Blarghagh

Turns out I'm wrong and my contribution is an amphibian, not a reptile. My bad! My honor dictates I learn about a similarily phallic reptile now. Anyone got any ideas?

This thread thus far lacks the sexy. Therefore, here's a real snake (limbless reptile, technically) that is almost too inappropriate to post. I give you Atretochoana eiseltiis.

That's what my girlfriend calls Li'l TN. (Not really*) For those wondering, here's the link to the picture: http://instagram.com/p/pHTJSVJx9V/# I like the Dandy Hat of the Diseased Yak. I imagine many people will get a good laugh when that drops. *Okay, really. :'( EDIT: Haha, I got ninja'd and it completely changes the meaning of my post.

I can see it from your point of view as well. I think earlier in this thread, or maybe another thread about scaling, I stated that perhaps some players would consider scaling of any kind to be more a punishment than anything else. That's why I'm not saying PoE should use this, but it could be a possible solution if the end game proves too easy. Personally, I don't want another end-game like KotOR II, where waves of enemies fell before me to the point that I was bored just clicking buttons. It went from power fantasy to immersion breaking boredom. Ideally, things like this would be controlled by the difficulty. Someone playing on easy mode would never encounter this, normal mode would encounter it moderately, and hard mode would encounter it to the full extent. After all, playing hard mode implies desire to face challenge. Maybe it could even be toggled off. Anyway, the thread is about crit-path encounters, so I would think it would apply mostly to the main quest anyway. And like I said, the boundary should be pretty high. I don't think the point is to make encounters impossible - just more challenging and engaging than just letting your characters wade in and slaughter everyone without a second thought. EDIT: As for open world, I would think it's more interesting for an open world where you're the hero to evolve based on your actions. If your enemies have been defeated by your techniques, it would make sense they would try to adapt to it. Again, just my opinion.

Well, I'd think solo players (or small party) wouldn't as easily break this barrier, so they should be unaffected unless they're really good. And if they are really good, I'd think they'd enjoy the extra challenge. In my opinion, the point of scaling is to keep the game challenging when a player becomes too powerful for the encounters to avoid it becoming boring. I would say the boundary should be pretty high. Like I said, I'm not 100% convinced this is even neccesary. The higher difficulty settings made BG2 plenty difficult for me, personally. I just find the discussion interesting and think this may present an interesting solution with interesting gameplay possibilities. Even if not fitting PoE (which it might be) it's an interesting idea to keep in mind for game design in general.

I don't know, possibly? It was just an example. It's not set in stone. Maybe only some encounters get this change. Maybe only some enemies in an encounter get changed because of it. However, if you force a player who had used a party build geared towards a lot of magic damage to change tactics, you've already made the game more challenging for that player and possibly made munchkin builds less viable, meaning you'll need to use more variable strategies which is more challenging. This means experienced players get more challenge while less experienced players, or players who do less optional content, do not get gimped because of it. Obviously there are issues to solve as to how to implement something like this, but it seems to be fairly non-intrusive way to scale the challenge to the level of the player. I'm not convinced it's neccesary myself. But it's still an idea that could work.

Not really. The scaling is in that if you meet the requirements, the enemies will be given more resources to make them a challenge. For example, if the game would detect that your party does an overwhelming amount of magic damage, it could give magic resistance potions to bandits as a way to compensate.

I have to admit, most RPGs have a backwards tension curve. Difficult at the start due to low level, easy at the end because of all the power you have amassed. I get that it's a power fantasy, but I've quit more than one cRPG because I simply became too powerful. When half of the gameplay becomes boring timesinks with no challenge, I have no drive to continue. Not neccesarily. It wouldn't be too hard to scale based on damage output or hit points. Not saying I prefer this because for now I can't see a way to implement this without homogenizing class experience (a chanter's enemy could be weaker just because a mage deals more damage?) but it would be more like scaling to player skill than level. Of course, it would still be influenced by level, but not entirely.

Nowadays? Terminator 3:Rise of the Machines was 11 years ago.

I saw the RoboCop remake. Surprisingly, it was good. A completely different version of the story, using the same basic ideas. Exactly what a remake should do. Only downside is that it liked beating you over the head with the allegory stick. "We're talking about real life drones, get it? GET IT?"

Sunset Overdrive looks entertainingly stupid.

It doesn't strike me as so unfair because the "hurricane of failure" I refer to has the actual effect of a hurricane. Whatever their last match is, they will be constantly comitting fouls, making it their own fault that they lose. I find it pretty hard to support them if it means giving them another oppertunity to kick opponent players in the face. This happened in the last few World Cups and European Cups. To be fair, there is a lot of new blood in the team now so it might not be so bad.

Interestingly enough, The Stomping Land is doing an experiment where they phase in content that is already complete to test the balance, or some such. All that did was convince me not to buy it yet - and convincing me not to buy a game with dinosaurs in it is quite a feat.

I think we could all stand to be a little more civil in this thread. Play the ball, not the man.

I've resolved not to watch it this time around. All it does it make me angry, whether through awful referees or my national team getting everyone's hopes up by playing amazingly well at the start of the tournament and then transforming into a hurricane of failure when it actually matters.

Spent most of the day at a local climbing park, climbing from tree to tree over thin wires and loose hanging logs 20 feet above the ground. As someone with a serious fear of heights, I'm quite proud of myself. I'm also exausted.

This thread has become more about who was or wasn't able to understand something than proper discussion. Topic has walked a fine line but I think it's run its course now.

I think Game Dev Tycoon is an interesting case. None of my friends would have heard about it if their clever way of dealing with pirates hadn't been reported on gaming websites. Now they all own it.

I may have conveyed my opinion ineffectively by choosing that extreme hypothetical scenario.Let me try again. Hypothetically, one of the special backer rewards was designing the art for a loading screen. Obsidian starts a PoE art contest and some hypothetically incredible artist wins the right for his awesome hypothetical piece to be featured as a loading screen as well. This would violate the statement of "you didn't pay, you don't get to contribute", correct? But would you be opposed to a cool piece of art being featured just because it wasn't created by someone who backed that tier, even if the contest involved the community with the project and resulted in great content that took serious effort and enthousiasm for the project from the person who created it? Like I said, I agree that in this case Obsidian shouldn't simply raffle off special backer content that was implied to be special rewards for people who went above and beyond to support the project. But there are other ways to go above and beyond to support a project than pledging money, and as long as that happens I'm perfectly fine with it. tl;dr version: I don't think the possibility for non-backers to contribute to the game should be written off entirely and instead it should be looked at on a case by case basis. This is just my opinion, you're welcome to disagree.

Went swimming today, then I ate all you can eat spicy chicken at a local steakhouse. It was a good day.

If it was a strawman I would be misrepresenting his argument, I don't see how I'm doing that. I'm merely presenting an alternate angle to consider. You're welcome to educate me if I'm wrong, Bryy.

I think the topic has been fairly intelligently discussed. I would like to remind everyone that admitting to or advocating piracy is frowned upon on a game developers forum, so please refrain from that. We'll allow the topic for now, unless the discussion turns sour.

I don't want to dominate the world. That's such a huge hassle. I'm fine with just dominating your money.

That's a very black and white view. It seems somewhat entitled - because some people paid for content, it automatically means nobody else can? I can understand the subjective moral objection (it is implied that it is a special privelege) but I don't see a rule. Not to say I don't agree with you, mind. I would definitely raise an eyebrow in a "that's not a decent thing to do" manner, but I wouldn't set it as a requirement. What if the Make A Wish foundation contacted Obsidian - this kid will die of cancer before the game comes out, and his last wish is to create a weapon for PoE! Would Obsidian be obliged to say "sorry, he didn't pay for it"? An extreme and unlikely scenario perhaps, but in such a scenario I feel it would definitely be the decent thing to do. Making it a fixed rule removes that flexibility.

I thought this thread was about me! I do agree, I would like to be able to play a neutral character. One of the things I disliked in Knights of the Old Republic 2 is the light side and dark side mastery bonuses - the completionist in me felt forced to pick a path and stick to it. That's my problem, but on the other hand, I couldn't pick a prestige class either until I had a light side or dark side net shift. I do think this game won't be possible without at least some combat (if I recall, Sawyer said as much in an interview) but most of it should be avoidable.