Tigranes

Mad Scientist, your idea has been executed a lot, but in a slightly different way. Basically, the hero always starts out thinking that that they're going to destroy big evil X: on the way they find out some crucial secret, that says big evil X is actually NOT the big evil dude, its Y. X is either a corollary evil or a force of good. Such an archetype has been, iwth modification, demonstrated in Arcanum, Final Fantasy IX, Neverwinter Nights 2 (sortof), and so forth. It's a nice inversion, but the one problem I always had with the way it was executed, is that it feels so gimmicky. You do all that stuff and finally find the big evil X: but wait, there's more! X isn't it, it's Y! The suddenness of the revelation, often involving a completely new element (Y), feels like a big gimmick to make the plot longer than it should be. So many RPG stories, furthermore, now have 'crucial twists' that they sometimes end up being banal (KOTOR1, Jade Empire). I think a more faithful execution of what I think your idea is, MadSc, would be more interesting; X and Y are known from the very beginning, and it's not that theres some sort of 'hidden secret' about X and Y, its just the perspectives of people; and its the people that work to perpetuate these myths that justify the evil X over the good Y, saying X is actually good. There is no man behind the scenes using secrets and magic to keep up a mask; it's a social effect so that the denizens of this fantasy world are locked into the delusion and operate under it. The player, condemned by the populace, would have to at each step work against the world, while doubting if he really has it right. The 'man behind the scenes' would simply be exploiting a delusion that is already present. Do I make some sense? Probably not, I'll type it up better soon. But that's what I think would be a lot more interesting, fresh, and less gimmicky.

I see what you mean, but my perspective is that while I don't like it, I think it would be worse NOT to play wizards, whom I like, just because of that. In IE games I even used to use Ctrl+J (instant teleport), and just pretend that the character was always there to begin with. It is immersion-breaking, but it's not a big price to pay. It would be good to control who talks to who; however, taking that logic further, if you had a NPC talk to someone you would have to be prepared to have him refuse to say certain things. You would tell the NPC 'go in there and charm him to giving you money', but if he's just a paladin with high charisma his conscience might stop him at the last moment, and he comes out of the conversation with less money than he might have got. That's really really complicated to execute though.

In KOTOR you're like a semi-God. It's okay if you die, but if everyone around you dies too, then you die!

I think you will appreciate Final Fantasy Tactics as well, the tactical combat is great fun if you can get past the JRPG-styles and JRPG-story. But yes, you're probably looking for something different than Obsidian's core style.

You still can, even if MOTB is harder you should be able to quickly run back after the dialogue ends. I play wizards all the time.

I read the post that this is part of, but I couldn't really tell how your argument was different. Or is the quoted bit saying that it's not good for him to appear so arrogant when he is trying to grab a future in the industry? In which case, I suppose my comments should be retracted. Anyway, "trying to do something original" isn't really good enough.

Subtlety of Thay, Hall of Fame. Played a couple of hours into that and it's not bad, but monster summoning and some other random things crashed me. I suppose I should wait for a patch-reconciled version or something then.

Been playing some random hall of fame module, its good but it crashes too much. Maybe that's the 1.07 patch though. It took the approach of just giving opponents much better AC and THACO (whatever their equivalents are in 3.5ed), which gets really really annoying especially on early levels. Instead of having all enemies able to thump you for six every turn you want some sort of tactical challenge; sadly, NWN2 wizards seem to buff up for 3 minutes then still be susceptible to a Khelgar Smash. I think the game needs more BG2esque, insidious protections and 'status effect' spells on players (who get plenty of saving throw items anyway). I just might try the OC in the hardest difficulty and see how it goes.

Game is on 'normal' by default. Hardcore solves a lot of difficulty problems without making it unreasonable. I mean, spells SHOULD damage your own party. The game is still too easy, but I suppose soloing an assassin changes that. Sneaking was much more fun in IE games for me, because it was obvious when you were found and when you weren't, and the controls weren't as clunky, and backstab could do some really high damage (chunk!), and you had traps for some of them. The sneak/backstab mechanics on NWN2 are one of the few things I think are actually horrible, and I don't think it would have changed in motb.

Let's skip the "WHAT IS RPG" stuff, huh? Huh? Come on guys, THE HORSE IS DEAD. BG2 was amazingly difficult the first time I played it, but I was 13 or something and that was my first exposure to any type of D&D, ever. Once I read up a bit on it, and understood the rules a bit more, it hit the right balance - it was fun and challenging. After a while of course, the issue was that you know every encounter before you come up to it, and BG2 unlike later IE games often does give you the time to buff till the shiny lights blind your grandma and lay a thousand traps. (The Tree of Life Irenicus is killable in 0.5 seconds using traps alone.) Which is where Tactics and so forth came in. But I don't think BG2 itself can be blamed for that. It needed some AI improvements and it was a little too much on the easy side, but the balance was fantastic. NWN2 isn't difficult at all. I don't remember a single OC battle, on D&D Hardcore difficulty, that you get wiped out easily - esp. with full party. There are some battles where you do need to think about what you're doing, but the final boss was more of an endurance battle than a challenge and I think I only ever had trouble with the dragon (before I worked it out) and the last 3 skull-dudes.

Nightandshape, it's perfectly legitimate to criticise someone when "you can't/haven't done any better". I can criticise Pavarotti's singing even if I can't sing for crap. I can criticise Molyneux even if I am an aspiring game designer (as Kaftan is) that has yet to make a big game or anything. I think only bad feeling will come of pursuing that illogical argument. That said, Kaftan does have an unhealthily large bag of monkeys to throw at the man. Many great ideas are great until they are put on paper; many great ideas on paper are great until they're put in the game; many great ideas in the game are great until people actually play them and tell you, "nah". I can only assume the same would be true of 80% of the ideas your game designer friends come up with every day. That's not a swipe at their capabilities, because the same thing happens with everyone. For Molyneux it's just that he's come to believe to an extent his own hype, and afforded so much creative freedom (even if nobody listens to him now) after his early success, he lost disciplinary control of his own ideas; ideas just started coming everywhere and he'd just go with them without thinking, without trying to rein them in. Obviously, that shows in his B&W/Fable era games, when he still did have a lot of control over how the games were made (I think). Basically Molyneux needed a big rumbling voice that told him, "so how will that work?", "what's the point?" and "just shut up once in a while and think." Heh.

I'm sorry, but the thread has fallen off the proverbial ladder. [Try Again] [Quit] Pragmatically speaking, the US government probably has every intention of getting out of Iraq as soon as they can. i.e. as soon as they think they've done just enough, so that once they get out there won't be such a big uproar of violence that people will just blame them. Thinking of Vietnam, that could take a long time.

Fable wasn't a terrible game, it was just so mediocre and there is nothing really good to remember about the experience, be it art, sound, quests, characters, story, whatever. That's why if for some reason it clicks for you, then you can say "it's not fantastic but its a fun game", and argue that it doesn't have more combat than other games, or other games have silly quests like that too... it's relatively polished and does all the motions, but it's like a really bored and sleepy person writing an essay for a class he doesn't really want to do. Uninspired and flat.

I watched Paprika, Xard, but I got sick of it and didn't finish. I don't know. I did like most of GITS and I loved Akira, it's just that I think I'm sick of pseudo-intellectual scientistic-psychological anime for now. It also didn't really seem like anything special. reading BECK and Monster (heh) and some other random small manga. What's Gurenn Lag thing?

Come now, Wals. I had desperately hoped that after the last three posts the thread would die a good death. I live in NZ so there's this big rugby thing going on, never got into it myself, but then I like a few sports and really don't like the rest. Like Boxing or Netball.

Dragon's Eye time loop was fantastic, it was fun. I liked the Wandering Village too. Fell Wood was just stupid, since it wasn't atypical, it was just abnormally bad.

I just used Area Codes to teleport around with the fell wood. It wasn't immersive, it did'nt ahve story, it didn't have fun combat and there was no point in it whatsoever. At least the Cube Dimension was filled with 4th wall jokes. I can't understand why any designer would actually think that's a good or even acceptable idea, though? I'd love to see the reasoning, really.

Australia beats Japan 91-3... and here I thought NZ-Italy 76-14 was bad. Geez.

I can't seem to remember, where's the hook horror caves in? The final battle in IWD2 never really made much sense to me, but then I'm weirdly inept at working out which protections particular creatures have and what they don't. Sherincal's lieutenant deathknight thing similarly frustrated me, but otherwise that game had some nice battles. There was nothing spectacularly wrong with NWN2 battles (except Orc caves/etc, where I just used a Godmode Khelgar on AI and went away for tea), just that any sort of challenge was numerical or brute, rarely tactical. I hope there's more BG2-esque magic buffs and dispelling involved. I wonder if there are any adjustments to the AI - i.e. patrolling around, calling mates, chasing you, fighters in front of mages?

Indeed, whether 'natural' or 'artificial' once it is constructed firmly enough it is no longer 'arbitrary' in that sense. And we see in Sand's latest post the manifestation of that framework, because he believes, whatever the origins of nations or that nation, it needs to learn to stand on its own and any aid from outside is by definition 'foreign'. He believes that for certain major things the responsibility of man and institution extends only to national boundaries... and his standards are still shared by many. Oh, I'm not saying they don't exist and they're artificial and we're all Earthlings anyway, or something like that. I do concede that systems of locality still rule the world by the powerful and basic level in which they possess our thinking. But you hit the jackpot in that we can't say 'Iraq' is a nation now, so 'Iraq' must get along with itself and stand on its own; we have to look at hte processes in which that 'Iraq' was proclaimed a nation, and whether, for example, it really *is* (or should be) a nation or it is better off separated. In a way we are looking at the formation of a new nation, if on the same ground with the same name.

I haven't been able to afford a game since January, I hate you.

It's not that Sand is a despicable human being (for this, anyway): it's just that for him, the nation is such a powerful unit of categorisation that he divvies up many things in the world by laws of national sovereignty and integrity. But the nation is an artificial conception to begin with...

I think it would have been great live - trying to get that thing right while you know a guard is coming round the corner, snapping the lock then hastily getting up to fight the guy behind you. Or the feeling when you're lockpicking and somebody suddenly goes "I saw a mudcrab today." But yeah, frozen in time it's useless.

7-0 isn't really surprising, the difference that having a proper team structure with basics down is massive in amateur leagues, and some of those guys have probably been playing in teams on and off for decades. Hope it doesn't take the fun away from you guys though, football's a fun fun game... if you aren't losing 7-0 every week.