Fenixp

Actually, when I showed PoE to my wife who's mostly a casual gamer, she said it looks beautiful. Something she never noted about games like Dragon Age: Origins. I think you'll find most people don't really care about whether a game is 2D or 3D, they tend to care about aesthetic first and foremost. As for 3D being natural progression for games, yeah, people thought that about 15 years ago and it brought us some horrible things. 3D is merely another tool you may use to develop a game and it's not inherently better or worse than 2D. Having 3D graphics for the sake of having them is counter-productive and unnecessary, which is why you'll find that many games returned to 2D after the late 90s 3D explosion ended - in fact, the most popular games of today are 2D. Yes, they're often casual shovelware, but that doesn't change that.

Lightning returns is stupid.

Well that's a new one. I sort of wish I stopped reading right there. Elegant solutions are actually much more difficult than interesting solutions. Anyone can come up with an idea, but implementing it in such a way that it's balanced and interacts properly with the rest is far more difficult.

You can make them widescreen. They're ugly, yeah. Still, I wasn't referring to DoW1 since it has pretty bad campaign. Well, okay, Winter Assault is great. And Dark Crusade is okay. Shame there was never any other expansion released for DoW1, right? Right!? Anyway, I was talking about the campaign of DoW2 and Chaos Rising, which were both great. Repetitive, sure. But great.

Aren't they working on the Underworld sequel as well right now? I wonder how are they going to handle developing two titles of this size and... Well, I won't put too much trust into their abilities unless they actually release something playable. Yes, more than a sandbox.

So um... System Shock 3 possibly? Me and my friend have finished the Orc campaign in co-op. The entire screen just kept exploding. Over. And over. It was amazing. Still, the overall quality of campaigns in the previous games was a lot better than in Retribution, which is a shame. Well it's good if you want to play the previous games, but... You know.

The displayed time limit in Fallout was actually kind of cool, and not something a modern game would ever attempt any longer. The hidden time limit in Fallout was balls and poorly implemented - thankfully there are mods to remove it. But yeah, generally speaking, putting a time limit into a game seems to only ever serve purpose when it's optional - the initial mission of Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a fantastic example of this. Because the moment it's not optional in the sense that you get clock displayed in your face and lose when you don't finish an objective in that time, that's just frustrating for no good reason. Then there are implied time limits where all NPCs tell you how world will end if you don't take action, but since that would be a failure state, there's no actual time limit in place so you run around catching bees for some reason instead. I kind of like what Batman: Arkham Knight did - there are points in the story where you're told that you need to wait for something to happen and are encouraged to pursue side missions. And then, towards the end of the game, pressure is lifted from player and it's made clear to him that he may do whatever now.

It wasn't ugly per se, but: a) Pillars is beautiful in 2D. DA:O is passable in 3D. b) It's a prime example of repeated assets. In Dragon Age, most dungeons consisted of rooms which were not visually distinct, they were all very similar with some details shuffled around to make them look unique. Nonetheless, you've had to fight camera about 100% more than in Pillars, didn't you? But yes, Dragon Age had great production values, it was mostly designed quite well. In spite of that, it happened often enough that some pieces of environment would cover corpses or objects which could be interacted with. Not really. First of all, Pillars of Eternity would gain no benefit from in-engine cutscenes as it's entirely written like a book, not like a movie. It's written to be read, not to be observed and listened to. Now it seems like you prefer the latter approach, but it's not inherently better. Of course, fully animated cutscenes go with voice acting and it feels weird when you don't also get dialogues in the same style. So while yes, 3D engine would benefit some games in that respect, fully animated dialogue/cutscenes is not it. It's also more expensive to create. A LOT more expensive.

And practical reasons. What is the practical benefit of having a 3d isometric game? It doesn't inherently look better, art style is always more important and PoE ended up being one of the most gorgeous games I've seen lately (probably surpassed by Skyrim, but Skyrim wasn't gorgeous because it's 3d, Skyrim was gorgeous because some extremely talented artists worked on the game - and it was first person perspective). The only benefits I can see are technical like proper scaling of backgrounds with resolution, but that can be quite simply solved by backgrounds being high fidelity to begin with, and the benefit of properly animated NPCs, which we got anyway as those are 3d. So ... Again, how would potential Pillars of Eternity 2 benefit from 3d? And would those benefits outweigh the downsides? (repeated textures, much less unique locations due to inherent asset reuse, the game would not be nearly as clear at the first glance unless a ton of polish was put into it)

Question is: Why? When I played pretty much any DnD games, I've had a character who could spot traps / disarm traps / unlock locks, as these skills sort of go hand in hand and it's quite annoying to not have them all on a single character. Merging them into a single skill seems fairly logical to me.

Perhaps Ubisoft will come up with an entirely new, completely unique mechanic tied to exploring territory like scrying the land trough a magic pebble which will involve a dream in which your character climbs a radio tower.

That's not a name, it's a title. Hi, I'm Fenixp, pleased to meet you But logically, one does exclude the other. There's several points I have to counter your argument, so let's go trough them all. I also love lists: a) RPG. Role-playing game. Going with one approach and sticking to it is playing a role and you should be rewarded for it. You should get the same reward for playing a consistent, sneaky rogue as you do for playing a schizophrenic lunatic who first sneaks past obstacles and then kills them. b) By rewarding killing, you don't give player freedom to go trough the game by infiltrating. If I infiltrated my way trough Baldur's Gate, I would quite simply not be able to defeat the final boss. You lock players to kill as much as possible, you take choice away from them. c) 'Balance' exists to allow players to have fun. As you go trough the game, it's both increasingly more challenging to sneak past obstacles as it is to kill them. (that's the idea anyway) If you give players twice as much power for doing both, the game will become extremely boring very quickly. If you add a third reward for talking, it'll become even more ridiculous. d) XP exists as an incentive to play the game as it was intended by the developers. If developers want players to find ways around killing, rewarding it makes no sense. If developers want to reward roleplaying, which is a big deal for Obsidian, they will reward doing that, not killing. If you want a game which focuses on minmaxing and battling your way trough dungeons, Pillars of Eternity is not it. e) You punish players by not giving them something they would have gotten otherwise. By rewarding talking your way trough an issue and then rewarding them again for killing everything, you would punish players for roleplaying and doing anything else but that. However, when you don't reward players for doing all of those things, you don't punish them - they won't lose anything in case of both talking trough a problem and then killing everything, they just won't gain anything either (which is described as lack of incentive as opposed to punishment)

Thing is... There's no practical benefit. Developers will have complete control over how much XP you can gain at any given point anyway so that's not much of an argument, the XP is just more difficult to distribute. And yes, XP during battle is like an award, which is precisely the problem - you should not be awarded for doing the same thing over and over again. You should get equal amounts of experience for talking/sneaking/fighting your way trough problems to keep your players making up creative ways trough the game as opposed to thinking "That's another fight I have to win" or "I can now make peace with these creatures but I won't 'cause I won't gain as much XP." Why? What's wrong with a game giving players more ways to approach it? The way I see it, a big thing that makes RPGs my favourite genre is how they allow you to approach problems using various solutions, and that they're all valid. That's the inherent issue with any RPG containing distributable experience points. Even if you fight every single encounter in the game, when you use a sword to win all of them, the character who uses the sword and has never held a gun in his life can become an expert gunslinger anyway. The only way to solve this is to replace XP rewards with a system which increases skills by using them - which is not the way Obsidian decided to take, so that point is moot anyway. Additionally, no, you won't end up with a fighter who has not done too much fighting - you will end up with an assassin or saboteur who's both good at fighting and stealth. Why shouldn't skillful infiltration be rewarded just as much as skillful murder? Edit: Now that I think about it, there's a quest in which you can come up with a peaceful solution in regards to certain faction by avoiding all the opposition. The game rewards you for not killing there. If you got XP rewards for killing, the way that would have gone would be: Sneak around enemies, talk to the 'boss' person, get praised for not killing anyone, get XP. After that happens, go and kill everybody to get more XP. That was the efficient way to play a lot of oldschool RPGs and that's also what Pillars is trying to avoid in order for people who actually want to roleplay to not get punished for ... Well, roleplaying.

I spent ages rotating camera in Dragon Age: Origins in such a way that I can see everything properly, walls don't constrain something etc. and the graphics were as dull as dishwater anyway. Pillars looks gorgeous and is perfectly clear at a glance.

You do get reward for defeating large groups of enemies, they're either protecting a valuable weapon or they're part of a questline that you get XP for finishing. The reason why you don't get XP for killing is: a) It makes the game easier to balance. It's just easier in general and there's no need for metagaming in which you calculate whether you'll get more XP from peaceful or violent solution - both will give you the same amount. b) You aren't forced to play the game in a specific way. My friend did a solo rogue run in which he avoided vast majority of enemies - if the game rewarded you XP for kills, he'd be severely punished for his playstyle. As for magic, while it might not look magnificent, it's extremely potent. Sure, destruction spells are weaker than in other RPGs, but support spells will routinely turn many battles from being tough as nails into a complete cakewalk.

You're swimming in money even without selling gear of your companions, what other benefit would preventing player from changing their equipment serve than be annoying?

Just Cause 3 would be massively improved by stealth mechanics. Look at Far Cry 3+ games - they allow you to make convoluted plans to take out outposts and you can allow your enemies to see you only after you start executing such plan. Just Cause 2+ tho? Enjoy being under fire all the time! JC2 was at its best with invulnerability and infinite ammo cheats and JC3 ... Didn't really get the memo so it puts even more restrictions on you. Want good boosters? Better go and do 10 000 racing time trials! To add some salt to the injury, they removed monetary costs of calling in vehicles which wasn't even a limiting factor in JC2 and put real-time and resource restrictions on it. So you can call in the same vehicle only once every ... 15 minutes? And without restocking you can only call them 3 times. Of course, for finishing a bunch of dull challenges, you can unlock these restrictions because somebody clearly realized they're stupid at some point.

That's ... Interesting. Brawler/Character action was a genre which worked perfectly for a Batman game, as Rocksteady showed us very nicely. I'm curious to see how will Telltale adapt Batman to fit their storytelling QTE ... Thing, but unless they really play on strengths of their way of telling a story and instead try to do a traditional Batman story, I'm afraid Rocksteady will remain the Batman Videogame Masters.

30 minutes of Far Cry: Primal gameplay by Angry Joe (who I think is annoying but ... Well, he plays the game, so...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zECVv9QEOi4&ab_channel=AngryJoeShow It looks like a quite sweet, idealized version of ... Whatever period is it supposed to take place in anyway. Melee system looks a bit primitive so I hope they'll work a bit on that, otherwise the game'll become very samey very fast.

I do not know of a single believable RPG. Well okay, there's that thing where you build a hut and maybe not die which kind of is that I can't remember the name of, but any RPG where your character goes from 0 to Big Evil Defeating Murderer of Doom in just a few in-game months is instantly unbelievable. Any RPG where putting a point in a thing makes you, from one minute to another, 100% more efficient at using something puts gameplay before believablity. Any RPG which makes one kind of steel cut 300% more than another kind of steel just doesn't make any logical sense (something Pillars managed to avoid for the most part, by the way). I assume that as long as you're willing to ignore these inconsistencies inherent to the genre as a whole you're also probably willing to ignore other (in comparison extremely minor) gameisms, like gaining minor bonuses from food.

Since forever, videogames fought a battle in balancing gameplay mechanics and believability. For me, gameplay > realism, pretty much every single time, and both choice of food and resting places provide interesting decisions in terms of gameplay. If you don't want food to do these things it's pretty easy to just ignore it, just like you can ignore resting bonuses, so what's the big deal?

With Broken Age, they have delivered a game people didn't quite expect, but was pretty good nonetheless, so by itself that would not undermine my trust in Double Fine. With Massive Chalice, they delivered a pretty decent game and what was promised, so by itself that would not undermine my trust in Double Fine. With Spacebase DF9 however, they released a game into Early Access where they charged money for the product and then released it in completely unfinished state, abandoned development and did not allow for any refunds and that would sort of undermine my trust in Double Fine unless everything else they did in the past was excellent. Which, as far as I'm concerned, it wasn't. So I wouldn't trust them with my money. I 100% agree with what Keyrock said: I'm cheering for Double Fine and want Psychonauts 2 to be amazing, but I would never trust them with my money.

All right, just watched the DS3 gameplay video. It looks a lot slower than Bloodborne which is a good thing since all Souls games are. Other than that, it looks pretty good. I'll reserve judgement until I actually see the full game, I'm curious what kind of improvements will the devs bring to the formula. By your own admission you're not able to look at attack animations and only use them when they don't get you killed, you're unable to change weapons in order to accomodate for various situations, you're unable to remain mobile and keep track of your surroundings in order to not fall off a ledge, you're unable to see one of the most telegraphed attacks in the game (Iron Golem and his swooping attack where he essentially gives you enough time to run around him 3 times before he actually executes it), you're unable to play the game without using exploits (which, by the way, were added to the game deliberately in order to make it easier for players who can't handle it) and you're unable to properly fight without a shield in order to get light(which you also can get around using a helmet that you can get). It's quite clearly difficult for you. I just said the level design is not perfect, didn't I? Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did. Also, you can finish Morrowind in 17 minutes or so and it's one of my favourite games of all time. And yes, it's good level design when it allows for various approaches, what's on earth wrong with that now?

Oh I absolutely get that, Vaeliorin, we all have different requirements of games, especially RPGs. FROM software is and always was primarily concerned with gameplay tho, and the thing with realistic levels is that they tend to be repetitive and don't present new challenges often enough. At some point, you need to make a choice - either you go realistic route or purely gameplay route. Personally, I was for instance very concerned when Bethesda decided to make a switch from believable dungeons present in Morrowind to very linear and gamey dungeons in Oblivion (and I was right to be concerned as it's even worse in Skyrim), but those games are primarily concerned with constructing believable worlds. You're damn right I demand evidence when you say level design is bad in a game which is widely praised by level designers for having fantastic level design. You know, level designers? Those people who design videogames for a living? Yes, they're designed in order for you to walk slowly on them. That's the point. You're calling it bad level design for it doing precisely what it's supposed to. ? I have no idea what are you trying to say. Yes. That's not bad level design, that's deliberate. Weapons were specifically designed in such a way that they collide like this with walls in order for you to be forced into changing weapons and using different tactics in different areas in order to make gameplay more diverse. Yes, that's very deliberate. You need to be aware of your surroundings at all times and be careful to not attack at wrong moments as to not fall. I have fallen once from attacking. Yes, once. Then I learned that's a thing which can happen, figured out how much do attacks of my weapons make me step forward, and used these attacks accordingly. You're right, the game actually forces you to use your brain before pressing the attack button - you need to have enough space so your weapon doesn't collide with a wall and so you don't step off a ledge. And you know what I started doing after figuring out these attacks work in such a way that you can fall off? I started luring more difficult enemies to the ledges and I made them fall one by one, killing them. That's why this mechanic is there. Also, that has nothing to do with level design. First of all, if you're talking about Taurus Demon, you can actually roll between his legs. And yes, some enemies can kill you instantly if you're not careful. Did you know you can kill Iron Golem instantly by making him fall? Do you know why does the dragon knock you down? It knocks you down because the breathing attack does such an insane amount of damage that it would kill you instantly, while knocking you down gives you small time of invulnerability. They literally made the breath attack knock you down in order for the bridge with the dragon to be fair and not instantly kill you. Meanwhile, there are about 3 places on that very bridge which shield you from the flames completely. Not a level design problem. Which is why you don't use weapons that make you step forward too much in catacombs. When you attack with a spear and your shield raised at the same time, you don't step forward at all. Alternatively, you make sure to never attack from side of a ledge. But yes, so far, this is the only point where you're right - funnily enough it's not a problem of level design, it's a problem of how your attacks home on enemies who are no longer on screen. I mean... Yes? Are you just whining that the game is difficult or what? You can kick them off ledges. Not a level design concern. Your entire post was essentially filled with "I can't play the game well enough, it's bad!", some personal concerns and then a bunch of things which are not related to level design at all, not to mention half of your complaints coming from you being unable to adjust to your environment and the other half coming from the fact that you can do the same things as non-boss enemies in the game. So... Yeah, again, I suggest you don't try to pass as a fact something you can't at all speak about with at least a little bit of actual knowledge. There are also so many actual issues with the game's level design (which doesn't make the level design bad, it just makes it not perfect) and you have not managed to pinpoint a single one.

Do you really want to argue about this again? Either present actual arguments to back up *why* is the level design bad or stop trolling, please. Last time I checked your knowledge of level design ended with "I make rooms and put big enemies in them". And levels not being realistic is not a good argument as long as you have enjoyed just about any videogame in your life. I mean, you're fully capable of creating a story which is by a large part told trough the level design yet you claim it's got a bad level design.