Tigranes

There's stuff on the strategy forum, and you can always post your builds and troubles - it's fun to see what people do to get their TCS/Ultimate/etc working.

KOTOR2 would never be a Top 3 RPG, because that series had subpar combat. You could mostly leave it on autopilot, and the over the shoulder cam + floating UI + party real time with pause made it so messy that the game had to become piss easy to compensate. It just felt a bit less boring because lightsabers and force choke. If we're talking a game with great writing and bad combat, then PST takes the cake. DAO was a solid RPG that did everything pretty well - OK writing for most parts, fun combat, pretty good systems, etc. But if we're talking an all-rounder then BG2 is there in Top 3. (In my utterly insignificant opinion, of course)

TCS has been done by many classes. Just check the records on these forums alone. There's also at least one account of the Ultimate playthrough on these forums, IIRC. And Shadowing Beyond isn't even 100% necessary for rogue runs. Point being lots of players have very different ways and come up with a lot of solutions you or I never thought of. If you want to say they're "impossible" you're going to need more proof than "I think they're super hard". I mean, I don't ever see myself doing FCS/Ultimate, though I had fun doing soft ironman pre-xpack. I don't mind, it's not like I need to have the achievements to have fun or feel like I achieved a difficult run.

He's talking about the fact that almost every depiction of nudity and sex in videogames have been "12 year old's cringey hornyness for style + the worst B-grade budget porn production", e.g. DAO sex scenes. But then, this thread is 'crazy ideas', so sure. Proper nudity, sex? Nothing against that. What we do get tends to be puerile trash.

The XP scaling OP mentions is entirely different from level scaling. It would be nice to be able to customise it so that I can give myself a bigger challenge if I want - or to adjust if Obsidian screws up the XP rate like they did with POE.

Torment, Fallout 1, BG2:SoA.

As with anything related to games, making games and mods is the most useful for your own skills, and the best recognised by your employers. Don't get a degree in English literature (unless you have other goals). For the love of god, don't go to one of those games universities. Mod games, make simple games, let experience teach you what makes good game writing. Beyond that, read widely. As Avellone and others have noted, real life history, or even seemingly distant interests (like, say, rocketry or wildlife ecology), can give you creativity and detail that you can't get by just playing video games all the time.

"Most people" = is there any indication of this, or are we just being Trumpian and making it up? Tyranny's system was a success? I don't know if you mean everybody loved it or you think it was a success, but the spellmaking system was the only bright spot in a braindead combat system where you just mashed shiny buttons to win... until, even on POTD, you got strong enough that you could even stop pressing the buttons half the time.

"I don't like something and it's old, I'll just call it outdated, there, no rational argument needed." Drained and other secondary mechanics are cool. I don't see what interesting decisions cooldowns add, while you have to take a lot of care not to turn it into a hamster at the wheel game. I feel like a braindead monkey pressing the shiny buttons in Tyranny. Mana doesn't change it much - if it's very hard to regenerate then it's basically per encounter, if it regenerates fast you kite until it does, if it requires mana pots you're looking at the inevitable late game of everybody with 8000 mana pots.

Stretch goals often cause all kinds of problems for development, and I've always donated based on the core pitch, and I intend my donation to go towards devs designing and creating a game they think will best achieve that core vision. I think this is the most sensible strategy, even though individual stretch goals can be extremely exciting. I don't want to lecture devs on how to make a game, because sometimes that actually hinders them on delivering on their core pitch. (Of course, I don't want devs to do whatever they want, but if I thought they wouldn't deliver on their core pitch when left to their own devices, I wouldn't trust them or back them in the first place.) In that respect I'm OK with them going with more modular features for stretch goals so far, including localisation. And honestly, if I could have any stretch goals I wanted, I would rather that they use each extra 200k for things like increased quest reactivity across the entire game, better animations, more man-hours spent on encounter design per map, etc. - rather than a stronghold or a new city. Sadly, that's probably very unattractive to put up as a stretch goal in many cases.

Depending on how it's coded, it might be as simple as creating a blank watercolour portrait and using it to overwrite all watercolour portrait files, or something like that, if you were really determined to exorcise them.

Thanks. So in this case, your point is that state run schools have proven able to take on good ideas and stay on top of the latest education strategies, while federal involvement hasn't done much for actual teaching quality since it got hands dirty in the 70s? It's good to get the specific reasons, because they are certainly more substantial than a blanket wish for local government in any subject.

Ugh, no. In the vast majority of cases they necessarily look much worse (including the teaser Eder model), and the portraits are a good way to evoke a certain atmosphere beyond - and in complement to - the in-game graphics. It's telling how loved many of the IE game portraits are years later.

As a foreigner, I'm genuinely curious (and ignorant): what makes state government so much better than the federal in these cases, such that so many commentators will often say "give it to the states and they'll just do it better"? Is it a general statement about scale, and governing as locally as possible? Is there a proven track record of states handling education or other issues far better, and if so, is that an efficiency question or is that about states tending to take different solutions?

GM has a great story, delivered in the worst way possible. It's like they took the script of a video game or film, and copy-pasted into dialogue screens. (Which is pretty much what happened, when they couldn't do the expansive 'mind dungeon' minigame originally envisioned.) Durance survives to be a memorable character, despite also being a word vomit dump, because of his, uh, winning personality.

This is exactly true. Also, the job allowed me to build a new PC, and... The good news is, at the rate old Donald is going at I'll be deported before you can say "Law? What law?"

"America: At least it's better than North Korea!"

Your reward for playing a game is the enjoyment you had playing it - and the use you got out of your various rewards during that game. I really don't get why people feel the need to have an entirely separate game with new systems 'recognise', as if they just spent three months in the coal mines and got nothing for their hard work. Is this related to how some people are proud of their 'achievements' or badges or whatever?

They look fantastic. And given that these are not for the party but for dozens of NPCs in the gameworld, this is a good mix of ease-of-drawing and excellent looks. I also appreciate the POE/BG style, but if I had to give props it would be to Icewind Dale:

Yeah, if you could stomach weathered veterans like Sagani, weirdos like Grieving Mother, castoff priests like Durance, etc. all magically being at the level you are when you find them...

You care to elaborate on that? I'd like to know more about those "easier ways to make deep character interactions", especially when you exclude the one human feeling that is both central to about 99% of all essential storytelling mediums out there and to human life in general... Agreed, purposefully avoiding normal human feelings between companions with whom you've been through thick and thin says something about writers' confidence in their work. PoE1 didn't even touch friendship properly. Sure. Nothing strikes me as more contrived and immersion-breaking than characters than the harem-like gravitational pull that makes the PC the object of romantic overtures by every other traveling companion, especially when they are on a life or death mission often bound together by alliances of convenience. Just like it is idiotic that every Hollywood movie has to have the Bond girl fall in love with Bond, and every male-female protagonist pair doing anything together involves them going to bed at one point, as if you're going to fall in love with anything you spend time with. I thought it was moronic when I was 10 and played RPGs; I think it's moronic now as an adult with multiple relationships over the years. In contrast, it is very engaging to find characters who are there to spy on you and never drop their wariness going through thick and thin (GO-TO); characters who do share a bond with you, but ultimately are compelled by people and events other than your precious self and main quest, such that you cannot simply bend them to your will (Hanharr). And yes, I do appreciate characters that delve into themes of romance and love - when it is explored without the need to make them fall in love improbably with the PC and then go through stupid sex scenes or whatever. I enjoyed Sagani's romance - the romance that she has with her husband, whom she had to leave behind. I enjoyed Eder's relationship with his brother, whom he loves very much, but struggles with the idea that he may have done things that cannot be answered for or that the brother may believe in things very differently than him. Even when you do have romance with the PC, characters who are written in this way tend to fare better. Jaheira's romance is one of the few not-terrible ones, partly because she is written as a level-headed character not swayed by idiotic hentai visual novel lines (or, even worse, gifting them crap like in DAO), and partly because her involvement with you is constantly complicated by her recent bereavement at the hands of Irenicus. Nobody that opposes romances in RPGs thinks that all romances are stupid or that love is a shameful or bad topic for RPG writing - that is only what some aggrieved romance-supporters imagine. Romances are already aplenty in RPG stories - when a NPC on a quest wants you to find his missing wife, when your traveling companion talks about the husband she left behind, etc. And yes, it could include the PC, in a similar fashion. However, when you have people demanding romance as a 'feature', which becomes announced as 'Lolita is a romanceable companion!', and when there is widespread expectation of a 'quest' with a 'reward', that's when things get stupid. Do I want Obsidian do include romances, involving the PC or otherwise? I don't care. I want them to write a good game with whatever themes and relationships that suits the situation. That means not pigeonholing them by demanding "romances" or "murders" or "family sitcoms", and that means developers not thinking of romances as a 'feature'.

Obsidian clearly isn't particularly into romances, and there are many other, easier ways to make deep character interaction, so the only remaining argument is "I really like romances and I really want them to make it." Fine, that's a perfectly valid argument for an entertainment product, but keep in mind that's just as valid as "I really dislike them and don't want them to put it in." I think so, years have passed since PoE1, devs could have reconsidered about a lot of things since then, not just romances. And today devs are not in such dire straights as they were back then. And furthermore, I don't think writing a bunch of scripted text is as costly as you make it out to be. So yeah, this thread is valid again and one can hope devs will deign to comment somewhere about it. Afterall, they're stabbing at Baldur's Gate 2 glory now, and BG2 had romances, which were quite fine. Devs in general are in just as dire straits as they were back then. Kickstarter does not solve the long-term problem in this industry where independent developers have very few realistic paths to actually existing in not-dire straits. This is well documented. "Writing a bunch of scripted text isn't that expensive" - ask any game developer. By that logic anything that just involves a bit of code or writing should be piss easy to put out, yeah? --- Getting into more subjective territory: MOTB and PST had passable romances from what I remember, but they weren't the best parts of the character interactions and they didn't make or break those specific characters. I don't see a good argument for including romances, I only see an argument that sometimes it's awful, and at rare times it is just passable.

Enforced party NPCs are unlikely. People hated Shandra in NWN2 OC because of how it screwed up party composition, and Obsidian devs said afterwards they understood why it was so frustrating and don't expect to do it again anytime soon (and they didn't, since then). This is only true if the game system only allows typical older D&D roles, so that every party has to have a Fighter and a Wizard and all your characters are divided into 'glass cannon', 'tough frontliner', 'healer' archetypes. That is obviously not true even in POE1. You could just run with what is essentially the same party that you play in all the other games - "this guy is a tank, this guy is a cleric" - but that's your choice. It was easy to create 4, 5, 6 man parties in POE1 that were clearly viable and powerful, and even have redundancy, because you actually didn't need a typical "I'm healing!" cleric to make a balanced party, you didn't need to have a "I'm fireballing!" mage to make a balanced party. Everything you're describing only applies in a very specific scenario where the player insists on making their parties in a certain way. Now, that's not entirely unreasonable: "I like making X party and I have to have 6 members for it" is a valid complaint. But it's certainly different from "oh my god you're breaking the system and we won't be able to have balanced parties and the game will become much more punishing etc". It won't.

Undead are often the more boring monsters to fight because when there's such a strong stereotype, designers get lazy. Oh, slow shuffling zombies, oh, skeletons immune to slashing, boring, boring, boring. Please have some undead that have a modicum of thought invested into them. Don't want to fight 800 skeletons.

But as it does indicate progression, it feels like our previous progress is completely lost. My character may as well not be my character because the adventures to this point are completely invalidated. Of course it's lost, this is a new game. I want to play a new game with overhauled, improved game mechanics, which is much easier to do with a fresh start. I don't get any particular hard-on from being level 800 and I don't really care to believe the Watcher is a real dude that goes to the loo and his life stretches out in one linear progression of power. I want to enjoy a good story, I want to play a fun game, and the history of CRPGs indicate that it's much easier to do that at low/mid-levels than super epic.