Hassat Hunter

@ Lephys While I have no idea how PoE goes around it, my prefs (and what I would do did I make an IE-game) would be; Combat log: Combat. Conversations log; Hidden inside a journal, not added the combat log Conversations: Full screen. Descriptive text: Click on item (magnifier icon?) get it in float, adds to conversation log, not combat log. Random banter (aka the fleeing people or the guy trying to lure you in the alley); See descriptive text, bar having to click something. (The actual descriptive text would appear once you initiative conversation, not as the lure to make you talk to him) Anything I missed?

I'd be more interested in PvZ2 for PC finally...

From what we've seen of the PoE screens, the conversation will be place flat in the middle of the screen, almost full-screen... should be plenty of area for conversation. Of course, might not do that for all conversations, but I wouldn't mind if it did

I'm confused... what? But even so, I'm not suprised most baddies will talk your ears off before smacking you (if smacking you at all). It's an OE-game after all.

PoE will also use descriptive text like that by default. Though I think it would be pretty awesome if they can add that SFX, I doubt they can time it on people's reading skills if mid-sentence or something

Aside from the point Bryy made above... AP definitely did not cost 8 million. 4 million is peanuts in the game's industry. You really think AP's fund was peanuts x2? Not bloody likely.

I suppose that somewhat makes up for them ruining shadow as DPS... my main... :/

You do realise there's barely any speech in PoE... it's 95%+ reading. So don't worry about the text being present

Also kinda meh with The Witcher II, not sure why so many people found it so good, to me it was overall a pretty heavy degredation from TW1. Tried re-starting after finishing to try the alternative plot, but gave up rather quickly, and never came back ever again... I suppose I could forgive them with TW3... until I heard it was open-world, I have no hope for redemption anymore. Oh well, atleast we got GoG.

It doesn't really matter which of us "wins" anyway. OE should be possible to distinguish the actual arguments between the trolling, baiting and flaming, and use those, and their own interpretations, discussions and thoughts for the final conclussion. The only troublesome thing would be if threads where so drowned in filler no dev ventures them anymore to find the real ideas and suggestions and talk material in it.

TSLRCM 1.8.3

I liked Silver... what was wrong with it. I would say; Oblivion. But I probably have worse RPG's locked out of my mind. Now if only I could forget that sorry excuse of a sequel to Morrowind...

Well, obviously you can't pick females for males or vice-versa 0_o And for the rest... if you make your priest a rogue, well, that's what you've made it to be. A rogue priest

Maybe they can actually allow people to tie "characters" to their adventure hall. So if you like the basic 'character A' for it's skillset... just make a new character that suits you need and assign it 'character A' as personality, so you experience all the added effect of a personality on a home-made character. Of course they should somehow prevent the player having the same character multiple times...

Well, traps obviously never say they are... And now you're locked in the room, 5 floating green shirts surrounding you. Are they floating shirts? Or invisible people wearing green shirts? Does it matter? Do you care now? Can green shirts even hurt you? Are you willing to stay around to find out. Or run, run like hell?

The blacksmith has been invaded by invisible-stalkers ... but now they're all in a panic because they keep tripping over the raised stones. Was thinking about adding in slimes, but this saves me the trouble from doing so

So what you're saying is... "All whores are sex, but not all sex is with whores"? But without sex no romance? Since apparently kissing or cuddling or whatever isn't enough for the pro-crowd. Sad as that is... :/

Also, adding to above post... do you know ME2's budget. How many times 4 million was in it? 7 writers compared to how many on PoE. And look, ME2 is ALL teammate. They didn't even have resources left for a main plot of any kind. Is *that* what you want. BioWare happily sacrificed *everything* for their teammates and romances, and took 2-3 years to do so. And their romances *still* sucked. And with the dialogue wheel the number of conversation options was also severly limited compared to, say, Baldur's Gate II. Obsidian however decides not to use resources that calleously. Any other points we need to debunk? EDIT: Just thought of the irony here. Someone using ME2 to prove there's no sacrifice needed to add romances. Somehow glaring over the quite obvious lacking of a main storyline. You want to imagine PoE without a MQ? Cause quite frankly, that sounds absolutely nightmare material to me...

So sayeth the person who could explain romance through science!

I am pretty sure research and pre-development can hardly be called anything remotely to "science"... Or are you talking about actually physical components of a PC for "without science no video game"... on which I would say you're grasping rather far...

In video-game development (like many other kinds of development) bugdet is everything. You fool yourself if you believe otherwise... Also, nice post Monte! Hopefully making it clearer how complex romance is, unlike how many people think about it (or gamedevelopment in general).

While the prof and actual OE-employee already confirmed it, still want to reply to the comments before that... YES. As far as I know novels aren't interactive. Novels don't need to tie in with the rest of something else (the game in this case). Novels probably wouldn't need as many revisions as the romance subplot as the game advances. Additions, alterations, the writer would be needed till the end for a proper implementation. But we already saw you would be sufficely happy with an "out-of-the-blue" single-conversation romance, since the timelines and costs you projected will give you... just that. But what writer would be capable of doing so. Not many, if any. The additional party wouldn't be primarily hired to supplement the romance writer, true, but a lot of his or her work would be diverted into making the romance workable ingame. Time, money and effort that can be placed elsewhere in game. If you really *want* to avoid that (to stay true to 'adding romances wont detract from making the game'), you need to hire another person. Since the goal here is to make a romance addition, and not take away from any part of the other game, yes, that employee's cost will be included in the eventual cost calculation. (Setting things up can be quite time-consuming, let me tell you that from TSLRCM-experience, even if it's not super-complicated. The more so the more complex convobranches are becoming) A completion time has no relation at all with the time it would take to add. I've added 3 simple quests to M4-78EP, all-in-all probably taking, say, 5 minutes each to finish (if not taking into account time walking inbetween quest NPCs). So a total of 15 minutes of extra gameplay. You want to know how long it took to add that? About 50 hours. And that's just if one person can handle it, with bigger projects probably it would go over several people, area developer, writer, game developer, potentially even area design. It's usually the 'simplest' things that take the longest to add to an actual game. Heh, well, we're trying to go here for good-quality romance... not BioWare romance. Sure, you can lessen the cost severly... but the quality goes down the drain together with the cost. And in the end you are left with something making the game worse than better, something OE is trying to avoid. And if people really want it in, there's a steep cost to it. And many posts in this and the other thread made it pretty obvious the people vouching for the romance have no idea of the actual cost, time and effort involved... EDIT: And while posting a lot of new posts, and even as second devpost. @ Tale; Guess I was too lenient... okay 100K then. Then you can start talking romances, fans.

Get 50K and get back to us... And... Science is useless in gameplay development... it's all about... Finance

That armor looks a lot cooler than the dress. And look, no boob-armor. Could do without the shoulderplates though...

FALSE. Unless of course you make romance an out-of-the-blue option after 5 dialogues without any buildup like BioWare. If you want romance you need to pay; * Writer for a full year (say, 10K) * Actual gameplay dev(s) to implent said writing (triggers, script, writing) (another 10K) * If aside from just the writing you want more (say, a quest)... add 30k minimal (for a short one) Total cost; 50k (and as stated, this is a low estimate). Feel free to pay OE that for the romances. I won't stop you... but I doubt you will.