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Gambler

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  1. Most RPGs I played had completely broken, and astonishingly boring economies. The basic pattern always seemed to be the same. 1. In the beginning you could benefit from buying a lot of things, but you don't have any money. 2. You get small handouts throughout the game simply because you're playing. (This includes both loot and quest rewards.) They accumulate. 3. There is never any real point in buying the items you can afford. Yeah, you could spend all you cash on some Slightly Better Sword. You can also wait 3 minutes and get something even better via loot in the next dungeon. 4. You finish the game with a heap of useless gold. The main point I want to make is that the most important aspect of an RPG economy is what kind of things money enables you to do. If all you get for being a billionaire is that Slightly Better Sword, than any kind of intricacies in the underlying systems are not worth the effort to develop or discuss. An interesting in-game economy would allows you to uniquely affect in-game events through money. This would make money valuable, which in turn would make spending or chasing money important role-playing decisions.
  2. The only boss battles I truly enjoyed were the ones in Torment. Mostly because they were tightly interwoven with the story, had a great buildup and didn't require some special set of character skills to get through enemies' immunities. Also, it's the only D&D game I played where PC wizards weren't ridiculous wimps, having to run in circles around party's tank character. The battle against bear god in MotB was quite good as well, because you were fighting a whole army of critters. Again, because of the buildup it felt quite special*. But overall, I don't like boss fights. They feel too much like a remnant from Sega arcade games. Especially if it comes down you your entire party fighting some overpowered monster with immunities or ridiculous amounts of HPs. Party vs party battles (like the ones people mentioned above) are far more interesting. Even more interesting is when you act as a part of larger scale conflict, with many AI-driven allies, plenty of enemies, dynamic situations and an objective that goes beyond killing everything that moves. Imagine fighting through a maze of castle rooms with your allies retreating and advacing, with large-sclae things happening at the same time and wih some kind of story behind it all. That's what I would vert much like to see. If the spell system is diverse and complex enough, mage-vs-mage duels could be very interesting-- But then there is a need to create equivalent gameplay for other classes, and I'm not sure how that can be done.
  3. One thing I'm certain of is that I would like to see more meaningful differences between different items, including armor. Even if that means fewer item types. For example, Fallout 1 had only a handful of armor tiers, but getting from one to the other made a real difference. You could do more stuff, go to more dangerous areas. It felt like an achievement. Also, that gave us a reason to actively seek out better armors, save money to buy one, and so on. In a lot of games, this concept is just not there. We get marginally better equipment every 10 minutes, without even noticing it. That's boring.
  4. Overall, I agree with the criticisms of IE games' magic in the original post. They are the same things that bothered me as well. So I like this update. But... grimoires? The image of wizards wielding tomes of Encyclopaedia Britannica into battle clashes with everything I like about magic in games. Surely someone can come up with a better analogy and visualization for the same mechanics? For example, instead of saying "you have to memorize some spells during rest" you can say (and think) "you have to perform a certain ritual before you can cast this spell". That is much more in tune with what we're used to in books and movies. Yes, it's just words, but words crate mental images, and that's a big part of storytelling. I also subscribe to Orwell's idea that language shapes (to a some extent) your thinking. Usage of differnt teminoloogy might result in different ideas occuring during design process.
  5. Overall, I like the ideas described in this update, with one exception. I would very much like some magic spells to be multi-context (i.e. useful both in combat and outside of it). Magic in games often lacks any subtlety. You can be a mage, scorching enemies left and right, but when someone asks you to start a camping fire, then you absolutely must have that special quest matchbox. Stuff like that makes the character look and the player feel silly.
  6. Definitely not a sequel. Definitely something that focuses on complex, somewhat non-linear storyline with tone-down combat. Isometric and original IP strongly preferred. And when I say "original", I mean something bigger than "not D&D". I would prefer an uncommon setting that hasn't been explored very often. Another thing I would appreciate is a complex, interactive and diverse in-game environment. Doesn't have to be huge, but I'm really tired of "rat maze" games where most of the things you see are essentially decorations. Wouldn't mind the game to be in real time. In fact, if the in-game time would matter by the virtue of things happening on their own, I would like that as well. (Then again JA had that and yet had TB combat, so it's reconcilable.) But I guess the first response has a good point. The best game you can make is the one that's based on your vision and ideas.
  7. As I said earlier, book's genre is determined by its overall theme, not the setting. Science Fiction is about exploring the results of having advanced sciences on humanity. Fantasy is about exploring worlds drastically different from our own. Obviously, these are descriptions, not definitions. There is not real need for definitions of any genres, since genres are by their nature supposed to describe books, rather than set up guidelines for writing them. The problem with many games (and books, and movies) is that they don't have an overall theme, aside from killing all that moves. This is why you are using settings to determine whether something is "sci-fi" or "fantasy". However, there is no real difference between casting fireball with a wand and casting plasma ball with some device. Instead of proclaiming that science fiction is fantasy or vice versa, maybe you should stop using "flavor" of the setting as a criteria? Going back to the original question, the "tolkienesque" setting (which probably makes Tolkien roll in his grave) is often blindly copypasted into games. That is bad, but it's the copypasting part that makes it bad. Gaming industry needs original (as in "origin", not as in "pink elephant") settings. That has nothing to do with fantasy or science fiction.
  8. Real science fiction has very little to do with real fantasy, hence the need to "separate" them. Neither of them is merely a product of the setting used in the books - this criteria is an invention of the people who like to create meaningless classifications of everything. What defines book's genre is its overall theme, not the setting.
  9. This is akin to advising you to stop reading the forum if you don't like someone's posts. Not constructive, greatly overused and simply illogical.
  10. Very good observation. Magic existed in myths, legends, folk tales long before fantasy emerged as a genre. It used to represent something mysterious, surprising and inspiring awe. Now it is just a pseudo-rationale for bad plot devices and broken game mechanics. Instead of firing lead bullets from guns, "magicians" fire magic bullets from their fingers. This kind of magic is fake. Tolkien himself wrote in one of his articles that magic is not supposed to be rationalized and systematized.
  11. Just finished Deus Ex. Just begun Anachnronox. Both are good, Deus Ex is _very_ good. Still can't bring myself to re-start playing Pathologic. The game is amazing, but playing it requires great deal of concentration. (Which wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that I play games mostly when I'm too tired to do anything else.)
  12. I don't think tha the best quality of Torment is that it's "different". The interesting thing about it is that developers were very conscious about genre cliches, and thus they were very conscious about what they did and why. Because of that the game feels much more directed and interconnected than most of the RPGs. From music, to companions, to art - most of the things in the game share the overall style and serve to express certain ideas.
  13. D&D is a system with restrictions, formulas and pre-concieved concepts, which have nothing to do with Obsidian (or computer games for that matter). It was already used in many, many computer games. Interface to generating a character in NWN2 is more complex that Visual Studio project ceration wizard. Faerun backstory is a classical example of generic fantasy. Do I need to say more? I trust Obsidian's creative vision much more than someone from WotC, and I believe that Obsidian's games will only benefit from the use of original IP.
  14. I hope it's clear that numbers and stats we speak about are not things like character's position in 3d space or the color of his hat in RGB. We speak about directed scales that are used to model something conceptual, something that is not usually measured by numbers. With that in mind, there are many games that do not use directed scales. Some of them are highly non-liner, like Blade Runner. Some other games use scales in a limited way, to create a computer-driven interactive background, in front of which the main events of the game unfold (e.g. Pathologic). Personally, I consider overuse of directed scales the single most damaging phenomenon in the modern gaming industry. The topic is big enough for a very long article, if you take it in the abstract, so it's hard to discuss it on a forums. First, let's clarify why I use the term directed scale. Scale is something that measures things, it is universal. Same number on the scale is supposed to mean the same thing in different situations. I call them directed, because they have "good" and "bad" side. More is usually better. More experience is better than none, more strength, more levels, more money. Influence is a directed scale as well. The quality of interest to us is this: as an input, the influence scale takes in-game events, like conversation choices. Afterwards, the number supersedes the event, becomes more important, and so the meaning of the original event gets lost. Instead, we get yet another characteristic to improve. It is like putting a price tag on everything you do. Ideally, I would model attitude towards the character as a number of connected states. You start with "unknown" state, then proceed to "known", then there would be several paths of development, individual to each NPC. This system would allow to avoid rating everything as either positive or negative. But even then I would not show that state diagram to the player. Ambiguity is natural, and thus obtaining information should be part of the game. It would be interesting if instead of looking at stats you could actually ask your companions what they thing about you.
  15. What do you mean by "transparent"? Feedback is essential, but raw numbers have too many negative consequences. They are too obvious, precise and instant. Reading about all those damage rolls, influence changes and other numbers feels less like a game and more like going through stack trace or core dump. Essentially, this broadens the barrier between the character's knowledge of the game world and the player's knowledge. Animation and voice overs are solutions to the problem, but there is another option, which is universal and very simple technically. Text messages. They were extensively used in Torment, and it turned out pretty well. Actually, it's much bigger than just influence. Properly implemented, text messages can supplement virtually any aspect of the game. Unfortunately, many people are quite... how do I put it politely... biased towards the existing design solutions, whatever those solutions are at the moment. Such people would say that "influence +6" is a more natural way of describing NPC's reaction, than a text description of the NPCs reaction. But "influence +6" is a text message! The only difference is that it describes some kind of variable that in turns models the reaction, instead of describing the reaction directly. What would be better? "Someus Dudeus: Influence -6" or "He silently stared at you for a moment, anger flickering in his eyes, but the emotion either quickly disappeared or was suppressed."
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