Codex Interview Jarl interviews Swen Vincke; Questions about Original Sin 2 and other things are answered.

[Darth Roxor]

Third point is, we do place quite a few items that are hand-placed actually, and they’re set in stone, but often we give our items only one or two fixed abilities and have the rest of the stats be flexible.

That's p. interesting.

Now, Mustawd asks: you mention the P&P influence on your game, but some of the competitive aspects seem a little bizarre from the perspective of someone who normally just plays single player RPGs. Is that how your own P&P sessions go? It seems to him like everyone’s just trying to screw each other over.

lol, figures that poor Mustawd has never played Dark Heresy

10 second over the top animations in multiplayer? Yikes.

I would assume this is the case because it would be hell on earth to code animation speed sliders into the game on the MP side when you consider situations such as one player running the fuck away and another engaging in combat. Or one player engaging in combat while the other is sneaking outside combat just next to the fight.

 

[passerby]

I like TB better mostly for two reasons:
1)RtwP and lots of active skills or complex combat rules, it is just a nightmare, even with pause. You have each one of your six guys doing backflips at the same time while you have to track what each enemy is doing, so you have to pay attention to potentially 12 or more characters at the same time. The only way to solve this is to dumbdown combat and restrict options so you can actually keep track of things. I don't think this is a good solution.

2)You can focus on what a single character is doing on a certain part of the combat , you get the information you need and act out on it getting a chance to plan for each move.

Sounds, like you are just a bit slow.

The only way to solve this is to dumbdown combat and restrict options so you can actually keep track of things. I don't think this is a good solution.

It is the only way, only if your goal is to cater to slow people. Of course developers do cater to slow people, so majority of games are BSB regardles of being TB or RTwP.

Back on topic, there are some valid reasons to make games TB from a developer perspective:
It's easier to develop TB system, it's easier to develop good UI for TB, it's easier to develop good AI for TB,
It's easier for less gifted to manage moment to moment gameplay, so as you said you can put some more systems there and remain economically viable.
Basicaly everything about TB is easier. So while TB is not my preference I can understand the choice and enjoy TB game for what it is.

But there is no excuse for not implementing 1-10x animation speed setting we can use once we have seen all the anims and are bored with them to death.
I loved W8, but I refused to play it until I've stumbled upon WizFast mod. All these new wave slow ass TB games are unplayable to me without CheatEngine speedhack.
It's annoying to launch it every time and manually manage game speed during gameplay. In theory it can also cause some glitches, even if it's extremely rare, so I demand this functionality implemented natively.
There is a malicious reason it is not there though. It is to stretch 30h game into 90h at the cost of non challenged people life time.
So retards can praise the game for a "good value per dollar" ( retards don't care about value per hour, since their time is worthless ).

So, our user Efe wants to know: will there be an option to increase animation speed?
No, it’s not on the feature list. I know there’s been some people asking for it, but it’s not on the list.

I see my lifetime is of no value to you mr Swen and you don't want me as your customer. Ok, I have a huge backlog and can wait for a bargain bin price sale. Skipped kickstarter already this time.

I’m not sure it would be easy to implement, either.

Speeding combat anims / special effects and fixing eventual glitches it'd cause ( if any at all ), would sure be some serious strain on the team, yeah right...
Even if it was difficult, which it isn't, we are talking about wasting my precious time here, so it's not an excuse I can accept.

I would assume this is the case because it would be hell on earth to code animation speed sliders into the game on the MP side when you consider situations such as one player running the fuck away and another engaging in combat. Or one player engaging in combat while the other is sneaking outside combat just next to the fight.

I don't see a problem here, but even if there is a problem, why not allow speed slider in singleplayer ?

 

[JarlFrank]

Turn based can actually be much faster than RtwP, what the fuck are you talking about.

Just look at the horribly slow and boring slog that is NWN's combat. Compare that to Temple of Elemental Evil which has pretty quick TB combat.

 

[passerby]

NWN games are slow ass games filled with trash mob filler encounters and boring writing. It has nothing to do with them being RTwP, or not.

Infinity Engine and NWN games are not really a real RT games. Movement is realtime, while other actions are phase based kinda like W8.
You give orders and the game calculates under the hood a single turn with action order based on initiative stat + roll and calculate the actions sequentialy, then display the result simultaneously.
If you spent beginning of the turn kiting, then your units next action won't go into the execution queue until the next turn.
Animations are only for show and not directly linked with what is calculated. Neither the actions are directly linked with the time you've ordered them.

This is why it feels awkward and unresponsive at times, because the system does not behave as true RTwP should. It does at least have a huge benefit of being very fast compared to normal TB.
A turn in these games is resolved in 6s plus the time it takes you to issue orders for special abilities, spells, etc. Half the time the order is "whack the enemy again" and you don't have to issue it again, unlike in typical TB.

Now tell me about all these turns in ToEE, that you can resolve in little more than 6s...

 

[Iznaliu]

Who is that illiterate newfaggot above and why does it have Roguey's avatar?

Somebody's alt.

 

[Morality Games]

What is role-playing all about?

A fine question, but to answer it, first we must ask ourselves, "What is an RPG?"

 

[Viata]

 

[Mustawd]

lol, figures that poor Mustawd has never played Dark Heresy

I played exactly two PnP sessions ever and they were Pathfinder. But really, before they explained more on GM mode the only thing they were really tputing was screwing over ppl with potions and I think stealing party member's stuff. I know the latter is common in D&D with the thief or whatever, I just thought the focus on screwing ppl over in order to show PnP roots was strange. But like you said, I don't know shit about PnP.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Somebody hook up Mustawd to a game of Paranoia quick.

 

[undecaf]

And you don't have to pause every milisecond

Yes, you can just press play and watch the game play itself. RTwP is inherently about controlling the flow of automation, and as such much less engaging for the player than TB.

 

[passerby]

The only thing I leave on auto in RTwP games are basic attacks that don't use resources, if AI picks the same enemy I would, otherwise retarget, manage everything else manually.

Letting the game auto the absolutely most obvious actions is watching the game play itself. Clicking on the enemies every turn and being interrupted 90% of the time, by having to wait for the animations to finish, is being "engaged".

 

[qwerty3w]

Original Sin's combat system is largely revolved around terrain effects, that can be triggered merely by unit positioning, like a burning character walking into flammable gas. Even if we make it like Infinity Engine, for any challenging battle it could still be quite unmanageable, a pure real time system would be a micromanagement hell.

 

[Iznaliu]

I just thought the focus on screwing ppl over in order to show PnP roots was strange

I think it's to show PnP-ish flexibility.

 

[JarlFrank]

Now tell me about all these turns in ToEE, that you can resolve in little more than 6s...

If you resolve every turn in 6 seconds you're doing it wrong because you're not thinking about things.

But then, simple turns where you know beforehand what you're doing are resolved in like 1 second per character. "Next turn I wanna cast magic missile on the boss enemy."
So you select magic missile and cast it. Animation takes maybe one or two seconds. Boom, wizard's turn is done.
Yes, theoretically you spend more time within one turn because you have to do every character's actions after the other, while in RTwP you can decide every character's action simultanously. Practically, however, RTwP has so many interruptions and the situation changes way more often, so you end up actually spending more time in each turn than you would in TB.

TB is more efficient and lets you get combat over more quickly, actually. Imagine the following situation:
You have one strong boss enemy with high melee defense but vulnerability to magic. He has a bunch of mooks with him to support him.
You decide to take him out with your magic users first.
In RtwP, all your magic users would cast their spells simultaneously. You expect to require an offensive spell by every single magic user in your party to take the guy down, so you use this turn to have every spellcaster fire a spell at him. They cast their spells at the exact same moment.
In turn based, you can do fun things like: the first mage casts a spell that causes additional vulnerability to certain spell effects; since his spell hits first, the second mage's spell can potentially do more damage. The third and fourth mage cast their spells at the guy after that, and the fifth... oh wait, the fourth mage made a critical hit! The enemy is dead! Now the fifth mage can use an area effect spell to deal with the weaker mooks!

In turn based, because you have more control over the situation and you can make better use of synergies, you've just solved the encounter in one turn! In RTwP, you would've wasted some of those spells on overkill.

Also, I specifically mentioned ToEE as a quick TB game because you spend very, very little time with waiting. The animations of enemy mobs often play simultaneously, so 10 orcs moving towards you takes as little as 3 seconds. Therefore, the element of waiting for the enemy turn to complete is radically shortened compared to other TB games, which is the only thing about TB you could actually consider slow.

 

[passerby]

Pondering whether I should drop two fireballs just in case, or one is enough to overhelm remaining mob with fighters, where taking risk can backfire, forcing you to improwise is not an isue, but a gameplay depth layer I enjoy.
Cooperation between units like you described is only easier to execute in RT, what if the initiative queue put your units in an order that'll make your plan impossible ? RTwP in principle, only adds another layer of depth and control to the system.
But, while I do enjoy RTwP more than TB, it's not really an element critical enough, to prevent me from enjoying a TB game, after all JA2, or W8 are some of my favourites, despite being turn based.

But, as mentioned, with a few very simple features, TB game can be made to flow almost as fast as RTwP:
- provide speed slider going up to 10x,
- calculate under the hood and display actions of the computer controlled units that are in the queue between player controlled units simultaneously, like in ToEE, provide combat log for review,
- provide default action for every unit ( default attack on the closest target, or repeat of the previous action on the same target ) that can be executed with a single button press, like in W8,
- code the game competently, so it doesn't hang up for a second after every action,

That is it, you can fast forward mundane shit and spent most of your time actually playing the game.
The problem is, most developers don't give a shit about our time and don't want to give up on free game length padding, so they ignore, under insulting excuses, any feedback about combat speed, or walking speed outside combat, etc.

I am close to carpet bombing all the slow ass TB games in my steam library, with negative reviews containing above suggestions, with encouragement for others to follow my suit and a promise of changing the review after the devs comply.
Review bombing seems to be the only feedback, that developpers won't ignore when it suits them...

 

[Mustawd]

Avernum combat is also pretty lightning fast. Boom boom, your turn is done. Minimalist animations help a lot in this.

 

[Trash Player]

Pondering whether I should drop two fireballs just in case, or one is enough to overhelm remaining mob with fighters, where taking risk can backfire, forcing you to improwise is not an isue, but a gameplay depth layer I enjoy.
Cooperation between units like you described is only easier to execute in RT, what if the initiative queue put your units in an order that'll make your plan impossible ? RTwP in principle, only adds another layer of depth and control to the system.
But, while I do enjoy RTwP more than TB, it's not really an element critical enough, to prevent me from enjoying a TB game, after all JA2, or W8 are some of my favourites, despite being turn based.

But, as mentioned, with a few very simple features, TB game can be made to flow almost as fast as RTwP:
- provide speed slider going up to 10x,
- calculate under the hood and display actions of the computer controlled units that are in the queue between player controlled units simultaneously, like in ToEE, provide combat log for review,
- provide default action for every unit ( default attack on the closest target, or repeat of the previous action on the same target ) that can be executed with a single button press, like in W8,
- code the game competently, so it doesn't hang up for a second after every action,

That is it, you can fast forward mundane shit and spent most of your time actually playing the game.
The problem is, most developers don't give a shit about our time and don't want to give up on free game length padding, so they ignore, under insulting excuses, any feedback about combat speed, or walking speed outside combat, etc.

I am close to carpet bombing all the slow ass TB games in my steam library, with negative reviews containing above suggestions, with encouragement for others to follow my suit and a promise of changing the review after the devs comply.
Review bombing seems to be the only feedback, that developpers won't ignore when it suits them...

Stranger of Sword City has functional auto-combat. It is a very grindy game though, from what I read.

 

[Zeriel]

To say that Stranger of Sword City is a grindy game is to miss the point. The grinding IS the game.

 

[passerby]

I don't want autocombat, I want't to be able to interact with the game the moment I've made decision on my next move. All these delays can add up to many hours of your time wasted, on a single game.
This is on top of being actively annoyed, by being constantly interrupted and having to wait few seconds before you can interact with the game again.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

(laughs uncomfortably) I read the Codex, so I know very well what you guys think about it, but there’s a practical point to it. We change our balancing a lot, and all of our balancing is relative, so all those stats change automatically when we change something in the base systems. That’s the first part of it.

The second part is that people do replay our games, and when you replay them, you will find different things. Third point is, we do place quite a few items that are hand-placed actually, and they’re set in stone, but often we give our items only one or two fixed abilities and have the rest of the stats be flexible. So you could have a dark sword that is always there and always gives you a certain ability, but its other stats will be randomized. It’s a mix of things. When I play it, I kind of like it that way. I don’t think I’d want to have it so that I get the same item every time, because that way I could always min-max one hundred percent, knowing which items are where, and I don’t think that’s a lot of fun actually.

I keep seeing this sort of argument used a lot to justify randomized loot. It may sound like it makes sense in theory, but all my practical experience in gaming tells me otherwise.

Predictability in subsequent playthrough is large part of what makes playing the same game more fun and engaging. You plan ahead, make ideal setups and/or party compositions in your head ("I'll take these characters, with these specs and dress them with these items"), in some cases you can even plan entire speedruns.
I also find the notion that being randomly rewarded with casually generated items would keep things "diverse and interesting" deeply flawed in principle. It simply never happens. The feeling is never "Wow, any new drop is a thrill!". It usually goes in the exact opposite way: "Everything I'm getting feels generic and same-y at any given time". In fact, when pushed to its extreme, it gets even worse than that. When randomization is too brutal, at some point you start questioning why should you even attempt to accomplish difficult goals, when a good/bad reward can casually come at you at any given time, during any action or fight.
Compare it to the sense of accomplishment you get when you finally put your avid hands on some extremely valuable artifact in Baldur's Gate 2: an item with an unique aesthetic, description, history and very specific abilities.

And this is before even starting to talk about how randomization and unreliability can severely screw the overall perception of fairness and balance, especially in a single player game with a finite number of not-respawning encounters.

I'm glad they are increasing the number of hand-placed equipment, but I will actually be happy about it only when they will bring it to the point of that being 90% of the itemization in game (and 100% of the relevant one).

 

[JarlFrank]

This is also why none of the newer Elder Scrolls games even come close to the feeling of Morrowind, where you can beeline for some epic items if you know where they are (and if you can survive getting them). The sense of discovery in that game is superb. It has random encounters too but all the relevant stuff is hand-placed and doesn't change.

When you find your first daedric sword, it feels like an accomplishment because there is a limited number of these in the game and they are all found at specific places.

Every dungeon you enter gives you the feeling "gee, I wonder if I'm going to find anything unique in here" and when you do, and it's even a cool named item with a custom model, you feel like a real explorer who just discovered something legendary.

If items are randomized... you don't get that feeling. In Diablo, even "Unique" items don't feel truly unique - because they're not. The stats are randomized, even if only slightly, and the drop is random too: you never have that guaranteed feeling of "I discovered this item because I went into this specific dungeon and defeated this specific boss enemy; I would not have discovered this item in any other place because it only exists once in the world".

That's what gives exploration its reward. Sure, on a replay it will be at the same place and you remember the location of course... but it still feels more accomplishing than having something drop randomly.

 

[V_K]

he feeling is never "Wow, any new drop is a thrill!". It usually goes in the exact opposite way: "Everything I'm getting feels generic and same-y at any given time".

Nah, it's worse than that. For me it's usually like "Fuck, I have to do this invetory shuffling/indentifying routine once again to see if it give some negligible stat improvements over the stuff I already have". In DOS I was actually dreading loot drops instead of anticipating them.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

I hope they will at least consider to tone down the quantity of loot and raise the number of uniques. The usually take criticism pretty seriously (as evident by the changes to the writing team).

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

he feeling is never "Wow, any new drop is a thrill!". It usually goes in the exact opposite way: "Everything I'm getting feels generic and same-y at any given time".

Nah, it's worse than that. For me it's usually like "Fuck, I have to do this invetory shuffling/indentifying routine once again to see if it give some negligible stat improvements over the stuff I already have". In DOS I was actually dreading loot drops instead of anticipating them.

Yeah, that's another side of it, but I didn't want to prolong my rant even more.
There are a lot of games where additional loot is actually DETRIMENTAL to the enjoyment of the game, turning it into busywork and endless, pace-breaking comparisons of items looking for virtually meaningless variations.

I often argued in the past that The Witcher 3 (but it applies to TW2 as well) would be a far better game with LESS stuff to loot, for instance. Not just equipment, but other junk as well. I would gladly do without that shitload of garbage in every chest, box, sack or drawer and without THOUSANDS of herbs and alchemicals (imagine having 1/40 of them but being genuinely happy to find something, for a change).

Darksiders 2 was a far worse game compared to the first mostly because of its disgusting bulimia of useless itemization (in contrast, the predecessor had a far more rewarding "Zelda-like" progression, where rewards were sparse in number but each one an extremely meaningful upgrade).

I'm not for itemless games. I love good loot when I see it. It's just that so many developers seem to get it wrong.
I don't want to drawn in my inventory to feel rewarded, for fuck's sake.

 

[Trodat]

he feeling is never "Wow, any new drop is a thrill!". It usually
I often argued in the past that The Witcher 3 (but it applies to TW2 as well) would be a far better game with LESS stuff to loot, for instance. Not just equipment, but other junk as well. I would gladly do without that shitload of garbage in every chest, box, sack or drawer and without THOUSANDS of herbs and alchemicals (imagine having 1/40 of them but being genuinely happy to find something, for a change).

Yeah. The Witcher 3 is a good example of a game where I pay zero attention to any of the items and don't anticipate anything regarding them. It just doesn't have any meaning to what actually makes the game good.

"Hmm, a new silver sword, maybe it's slightly better than my previous one"