Goblin Squad Member
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Looks like things are really coming along visually. One thing I really appreciated was the city wall. Walls that you can walk on and shoot from are always a great feature. Only comment is that human can barely see over and humans are a taller race, and the gap at the bottom of those gates may not allow a fire truck to fit under if the ladder is extended. Guessing you guys already planned to address those points though.
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Goblin Squad Member
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While I appreciate the video, and it is very nice, I have to say I was hoping for a blog post. However those are done for our benefit, and not exactly necessary, so I can't complain too much. Video looks good. Some things I hope get polished up, but as it is pre-alpha I can hardly expect perfection. Glad to see that it is all going well.
Quick question, I know that the latest Unity build has multi-threading support. Any idea whether or not PFO will be making full use of the newly developed Unity features between now and release? Nothing I have seen looks that CPU intensive, but every little helps.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Very happy with the character's equipment and clothes designs. They really hit the sweat spot of working clothes atst as the style of these outlandish people in this strange River Kingdoms land. The characters really fit in. Great job!
The buildings look similarly diverse and the stone ones appear to be possibly higher on the development index? We'll need a blog on building recognition, function and variation in visual development level at some stage.
Thanks for the video peek yet again. Great progress update.
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Plenty of good in that video that others will touch upon. I just want to lobby for improvement of faces. Sure, you spend the most of your character's career staring at their backside, but right now the quality of your faces seems about at the level of Neverwinter Nights. Which is to say...not great.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I just wanted to add a note that the faces are just static placeholders at the moment (one male one female), and we will be doing a ton of work on that.
Great to hear! More character options and customization in physicalappearance and costuming/clothes/armor will be greatly appreciated.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'd like to raise one point of concern with the size of the space.
I'm assuming the palisade wall is enclosing the buildable portions of a settlement hex. While I know there were under 10 characters moving around, I'd suggest even 50-100 characters would be insignificant in that space.
Now, maybe you have to size towns for their largest population, and figure 10-40% will online at one time. I wonder if city perimeters can scale with the settlement population, or their extent of construction, whichever is greater. When playing Darkfall, the smaller cities (ie, not the huge elaborate ones) felt busier and more reassuring; I was not the only person playing the game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The only thing that worries me a little bit is at the 2:38 mark, where the archer pulls the goblin and proceeds to basically run around to avoid getting hit. Is this just an artifact of the tester's play-style? I hope that even Goblins are able to take advantage of Opportunity...
Couple of questions about things I noticed in the video:
1. The archer back-stepping/circle-strafing around the goblin at 1:45 and 2:38. Is that a legitimate tactic that allows the archer to be hit less? Also, the goblin's pathfinding looks awkward in that he's always chasing after where the archer was as opposed to where it is. I guess I'm curious as to how "sticky" the mobs are going to be.
2. Aggro range at 2:03. For some reason it's unusual to see the typical "stand outside the magic aggro circle" behaviour with Pathfinder monsters. Is that how the game is going to be?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Looks very pretty :-)
Buildings look very Tudor-Englandish, and what little I could see of character appearance, it appears very Robin-Hoodish. Not bad, just not sure its what I expected from Golarion.
Raising a question I raised in another thread; watching the snippets of combat, it appears that character movement was being done via key-strokes. As someone whose hands work better when using a mouse for most things, is movement only keyboard or will mouse movement be supported?
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
Creature AI and animations aren't tuned to deal with even simple kiting yet, and our in-house playtesters have been exploiting it mercilessly.
But we'll fix it soon, and then we'll see how much their tricksy backwards-walking avails them :) .
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Goblin Squad Member
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Creature AI and animations aren't tuned to deal with even simple kiting yet, and our in-house playtesters have been exploiting it mercilessly.
But we'll fix it soon, and then we'll see how much their tricksy backwards-walking avails them :) .
Awesome! Thanks for that :)
Now I officially have nothing at all to complain about :)
And I! Still! Love! That! Music!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'd like to raise one point of concern with the size of the space.
I'm assuming the palisade wall is enclosing the buildable portions of a settlement hex. While I know there were under 10 characters moving around, I'd suggest even 50-100 characters would be insignificant in that space.
Now, maybe you have to size towns for their largest population, and figure 10-40% will online at one time. I wonder if city perimeters can scale with the settlement population, or their extent of construction, whichever is greater. When playing Darkfall, the smaller cities (ie, not the huge elaborate ones) felt busier and more reassuring; I was not the only person playing the game.
...we expect and are designing for Settlement organizational structures with thousands of members.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Hardin, Yeah, understand that. Will a space that's comfortable for 3000 be too crowded or excitingly busy at 5000? Whatever the fraction of 3000 and 5000 are online at once. Will it be forlorn at 1000? Will it scale with population?
Also, some fraction of the settlement organization will be based in the surrounding wilderness hexes where they hold POIs or outposts. Gathering groups will likewise be outside working in wilderness hexes where there are nodes. That might be several hundred people based outside off the top.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm happy to see an update, and especially one that makes it look like alpha may not be far behind. Most things look fun and appropriate, so while that's exciting, it's also hard to comment on.
Hopefully-constructive criticism:
I hope the UI is highly customizable. I would have such a hard time reading that chatbox that I might need to roleplay my character as mostly deaf to explain why I respond to very little of what anyone says. A darker and much less transparent background with larger, bright text would help. I hope the UI will be minimal and context-appropriate enough that I can scale up the various elements and still have them fit nicely on the screen without too much crowding.
Was the city wall literally hexagonal? Should we assume that's a common architectural design for the RK?
The rate of speed and running animation seemed somewhat out of synch, and some of the combat stances seemed quite awkward. I suppose that's an area with at least a few more polish rounds in store?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Urman,I can imagine 1,000 online in a settlement that large might still feel a little empty. The settlements are really huge, much large than say, even the larger cities in Darkfall. I am in a smaller town and am often the only person in town in off hours (I am off on Sun and Mon, so slow game days and quite peaceful).
Even in WoW the capitol cities were really huge, but all the players loited around the banks, auction houses and portals, so the rest of the settlements were pretty sparse. Sure makes a good argument for NPC worker bees and residents when the player pop is low. Keep some life in town.
On a different note, there seems to be an excess of space in town with only maybe a dozen residents. But once jammed with people the interior dimensions of each building need not be the same as the exterior dimensions. If there IS room, awesome. But much like the magic tent Arthur Weasley had in Harry Potter, the interior could be larger simply to allow room for what is needed, without worrying too much about the footprint in the settlement planning system. Have not seen anything remotely resembling a planning map, but scale seems like it could be flexible without losing any value.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I also got the impression that there was too much wall. Very difficult to defend that much length.
Then again, that could be the NPC "town" that we start in and that would be better on the large size.
I'm going to hazard a guess that the town we saw in the video might just be a placeholder, and isn't expected to make it into Early Enrollment.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Sure makes a good argument for NPC worker bees and residents when the player pop is low. Keep some life in town.
Or... or... well... you could... maybe... keep characters in-world at all times, even when players are logged off.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Looks very pretty :-)
Buildings look very Tudor-Englandish, and what little I could see of character appearance, it appears very Robin-Hoodish. Not bad, just not sure its what I expected from Golarion.
Oh yes. I forgot to say something similar. Characters, costumes, armor all great. But the architecture, while nicely rendered are a little uninspired.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm going to hazard a guess that the town we saw in the video might just be a placeholder, and isn't expected to make it into Early Enrollment.I also got the impression that there was too much wall. Very difficult to defend that much length.
Then again, that could be the NPC "town" that we start in and that would be better on the large size.
That is possible, but Ryan did say that settlement populations might reach the high hundreds if not thousands.
Could you imagine an entire an entire wizard academy on those walls with archery support? Oh the possibilities.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Could you imagine an entire an entire wizard academy on those walls with archery support? Oh the possibilities.
I'm extremely hopeful that Wizards in PFO can be something besides just glass cannons. Personally, I'd much rather play as a Divination specialist, quietly revealing hidden truths, advising kings and generals.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Could you imagine an entire an entire wizard academy on those walls with archery support? Oh the possibilities.I'm extremely hopeful that Wizards in PFO can be something besides just glass cannons. Personally, I'd much rather play as a Divination specialist, quietly revealing hidden truths, advising kings and generals.
Hopefully I can train to be a neutral assassin. ;) We shall see.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There's a higher quality version of the video if you follow the links in the blog. Click download and choose the 90 MB version
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Goblin Squad Member
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There's a higher quality version of the video if you follow the links in the blog. Click download and choose the 90 MB version
Ooh, thanks for pointing that out.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Sure makes a good argument for NPC worker bees and residents when the player pop is low. Keep some life in town.Or... or... well... you could... maybe... keep characters in-world at all times, even when players are logged off.
I wouldn't mind a 'day job' system, as long as I could select it and my character isn't a PvP target when there's no 'P' on my end. Or, if for example the character's day job is being a town guard, there's an alternate set of equipment worn and put at risk for that. Stocking an armoury for such purposes would give the artisans more to do.