Magnum Opus

Actually, I don't see movies in the theatres very much either anymore, and I'd be lying if I said the media blitz I'm subjected to every time I set foot in the theatre didn't factor into it. It's not the main reason I don't watch a lot of movies, but it does factor into it. Prior to Return of the King it was The Two Towers. Prior to that it was The Fellowship of the Ring. Pior to that it was... Seven? ('94? 1995?). For those last three, I just read a book through the ads, and napped until the 15 minutes of trailers were over. I'm not talking about the truly subtle product placements in movies, though. Most movies deal with scenes and situations straight out of contemporary society, so seeing an ad on the side of a bus going by in the background of a movie is no different than seeing an ad on the side of a bus when you're walking down the street: it's just meant to be ignored as useless information. It'd be odd if you didn't see an ad somewhere in the movie, if it was being shot at a Rangers' NHL hockey game in New York, for instance. It's when they start lingering on that bottle of Windex, glistening in the sunlight by the spotless window, as the camera pans over a crime scene that it starts feeling contrived. But, most of the games I play are played for their escapist qualities. Fantastic monsters, epic quests, superhuman characters with the power to destroy a small island with the twitch of a finger, politicians that actually try to do what's best for their people, that sort of thing. Recognizable products have no place in scenarios like that and just draw you away from the fantastic and into the mundane. Beyond that, though, I'd just like there to be one entertainment medium that didn't feel like it was trying to sell me something. Just one. The day that I see a can of Coke sitting on a table in a CRPG is the day I give up CRPGs. :D And Coke, for that matter. @Zantetsuken: exactly. Rampant != acceptable.

If I'm going to be paying for entertainment, I don't want some company telling me which soft drink to buy or which car to drive, simple as that. That's not entertainment to me, and that's not what I want to buy.... whether it's included in the cost of the game or not. One of the reasons I like games over TV is because I can get away from the commercials. I can't even watch a movie on TV anymore because the commercials just destroy it as a valid form of entertainment for me, intruding into the thing ever 15 minutes and lasting just long enough to completely ruin any sense of pacing that might have been generated by the flick. If ads become standard in the games I like to play, it's time for me to consider a different avenue of entertainment. Besides, unless the game revolves around a Coca-Cola plant that just happens to have been taken over by the aliens I've got to annihilate, any sort of recognizable product placement is going to seem mighty out of place. Even there, though, it's going to stick out like a sore thumb and kill a significant chunk of the fun-factor. It should be noted that I tend not to draw a line between real brand names and fake ones, or ones that I don't recognize. If it feels like advertising, it's going to make me start thinking "what the devil is this doing here?"

That's kind of an interesting idea: having the game start out as a traditional party-based RPG, but then as the characters advance in level, having the very nature of the game change to something more like an RPG/strategy hybrid where you're not leading a party of 6, but a "party" of 600. I've always thought of higer level adventurers as taking on more administrative roles in their particular society anyway, as they advance in levels and power; politicians, generals, teachers... that sort of thing. Interesting idea indeed... no idea if it's workable or not, but it's something I haven't seen before, anyway.

But has it been implemented. No. Doesn't need to be implemented to be an idea... although some of the scripts for the BG2 monsters the Ryu have come up with are getting up there, IMO. (Still in a crappy mood... don't even think of taking me seriously here... 'pologies in advance) Edit: Could go a long way, though, if you could give a quantitative definition for "smart".

Just because I'm in a crappy mood right now, I feel it's my duty to point out that the ideas mentioned above have already been tried. NWN allows doors to be fireballed... and chests as well, for that matter... and it also allows for first person mode, even though it's not the default. Physics has been attempted (mostly failed, too, although it was a valiant effort, and some of it actually works out reasonably well; it's gravity that's the real kick in the nuts) in Ultima 9, and smart AI has been the buzzword for the last generation of RPGs at least. What Ipersonally haven't seen attempted yet, though, is... *thinks*... is... randomized dungeons! No no... that was Diablo's claim to fame, although there's some question about whether that's an RPG or not... no wait... give me a sec... it'll come to me...

*nods soberly* Words to live by. I know in Ultima 6, at least, they got got around it partially by just beaming the characters to their destination, if they weren't on the screen. I know this because one time I moved Nystul (Lord Britsh's in-house mage) into LB's closet, surrounded him with fire fields, closed the door, trapped it, and then magically locked it, and the guy just appeared in his laboratory five minutes later, locks, traps, and fields intact! *considers* Of course, the guy was a magician, so maybe his dashing escape wasn't so miraculous. Maybe I should have tried it with the blacksmith... The point is, I don't want the game grinding to a halt with all these scripts running in the background, telling people to be at location X by 5:00. It'd be great if they could include schedules, though. Getting trapped outside the city because they closed the gates at night brought a whole new dimension to games like Quest for Glory. Sneaking through the woods, down to your last hitpoint, no potions... pleasepleaseplease don't let there be a monster here... ahhh, good stuff, that. Schedules... good thing, if they can make 'em work.

I'm in favour of the idea as long as it doesn't increase the system requirements beyond my means. Having a town full of characters packing up to go home at 5:00 is bound to do some funky things to the amount of CPU/GPU clock cycles available for things like combat, special effects, day-to-night effects, that sort of thing. I'm not again the notion of having shops close for the night, though. Makes a fair bit of difference if you can't get into an apothecary to replenish your supply of healing potions when you're running around smiting monsters.

Consistency is a big part of it for me as well, affecting not only the roleplaying aspect of the game, but the gameplay aspect as well. There have been several examples of puzzles in games that I can think of whose solution just never occurred to me, simply because they required an level of interactivity with the game world that wasn't found anywhere else. To use your example, how are we to even suspect that we need wood to build that bridge to get to the next area if all the wood we've seen in the game up to that point has been nothing more than backgournd art and completely non-interactive? If the world is completely static, why would we suspect this one part isn't? For me, I was just impressed with BG1's continuity when it came out. They gave me the sense that they just dropped me into the world and left me to explore it, with all the incoveniences and dangers intact. Walking across six large areas on my way to Nashkel was just expected; I didn't have a teleport spell or a horse to speed my journey, and once an area had been accessed, the overhead map provided enough gameplay convenience that I didn't get bored to tears walking all the way back. They gave me buildings to explore (building that for the most part didn't have anything to do the a quest, but just held citizens at night) and books to read. It didn't have the detail of U7's Britannia, but it was consistent and continuous. BG2 tightened things up significantly. Areas didn't exist in BG2 unless there was something significant in them that related to whatever quest you were on, or, when they did exist (Small Tooth Pass and the North Forest) they stuck out like sore thumbs. I spent quite a bit of time rehashing old quests and NPCs in Chapter 6 looking for some mention of those areas in the dialogue, because it didn't seem to me that they'd put in those areas unless there was a quest involved in them; they hadn't done it in the previous 5 chapters; why start now? I could see why they did it that way from a DnD perspective: having that many high level foes in one continuous area would have been utterly absurd; but it also removed the player from the world a step. In what's supposed to be an RPG, I think that's a step in the wrong direction. ToB continued that trend even more. There was no random wandering at all, and even the cities had been reduced in scale to facilitate the process of getting from one place to another. Moving from outside to inside, I was always left wondering how those architects in Saradush and Amkethran ever found room for the interiors, when the exteriors were no bigger than a doghouse. Good from the perspective of ticking off quests in your list on your way to greatness in as few steps as possible, but poor from a roleplaying perspective, IMO. Maybe it was just symbolic of, or a necessary result of, your ascent to godhood, the world seeming smaller and smaller, but it didn't do anything for me from the point of view of being in the Forgotten Realms... I'd love to launch a fireball at a wooden shack in the wilderness and see it burn to the ground, but I think level of detail is a long way away yet, even if designers began showing an interest in creating interactive and immersive worlds from anything beyond a graphics standpoint. It's hard enough getting complex or interwoven dialogue trees and scripts to work right, never mind that kind of game world. I'd still like to see it, although it does bring up another issue: how much is too much? Ultima7's weight and volume inventory management was workable for me, but I know quite a few people who thought it was just too inconvenient to use. Same with the food issue; is having to feed your people getting into too much micromanagement for a game? What about just making sure you've got enough food in your backpack and letting them feed themselves?

For me, the Ultimas (the ones that defined the series... 1 - 7) represented huge, interactive worlds, and a pluralistic way of looking at things. Ultimas 8 and 9 did a complete 180 on that. World interaction went down the toilet in many cases, and the party was nowhere to be seen. "Baking bread" became sononomous with the level of detail that was just expected with those games after Ultima 7... gather the flour, mix it with water into dough, pop it in the oven and sell it for coin. That sort of player interaction just wasn't there in Pagan... although I did rather like the destructible tables and chairs in that one. Covered the entire rooftop of the palace of Tenebrae with flasks of oil, fire gems, and chaos gems, and then just lit one. Great fun, that, watching the whole thing go up in flames. That's not to say that I think those last two are bad games, but they just don't measure up to the previous standard that was set by Ultima 7, in the ways that Ultima made its trademark. Ultima 8 is fun, if a bit frustrating in certain areas, and Ultima 9 has great music, gorgeous graphics and a detailed plot to explore, but there's just something lacking with them with no companions complaining in your ear and a plot that sheperds you through the game like you're on a guided tour. Either way, though, they still have something that I miss in the most recent games I've played: The ability to have fun just messing around with the world you're adventuring in. Ultima 9 may have cut out a lot of the interaction, but you could still build bread bridges that reached up higher than the clouds to see what was really at the top of Stonegate tower... although using empty flasks was more convenient, if a little harder to climb up. Ultima 8, while it didn't have the variety of monsters or quests that its predecessors had, still had enough world interactivity that enterprising minds could find ways to have fun with the inhabitants of the world that might be considered "unethical" by more rigorous Avatars. Even in those games, the worlds were like little games unto themselves with all the things you could do in them. That's what I 'd like to see again. A game world whose existence isn't limited to its relevance to the quest at hand.

That's more like it... there may be hope for you yet, young Grasshopper.

Nope... nothing wrong with that at all, but how many of those games that suck end up being famous for ... anything? People might have noticed that the graphics engine's good in a lousy game while they're playing it, but if the game itself is forgotten before the hard drive stops spinning, I don't think famous is really the right term to use for it. I don't have any stats on this sort of thing either, but a game's got to be at the very least memorable before it can become famous, and memorable usually implies that it does something (or everything) really, really well... greatly, even. Or really really badly, but I'm not wishing that on Obsidian. For it to become famous for that element, though, people (enough people, as well) have to remember it long after it's become obsolete; games that you go through and then use as coasters don't get remembered unless people are really bitter about the way they turned out. Planescape: Torment is famous too... I a couple ways, I think. For those who played it, it's famous for it's incredible characters (sweet, sweet Ravel...), philosophical plot and unorthodox roleplaying. For the majority of gameplayers, though, I think it's also famous as an example of a critically acclaimed game that no one bought. Oh, and stop agreeing with me, damnit! Everyone knows that internet discussions like this are supposed to be ill-tempered and eventually end with flames flying everywhere, and one or both parties getting a warning, if not banned outright. It's like you've never been on a message board before... :D

The way I look at it, you can't really separate the two quite that cleanly, at least not if the fame you're referring to is earned. If any given game is going to become famous on its own merit, it's either got to be spectacularly good at everything (making it a great enough game in general to receive critial acclamation and/or financial success), or it's got to do one thing so well that it almost becomes infamous, with that one element putting everything else the game offers to such shame that everyone's just scratching their heads asking "Why couldn't they get the rest of the game right? It could have been the best game EVAR if only they'd paid enough attention to everything else the way they did with [element Y]" (Again, I'm thinking ToEE here. Great combat system in an otherwise lackluster game). Either way there's an element of greatness there, and the fame the game receives is due to that, not the other way around. You can be great without being famous, but I'm not sure that it works in the other direction, not if that fame is earned instead of just given. (Note that I'm also leaving out the option of having a game become famous the way PoRII did; massive expectations, huge hype, complete and total letdown with the product) If Fallout and Final Fantasy VII hadn't been so well received in the first place, though, would people have stopped to dissect them so much to see just what it was that made them so good? That's also why I don't particularly see a conflict between the thread title here and the poll question: Answer the question of which element is most important to you, and you answer the question of what makes a great (for you, yes, but others will share your views). Any fame that the game receives will follow from that.

Gotta agree with you there. For me, the game is almost always made or broken by how well those elements come together. I don't think one element can make a great game, but I do think that if one's far enough out of whack it can easily ruin one. Case in point, ToEE. I took one look at the portraits and said "ewww!" I just hated the style of those things... too angular, too cartoonish, often they were just looked too brightly coloured. But when I started playing the game, that just sort of faded into the background. When I got into the gameplay, the style of artwork in the game didn't make a difference in light of how well it worked with what they rest of the game did. 'Course, ToEE had other problems, but that's beside the point. I think I'm going to go with the World Environments option, though, because I figure that if the devs are going to put that much effort into the world, they're going to do something similar for the characters in it. Even if they don't though, it's easier for me to foist my own ideas of what they should be like onto them, if the world has a certain level of detail to it. Really, though, it's a toss-up between the environments and the characters/story for me... emphasis for that last part being on the characters. The story itself could be the most clich

*finds himself oddly fascinated by King Doom's avatar....* *stares vacantly*

I didn't say you weren't serious. I said I wasn't going to take you seriously. Come back in a week or two, and if they still haven't done anything in the way of moderation, still haven't released any pre-game info, and still haven't posted on the boards, then I'll take you seriously. Oh, and I'm not American.

Heh heh heh... good post. I'd give it a 7/10; I was almost about to take you seriously there for a minute. Certainly could be better, though.

The original release of Ultima 8 was a nightmare, but the patch at least let you jump to where your cursor was pointing, instead of a predetermined distance from where you were standing... a distance that was damnably difficult to judge sometimes, since the screen always scrolled in the midst of jumping. Still, even so it's not nearly as bad as I remember it being at the time, considering some of the things I've played since then. Just goes to show how much I liked Ultima 7, given that I played 8 right after, thought it hellish, and yet still play it today (well, yesterday, to get technical about it). I suppose y'all ought to take that into consideration when reading anything I've got to write about Ultima7...

I don't know if I'd consider either Ultimas of Ultima 7 to be really Linear. To me, linear gameplay involves them herding you along a specific path in the gameworld, and The Black Gate was the most open RPG I've ever played with the exception of Daggerfall -- at least, it was once they let you out of Trinsic. If any game is going to want to tell any sort of story at all it's going to have to be linear to some degree, but The Black Gate let you do everything in your own sweet time without imposing any real limits. Part of that was due to the nature of the "plot" itself, I think. Dropping you into Britannia with the quest of "finding out what's wrong" gives you a lot of leeway when it comes to exploring the world and talking to who you want to talk to. The story itself was a bit weak in Ultima 7, but as you mentioned, if you want a wide open game world where you can do what you want when you want, you're going to have to keep the required plot elements thin. Serpent Isle was a lot more linear, but for a really good example of what I'd call a linear RPG, there's always Ultima IX. They were telling a reasonably well fleshed out story, but they also boxed you into specific areas of the gameworld for each and every step, and only at one point that I can recall was there ever a choice about where you'd go next. Moreover, those areas were small enough that you could feel you were being boxed in. That's the only Ultima that even remotely made me feel claustrophobic, something that, after the Ultima 7s, I didn't think would happen at all in that series. Serpent Isle made you go to certain places, yes, but there was enough to do there, and enough space to do it in, that it didn't feel "close" to me. I was just moving on to a new part of the world to do what needed to be done there. I did like how they boxed you in, though. Whether it was you being stranded on an island because the ship you came on was beached and in need of repair, or whether there was an echantment on the swamp preventing you from going north, the obstacles weren't artifical to the world, but rather were part of it and part of its history. Gotta disagree with you there. There was a lot of roleplaying in the Ultima 7s. Yes, they constrained you to playing the role of the Virtuous Hero type, but with the entire world built around that Hero, mythology included, there were plenty of roleplaying opportunities in those games. Not much choice of which role to play, but plenty of roleplaying. The lack of definition of the core NPCs (Iolo, Dupre, Shamino, and to a slightly lesser extent, Spark) didn't bother me, though. There was enough random banter and description thown in to let me know that Dupre, while noble and heroic, wasn't one to turn down a drink at the local tavern, that Iolo was the parental father-figure Bard, and that Shamino was pretty much a standard elven ranger type: never aging, perceptive, quiet, doesn't much like the cities. Whatever they didn't fill in for me regarding their personalities, I filled in myself. The level of detail in the world helped with that. If it hadn't been so detailed, I could have been quite happy letting those three remain as human packhorses. As it was, though, I paid attention to anything they said, whether they were whining about food, passing a tavern and looking for a drink, or interjecting with their disapproval over something I had to do.... or something I didn't have to do but wanted to do (sometimes my Avatar engaged in questionable adventuring practices). Of course, the fact that all three characters follow well-established stereotypes doesn't hurt, either. Job's half done when they say there's a Knight in Shining Armour walking around beside you, unless they want to deviate from the norm. The combat was crap, though. Always gave me a laugh when I hit that Combat button and all my characters would dash madly off into the trees, only occasionally streaking across a corner of the screen on their way to somewhere else. The fact that Iolo kept hitting me in the back of the head with his crossbow bolts was just a hazard of combat, though. T'was just part of his personality. Master Archer who hadn't quite mastered it enough, for my taste Inventory management could get nasty, too... sometimes I felt like having a cluttered backpack where objects had weight and volume added to the realism, sometimes I felt it just just more a pain in the arse. Still quite undecided on that issue, personally.

Well, considering the turnover rate of computer game companies these days, you should have another chance in half a year or so...

We've got the monster pit, and there be monsters lurking around (I've even seen one of 'em! I swears it!), but last I checked, there'd already been 233 pieces of meat thrown in...

I came because of 1) curiosity, 2) new company, new game, familiar faces making it, and 3) the colours. You can't tell me these aren't just the best colours for a message board....

I wouldn't mind something with a more Arabian Nights feel to it myself. No Elves or dwarves, but maybe some ghuls or nasnas for that more supernatural element, some intrigue... something along those lines would be good, IMO. Last good game I played in that kind of long-ago desert setting was Quest for Glory: Trial by Fire. *reminisces*

Thanks guys, fixed. No no... thank you

Post count, I'm guessing... I noticed mine changed at post #5. Could've gone with something a little more creative than just level numbers, IMnsHO. If I were the paranoid type, I could extrapolate this to mean that the game they're working on will be a "light on roleplaying, heavy on levelling up stat-fest", but I'm not, so I won't.

Might want to change the background colour that the "quote" functions uses. White seems a little on the vibrant side to me considering the rest of the colour scheme here, not to mention that it's hard to make out the authors of nested quotes with the light grey on white. In the same vein, I'm finding the number telling you the number of open tags you've got in the post you're making to be a little hard to make out; black number, darker grey background... Aside from those issues, though, I'm liking these colours.