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

[Duraframe300]

 

[polo]

Nice one.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

That looks like a great low-to-medium level adventuring experience.

 

[Frusciante]

Looks like fan art to be honest. Don't think Kaz did this, his work is usually much better.

This is the november issue? When will we be able to read it then?

 

[Infinitron]

It looks Elmore as fuck IMO.

Sagani's face is a bit derpy though

 

[Zed]

yeah hope that's not a new look for sagani, cuz then my fanart becomes dated
current wip

 

[Abu Antar]

Looks decent but not amazing.

 

[Hormalakh]

ITT armchair game developers become armchair computer programmers.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/

RPG Codex > our pretentiousness doesn't scale to human levels

 

[aeonsim]

Looks like some one tried to do a 1980's (mass paper back) fantasy novel cover and succeeded reasonably well. The fight doesn't look to hard , just a pack of drakelings like in the beta.

 

[mutonizer]

ITT armchair game developers become armchair computer programmers.
http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/
RPG Codex > our pretentiousness doesn't scale to human levels

Some "experts" been telling people bullshit since the beginning of mankind, from "eat that plant, trust me I know", "the earth is round, trust us, we know", "drink this snakeoil, trust me, I know" and "smoke that, it's good for you, trust us, we know", to "bomb them fuckers, trust us, we know" and more. Always blindingly trusting experts is as dumb as always distrusting them and, at the end of the day, who pays the experts is mostly what matters.
Personally, I think that questioning something is always healthy, as long as you're questioning it not because of some ideology that you have or to prove some preconceived notion, but simply to question it, investigate it and, above all, are ready to accept the answers, even if you don't like it or if it proves you wrong.

And that's what happened here. Some of us wondered about how the code was arranged, so we dug a bit. Some experts came in, and shared some of their expertise. More investigation was done to double check said expertise and dialog was established, and in the end, it was overall accepted as a plausible good answer to the wondering. Case closed as far as I can see. Nobody came and bashed Anthony or Immortal I think, nor pretended to know better than they did.

So, all in all, not sure why you linked that post, since it's not really relevant.


Or maybe it was just to be funny..I'm not expert on that

 

[Hormalakh]

Nobody came and bashed Anthony or Immortal I think, nor pretended to know better than they did.

between this + the quality of the code, im beginning to wonder if the programmers at obsidian are stuck in an early-90s time loop

There's so much useless shit in the classes, it's like they don't delete stuff as they change their code :/

let's say noticeably less than optimal.

this is a classic symptom of not having unit tests

what im trying to figure out is whether the obsidian programmers know their code is a travesty and just don't care, or if they don't realise how bad it is

because personally, a 4,000-line class like CharacterStats.cs would get me fired

And of spaghetti OO clusterfuck in general. I was curious how much they do in functional style, looks like very little. Wanna write a short survey/review of the code? It's the first time we have first hand insight into legendary Obsidian programming.

You guys are behaving as if the hacks at Obsidian actually give a fuck about the quality of their work. That bunch of old washouts already got your money.

when their shitty design is the root cause of such a landslide of bugs that mean you need a three+ months to get rid of just the major ones, and when it happens with such regularity that the company as a whole acquires a reputation for crap software, then maybe its time to think twice about whether a fire-and-forget approach to development is really the best idea

The Gameplay is Shit. The Code is shit. Also RTwP.

suffice it to say it's not pretty and the vast majority of it can't be blamed on compiler bloat

As for your "don't trust the experts becaues they ~*LIE*~, what you don't understand is that if an expert makes a mistake or an error, a layman wouldn't know where the error lies: it's other experts in the field who understand the foundations and have the experience who would know better. Then over time that shit trickles down to "common knowledge" and everyone is suddenly soooo much smarter than the "idiotic experts."

Also the Earth is round.

 

[mutonizer]

Heh, brain has problems typing "Earth is flat", but you get the point I'm sure.

Also, you keep assuming that because someone calls himself "expert", he's an actual expert in a given field or even if he is, he'll actually be telling you the truth. That's my point, the term is dangerous because it has differences between it's meaning, and the reality of it, therefore forcing you to double check everything, or at the very least if you don't want to spend the time, the guy's CV and probably a couple other experts in the same field or something. In a perfect world, I'd agree with you 100%. This isn't a perfect world.

As a note, you do realize that what you quoted indicates he'd be somewhat qualified to be labelled an expert, just like Immortal or Anthony. Why would you trust more one over the other? Would it be because you blindly believe something? Or because you double checked before, know one more than the other? I think you get my point once again and actually agree with me and don't just accept everything you're told just because of a title or pretended title.

On top of that, it's the internet, so all you guys could actually just be 11 old years girls for all I know

 

[Immortal]

Heh, brain has problems typing "Earth is flat", but you get the point I'm sure.

Also, you keep assuming that because someone calls himself "expert", he's an actual expert in a given field or even if he is, he'll actually be telling you the truth. That's my point, the term is dangerous because it has differences between it's meaning, and the reality of it, therefore forcing you to double check everything, or at the very least if you don't want to spend the time, the guy's CV and probably a couple other experts in the same field or something. In a perfect world, I'd agree with you 100%. This isn't a perfect world.

As a note, you do realize that what you quoted indicates he'd be somewhat qualified to be labelled an expert, just like Immortal or Anthony. Why would you trust more one over the other? Would it be because you blindly believe something? Or because you double checked before, know one more than the other? I think you get my point once again and actually agree with me and don't just accept everything you're told just because of a title or pretended title.

On top of that, it's the internet, so all you guys could actually just be 11 old years girls for all I know

Tee Hee ~~

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

On top of that, it's the internet, so all you guys could actually just be 11 old years girls for all I know

11 yr old girls who like to argue about coding... only on the Codex

 

[mutonizer]

Tee Hee ~~

The defense rests

 

[Hormalakh]

Also, you keep assuming that because someone calls himself "expert", he's an actual expert in a given field or even if he is, he'll actually be telling you the truth.

That's the point. Everyone here on the Codex is an "RPG expert."

My point wasn't directed at you: your conversation with Anthony, etc was reasoned and productive. The quotes were examples of what I consider ridiculous armchairing.

It is actually possible to disagree with a point - be it game design or coding or whatever - without sounding like a total pretentious prick or a jackass. But you're probably right: I should just remmeber that most of the kiddies here on the 'dex are 11 year old girls.

 

[mutonizer]

Oh, I see. My bad then, I didn't include the guy who claimed working in the field in the "armchair" laymen group, just a way too exited and less eloquent Anthony/Immortal, so figured the only ones left were Sensuky and myself, so your post felt a bit...aggressive and off topic.

Simple misunderstanding then

On that, I need to go braid my hair, mommy'll be calling for dinner soon. Tata!

 

[Duraframe300]

I do think this thread lacks glitter

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Also the Earth is round.

No Sir, it's an imperfect Sphere!




/expert

 

[HiddenX]

Glitter ->
Photoshop reveals the original:

 

[mutonizer]

Geeesh...I swear every time Mr. Sawyers writes something or talks, the only thing I see is an awful GM nobody wants to play with because he sucks balls, so he ends up being a game designer to make sure he got his way.

How is that even remotely close to the IE experience is beyond me...

Spoiler

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68476-discussion-the-poe-beta-xp-system/page-9

My goal isn't to discourage killing/combat overall, but to avoid the emphasis of combat solutions as the de facto best way to resolve quests (unless the quest is fundamentally about killing someone/thing, of course) and to avoid the player feeling compelled to kill everything they come across. I think it will be good for the game if a player can ask themselves, "Am I losing out by not completing this area with combat?" and sometimes answer, "Nah." Quest only XP accomplishes this, but obviously a lot of people want to gain XP from fighting. Short of having a separate mode where you get combat XP from everything and all of the quest XP is rebalanced around that, bestiary unlocking XP is the best solution I've come up with to accomplish both goals.

 

[Immortal]

Geeesh...I swear every time Mr. Sawyers writes something or talks, the only thing I see is an awful GM nobody wants to play with because he sucks balls, so he ends up being a game designer to make sure he got his way.

How is that even remotely close to the IE experience is beyond me...

Spoiler

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68476-discussion-the-poe-beta-xp-system/page-9

My goal isn't to discourage killing/combat overall, but to avoid the emphasis of combat solutions as the de facto best way to resolve quests (unless the quest is fundamentally about killing someone/thing, of course) and to avoid the player feeling compelled to kill everything they come across. I think it will be good for the game if a player can ask themselves, "Am I losing out by not completing this area with combat?" and sometimes answer, "Nah." Quest only XP accomplishes this, but obviously a lot of people want to gain XP from fighting. Short of having a separate mode where you get combat XP from everything and all of the quest XP is rebalanced around that, bestiary unlocking XP is the best solution I've come up with to accomplish both goals.

Glad you got this thread back on topic of Pillars of Eternity Beta Why Josh shouldn't be designing the spiritual successor to the Infinity Engines

 

[Duraframe300]

Geeesh...I swear every time Mr. Sawyers writes something or talks, the only thing I see is an awful GM nobody wants to play with because he sucks balls, so he ends up being a game designer to make sure he got his way.

How is that even remotely close to the IE experience is beyond me...

Spoiler

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68476-discussion-the-poe-beta-xp-system/page-9

My goal isn't to discourage killing/combat overall, but to avoid the emphasis of combat solutions as the de facto best way to resolve quests (unless the quest is fundamentally about killing someone/thing, of course) and to avoid the player feeling compelled to kill everything they come across. I think it will be good for the game if a player can ask themselves, "Am I losing out by not completing this area with combat?" and sometimes answer, "Nah." Quest only XP accomplishes this, but obviously a lot of people want to gain XP from fighting. Short of having a separate mode where you get combat XP from everything and all of the quest XP is rebalanced around that, bestiary unlocking XP is the best solution I've come up with to accomplish both goals.

I agree with him.

Anyway, more important (imo) is this tidbit

We were trying to balance what I saw as competing desires among backers for per-character inventories, reduced hassle in picking up items over the long haul, and some nod toward realism/strategic decision making in personal carrying capacity. The last element has always seemed like the least important to me, but that is what the Stash restrictions were meant to accomplish.



If the overwhelming vibe from people is that they don't like the Stash access restrictions, I am a-ok with removing them entirely. E: Except for in combat, of course.

 

[Duraframe300]

Some more Sawyer from today

I'm pretty easy-going about mechanics in the things that I play and it's not uncommon for me to implement mechanics I personally do not like if I feel they will improve the game overall. Most of the design choices I make focus on trying to produce a great experience for the audience, varied as they often are. In the process of working on RPGs over the past 15 years, I've observed a lot of things that create roadblocks in our games for subsets of people or structural flaws that make it difficult for people to really make a wide variety of viable characters. If I can fix those elements while still retaining the spirit of the genre, I feel that it is my responsibility to try. Those attempts don't always work out. In those cases, we either have to take a different approach or fall back on traditional conventions.

Yeah, we're talking about various other forms of XP including exploration, trap, and lock XP. We've also discussed XP connected to unlocking elements in the bestiary, which is sort of a limited-pool form of combat XP that eventually gets exhausted and doesn't require you to commit genocide to reach it. Also, kith (humanoid people) are not (and would not be) in the bestiary, and those are the characters most often associated with quests.

The main motivation for our quest-only XP system came from observing how many people, both regular gamers and QA testers, completed certain types of quests in the games we've made. Those who completed a quest via stealth or conversations often backtracked to kill the people or critters they had just "spared" because the game's basic mechanics systemically rewarded that behavior. You can set a bunch of flags for each quest and try to side-step around these cases but it's a huge amount of work for something that can be solved in a more straightforward manner by awarding XP for objectives and quests instead of individual creatures killed.

Since creatures (i.e., not humans/elves/dwarves/etc.) are directly involved in quests as non-hostiles with much less frequency, I think having XP awarded based on bestiary unlocks could work well. If we set those unlock thresholds much lower than the total number of critters in the game, players will hopefully learn that they don't need to exterminate everyone/thing they come across and they will eventually exhaust the available XP for that type of creature. E.g. Korgrak is an ogre, but he's by no means the only ogre, so if you don't kill him, you should still be able to completely unlock the entire ogre bestiary entry (and get all XP from it).

 

[kris]

Geeesh...I swear every time Mr. Sawyers writes something or talks, the only thing I see is an awful GM nobody wants to play with because he sucks balls, so he ends up being a game designer to make sure he got his way.

How is that even remotely close to the IE experience is beyond me...

Spoiler

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68476-discussion-the-poe-beta-xp-system/page-9

My goal isn't to discourage killing/combat overall, but to avoid the emphasis of combat solutions as the de facto best way to resolve quests (unless the quest is fundamentally about killing someone/thing, of course) and to avoid the player feeling compelled to kill everything they come across. I think it will be good for the game if a player can ask themselves, "Am I losing out by not completing this area with combat?" and sometimes answer, "Nah." Quest only XP accomplishes this, but obviously a lot of people want to gain XP from fighting. Short of having a separate mode where you get combat XP from everything and all of the quest XP is rebalanced around that, bestiary unlocking XP is the best solution I've come up with to accomplish both goals.

I agree on the principle that combat XP gear people into killing everything. I even killed some Orcs in D:OS that I had talked my way past because I wanted that early XP (later in the game I would not have bothered though). As a GM I had many a player (the younger the more likely) that wanted combat solution just because they knew it was the best way to earn XP.

I don't neccesarerly agree that it would be best for this game though. He could reach just as good a solution by making kill XP less significiant.