributes more competitive is to give all classes some durations and AoEs, as the less active classes don't have much reason to invest in Intellect because of this, whereas the ones that do - don't. Also playing around with Base Deflections.

All classes have important duration-based effects. Notably at lower levels, barbarians' Frenzy and Wild Sprint, fighters' Vigorous Defense and Knockdown, rogues' Crippling Strike, monks' Stunning Blows and Swift Strikes, paladins' Inspiring Triumph and Liberating Exhortation, rangers' Wounding Shot and Marked Prey, etc. All of those durations are affected by Int.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2014 08:37

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Sensuki posted:

That's a good point. I don't think Monks have an AoE

A lot of their abilities are broken/garbo right now, but Torment's Reach and Rooting Pain are both AoEs.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2014 18:12

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Yeah Torment's Reach has a confusing description and had a weird implementation. It's a cone AoE now. I can't remember what level Rooting Pain is. Somewhere in the mid-levels. It goes off automatically when the monk takes a Wound and causes a very short duration foe-only Stun to hit everyone around.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2014 18:27

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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DatonKallandor posted:

I think he's saying that he wants all classes to viable on some form no matter which attributes you chose as long as you play to the strength of the character your attributes give you.

Basically you should be able to make a character where the reason you spend points on attributes is because you want the character to be a certain way from a roleplaying/story point of view and not be screwed because of it.

Yes.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 00:34

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Furism posted:

Ogres seem smart enough to speak like anyone else, but they're still barbaric enough to eat people venturing too close to their lair. Probably because the people who come close intent to kill them. Also, they don't mind if the said lairs are shared with nasty spiders.

Male ogres are quite intelligent but extremely aggressive, even with each other. They normally don't organize into larger groups unless they are wrangled by ogre matrons. It's very rare that they form communities of any significant size. The most legendary force of ogres was the army that destroyed White March, though it disbanded shortly after.

Trolls, on the other hand, are really stupid.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 16:28

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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BG units would make pseudo-attacks or stand around until their time in the round came. It wasn't so much that recovery wasn't paused as much as the round timer continued moving for all characters regardless of what they were doing. That's why people would micro-kite their archers away for X seconds, pause for a few frames to fire, and repeat the process.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 16:54

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Sensuki posted:

The disengagement mechanic is pretty lovely

A bunch of backers requested front-line stickiness. Without adding an aggro mechanic (which again, many backers rejected out of hand) there are only so many ways to accomplish that.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 17:09

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Question: Can you physically move through an opponent in this game? I read the engagement mechanic article, yeah, but if there's a troll fighter standing in a one-troll-wide doorway, can you run past and through him if you're willing to take the hits, or not?

If there's no room around the troll, no. However, a rogue can use Escape or Tactical Positioning to get around that.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 20:12

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verybad posted:

I hope once the worst bugs in the beta are ironed out, Obsidian takes a serious look at the the recovery mechanic. Maybe it'll turn out fine, but it just sounds like such an unfun mechanic to me. Kiting is basic RTS gameplay, and if it's too problematic, there are more interesting ways to deal with it. It can be accounted for in class, monster, encounter & area design. The current approach seems heavy handed.

We want movement and recovery to feel good, but I think you're trivializing the problem. Most RTSs use relatively immutable units. They change a little and usually in specific ways over the course of a game. We can account for monster, encounter, and area design, but the "class" (or rather, party) side of the equation is much more variable and difficult to deal with. The variability of those parties is one of the great attractions of RPGs, but it's extremely easy for minor imbalance or an AI shortcoming to get magnified if players notice it.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2014 15:50

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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verybad posted:

(Kiting as a core mechanic also promotes giving melee types blink/burst of speed movement abilities to compensate, and those are always the most fun abilities to use.)

True, but it's easier for a human player to kite and respond to kiting than it is for AI to do it/recognize what's happening and adapt. In any case, we'll be looking at recovery more in the near future.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2014 17:35

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Hieronymous Alloy posted:

It will never happen, and when I think about that, I am sad.

Convince Feargus that people will buy/play it and I'll make it. I've been wanting to make a Darklands/Ars Magica style game for a long, long time.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2014 23:38

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Sensuki posted:

rope kid what is the minimum damage supposed to be?

I've seen slashing weapons doing 1 damage minimum, but piercing and crushing seem to do less minimum damage (like 0.6 or something)

Minimum damage should be equal to 10% of the incoming damage value. So if you did 52 Slashing, the minimum should be 5.2 Slashing. If you did 8 Piercing, the minimum should be 0.8 Piercing, etc.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2014 17:23

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Incoming, before armor is applied.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2014 17:44

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Cthulhuite posted:

rope kid, how difficult would it be to add back the screen shake on a gib, maybe as a toggle? There some something so satisfying about hitting someone so hard they exploded and the entire world rocks back and forth.

I think that's in now. Today we were doing a build review and all of the procedural blood/fire/electricity/acid/freeze hit effects are finally hooked up + gibs on a crit kill + the gibs have fire/electricity/acid/freeze particles if that's what killed them. Would you believe a rogue's arrow could cause a lion to explode into flying chunks of bloody lion meat? I've seen it with my own eyes.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2014 07:30

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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It's really easy, actually.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2014 20:08

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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To elaborate, our XP is all derived out of a relatively small table. We establish tiers of quests (by character level) and allocate a total amount of XP to be spread among all quests marked for that level. In turn, each quest is marked with a given level and as major, standard, or minor. The major/standard/minor classifications determine relative proportion of XP share that the quest gets when all quests are taken into account. So if 28 quests are marked as level 4 and level 4 quests only have 1000xp allocated for them, the per-quest reward is really tiny. We mostly just adjust the allocated XP in each tier and what quests are classified as, level-wise. To accommodate additional sources of XP, we start by determining those fixed-pool allocations and subtract them from the total quest XP. The exploration-related XP is a) not large and b) easy to quantify. The bestiary-related XP is also relatively easy to quantify because we associate total XP per bestiary entry, of which there are a fixed amount. We still have to tune after that basic estimation, but it's not a hard or time-consuming process overall.

We currently track within 1 level of our expected targets for XP acquired over the course of the game, so I'm not too worried about it.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2014 20:34

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Scorchy posted:

- Something's significantly changed with the background map art or the way it's displaying on my machine, they look miles crisper and less fuzzy now. Here are links to some uncompressed before and after screenshots.

We changed the filtering. It looks better at the standard view but sizzles a bit when you zoom out, I think.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2014 05:46

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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PurplieNurplie posted:

Did DoT damage get a pass? I remember people getting weirded out at stuff like Deep Wounds or that one wizard spell that's an aoe DoT, or Soul Ignite, that Cypher thing. I think Soul Ignite got nerfed previously or something?

Really it was just the DoT damage being kind of crazy high overall.

The tick rate for all DoTs and HoTs was changed from 1 every second to 1 every 3 seconds and a lot of values were tuned.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2014 06:36

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Scorchy posted:

- There's like a new grey bar across the portrait which I think is when you get to low health, it clamps down on your max stamina/endurance.

Yeah, since Health is the limiting factor (i.e., you will be Maimed/Killed before KOd), Endurance is limited to current Health. Before we put in that limiter, people would drop from low Health while it appeared that they were full of Stamina/Endurance.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2014 17:05

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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BTW, the PC Gamer article states, in an image caption, that Defiance Bay is bigger than the city of Baldur's Gate. This is not correct.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2014 21:50

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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We're still working on a lot of the interface feel/responsiveness/clarity issues. I think the BB has improved on it a lot already but there's still more to do.

And yes, the reason why we went with the PC always speaking (short of interjections) is because in this story, the PC is the driving/organizing force. The companions have interests that overlap with the PC, but it's not their ship to steer. The reputations that you develop are also based off of the things that your PC is saying/doing, so I think it comes off as odd if just anyone can stand in for your character in those circumstances.

***

It's interesting to see how different languages construct the concept of "having" fun or enjoying doing something. In German the thing that "is" fun becomes the subject "making fun" or "making a lot of fun" (z.B. "_____ macht viel Spa�"). If you enjoy doing something, you use the adverb "gern"/"gerne" (gladly), which has the similar etymology to yearn.

"Gaudi" also appears in German as a type of festival or as fun itself (though I think that latter use is more southern/regional in Bairisch/Austrian German).

# ¿ Oct 2, 2014 14:08

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Sensuki posted:

Cheers for the avatar Furism btw.

That painting, The Flagellation of Christ by Bouguereau, is notable for, among other things, being 10' tall.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2014 15:31

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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I don't think I ever said that. I never worked on any of the PC Baldur's Gate games (just a little bit on BG: Dark Alliance) and The Black Hound wouldn't have continued any of the Bhaalspawn storylines (it did feature some characters from Icewind Dale II, though). Sorry.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 02:18

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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I don't know the timeline for their release but I can say that almost all of them are final or very close to it.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 04:46

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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DatonKallandor posted:

What did you do for Dark Alliance? Because that's still one of the best hack and slash games ever.

Just some interface elements/suggestions and maybe some items, IIRC. Nothing major.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 18:56

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Very well. Our dialogue tool allows us to see every place we're making checks of various types and it's easy to filter them in different ways. So if, for example, one type of Disposition is overwhelmingly represented and another is hardly represented at all, we can see that and then look at all of the individual instances to see what's going on.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2014 21:13

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Literally everything we check for via script can be queried. Race, subrace, sex, class, culture, background, deity, paladin order, dispositions, reputations, attributes, skills, etc.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2014 22:05

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Drifter posted:

Also, I suspect I know why they did it (because they simply hadn't devoted the requisite work hours)

We've* been shooting documentary footage periodically for the entire duration of development.

* The company we contracted.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2014 03:30

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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SoggyBobcat posted:

What was the impetus for such a major change?

It's not really that major a change in terms of the time to implement.

In watching how people play PoE, skill advancement was bordering on mindless. Every player I watched simply mashed one skill for their chosen character, effectively making it a non-choice. In practical terms, there were still problems with redundancy because, as in many RPGs, skills often act as keys to locks (literal and figurative). Only one person needs to be able to open the lock, meaning anyone with redundant skills simply has wasted points.

Linking skill advancement to Talents is an attempt to make the choice more meaningful and making redundancy less relevant since the primary investment for the players is the Talent, not the skill.

The normal skill progression system is disabled so we can see how it works using only Talents.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2014 22:14

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Hopper posted:

I don't see the problem in this? If a player chooses to do this, let him. Why take away flexibility in choice because some people (no offense) "do not play the way you would"?

I think people are giving good feedback, but I did not say that and I sure as poo poo did not make these changes for that reason.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2014 12:31

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Scorchy posted:

- Non-spellcasters get some love at character creation now, they previously had their core abilities auto-assigned to them (Knockdown on Fighter, for instance), but now they all get at least 2 paths to spec their character at the start.

Fighters - Knockdown (active) or Armored Grace (passive to reduce armor speed penalty)
Barbarians - Carnage (AE melee hits) or Barbaric Yell (AE fear)
Paladin - Flames of Devotion (+fire dmg) or Lay on Hands
Monk - Swift Strikes (+attack speed) or Turning Wheel (passive, +burn dmg per wound)
Rogue - Crippling Strike or Blinding Strike
Ranger - Swift Aim or Crippling Shot

BTW this now happens every other level. A 12th level fighter, rogue, barbarian, etc. can have a completely different set of class abilities than another character of the same class. You pick between class Abilities on odd levels and Talents on even levels. You can actually build a fighter with no active use abilities (or entirely active use abilities) if you want to. Most will likely have a mix.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2014 15:44

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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In case people haven't experimented much with personal buff spells, most of them are now short cast with short recoveries. Some spells/powers now have instant recovery (e.g. Frenzy and most weapon-creating spells).

Also has anyone made a Bleak Walker with The Black Path and Remember Rakhan Field yet? :kiddo:

# ¿ Oct 26, 2014 15:49

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SNAKES N CAKES posted:

No irony. Obsidian expected players to spread out their skill investments. Most beta testers just tried to "game the system" by investing in a single skill, which effectively broke the game.

We expected players to either invest in single skills or split their points between two skills per character. Nothing "breaks" by investing in one skill, but the investment itself isn't interesting. Selecting Abilities and Talents is more interesting because those choices have larger and more diverse impacts on how the characters play.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2014 17:58

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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IIRC all of the bonus vs. creature type Talents give Lore bonuses.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2014 20:22

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 06:09

rope kid: Feb 3, 2001; Warte nur! Balde
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Attributes are used more than Skills overall. While Lore does come up a bunch, often it's more "Huh, TIL" than something that gives you an upper edge in conversations.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2014 09:17

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