Tale

What the heyhey? I love Heat. The Heat. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2404463/

I'd recommend the whole Ender and Shadow series as well, although the rest of the Ender books are very different in tone while the Shadow series are more in keeping with the feel of Ender's Game. I loved Ender's Game and the Xenocide series for their takes on aliens that are so different humanity struggles to communicate with them. Does the Shadows series keep on that?

Nobody ever really understood alignments. They were abstractions people tried to make concrete and others tried to flower over and make sound like these wonderful things. When all it really was is just a proud nail that some people really wished they could hammer in and other people thought added to the charm to the point they'd defend it to the last. The best description I ever heard for it was simply an explanation of the law-chaos axis. Planning vs. impulsivity. The lawful good character is the one who does good while giving full consideration to the consequences of his actions. He makes sure he has all the information he can get before making judgements, and even when he can't, he tries to not allow his passions to override the facts. He only respects THE LAW when he has evidence that the law provides for the good. It's not a goal or an ideal, it's the person that he is. A man who thinks before leaping into action. Like every other spot on the chart, it's just who they are. Lawful Evil isn't an ideal. Chaotic Evil isn't an ideal. They're not struggles. They're people who think about their evil or people who rush into it on whimsy. The problem with "understanding" alignment is that I see notable differences between your idea of LG and mine. But I'm not so sure you can convincingly provide something that paints my idea as anything else. And that's kind of how alignment goes. It's too abstract to pull out a solid rule to understand it with.

I'm not the biggest fan of stats all doing the same thing for different jobs. With Intelligence meaning more damage for mages, dexterity more damage for rogues, and strength more damage for fighters. It's functional design, but it doesn't compel me to think about the system. Classes favoring their respective stats for different reasons (more damage for fighters, more versatility or casts/battle for mages, more reliability for rogues) just seems more interesting to me. And I think it paves the way for doing interesting things outside the standard three or four.

It's hard for me to really be objective here. I think I would be okay with any direction they took. But I also recall them being pretty open about what they were hoping to do during the kickstarter drive. There are things they bragged about and compared it to, but I never got the impression they were going to simply be copying any particular set of old IE games verbatim. The core elements of tactical combat and parties are things they seem to really still be focusing on. I don't think that Icewind Dale-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off is what they were seriously promoting. That said, I like the deviations I've read about, and am impartial to others. I'm sure if playing Baldur's Gate II as a Kensai/Mage is what defined that game for me more than arranging party members and microing them, I'd likely have a different perspective.

New thread.

End of last thread. I saw Heat last Friday. I am ashamed, but I did laugh.

At worst, this thread seems like it's trying to move towards something racially offensive. At best, it does not seem that too many people here are interested in discussing the history of particular racial identities. Either way, not much is lost if I lock this thread. Let's play it safe.

I went over my dad's so he could show me around. I'll be house sitting for the next two weeks. I'm going to try getting away from video games and internet forums so I can focus on reading and writing.

Bought Rogue Legacy on impulse and spent way too much time playing it last night.

My Zer0 is high level, but he's boring. With a melee focused character, the second you get the +200% melee damage gun, you've found the only gun you'll use for the rest of the game.

Yup. I'm going through Tiny Tina's DLC right now. I haven't played the game since I beat it when it was first released, so I haven't touched any of the DLC before now. I''m liking what I've played so far though. I like that it shows me people on my friends list playing. I see youuuuu. But we're like 20-30 levels apart.

Borderlands 2, finally doing the DLC. The pirate one is pretty darn good.

You don't have to do every possible permutation. Just the choices that appeal to the widest range of players. New Vegas did it well. Yes Man is the perfect example. It's basically the "I hate every other option, so I'm taking over" one. You don't have to do every possible choice. Just do the choices the player is likely to want. Nobody's going to be dead set on a single option and only that option, but the options present should appeal to a range. Instead of all being the same and only appealing to the writer. The choices that the player are going to want are the ones that benefit him or her the most and fulfill the goals that were established in initial premise. Get revenge, kill the bad guy, save the girl, become king.

I agree. When designing an RPG, the important thing to me seems to be asking "what would the player want to do here?" And I can't stress how important a question that is. Because when the player is forced to make a choice they have no interest in making, then they have no investment in the outcomes of that choice. To put this in a context with what Gaider said. You can't make the player care about events that happened because of a choice you denied that player. The player immediately sees all of those events as being things the writer forced on him. Not events he forced on himself, not events the world forced on him, the player will see that choice denied as the writer's hand. I can't care about the mage rebellion when the entire thing traces back to Meredith asking me to do chores I never wanted. And then when I have to kill people I like. I can't care about the fate of a galaxy when it's all the result of space magic I don't understand, trust, or accept. And I'm not letting that stupid Devaronion on my ship. I don't think I'm an unreasonable player. I don't ask for the choice to wear a banana hat and squawk at the king. I just ask that when I'm confronted by characters I want dead, characters the game has encouraged me to want dead, that I get to refuse their requests. This is my fear of Dragon Age: Inquisition. That, in the service of whatever ending or piece of drama they desire, every investment I make in the game world to that point gets tossed out on a "but though must."

I hope they listened to my suggestions during DA2 and implemented bromances. Instead of a sex scene you get a hi-five and a fistbump.

I refuse to be anything but bitter towards this game until after release. That way I don't get my hopes up.

Rifts. The first game was alright. I'd rolled a Crazy because I wanted to be random and wacky, but the rest of the group was being random enough that I didn't have the heart in me to add to it. The first session was fine. It was around the 3rd or 4th session that I got sick of it. Our DM started getting a little too creepy for my tastes. "You're fighting a vampire, roll for sanity. Critical failure, you just bleep and bleep all over yourself." "Oh, you critical failed too, so now you're fleeing, right through that guy's bleep and bleep, you slip on it and now you're..." you get the drift. That wasn't even the first time that stuff started coming up. The previous session had ended up with people basically abusing one of the AFK player's characters in manners unspeakable. I had asked if we could cut back on that, but the next session was just as bad.

Possible ARG in Half-Life 2. There was an update with localization files, but it ended up turning everyone's game into the Korean language. And there's reports that Breen has been replaced by Kim Jong Un in some capacities. Steam support's twitter is playing with this, claiming it was an error, but also saying "Prepare for unintended consequences" in Korean. Edit: The reports about Kim Jong Un seem to be too few, however. So it's probably a bugged update.

In my opinion if you can label it evil, then it's already a bit juvenile. Selfish choices are juvenile choices. Maybe killing a guy for coin isn't as juvenile as killing a guy because you don't like his hat, it is a spectrum after all. But it's still not as mature as killing him because his death would prevent a greater tragedy. Choices that force players to think beyond good and evil are the mature ones. The choices that might encourage a player looking to do good to instead do something traditionally considered evil, these are the more interesting. They become a challenge in a sense, as they can make the player pause and give it deeper thought. Though, and I have to cut people off here that may misread what I'm saying, I don't support trick choices either. A player intending to do good that chooses the seemingly good choice, should still have a good result. It should just be a different good than that of the guy who thought about it and chose the more ambiguous good. The outcome should reflect what is put into it. Simplistic choices should have simplistic outcomes. Complex choices should have complex outcomes.

Trying to play Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition or Shadow Hearts 2. Both are way too slow for my mood at the moment.

Atari just turned out to be a very bad partner for it in the long term.

No I do not. Because I did not have enough memory to run sound drivers and DOOM at the same time. I played that game completely deaf, nonstop, for 2 years.

And a good part of what people enjoy about Dark Souls is the idea he might be there. People are really just trying to figure out what to do with multiplayer now other than arena combat. Sadly, this won't fix the problem of feature bloat and design by checklist. But hopefully it won't make it worse.

That one was really good, too.