Chairchucker

In much the same way as how, if a developer's pay from their first game that is funded by a publisher isn't enough to self publish the next one, they should deem that game a failure?

This reminds me of a video I watched the other day. It was on whatever show Jon Stewart was on, and he was talking about the whole Ferguson situation, and how it was being reported on. There was a quick montage of comments from predominantly Fox affiliated reporters, and Stewart paused it after one of them said 'you know who talks about race? Racists!' Now, it would be easy for me, as a white male who has enjoyed the privilege my race and gender affords me, to pretend that the fact that black people are underrepresented in high paying jobs and over represented in prison, slums, clubs and being on the wrong end of shootings from police officers is because, dang it all, those darn negros are just predisposed towards criminal activity. So tell me, would it be more racist of me to think that there is something wrong when this disparity exists, or to think that there isn't? And once you've answered that question, maybe you'd like to join the remaining dot and decide whether, actually, it is in fact the sexists who think there's an issue when female are under represented in certain fields.

Yo just wanna chime in again and say that love (romantic love, that is) can be a pretty cool plot element, or even driving force of a narrative. Also, narratives can be pretty great in the complete absence of romantic love. I reckon it's hypothetically possible to have a video game romance that doesn't feel gross and icky, and that is well told and rewarding. Closest I've seen to this is romances that don't involve the PC, but whatevs. Romance could be a good thing. Equating the absence of romance in a game to an absence of roleplaying or story seems kind of dumb though. The more powerful narrative scenes I've seen in video games had, without exception, absolutely nothing to do with romance. (Nothing inherent about romance in this, I just don't think it's been done as well in video games as other themes have.)

Then again, one of the reasons that men might not want to work in those professions is that there is a societal stigma against men who choose to work in traditionally female jobs. 'Male nurse' is often seen as a punchline to a joke about someone's sexuality.

Sometimes it's not as simple as 'if they wanted to be in X job they would'. But don't take my word for it. Take this guy's. http://whatwouldkingleonidasdo.tumblr.com/post/54989171152/how-i-discovered-gender-discrimination

By extension, could we say that most other art forms didn't count as such until semi recently/still don't count? It's not like there's a glut of female directors, for example. Which is not to say that the dearth of female game developers isn't a problem in need of a solution, but I think we're being a little kind to the other forms of media if we single out games for this attention.

I checked Wikipedia (yes, yes, I know, but I don't see any other sources being cited so whatevs) and it reckons that actually there is a valid 'European Arrest Warrant' out for Assange. Apparently on the Swedish side of things, the reason there hasn't been a Swedish arrest warrant (but there has been a European one apparently, so I don't know what's going on there) is that they actually can't do that until after he's been questioned. One account I heard of at least one of his sexual encounters is that the young lady he was with checked if he had a condom, he didn't, and she was like 'sorry, no glove no love,' and he went ahead and had sex with her anyway, which fits the legal definition of rape in a lot of countries, not just Sweden. He is of course entitled to the presumption of innocence until being proven guilty, but given that he has not seen fit to permit these two ladies their day in court so far, some people might make their own conclusions, and their conclusions might, hypothetically, be that he is a self important narcissist hiding behind the idea that Sweden would extradite him to the US (whereas the UK wouldn't apparently, because the UK are famously less close with the US than Sweden is I guess is the theory here, I'm not quite as up to date on international politics as I could be) to wait out the duration of the statute of limitations.

...what? I don't get it.

Yeah basically. Although personally, the choice in recent gaming memory that REALLY irked me, was the Dragon Age: Origins choice of either: a. Execute a man who has surrendered to me. (And I'd already set a precedent of never executing anyone, so really, could Alistair have been too surprised when I chose the only other option available to me of..) b. Recruit him to my team. (Which isn't a romance related option but is another example of when binary choices are annoying.)

I think one of the major issues I have with the way romances have been done - and are likely to continue to be done - is that romance is an aspect of life on which there are likely to be a larger amount of diverse views as to the 'right way' to do it, yet there's more or less always only one way to romance someone. Let's take for example the Mass Effects games. Now, if, hypothetically, my Femshep had wanted to romance someone - well I was already in trouble because I let Kaiden die because Ash was my BFF, and my Femshep was only into human males so that ruled Liara out, but let's pretend for a moment it had been Kaiden who had lived. The only two options in the romance conversation were basically 'ugh no I don't fancy you Kaiden' or 'take me now you biotic stallion!' But maybe I don't care for either of those options. Maybe Femshep is a classy lady and Kaiden needs to woo me first, maybe take me to a museum or something, had you thought of that Kaiden, huh, had you?!? If you like it, maybe you should try putting a ring on it! So for someone who is totes down for a quickie in the captain's quarters and that's the end of that relationship, that might seem like an OK romance, but not for my Femshep, no Sir. I'm not breaking Space Corps directives on fraternisation for a casual fling. The problem is, different people have different opinions of how they want their character to act in a relationship, and probably stronger opinions than they have of other decisions their characters might make, and thus romances are gonna end up sucking for a large percentage of players unless an even larger amount of resources are pumped into them.

Yeah I saw a preview of Calvary before Lucy, it looked very interesting. May give it a watch eventually.

To be honest, I would rather Obsidian make original IPs as well. Pen and Paper games are great and all, but there's no reason to saddle yourself with the restrictions inherent in a pen and paper gaming system when you have a computer available to do all the calculations.

Oh, Jennifer Lawrence chat, huh? She's a real good actor OK that's all I got on this topic.

That's cool and all, but why have you chosen to ignore the actual point of my post and respond only to the throwaway example? The point of that post was about opportunity cost and limited resources and Obsidian having to make choices (that's my answer BTW. Obsidian should ultimately wield an iron fist and make all the choices) about where to spend their available resources, and the problem with a poll is that some people will, as demonstrated within this topic, answer the poll question as if resources are no issue, whereas some will assume that if resources are diverted to romances, they'd have to cut out an entire race or something. Like elves. On second thoughts, I'm OK with this trade off.

As someone previously mentioned, if it's a simple choice between 'have romances' and 'not have romances' without resources being an issue, sure, I'll vote for Obsidian to wave their magic wand and implement it. But resources are an issue. They are an issue for anything that can be implemented, and Obsidian have to weigh up all the different goals and the resources they'll take. I'm sure there are plenty of things that would take the same or less resources than romances that I'd ask the magic wand to give me first. Like more in depth non-romantic party interaction, for example.

My inference from the conversation that you seem to be referring to is that the things that Josh thought should be optional were things that could be said to 'break immersion', like a mode that makes everyone's heads larger than one might expect a head to be, or a mode that activates a lot of pop culture references like a corpse bearing fridge.

It's important that we make realistic goals. If one makes 'anything possible', the choices are either having the 'anything' be shallow and meaningless (an outcome that J.E. Sawyer has specifically mentioned as being unacceptable) or requiring a lot more resources. I don't think you'll find many people disagreeing with the ideal of a game where you have an absurd amount of roleplaying options, it's just that logistically that would be a nightmare.

I saw GotG, I also liked it a lot, well bye.

IMO the current US rules are bad and should be changed. Then again, I live in Australia, sooooo... :/

Was pretty fun. Plot was a little better than I expected. Dragged a little bit leading up towards 'half time', but then they brought it home with a whole bunch of action in the second half. Not anything I'd get on DVD or anything, but was an entertaining and violent distraction.

Yeah, I was gonna say prohibition era gangster game.

Ah, well like Mr Mitchell says, you could just have an extra box you tick. Honestly I would've thought incest would be the biggest sticking point other than polygamy, if it was just about genetic tomfoolery, well, there's plenty of precedent for us not caring about hypothetical unborn children. If it was about power imbalance, there's a bit of precedent *cough*WoodyAllen*cough* there as well.

Don't beat around the bush Nonek, I can't figure out whether you like the romances we've seen so far or not.

Just saw Hercules and Lucy this week. Hercules was the better of the two.

Yeah that's what I figured. Did you also have to cover things like incest, age of consent, and the right of consenting adults to marry rollercoasters or horses? And of course there's this little issue: