Yeah why even make a party based RPG when you'd include that as a goal?
Yeah why even make a party based RPG when you'd include that as a goal?
You do realise how limiting "must solo with character X" is?Originally Posted by Nalano
As long as they don't turn fighters and rogues into pseudo-spell casters like hey did in Dragon Age: Origins then sure, pad out those classes. One of the most despicable things to happen to this genre was to borrow the "every character must have a similar number of special abilities" thing from JRPGs.
Last edited by Wizardry; 08-10-2012 at 04:08 PM.
Which goal are you talking about?
Making other classes more complex isn't a bad or unrealistic decision. In real life melee fighters can grab, throw, strike a nerve, feint, parry, kick, knee, intentionally lock blades, intentionally deflect blades, throw their weapons, slap, headbutt, do elbow strikes, break bones, target the groin, leglock, and move every which way you could imagine. That's before all the things fantasy fighters can do, like shadow dancers jumping into shadows, barbarians getting magic rage, and calling on 800000 different power sources to empower a blow. So there's plenty of room for melee classes to be more complex without doing anything that strains credulity.
Adding the solo goal is an interesting problem, I'm not sure if it was the best decision either. On the one hand, it's pretty silly to force a player to take a party, especially if they want to treat it more like a rogue-like. On the other, that's going to be very hard to balance.
Haven't been following too much, but making fighters "realistic" in their depth can actually be a bad thing. Look at D&D 4e.
Before 4e (or, at least, during AD&D and 3e), there were two kinds of characters "worth playing" from anything other than a purely RP perspective: mage and rogue. Fighters were just boring (from a stats and "gameplay" perspective).
4e turned that on its head by basically making it almost MMO-like in that everyone just spams their special abilities. And that made Fighters REALLY fun (and really powerful). So much so that mages actually lost a lot of their strengths. I am not sure if high-level fixes it, but in all the quick games (lvl 1-10 or so) me and a few friends had when deciding what to change to (Pathfinder won, for those wondering), we found that Fighters were the winners of that ruleset.
Why? Because you could spam a fireball/fireball like spell. Or you could get up close and use a bunch of really cool techniques. Many of which could be strung in combos that put most 3e wizards to shame.
Is making everyone interesting a bad thing? Not at all. But think about movies and books: The squishy wizard is boring, and the sneaky thief is tedious (You mention Dishonored or Thief or Deus Ex:HR or SC and I will smack the crap out of you for screwing with my semi-faulty logic :p). Or, at least, tedious when you aren't doing the sneaking. Movies and books almost always have the mage know how to fight (Harry Dresden is a big guy who knows how to brawl and smack people with a stick. Gandalf had a sword and horsey. Sandman Slim basically just buffed the crap out of himself and goes in as a brawler) and the thief have to beat up a few people during an escape sequence. Generally, games get around that by making them obscenely powerful/more varied. You take that away, and the balance we are used to falls apart.
And it makes sense. NWN was a perfect example. Yes, it is fun to be a squishy wizard or a stealthy rogue. But when you get magically teleported to a conversation and attacked right afterward, you need a fighter to rescue your ass.
Of course, upsetting that balance may be a good thing. Or it can end horribly.
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Well, casters can wear plate in this, so there's that.
But anyways, our fighter in 4e was ridiculously poorly optimized (elven glaive fighter go!), so I noticed much more early imbalance in the paladin's favor (everyone is sanctioned and I have 8 billion armor). But I think the real problem with 4e fighters is that they're too aggressive and not reactive enough. If fighters had two offensive (lets say slash and bull rush), two defensive (Raise Shield and Grapple), and two reactive powers (body throw and intercept), suddenly fighters start playing like actual fighters and combat becomes more interesting. A monk might wait for an enemy to attack first, so he can throw him into another. Fighters have more attacks than the Infinity Engine fighters, but they're not playing like 4e fighters (let's use knee-breaker on a dragon!).
Also, I think 4e just gives a lot of melee attacks too much or too little damage (a punch from a low level monk hurts more than a searing bolt of magical energy?). So I don't know if 4e is a great way to show the problems with varying a class.
But rightly or wrongly they decided that this game would also be soloable in the kickstarter pitch. They have to go by the pitch, so this is not strictly a party game, whether or not it should be.
So, an expansion pack. I like expansion packs. Unfortunately, included at starting at $165, it looks more like a prize at the bottom of the box or a PBS tote bag than a reasonably priced commodity. Value seems to erode much past $65. Except for the boxed copy, I haven't seen anything that could drag me out of the $20 tier. I can't imagine it's easy to convince backers who are ostensibly saving money to start throwing it around like an expansion pack for a $25 game is worth $35 (= $165 - $110 - $20 [WL2]).
Turn them from what? It's the first game in the series, but you're starting from an assumption of what a fighter or rogue should be.
Almost as if fighters and rogues have appeared in other games before.
If content are soloable, that makes most encounters piss easy when you have 4 or more characters. I don't know how they gonna do this unless they scale it to party size.
If one class can solo an encounter, then 2 is probably going to have easier time, and 4 would just walk past it without a sweat.
See my point here?
Well, people have soloed every Infinity Engine RPG, on the hardest difficulty settings. Personally there are encounters in those games where I have to reload a dozen plus times, with a full party, so what you're saying is not necessarily true. The stretch could just be referring to them putting in the extra bit of time to make the soloing possible without having to rely on game breaking exploits or something.
They'll probably recommend that parties go at expert difficulty and solos start at normal difficulty. They've already confirmed that they change encounter composition based on difficulty, so it's not inconceivable that they are also using assumptions of party composition to decide the encounters at different difficulty level.
Also, the maximum number of people you can have isn't static, it increases as the game goes on, so presumably shared experience would let soloers get a substantial level advantage on parties by the time full parties are common, which would level the playing field considerably.
Yeah, I'm super not crazy about them announcing an expansion while the Kickstarter is going on. I think it's better that they do this now, because backers would rightfully be go apeshit if they found and expansion pack was coming a few days after the game was released. I just think it's a bit parsimonious, especially considering that basic pledges already cost 2/3rds more than Wasteland 2. However, it's entirely possible that they'll lose more doing the kicking it forward than they'll make in extra pledges.
I imagine the expansion will cost $30 when it comes out. That seems to be about standard, and I wouldn't be surprised if backers got a discount. I'll probably just wait for an NWN style collection though.
Last edited by Internet; 09-10-2012 at 03:39 AM.
lol. Too early to declare an expansion. I don;t understand it. The whole game is still in the design stage, how the heck do you even promise an expansion during a kickstarter campaign. It'd look quite silly if the game bombed when it released and not much if left of the funding to create an expansion pack.
There were fighters in Street Fighter 2. I hope they don't change it too much from those.
It's just depressing to see people go "god, I hope they don't do anything interesting or innovative".
Not necessarily.
As an example: Borderlands 2, on higher difficulties, REQUIRES you to understand and abuse the right elemental damage for each situation. Imagine if you had a class (fighter) who couldn't do that on a whim. That would make it "impossible" to solo as a fighter.
Theoretically, all this means is that every class has ranged combat abilities (fighter with a bow) and the capacity to tank (mage with stoneskin). And that if you need fire to kill a troll (I love you older D&D-based games!), you'll find firepots or something nearby.
Balance wise, I would personally balance it for around 2-3 characters. That way you still have a challenge at 4, but solo is not just about exploitation and grinding.
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There's nothing innovative about turning fighters into spell casters who use up "stamina" instead of "mana".
Project Eternity just hit 2.5m. I most excited about cyphers, because I missed the psionics boom in D&D, and never saw it implemented into a video game. They're also adding paladins (boo!) and bards (chanters) at $2.7m.
In somewhat related news, they released the first song for Wasteland 2 and it is amazing. Very atmospheric and reminiscent of earlier games. The technical designer started talking about how he organizes dialogues (in Bard's Tale it was Excel, in Wasteland 2 what I understood said it's stored with the rest of the information for each NPC), and it still sounds quite cumbersome. I'm surprised Obsidian (who I believe is sharing tools with them) doesn't have a custom editor that automatically gives the appropriate tags to a character and then puts that character in the game and shows the relationship graphically. Has anyone worked with this kind of crap so they can speak to my ignorance?
Last edited by Internet; 09-10-2012 at 08:34 PM.
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