Tale

That seems fair. So the main reasons they were doing durability is to give the crafting skills a party-wide use so you don't dump it on only one character and as a sink in the economy. I'd like to think they can still handle the economy without it. Which leaves it existing to do little more than justify a skill. Removing the skill, but not associated functionality of crafting, seems to be the more elegant solution to that little problem. That's probably how I'd prefer it. I haven't played too many RPGs where having crafting be a skill sink actually improved things. Does anyone actually prefer for crafting to be attached to the skill system?

That seems a chicken/egg situation. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that older games are cheapened by sales, and not that the sales reflect how they cheapened naturally. Especially when consoles have similar issues of games losing their value in the tail. Really, the only decent way to grow audiences is by encouraging impulse buys. With larger franchises, people need a way to catch up without breaking the bank. And with smaller franchises, there's not enough word of mouth going around for the people on the fence to spend the full price. How else can they get people to take a chance? Especially in an atmosphere of growing consumer distrust.

I also learned yesterday that I am absolutely awful at swimming. Was good when young, but I haven't been in so long that I was just flopping around in water. But it was good exercise for me, so I'll do it again today.

Old thread Additionally, I appear to be closing threads for being too long.

Getting upset. My boss is having me check on the tax status of one of his business for like the past two months. Now everything's in order... except our tax preparer forget to file the right affiliate list. So I'm going to have to file that myself. And then who knows what it's going to take for the good standing to come into effect. New thread.

I like the idea of an economy. Of the player's gold going towards something. I am not remotely used to that. In every game I've played that wasn't an MMO, it always went to hoarding. I think other people, like me, may simply be used to that. We're used to stockpiling 99 megalixers and 4 billion megabux for the final confrontation, then not using it for anything. Then pondering later about how our character can decimate any in-game economy and how strange it all seems. But being used to that, we come to like it. That said, I think we can come to like tighter economics. Ones where our hero ends up with only a bottlecap and a nickle wafer that he swore was 30 pence when he stuck his hand in his pocket, but really shiny armor. Some people will never get used to that. I'm willing to try.

Is Viola even confirmed?

Of the higher funded ones? Shadowrun Returns is about to come out, so I'm fairly optimistic about them. I haven't seen any red flags on P:E yet to make me worried.

Scamstarter at its best. How can it be a scam if they're producing more than we paid for?

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.