Night person, Skills and game balancing...

Odin

Carbon Dated and Proud
Admin
While going through the IPLY Forums, I noticed that JE had posted in several threads and here's what he said:

About the night person trait (ie bring it back):<blockquote>I liked Night Person because it was very easy to understand and very straightfoward in implementation. These hours = bonus. The rest of the time = penalty. Sometimes it could be very advantageous if the person planned ahead, but many times, the player can't choose to do something at a certain time. Random encounters often show up during the day. Certain people can only be found/talked to/attacked during the day.</blockquote>So your opinion about this trait is what, JE ?
Link: Night Person trait thread

About skill points and weighted point buy:<blockquote>A weighted skill scale allows the jack-of-all-trades to remain competitive with the specialist. The specialist, in return, gains access to better perks that have high skill ratings as their prerequisite.

EDIT: It also does a decent job approximating real-life learning curves. The margin of difference between a great violinist and a virtuoso is actually not large. However, the effort a virtuoso puts into attaining that level of skill is often double that of his or her slightly lesser comrades.</blockquote>Okie, dokie..moving on...
Link: Thread

And in a thread about too much game balancing could ruin the fun of the game, Je had his hands full and replied several times. Here's a good quote:<blockquote>You've convinced me. I'm going to bump up Gifted's bonus to +12 primary attribute points and make the penalty -3 skill points/level.</blockquote>Anyone else notice the sarcasm here? There's more where that came from..
Link: thread

About the Van Buren engine:<blockquote>DirectX, optimized for NVIDIA cards (currently GeForce 2 +) with best visuals from a GeForce 3 +. Mostly static geometry with pre-burned lightmaps altered by dynamic lights. Dynamic objects have dynamic volumetric shadows, but the user can bump that down to drop shadows if they want. Polygon counts on characters are typically in the 1,000-1,300 range. Most human-sized PCs use a single 256x256 texture that is stitched together from all of their individual skin/hair/equipment textures at runtime. Creatures that are generally more "static" use a single texture that is not stitched. Size varies.</blockquote>Not much to say about this.
Link: Thread
 
The thread about game balancing was pretty entertaining. "Slowtrain" vs "J.E.": Sarcasm Showdown!

As for the weighted-system...I don't really know. I think I'd have to have an idea of what 100% in a skill in Fallout is equivalent to in his system before I could decide, and I can't remember what he's written about it before. Worse case scenario sounds like choosing between a decent specialist or a mediocre jack-of-all trades, but I don't think that's what he's going for. It kind of ties in with the game balancing thread for me, like their views(which I share) on IWD2 - I don't want to play a game where my character or party is constantly at the "starvation" level, no matter what part of the game they're in or how high a level they've achieved. If the weighted skill system is going to have that kind of feel to it, where your skills are always just barely good enough to get by - that just spells frustration. Not fun in real life, not any funner in a game. But that's just assuming the worst about it.
 
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