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Azuth0667 posted:Speaking of scenes will you stick with that beautiful hand painted look for any future PoE work? They'd be nuts not to. There are plenty of "I ain't gonna play that old 2D top-down poo poo" types I see posting on PC Gamer and such, but you're never going to get those people so gently caress them. Among people who might actually like a PoE-style game, the artwork is the one thing no one seems to complain about. Even our favorite Australian Infinity Engine fetishist. 
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Nov 19, 2015 22:53
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rope kid posted:I think if we can increase the quality of the gameplay, primarily through better encounter design, feedback, and pacing in combat; better choice and consequence in stories/quests; and better/more open exploration, future installments can reach a bigger market. Is it fair to say that you'll be using the codebase that's current after the TWM part 2 as the base for any potential POE2 development?
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Nov 20, 2015 00:42
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Is it possible to Scale Option of Difficulty after you complete White March, getting frustrated at that because you shoot to level 14 if you hit level 12 in White March really fast then it's like welp everything till the final act is easy peasy. I think that's what frustrates me with White March. I take it on as soon as it becomes available because it scales so nicely but then you go back to regular game and it's like coasting, then you get the option to scale when you go to the final boss thing and it's a bit better.
Hollismason fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Nov 20, 2015 |
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Nov 20, 2015 04:34
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I thought that most of Act II and early Act III was a cakewalk even before the White March got released and even on Path of the Damned. The only really difficult fights are fampyrs because of charm-spam, ogredruids because of insect swarm, the Lighthouse because of the shade parade, and the big drake pulls near Cail the Silent. Maybe the Sky Dragon if you went after her at L9. Everything else is pretty much a pushover, largely because it's all so susceptible to chokepointing. That's really the biggest downfall of PoE combat, to me; most of the fights get all their difficulty from the number of enemies you have to fight, and most of those fights are positioned in a way that lets you largely negate their numbers with a doorway.
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Nov 20, 2015 06:50
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Elias_Maluco posted:Probably you already talked about that, but will this patch be compatible with current saves? Ive just started a game If past patches are any indication, then you should be fine. When they release a somewhat major patch they convert the saves to the new version (this happened for patch 1.5 and 2.0) and make backup of the old saves too. Of course it's possible that in the future there will be too much change to allow converting the saves (hello Wasteland 2), but we can assume they'll do all they can to make it possible. Hollismason posted:Is it possible to Scale Option of Difficulty after you complete White March, getting frustrated at that because you shoot to level 14 if you hit level 12 in White March really fast then it's like welp everything till the final act is easy peasy. Only the final dungeon offers that option. Khizan posted:I thought that most of Act II and early Act III was a cakewalk even before the White March got released and even on Path of the Damned. The only really difficult fights are fampyrs because of charm-spam, ogredruids because of insect swarm, the Lighthouse because of the shade parade, and the big drake pulls near Cail the Silent. Maybe the Sky Dragon if you went after her at L9. Everything else is pretty much a pushover, largely because it's all so susceptible to chokepointing. Don't forget that rear end in a top hat Adra Dragon. That's a pretty tough fight, even at level 12. Or the later bounties. Or Cragholdt Bluff.
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Nov 20, 2015 07:24
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Don't forget Cean Gŵlas. gently caress your OP AoE Stun bitchhhhh
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Nov 20, 2015 07:25
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rope kid posted:I think if we can increase the quality of the gameplay, primarily through better encounter design, feedback, and pacing in combat; better choice and consequence in stories/quests; and better/more open exploration, future installments can reach a bigger market. First I'll say that I think PoE has by far the best real time with pause combat I've ever seen. But nothing is perfect and it's absolutely true that the pacing, feedback and encounter design can be improved a lot. However, there is one other aspect of the combat that gets very frustrating, and that's control. Even aside from issues with the in-combat pathfinding, just making your characters go where they're supposed to go without getting stuck in engagement can be maddening. I think the game would benefit a lot from a "tactical mode" that shows up in pause that shows engagement circles and weapon ranges clearly and lets you hold down a button to trace a route for your characters to follow. This would also lessen the frustration of walking your party around traps.
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Nov 20, 2015 07:30
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I think you can hold shift to make waypoints when moving
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Nov 20, 2015 15:59
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Heithinn Grasida posted:First I'll say that I think PoE has by far the best real time with pause combat I've ever seen. But nothing is perfect and it's absolutely true that the pacing, feedback and encounter design can be improved a lot. However, there is one other aspect of the combat that gets very frustrating, and that's control. Even aside from issues with the in-combat pathfinding, just making your characters go where they're supposed to go without getting stuck in engagement can be maddening. I think the game would benefit a lot from a "tactical mode" that shows up in pause that shows engagement circles and weapon ranges clearly and lets you hold down a button to trace a route for your characters to follow. This would also lessen the frustration of walking your party around traps. The thing I find awkward is that it's comparatively difficult to work out how to get synergy out of your party's abilities. DA:Inquisition is very good at highlighting 'x ability causes y effect' and then elsewhere 'DOES DOUBLE DAMAGE TO THINGS WITH Y EFFECT'. Divinity Original Sin pushes the idea early and hard that you can and should mix status effects (ie. oil plus fire equals explosion). In PoE you have to sit down and read through a dozen potential abilities or so until you go 'okay, this might be a nice spell to cast. It attacks reflex, so now I need to scan down the list of abilities all my other characters have to see if I have a reflex debuff' etc etc. It would be nice if the tooltip/descriptions included short lists of relevant complementary abilities. It would be perfect if that list consisted of the abilities your party has available right at that moment.
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Nov 20, 2015 17:10
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Alchenar posted:The thing I find awkward is that it's comparatively difficult to work out how to get synergy out of your party's abilities. DA:Inquisition is very good at highlighting 'x ability causes y effect' and then elsewhere 'DOES DOUBLE DAMAGE TO THINGS WITH Y EFFECT'. Divinity Original Sin pushes the idea early and hard that you can and should mix status effects (ie. oil plus fire equals explosion). In PoE you have to sit down and read through a dozen potential abilities or so until you go 'okay, this might be a nice spell to cast. It attacks reflex, so now I need to scan down the list of abilities all my other characters have to see if I have a reflex debuff' etc etc. I see your point of view, but I think there is a limit where QOL features turn into Babby's First Game Aspect, and those changes are beyond that limit. I'm saying this as a player that doesn't always synergize well and frequently just powers on through tough encounters through sheer beatdowns. Those kind of tooltips verge close to a "press these buttons to win" combinations. But then again, I may be in a grognard minority.
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Nov 20, 2015 17:33
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rope kid posted:Tuning combat requires coordination between (primarily) system design and area design. If those two groups don't have the tools they need to make encounters all that they can be, it requires more involvement from programming and, to a lesser extent, animation and visual/sound effect folks. But you definitely can continue to tune and improve encounters and systems more easily as the project continues and long after launch. Out of curiosity, what was the most time-consuming part of Eternity? Was it designing everything from the ground up or just making the resources and designing and implementing quests? From an outsider's perspective, I'd think that designing the systems would take a long, long time and you'd have a huge incumbency advantage with any sequel where those things are already largely in place, allowing you to experiment a bit more. In that sense, do you think you'd be able to hit the ground running a lot better with Eternity 2 (when it goes ahead)?
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Nov 20, 2015 18:07
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There are so many potential synergies I think the UI would get immensely cluttered if that was implemented in that way.
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Nov 20, 2015 19:37
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Biggest problem I had with the combat is just the lack of visual feedback from whether anything hits or not, as well as most status effects. Unless you're intently watching everyone's life bar or reading the combat log you have no easy way to tell if any individual attack or spell hits or not, and most status effects don't give any visual feedback other than an icon on portraits. So in most fights I just sort of send my melee fighters in, use per-encounter abilities, and throw a few CC spells with my casters then hope other things die before my guys do because keeping track of things at any level closer than that is impossible.
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Nov 20, 2015 22:21
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Nycticeius posted:I see your point of view, but I think there is a limit where QOL features turn into Babby's First Game Aspect, and those changes are beyond that limit. I'm saying this as a player that doesn't always synergize well and frequently just powers on through tough encounters through sheer beatdowns. Those kind of tooltips verge close to a "press these buttons to win" combinations. But then again, I may be in a grognard minority. Yeah man, sifting through a ton of different abilities in lieu of having a tooltip is completely a case of "Babby's First Game."
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Nov 21, 2015 00:20
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Blacktoll posted:Yeah man, sifting through a ton of different abilities in lieu of having a tooltip is completely a case of "Babby's First Game." Everybody else throws their two cents down this well, just doing the same. Having those kinds of options stated for you take away the joy, for the lack of a better word, to figure them out yourself. Also, The Sharmat posted:There are so many potential synergies I think the UI would get immensely cluttered if that was implemented in that way. this.
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Nov 22, 2015 01:44
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I think it is good to have immediate feedback into what is going on but "what skill works good in combination with x, y, and z spells" outside an example or two in a tutorial to show that this kind of synergy happens is probably more a matter of the player experimenting and it would take some of the fun out of it if they were outright pointed out to you. I enjoy figuring that stuff out myself.
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Nov 22, 2015 01:56
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Perhaps the best thing to do would be to give some examples of potential synergies as loading screen tips. That'll give new players a strategy they can try and clue them into this way of thinking. I mean, I've been plugging away at the game recently and barely cleared Act 1 on Normal, (and thinking of starting over anyway) but I never once thought about how "inflicting affliction X makes spell Y more likely to stick" until these recent posts spelled it out for me.
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Nov 22, 2015 02:30
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Probably the most frustrating thing ever is having to scan the combat log to figure something out so I am happy for every UI improvement that has me avoiding the combat log. Even the current log is much better than previous games but it's still a ton of info without filter support. What combos are people thinking of when suggesting "synergy tooltips". I hardly ever used any of them myself because playing on Potd means you mostly use spells that never target fortitude. Debuffing just isn't something you worry much about in the end when your CC usually sticks first try if you target the right save.
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Nov 22, 2015 04:40
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rope kid posted:I think if we can increase the quality of the gameplay, primarily through better encounter design, feedback, and pacing in combat; better choice and consequence in stories/quests; and better/more open exploration, future installments can reach a bigger market. If X-COM of all games did it, I'm sure you guys can. The Sharmat posted:That's quite true, the problem is it's kind of inherently something you have to do when designing the companions as being purely optional. Likewise I think having a blank slate player character is a hindrance to story telling, but it's a necessity for this kind of game. Isn't Aloth a bit like this? His companion quests are mostly triggered alongside the main questline. Shadowrun did this (very superficially) with certain quests, like one of the enemies in a run was the nephew of one of the companions that started hanging out with the wrong crowd and you'd have the option to convince him to leave the gang without killing him if you brought your companion along..
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Nov 22, 2015 05:09
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Cancelling wounding shot after the animation starts gets you both uses back. I'll test other abilities later. edit: Also works for crippling strike and knockdown but not the per rest prestidigitator's missiles. Presumably any multiple use per-encounter ability is affected by the bug. Ratios and Tendency fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Nov 22, 2015 |
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Nov 22, 2015 06:07
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Head Hit Keyboard posted:Perhaps the best thing to do would be to give some examples of potential synergies as loading screen tips. That'll give new players a strategy they can try and clue them into this way of thinking. Yeah the loading screen thing isn't a bad idea. Playing on Normal it's not surprising you haven't thought about it at all because it's really not an issue on that level. I've thought about it way more on PotD, although as Rascyc says fortitude is a bit of a wash on that because it seem to b a really common very high defense on PotD to the extent it's hard to even bother assailing it. nerdz posted:Isn't Aloth a bit like this? His companion quests are mostly triggered alongside the main questline. A bit yes but he's so underwritten it's hard to notice. He just has very little content until the very end of Act 2 and then the twist feels kind of unearned because despite having him in the group since Gilded Vale I feel like I've barely spent any time with him. Which is a shame because his (and Iselmyr's) voice work is good and the character concept is very interesting.
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Nov 22, 2015 06:51
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The Sharmat posted:Yeah the loading screen thing isn't a bad idea. Playing on Normal it's not surprising you haven't thought about it at all because it's really not an issue on that level. I've thought about it way more on PotD, although as Rascyc says fortitude is a bit of a wash on that because it seem to b a really common very high defense on PotD to the extent it's hard to even bother assailing it. I meant like, even if I was playing on something harder, I never would have thought of that. At all. Normal as it is is kicking my rear end enough and I'm finding it far and away harder than anything Baldur's Gate has thrown at me so far (albeit, haven't finished BG2 yet). There's probably some key thing to do with combat that I'm just not getting. That's a common thing I've found with RTwP RPGs in general, that there's something that needs to be made clear to the player that, to someone inexperienced, just isn't.
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Nov 22, 2015 07:29
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Head Hit Keyboard posted:I meant like, even if I was playing on something harder, I never would have thought of that. At all. Normal as it is is kicking my rear end enough and I'm finding it far and away harder than anything Baldur's Gate has thrown at me so far (albeit, haven't finished BG2 yet). There's probably some key thing to do with combat that I'm just not getting. That's a common thing I've found with RTwP RPGs in general, that there's something that needs to be made clear to the player that, to someone inexperienced, just isn't. A large percentage of the fights in the game can be trivialized by dragging the fight into a chokepoint. Then you just block the chokepoint with Eder while your guys used ranged weapons and pikes and attack them over Eder's shoulder. This will get you through a looooot of the game without incident or any real tactics other than this.
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Nov 22, 2015 08:28
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Head Hit Keyboard posted:I meant like, even if I was playing on something harder, I never would have thought of that. At all. Normal as it is is kicking my rear end enough and I'm finding it far and away harder than anything Baldur's Gate has thrown at me so far (albeit, haven't finished BG2 yet). There's probably some key thing to do with combat that I'm just not getting. That's a common thing I've found with RTwP RPGs in general, that there's something that needs to be made clear to the player that, to someone inexperienced, just isn't. Are you fighting shades at level 3 or something? This is baffling.
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Nov 22, 2015 08:29
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Despite having backed this the day it went up on Kickstarter I've only just installed it and tried it today, for various reasons most of which are that I just straight up don't play video games much anymore. Writing seems good by video game standards, nice world setup, lovely backdrops, made a Rogue for my first guy thinking I'd do the Cipher Godlike thing for all the extra side quest stuff I assume they'd have on a second or third run, and I've already just rerolled into a Godlike Cipher to see/read as much as I can on one play through because holy poo poo the combat is awful. I get that this was pitched as having this old combat system as a feature, but my nostalgia for Planescape apparently blocked out the memories of just how boring all of these old pseudo-real-time Dungeons and Dragons systems are. What's the best means of making combat as fast as possible?
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Nov 22, 2015 11:06
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Wheeee posted:Despite having backed this the day it went up on Kickstarter I've only just installed it and tried it today, for various reasons most of which are that I just straight up don't play video games much anymore.
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Nov 22, 2015 11:30
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That's stupid. The real-time with pause combat is the worst poo poo possible, being supposedly real-time everything is delayed by timers, yet you also have to constantly pause it to issue commands due to the combat UI being horrid. There's no reason for this system to even exist, it's slower than a well-designed turn-based combat system and never feels as good as even a rudimentary action combat system. The backdrops really are lovely however, the art folks did a phenomenal job.
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Nov 22, 2015 11:46
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Maybe you shouldn't have backed a kickstarter for a game in a genre you clearly hate.
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Nov 22, 2015 11:49
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The Sharmat posted:Maybe you shouldn't have backed a kickstarter for a game in a genre you clearly hate. Possibly they wanted to back an RPG with emphasis on writing/choice and consequence/hand-painted backgrounds/whatever and this was the price of admission? PoE would only be improved by dropping the RTwP nostalgia-driven slogfest combat.
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Nov 22, 2015 12:16
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I haven't kept up on things, are they releasing a patch that will basically remove all combat? I think that's the only thing that would motivate me to actually continue the story.
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Nov 22, 2015 12:18
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Lt. Danger posted:Possibly they wanted to back an RPG with emphasis on writing/choice and consequence/hand-painted backgrounds/whatever and this was the price of admission? PoE would only be improved by dropping the RTwP nostalgia-driven slogfest combat. exquisite tea posted:I haven't kept up on things, are they releasing a patch that will basically remove all combat? I think that's the only thing that would motivate me to actually continue the story.
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Nov 22, 2015 12:30
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Man, am I the only person who actually likes the RTWP combat?  Seriously, playing the game only makes me wish it'd be done more, especially if such systems included the same auto-pause options.
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Nov 22, 2015 12:35
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Combat is fun, although I still prefer Dragon Age system. My biggest problem is that I often can't tell what is happening just for the graphics. Also, the AI thing makes micromanaging less necessary but still necessary, as sometimes it will make some pretty stupid decisions (like breaking from a pack of enemies to engage another pack that wasn't even on the battle) Anyways, I started a hard game with a barbarian, got Aloth and hired 2 generics, a cipher and a monk. How hosed up I am? It is kinda working and it's fun, but I have no experience with none of those classes (barbarian, cipher or monk), so I'm a bit lost. Any tips?
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Nov 22, 2015 12:36
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CommissarMega posted:Man, am I the only person who actually likes the RTWP combat?
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Nov 22, 2015 12:42
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The kickstarter campaign was quite explicit about its objective of recapturing the essence of the infinity engine games so i don't know what to say if you expected something non-representative.
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Nov 22, 2015 12:45
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CommissarMega posted:Man, am I the only person who actually likes the RTWP combat? Nope. I love the combat in this game and RTwP in general, and there's plenty of other people that do too.
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Nov 22, 2015 12:45
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CommissarMega posted:Man, am I the only person who actually likes the RTWP combat? I really enjoyed it, obviously there's room for improvement but it's the most fun I've had with gameplay in a wrpg in a long time. I really don't know why so many storygamers are upset or confused by it either, it's been stated very clearly at every point that combat is a major focus of the game and that Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale were significant influences, and Obsidian delivered exactly that
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Nov 22, 2015 12:47
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Carew posted:The kickstarter campaign was quite explicit about its objective of recapturing the essence of the infinity engine games so i don't know what to say if you expected something non-representative. Sorry but I'm opposed to all reading in video games and this includes product descriptions and in-game tooltips that I can use to learn how to play the game.
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Nov 22, 2015 12:50
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Antares posted:Sorry but I'm opposed to all reading in video games and this includes product descriptions and in-game tooltips that I can use to learn how to play the game. Didn't read but quoting anyway
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Nov 22, 2015 12:52
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The combat in this game just isn't very fun to look at visually, sorry. It's often difficult to tell what's going on and having to input new commands after every little action is tedious and makes the flow of the game really choppy. Many spells feel like they have no impact to them whatsoever. Sludgy combat isn't uncommon to RTwP systems, DA:O felt like the characters were fighting underwater the whole time, but simply falling back on "well that's just how games were 20 years ago" is, I think, a poor argument. You can evolve the genre in natural ways without using the holy scripture of BG2 as a reference point for absolutely everything.
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Nov 22, 2015 13:08
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