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Drifter posted:So Cadegund is a guy now? Wasn't she an awesome gun-paladin or something?
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Oct 27, 2014 10:08
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One possible "third way" would be to have talents exclusively but present a binary / triad choice of skills to buff when you take one, skills that loosely apply to the talent. So for example, a weapon specialization could confer athletics (physical training) or lore (tactics + strategy training). Hell, rip a page from Mass Effect 3 and make talents boost numerous skills but let the player choose which gets the biggest payoff. +2 athletics +1 lore or +2 lore +1 athletics.
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Oct 27, 2014 10:40
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Or just the old system with less superfluous clicking ...
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Oct 27, 2014 11:42
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I think the talent based skill bonuses would work better in combination with regular skill advancement. To reach a high level of skill, you would have to either invest heavily in a skill (but then be free to pick whatever talents you like), or invest moderately and take the appropriate skill boosting talents. The benefit of doubling down and focusing on one aspect with both skillpoint allocation & talent selection should only come from the mechnical aspects of the skill, and should not unlock further content (though it could allow a focused character to beat "level inappropriate" challenges). This: rope kid posted:
... sort of gave me the idea that something like what I described above was the "endgame" of Sawyer's design, and this talent-only thing is just a trial run. I think a system like this should give some sort of feedback to the player about what kind of challenges he can expect to beat with what level of ability. I think not knowing how much skill investment you need to unlock content is one of the reasons that leads to people just maxing out stuff and not thinking more about the finer details. You don't want to take the risk of having invested in something, but having invested too little for it to do any good, so you pick one thing you want to be good at and go all-in. verybad fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 11:57
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verybad posted:this talent-only thing is just a trial run. That was what I gathered as well, I just don't think it works like they expected though and it doesn't solve the problem they're trying to fix. I think (as stated previously in this thread) that the problem is in the RPG design itself, not the skill system. The only thing the skill UI needed was way less button clicks, point saving and either no triangular system or making sure that the actual effective points in the skill were the focus of the UI rather than the triangular number. I think the skill UI was a bit confusing.
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Oct 27, 2014 12:33
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Sensuki posted:I think (as stated previously in this thread) that the problem is in the RPG design itself, not the skill system. That's true to a point. As long as having 5 guys master one skill looks like the optimal strategy, players are going to do that. One way to address that is to make clear to the players that over-specialization is a thing, that there is an opportunity cost involved and that significant content isn't locked behind super high skill checks.
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Oct 27, 2014 12:43
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I think more variation in skill check design would help alleviate the issue. Especially for the PC - if PE had dialogue checks that checked two attributes, you know - 15 Mig, 13 Res = this option unlocked ; two skills - Mechanics 2, Lore 3 = unlocks this option. That might be difficult to design, I'm not sure - but that kind of stuff would encourage dabbling.
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Oct 27, 2014 12:56
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The problem with the leveling wasn't the number of button clicks - the demo has you rush through five levels at once and when you're continuously restarting the game and of course that's tedious. The problem was that the skill design wasn't clicking in players' minds and it was producing delinquent behavior reflexively. I'm told that there are people who actually play Paradox games, so it's not as if intense UI demands are necessarily a problem in game design.
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Oct 27, 2014 13:03
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Also, one of the first "skill as key" that players of the beta are likely to come across in the game is really high. In the gameplay demos given at E3 the party went to kill the ogre. On the way they stumbled across a mysterious ruin with a mechanics skill check attached to it; I don't think I was the only player going "I want to see what's in there". The check to get in there is too high for BB Rogue, who is fairly well-invested in Mechanics. That's a clear message (intended or not) to beta players that in order to pass these kinds of doors, you have to max out the relevant skill.
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Oct 27, 2014 13:17
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Basic Chunnel posted:The problem with the leveling wasn't the number of button clicks - the demo has you rush through five levels at once and when you're continuously restarting the game and of course that's tedious. The problem was that the skill design wasn't clicking in players' minds and it was producing delinquent behavior reflexively. I'm told that there are people who actually play Paradox games, so it's not as if intense UI demands are necessarily a problem in game design. That was also the case, yes. I stated that in my first post on the subject in the thread. I mostly fire up the game to do testing and in those short test bursts, what skills I have do not matter. I do think that having to click the mouse 15 times to level up my skills was a drag though. I haven't actually done a full playthrough of the beta yet due to the FPS issues in Lle A Rhemen and the Dyrford Ruins. Get like 30 FPS upon entering the area and 10-20 with UI menus open / when stuff is going on. No thanks. Sensuki fucked around with this message at 13:20 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 13:18
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verybad posted:That's true to a point. As long as having 5 guys master one skill looks like the optimal strategy, players are going to do that. One way to address that is to make clear to the players that over-specialization is a thing, that there is an opportunity cost involved and that significant content isn't locked behind super high skill checks. This is precisely the wrong way to go about it. Open-ended skill progression makes sense in a PVP game with opposed skill checks - in NWN2 terms, hide in shadows vs spot, and the like. Being able to raise a skill beyond the highest check that's actually in the game, in a single player game, would be an idiotic design decision. Likewise, having the highest actually useful rank be different for each and every skill is also a big no-no. I've never really got the hang of NWN2's (i.e. D&D 3rd edition's) skill system, so I may be doing it injustice, but I absolutely hated it. The impression I got was that if you wanted certain skills to be and stay useful, you had to keep maxing them on each level up just to keep up with the DC progression. If you just spent a few points on a skill, those would end up being completely wasted once the progressive DC increase through the game got to be 20 points higher. With that kind of design, your skills are basically locked from level 1 on, and the upgrade screen becomes one giant trap, where, if you stray from the right path, the only result will be a sub-optimal character. Hyperbole, I know, but that has always been my impression with NWN2. I'm only speculating here, but I think the behavior you see of players spending all their points to keep single skills maxed may be inherited from that kind of design. (No idea how different PE is from NWN2 in regards to skill checks.) If you have a fine-scale difficulty progression for skill checks that scales with level, or area or whatever, it becomes really hard to recognize at which point you can "leave be" any given skill, and players will simply keep maxing them just to stay on the safe side. Personally, I prefer an easily recognizable 5-tier (or 4, 6, etc) system from unskilled to expert, or however you want to call it, with each rank becoming progressively more expensive to advance, but that's neither here nor there.
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Oct 27, 2014 14:05
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Tie the skill caps to character level and make most skill checks require/sum the total of several skills. Also, I have to agree with Sensuki that stealth and traps should be made their own thing and combat benefits removed from skills. Stealth could be tied to armor class with talents to boost it further and stuff most other skills got just seemed like QoL that I would rather have as baseline.
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Oct 27, 2014 14:15
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I was making that argument last year when the Crafting/Durability topic was hot. I don't know if it would be feasible to do that at this stage of the development. There ended up only being five skills including Stealth (as Crafting was cut) so it may as well be left as is .. however I am not sold on the combat benefits of any of the skills so far except Athletics really, and that's not an "Athletics is good", it's "Not having some Athletics is a pain in the rear end". Can't really comment on mechanics - haven't set a trap yet. Haven't really noticed the impact of Survival on potion consumption, but then again the economy in the beta is so drat expensive so I haven't used many consumables - mostly the free one we were given in the last patch I don't think the Lore skill is beneficial at all, particularly if you have the Qualified Defenses option disabled No-Low Athletics is an annoyance after a period of time during the adventuring day, only really noticed it in the last patch and was forced to rest when I didn't want to. It seemed like it only took a few minutes for characters with 0 Athletics to go from hero to zero. And yeah so far, unless you want to avoid combat I haven't found stealth to be beneficial on anyone in any of the previous patches, and in the current patch the BB Rogue stealth allows her to get an Arbalest shot off without triggering AI targeting until after she has fired. Since you don't get any other bonuses from it, I wouldn't invest in it on other characters. So besides making sure everyone had some Athletics, I'd pretty much focus on the traditional individual maxing of skills in PE so far. Obsidian can limit us from doing that (as they are trialing in the current beta version) but I won't be happy about it if that was the case on release and would probably just mod the old system back in - I keep all the version dlls. Sensuki fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 15:07
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"Delinquent behavior". Hoping there was some irony there, because otherwise 
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Oct 27, 2014 15:20
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Hannibal Rex posted:(i.e. D&D 3rd edition's) skill system, so I may be doing it injustice, but I absolutely hated it. The impression I got was that if you wanted certain skills to be and stay useful, you had to keep maxing them on each level up just to keep up with the DC progression. If you just spent a few points on a skill, those would end up being completely wasted once the progressive DC increase through the game got to be 20 points higher. With that kind of design, your skills are basically locked from level 1 on, and the upgrade screen becomes one giant trap 3e is/was terrible.
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Oct 27, 2014 15:24
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I liked what they did with skills in 4e, didnt care for anything else about it though.
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Oct 27, 2014 20:25
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Hannibal Rex posted:This is precisely the wrong way to go about it. Open-ended skill progression makes sense in a PVP game with opposed skill checks - in NWN2 terms, hide in shadows vs spot, and the like. Being able to raise a skill beyond the highest check that's actually in the game, in a single player game, would be an idiotic design decision. Likewise, having the highest actually useful rank be different for each and every skill is also a big no-no. I don't think you quite understood what I meant. I agree with you that the NWN2 skill system is terrible, and that's because the checks are mostly designed so that you have to max out whatever skill you're using if you want to pass them, but at the same time it's possible to overshoot (but get no benefit from it) due to bonuses from stats, feats, equipment, etc. I think it would be good if PoE game system had multiple ways to reach the "optimal" skill level (that point where you can open all the "locks"). Skill point allocation, talents, consumables, whatever. Build diversity, more than one way to skin a cat, all that jazz. If the player wants to be a super focused specialist, that should be supported too, because again, diversity! But if you gate significant content behind locks that need super specialized keys, you don't get diversity because players want all the content and will only build super focused specialists. So the reward for specialization beyond a certain point has to be something other than more content: it has to be mechanical advantages. That's something the PoE skill system can accommodate for (though apparently not very well at the moment). Unfortunately, players won't automatically know when they reach optimal skill level, and will overshoot it if the developers don't inform them about it. So that's a thing they should do.
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Oct 27, 2014 20:36
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Clever Spambot posted:I liked what they did with skills in 4e, didnt care for anything else about it though. Really? The skill system/skill challenges were probably one of the weaker parts of the system.
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Oct 27, 2014 20:38
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Bring back the skill system, give players less skill points on levels, talents still give a skill bump (just smaller). Best of both worlds. Coming up with more combat applications for skills would also be really cool. Athletics already has one but having Lore give a small armor pen bump or stealth give a small chance to ignore an engagement attack would be neat.
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Oct 27, 2014 20:41
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:"Delinquent behavior". Hoping there was some irony there, because otherwise 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.
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Oct 27, 2014 20:46
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AXE COP posted:Really? The skill system/skill challenges were probably one of the weaker parts of the system. I would have preferred they made a good system that wasn't just a lame wargame and focused more on the exploration of interesting worlds and interactions with cool characters aspects of roleplaying but since they clearly weren't ever going to do that dumbing the skills system down was the smart thing to do because it just got in the way of the point of 4e, which is hitting things and running a loot treadmill.
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Oct 27, 2014 21:06
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Clever Spambot posted:I would have preferred they made a good system that wasn't just a lame wargame and focused more on the exploration of interesting worlds and interactions with cool characters aspects of roleplaying but since they clearly weren't ever going to do that dumbing the skills system down was the smart thing to do because it just got in the way of the point of 4e, which is hitting things and running a loot treadmill. I'm sorry you had a bad DM.
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Oct 27, 2014 21:10
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DatonKallandor posted:I'm sorry you had a bad DM. Yeah basically. The reason why 4E spends all of it's time on combat is simple: Conflict resolution is the thing that actually needs extensive rules.  If you want to use that to play Diablo, that's on you. Or your DM, as the case may be.
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Oct 27, 2014 21:24
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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. Yeah but there's really no reason to spread out your skills. Lore - fills out your bestiary faster and then becomes useless, unless you're the PC who can use it for dialogue options Survival - food effects last longer? and more dialogue options for the PC Mechanics - just need it on one NPC to do poo poo Stealth - either use it or don't Athletics right now is probably the only skill that everyone should get some points in, and it's most likely why every combat talent gives you some points in it. The other skills just don't seem very important or necessary even.
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Oct 27, 2014 22:53
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At this point for skills i'd argue for a much simpler system, comparable to those seen in dnd 1e, 2e, and 4e. For instance: Each PC has every skill at a value equal to their level, or some derivative therof. You can become trained in a skill for 1 point, or specialized for 2. Each one raises the skill value over the level-based base. Those three values could be balanced however is required; for instance for a triangular approach, or allowing for any high level pc to pass any low level check, or not. Give each character 2-3 skill points at level 1, and get more points from talents. You then end up with say, 3 skills trained, or 1 trained and one specialized, and some small growth over time if the player wishes it.
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Oct 28, 2014 07:32
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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.
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Oct 28, 2014 17:58
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Why not give the player incentive to pick two skills instead of one, rather than limiting their ability to max a skill?
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Oct 28, 2014 18:02
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Kinda OT: Got pretty far in Expeditions: Conquistador recently and was really really surprised at how awesome the 'Scripted Interactions' were in that game. The Fountain of Youth one was really cool - had to assign different characters to different tasks that would check their stats and stuff. Really well done.
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Oct 28, 2014 19:15
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Not really sold on the new system of getting skills via talents. Although part of that may be the fact that you only get talents every other level, which makes them much more precious. Hmmm... Do I want: A.) +2 Lore skill or B.) a burning sword of justice I can use every encounter  (It's the burning sword of justice  )
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Oct 28, 2014 20:04
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I thought the idea was that skill bumps were folded into already-existing talents? So it's more along the lines of A) a burning sword of justice, +2 Lore or B) lightning bolts shooting out of your eyes, +2 Toaster Repair ? (I'm not in the beta)
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Oct 28, 2014 20:08
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Autonomous Monster posted:I thought the idea was that skill bumps were folded into already-existing talents? So it's more along the lines of But it does mean that if you want a lore-rly eyelightning-bolty man, you're out of luck. Which I thought everyone agreed was stupid, as it's a more specific extension of the 'all fighters are dumb' trope.
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Oct 28, 2014 20:18
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IIRC all of the bonus vs. creature type Talents give Lore bonuses.
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Oct 28, 2014 20:22
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:Jesus Christ, dudes, we know next to nothing about the plot and the characters. Don't get hung up about initial concepts that were shown and might have changed. There was an actual discussion about using firearms with armor in this thread and people talked about modifying shoulder plates to rest the butt of a gun on, but alas her feet were simply too big. 
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Oct 28, 2014 22:57
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rope kid posted:We expected players to either invest in single skills or split their points between two skills per character.
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Oct 29, 2014 00:31
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CottonWolf posted:But it does mean that if you want a lore-rly eyelightning-bolty man, you're out of luck. Which I thought everyone agreed was stupid, as it's a more specific extension of the 'all fighters are dumb' trope. Aren't clever fighters actually viable in this though? Better at different things than a straight up beefcake but still a worthwhile character?
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Oct 29, 2014 01:55
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Pwnstar posted:Aren't clever fighters actually viable in this though? Better at different things than a straight up beefcake but still a worthwhile character?
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Oct 29, 2014 05:31
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You can still give your Fighter a ton of intelligence, and he'll benefit from it. Lore doesn't mean smart. Lore means a very specific kind of learning.
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Oct 29, 2014 13:23
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I don't give any classes Intellect except Paladins and Chanters. It's fairly pointless. It's kinda sorta okay on the Fighter because you get Deflection from it now, but in the latest patch enemies have boosted accuracy, and when enemy accuracy is around about equal to or higher than your defenses, Constitution grants more survivability in single fights AND over the course of the adventuring day. Deflection only protects you from one type of attack (physical) and only gives more survivability than Consitution when your Deflection already severely outclasses enemy Accuracy scores. I don't believe the Fighter currently has any AoE abilities, and even a moderate AoE increase is fairly pitiful, so IMO Constitution, Perception and either Might or Resolve are the only things I would invest in on a Fighter. Dexterity currently sucks and you can bump that below 10 and still get more DPS if you bump Perception or Might with those extra points, because Might and Perception grant more flat DPS vs DT.
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Oct 29, 2014 13:47
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Is there a way to lock the camera onto your selected party members yet?
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Oct 29, 2014 13:53
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I'm worried about one thing with skills depending on talents: The difference between skills used in conversation, and those which are mostly used outside conversation. You can have mechanics and athletics on anybody, not just your main character, to open doors, disarm traps, jump over things and so on. But in conversations, the main character is the only one who can use skills, so you need lore on him. Which means you have to take some kind of mage who profits from talents giving lore as main character.
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Oct 31, 2014 10:57
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