Zenbane

Howdy! Has anyone been able to partake in the new revolution of gaming in VR? I've had some amazing and unparalleled experiences with games like Technolust and Dreadhalls. The RPG, Chronos, isn't as epic in its journey as games like Pillars of Eternity, but it's a mighty fine preview of things to come with RPG gaming in VR.

Glad to see business as usual on this forum lol Albeit saddening that Cantousent hasn't been around as much, his Modding style and overall personality is sorely missed. Aside from that, I sure hope the next major patch to this game involves making it compatible with the Oculus Rift. I'm been doing VR gaming for a few weeks now and holy smokes it's amazing. Regular 'ol "looking at a monitor" gaming is quickly becoming secondary. I'd love to know of OBS has any plans for Virtual Reality support. Anyone else enjoying VR with either the Vive or Rift?

Correction: "probably not if you have a bad job" But doable if you have a good profession. It doesn't have to be done in a single week, afterall.

That excuse works fine when in a verbal conversation, but when typing something up (forums, email, chat, tweets, etc), you actually have time to preview and think about what you are saying and can adjust accordingly. Calling folks "thick" for holding you to your words would be like calling you "dense" for not taking the time to articulate better, na' mean? Either way, the combat balance in Pillars is fun and diverse and really doesn't leave room for overly negative balance complaints. At least not like the true balance issues found in games like DAoC, WoW, etc.

Of course there can, in exactly the same way as reading a novel can be immersive. It's just a case of letting your imagination take over. I usually refer to that as "thinking" whereas video game immersion is supposed help my imagination come to life instead of keeping it, y'know... in my head. Indeed. I'm actually quite excited about the comeback PC gaming is making. I wanna play the new Doom game in 360 degree Virtual Reality. I would love to one day experience a PoE style game from a perspective similar to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtmEjqzg7M Gaming for 2016 and beyond is gonna kick serious immersive arse (without having to keep it all in the imagination lol)

Can there really be any immersion, regardless of how you define it, WITHOUT a VR headset with 360 degree support?

@Caribou, you aren't really gonna make enemies either since you illustrated your opinion of the Witcher quite elequently. As opposed to you, y'know, the Author of this thread lol I understand your impressions of the Witcher, and I felt them to a lesser degree ever since the first game. However, I went in to the Witcher series knowing it's background and cultural origin so I ended up feeling more impressed than disappointed.

Well damn, if the Witcher is from an Atheistic point-of-view then that completely destroys my "Atheists are intellectually lazy" argument

lol, well to bring the topic full circle, I stated that I consider Atheists to be intellectually lazy, and based on the article Brimsurfer recently posted we witness exactly that in the closing sequence of PoE. In the article, the author adequately illustrates that Theology (or "Theism" for Silent Winter) saturates the Main Story in every convincing way possible; so much so that any attempt to suggest that "God's are non-existent" makes zero intellectual sense. Yet at the very end of the story, the plot very "lazily" attempts to do exactly that without offering an ounce of intellectual credibility that satisfies anyone paying attention to the overall dialogue, tone, and mythos. Everything leading up to the ending sequence is convincingly Theistic, and shares the following traits: well-formed, consistent, believable, intellectual, engrossing, and thorough. Whereas the ending is unconvincing, inconsistent, unbelievable, and completely disconnected from the main story. It is intellectually lazy because it depicts the work of someone who could not be burdened with the task of reading and understanding everything that came before. The first 90% of the story shows that Theists can manufacture some great stuff when it comes to deities; the last 10% of the story shows that if an Atheists takes over they will just throw together whatever they think will get the job done the fastest (where "thinking" is clearly optional). FIN.

The disconnect here is that when people are glued to their phones all day the activities are primarily "social media" related; which tends to be the opposite of someone glued to a video game all day. The only relation between someone making status updates all day and someone leveling up their Nightshade is the "screen" on the device. But make no mistake, just because civilized adults are staring at a screen doesn't mean they are "just like gamers." There's a huge difference between "put your phone down" and "stop playing video games." Other than that, I concur with the rest of your thoughts. Bonus for mentioning the Witcher which is high oh my "badass games" list. Fixed that for you, you're welcome. Both Skyrim and Oblivion have certainly been subject to much criticism as Elder Scrolls RPG titles, so I would better adjust my original statement as such: 2) The evolution of Elder Scrolls titles (Arena vs Morrowind) Surely, you would not dare taint the great name of Morowind??

And my point is that gaming in itself is subpar/filler in the grand scheme of things (e.g., spending time with family, friends, work is much more productive than gaming if you're an adult). Additionally, as gamers get older, instead of moving on to more mature hobbies they often acquire a misplaced sense of "quality standards." The first part of your argument here is a bit ad hominem and doesn't really further the discussion. As for playing 2 games instead of one... that was my point entirely. I argue that gamers who act as though they prefer quality over quantity are kidding themselves since in the end they end up playing multiple subpar games instead of one lengthy epic game. Granted, I understand that there are total garbage games out there, and I'm excluding obvious fodder from my conclusions. I definitely agree with this sentiment. I suppose my perspective adds the fact that most games (even the most epic) are a regurgitation of at least one predecessor. So when people are proclaiming "QUALITY!!" I can't see how it applies with copy cat experiences. Which leaves one to conclude that the idea of "quality" is either highly subjective or is simply being used to mask something more subpar. Examples: 1) PoE is great but it re-lives Baldur's Gate, IceWind Dale 2) Grimrock is great but it re-lives Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder 3) World of WarCraft is great but it re-lives Everquest, DAOC 4) StarCraft is great but it re-lives WarCraft 5) All dungeon crawlers re-live Diablo 6) All first person shooters re-live Doom Is the definition of quality: "do a really good job of re-doing something else that was good" ? Only a handful of games truly try to re-invent the wheel: 1) Fallout post 2010 vs Fallout in the 90's 2) The evolution of Elder Scroll titles (Arena vs Skyrim) 3) GuildWars In the end, I feel that the desire for shorter games in the guise of "quality over quantity" is just a ruse to hide the fact that the new age of "mobile apps" has created a breed of gamers with very short attention spans: instant gratification vs worthwhile investment. I remember a time when the "instant gratification" debates took place between FPS gamers vs RPG gamers. But now the debate takes place between RPG gamers. I blame the mobile app industry for this shift. Lastly, I know some of the things I've stated may come across a bit accusatory so let me be clear that I'm speaking at a high level and am not accusing anyone here of being "subpar" or not living life properly as an adult lol

Shorter, more polished game that has amazing amount of replay value = sign me in... to YouTube for a "let's play" session lol Thanks to all those "let's play" videos saturating YouTube, I rarely feel compelled to buy games unless they look truly worthwhile. In PoE's case, I didn't watch any player-made video's until after I bought and played it. But for the Stick of Truth and other short-term games? I'll let it run on YouTube while I multi-task https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xt4FpIzYlk

This I agree with lol, you naughty boy. Stirring that pot Which cliche do you mean? The Theist cliche of the main story, or the Atheist twist at the end?

Thanks for the reply, Y. I agree with everything you said there at the end, but I have a few additional comments. Yeah I saw one of his interviews, and the point is that he embraced a business model that involved waiting nearly a decade to turn profits. If he had been concerned with the zero-sum pitfall inherent in most software development, then perhaps he would have chosen internet ads and other sources of revenue at the start. I honestly have never experienced nor heard of any problem with a lengthy video game causing people to get lost when they go back to it. Quite the contrary, people tend to have more knowledge and experience with the game, unveiling new methods and strategies each time they revisit it. That last part about the Stronghold where you state that they "might as well have" is rather contrived. We can say, "if you do this then you might as well do that" for a virtually infinite variety of things. Just because they did one thing instead of something that they might have done instead isn't an indication that the thing actually done is problematic. I completely agree that content and components should be built in a way that allows them to be reused/repurposed. I feel that OBS did that quite well with the foundation of PoE in every aspect: the Stronghold, the character class system, the combat system, the leveling system. This is what allowed them to release the initial version which was worthy of an Award, followed by 2 expansions and several patches that served to further enhance an already solid product. As it pertains to the article and debate: short games vs long games; the only way quality can be achieved in the first place is if the initial design architecture contains quality specifications. The idea that a Dev may have the choice to either add more content for the sake of quantity or polish existing content for the sake of quality completely ignores the fact that you can't "polish" something that does not contain quality design as part of it's fundamental architecture. In other words, you can't polish a turd lol The design architecture for the Stick of Truth specified a short game from the onset. I agree that in this scenario the dev's time is better spent polishing existing content. Adding more content would violate the existing architecture. A longer game should be supported by an architecture that specifies lengthy quality content. Aging gamers, aging developers, and zero-sum pitfalls should not prevent anyone from designing a quality architecture that entails a lengthy experience.

I feel that some of the things stated do in fact portray shortness as an inherent benefit, where the benefit is more apparent to gamers who are "getting older": "As a gamer, I'm getting old. I'm short on time. I'd rather spend $60 on a 12-hour experience that makes me laugh my ass off than on a 100-hour experience that routinely wastes my time." - Eric Fenstermaker "I definately agree with Eric's remarks on shorter games. I don't have time to replay games that take 50-80 hours to finish. I work and I have other hobbies" - Flouride Both of these statements depict a scenario that "with age comes less time to waste," and I find that to be a bit self-defeating since, theoretically, anyone who is over the age of 19 and still playing video games (even for a single hour) is probably wasting their time. The fact that someone decides to spend any amount of time as an adult playing a video game means that the person has already embraced "time wasting" as a hobby. If people are playing video games in order to waste time, then it makes no sense to condemn something as time wasting simply because it lasts twice as long as the current time waster. Especially since the person wasting their time will make up the difference by playing multiple short time wasters as opposed to one lengthy time waster. The entire "time wasting" concept is the true red herring. Every piece of software is a zero-sum choice. Examples: 1) The original version of Microsoft Word ran 3 years beyond it's release date 2) Pandora Radio took over 7 years to finally turn a profit I said nothing on that topic either, so not sure why you felt the need to say that. That is not true in all cases, such as First Person Shooter games like BattleField. Most of the BF games have very little depth (e.g., no single player campaign worth completing); yet as a Multii-Player game people can spend an absurd amount of time each day engaging in a quantity-based experience (playing the same maps on the same servers against the same people over and over again). This is all about personal choice and the subjective interpretation of "fun factor." Time wasting happens by default, but it is excused due to the fun factor. So just because someone would rather spend 12 hours laughing at the Stick of Truth game and another person would rather spend 100+ hours playing through the Wizardy 8 campaign, doesn't mean that either of them is wasting more or less time than the other. Software development, including gaming software, is an iterative process. Both quality and quantity can be equally improved throughout the iterative lifecycle.