Hell Kitty

Only in Western games. Japanese games are still chock full of stat-based combat goodness. Of course when folks say they want stat-based combat in RPGs what they really want is a particular type of combat from older PC RPGs they used to play, not any old stat-based combat. Personally I love me some Jagged Alliance 2 or Silent Storm style turn-based combat, while the type of combat from the old Bard's Tale games I played once upon a time I have zero interest in. I suspect that while the number of gamers overall has grown, the amount of folks who enjoy (western style) stat-based combat is about the same as it always was. Thus, (western style) stat heavy turn based isometric RPGs will never be the "flavour of the month", but perhaps in the future there will be more devs happy to cater to smaller particular markets.

Having come to alanschu to get some of whatever it was he was offering earlier, I decide to take the opportunity to steal a whole bunch of his stuff while he's on the loo. It's okay to steal from him because I wouldn't have bought that stuff anyway.

Not true. The player typically has access to information that they wouldn't if they actually were the character, sometimes through the UI (such as choosing to attack a weak character because selecting them brings up a box telling you that they have a low health bar), sometimes through the camera angle used in the game (such as an isometric or third-person view allowing the player to see enemies or locations their character can not). Also the rules of the game world will determine the choices you make. In a typical FPS you might choose to run in guns blazing because you know that you have a full health bar and your character can survive several shots to the face, whereas your actions will change in a Rainbow Six style game because you know a single shot could be fatal. The coherency of game worlds has little to do with the issue of player skill vs character skill. See the Silent Storm example from earlier. No, no one is claiming that. Is doesn't matter how many people prefer one system or the other. Tradition isn't a rule. One can prefer that an RPG features x, y, and z, but that doesn't mean games without x, y, and z aren't RPGs, which is what your loaded poll claims. Do you find it hard to believe that some people actually enjoy player-influenced combat? And some people enjoy both, sometimes separately in different games, sometimes together in the same game, like AP. And the enjoyment one gets from them has nothing to do with what genre that game belong to. Crazy, huh?

Anyway, as far as AP is concerned, I'm happy with what I've heard about it: Aiming is left entirely up to player skill, and character skill determines things like the amount of damage done, recoil, reload speed, and the availability of special moves.

The idea that it's either character stats or player skills that determines the outcome is nonsense. Player skill always plays a part in games, otherwise they wouldn't be games, you'd just create your player and then watch as a non-interactive movie plays out. Even if damage and aim is determined solely by stats, it's still the player who decides when, where, how, and who to attack. If a character dies attacking an enemy who is far to strong, it isn't solely down to the characters stats being too low, it's also because the player made a poor decision. I'm currently playing Persona 3, a turn-based RPG, and while it's the characters stats that determine if you hit the enemy and how much damage you do to them once the individual attack has been launched, the outcome of the battle is also determined by which attacks the player chooses, which persona they have equipped, and which enemies they target. To give a proper example of this, rather than the nonsense above, in Silent Storm, your character can be standing right in front of the enemy, but if your weapon skill is too low and the roll determines you don't hit, then your character will aim away from the enemy before firing, purposely missing them. Hell, player skill isn't even the issue here, it's that the game doesn't factor in that being at point blank range ought to mean you don't need a high weapons skill to hit. Of course when people argue against player skill, it seems that what they really are against is player reflexes. This is a leftover of the days when CRPGs were PnP simulators. In PnP, the character can't use any of their physical skills, because the game world and everything in it exist solely on paper and in the players imagination, but some folks seem to have taken this as a rule rather than what it really is, an impossibility. CRPGs aren't limited to what PnP RPGs can do. Nor are they limited to being what any one person prefers them to be.

I find my character being "forced" into doing things, going places, or dealing with certain people when they might not otherwise, far less contrived than things always going as I, the player, want them.

As much as folks like to bring out the old "lololol marketing" non-argument every now and then, well, you can't polish a turd.

I <3 Shandra

So I downloaded the Too Human demo and then I played it for a bit and then I discovered it was the opposite of fun and then I deleted it and then all was right with the world. The End.

^ That's a nice idea, reminds me of destroying the enemies food supply in MGS3.

Body awareness ain't all that. No matter how realistic the first-person perspective might be considered, it's only ever going to be like looking through a camera, not seeing through human eyes. Our eyes aren't glued in place in our head so having the camera bobbing all over the place is just annoying.

The Dawn of the Dead remake was the bestest zombie movie ever.

Both of those questions are answered (although the second only partially) in the pdf. Under Game Structure.

^ My frigate of Getting Stung by Bees shall annihilate your battleship of Second Hand Smoke. Have at you!

Reading all the stuff coming out about Alpha Protocol makes for a tingling sensation in my special places.

Shocking. Apologies to the internet.

Piano Recital of Rejection Drum Circle of Sorrow Bus Ride of Ennui Sing-a-Long of Compound Fracture Quartet of Indigestion Toy Piano of Kidney Stones Mix Tape of Second-Hand Smoke Bedtime of Getting Stung by Bees Morning of Mild Discomfort

^ Hell has frozen over!

Just got back from The Dark Knight. It was awesome. Maggie Gyllenhaal made a much better Rachel Dawes. Both Ledger and Eckhart were fab.

According to the news report I saw last night about this, they aren't even certain he threw the grenade, they only assume he did because he was the only one left alive. Is Canada having an election soon, because that's what got the Australian citizen in Gitmo back here.

Capitalist pigdog. You'll buy my **** and you'll like it, jerkface. Whoa...sass! When did you become more awesome!? October 4, 1987.

Yes, yes it does.

^ I wouldn't say that responses didn't match the keyword at all, but there were a few times where the response was much more aggressive than I expected.

So has anyone played the Too Human demo?