alanschu

Fair enough. I was curious if there was going to be some level of "We can't screw up!" conservatism. Although to be honest, the DFA seems to be a relatively serious one. I do agree that the Massive Chalice Kickstarter comes across as a bit shady.

Hmmm, please convince me that I'm wrong in assuming that there wasn't any sort of inference because it was done by a "clean power generator."

Don't count out the Oilers!

I was expecting something like this to happen with Kickstarter, though I'll admit I'm a bit surprised that it happened with the first. It's why I'd rather stretch goals be a nebulous "We'll make the game better" rather than a checkbox list. There's an implicit commitment to deliver on those things. Frankly I'd be okay if they just kept all the extra money and just made their $400k game.

??? Are you referring to Atari's legal issues? Maybe the rest of EA is licking their chops (skeptical) though the only thing you'll hear from BioWare staffers is "Man that sucks." If you're implying that EA is somehow responsible, however, you'd be incorrect.

You mean the guy that was doing one of the early, almost tutorial fights? Yeah, he sure did pretty well. I actually made a comment on it! He didn't seem to like it, though it took him 6 months to think of his response. I don't care if the combat is "easy," because it's *absurdly fun.* Yes, I can "win" by pressing X and Y and doing nothing else, or I can look totally badass and get a flawless victory while pulling of a 38 hit combo with 9x variation bonus. And when you get farther than 10 minutes into the game, you start meeting badguys that you can't just press X or Y, because the game does a pretty stand up job of slowly building up your skills and introducing you to new combat types. You're right that the auto target does help a lot, but that may be because at any given time it's not impossible for you to be fighting against 10+ guys. Though when you're fighting the mooks, it's not about "am I going to die?"

I did not get this impression at all. Mostly because I found Batman's combat to omgbbq fun, while The Witcher it was not so much. Batman is about chaining a multitude of hits and neither he nor his enemies really have any sense of "preventing" opposition attacks, with the exception of Batman's counter. The whole combat system is literally designed around multiple hostiles and it flows so well. The Witcher's was a lot of tumbling trying to get an attack on the flanks and Geralt becomes exceedingly vulnerable with multiple hostiles. Due to the multiple hostiles, Batman's combat has a plethora of autoaiming to assist the player, while it's not uncommon for me to forget that Geralt attacks the direction he's facing, so I sweet tumble into... attacking the air...

Ah yes, the killer crossover :D He still had the handles (and reactions) though it's too bad he injured himself through all of '93-'94. Some Pistol Pete ( I love the one at 3:49) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z2HyiNk0SE

It's also possible that Spider has mad skills

Huh, well that I actually kinda do know the answer to! >.>

Could be. Though that sort of research is also the shaming kind. I'd be curious to see the results of a study like that across the board.

I suppose JR's departure may open the doors for Steam reconciliation (Though I wouldn't get my hopes up).

I recognize that DAO had examples like Sten (and Leliana, Zevran, and Morrigan). My statement wasn't that games must have forced companions or anything like that, and even said that our games "frequently suffer from that."

Extending from Zoraptor's point, I'd say that "reasonable character choices" are most likely the ones that a dev will "think the players will want to make." Forced companions is always a point of contention, and BioWare's games (as well as Obsidian's) are certainly games that frequently suffer from that.

This is a strong argument for removing submitter names from the peer review. Interesting, however, that your article would have passed it's own peer review! I wonder if the fail rate would be the same now, or if papers like that made an impact (it was written in 1982).

Is this actually true? (I haven't really done much analysis on what the hobbies are of gay people - my assumption was that the distribution would be not a whole lot different)

Is it that you don't know any gay people, or that you don't know that they are gay? (I literally just learned that some people I have known for a long time are gay).

Hopefully the kickstarter games don't suck!

Isn't it a remake of Lounge Lizards?

I was more referring to the "Well, I would prefer to do something else, so I'll just shut the game down and delete the save." I consider that unsatisfactory, although you seem to indicate that it allows a game like Planescape: Torment to then fit under your criteria. Why can't this work for every game?

Probably doesn't help that I don't really have much interest in D&D. My first exposure to it was Eye of the Beholder, and later FRUA. In both cases, I think I enjoyed the games despite AD&D rules. I almost gave up entirely on the first Baldur's Gate due to its punitive adaptation of the rules.

I don't think that Romance is essential to a good RPG. In some cases I feel it can hurt. My favourite RPG of all time does have a "romance" in it, but in both the females (Annah and Fall-From-Grace) they only begin to skirt the layers of genuine romance. And FFG ultimately refuses the player (which I thought was amazingly well done).

Sorry babaganoosh, but I doubt the lack of capital letters affects anything haha. I don't think I played any game by the name of Dark Sun.

Can't this work equally for all games? I know that this doesn't work for me. I can understand that. There's evidently some differences here in our expectations and interpretation. I'm typically of the mind that the PnP experience is best left to PnP, because of the inherent restrictions that get placed. For me, the closest analogy is that the game designer is effectively the DM for the game, but must come up with the entire campaign and all of its potential tangents before even presenting the campaign to the player. Hence, I see a game like Torment as one where the game designer has afforded us a wide range of choice (and even consequences), but in the end we can only meaningfully choose the choices that the game designer provides for us. Very, very rarely are we able to choose our own path, and while deleting the saved game might still be satisfying for you (You should check out a chap here that came from the BSN, Sylvius the Mad, as he seems to be an RPer much like yourself and you'd probably get along with him), it certainly wouldn't for me... though in exchange I'm much more okay with accepting that I likely don't have full control over my character in a video game; I only have access to that which the game allows me to do. I feel this applies to most RPGs barring sandbox games, and as you say, even sandbox games struggle with the consequences. It's a large part of the scale with CRPGs. Branching factor becomes unwieldly, and the more choices you have the more difficult it is to have meaningful consequences represented. Anyways, in this case I think the difference in how we see the games is pretty established at this point. It's great that you can see PST as a game that is as open as you feel it is.

Given that I am not familiar with the name....