Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Player-Created 'Dungeons', but not so fast....
Timberhick
Member UncommonPosts: 554
Sounds nifty doesn't it?
But wait, there's more...
Also on Dec 1, 2015 we have a QnA with Soulbound and questions arise from this very Journal entry which, I'll list here
Question 1 “How will good detective skill affect the way you perceive traps in someone's dungeon? Can a skilled detective see where traps are in some way, or are they just as blind as the rest of the intruders"?
Soulbound: We’re working on how the different detective skills work in relationship to traps, right now it’s just based on your perception, your perception is a combination of your intuition skills which is a social skill and your reason which is a mental skill. So those two combined kinda give us an overall idea of how perceptive you are as well as how intuitive you are as to where things might be. But that’s obviously separate from a person's ability to actively search for something. Which is kinda of where the difference of detective skills comes from instead of just passive perception and at this point we haven’t had a chance to do a lot of work on the active search skills.
Comment: So do you think the detective work, for example a detective skill that would help you kind of deduce riddles or problems within the dungeon, or was that skillset originally supposed to be around determining ‘who done it’?
Soulbound: No I think that would fall under the bardic skill tree. The different skills are related to understanding different languages. I don’t know whether or not there’s a specific puzzle solving skill aside from forensics and doing the whole ‘who done it’ kind of thing. But I don’t know whether or not the same forensic skill will be used for exploring dungeons or whether or not that’s gonna be left more up to player observation. I just don’t know if there’s a character skill for that. I kinda feel it just needs to be something the player does, like we could add extra game mechanics for the platformer but that’s just kinda a built in player reflex sort of thing, so that’s probably the direction we’ll go with that. But it’s still early days on those systems so we’ll know more within the next 3-6 months.
Comment: I guess right now we’re talking the difference between player skill platform or character skill detective work, trying to get to the bottom of where your mind is on this. So trap-finding and disarming is that a player skill challenge or character skill challenge.Soulbound: The detection right now is more a combination character and player perception, like do you know where to look for these things? Do you opt to actively search inside the correct locations or are you just blindly walking in and forget to do any kind of investigative work, the disarming is definitely a skill challenge and at this point the skill works a lot like lock-picking.
Question 2 “Would detective skills be part of the skill set of disarming traps?”
Soulbound: No that would definitely be a deviant skill.
Did you notice it?
Soulbound goes into land ownership, obtaining/leasing land, keys, hidden safes, traps, guards, then goes onto damage like fire, finally ends with a bit about making a dungeon in the Dev Journal, which is 'hype'....when asked how this is going to work from a player perspective...they haven't figured out that part quite yet.
Did you also notice the number of skills?
'A hierarchical skill system and Character Roles that encourage people to specialize in order to create a unique persona in the world'
Kinda makes you wonder how that is going to be accomplished.
Comments
Have we heard anything yet on character slots?Reason why is i was thinking about the death and all these skills.I am thinking they don't want players just killing their toon and restarting every time they find out something on the skill patterns.
I also wonder about the limitations on skills.Realistically a person could learn every skill under the sun but would be unrealistic that they became very good at more than 1-2.I am also not sure why so much banter on the detective skill in someone else's house,i would hope the game is not full of easy entry into homes.I would expect entry to another home to be so minute ,it would hardly justify many skills in that area.
On player dungeons,i was thinking more along the lines of basements and not really full blown dungeons.However i guess i can see how that flies since all that content would instanced at least i think it would be.I can picture players spending days on end burrowing under ground with 500 passages lmao.
One of my biggest concerns is past everything i have heard so far,,which has been great btw.My concern is the content outside of player interactions and skills,is there more to use skills on than other players and homes?Is there going to be any creatures in game that you could possibly steal from or interact with.Will there be any wandering nemesis/foes to worry about that are not players?
How about diseases/illness/injury,is there going to be a healer/medical skill?
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
so if u create a new charr u cant say for sure u dont have a gift unless u play that character for a while.
The engine part of gaming is the most difficult to get done, lots of parts need to work together.
Soulbound admits to not having figured out the engine part of just this little bit, what does that mean for the rest of the game?
What have we seen so far from CoE? Graphics.
The term Player Dungeon, to me, is not a true dungeon. A player or group enter an unknown space (house with tunnel), face traps, dangers, animals, enemies to get to the final end, the owner of the house and the sell-swords (Raid Boss with Minions) to get a hidden treasure. Sounds like a dungeon crawl to me, only it is in a house.
And to your last question about the number of skills. I am sure there will be plenty. Unlike other games where you had to be multi-roll (a little healing here, a little crafting there), to be effective you will need to concentrate on a single skill type. You will not see a sword swinging Champion at the local blacksmith shop fixing his own sword. Nor will you see a local blacksmith exploring the depths of a cave. You need to pick a roll (of sorts) and stick with it. If you need anything else, it must be traded for or found another way (forcing character interactions and interdependancy).
@Morwynn Best go back over how many skills that takes. Takes a bit more than 2 skills.
Here's some help
However that is not what hype is,hype is what you perceive not what we already see or know for fact.
The way i see it,what else would we hype,moba's?There are tons of cheap games going around and when i say cheap i mean REALLY cheap.Geesh i remember people hyping Darkest Dungeons,i just shook my head and said seriously?Nobody even mentions it anymore,i doubt anyone even plays it anymore and it became that way after only 2 weeks.
If you haven't figured it out yet,my point is we have NOT been witnessing hype in this gaming market,we have been witnessing ADVERTISING.Hype is created by gamer's,marketing is created by websites who get paid to endorse CRAP games.
Even SC that someone mentioned had absolutely NOTHING for several months,that game never became a serious vision or even a possibility of quality until they hit around the 60 million mark.If they never got past 20,i would bet anything the game would have been below average at best.It didn't even have Squadron at that budget,can you just imagine how shallow that game was going to be and yet it received hype lol.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
It seems after developing the game for so long, and understanding the concepts themselves, it is tricky to remeber that clarity of terms is really important to those of us getting to grops with their game. I suppose part of that comes from interviewing developers rather than PR agents, but it is something I really hope they work on. While they did use the word 'skills' a lot in the Q&A reposnes from what we have seen previously they were actually taking about a couple of concepts:
Attributes - When Caspian spoke about intuition being Social and reason being Mental, these are attributes rather than skills. This was discussed back in developer journal three (http://chroniclesofelyria.com/blog/347-Design-Journal-3--Time-Aging-and-Offline-Player-Characters). Now here is where the use of unclear terms gets confusing, if perception is just a combination of two attrributes does that just make it a secondary attribute or is it actually a skill?
Skill Trees - All skills fall under one of six skill trees. They are just umbrella names that cover them all, and anything you learn in one skill in a tree infers slight bonuses to everything else in the tree. Bardic and Deviant are both skill trees, rather than skills themselves as was covered in Developer Journal eight (http://chroniclesofelyria.com/blog/620-DJ-8-Character-Roles-and-Skill-Advancement). They are sort of opposed with deviant being the 'bad' skills and bardic being the 'good' skills. So devinat forging contracts, bardic writing contracts.
Player Input / Discussion - 'We don't know if we want to make this a skill or just leave it up to players input' is discussion. It is talking about ideas with us, it is hinting that currently they are erring on the side of player input and having no character skill for it. Remember this is a game in development and they do like to talk to us and feel free to express their current thoughts and opinions. That is good! They even gave us a time frame for when they think they are going to have that fully ironed out. Sometimes it might come down to player testing, if they do not at a character skills is there enough a player can do on their own? Is it still fun?
Skills - Yes actual skills too, though in there the ones they talked about were forsensics (not currently relevant to traps), languages (not currently relevant to traps? I can not work out why this was mentioned to be honest...), and a disarming skill (very relevant to traps!).
So how many skills does it take to find a trap? Possibly 0 though could be up to 2, depending on if perseption is a skill or an attribute and whether they decide to add a character skill to trap detection.
How many does it take to disarm them? 1.
Now, I do agree the game currently does have a lot of skills planned. Some of those skills will be very similar to each other (such as multiple skills for the different languages) so as not to take up much developement time, and others very different (forensics or cartography aregood examples) that really will stretch things. It might be too much, it might not, I think a lot will depend on funding.
Again notice the total number of skills it will take and compare that to Soulbound's statement of
'A hierarchical skill system and Character Roles that encourage people to specialize in order to create a unique persona in the world'
Nice to see their Attribute system is a blatant ripoff from White Wolf. As is the skill system. Must have been a fan of Vampire.
As I said there are aiming at a large number of skills and it will not be feasible to learn them all, if their design goes to plan. So that means if you are focusing on the three (max) that lead to disarming a trap you are not focusing on all those that are in the Crafting Tree, Combat Tree, Gathering Tree or Bardic Tree (most likely). Even when you look at the Deviant Tree you are focusing on disarming traps and not creating false ideties, forcing contracts, making disguises, pickpocketing etc.
I think if they are able to deliver the skills they have suggested they will then you are going to see the speacialisation they have spoken about. Now that is one huge if as I said before!
That's just one part of what is needed in a dungeon, how much will be able to crossover to other parts of the game?
Let's not forget the pixel-bitching part as well.
Every single game in existence can be compared to other ideas and in most cases look to be complete rip offs in their entire design.
If this game took 100 ideas from FFXI i would be giddily happy,don't expect it,doesn't bother me either way.
There is without argument no other game currently in market like this game so i would say they are doing a good job so far to stay clear of any CLONE title.
Also remember they are trying to give us insight and some tidbits of the game that is not even very close to fruition,so should cut them some slack,ideas can change a lot from now till then.This is not like every game we have seen where they are calling unfinished crap an Alpha early access,pay us now to get in on it idea.Nope they are not asking for money,just sharing with us their vision of the game ideas.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
As for how much will cross over, persoanlly I think there will be some need to focus on a particualr area of gameplay if you want to be the best at it. Iif you want to do it all, you simply will not be as good as those who choose a certain path. However, from the developer journal about crafting (http://chroniclesofelyria.com/blog/663-DJ-9-Crafting--Professions) we know that speacilisation is still a mix of skills, and not just focusing on one. It is just choosing skills that work together to meet one goal.
There is also an element of player thought here, early on there are not going to be huge numbers of highly fortified dungeons. That means if your end goal is to be trap disarmer it might be worth looking at the other skills that are going to contribute to that skill (so in a simialr location in the skill tree) and using ones that are more useful outside of a dungeon and transitioning later in the game.
We, gamers, don't know how this is going to work out and according to the current DJ Soulbound doesn't quite know all of it yet either. That may or may not be a cause for concern. Who knows, only time will tell.
Look at Ark, there are feature that change during playtime in early access. Actually coded in then changed.
They could have released a design Journal about how inventory limits work pre change and we'd have the exact same situation we do now with half these 'debates '
Finite Resources, WYSIWYG looting to player created and maintained maps and a deep modular crafting system. So much more that hasn't been said, ask questions! Post your thoughts! Spread the word of COE!
If you haven't yet, register with my referrer code on the official website: B0E240
However, my reasons for doing Physical, Mental, and Social were unrelated to my time playing V:TM. Those simply came from me thinking about what aspects there are to our existence. The first two were the easiest - mind & body. The last one took quite a while to settle on, and the specific names for the Social dimension : Intuition, Persuasion, and Leadership took even longer. For a long time I was using Charisma, Luck, and other random things for the third dimension.
As to what axes exist on each dimension - D&D's system of Strength, Dexterity, and Stamina made it obvious to me that within each form of existence there needed to be a Force, some form of Agility, and then some type of Endurance. Each attribute was orthogonal to the other, but related.
In the end, the attributes were added to CoE in the same way that every other mechanic has been added to CoE. I was sitting at my desk journaling. I wasn't searching the web, evaluating other systems, or anything. Every single system has come from my own ideas save for one - the way in which houses are built. I really liked the feel of how The Sims did home-building. So the blue-print system was designed with that in mind.
Every other mechanic has been my own design. Does that mean they weren't influenced? No. Does it mean books I've read, movies I've watched, or other games I've played haven't influenced me at a sub-conscious level? Of course not.
But it does mean I have never - Never - looked at a specific design idea and said "I'm going to do that in CoE."
Owner/CEO of Soulbound Studios
ChroniclesOfElyria.com
We don't know everything. We're developing the game using Agile methodologies, including developing a thin vertical slice to prove our end-to-end design.
This means we "know we'll have skills" and even "how some skills will work", but not "what every skill is, or every pattern for every skill." For us, at the moment, that's enough. It allows us to prove the concept of skills and skill trees without having to worry about every last detail at this point in development. We don't have to know *all* the skills we'll have. Because we know how to add new skills later.
This is the most cost-effective way for us to develop the game, and it's an example of how we're doing things smarter than many other game companies, not the opposite.
We prove out a concept and then move onto proving out the next difficult concept, rather than rabbit-holing all the details of a single system this early in development.
We're doing it this way to reduce risk for us and for players. By exploring the challenges of the systems in great enough depth that we feel confident that we've got a viable solution, and then moving on to other challenges, it builds confidence in our ability to flesh out the entire game at a future point - when we've got additional resources to do so.
So rather than looking at the fact we don't have all the questions answered at one month into having a temporary office, instead, be assured that we're moving forward quickly, making great progress, and being intelligent about how we make decisions.
Owner/CEO of Soulbound Studios
ChroniclesOfElyria.com
As to the attribute issue. I don't know what to say without it sounding 'negative', it's easy to look up for anyone who bothers to.