Fenixp

I'd say, simply put, that there's an attribute that's supposed to affect all direct HP modifications your characters cause, and that's enough justification for me. I'm just baffled that people would go out of their way to explain why can't there be a direct link between strength and spell damage in spite of magic being ... Well, made-up and with no point of comparison to the gritty reality we have all experienced, yet don't really mind that there is a link between Might and crossbow/firearm damage where we do know for a fact that's just not how those work. Well unless you throw a gun really hard at someone while firing it, thus adding some velocity to the bullet. But it's a talent with rather low ACC. As I said tho, I'm not complaining - I'm used to playing board games, so clarity of ruleset always trumps the theme. Which means that Pillars of Eternity still leaves me with a lot to desire. But not in department of Attributes which are all 100% clear. Lovely. I do hope Deadfire goes further in that direction and finally comes up with a RPG ruleset that's actually intuitive in all of its aspects, that'd be nice.

Which is quite an achievement, considering the maps are like 3 by 3 meters large.

Got my salary, which essentially means "Buy Nier: Automata". Finished it in 15 minutes. That was a good ending. Anyway, the combat feels great, the game doesn't give a **** about gamer sensibilities and just goes and does whatever the hell it feels like. This is amazing. A character commented on me enabling controller vibration.

I think it's odd that a person in otherwise fairly close-to-life setting can create fire in his hands. Barring that, I think it's odd that a person can produce fire that burns people more than fire other people can produce from their hands, considering heat of a flame is based on burning material (well not only that, but mainly in our atmosphere and considering both battling mages share roughly the same atmospheric pressure) At this point, I don't really mind if I'm explaining away whether fireballs burn hotter thanks to bodily mass or thanks to being made smarter. Incidentally, what I do find odd is that a person with more might shoots bullets out of their guns that do more damage than that of a person with less might. But I suppose nonsensical ranged damage scaling with an attribute of some description is at this point entrenched so deeply into RPG player's mindset that most don't mind.

Oblivion did basically that and people hated it :-P Seriously tho, it's not a concept that would be unknown in games. The original Metroid already had expansive levels with very little stat growth, but with a lot more complexities unlocked along the way. The original System Shock worked like that too, actually. But yes, I don't think it'd fly in more traditional RPG games.

This quote contains both the question and answer to that question :-P Debates with easy right answers aren't particularly interesting, eh? And as I pointed out, you can absolutely create a mage with low Might value - he's just not going to be very good at throwing fireballs everywhere. Which is fine as making sacrifices is one of the cornerstones of RPGs, isn't it?

Yes, you can. First of all, you can actually do that in PoE. Remember that, effectively, there are two kinds of major spell focuses in the game: Some are based around an immutable effect for X duration, which are essentially dependent on Int, and others apply powerful effect over short duration, that are dependent on Might (or combination thereof) - if you build your spellcaster right and choose proper focus, you can absolutely have a very potent mage with low Might attribute. Secondly, the request of being able to create a weak mage reflects nothing more than you being too entrenched in the ways of other games. Remember that even with separate strength, you can't create your characters in a way you envision them anyway - you're still limited, just by other things. You won't make a person who has good lower-body strength from, say, running a lot. Or a really durable character that's unstable and will take heavy hits from psychological attacks. You always are and will be limited by system - so it's not about "I can't have a mage that's also weak", it's "I finally have a different system that lets me have mages previous systems didn't encourage." And, at the end of the day, there's no real-life example of how does magic work. Having a setting which has a bit of a different outlook on it is just a + in my book, it's not like we're lacking in the department of games where magic power is governed by intelligence.

You could easily make an argument that with physical fitness comes spiritual balance or some such. A lot of people do in fact. [citation needed]

Now this one's peculiar.

Finished Layers of Fear, in a manner. It was a nice walking simulator, there actually were decision-making points and some extremely easy puzzles so that's neat. It's basically 'Explore creepy mansion and things will progressively get more ****ed up as you uncover teeeerrrible stoooryyy!' kind of thing. There are 3 endings to the game, but considering how static it is, I'm not finishing it again. The game's extremely fixated on rats, so um... That's a thing (and now I understand how people feel when they get me talking about rats), I also feel like I wasn't supposed to say "Look at the little guys go!" when rats were scurrying about the house. Incidentally, the game insists on using extremely high-pitched sounds for some of its bits, making my actual rats leave their homes and investigate what the hell's that all about. They got bored when the sound ended so I have another sock they decided to chew through, little bastards (See? I'm doing it again.) I really liked how it played about with perspective and level architecture - using impossible angles, constantly breaking laws of physics and changing layout of surrounding rooms or even changing the room itself to unnerve the player. I also really like how many recurring paintings in the game slowly evolved and changed as the main protagonist's psychological state progressively deteriorated, really cool. I do rather enjoy mind games like that and Layers of Fear put a lot of effort into constantly throwing something new at me, so that's really nice. What's not nice is that it's quite obvious budget for the game was limited, and it takes away some of the experience when you're asking yourself "Wait, so is this room one I have been in before or are these assets just reused again?" I really enjoyed it for a game I got with a monthly bundle, but personally, given extremely limited gameplay it offers, I'd not have dropped more than 5 bucks on it. Really glad I played it tho.

Layers of Fear. It's basically a psychological horror walking simulator with some good sound design and jump scares. It does some really cool crap with perspective and level architecture. It... Claims to have decisions and consequences, but I didn't get any of that yet (may be the point)

So um... What's the scale? How much of gritty reality do I need to experience? I live in a basement with my parents (they actually also live in the basement) and have never left for outside, I have my rats do my groceries, see. That means I can enjoy games like Torment: Tides of Numenera and Might attribute in Pillars of Eternity. Will I stop playing Torment if I now grab an axe and chop down a tree for I will be touched by the gritty reality? On scale from 1 to 1000, how much of gritty reality did you experience to be able to accept much more obvious breaches of physics like people shooting flames out of their hands, calling for lightning, transforming into animals or continents that are formed completely illogically but get bothered by naming of an abstract statistic? If you fight in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, will that make you stop accepting mages? And if you then move to US police force and shoot a few people by accident, are any fantastical elements in your games impossible? I'm genuinely confused, never having experienced reality of any sort. Seriously tho, there's not much more to be said after you pulling that. If you find your point validated on basis of believing to have more real-life experience than everybody else you know nothing about because they don't mind fantastical elements in make-believe videogame on a discussion board about fantastical make-believe videogames, well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Let me sign off with a nice song for calm evenings so that we can return to our regular scheduling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qatmJtIJAPw

To be fair, if my sword was on fire, I'd never sheath it. In fact I'd carry it at my arm's length, always. Pretty good exercise.

Wait, what does the star mean? Where's the note explaining the star? ... No, it's not a smear on my screen, there's definitely a thing behind the 's'

I mostly feel Deadfire needs better animations. Point about animations for status effects is spot-on, add some animations for swordfighting (KOTOR had these cool, albeit repetitive, animations where the combatants would actually parry and counter their attacks, that was nice), add some sync-kills (instead of regular blow, enemy will get his neck arteries cut by a short sword, dagger plunged in his heart etc.) - I feel little changes like these would do wonders to liven the combat up without actually changing much in terms of functionality. I'd prefer avoiding pure RNG elements as much as humanly possible, but they're already present in the original, so ... Eh.

Go and play Doom (2016), basically. It never throws overwhelming numbers at you like Serious Sam did (it never has too many opponents at once in fact), but it more than makes up for that by being mechanically brilliant. It's among the purest FPS games I have ever played.

I'm still sticking to the same goalposts of the discussion - but I might have set them unclearly in my flurry of words, for which I apologize. And, more importantly, I'm of the opinion that this entire line of argumentation is completely irrelevant to the point I was trying to make in the first place - you are arguing with illustration of my point, not the point itself, which is that attributes in games never translate to how similarly named attributes behave in real life. I do think we can agree on that point easily enough, yes? Not just with strength, with pretty much all of them. To extend that argument, I'm saying that since there already is a disconnect between the attributes and their real-life behavior, there's also a disconnect between how you see your character and what is the character doing (you will always be explaining away a lot of inconsistencies in any attribute-based RPG), or am I wrong on that account? That I also agree with, yes. Or leave 'Might' named 'Strength' and explain it away by potency of magic being governed by body mass or bollocks like that - it's not like we have real-life basis for how magic works anyway. You... Did start with a condescending personal jab and then just threw your own opinion into the mix, so it's more of a "Welcome to the club." Anyway, Which is the second part of the argument I was making, put much more eloquently. So thank you.

That would surely make strength a part of constitution, not damage dealt tho. Regardless, we keep dancing around the core point, which was: "Physical attributes don't actually work like that." They're far more complex than +4 damage, and when Ninjamestari tries to persuade me that +4 damage is good enough, then Might is also good enough. I'm also not entirely sure where did I claim mastery over meele weapons - I held a few, got basic tutoring on how to use them, but that's it.

*sigh* When hitting things, you're trying to exercise as little strength as humanly possible as to not over-extend yourself. That's why very sharp things eventually became much more widespread than clubby things (and eventually, strength was taken out of the equation more or less completely). You not only keep dodging the point, but also replied to 1/3 of the argument I was making in the post you quoted and like 1/10th of the argument I was making in the first place. Besides... Yes, absolutely - the issue does stem from expectations. But any way you put it, the 6 attributes used in DnD derive from both physical and from mental abilities of an individual - I mean, obviously. Strength isn't just about strength, it's how you apply it. We covered constitution. Dexterity is about fine movements but also perceiving details. Mental stats are mental, true, but don't really make any sense ("I can't form a coherent sentence but I'm ... Like ... Really charismatic. Bro.") At the end of the day, if you wanted a realistic system, character creation would look roughly like this: What's your lung capacity (l)? What's the tensile strength of tendons on your left arm (MPa)? ... And since we have no idea how do you measure potency of magic (for... Obvious reasons), 'Might' is as good of a stat as any.

Merriam-Webster defines Pander (verb) as: That... Seems to be about right use to me? But different culture and all that, one word can have different connotations in different parts of the world. And I think you're downplaying issues people had (and are still having) with the game. Look, it's perfectly fine that Bioware has stated an apology. What just comes off as rather weird is that Bioware has made many genuine mistakes and this is just the one they cherry-picked to apologize for. And I don't really care which group they pick for this - LGBT community who got offended for the dialogue, people who dropped a bunch of money on the game which refuses to work properly or PC gaming master race that got offended because PC gaming master race always gets offended. State an apology that'll apologize to people who took issue with the game because of terrible writing and I'll say "So the rest of the game's perfectly fine, eh?" If you want to apologize for making mistakes, make the apology genuine - don't choose group that you thing may bring the biggest trouble to you or one that feels to be the most sympathetic to you if you apologize, just owe up to your failure and do it properly or don't do it at all.

You guys should really stop arguing about who cares less, it does nothing to further the discussion and is, quite frankly, even more ridiculous than me. That's the thing tho - it is pandering as long as Bioware isn't responsive to all criticisms. It's not only people that complain about their sensibilities who have problems with that game - there are other issues with it that genuinely impede enjoyment of a product that costs quite a hefty sum and if you're going to apologize to a group for doing things wrong for them, you might as well apologize to everybody else (Everybody who cares, obviously. We don't. We're cool. We wear sunglasses and sneer at problems.) To me, it just stinks of "Oh boy, who cares about the rest of our customers, we have to apologize to this minority because that's the politically correct thing to do now."

... I'm so very sorry.

Oh look, another European studio that does better facial animations than some AAA budget titles from Montreal. Anyway, I'm... Actually properly excited for this.

Oh yeah, the primary form of Axii is quite useful, but the alt is so useless it's not even funny.