Development Info Josh Sawyer on Utility and Balance in Game Design

[Captain Shrek]

We all saw Adam "Attempt" IWD. I have a good idea what to expect from him.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Also, a lvl 10 fighter/ 7 cleric is not a lvl17 fighter, right. But he has 15 BAB and in exchange for the loss of 2 attack bonus he has divine favor, bless, prayer, divine power, recitation. I don't see how this char would fare worse than a straight lvl17 fighter unless he decided to make him charismatic or something.

 

[GordonHalfman]

If some of youse guys really don't believe that some battles in BG2 were so significantly easier with a mage that not having one in your party was gimping yourself

So what?

I'm not in the Sawyer-hating crowd, but this is wrong.There is a little thing called backstab.In BG2 it was death for enemy mages.FFS, a high level assasin could deal damage in the tripple-digits.

Backstab is a situational ability that requires a backstab-able enemy, not applicable in a lot of cases.

Same question.
Let's talk about clerics. They're very strong against undead. Is this a problem? Should fighters be able to turn undead? Or do we make take turning work on everyone. Or just take it out the game.

 

[Captain Shrek]

Also, a lvl 10 fighter/ 7 cleric is not a lvl17 fighter, right. But he has 15 BAB and in exchange for the loss of 2 attack bonus he has divine favor, bless, prayer, divine power, recitation. I don't see how this char would fare worse than a straight lvl17 fighter unless he decided to make him charismatic or something.

This is correct. MotB can indeed be "beaten" with a Bard/Cleric/Swashbuckler/Arcane archer build.

 

[Roguey]

If some of youse guys really don't believe that some battles in BG2 were so significantly easier with a mage that not having one in your party was gimping yourself

So what?

The presence of a single class in your party shouldn't have such a drastic effect on difficulty.

Backstab is a situational ability that requires a backstab-able enemy, not applicable in a lot of cases.

Same question.

Classes should have more to do in combat than just an opening attack against certain creatures.

Let's talk about clerics. They're very strong against undead. Is this a problem? Should fighters be able to turn undead? Or do we make take turning work on everyone. Or just take it out the game.

Clerics aren't just the "turn undead" class, they have many other useful actions they can perform in any given combat session.

 

[GordonHalfman]

This is a problem if mages are making the game too easy, but I don't believe they were. The game just expected you to have a mage. But so what? The space of all possible parties that include an arcane caster isn't much smaller than the space of all possible parties. In any case mages only have a drastic effect on the difficulty in certain encounters, assuming they have spells stocked. The point of bringing up clerics is that they do this as well, having a cleric makes undead encounters much easier. The same is true of rogues for encounters they can start with a backstab. Fighters on the other hand usually get the most kills over the course of the game.

We're talking in the context of a party based single player game. The player controls the entire party, and doesn't have any obligation to feel bored or embarrassed on behalf on his imaginary party members every time he feels they aren't pulling their weight. What matters is that the player has enough to do, why does it matter that his rogue has enough to do?

Now it could be argued that in D&D games the player doesn't typically have enough to do, and perhaps melee classes should be given more abilities and stamina/adrenaline bars or whatever. I'm kind of dubious about this but it's not really an argument about balance.

 

[Alex]

I don't think having your approach defined by skills is really the best way a lot of the time. Especially if it's skills picked independently of combat stuff. It basically amounts to you choosing your approach on the chargen and level ups, instead of deciding what to do as new situations come along. If you're good at X skill, obviously you'll use it every time over Y, no choice to be had.

But not every skill is applicable all the time. Using different skills could have different outcomes as well as different difficulties. It might be a lot of work to persuade the barbarians to leave the valley alone and not attack the people there anymore, requiring high skill levels in several different skills and that you pass in different tests to prove yourself worthy. However, doing this could earn them as steadfast allies, whereas the easier option of threatening them would make them flee. But later join up with the ogres when those decide to attack, making that encounter much harder.

It's more interesting to base decisions on what happens in the gameworld, on your own actions - f you're a known slaver you're treated differently than if not, for example. Or you might learn lockpicking from a dude in the gameworld, which opens up some possibilities, and is much more interesting to actually have to go out and seek that skill instead of checking a box upon levelup. But if you just kill the guy who'd taught you, you get a different kind of advantage from that.
Of course, branching like this is much more complex thing to do than just checking if a certain skill is above a threshold and acknowledge that.

This kind of informal skill system was used by many D&D campaigns before an actual system was implemented. One thing that this does is make the game a lot less about "builds". This is a really bad thing to some, as they see making a build as a very important part of character creation. It is where they get to test their skills, and I think it is somewhat akin to making a deck in Magic: the Gathering. However, while I can have a lot of fun with this kind of system, I think having skills divorced from the leveling system like this can be a very good thing!

About this being a lot more work... Well, yeah, you are right, but each situation doesn't need to be completely unique either. Instead of keeping track of everything the character has learned from NPCs, you can keep track of a few skills, and make different NPCs change these differently. Instead of keeping track of each individual you killed, each battle you won and how, you can have various reputations. And so on.

 

[Broseph]

Problem is it's more episodic content BS. Who wants to sit through the same cutscenes over and over? Which comes back again to sawyer being yet another dev who wants to make noninteractive movies, not games.

 

[Captain Shrek]

This is a problem if mages are making the game too easy, but I don't believe they were. The game just expected you to have a mage. But so what? The space of all possible parties that include an arcane caster isn't much smaller than the space of all possible parties. In any case mages only have a drastic effect on the difficulty in certain encounters, assuming they have spells stocked. The point of bringing up clerics is that they do this as well, having a cleric makes undead encounters much easier. The same is true of rogues for encounters they can start with a backstab. Fighters on the other hand usually get the most kills over the course of the game.

We're talking in the context of a party based single player game. The player controls the entire party, and doesn't have any obligation to feel bored or embarrassed on behalf on his imaginary party members every time he feels they aren't pulling their weight. What matters is that the player has enough to do, why does it matter that his rogue has enough to do?

Now it could be argued that in D&D games the player doesn't typically have enough to do, and perhaps melee classes should be given more abilities and stamina/adrenaline bars or whatever. I'm kind of dubious about this but it's not really an argument about balance.

Would it not be:

1) Simpler
2) Elegant
3) Valuable

To design encounters around a party composition (which is exactly what is done in PnP)?

Understandably this can NOT work for cRPGs; fixed scaffold and all that. Some compositions are going to be super awesome than others in combat. The solution to this dilemma is of course tying the NON-combat elements around all the possible party animals, so that every class can "feel" useful. And not just fluff useful with ONE dialogue option (or an insignificant few) over the entire game, but really gameplay affecting multiples. Here's where Overlap helps in computer games. A "balanced" (I leave the quoted word undefined for I am sure that the sensible amongst you know what I mean) overlap will be a rigid scaffold that will still allow "seeming" flexibility around all party compositions.

 

[Castanova]

Well, feel free to disagree, but I feel this model wouldn't be inappropriate even to a Knights of the Chalice like game..

I don't disagree. I just don't think you can accomplish this in a combat-centric pary-based RPG without splitting up combat and non-combat skills, or making other more drastic concessions.

 

[Rake]

Sawyer's approach make sense under a sertain light. Maybe all this class "overlap" really means that it is his way to intoduse multiclassing without naming it so.For examble,you start with a mage and over the course of the game you can leave him a traditional mage, or make him an assasin-mage, or mage with armor and two handed sword, or pistols. If that is the case it seems to me he tries to conbine the class system of IE games with the developing freedom of,lets say Arcanum. I think it has potential if they can pull it of.Don't forget, that Sayer is not alone.Tim Cain is also on board as a senior designer.

 

[Captain Shrek]

Sawyer's approach make sense under a sertain light. Maybe all this class "overlap" really means that it is his way to intoduse multiclassing without naming it so.For examble,you start with a mage and over the course of the game you can leave him a traditional mage, or make him an assasin-mage, or mage with armor and two handed sword, or pistols. If that is the case it seems to me he tries to conbine the class system of IE games with the developing freedom of,lets say Arcanum. I think it has potential if they can pull it of.Don't forget, that Sayer is not alone.Tim Cain is also on board as a senior designer.

And I think you are giving him too much credit by freely interpreting things when they seem to become uncomfortable with this "vision ".

 

[Alex]

Well, feel free to disagree, but I feel this model wouldn't be inappropriate even to a Knights of the Chalice like game..

I don't disagree. I just don't think you can accomplish this in a combat-centric pary-based RPG without splitting up combat and non-combat skills, or making other more drastic concessions.

I dunno, I can see the separation as something validated if the game has everything besides combat either as a quick distraction (like using persuasion to get a better quest reward) or as affecting combat in a specific, clear way (like crafting skills allowing you to create new gear). But if your skills allow you to act half as dynamically as I am suggesting, I think that it would make sense to put this in the hands of the player, or to make them make hard choices for them. Like, bards may suck at combat, but they may have unique skills you can't find otherwise. Or a certain type of mage might be too slow with its spells to really be useful in combat, but he could have all kinds of useful spells for outside combat.

But enough about what I think. Why do you think this would be such a bad idea to allow characters to make their own decisions here? Is it just because of frustration? Or are there more factors I can't see?

 

[Rake]

Sawyer's approach make sense under a sertain light. Maybe all this class "overlap" really means that it is his way to intoduse multiclassing without naming it so.For examble,you start with a mage and over the course of the game you can leave him a traditional mage, or make him an assasin-mage, or mage with armor and two handed sword, or pistols. If that is the case it seems to me he tries to conbine the class system of IE games with the developing freedom of,lets say Arcanum. I think it has potential if they can pull it of.Don't forget, that Sayer is not alone.Tim Cain is also on board as a senior designer.

And I think you are giving him too much credit by freely interpreting things when they seem to become uncomfortable with this "vision ".

I think it comes down to this. Either you think Saywer and Cain know their job and will make an interesting system,or you think that the don't and will make a dumbed down streamlined system for the retarded casual audience. Neither side has enough info at his point to prove one or the other.

 

[Nebuchadnezzar]

"
Update #15: PayPal, Polish and Russian support, $2.5M/$2.6M stretch goals, new reddit Q&A, classes, and art!

Update #15 ·

Barbarians come from many of the more remote cultures found across the world. In the Dyrwood, they are commonly found among Glanfathan elf communities. They are distinguished from fighters by their recklessness, ferocity, and their predilection to substitute raw aggression for discipline. Barbarians are a challenge to deal with on a battlefield, though they are vulnerable to exhaustion if they don't pace themselves.
Ciphers are uncommon and often misunderstood individuals with extraordinary mental abilities. Like wizards and priests, they have many talents that draw directly from their souls, but ciphers have the unique ability to peer through the spiritual energy of the world to manipulate other souls. While wizards use complex formulae in large tomes and priests tap into the passion of their faith, ciphers are able to operate directly through the power of their minds... and yours.
But wait, we're not done yet! We've been reading a lot of feedback online about classes, companions, and party composition options. We want to give people the ability to build their parties as they like and we also want to allow people to experience the full spectrum of class mechanics. Companions go a long way toward achieving that goal while also providing a ton of reactivity in the world. Even so, we'd like to do more.
Classes: the "Core Four"

Classes in Project Eternity are meant to provide a general framework for character types. Different classes excel in different areas, but the framework can be extended and elaborated on in a multitude of ways to create characters with unique capabilities. If you see a fighter, chances are good that he or she is going to be able to take a lot of damage, but that's about all you can be sure of. If you see a wizard, he or she probably has some hard-hitting spells that can cover a large area, but his potential list of capabilities is vast.
If you want to create a wizard who wears plate armor and hacks away with a broadsword from behind a heavily-enhanced arcane veil, we want to let you do that. If your idea of the perfect fighter is one who wears light armor and uses a variety of dazzling rapier attacks in rapid succession, we want to help you make that character. So it's good to think of Project Eternity's classes as being purpose-ready but not purpose-limited.
To date, through our Kickstarter campaign, you have helped us fund seven classes. In our design, we started with the "core four" because they are the most broadly familiar and also some of the most versatile: the fighter, the priest, the rogue, and the wizard. To these four, you helped us add three specialized, but popular, classes: the ranger, the monk, and the druid. The design of each class has a solid, distinctive base set of abilities that remain in most builds, but will have a large number of optional specializations and alterations to give players a high level of flexibility in developing an individual character's particular style.
Though we are still early in development, we'd like to let you know the rough ideas on what the core four” classes of Project Eternity encompass:"

I think this should be a good refresher.

 

[Captain Shrek]

Nebuchadnezzar

There is Much more to this story apparently, concerning especially this overlap thing we are talking about. Providing single article to base that argument on is kind of fallacious. Probably someone can find a video / post on which this discussion is based and post that too.

 

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Nebuchadnezzar

There is Much more to this story apparently, concerning especially this overlap thing we are talking about. Providing single article to base that argument on is kind of fallacious. Probably someone can find a video / post on which this discussion is based and post that too.

Except I'm not making an argument for or against the current system at all.

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

Well, the kickstarter pitch is probably the best place to start, since that is where Obsidian was describing the game as a whole and the features they planned to implement in somewhat concrete terms. For example, they described the classes they would implement. Everything that I've seen causing panic, rage and sadness ITT is based on Sawyer's very high-level discussion of principles he applies to game design generally, with very little detail about what they are actually doing with P:E itself.

 

[Infinitron]

Well, the kickstarter pitch is probably the best place to start, since that is where Obsidian was describing the game as a whole and the features they planned to implement in somewhat concrete terms. For example, they described the classes they would implement. Everything that I've seen causing panic, rage and sadness ITT is based on Sawyer's very high-level discussion of principles he applies to game design generally, with very little detail about what they are actually doing with P:E itself.

Yes. And most of those raging people are comparing Sawyer's high-level principles to their own vision of the "Ultimate Codexian Game", instead of viewing those principles in the proper context of an Infinity Engine-like, D&D-ish game.

 

[Captain Shrek]

Well, the kickstarter pitch is probably the best place to start, since that is where Obsidian was describing the game as a whole and the features they planned to implement in somewhat concrete terms. For example, they described the classes they would implement. Everything that I've seen causing panic, rage and sadness ITT is based on Sawyer's very high-level discussion of principles he applies to game design generally, with very little detail about what they are actually doing with P:E itself.

Probably you should read the Topic title again.

 

[Alex]

Yes. And most of those raging people are comparing Sawyer's high-level principles to their own vision of the "Ultimate Codexian Game", instead of viewing those principles in the proper context of an Infinity Engine-like, D&D-ish game.

Well, for what is worth, I am comparing them to my own vision of the "Ultimate, Codexian, Infinity Engine-like, Old School D&D-ish Game".

 

[Infinitron]

Yes. And most of those raging people are comparing Sawyer's high-level principles to their own vision of the "Ultimate Codexian Game", instead of viewing those principles in the proper context of an Infinity Engine-like, D&D-ish game.

Well, for what is worth, I am comparing them to my own vision of the "Ultimate, Codexian, Infinity Engine-like, Old School D&D-ish Game".

Yes, Alex, but you have to ask yourself, does really it make sense to:

1) Whine about the skill system in the spiritual successor to a series of games which featured little to no skill usage?

2) Whine about cooldowns between battles in the spiritual successor to a series of games notorious for encouraging rest spamming?

3) Whine about "blurred" class roles in the spiritual successor to a series of games which featured multiple wacky multi-classing options?

 

[St. Toxic]

Everything that I've seen causing panic, rage and sadness ITT is based on Sawyer's very high-level discussion of principles he applies to game design generally, with very little detail about what they are actually doing with P:E itself.

However, arguing against these general design principles is countered with the misguided rebuttal that "P:E is this and that, which makes the principles 'o.k' in this one specific context."

Thus, measuring a game-designers ideas against your own standards, deluded "Ultimate Codexian Game" though they may be, is a no-go because P:E just isn't an "Ultimate Codexian Game" and is exempt from criticism on the popamole front. At the same time, these ideas in no way reflect on P:E, because they're just general design principles and won't necessarily find their way to P:E. Must be nice having both bases covered.

 

[Infinitron]

Everything that I've seen causing panic, rage and sadness ITT is based on Sawyer's very high-level discussion of principles he applies to game design generally, with very little detail about what they are actually doing with P:E itself.

However, arguing against these general design principles is countered with the misguided rebuttal that "P:E is this and that, which makes the principles 'o.k' in this one specific context."

Thus, measuring a game-designers ideas against your own standards, deluded "Ultimate Codexian Game" though they may be, is a no-go because P:E just isn't an "Ultimate Codexian Game" and is exempt from criticism on the popamole front. At the same time, these ideas in no way reflect on P:E, because they're just general design principles and won't necessarily find their way to P:E. Must be nice having both bases covered.

I would think that conceding that a game is not the Ultimate Codexian Game, nor striving to be it, is damning enough on its own.

 

[Johannes]

So what would be closest to the Ultimate Codexian Game - Grimoire, AoD, or PE? Or WL2?