Project Eternity - Post-Funding Update #58

Couchpotato

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Project Eternity has a new post-funding update, and the topic this time is crafting.

Crafting Basics

Crafting is the skill that you use to make equippable items like armor and weapons, and consumable items like potions and food. To begin crafting, you must find an appropriate crafting location.

  • Forges – these blacksmithing locations can be used to make all of the equippable gear. From helmets to armor to boots, if you can wear it, then you can make it here.
  • Labs – these alchemical tables are used to make any enchantments, as well as all alchemical consumables like potions, scrolls or figurines (which let you summon a creature that will fight for you). If you want to improve your gear or brew a potion, you need to find one of these labs.
  • Hearths – these cooking spots are used to make food and drink that can give you long-term benefits when you ingest them. Many rest areas will have hearths, so crafting of this sort can often be done “in the field”.
When you use the central object at these locations, such as the anvil at the forge, you will enter a crafting interface that displays all of your forge recipes, broken down into categories such as armor, weapons, boots, helmets, rings, etc. You pick a category and can see all of the recipes you know for that category. Each recipe has a set of ingredients needed to make its item (or items, as some recipes will make batches of items). Some recipes will have additional prerequisites, including requiring you or a companion to have a certain talent or ability or even skill at an appropriate level. Higher level recipes have more prerequisites and need rarer ingredients.

Item Durability

Most items don’t degrade over time. This means that boots, rings, helmets, gloves, amulets, cloaks, and belts are not worn down by use. However, weapons, shields, and armor (that is, chest armor) do have durability values and are worn down by use. Specifically, every attack with a weapon degrades that weapon by one unit, and armor and shields are similarly degraded when the wearer is attacked.

Items have lots of units of durability, and they do not suffer any negative effects until those units are completely gone. When an item has reached 25% of its maximum durability, it will become “worn” and appear that way in your inventory, but it will not behave any differently until the last unit of durability is lost. At that point, the item is “damaged” and the following effects will happen:

  • Weapons – damaged weapons do less damage and have less accuracy
  • Armor – damaged armor has lower damage thresholds and the wearer’s attack speed is slower
  • Shields – damaged shields lose part of their defense bonuses
Items can never become worse than “damaged”. They will not break or become more damaged. They just stay damaged until you have them fixed.
More information.
 
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I don't see the point of such a half-hearted durability system.

It comes across like an awkward compromise between someone who wanted a more punishing durability system and someone else thinking that was just a pain in the ass.

A stricter version of item-degradation might very well be a pain in the ass, but this watered-down version sounds like it's just going to end up as pointless busywork: every so often you have to drop by a blacksmith and click "repair" and it costs 20 silver. What does that really add to the game?
 
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It sounds p. good, and inobtrusive enough to be ignored by the casuals and tolerated by its other critics. Items will never break, so the only thing you need to keep an eye on is your performance in combat to decide if repairs are in order.
 
I wrote Tim Cain on the forums that leaving out BREAKING EQUIPMENT from the game takes away the FUN i have with this feature in Baldurs Gate.

Armor should become UNUSABLE or better: make it
Sneaky Breaking Armor = Armor degrades over time, but the game doesn't give you popups about it. You can check out your gear in the inventory and your armor degrades, until it is completely devoid of any AC bonus and it becomes only added WEIGHT that makes you tired faster.
 
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I wrote Tim Cain on the forums that leaving out BREAKING EQUIPMENT from the game takes away the FUN i have with this feature in Baldurs Gate.

Armor should become UNUSABLE or better: make it
Sneaky Breaking Armor = Armor degrades over time, but the game doesn't give you popups about it. You can check out your gear in the inventory and your armor degrades, until it is completely devoid of any AC bonus and it becomes only added WEIGHT that makes you tired faster.

I disagree. Having items break simply forces you to constantly keep an eye on it and frequently backtrack just so the item doesn't vanish. That's not fun. Making basic decisions about character skill (crafting) and what to spend money on (repairing) is fun.
 
I have no idea why they bothered to add this feature unless many backers were asking for it.o_O

Me personally I hate degrading weapons and armor. It becomes a pain in the ass very easily. I'm glad there just lowering damage, and other stats instead of destroying the equipment.
 
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For most games, durabilitie's only use is balancing. And its not a good choice at that.

Unless the process of repairing is actually fun (never happened in any game.), I can live without it.

Also, my characters should not be forced to drink, eat, shit, sleep, make a regular tax declaration, walk the dog, milk the cows, feed the horses, plow the land or repair the roof of my stronghold. I want an RPG, not a life simulator. I also dont want to spend an "Eternity" walking back and forth between dungeons and smithy.

So… the more unobstrusive, the better. Tho not at all is best.
 
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I think they should do what they did with New Vegas and have a realism mode where things degrade, you need to eat and drink, etc. I can understand why people would want it or not want it and having it is the next step up from what rpgs are. Whether a player wants realism or not really all depends on their preference rather then it needing to be a necessity for the game.

PS. Degradation of weapons/armor would be over time till they brake and having a chance of losing durability or the equipment all together when you try to repair after it brakes.
 
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I wrote Tim Cain on the forums that leaving out BREAKING EQUIPMENT from the game takes away the FUN i have with this feature in Baldurs Gate.

Armor should become UNUSABLE or better: make it
Sneaky Breaking Armor = Armor degrades over time, but the game doesn't give you popups about it. You can check out your gear in the inventory and your armor degrades, until it is completely devoid of any AC bonus and it becomes only added WEIGHT that makes you tired faster.

If I recall correctly, only basic armor and weapons could break in BG, never the magical ones. So it became a non-issue pretty quickly in BG, and if it was in you never noticed it in BG2.

Personally I feel it adds little to my immersion, but I don't excactly have a problem with it either. If it's in the game I prefer a system where the weapons/armor is unusable when at the low point, but will never be unfixable, like in the MM games. As long as you have a party these kind of mechanics works alright, it's when I play a single character it can annoy me a little bit (making the repair skill a no-brainer also makes it a useless mechanic at that point, I want choice damnit, and anything I always pick is always wrong… ;))
 
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I think they should do what they did with New Vegas and have a realism mode where things degrade, you need to eat and drink, etc. I can understand why people would want it or not want it and having it is the next step up from what rpgs are. Whether a player wants realism or not really all depends on their preference rather then it needing to be a necessity for the game.

PS. Degradation of weapons/armor would be over time till they brake and having a chance of losing durability or the equipment all together when you try to repair after it brakes.

One of the stretch goals was to add an Expert mode. That seems an ideal place to insert equipment maintenance.
 
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I forgot about the Expert mode in the stretch goals so it is likely that this is part of that since that is what the Expert mode is about.
 
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should they make the unfortunate decision to consider this for expert mode, they will have to carefully weigh their options.
One thing that was planned for expert mode from the start were different setups of enemies, i.e. where you only encountered one strong ogre before you might on expert meet an ogre with an assortment of kobold archers and a shaman bearing down on you. This is what expert mode is really about IMO, having mastered the game so you can deal with much larger risks. I don't think I'd appreciate my weapons breaking only because I'm an expert now.
 
inobtrusive enough to be ignored by the casuals and tolerated by its other critics

Right.

So ... if the best thing that can be said about an aspect of the game is that it's "unobtrusive enough to be ignored" ... why on earth take the time and trouble and money to implement that feature?

I'd be open to a durability mechanic that was involved enough to actually require planning and increase challenge. And I'd be open to just leaving the mechanic out completely. But this weaksauce pointlessness is just a great big why.
 
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Right.

So … if the best thing that can be said about an aspect of the game is that it's "unobtrusive enough to be ignored" … why on earth take the time and trouble and money to implement that feature?

because - as you may not have noticed - there are people who like this feature (therefore "the best you can say" is a fallacy).

There's also the majority of backers who have remained silent on this matter, and I don't think you want to suggest removing every feature that they remain silent on.

actually require planning and increase challenge.

except if this feature never was intended to "increase challenge". It was intended, as has been implied by JE Sawyer, as a money sink, and it's a good one. It ensures that fighting more doesn't naturally result in more money, not by necessity anyway.
 
should they make the unfortunate decision to consider this for expert mode, they will have to carefully weigh their options.
One thing that was planned for expert mode from the start were different setups of enemies, i.e. where you only encountered one strong ogre before you might on expert meet an ogre with an assortment of kobold archers and a shaman bearing down on you. This is what expert mode is really about IMO, having mastered the game so you can deal with much larger risks. I don't think I'd appreciate my weapons breaking only because I'm an expert now.

Here's the original writeup from update #9:

Expert Mode will disable all of the common ease-of-use / in-case-you-missed it gameplay elements like the display of skill thresholds, influence/reputation modifiers, and similar "helper" information. In a fashion similar to Fallout: New Vegas' Hardcore Mode, Expert Mode will also enable more punitive and demanding gameplay elements, in and out of combat. We're not saying we're going to have weighty gold (for real, we're not saying that), but if we did, you can bet that would be automatically turned on by Expert Mode.

Perhaps you're thinking of "Path of the Damned"?
 
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Here's the original writeup from update #9:perhaps you're thinking of "Path of the Damned"?

probably.

So that would mean you could have Path of the Damned, Expert mode and Trial of Iron activated at the same time... should be pretty hard to balance.
 
Scrounging for resources is a totally legitimate design method and durability can be a part of it as can food and drink. The challenge works best when there's scarcity as in SysShock 2 but still creates a reasonably compromised verisimilitude of scrounging vs boring chores.

Regarding food and water: New Vegas treated these resources right in hardcore. The stuff was nearly useless and pointless in F3 (and unintentionally reduced the emotional impact of the games main story: scarcity of safe, potable water; it would have been a very different game if you were constantly trying to balance dehydration with maintain anti-rad supplies and really really valued clean water… cool, clear water).

I think in any heavy-simulated RPG that if you're simulating large portions of a character's life, having food but no starvation makes food a useless backdrop of cruft. And leaving out food entirely reduces the verisimilitude of the game's focus. It's gotta be there. Otherwise one might as well go home and play old Final Fantasy games. Those don't have food.
 
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