The team also changes the mechanics for damage distribution

Jan 23, 2013 22:29 GMT  ·  By

In the first big update for Project Eternity delivered during 2013 the team at developer Obsidian talks about one of the most important mechanics of a role-playing game: attack resolution.

Josh Sawyer, the game director working on Project Eternity, states in an official forum post that, “All attacks in Project Eternity compare the attacker's Accuracy value to one of four defenses: Deflection (direct melee and ranged attacks), Fortitude (body system attacks like poison and disease), Reflexes (area of effect damage attacks), and Willpower (mental attacks).”

Based on attack and defense numbers, one swing can result in a miss, where nothing happens, a graze, with 50 percent damage dealt, a normal or a Critical Hit.

Sawyer also reveals that Obsidian has changed the mechanics for damage type and armor comparison, because the initial system was judged to be too unintuitive.

Armor is now classified as light, medium and heavy and players will see how a particular weapon performs against each of them, before figuring out exactly how the Damage Threshold mechanic influences the damage dealt.

Energy-based attacks will ignore armor type and will focus on the material it is made of in order to determine how much damage a target takes.

Obsidian also explains how abilities will work in Project Eternity, with Sawyer adding, “the only way in which we are currently using anything cooldown-like is for per-encounter and per-rest abilities.”

This means that each character will have special powers that can be used a number of times for each combat encounter and ones that are linked to rest periods.

There are also abilities that can be turned on and off at will but conflict with other powers that a character can use.

Project Eternity is set to be launched in the spring of 2014 and will use all the core ideas of the party-based role-playing game genre.