Pillars of Eternity and Proper Attribute Tuning

hello welcome to the most amazing talk at GDC this talk is called gods and dumps I'll get to why it's called that in a bit it's about attribute tuning specifically this is very narrowly focused on tuning attributes in pillars of attorney Who am I who are any of us really I am a game director Josh Sawyer I'm at obsidian entertainment where I've been for the past eleven years I've been a tabletop role-playing gamer for about 30 years I started with basic Dungeons & Dragons I've been a C RPG developer for the past 17 years starting at Black Isle Studios actually this month and I started out doing area and narrative design but I primarily focus on system design and direction these days what are we even talking about we're talking about pillars of eternity if you're not familiar with the game it was a Kickstarter funded game that is inspired by the Infinity engine role-playing games from the late 90s early 2000s that means Baldur's Gate Icewind Dale and Planescape torment and we had 77,000 amazing backers who helped us raise over 4 million dollars and we release the game in 2015 and we just finished releasing the second part of our expansion the white March earlier this year we are specifically talking about attributes or what is commonly called ability scores and Dungeons & Dragons this is your strengths decks Constitution all that sort of stuff I'm amazed this talk was approved because this is the easily the most narrowly focused talk I've ever given I'm going to be talking about things using the terms viable and optimal I'd like to define those just so it's clear what I'm talking about viable means you can actually get through the game within like your character will live and I don't really mean by the skin of your teeth I mean like you can actually do it it's not a nightmare of frustration optimal means the sort of high end a min/max ER will take a character by you know scrimping and scraping and finding every single bonus they can possibly get a big focus that we had on pillars was to kind of try to reduce the gulf between viability and the optimal end it makes a lot easier to balance but obviously we want min/max ears to be able to go crazy because that's fun even though I hate fun by the way uh what I mean by gods and dumps is it's kind of common when people are talking about stats in games to talk about things in terms of a god stat or a dump stat a god stat is a stat that is extremely extremely good for the class or a build you always want to max that out as much as possible a dump stat is a stat that you can just put it in the toilet like nobody cares it's not going to really affect your character how you play the game maybe a class doesn't rely on that stat at all and that's something that we are watching out for throughout the course of development of pillars so I'm going to go back into the archives because pillars of attorney is a very nostalgia driven game obviously we were inspired by the Infinity engine games the Infinity engine games were based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons second edition except for Icewind Dale - which was 3rd edition D&D so there's a big legacy there that we had to pay attention to we didn't have to do exactly what those games did but if we stray too far away then understandably our backers would be kind of annoyed at a minimum so what we're really talking about when he mean attributes in class based role-playing games is a D&D Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons a lot of games have their own variations on this but really it started with pre basic it started before basic there's a version of Dungeons & Dragons that's just after chainmail which was the sort of hardcore a tactical tabletop wargame and even that had stats back then so they go back a very long way but lots of games have them now Ultima final fantasy games have none Dark Souls have them lots of games that have classes also have ability scores those can come into conflict which I'll be talking about but it's very widespread and role-playing games for these things to exist they're used to define and distinguish the fundamental things about a character so how strong they are how tough they are how smart they are how well-spoken they are these sort of very basic concepts of a character originally in the olden days they were always random actually what I found when I was doing some research is that in the first Dungeons & Dragons before basic the Dungeon Master actually rolled the stats for the players characters which is kind of crazy but yeah there's a big emphasis on randomization but eventually over time it shifted to point by computer role-playing games tend to have things as point by because you know otherwise people just sit there and they rollin rollin rollin roll which some people have fun with but it makes it kind of hard to balance the game that way and yeah so the the traditional stats in Dungeons & Dragons are strength Constitution dexterity intelligence wisdom charisma and can anyone remember the seventh attribute that wasn't thank you seventh attribute that was introduced on Arthur Khanna was comeliness and it went away immediately in second edition uh-huh yeah because how beautiful your character was is not necessarily the most important step to have in D&D so in the olden times meaning from basic through second edition you would roll your dice and then you would figure out what class you could be so it wasn't and it's actually interesting if you go back and you look at the text in the old players handbooks it really does say roll your stats then think about what character you want to make whereas I think now especially in the language of players handbooks and things like that you sort of conceived a character and then maybe you roll or your allocate stats but you kind of do it in that order but in the olden days it really was like well maybe you can play a paladin I mean can you get a 17 charisma because then you can play a pallet and if not you're not playing a paladin there were lots of dump stats whole bunch of them so there are plenty of stats that classes could ignore it didn't really matter and there are big dead ranges I'll talk about scaling of valuet but in a lot of cases D&D a D&D between 8 and 14 not a lot really changed or if they did change there were really minor secondary things like carry weight and stuff like that well you don't want I just forgot to tell you guys we do have review forms I'm sorry completely ruining the float we do have a review forms for this please fill out the evaluations at the end and if you have cellphones please silence them I will say at the beginning but they screwed up anyway so because of the fact that you were rolling these and because you had these big dead zones and you have these requirements for how you play the class-a viability was always in question you might not be able to play a character of a certain class or if you allocated stats they might be so bad that that character would either immediately die like in the first session or they would eventually just round a scheme and you couldn't practically speak and play them anymore I'll give us a few examples of how this might work so here's one the reasonably intelligent wizard in a D&D make a wizard with a 14 intelligence it's a bad idea you might say like well 14 on a scale of 3 to 18 14 sounds pretty high according to The Player's Handbook I have a 140 IQ I'm a genius I'm an amazing wizard wrong you suck because as soon as you advanced a 13th level you realize you can't cast seventh level spells or higher so you can keep advancing but you're not doing crap I mean you can find ways to boost your intelligence but if you if you built your character that way you're going to run into some trouble you thought you're going to be this dude you're this dude reasonably strong fighter in a D&D this is not quite as bad so you start with a 15 strength by the way collied and Baldur's Gate head of 15 strength I'm just going to mention that because it's not a very good strength score and then you take specialization because fighters specialize in weapons and your damage is really really bad so if you use a two-handed sword against medium and small creatures just in case anyone's wondering you'll do one to ten plus two because you have specialization which is 7.5 average damage versus 1d 10 plus 8 which is 13.5 average damage that's pretty bad and you might say well I'm going to get some more stuff later so I can work my way out of this hole so you go up to 13th level you take grand mastery you're using combat and tactics rules whatever so and then you get a +4 weapon and your damage is still terrible and the thing is now it's even worse because this is being multiplied across multiple attacks so this Golf is like you can play this way but this character is way worse than the character that sort of maxed out so you thought you're going to be this guy but you're this guy in third edition there was a shift the explicit class requirements went away so it no longer said hey you have to have a 17 charisma to be a paladin there are lots of implicit things that you were supposed to do usually you could see them if you read the abilities and so like oh wow a lot of my abilities are based off of wisdom or charisma I should probably focus on that bonus xp for your class disappeared so there was a thing in 18d where if you had higher than a certain thing in your main stats then you'd get more XP which is giving a reward to someone that's already doing really well so they got rid of that because that's weird also a third edition got rid of the the nonlinear progression so they went to every even point every even step you would get +1 so that changed the feeling of it it is much more consistent but that sort of massive ramped up at each end went away there were multiple builds that were viable you could build of characters in a few different ways not necessarily optimal especially as you get to higher level in 3rd edition that stuff gets really tricky some of the classes arguably required only 3 stats to be pretty good others like monks monks and paladin's are very notable because they need 4 to be at least kind of good or if you do not do that then some of your class abilities will be stinky poopoo and then didi introduced splat books if you're not familiar with the term splat book it's an expansion book that usually introduces a bunch of crazy stuff like cool new prestige classes and insane feats that your DM should say no to but they introduced lots of neat gimmick build possibilities because you could do something like make a high intelligence fighter that was actually a good character whereas if you made a high charisma or a high intelligence fighter in Korra 3rd edition that's a shitty fighter like that might be a really cool character roleplay with that character is very bad at doing their job which is fighting 3.5 or 3e and 3.5 is really a min/max or is the light it clarified a lot of rules but it left a lot of room for optimization so you know it's said well here are all the rules and but here all these bonus types so if you can search through every single source book and combine bonuses in there way you can just really go crazy people made a lot of character builders for 3e and 3.5 and for Pathfinder all those character builders allow you to rapidly see like where all these stats can come from and people are insane on online forums like they're crazy they'll come up with really really crazy stuff as an example of this I like to use the example of Lawler skate there is a forum something awful and in their traditional games forum they had this ultra high level character contest to see who could make the most insane character and the winner was an insane Australian person who made this you can't see the staff super clearly but this is ludicrous he's like a yawn T on a Thema and he had like seven classes or six classes and 755 hit points and so yeah you could go you could go really really really crazy and third edition D&D and so people really like to mend Mac's but we also know that when the potential for min maxing the optimal character when that character gets too far away from the viable character it's really hard to balance content in any meaningful way because the Gulf is so huge so in pillars of eternity when we set out to make our ability scores we had a few goals these things were not necessarily things that we start that out with but that we move toward them over time six attributes which is very Dedes class abilities that are not explicitly associated with attributes so for example if you look at third edition Dungeons & Dragons a paladin's smite is in part based off of their charisma score we didn't do things like that where classes have very specific abilities key to specific ability scores the statistics the the attributes would influence statistics of importance to all classes and obviously there's variability in there as to how significant that is but our goal was to say try to influence things that all classes use rather than things that classes can safely some classes can safely ignore or they don't have any meaning to them because then you get into situations where you can just dump stuff or certain classes really need stats more stats than other classes a primary goal is no bad builds what that really means in practice is that if you have an idea for a whacky character like the super genius barbarian that is a viable character doesn't mean it's necessarily an optimal character but it is a viable character so we wanted people to be able to make four crazy characters like their charismatic fighter or they're clumsy rogue or whatever sort of weird thing they wanted to come up with and instead of that being a character that is just fundamentally you're not going to get anywhere with it it was viable not optimal but viable and we had a secondary goal which was to ensure that dumping stats stung a little bit this was kind of a reality check on our systems just to make sure that you know like if we thought a benefit from a stat was really important if people dumped it then really they didn't think the bonus that was being granted was that important so we needed to go back and look at it again so why did we do these things why do we have six attributes tradition I mean that's that's the main thing uh we asked our fans in our forums and they'd like oh you know somewhere between five and seven I don't know maybe six I guess but it was it was pretty common I mean some people genuinely did say like oh five or oh seven but a lot of people said you know six they wanted six it just it felt comfortable it fit this type of game so that's what we did also there were some nice things though that pairs worked out well for our three secondary defenses which are fortitude reflex and will and defenses are not opt out I saw someone who made a more elegant sort of way of saying this but defenses are things that you use when you're attacked and as long as the content actually attacks these different defenses with some regularity the player can't they can't not participate in that if that makes sense whereas certain things in D&D like if you like I don't care how long the duration of anything is so I'm going to just dump the stat defenses as long as they're being attacked you don't want them to be bad because you will suffer for it so six attributes worked into three pairs and that worked out pretty well class ability is not associated with attributes the reason we did this is um if you make explicit ties between certain stats and fundamental class abilities and there's an emphasis there on viability so it's sort of saying if you don't Maxo the stat or if you don't have the stat at at least a pretty decent value this character sucks so for comparison if you think about the example of the wizard with the 14 intelligence in D&D vs. intellect in pillars of eternity intellect effects durations and it affects area-of-effect for all characters and pillars of eternity so you can make a wizard that has small load operations and small area defect that's actually fine it's not going to prevent the character from learning spells or casting spells or anything like that so there's a big difference there similarly if you look at charisma in 3rd edition D&D it's extremely important for paladins it affects their defenses it affects their smite it affects all sorts of things resolve is not anywhere near the same propellants it's a nice defensive stat it boost their deflection increases their concentration so if they're on the frontlines it's important but it's no it's not vital and it's not associated with any other class abilities directly and this sort of question that I asked is if something is required for viable play why is it an option like we want players to make meaningful choices and not put in gotchas and traps that say like well yeah you can kind of put these stats wherever you want but not really it's like like you can dump this no you can't so if something's required for viability that shouldn't be an option so rather we would say no none of these are required for viable play so it is really an option so influencing statistics of importance to all classes this took a long time and as I'll say later we we had to actually revise this during beta and post launch and into a couple of patches so that process was fun but this is a someone put this together on the pillars of attorney gamepedia site which is very nice but it shows how things are affected so you can see that each pair of stats contributes to one of the secondary defenses to the stats are actually one of the stats contributes to two defenses which is resolve those defenses are important to everyone even if you have a character for example if that's not on the frontlines deflection is still attacked by arrows and guns and things like that so you don't want to tank any of those in and health are important to everyone obviously for frontline characters they're a little more important but if you're playing a class like a wizard that already does not have much endurance or health dumping that will be not good and giving it a boost will be nice if you want to be a character that Wade's in to the frontlines damage and healing is important to everyone action speed is important to everyone interrupts and basically the ability to interrupt someone with an attack concentration which is the ability to resist that accuracy which is used for resolving every attack you get the point so the idea is that this is stuff that all classes use because they all have abilities that rely on them broadly and that was to make sure that if you wanted to build a character of a certain type you could play towards those strengths so why do we not want to have bad builds well role-playing is about building and expressing a character both through social interactions and through mechanics and viability limitations as I suggested before can result in mid or late game roadblocks you know as the challenge sort of ramps up you may find that how you built your character doesn't work and you know I've seen so many people playing a lot of role-playing games that said like I got eight hours in and I realized I did this all wrong and I have to start all over some people think that's fun I don't think most people do and if we have fewer viability limitations then we have more viable character concepts so you can make the perceptive genius barbarian which is actually a pretty darn good character in polar's of attorney because they affect a very large area with their carnage and they're very accurate you can make the idiot muscle wizard which is a favorite of mine so that's like character the wizard that is a low intellect but has a very high mite so they don't have big areas of fact they don't have long durations but they do a huge amount of damage because my Tim pillars of eternity affects all damage not just weapon damage but spell damage all sorts of damage or you can make the clumsy determined rogue who has a low dexterity and a high resolve they go into the frontlines they have a good defense good concentration they don't attack that quickly but they can still do a lot of damage and they have good defenses for frontline attacks we wanted to avoid the cool concept bad character problem so I have been a dungeon master for most of the time that I've been playing D&D and I really hate the feeling when someone has a really cool idea for a character that is a sucky character because they have a dream of playing this wacky dude or lady and you know I have to kind of say like there's nothing like the game doesn't support that like you're not going to be able to make anything like that that cursor is going to die or you're going to be frustrated playing them because they're going to fail all their checks it's not going to be good so how does it happen how it happens is that ability scores and classes can conflict if you say like Class A is good at XY and Z for example like causing damage rogues are good at causing damage but ability be drastically impacts X and Z then those are in conflict because it means that if you set ability B to some low value you're basically torpedoing the thing that your class is supposed to be good at the mechanics and the content balanced around one another run into problems when these things are sort of you know converging so in DD terms a warriors to hit armor class zero or base attack bonus goes up and their strength is kind of supposed to be high and probably will get higher and thus armor classes for monsters increase assuming that those things are going up together if they're not then that characters going to fall behind and they're not going to be able to actually hit those characters as much as they should so the example of the sort of the reasonably strong fighter I gave before the other thing is that strength also affects your chance to hit so that character not only is doing less damage per hit but is heading less frequently so they're even farther behind or further behind sorry another examples rogues and reflex saves they're already high they have skills that are very good and based off of dexterity they assume that your dexterity is high so reflex saving throws and the difficulty classes of the skills that they use assume that those are both high if you're not men maxing them then it's very difficult for the DM or in our case as people designing a computer role-playing game that doesn't adapt to the players stats it's very difficult to find a difficulty class that actually works so you get this thing the cool concept the smart fighter that is bad in practice the failure to min/max your key attributes means that your traits are lower your totals or lower overall and the content that scales assuming that the player is men maxing uh we'll just leave suboptimal characters behind and that's where you get that mid-game non-viability or late game mid viability both are very frustrating we wanted to ensure that dumping would sting so dumping a stat is again like if you you know it starts at ten and you're like I don't need this and you take it down to three and then you put the point somewhere else so why did we want to ensure the dumping stings it wasn't to be punitive we weren't trying to say like we'll get you player but it was supposed to be a reality check so again if we said hey we put this stat or this you know thing on this attribute for example area of effect and duration so we think area of effect n duration are important and we think the value we give to it is important but if we see players continually dumping them then clearly it is not important to them that might be a perception problem which I should also say that a huge part of balance is actually just a player's perception whatever the sort of there's no objective sort of understanding of it it's all what they perceive of it so if they're dumping it you have to find a way to either communicate it better or you have to look at the values of what it's affecting if people don't care about dumping it it's not that important go back and choice and consequence is important to obsidian games we make role-playing games and in our role-playing games we think that if you make choices there should be consequences for those good consequences and also bad consequences so that is another part of it is how you build your character there are trade-offs to how you do that here are some good things about how this all turned out I'll start with good things and I'll go to things people didn't like it is hard to make non-viable characters unless you're playing on the path of the dam difficulty which is the highest level of difficulty it's pretty hard to make a character that can't get through the game and as long as you play toward the strengths of whatever the the build of the character is like again if you make a barbarian that has a high intellect you want to emphasize your carnage which is your big AoE melee attack and other things that have an area of effect and duration based effects because that's what into effects it's easy to build a lot of unusual and viable character concepts I've seen lots of people that proposed a lot of the weird weird characters that if you try to make them in D&D would just be bad characters but they're able to play them in pillars of eternity and they're just fine and they love playing them because they had that fantasy and that's part of why we allow people to do these things it is not hard to make different optimal builds that emphasize different things again I'm not going to say that everything can be made into an optimal build because then they wouldn't be optimal optimal sort of the cream of the crop so I've seen people make an interrupt focus barbarian so a barbarian that really focuses on just causing hit reactions on a lot of enemies at once they ramp up their into they ramp up their perception and they just smack those guys all day long a lot of people will make gif muscle wizards Gish's are sort of the fighter wizard combos they emphasize personal buffs and summoning spell weapons super strong and powerful versus a crowd control wizard this is someone who focuses very heavily on big AoE stun locking enemies keeping them locked down lots of d-bus and then max which can still go wild like you can't make Lawler skate in in this um no one can make Lawler skate by the way did I mention that that guy lost a semester of his university making that character I personally admire that a hell of a lot because uh I was a terrible student um yeah I'm in max Erskine still go crazy on this stuff yeah it does not get as wild as a three year 3.5 but there's a lot of room for optimization in it and despite the relative simplicity the mechanics still allow for a lot of interesting analysis so for example accuracy and damage is a common trade off each point of perception that a character has in polar's of attorney adds one on one hundred point scale to accuracy and that shifts your miss graze hit and court ranges for all attacks now one point is not very much but it's shifting that whole all those attack windows and so people do perceive that as being valuable it's not you know crazy powerful but it does make a difference each point of might adds three percent to damage and healing from any source so again casting spells shooting a gun stabbing someone with a knife whatever those are all affected by your might score if a character cast a healing spell cast lay on hands or you know Kuras Aminah then that is affected by your might score so certain builds will rely more heavily on accuracy than damage output so for example the crowd control wizard that I mentioned they're not really focusing on doing damage but they real want to hit they want their accuracy to be as high as possible so with that you can say like well my mind doesn't really need to be that high because I'm not really focusing on doing damage that's other characters are doing that I'm D buffing people and I would just want to make sure that they're more likely to hit or crit and so people do breakdowns and analyses of these and a lot of it comes down to personal preference what sort of character do you want to make and how do you want to make that or how do you want to play that character so that's always good is that we do want that room for interpretation in there um if it's really open and shut well this is superior all the time then we kind of screwed up so here are some common criticisms things people either didn't like or continue to not like about pillars of eternity attributes they aren't realistic I'm not going to argue that they are they don't have enough of an impact certainly compared to DD I think that's a fair criticism perceived lack of value when again this goes back to the difference between like what the numerical value is and what people really understand at that value and the Companions are awful oh my god the worst stats you've ever seen Wilson we'll see about them so they aren't realistic well a D&D is not super realistic either which is kind of our starting point a D&D kind of has some interesting things there are eighteen D&D indeed there are certain things that it seems like it is really trying to simulate like it is really trying to say like no this is like things work in the real world also you can jump off of a cloud castle fall and take 20 d6 damage and get up and dust yourself off and that's fine so it's not super concerned necessarily with verisimilitude being really like reality pillars already abstracts a lot there's a lot of stuff we already knew we are going to abstract so for us realism is not a priority so you know for players who you know say that it is not realistic and we go even we I would say we go even further in some cases so for example might effects gun damage it affects spell damage it affects you know melee weapon damage that's not realistic that's done so that all that stuff is on one stat rather than being spread out in a way that certain classes can kind of ignore certain stats or it doubles up for certain people which is what happens in D&D like if you get things that on one staff then you're always supposed to max that and it doesn't make any sense to you know focus on the thing that affects the damage types that you don't use so our focus was to try to make a good gameplay out of these stats and realism most not really a priority for us not enough impact so because we wanted these characters to be insured to be viable that means that that limited their relative impact if you have something that goes up this high at the highest end and it drops down this low there's a big chance because that Gulf is so huge that's something about the viability the character is dropping into the netherworld so whereas if you keep it in a more constrained range it's much more likely to avoid viability problems if you dump that stat the character will suffer but they're not a non playable character if you give a wizard in D&D a three Constitution they get one hit point per level and will die linear scaling means that we have a regular progression so if you look at the strength table that I'm going to show you in a bit you'll notice that there's a big dead zone and then it ramps up pretty quickly at the ends and so there is a much more significant sense of progression once you start really ramping up things like strength Wow like the difference between these scores is really really huge but it kind of ignores the dead zone in the middle so when you have a linear scaling that does mean that it just kind of goes up at a very regular pace third edition skips the the odd numbers so they actually get a sort it's a sort of skewed thing where every two points it goes up so it's a different feeling than having a little teeny increment every single point and we were trying to avoid what we already were known and when I say known I mean by the designers of DD imbalances in the scores so if you look at some of the ways that things were designed in third edition or three point five they understand that strength is an insane stat it affects to hit it affects damage or rather it affects base tech bonus or being added to attack bonus and damage and so for example half works get twice as many penalties as they get bonuses because they get a plus two to strength because they knew that if you give a half work a 20 strength and give them a great axe they are going to chop through the entire world so we knew based on looking at how they design those mechanics by reverse engineering how they tried to solve those problems that they knew that they were too powerful so we said like well you know we know that these things are crazy so let's you know let's scale them back so that they they're more balanced across the spectrum so as an example if you look at strength in D and D if you have a two handed sword with an 1,800 strength which is sort of like you know good times top human strength you're going one D ten plus six one two ten plus six is a lot better in terms of percentage than fourteen to twenty plus twenty four percent so yes a much bigger impact in D D so if you want your stats at a huge impact we decided to or on the side of viability not making characters really swing really wildly in terms of how their stats were built up so this table shows 18 D strength damage adjustment this is for comparison you can see that big dead zone in the middle where it's just flat that means there's no damage bonus this is only looking at damage bonuses there are other things that strength effects but it's primarily damage assuming it can hand it sword because it's one to ten that means I can do percentage modification and it's easy if you use D eight then suddenly that's an even bigger percentage modification but you can see how it it kind of has some spots where it'll go to points and flatten out and then it you know keeps going up and then at twenty five strength they just go and get a next or you don't extra plus one for fun so there's not really a lot of rhyme or reason to it I should also note that before third edition strength had this weird percentile system so if you are a warrior and you got an eighteen strength you'd get you'd roll percentile and that's how they incremented above 18 until you got to nineteen that's why this chart is weird D and E is weird you got it now if you look at pillars of attorney strength damage adjustment you can see though this is extremely linear it's going up by three percent just so you can go back you can see a hundred and forty is the top end at twenty five strength for us thirty is the top end and that's 60 strength so it is quite a bit less of an impact but again that is by design some people don't like that and that is okay but we're not changing it and then there's problems with perceived lack of value and again balance and perception of value is not just about what you set up but about what the player actually perceives about it and lots of stuff goes into perception of strength I mean I talked to someone one of our system designers who had worked on a game where a gun was in a test animals got this gun sucks like this is so horrible everything about it is junk I never want to use it and then they went through a tuning phase and they changed the audio effects on the gun and they did not change any of the stats and they put it you know they did another test and the players like oh man that gone so good now seeds you guys got it and it was just purely it was purely audio so lots of things going to perception of these things so why did people have problems perceiving the impact of stuff or continue to have trouble perceiving them one is that percentages are hard if you ask people to do percentile modifiers like yeah this is 23% better like they're not immediately like boo boo boo doo doo yeah I got it um so you know they kind of round off but sometimes it gets difficult to do those verses oh one to ten plus six that is a little easier to conceive larger numerical values post problems so for various reasons we used bigger numerical ranges I think you notice before our our grade swords do 14 to 20 points of damage so once you start saying like hey you have two or three digit numbers that you're supposed to do percentile operators on players kind of start going like I don't I kind of get that but I don't really get it and we didn't have great feedback in the UI initially thankfully Brian McIntosh and Kaz arooga have improved us a great deal so that players can actually see comparisons like this is the base this is the modified version these are all the things that are contributing to this value of transparency within the UI is extremely important and that was a reason why though is that early on people were just like I don't know I mean it says this damage value I don't know what the base is I don't know what's modifying it I don't know how much my strength is actually contributing to this and the Companions are awful so people complain about the stats of our companions a bunch when we designed the companions we did them this way for a few reasons one is that the companions attributes are reflecting they are as characters so go back to the kalid example leads not a super tough guy he's got a 15 strength that's okay man our attributes are designed to be middle the road so you know if you make your let's say you have a paladin and that paladin is super min max for damage our companion paladin Palladino is set up to be kind of like well you can use her for healing you can use her for damage should be used for defensive stuff her stats are kind of more evenly balanced across what paladin's can do and despite the fact that players you know plenty of players have played through on path of the Damned the hardest difficulty using just the stock vanilla companions without modifying them and they're just fine a lot of players are still like no I want to change these stats so I'll give an example of how people kind of change these stats first example is pala Jeana she is our paladin companion her character is described as being very willful she's tough but she describes failing her physical examinations and the Brotherhood more than once sure she's not especially strong she is an avian godlike meaning that she sort of has these bird-like features she has heightened senses and her eyes are frequently described in reaction text like she's very perceptive of things so the way that I stated this character because this is the character that I made kind of hard to see there but she has a 12-9 13 Constitution you know nothing too crazy and then 14 perception because she's 80 and godlike and what is that a 13 into intellect and a 15 resolve because she's very very strong-willed so this is from a mod called better companions she has a 21 mite she's incredibly strong she has a 15 Khan okay that's fair she's a 4 dexterity extremely extremely clumsy a3 perception which is about as bad as you could possibly get she's a genius she's a 20 intellect and an 18 resolve so clearly this person wanted to do like one thing or actually two things they wanted to cast land hands and they wanted to use their auras because paladin's have nice auras if you want to hit something good luck because you have a3 perception so you're tanking your main attack stat you can play it you can play a pallet in this way but this is like the way that you have to play this paladin so our stance on this is we don't really care about people adjusting the companion stance maybe a little it does seem weird to see that character who's described in that way be so different from how she's described and but the attribute system is designed to handle it again like it's robust enough that it doesn't it's not that that character can't be played you just have to play them a certain way so sure like knock yourself out here's an example of how you could go crazy with another companion double if Carrick is a rogue that you get in the white March a lot of people like to complain about her stats and her armor she has a relatively modest might score it's 13 might bonuses to damage are not multiplicative but they add up so every bonus to damage they just kind of add up as a percentage modifier so if you set her Knight to 18 you get an additional 15% damage but a rogue sneak attack which is their common like they just get it all the time they do it to anyone who's vulnerable to it is plus 50% damage so that alone is a huge bonus most rogue active abilities add 25% damage and you get a bunch of those so just netting 15% more damage is not really I mean it's making a difference but it's not that big of a difference if you dumped her might down to three that would be actually wouldn't be 30% I think it's about 30% though I think it's actually 27 but you it's not that big of a deal because you're already doing plus 50 from your sneak attack and you're doing plus 25 on any active ability so rogues are good at doing damage even if you tanked their might they're still pretty good at doing damage and you probably put those stats somewhere else so they're getting a bonus somewhere else significantly lower damage but it's certainly not non-viable so I'd like to talk a little bit now about the changes that we made during the development cycle and after launch so we did have a pretty extensive beta which is great we got a lot of feedback lot of feedback on attributes initially all attributes granted bonuses from one so if you looked at the scale before like DDD any kind of is balanced around nine as being neutral and then things above that give a bonus things below it give a penalty so he said no no no or actually I should say I it's my responsibility I said yeah at one that gives you a bonus it just keeps getting better well people didn't really dig that it was different from do you need which and it's all some people don't respond well to the other thing is that we have this concept of perceived loss like our perception of loss is way stronger than our perception of value so with that sense of we want people to feel like dumping a stat is not really a great thing as soon as we set those like we basically just normalized all the math and then said oh yeah ten is zero and if you go down one your minus three percent damage and immediately people like you like like oh my god I can't put anything to nine and if you look at people's builds a lot of people are real I'll take everything down to ten but that perception of badness from going negative is extremely strong and powerful and I knew that at the beginning I should have probably just had them at ten to begin with but well I didn't we also had perception and resolve both contributed to a deflection so though we had two things feeding into that step perception initially granted plus two to accuracy per point everyone maxed this out as much as possible it was really dumb like everyone in QA made max perception characters every little teeny bonus they could get to perception because it's shifting you miss Gray's hit and crit chances it slides the whole thing up so that was dumb constitutions bonus to endurance and health was only three percent this is minor thing that we adjusted later perception modified range that felt terrible on intellect modified radius not area those are different things and it did it in three percent increments so throughout the course of the beta and into launch and I don't remember when each of these things happen like I said we were I think we continued patching attributes through patch 2.0 maybe or maybe even later than that we averaged attributes around 10 with lesser values inflicting penalties perception now continues to accuracy at one point per and people seem to find that worthwhile and resolve contributes to deflection just by itself we increase the Constitution bonus to 5% and that actually did make a significant difference in how people perceived it 3% to 5% doesn't seem like it would be that big of a deal but people receive it as being a bigger deal and so they actually kind of said okay I'm not going to dump this so much anymore and intellect modifies area in 5% increments so you can't make everybody happy obviously not everyone was super thrilled with how this worked out it's true of any design but we did not we did not set out to try to make everyone happy we knew that we had an audience with a variety of tastes our implementation was within what we believed our audience's tolerance threshold were so we know that some people that play our games they don't they would rather not have attributes at all there are role-playing games like Mass Effect that has classes but it doesn't have attributes at all you don't have to do that um it's easier when you're not making a fantasy game it's easier when you're not making a fantasy game based on D&D very clearly on so we know that some people just sort of ideologically or because of their preferences for system design they'd rather have no attributes at all that's fine we understand that and we know that a lot of people wish that there were stronger or different attributes and during during our beta phase there were people they got real real upset about how we initially specked out attributes how we changed attributes there are some people that sort of forswore the game they're like I'm over this so people have really strong feelings about this stuff but we knew that there was a big group within our core audience that we could probably make something for them where most of those people would be happy so usually you know you still I still hear people criticize that which is sort of like we wish this were different but it's not a deal breaker and so that net applies to class design that applies to armor design what like all the stuff that we have in our game there's a lot of stuff that people will say like well we wish this were not quite this way but we're okay with it as it is no data to support this this is just anecdotes we do have very active forums lots of people that get feedback a lot also there are lots of off sites young neogaf RPG codex something awful lots of very active communities there that have very robust discussions about this stuff and ultimately ideological purity doesn't necessarily mean the players are going to be happy you know I think it's important to have ideology for what you're doing as a designer but at a certain point if what you're trying to accomplish sort of hits the players and the players go I don't like this this isn't fun um you know whatever your ideology is you kind of have to step back and say like am i approaching this wrong is this a bad goal is this not really accomplishing what the players needed to accomplish so start with start with an ideological point but then you know move toward the players in a sense of like you want them to have fun with it so yeah that should always be a goal would we do it this way again probably the benefits seem to outweigh the drawbacks I will say that I spent an obscene amount of time talking with people about how to set up these attributes how to tune these attributes going back and forth programmers on it because the math gets really complicated seemingly it wouldn't because we have a simpler system in many ways but it does get very complicated listening to form feedback and all that stuff it really did take a lot of time and effort to make something that actually accomplished all the goals that we set out to do and even there like you know we didn't necessarily do a perfect job on it obviously but the benefits IVA do seem to all the way the drawbacks we were happy with the gameplay so internally people seem to like overall how stats work they're like you know adjusting getting a little stat boosting bonuses and using spells and buffs to raise those up that's fun gameplay and most of the players seem happy - like I said there are some players that really don't like it that is ok would I do this personally no I don't like that stuff like I don't I I think attributes conflict with classes they have a lot of problems I don't even like class-based systems so I've been playing ARS Magica for the past two and a half years it's a goofy goofy game so yeah this isn't really about like my personal preferences though like as a designer I'm looking up audience I'm looking at their expectations obviously we started a game based on nostalgia on that you know that's based in a lot of memories and feelings and motions that people have you know the point of designing this stuff is not to make something exactly as I want it but to make something that I think will make a good game that sort of fulfills the expectations of the people that backed it and the people that want to come into the genre for the first time I do want to thank a bunch of people that helped out with this stuff I want to thank all of our backers obviously we wouldn't been able to make this game if it were not for them our beta testers we had a subgroup of beta testers and we still have beta testers that beta test our patches they give a lot of great feedback and players we have a lot of players we have great youtubers a lot of us at work you know we watch these youtubers and we see their breakdowns of their analyses of the classes sometimes it's very interesting to see how they perceive things and we understand like oh crap like they think it works like this what are we doing wrong here yeah but players give a lot of really fantastic feedback our QA testers I know that I think that especially in the in the non development world people don't really give QA enough credit I think that you know in in development also I think there are a lot of places where QA is underappreciated I spent a lot of time talking with our testers and I still continue to spend a lot of time talking with our testers they play the game all the time they're trying to min/max and break everything they have a really good insight into how the game is played you know I don't always agree with their analyses of things but again that's the point I was like you want to listen to their viewpoint here where they're coming from on that stuff but they were they were extremely valuable in how we built this stuff and lastly to Brendan Romero so I had given up on trying to pitch talks that were this narrowly focused because every time I did they were like this is really nice like no one's going to no one cares about this stuff so I had gone broader and broader and kind of stopped submitting things and Brendan Romero actually contacted me and said hey I want you to do or consider doing a really narrowly focused niche RPG talk so thanks to her I was able to do this we have some time for questions if anyone has anything Oh hello hey thanks for great presentation thank you in the old like Baldur's Gate games usually are dumb stats and I remember specifically that you had if you could have a little charisma can dump it down to three and like in the first ten dog cider and a cast onion you can get a ring that set charisma to 18 yeah so lots of people do that was like go to strategy for many classes how did you work with items to a effect add attributes and imbalance so the question was sort of compared to Baldur's Gate where there were lots of items that influence stats and in fact would set stats to certain values regardless of what their starting value was how do we approach that in pillars of eternity so in pillars we did something that's more like third edition didi in the sense that we don't have items that gives that set stats to certain values instead they give bonuses and there are stacking rules for those so you can min/max them a little bit but at a certain point you know it's only going to take the highest value from that part of that is also because um if you think about especially in the context of a single player C RPG if a person has a strat guide or if a person read a forum and they already know oh there's a griddle of Hill giant strength right here well then they can start dump the points that they would have put in strength they can put them in another stat go straight to that girdle of hill giant strength and effectively they're playing with many more points in their attributes than other players are so that kind of stinks um like obviously it's cool to have game knowledge and like knowledge of the world be able to beeline for things and get that cool stuff but that advantage I think should be a marginal advantage you shouldn't be so gross like to the different field ryan strength is 19 strength if you set your strengths to three you just got 16 free attribute points so yeah we tried to keep those bonuses a little more constrained I know that again some people would like those to be more significant in the white march expansion we added +4 items which I oh my god um you know people really like when those step up and they can you know keep ramping them up so thank you thank you hello first of all thanks for the game it's great and I just had a question actually about the early process of design and the prototyping process since you were so steeped in tabletop design what I was like to test such a complex system if you went straight to digital or if you did paper prototyping or even a tabletop session and how that sort of looked like and how you kind of got to where you are before the code happened um we did not do any so the question is if we how we prototype prior to implementation yep and since we had a lot of basis and tabletop did we do any tabletop gaming we did not part of that is because these stats would be a nightmare it's funny too because some people say like hey once the tabletop version is coming online you want to do percentile operations on damage ranges that are like double-digit I don't think you actually do so we didn't do that we we sort of charted things out in Excel to see like what are the boundaries of this house is really mapping out with how we're planning out abilities and damage ranges and things like that so it was mostly sort of it was theoretical for a very long time but we also we looked outside of D&D we look to other games and said you know how do we feel about balancing in these games and what are the sort of margins of influence like how impactful are these attributes on that and how does that feel for the type of game that we're trying to make and the nice thing was that you know Tim Kaine did a lot of the implementation of the attribute things and it was it was usually pretty easy if I went to him and I said yeah I was wrong like these values are bad we need to adjust this up or down or whatever it was usually pretty quick turnaround so we can test out those changes relatively rapidly but yeah I I would have done tabletop sort of testing of that stuff but the mechanics were really designed and we we wanted to design them for a C RPG we wanted to say like we got a computer here you can do lots of calculations really easily for you we don't have to base things on dice you know and so that's why our damage Rangers are more things like you know 14 to 20 so yeah all right thank you thank you hi um so obviously the tributes are a pretty big exception vote there anything else that came up kind of organically while you were designing the game that you wanted to put in but you thought the the nostalgia focus wouldn't allow were there things that we wanted to put in that we thought that nostalgia focus won't allow um I not really there were certain things that we put in that people resisted very strongly because they weren't kind of part of the their vision of what the experience was so for example we have firearms enclosure paternity but they're all they're all like 16th century era firearms and while Forgotten Realms did have guns as really a second edition they weren't part of the Infinity engine games at all and so a lot of people thought that that was just like they were like that's no that doesn't work that that feels completely wrong and there were certain things that early on we decided we should probably have these because we think of people a lot of people will miss them if they're not there so for example we have humans we have elves we have dwarves I think a lot of people like humans elves and dwarves we don't have halflings we don't have half works so we're like ah we don't need to have those we can put in a mouth there are big race and then you have orleans as our small race so we kind of figure that people like that idea of like this or the big race in small race we didn't think people were that attached to the idea of like I must play my halfling or gnome in this game so thank you thanks hi um I was wondering if you could elaborate on the different difficulty options in your game and kind of how that influenced your attribute design I find that you know the higher difficulty goes usually that leans more towards men Maxine less towards viable characters and since some of your most dedicated players are going to be like interacting with those systems I feel like it hurts always look there and not look at like viable care this is wondering what your experience with that was so the question is about our difficulty design and how that influenced our attribute design and so we have a easy normal hard and then we have a few other crazy ones the most significant of which is path of the Damned and we except for path of the Damned we did not do staff modifications on creatures instead we change the composition of encounters so if you're on normal you might see you know like a wizard and two paladin's but on hard it's like an Archmage it's completely different like more powerful wizard and two paladin's and you know like a rogue gets added into the group and it's in a weird position where it makes it more tactically difficult free to deal with it but half the Damned was specifically designed for the most aggressive players and so we said like this mode not only does it have all the creatures from all levels of difficulty but they all have increased stats so they have better defenses and better accuracy and we're kind of we kind of said with path of the Damned like we know that there is a gulf between viable and optimal and this is where the players who want to push that envelope like they need to do that if you just kind of stumble them like hey pass the down what's this and like you just kind of try to stumble and bumble through you're probably going to die so yeah we wanted to make sure that viability for characters didn't require crazy optimizations even on hard but I'm half of it and there are some really good paths the damn players who don't even feel like you need to optimize that much on path of the Damned but they're really good players most people have to get a little more ambitious with how they're looking at their stat spreads and things like that they're gearing becomes much more important on path of the Damned so that's how it tied together thank you Rock yes so talking about dump stats um I get the feeling that a lot of RPG players kind of naturally assume that you know if you're playing a fire you want to dump charisma if you're playing you know wizard you want to dump like dexterity or something like that how did you guys communicate to new players of your game that you don't necessarily want to you know just dump all your perception on ya so that that is a tricky that's a tricky thing and we did have to deal with that a lot thanks for bringing that up um you know we did have a thing where you know people would look at something there like wizard strength I don't think so and then they're like casting their you know damage spells and I'm like what the heck is going on because you know in D&D they're usually stats don't affect your spell damage at all so they had no expectation of that so one is again like trying to make the UI reflect a like you know clearly say like this effects damage like all damage but the other thing we did is uh one of our programmers Robbie put in a thing where we could add little stars next to character attributes in certain classes to say like this is kind of important like to sort of say like you might think this is not important look again so I think Wizards had like either silver or gold star next to might to sort of say like this is more significant than you might think it is you can still dump might but if you dump might you're going to make a crowd control character or something like that you're not going to be focusing on damage but yeah it is a difficult problem because again you're we're dealing with a lot of expectations we also we called it might hopefully to make a player go like wait a minute isn't that normally strength is this something different it is something different friend it's something that affects damage and healing for everything so sometimes is the nomenclature like charisma we got rid of and replaced it with resolved it's sort of similar but it affects like deflection it affects concentration very different from how charisma works in mechanically in DD although resolve is also used in conversations for you know being like a real intense kind of a person so it's difficult but we tried to use naming and you I sort of signaling to help guide people in that direction thank you thanks and you'll ask questions all right thank you everyone for coming

Channel: GDC

Views: 194,898

Rating: 4.9172473 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: fvyrEhAMUPo

Length: 58min 24sec (3504 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 24 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/The_mango55]

Pillars attribute balance was spectacular. Every attribute was useful for every class and as long as you used the right strategy it was almost impossible to build a character that was totally gimped.

Obviously some builds were better optimized than others but you could make almost any build viable.

[u/slaya45]

Hey guys, this might not be the best place for me to ask this, but, did they add AI for the characters in your group? When I bought this game a while back I would have to go through each and every character in order to command them to AA the enemy. IIRC they would continue to AA the mob but once that mob died, they'd be dead in the water. Not to mention abilities/spells and the likes. It just irked me on how much micro-managing there was to this game! Sure, some may like it, but a system like that in FF12 would have fit perfectly in this game and made it SO much better imo.

I barely made it past the first town because of this.... So I guess the boiling point would be, is it worth playing through? I don't want to have to pause the game and select a group member every time I want them to 'taunt' or fire off a little cone of cold.