Messages

31

General / Re: Uhm, the economical and crafting sistems stil need some more loving..

« on: January 20, 2015, 09:27:10 pm »

But you do get rewarded for straying from the main path, you get equipment, material, quests, experience, interesting story-lines etc. It's not all about the loot you know.

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General / Re: Uhm, the economical and crafting sistems stil need some more loving..

« on: January 20, 2015, 09:13:35 pm »

Have you gotten past the drill part El? Because that's when the game opens up and really reward player behaviour that is not exploitative (not that it ever does); such as scavenging, exploring, crafting etc. I tend to think about the part before that as an introduction, sort of like how New Vegas funneled you around the map before hitting new Vegas were the game truly opens up. I've found that I only go to traders if I need healing items or if there's something I really, really need for crafting or repair kits. Because most useful items you get, you get from exploring the game, not exploiting its systems. I'm still not sure if this is a real game design problem or if it's the systems not lining up with your preferences.

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General / Re: Uhm, the economical and crafting sistems stil need some more loving..

« on: January 20, 2015, 03:24:49 pm »

You also discover quests, you get new equipment, you gain exp and you meet interesting characters. That's well enough reason to explore and then some.

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General / Re: Uhm, the economical and crafting sistems stil need some more loving..

« on: January 20, 2015, 02:07:18 pm »

You get materials that can be used for crafting, you get better guns, ammo. You also get oddities if that's the xp system you play with. There's lots of reasons to go off the beaten path.

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General / Re: Uhm, the economical and crafting sistems stil need some more loving..

« on: January 20, 2015, 01:14:16 pm »

Underrail incentivise you to not do what you do El, by making that stuff aggrevating and boring. The game outright discourage you to pick up everything, that's what I meant a few pages back when I said that the point of the looting in Underrail is not to hoard, it's to scavenge. You are supposed to leave stuff behind. And it is - no matter how much you disagree with that or how annoying it is -  your choice whether you want to participate in that system or not. Just like how I don't like the way stealth characters progress in the game (I have already aired my opinion on it so I won't repeat myself) you just have to readjust your expectations and simply deal with it, just like everyone else. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh but it's the reality of it.

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General / Re: Uhm, the economical and crafting sistems stil need some more loving..

« on: January 12, 2015, 02:26:09 pm »

Taking into account that you can chose a max of 8 skills (divide starting points by 15) and you stick 5 crafting skills and 3 psionic skills, I don't see where you get enough for lockpicking, hacking and a social skill of your liking. That would requir you to have 45 extra starting skill points and 15 extra skill points per level.

But you can put skill points into other skills as you level up. You don't need to max every starter skill every level, especially if you're in a position where that's not required to progress or in need of those skill points. I usually never pick biology when I start out, but I put 20 points into it when I first level up just so that I can get the doctor feat, but that leaves me with not having maxed one or two of my starter skill, but I make sure I sacrifice the skills I don't need to have a high level at the moment, relative to my character level of course.

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General / Re: Uhm, the economical and crafting sistems stil need some more loving..

« on: January 02, 2015, 10:40:01 pm »

I'm not entirely sure where this supposed large subset of player that dislike the system are. I've gone through this forum, the steam forum and Desura reviews and I can't see a significant number of them. On Desura I couldn't find any, on here it's just you and a few other people, on the Steam forums I haven't seen any and on the Steam reviews there's a couple of people. I honestly don't know where you're finding them because I don't.

How did I arrive at these numbers. Do i really need to have numbers to understand that people don't like playing games that aren't fun for them? And that games that have bad mechanics suck out the fun of the game? I'm trying not to be sarcastic here but come on...

Well, I assumed you had a good basis for what you're saying that's why I asked. See above


I think we've just gotten into a "I'm right you're wrong" argument so I'm going to blow this off now. We've strayed away from discussing my original point enough that I don't really see a point in continuing, as it's getting pretty heated.

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General / Re: Uhm, the economical and crafting sistems stil need some more loving..

« on: January 02, 2015, 02:49:01 pm »

You keep saying that but there's no way of knowing for sure whether that's the case or not. The majority of RPG do have carry limits and if it was such a huge problem that you make it out to be then it wouldn't be part of the modern formula. Even Skyrim has carry limit and that game is widely praised as one of the best RPGs ever made, give or take. I have a hard time believing the carry weight is going to be the downfall of Underrail because that have never happened before with any other game. If the current audience is anything to go by (because it's the only thing we can surely examine right now) the worst case scenario is that some people will stop playing it  entirely (which is already the case) but most people will play it despite the carry weight.

As someone once said about what makes a great RPG. Remove all busy work from it! Have no such things as fetch quests. Have no carry limits. Have no limits to the amount of things you can sell.

That someone is..?

Make your game stand by the solidity of it's good mechanics, don't add mechanics that waste people's time.

The same could just as easily be said about anything if you're not ready to play by the rules of the game. If you try to game the system you will get punished for it.

Some people do not mind time wasting mechanics or mechanics that cheat them out of their stuff. That is ok but those people are a minority.

How did you arrive at that conclusion? Is there a statistic on this?

You do are right that I keep saying the same thing over and over again, but this is something that needs to either be changed or at least have an option implemented as soon as possible. The reason is that when the game is released it's working well with a proper trade system.

"Proper" is a strong word. Some people like it, some people don't. Only time will tell if the current system is going to be well received or not. Fiddle with mechanics and system because a few people said they don't like it isn't a great idea by any stretch in any field, and this comes from a developer myself.

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General / Re: Uhm, the economical and crafting sistems stil need some more loving..

« on: January 02, 2015, 01:22:35 pm »

No mater how much you want to try and shy away from common practice, loot is at the end of the day exactly that. Either something you use or money. You want it as a part of a gun, it has a use. It's an armor better than yours? It has a use. When it doesn't has a use then it has a monetary value so that if useful stuff doesn't drops, you buy it.

That's your perspective yes and it may be common practice in some games but far from all. I listed numerous examples of how loot is used differently, to different ends.

Everything in underrail is useful! can you tell me of something that you pickup that has no use? Even if you can I'm sure it's something incredibly rare. Everything has a use. Society has collapsed, the few survivors life in the metro and bunker dug and fortified inside the earth. Resources are scarse, do you think people who scavnge for stuff wouldn't horde and sell everything? If they found a place with stuff they'd pick it clean! Eveything has a value!

But does it have value to you? This is where the itemization becomes interesting to me. The carry weight is not in the game for the fun of it. It's to encourage you to think long about what kind of stuff you want to fill your inventory with. If you use and craft crossbows and grenades, you will pick up crossbow parts and chemicals above anything else, because it's the skill that keeps you alive. If you find a random piece of loot that doesn't have actual value to your character, what item will you compromise to pick it up? Should you pick it up or hold on to your more valuable items instead?

Obviously people can't carry a train on their back nor do the merchants really have unlimited amounts of money. But this is where gammy sense has to overcome real sense and if needed you can justify it very very easily. You can have some sort of backapack that can magicly (or tecnologicaly) store whatever you put inside and with no weight associated to it. Merchants will never buy you anything at all, each town has a storage which buy anything and everything, they have quite literally tons of money. Merchants only buy things from storage to sell so the storage just has lots of money because merchants need to aquire stuff from them. Easy to justify things if you really want but above all, it stands to reason that gammy sense has to prevail over real sense in some parts to make things work.

It's not like the itemization and trading doesn't work. It does, it's just not tailored to your style of play.

Also it's wrong to compare this to ARPGs (or hack and slash games as I call it). In ARPGs you are put in a situation that it's neither profitable nor timely to get every piece of loot. White loot won't even pay for a scroll and the time lost in going to town every 10 seconds would make playing the game pointless... Even then there are ARPGs that do that right. Look at Sacred 2 and you have a perfect example. You have a huge inventory and you can instantly sell from the inventory at a smaller margin but the value of white items are not high so the loss is insignificant, meanwhile you keep getting every piece of loot and selling and not stop playing thus not breaking game immersion. Do they bother explaining how you can do that? No, why would they? It's a thing meant to keep you playing and have fun, it only has to make gammy sense, not real sense... But going back to proper RPGs which use a turn based system you are supposed to pick up everything. Take fallout 2 as an example. Did you leave any loot behind? I know I didn't. I know I sold everything I got my hands on! If there was too much loot  I'd store everything I couldn't carry in a closet near the exit and make trips back and forth. this is where the game could have used a little bit of a hand. No carry limits would make those parts less boring and keep you constantly engaged on the fun. Similarly there was no unlimited amount of money on merchants but in any given place they could always buy all I had and if not I'd just start getting stimpacks as money replacements since you use a lot of them anyway. There was no limit or this type only of items that they bought from you and again, if they had unlimited money, it would only have made it better because again, it would have less of boring trading time and more time engaged in playing the actual game.

I wasn't comparing the games per se but their respective view on what loot is and its value. Loot in Underrail is clearly not meant to picked up at all times, if you want to do that, you need to make sacrifices, just like you mentioned you did in Fallout 2. Like most of the loot in The Elder Scrolls is just decoration and world building and how items give you lore in Dark souls, they have different reasons to exist and Underrail excercise its itemization to encourage scavenging and if you embrace that, it's a damn fine itemization system. If you don't, or if you can't for some reason, then it's probably not the very best system, but that goes for everything.

I understand that Styg has different views for his game and I do respect that he wants to do some things differently. But in these areas  I feel it's an exercice in futility. People don't like these things. People don't like to have their time wasted or feel like they are being cheated out of their money. He could have dealt with it the same way he dealt with the oddity system. Make it an option, not an obligation... At any rate it's very likely people will mod these exact things I'm talking about. It might take a long time or it might come up quickly. But it's sure to be expected to happen either way because most people won't like it as it is. The same will go for the crafting, I'm sure someone will mod it to make crafting useful from the very start but that's a whole new can of worms.

I agree that making it an option would be cool but I think I've answered this very exact thing a few months back. Can't seem to find it right now though.

What I mean is. If it's already well known that mechanics which make people feel cheated of their stuff or make people feel like it's wasting their time is pretty much widely disliked. Why go so hard on making sure the game has it? Why give the moders the credit for making a game good instead of the developers taking the credit for having made a good game? Again, so long as there is options and you can chose whether or you want those mechanics or not, then there is no problem.

I haven't actually seen a lot of dislike for the itemization. I can count on my fingers the amount of times someone have complained about it, most people actually like how the itemization works otherwise it would be a hot topic frequently but it really isn't. And I'm pretty sure Stygian won't expect their audience to "fix" their game for them, and even if they do it's to satisfy a relatively small portion of their audience, given the low amounts of complaints on the area.

Of course you can say those can be added last and you'd be right, but then how much testing is the game going to have with those options? Sure the early access is mostly a way to gain revenue to help funding the game but still, if you can use feedback to improve the game then it should be used in all aspects of the game.

You have given your feedback, time and time again. And people have listened, and replied. Styg have listened, and replied. Though not in your favour because he have other plans but he have indeed listened. I've given my rather less favourable opinion on the leveling system but I don't expect him to change it if he have better plans, I've given my feedback and that's enough. It's fine to throw your opinion out there, if it sticks, cool! if it doesn't then I don't see the point in nagging.

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General / Re: Uhm, the economical and crafting sistems stil need some more loving..

« on: January 02, 2015, 03:08:02 am »

Loot is never junk, loot is money!

That brings up a pretty interesting point actually. Generally "loot" is refering to stuff you pick up to sell, basically it's a never ending but slow source of currency. But is that all it is and can be? it really gets down to what you expect from loot in games and you're no stranger to sharing your view on it Elhazzared and it's that loot is either to sell or to use, to a greater or lesser extent and often if not always without compromise. Leaving it behind is not an option for you because loot is never a waste from your perspective and that's fine. The thing is, this clashes with how loot is portrayed in Underrail: not always useful and if it is, you often have to compromise if you want to acquire said piece of loot, either by dropping one or more things or going back and sell your existing loot. Loot is not a source of income in Underrail more than it is a possible resource for crafting or exchange of equipment. This is strongly reinforced through having carry weight and the way traders work, you're not supposed to pick everything up, you're supposed to make the decision on the spot whether the thing that dropped is worth investing in, because that's how things work here. You're scavenging for the most useful, you're not hoarding.

More to the point, Underrail (in it's current stage) doesn't exactly shy away from the way its itemization works either. The first time you get back from the caves (with the power stations) you can't sell all the stuff you carry. This signifies that not only do you have to be picky about what kind of stuff you get, but it also reflects how merchants operate in Underrail, why would they purchase things that they won't have any use for or will be able to forward to other traders (based on what kinds of goods they trade with)? after all, merchants in Underrail don't have unlimited amounts of currency either. You are all in this boat together, following the same basic core principle: scavenge, don't hoard. And this is talking from a strictly thematic perspective. In the game's previous iterations, this was not present, but that can easily be attributed to the fact that it was in early alpha stages and the idea wasn't fully developed at the time, but what do I know really, I'm just guessing?

Even in Diablo 3, most of the loot drop was intentionally worthless simply just so that the monsters would explode with loot, you were not supposed to the pick it up. And that game was an ARPG, a genre built entirely around loot. In Divinity, a lot of the loot is decoration, only there to enhance the world building, the same goes for the Elder Scrolls. In the Souls series, loot items literally told you the lore of the game through its description. This goes to show that loot is not strictly one thing or the other. It can be used for a lot of different things depending on context, and the ways loot have been treated in games throughout the years effectively demonstrates that. And just as all things it comes down to preference whether you like it or not. I for one thinks the loot system and implications it has is very interesting, not only from a designer perspective but from a gameplay one as well, it encourages me to follow the rules of the world and that immerses me. For you, not so much.

Maybe this was all just a bunch of mumbo jumbo for you guys but I'm not really that much into the technicalities and numbers, just wanted to share my view on this whole loot thing.

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Suggestions / Re: Some thing that could be slightly changed, possible spoilers inside

« on: December 27, 2014, 11:47:40 am »

Interesting, I play almost exclusively stealth characters in Underrail and I've never encountered this problem (except Tanner, like Epeli pointed out). If you invest 100% in stealth than this is not a problem, do you have an idea of how much stealth and detection you have? It might be that your character just isn't up to snuff.

As for defense, I've never felt that my characters were cheated by the mechanics due to what kind of defensive strategy I use. Sure, if I tank all the damage then it's a problem but that not the fault of the game, that's me lacking tactics and strategy. As long as you find ways to avoid damage rather than reducing it, then low defense characters work just fine.

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Suggestions / Re: Action bar accepting equipment.

« on: December 16, 2014, 10:49:19 pm »

Since this game is inspired by NWN why not make action bar accept equipable items? You know, armors, weapons, helmets, boots.
If more than one such item could go into single slot it would be terrific.

+1

This is something I've thought about but never mentioned on the forums. I'd love to see a feature like this, it quickly becomes a chore during the more exhausting battles where you need to switch up in the midst of it.

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Development Log / Re: Dev Log #36: Version 0.1.13.0 released; Development Roadmap

« on: December 16, 2014, 11:15:57 am »

Great stuff, making a new character right now but I have one question: the melee skill now says "Strength or Dexterity" as its base ability, what does that mean exactly? do you get bonus to you melee from both strength and dexterity or just the one you have the most invested in? Shouldn't say 'and' instead of 'or'?

It uses either Strength or Dexterity, whichever is higher.

Got it, thanks Epeli.

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Development Log / Re: Dev Log #36: Version 0.1.13.0 released; Development Roadmap

« on: December 15, 2014, 06:35:32 pm »

Great stuff, making a new character right now but I have one question: the melee skill now says "Strength or Dexterity" as its base ability, what does that mean exactly? do you get bonus to you melee from both strength and dexterity or just the one you have the most invested in? Shouldn't say 'and' instead of 'or'?

I'm curious about those signs as well.

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General / Re: [Poll] Which XP system do you prefer?

« on: November 13, 2014, 11:24:13 am »

There's no "both" option? I usually use the one that fits with my playstyle, and it varies between the two.