Humanoid

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.

I demand at least as big a manual as Falcon 4.0! Though perhaps with a 4-ring binder instead of a 3-ring one, because triple hole punches are bulky and expensive.

Surely we can't let them leave it at that. No rest until we successfully campaign for Chris to be named their Man of the Year!

Going against my own preference for having no vendor selling restrictions; but I do have to say that loot bloat is a serious enough fun-killer such that I'm backing the approach of making no vendors accept the majority of lootable crap. Even trade goods would have no direct vendor value for this purpose, let alone animal parts. My nirvana is being able to walk away from a big melee having looted nothing but "gold" and perhaps the sword of the foe's leader.

It got a bit lost amidst all the excitement surrounding Eternity (which I am guilty of myself - probably would have pledged more to this if it didn't have competition ), but the Broken Sword Kickstarter has closed, having met all the stretch goals except the Beneath a Steel Sky one (but fairly confident it will come around eventually anyway). Final tally on the Kickstarter page of ~770k, but comfortably enough past the goal with ~820k overall once Paypal pledges are accounted for.

Mostly rehashing a previous post from about a week ago, but my preference is basically for as little as possible. Other attempted solutions haven't really done much to address the issue. The common approach of limiting carry weight (another thing I think could potentially be cut altogether) only encourages people to ferry stuff back and forth to a vendor. Alternative solutions such as DXHR's conversion of duplicate guns into ammo did the same. The principle for lootable stuff I'd prefer is that you'd want to represent the most liquid stuff first: 1) Gold and other-stuff-so-close-to-gold-that-it-may-as-well-be-gold. I don't see the value in separating out little pocketable mundane valuables. Gems, jewellery, gold tooth fillings - just abstract it all into a gold sum. It's really not a big leap from your copper and silver coins magically turning into gold ones after you hold a hundred of them in close proximity to each other. P.S. don't make the player have to manually click on the gold in the loot window please. 2) Weapons and other universally wieldable gear. This is the one I'm torn about most, really. It's not just stuff you can zap away, and a sword is a sword, anyone can use it so it's easily enough sold. But it's a chore, and difficult to determine how much of a realistic load it is. At the moment I'm favouring a compromise where low quality weaponry is not lootable: consider a rusty sword a zero-value item. 3) Bulky bespoke gear like armour.* The post is fairly old so I won't bump it, but in summary, I'd take the undoubtedly controversial option of making it completely unlootable. The primary reason is a gameplay one of trying to minimise ridiculous loot hauling, but I think it's not *too* difficult to justify from an in-universe perspective. Heavily battle-damaged, crude running repairs over the years, parts cobbled together from bits and pieces in the first place, and probably very bad BO. It's not too hard to imagine that this stuff is just scrap, and unless there's a crafting mechanic where you'd want to be collecting scrap metal, a'la Vegas, then just leave it there to rot. * Without wanting to go into any great detail, the larger point in context from the previous proposal was to make armour in general a non-item: it would be an attribute on your character sheet instead of on the inventory screen, with progressive upgrading done over the course of the game. Imagine it like say, upgrading your spaceship in a space trader game.

'Ere, but I cannae help but get distracted laddie when there's an NPC who's entire dialogue is written like this aye? Which is to say, while employed correctly it can be an interesting asset, it can introduce a bit of a disconnect between the few lines of voice and the reams of text which follow - either they're written in the Queen's English which doesn't read anything like their voiced exclamations, or written in a jarring style full of their conversational tics. Which is to say I guess, that they should be careful with the few lines in the script that do get voiced.

Clearly the best solution is to make *everyone* left-handed. I've had enough of the dextrous hegemony. We're in a fantasy world where everything is, er, fantastical, and yet we continue to perpetuate the notion of right-handed dominance? Sinister forever!

It's something that's fun but mechanically challenging to implement, given that it's probably something that'd only see use a few times at most in a typical playthrough. I can definitely see actions of this nature being made an option through 'dialogue' instead without damaging immersion overmuch. I'm thinking particularly of the give gun to kid trick in Fallout 2.

As per the FAQ on the bottom of the Kickstarter page:

Bit ambivalent on traps. Player-placed traps are something I've never bothered with, outside of the ubiquitous Delayed Blast Fireball, and so is one of those features that'd do no harm to add but may well be skipped by a significant majority of players. This tendency is, I imagine, due to the typical design of static groups of enemies in most games that need to be manually lured - a fiddly, time-consuming and oft immersion-breaking process. If we somehow manage to get a more dynamic encounter dynamic, then I may revise the opinion. As for enemy traps - I despised the IE games approach with a passion. It was incredibly tedious to me to always send the thief one corridor ahead of the party in any environment. More than that, the reward vs consequence balance of them was mostly pointless - a bit of minor damage and loss of disarm XP makes it nothing more than a chore. If traps are implemented, I'd like to see them used very rarely, and with interesting consequences for triggering them: causing environmental changes for example which force you into a different path, or even cause plot consequences like causing that plot NPC you were tailing to escape the current location.

Loved the iterative approach of the Darklands system, but given this game won't have the sheer scope in terms of time and open play, it would make sense to narrow down the range and make it a bit more fine-grained. If I remember right, Darklands started the character creation at 15 years old and advanced in increments of 5? And let you terminate the process at 15 and start at that age, or go right through to your twilight years. In the context of Eternity though, I'd say, maybe also start it at 15 but force a minimum number of iterations until you're say, 18 or 20 years old, and optionally allow advancement to ~30. Increments of one or two years. Further, perhaps instead of the fairly static "so I was a soldier for the next 5 years" approach, perhaps have the advancement steps be presented in the form of two or three background-appropriate multiple-choice questions per iteration. Don't care about the raw stats so much but I'd be curious to see if this iterative advancement system would create enough diversity that no allocation whether random or manual is needed. You have stock-standard base stats on your non-playable 15-year old self, and that dynamically changes as you go through the process.

I've always had a bit of a conflicted position on the thieving mechanics of RPGs, in that, a) I almost always play a thief (not a rogue, dammit, a thief) in CRPGs, but b) rarely actually ever end up stealing anything but plot items. I don't feel it's really possible to simulate anything that would even vaguely resemble how a traditional thief would act, making general thievery beyond the super-abstract. The feeling I dislike most is that of thievery essentially devolving into 'harvesting' NPCs in the same manner any regular character would harvest a roomful of crates: check every single one and take everything your pockets can hold. As for solutions? I'd be keen to experiment with firstly removing the general interface function for stealing everything in sight. I'm not interested in the game trying to depict the act of pilfering mundane goods. Now, this is where I think a feature common to old adventure games with text parsers might find a new home - the 'look' command. As you enter a new room or 'room', you perform this untargeted function and the game returns a report with potential targets: quest items, unique gear, or otherwise special and interesting stuff. The detail, i.e. whether some or all of the actual stealable stuff is returned, may depend on your thief's perception/awareness/stealing/whatever skill, and stuff that isn't in the report can't be taken. The stuff that is in the report becomes interactable, either via normal looting for unattended items, or, for items on a mark's person, either via dialogue or a loot function (I prefer the dialogue approach). As for the mundane stuff that I said should be taken out, an abstracted approach could be taken. On the rest/camp screen, say, assuming such a beast exists, you have the option of sending your thief to go on a 'mission'. This mission need not be shown at all by the game engine, just the results (modified by the thief's ability) displayed, either some cold hard currency or at least easy-to-liquidate goods. Or utter failure, of course. EDIT: Actually, failure is probably the next most interesting to discuss in this context. To be honest, I've only skimmed the above posts about the consequences of being caught and all that and how difficult it is to simulate a believable reaction. I'm wondering though, if with a reasonably designed system, failure could be removed altogether - your thief may simply not be able to make an attempt at a certain item if they've not got the skills. In terms of the system I've proposed trying, the no-fail mechanic would be applied to the "special" thieving mechanics, while failure in the mundane thieving missions would either result in returning with no loot, or having to bail/break your thief out of prison.