Humanoid

In the spirit of the other desires listed in this thread, I want my player character to be voiced, and by voiced I mean shouted, by Klaus Kinski.

Never played any of the Total War games so I can't give a reliable answer, but probably yes. I guess Homeworld might be another example? Again not personally having played it. In essence it's really having your tactical assignments phase be done under slowed-down conditions rather than a total pause, though players would be free to play the whole thing slowed-down if they had the patience.

In-universe humour in the main game as personality fits; easter eggs, pop culture and the more out-there-stuff (especially the Python stuff) hidden behind a Wild Wasteland setting.

Having a game-speed-while-in-combat slider would probably be all that's needed to deal with either preference. I'd certainly try both ways if possible. Not that I wouldn't be fine with the repeated pausing, but there's some merit in a slow-RTS style, thinking of things like the Close Combat or Gettysburg games. I think that Mechwarrior RTS was pretty slow too, but I only played the demo and then only briefly. Did BG/2 have a speed slider by the way? EDIT: Odd as it is to bring up The Sims in this context, I think its speed options are well done: 5 discrete speeds laid out logically at your fingertips and designed to be used dynamically, instead of being a global option hidden in a menu, pause-slow-medium-fast-fastuntilsomethinginterestinghappens.

I'd be pretty worried about the game world if we're killing kings off the bat. But flippancy aside, the idea would be that there's probably some special aspect of it that you would recover and perhaps incorporate into your own armour. This can range from the obvious - use some scales from that dragon you killed to provide special plating to your armour - to the more abstract, like a evil wizard's protection was drawn from a magic gem embedded in his hat. As for the king again - happy enough to handwave it for a combination of reasons, both specific to the scenario, and those that can be explained generally: the monarch's armour would be largely ceremonial, it would probably be severely damaged from your act of violence, it would have been fitted (perhaps for a somewhat rotund fellow), and trying to find someone to repair, let alone wear yourself, a piece of armour marking you as a kingslayer in public may not be a decision of the greatest wisdom.

A one-room shack in the city. If you're rich you might be able to afford to buy a house with a couple of bedrooms eventually, maybe even in the middle-class part of town overlooking the main throughfare from the second storey window if you're lucky - it might even be connected to the town's sanitation infrastructure. Luxury!

I worry about repeating myself too much given the relatively small pool of design areas I have any real interest in, but I've been voicing support for a design where armour and clothing isn't looted, or indeed extant as a 'thing' at all. A tentative proposal would be to have armour as a toggle: adventuring gear and town/civilian garb. You can pay a smith to upgrade how your armor performs (such as sewing studs into your leather armour), perhaps requiring the acquisition of certain rare items to enable some more exotic enhancements. But the main point is that armour would be something on the character screen only, each character having their own inherent and separately upgradable design, and not exist on the inventory screen in any way. Obviously it's a bit out there, and I'll be the first to recant if it proves unfun or unworkable.

I want the XP system to be displayed in hexadecimal so it can be more arcane than any other designer could dream of! But in all seriousness, I don't even care if I can see a number as long as there's a bar to approximate it visually.

A lot of discussion presupposes multiple language support to be done as a favour instead of being a business decision. Is it? Is it a net loss in terms of pledged development funds against the extra amount gained? Is it a net loss post-release in terms of additional sales? Is it even a loss in terms of personnel-hours towards the core game? Any guess I make would be a completely uneducated one, so I will refrain from doing so, and view all other guesses through the same prism.

Maybe you should buy this set then. I'm not a huge follower of samurai films so his more modern-set work interests me more: the likes of High and Low and Drunken Angel. But then I like film-noir in general, and this is about as close as you can get to Japanese noir, so it's only natural.

Don't care about what the name is, but if it's not named relatively soon, then it'll be hard not to just end up naming it 'Eternity' or some close variation thereof. I mean if you call your puppy a temporary name for the first month you have it, it'll be a pretty big task trying to change it down the road. See also: Snakes on a Plane

Binary vs greyscale morality is, to me, a red herring either way, especially since in implementation, the latter is often just a compound for the latter. The larger issue for me is the notion of the writer assigning a motivation or emotion to my character which I may not feel at all - in effect, trying to quantify my character's personality. It's as simple as allowing me to not care. In context, for example, I fully understand not having to option to go around killing civilians, but that's a completely different position than being told you feel guilty because you caused a civilian death in an act of collateral damage: point is that I don't care if the evil option isn't there, but let my character's mindset remain in my mind. "Oh no, some kid died, you feel sad!" is the worst kind of railroading to me because it's an egregiously unnecessary one. Railroading the plot is necessary because computers can't yet dynamically write games on the fly. Railroading my character's personality is just a case of writer hijack. TL;DR: I understand providing a reasonable 'evil' option is difficult-to-impossible in your common game scenario, and I don't begrudge anyone for the lack of it, and indeed praise them for omitting them where shoehorning the option would not reasonably fit into the narrative. But don't assume that my character is a good person because of a lack of that option.

I haven't been to the cinemas in over a decade now, don't miss it at all. Though getting a larger display for home would be nice of course.

If XP were the chief motivation to do anything in an RPG, it's probably not a good RPG. Progression can be expressed in other terms, both quantifiable ones like reputation and more abstract ones like modifying the game world. Both of those are just as strong, if not stronger, motivations for me to play RPGs in the manner that I do than whatever happens on the character sheet. Not saying the outcome should be zero, but if one were to chart all sources of XP in a spreadsheet, the majority would be in the mainline column. Now the above is all well and good, but not, strictly speaking, an argument against 'standard' sidequest XP loading - it was just an argument that changing that status quo is not as 'harmful' as some may perceive. The argument is the tradeoff in which significantly reducing this loading helps improve the gameworld. This comes from: a) Removing the need for heavyhanded scaling, if not any scaling altogether; and b) Preserving the intended expected skill factors for aspects that are not scaled in the first place. The point I'm trying to make is that the gains of tweaking this loading, in my view, far outweigh the loss of the XP-as-a-reward mechanic this particular subset of the gameplay experience, especially considering the other possibilities in terms of outcomes assigned to these quests can be written such that they end up having a much more variable effect on subsequent content than that of simply arriving at that next quest a level or two higher. For those who view XP as the primary driver, I'm happy enough to agree to disagree, I won't carry on about my off-topic rambling any further here. P.S. Off on a tangent again, a common annoyance for me is the notion of absolute skill levels causing certain skills to be nigh-unusable at lower levels, such that points you put towards this skill are not for immediate use, but for some future payoff several levels away. This is particularly endemic to the stealth skill in many games, I find.

(Apologies for the generalisation but I'm noting some sentiments in this direction) The main argument I tend to take issue with is the sentiment of "if I'm not rewarded for fighting these guys then why should I bother?" There's something wrong with that picture. Contrast to a sentiment more typical to the alternate sneaky playstyle: "I play the sneaky type because I like sneaking". If the all-action combat approach isn't its own reward - that of a fun combat mechanic - then the solution isn't to tack experience points on to cover up that flaw, but to redesign the combat experience in the first place. Spot the odd one out: - Sneak around in Thief because it's fun - Kill stuff in Quake because it's fun - Sneak around in Eternity because it's fun - Kill stuff in Eternity because....? (Again, to close, this is only addressed regarding one specific argument for combat XP, that of it being a payment for work.)

An interesting but to an extent equally broken was DXHR's approach which penalised combat with significantly lowered XP - e.g. 10xp for a kill, 30xp for a non-lethal takedown, even if they were, in terms of execution, exactly the same except for what weapon you had equipped at the time. Just an observation, so to drift back on topic: I'm trying not to be dismissive, but the combat experience issue to me is largely a nothing one. It's not *too* difficult to balance it for a 'proper' playthrough, if it is judged to be necessary for it to be implemented in the first place. But why? If the gameplay experience is broken down to mowing down hordes of mooks to facilitate the mowing down of tougher hordes of mooks, then to create a meaningful experience you need to have a mook progression system typical to A"RP"Gs like Diablo, which does bring significant balancing difficulties. The reverse of course is just mowing down mooks to facilitate mowing down more of the same mooks, in which case progression is not just unnecessary, but perhaps impossible, since in the course of this grinding, you haven't progressed the game state at all. What's more of interest to me then, is the sidequest issue, since in this case you *are* progressing the gameworld, albeit laterally. I'm repeating a previous post, but they do tend to cause problems in that they tend to be the biggest factor in terms of early game level inflation, leading to further quest design needing to anticipate a large possible level range for the characters doing those quests, and so forth in a rapidly snowballing fashion. This tends to lead to undesirable 'fixes' such as Bethesda-style massive area-wide scaling. An example of a very inflationary sidequest would be the very-much-optional REPCONN ghoul facility in New Vegas. So what to do? I'd take a chainsaw and systematically dismember the scale of experience awarded by sidequests. But of course there still needs to be incentive to do those quests, which is the real problem here. To start with, ideas would go along the lines of having them modify your reputation in a way that significantly alters future quests, having them reward interesting but unessential loot (with power kept strictly in check), and having them meaningfully affect your relationship with various party members.

Reading Tyler Hamilton's recent, as in released this month, and controversial book - The Secret Race (or to give the full, and slightly awkward title, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs). Now if you've ever made more than a cursory glance at my sig, you've probably surmised my position on the matter, a position I've held for a number of years now. Passions are pretty high when discussing the topic and minds are hard to change, but it's a cracking read: sure it's not a bounty of massive revelations, not to say there aren't any, but what it mainly does is add a personal, relatable angle to the cold facts that many have known for years. Previous books on the subject, most notably the Sunday Times' chief sports writer David Walsh's 2007 groundbreaker From Lance to Landis read clinically, as would be expected for the piece of investigative journalism that it was. Hamilton's book adds colour to the greyscale world drawn from the fragmented shards of truth compiled over the years, done as only an insider could do, and as such, adds another layer of fascination to its reading.

Watched the 1957 Frank Tashlin movie Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Sharp, satirical and maybe even a little subversive, with a sort of self-parodying, yet signature performance by Jayne Mansfield. Had fun watching it, and it looks like the principals had fun making it, with a healthy dose of playing with the fourth wall.

Saw that TessieCalliSarah has been around this year on the sort-of-Missy's-lair.

I bought a new sofa this month, looks like I timed it perfectly for the upcoming release date then.

Can't say I'm seeing the doom and gloom personally. If only one of those named RPGs gets released next year, it'd already make 2013 a better year than 2012 for the genre, and on par with the preceding two years which averaged one a year. 2010: FONV, 2011: The Witcher 2, 2012: Uhhhhh..... Indeed it's been years since I've been this optimistic about games in general as I am now - and this is before the upcoming announcement of whatever it is Chris Roberts is up to. Also ought to be a good year for the only genre outside the PC that I play, given that the new Wii should bring a healthy new crop of platformers for that old timey time fun.

Or Day of the Tentacle given the vaguely timetravellish thing. George says every American should have a vacuum cleaner in their basement.

Apparently you can change the demo difficulty from the ini/config file if you want to extend that 10 minutes to something more challenging.

I'm surprised he had the restraint to not have a version with Sheploo there instead.

I never even got to see Kai Leng's introduction (not counting the peripheral shot of his yet-to-be-named-self in TIM's office near the start). Well and truly off on a tangent perhaps, but I have an odd relationship with the Mass Effect series in general. The initial release completely passed me by: my thoughts were probably along the lines of "huh, Bio's released a shooter game for the XBox, weird" - I may have even thought it was an FPS - and I more or less forgot about its existence. ME2 I ended up playing only out of near-happenstance: a cheap game picked up in a retail shop (back before I turned into an online shopping addict) during a very boring week. I liked it enough, in isolation, to later pick up ME1 for a fiver during a Steam sale some months later. It felt very rough and wonky and I was probably on the verge of abandoning it a couple times during my only playthrough, but the story, at least in the sense of wanting to see how it segued into the ME2 that I knew, kept it going. At this point in my mind, ME2 was clearly and by some distance the better game, and a good-to-very-good one overall. And then the slide: I exported that character to attempt a second playthrough - something I very rarely do with any game - and found myself wincing on multiple fronts. The least of them was the dull-as-dishwater gameplay of the Adept class, which seemed to be mostly only good for trying to stage novelty kills. But the big regret was, unsurprisingly, how the vaunted "real choice", plotting continuity and character development flaws got exposed in full. (Hey, I came into the series believing Cerberus was legitimately a respected and competent entity ) I could see where the complaints of folks both here and in other nooks of the interweb were coming from. So yeah, playing ME1 kind of retrospectively ruined ME2 for me. And so ME3. Maybe I was slightly unfair to it, coming under a cloud of negativity born both out of that prior experience, and the general PR storm over the ending and all that. But whatever the final cause, ME3 was more or less sunk as soon as it left port: the terrible and cheap opening (one I think doesn't get its fair share of the flak relative to the ending) set the tone on a downward spiral that turned out to be irrecoverable.