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VanSandman posted:One of the things I've rarely seen that bugs me about party-based RPGS like this is making the role of party tank feel heroic in combat. Sure they do a vital role that lets other party members get their kill on, but any sort of visual or audio feedback to the player that the tank is enduring some serious poo poo would be amazing. Maybe a short voice clip could play when they survive an opponents' critical hit - 'That the best you've got?' 'None shall pass!' 'Try harder next time!' - or some short-lived glow around the character model when they successfully negate enemy damage would do the trick. Are there any plans for this sort of thing right now? I'm playing KOTOR 2 for the first time right now, and something that has stuck in my mind are the really involved parrying animations that play when you're in a melee fight. They don't fire nearly as often as they should, but even something as janky as that would make tanking a lot more interesting, visually. Lot of animation work, though.
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Mar 17, 2014 00:15
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:Rock, Paper, Shotgun acted flabbergasted ahahaha what the gently caress is this  RPS has fallen off a cliff since Gillen and Quinns left. Rossignol is cool too, but he never posts DatonKallandor posted:So I've been wondering: I would actually be super interested in seeing rope kid set out exactly what his dream RPG experience would look like. Without reference to PoE, so we don't have to go through a whole round of, "But then why are you doing X?" "Because Baldur's Gate."
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Mar 19, 2014 18:30
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:Eeeh, Paradox has fairly bad DLC policies and I want Obsidian to stay independent. That said, there are definitely worse outcomes for them as a dev. First off, that's not something you need to worry about because Paradox are being brought in solely to handle distribution and marketing. They're not acting as producers. Second off: As far as I can tell, the actual outcome of Pdox's DLC policy is that they've pushed out seven expansions for CKII in the space of 25 months, and each of those has been accompanied by a massive patch that's fixed a whole bunch of poo poo and integrated new features into the base game for free. Compare that to the previous regime, where EUIII got four expansions over its entire five year lifespan, and the bug-fixing policy was, "We'd like to fix that, but we only budgeted for three patches, so." DLC is the best thing to happen to Paradox games since they discovered QA. And if you want to draw a line between PDS and the publishing house, does PI even have an explicit DLC policy?
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Mar 19, 2014 19:30
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:And I'm not worried, because this is a deal between two partners and not a merger. But I definitely wouldn't be thrilled about a situation where Obsidian loses its independence. Oh, okay, I think I must have misread your first post  That happening a lot these days, I need to try reading slower. AngryBooch posted:Eh, Nathan Grayson throws out a really hostile question right before his interview time is over like 90% of the time. Most recently with Blizzard and EA. I think it all goes back to his interview with CD Projekt, where he (I think justly) got a lot of praise for grilling them on the sex thing. He's learnt that people like it when he asks tough questions, but not that you need actual tough questions to ask to make that work. 
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Mar 19, 2014 19:54
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Fintilgin posted:That would be around 700,000. But I already put my money down on a 1,000,000+. Which is going to net them what, in real money terms? We're talking somewhere north of ten million, even after Pdox/Steam et al take their cut, right? 
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Mar 21, 2014 03:11
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verybad posted:While I don't disagree with the general sentiment, care to elaborate on the orphanage problem? DrManiac posted:Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's an old d&d thing where certain races were always 100% evil so doing hosed up stuff like killing orc babies counted as a 'good' act. Pretty much (noyouseeAlwaysChaoticEvildoesntactuallymeanalwaysetc). It was brought up the last time the thread had a bout of alignmentchat, starting hereish.
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Mar 22, 2014 19:13
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Darkhold posted:Book 5? At least that has a semi-decent battle at the end of it. Now book 10 Crossroads of Twilight aka 'Back at the Ranch' was a true exercise in nothing happens for 600+ pages because what we need after 9 books is to slow this series down a bit. Rand's plotthread in 5 is pretty good, with all sorts of battles and magic and poo poo, but that book also has the Braid Sisters driving a wagon across a continent and passive-aggressively bitching at each other for nine thousand pages.  (I am sorry, I know far too much about this lovely fantasy series)
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May 2, 2014 11:17
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CottonWolf posted:I just want an M. R. James-esque ghost stories RPG. You play a proper English Lord or Lady, then wander around expressing mild surprise that the book was possessed by the devil or that the witch's corpse was birthing giant spiders under the ash tree. I watched Penny Dreadful the other day, and as soon as the first fight scene kicked off, my immediate thought was, "I wish this was an RPG so I could play thing encounter." Insufferable nerd or most insufferable nerd?
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Jul 23, 2014 18:51
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Fintilgin posted:The only thing that exasperates me is that paper doll customization should come at the BEGINNING, directly after picking the race and portrait and BEFORE all the stuff like class and background. I need to see what my character will actually look like in those various suits of armor, not the One thing that I liked about character creation in Fallout- the original Fallouts, at least- and have always bemoaned the lack of in other CRPGs, is that it takes place all on the one screen. You can start anywhere you want and immediately see how your choices feed through into the rest of the system. If you ever decide you want to go back and adjust something in a section you've already been through- it's right there! These waterfall systems everyone else is using are painfully clumsy by comparison. GreatGreen posted:Will you guys please please pretty please include that functionality as an option? Party games with move-party-then-move-camera-then-move-party-then-move-camera view mechanics have always really put a damper on playability over the alternative. GreatGreen posted:Yeah you could do that, but it was still kind of jerky and always kept your eye drawn to character movement instead of the beautifully drawn world around you. I'm at the completely the opposite end of the spectrum: these locked-to-character camera systems drive me nuts, they feel incredibly closed in and claustrophobic. They actually distract me from the scenery because I'm forever wrestling with the things- it's one of the problems I'm having with Divinity right now, as it happens.
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Jul 25, 2014 03:27
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Drifter posted:I've really never understood why turnbased games don't just run the enemies' actions together into one turn. Just have them move all simultaneously. Ravenfood posted:
Drifter posted:Ummm...the computer would figure everything out sequentially and then apply it to the scene in one go. Anyone ever play Laser Squad Nemesis? Literally XCOM with simultaneous turns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDWzEMvBYCU Disgaea does a plan-then-execute-in-sequence thing too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOjkR7RJFdA (note: it is really drat hard to find a Disgaea video that is not about some sort of rule abuse) I think there are PnP games that have simultaneous turns (Riddle of Steel?), too, which has got to be some sort of crazy magic.
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Aug 26, 2014 12:34
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Sea Otter posted:Can be bit optimistic but I personally believe/hope that most people will be rational enough to appreciate solid tactical choices once they free themselves from the fixed idea. Ah, a pure, innocent soul, untainted by the foul scourge of grog.txt. I will pray that your state of blissful ignorance long continues! (You would not believe how attached some people are to caster supremacy)
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Sep 11, 2014 17:04
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Drifter posted:Scrap the current special abilities and just give the front line people all the special moves from Kung Fu Hustle. I desperately need someone to make a Legends of the Wulin game.
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Sep 12, 2014 09:57
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A Catastrophe posted:^^^If they can take a Web spell or a trap, they can take a knockdown or a Disengagement Attack. For the record, I haaate web spells (<3 Spider's Bane). All types of stun effects, really; I never want to be sat in front of my computer twiddling my thumbs, waiting to be allowed to do something. What makes it worse is that these effects tend to binary: they either shut you down completely or they fail to do anything at all. You never see someone getting partially webbed. (gently caress you, Divinity)
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Sep 14, 2014 09:43
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Intelligence boosting Deflection? I read lots of books means I'm good with a shield? Huh? Intelligence making for a better fencer makes perfect sense to me. It's not so much about speed or precision or balance (though these are still vital), it's about knowing exactly how and when to attack so as not to leave yourself open to riposte. And, honestly, if all we need is one slightly-off association to make a balanced stat spread, I'd say we're doing pretty well.
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Sep 16, 2014 19:31
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:( Is this actually a problem, per se? I mean, if people play a game, play it to satiation, enjoy it, and then stop- does that have no value, if they don't check every box? This goes doubly for open-world, sandbox games- if there's no defined goal, then how do you define completion? 100%-ing every sidequest? That's an exercise for lunatics. (Also: if I recall correctly, the vast majority of all games suffer from a high non-completion rate; it's by no means a phenomenon restricted to free-form RPGs.)
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Sep 17, 2014 19:26
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about people not finishing open-form RPGs)
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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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Drifter posted:Crafting Has there ever been a good crafting system in an RPG? I mean, has anyone got an example they can point to and say, "like this"? It seems like every implementation ends up being underpowered or overpowered or reliant on tedious grinding in other parts of the game- and even if they get past that, designers seem to that've a hell of a time making it interesting. Leinadi posted:Personally, I think that's completely fine. I like the idea of having a few "surprises" when replaying the game or when just going outside the usual "RPG boundaries" of what usually works. No need to beat people over the head with it if the statistical info is there and easy to find in the game. If it's leading to balancing problems because people aren't aware of all the options they have available to them, then that is a problem that needs solved. Surprises aren't worth that.
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Nov 26, 2014 00:56
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FRINGE posted:That is totally fine. Some players want the option to have a low-stress low-maintenance character(s) around while they babysit the complicated ones. It's cool if you can build a class to be low maintenance, if you want to ease into the game or spend time focusing on other characters. It's not cool if some class is pigeonholed into being the dumb boring class for idiots (or, conversely, if one is always going to be an attention hog, no matter what). If someone goes into a game hoping to play some sort of wire-fu master swordsman they're not going to enjoy being forced to spend most of their playtime titting around with some wizard's spell list.
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Dec 6, 2014 17:23
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FRINGE posted:If kung fu movie characters are not in it, and someone is "surprised", then the failure is with them. Sorry, I guess I picked a bad example and confused you. My fault. The argument is not, "Pillars of Eternity should do wuxia  ". It's that, as far as is reasonable, a game should allow a player to play to their desired character concept without being locked into a given level of complexity. The ideal being, a player should be able to build their party such that the characters they spend the most time managing are the ones whose concepts they find most appealing, whether that be casters or otherwise.FRINGE posted:That sounds a lot like the normal edition war stuff. What, as in, "people bitch about caster supremacy (and related issues) a lot"? Well yeah, it's a thing a lot of people have problems with? DatonKallandor posted:Plus PoE fighters have a lot more active abilities than Infinity Engine Fighters. And there's talents to give them more active stuff (and talents for passive stuff). They're not Wizard level active ability selection, but that's cause they're not Wizards. Right right, I wasn't thrusting at PoE specifically, Rope Kid's made his position on this pretty[url] [url=http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3506352&pagenumber=433&perpage=40#post416956256]clear, just FRINGE's notion that fighters being locked into low-maintenance gameplay is a good thing in the general case. Drifter posted:If you're just a boring ol' soldier, Why would you get all the cool stuff, you're just a normie, not someone special. All characters should get to do cool things, dude.  Also, every has freaky soul powers or whatever here. e: Full disclosure, I find wizards really loving boring on a conceptual level, so I am massively biased here.
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Dec 6, 2014 22:28
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Going back a bit, but:grobbo posted:MotB was a very particular (and marvellously unique) mix, tonally - fairy-tale elements, a little Japanese vividness, a really twisted Harry Potter riff...I don't think it's easy to replicate that, even if it was what they were going for. If PoE comes even close to the inventiveness, heart, and unconventionality of Mask, that'll be a Very Good Thing. So. I only got as far into NWN2 as the elf druid lady showing up before the sheer concentrated mass of cliche forcibly shot me out of my computer chair and into the wall at the other end of the room (sorry rope kid  ), but this sounds Genuinely Interesting™. Is it worth pushing through to get to? (Can I just jump straight into MotB?)evilmiera posted:I'm wondering too, if only because I'd feel sad to miss out on the stuff he produces I'm just an incorrigible gossip whore
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Jan 14, 2015 14:39
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:You can (and should) do it. Clever Spambot posted:You can just jump straight to MotB, it is worth mentioning though that the base campaign gets way better after act 1. Righto. I'll get to that as soon as I'm done with this dorf fort mod.
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Jan 14, 2015 15:15
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Sensuki posted:Some new screenies from the full game up on GOG: http://www.gog.com/game/pillars_of_eternity_royal_edition  Would you build a house in the palm of a giant hand? I'd be worried about it waking up, myself. (Game is purdy.)
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Jan 14, 2015 17:04
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Fuschia tude posted:Didn't Fallout do that a year earlier? I can't remember whether it does in 1 (though it probably did, the engine didn't change a whole lot between the two), but 2 certainly does it. Unless you take the Awareness perk, in which case you get an exact number. Fuschia tude posted:Also the pips are clearly cribbed from Starcraft 2 Was it not the same in 1, too? I know the colours were in. The pips are good game design because you don't really need to know how much health your characters have exactly (well, I guess you might want to be supremely anal about when you drop your heals, but by a sane metric); the important break points are "unharmed or near enough", "worth dropping a heal on", "in trouble", "seriously in trouble", and "completely hosed unless you do something right now"- which is exactly the information the pips convey. Plus, it's not actually as easy to read a bar as you might think- "half and half" is easy enough, but it's very easy, or I find it pretty easy, to mistake 1/5 for 1/4 or 1/3 for 1/4 unless it's broken up into discrete chunks (i.e., pips). e: evilmiera posted:I keep getting amazed by ropekid's tumblr. Not because a lot of content gets posted there, but because of the questions he gets asked . Like I'm hoping it isn't intentional that some of these things sound massively passive aggressive RPG-codex-like. Odd coincidence, I'm reading it right now. There are a lot from this one melnorme guy, I don't know if that's because he just keeps machine-gunning questions into the ether or if they're just the ones rope kid thinks are worth mentioning.
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Jan 21, 2015 23:07
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SurrealityCheck posted:Holy poo poo big head mode affects dragons O.O Alright, pack it up, civilisation over. We're never going to top this.
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Jan 24, 2015 22:01
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Barracuda Bang! posted:I forget where I heard it too, but I believe the region was southwest England. There's a name for the area, I think, but I forget that too. The West Country? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb63PdPweDc They do go "ooh-arr", but I wouldn't really call it a pirate accent
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Feb 11, 2015 10:53
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Litany Unheard posted:edit: And googling around it looks like Beamdog got permission to make their own Baldur's Gate spin-off games. Prepare yourself for a flood of lovely, "old-school" isometric RPGs; publishers smell money. Man you cannot convince me this is a bad thing. Even if they're just blind-firing money into the ether, there's got to be at least a small chance they'll hit gold. That's got to be better than a complete drought.
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Feb 12, 2015 19:58
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Krowley posted:The disengagement system in PoE is way more intuitive and better than any gauge-based aggro mechanics. Or whatever it is BG had, it was probably just kinda random I think the AI just latched on to whatever it saw first and stuck to it until it was knocked loose. Also I am more than moderately amused by Sensuki complaining about people winning in "not fun" ways after posting this: Sensuki posted:Think about it for a second, what is tactical blocking ? If an enemy is chasing one of your friends and you want to stop him, what do you do? You block them. This is a common practice in RTS games. It's also related to how the AI targeting works in the game. IWD:HoW had particularly snappy target reacquisition, so when an enemy 'lost' a target they would quickly re-acquire a new one (likely a kiting prevention mechanism), so to stop an opponent from chasing one of your wounded characters down, simply clicking to attack them didn't work most of the time due to the way the round system worked (you would not always attack instantly when you reached an enemy) and because it was difficult to attack units moving units from several angles if you have to move to attack them first. Even if you landed your attack ... that enemy is not going to stop to attack you. Therefore, the best way to stop an enemy was to block them, by placing your character in the direct path between your ally and the enemy. They would bump into your selection circle, stop, and then try and path around you. If you moved to block their movement again, by now 99% of enemies would have re-acquired a new target, often to the blocking character - job well done. Selection circle snooker sounds only slightly more fun than feeding your gonads to a food processor.
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Feb 25, 2015 10:13
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Sensuki posted:Do you enjoy RTS games? Because most RTS games generally involve managing the movement and positioning of your units. The Infinity Engine games were built off an RTS engine, and the games that I was into before I got Baldur's Gate 1 were Warcraft 2 and Age of Empires 2. It's only natural that it attracts people like me who enjoy that part of the combat, which may have been an unintentional feature. I do, actually, though I typically prefer to focus on the base-building and economic side of those games rather than micromanaging tactical engagements. The thing with micro is, well, let's take the Selection Circle Snooker example. The interesting tactical decision in that scenario, at least to my mind, is in figuring out where exactly you need to position your front-liners to properly screen your artillery. The actual act of microing units into other units is not an interesting decision- it's not actually a decision at all. There is skill involved, but it's the skill of wrestling an uncooperative UI into doing what you already decided to do. That is wholly uninteresting to me, mindless busywork I'd much rather the computer took care of. I like the idea of engagement because it suggests a scenario that preserves the interesting decision- positioning- but at least partially obviates the tedious micro involved in pulling it off. This doesn't, let me be clear, mean I'm against flanking- I don't expect or want forming a battle line to be a once-and-done affair with no dynamic component. But in the IE games fighters were so unsticky that the enemy could practically flank you from the front. I think I prefer my flanking to involve actual flanking. (As an aside: I play a lot of poo poo like Fire Emblem and other SRPGs, where controlling enemy movement has to be something like 95% of the gameplay. It doesn't bother me there at all, which is interesting. I guess it probably boils down to the fact that those games are turn based and give you a lot more units to work with.)
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Feb 25, 2015 12:40
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SurrealityCheck posted:Basically everything about the infinity engine games to 13 year old me was something to be subverted to make it as easy as possible. Farm XP to get overlevel for everything? Sure. Get all the broken items asap so I can faceroll enemies? Let's do this. Import a higher level character? For surearoonie. Alright, so, the first time I played BG2 that black dragon pissed me off. The one you have to sneak around. In the temple thing place. I think there's the halfling companion in there somewhere, though I missed her on the first go round. I had a big place in my heart for chopping giant terrifying beasts into tiny pieces and 13-year-old me was unimpressed by being presented with a terrifying beast that was too giant to chop. So I resolved to come back and murder it later. Alas! Upon returning from the Underdark (which contained another dragon I wasn't allowed to kill, though I think I ended up murdering every other living thing down there- drow, illithids, beholders, fish people, the lot) I discovered I couldn't get back to the temple! (I think, memory's a little fuzzy now.) Clearly this would not stand. So I broke out the internet and CLUAConsoled myself up a black dragon! Yaaaaaaay! And I was extremely happy when it when down like a chump. I was even happier when I got a metric poo poo-tonne of XP for it, so happy that I spent the next half hour summoning up black dragons and slaughtering them, to the point where the centre of this otherwise unremarkable map ended up carpeted in dragon corpses. And that is my IE cheese story.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:48
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Disco Infiva posted:I wonder how the German version sounds.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBXA-eqIt58 
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Mar 1, 2015 15:04
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Feargus needs to post here so I can yell at him about what an awesome idea it would be to do a Darklands remake Behold http://serpentinthestaglands.com/ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1649838104/serpent-in-the-staglands
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Mar 2, 2015 19:07
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I'm reminded of the complete opposite in FFXII where you could fail your best chance at getting the greatest weapon simply because you opened one of four unmarked completely ordinary treasure chests. And then, if you actually made it to the Necrohol without having opened any of the gently caress-you-buddy chests, what you will discover is an otherwise unremarkable room with sixteen identical chests laid out in a 4x4 grid. I might be misremembering this, but I think opening any of the other fifteen chests before the one with the spear in it will screw you over too. And of course after all that the spear is only there if nobody in your party is wearing one specific accessory. There is nothing in the game that indicates any of this. The other way to obtain the Zodiac Spear is to find it in a chest in a hidden area of an optional dungeon, a chest that only spawns 10% of the times you enter the dungeon, only contains an item 10% of the times it spawns, and only contains the spear 10% of the times it contains an item. Fortunately, FFXII does not track the phase of the moon, so there was an upper limit to how obnoxious they could make this process. On the bright side, it's a spear! I'm fond of spears and they don't get to be ultimate weapons very often.  e: beaten like a red-headed stepchild
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Mar 2, 2015 23:45
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Furism posted:Why the gently caress would you do this as a developer? Just so people end up discovering it? This is a genuine question. I literally don't understand why somebody would code that logic into a game. I'm going to hazard a guess at "to sell strategy guides". Or maybe Akitoshi Kawazu wandered into the office one day and wouldn't leave until they committed a terrible sin of game design. If you don't know who that is I recommend reading this. (Warning: it is a Tim Rogers article.) e: Kawazu was executive producer on XII, this explains everything KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Mar 2, 2015 |
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Mar 2, 2015 23:55
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botany posted:He's He... he is? I'll grant you it's been a while since I played either BG, but I don't remember him being random. His character basically boils down to: big, strong, stupid/brain damaged and fond of justice and friends, and unless I'm forgetting something everything he says and does is consistent with that premise. Mostly I remember Minsc as someone who had decided his life was a swashbuckling action-adventure (in fairness- it was), and was determined to enjoy the poo poo out of it.
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Mar 9, 2015 14:56
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monkey cheese r4nd0me
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My main memories of ME1 involve killing a Thresher Maw with a pistol and driving up sheer cliff faces in the goat car. Good times.
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Mar 16, 2015 01:45
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Diomedes posted:On the other hand, that's something that often bothers me in RPGs, where you can just call a time out on some world scale threat that should by its nature be time critical, and bugger off to return someone's cows to them on the other side of the continent for a few months. Racing through content to get the water chip wasn't fun, so for once I think the disease is worse than the cure. Maybe the real solution is to stop making such time critical crit path quests.
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Mar 16, 2015 12:56
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