Humanoid

The comedy poll option should have been "I'd sooner pick my own eyes out". Don't think it would fit even in Thief, which isn't meant to be Locksmith Simulator 2012. On the other hand, I've always kind of wanted to be able to pick locks in real life..... hmm.

I would extend it beyond that personally, as scouring the map methodically looking for every possible XP-bag/goblin in the game is at the least no more desirable than running around hoping for random encounter experience (a'la Final Fantasy), and probably much worse. Casting my mind way back to the very start of Fallout 1: killing every single rat in the cave you start out in: not compelling gameplay in any sense of the word - I'd very much call that grinding. I would certainly hope that in a typical playthrough of a game, the player encounter only a minority of the actual possible individual foes in the game - not in terms of variety, but in terms of quantity.

Heard November, but that was a while ago. My take on what SWTOR did well was to provide a sense of character ownership in a way WoW never did for me. Sure it was an illusion, but it was the first MMO, perhaps since UO, in which I felt I was playing *my* character and not the writers'.

Feels like a lot of the issue some may have with the non-scaling, limited XP reward system is down to equating a progressive system to a linear one. It's natural to advance the plot in *a* sequential order, which is not the same as saying that it's necessary to progress everyone down the one same singular sequential order. I would also argue that it would add some sort of dynamicism to sidequests (which as I've argued prior, should provide minimal XP gain) to have both dependencies and resolutions tied to your progress in the main plot, instead of being a completely self-contained "guy who stands there from the start of the game right to the end waiting for you to happen to pass by". This is a benefit both on the narrative side, avoiding the sense of sidequests being unrelated busywork, and on the mechanical side, of being able to at least approximate the PC's expected ability levels at a given point in the game. Now even if one disagrees that the above path is not a desirable one to take, it remains that increasing the granularity of XP awards, be it in kill or skill XP, does not affect the problem of anticipating player level in any meaningful way in terms of actually designing the game. What it does do it just add a method for the player to attempt a workaround by the act of grinding. I would say that if that situation had occured in a 'natural' playthrough, then some proper refactoring of the progression curve would be the solution, not that "grind some more" band-aid.

I'm also not sure why people think that if a game isn't linear, it's totally going to be Elder Scrolls or GTA-type open go-anywhere-you-like-with-no-possible-negative-outcome as soon as the 'tutorial' section is done.

There might be a decent niche for someone to develop a utility to manage multiple Steam accounts automatically. A good use for this would be to have every game exist on a separate account to enable resale of games you're done with.

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.