Bartimaeus

...not only that, what if you're not even slightly interested in those two games to begin with? I certainly am not...

If that doesn't work, you can just talk very loudly about jury nullification and either get disqualified or cause a mistrial. Either way, it ends your obligation!

Dialogue and choice and consequence around it is definitely lacking, for sure. What's your line in the sand for what is an RPG and what is not an RPG here? I, for example, don't see why explicitly choosing a "character archetype" is necessary, though - is not enough to just simply PLAY and hold true to a certain type of character? If I play D&D, it's not like I'm explicitly laying out 100% what kind of character I will be before I even start playing - yeah, there's the required stuff like what your class and alignment is (necessary for the purposes of the game system), but there are all sorts of little sub-details and variances within that that aren't clear except through your actual actions. If D&D had a sort of "classless" variant where you just build your character as you go along with no strictly defined class or character types, I would hardly think of it as being less of an RPG - it would just be a different kind. Why is that necessary here?

But I didn't say the combat system had anything to do with it being an RPG or not to begin with (probably where we're getting confused here, and probably what I should've replied with to begin with - my bad!). My entire argument was more trying to establish why it's still an RPG even with an un-RPG-ish combat system (in reply Zoraptor and Azdeus saying it's not an RPG at all, which is where I thought you were arguing from, but I see that you were not).

You pick the role you want to play. If you want to be a heavily armored mercenary who only trusts his AK and will take any job - including murdering others for no other reason besides that you'll get paid - that's the role you can play. If you want to be an ideologue that values personal freedom and the sanctity of human life over anything else, maybe you'll align with the Freedom faction and avoid trying to kill anybody and instead just try to sneak through or around combat encounters...and you probably won't be taking very many assassination contracts, that's for sure. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. didn't implement these things perfectly, of course not...but there is absolutely more to roleplaying than just ridiculous abstracted stats in my mind, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. allows for it more than most other so-called "RPG"s that railroad you into completing certain objectives or doing certain kinds of tasks. Yeah, there's still some of that due to the main narrative of the games and stuff, but you have much more relative freedom than a whole lot of other games. You choose your jobs, you choose your equipment and playstyle, and your actions affect your relations with other people and factions. That's about as much of an RPG as you can get in my mind. Yeah, again, all these things could've been done better than they were in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, but that's true for literally every game ever. And on the plus side, you don't have what I'd consider a terrible/wonky combat system either (...unlike the Fallouts), especially if you're okay with quickly adding a mod somebody else already worked on and complete to increase the damage/accuracy of weapons to make combat more deadly - for both yourself and enemies. Shadow of Chernobyl will quite possibly be my favorite shooter for the rest of my life for just these reasons - a very unique and extremely visceral blend of FPS and RPG elements with a pretty darned cool setting that I just cannot really find anywhere else in gaming.

Not counting Fallout 4 here necessarily, but isn't listing pretty widely poorly received games like Andromeda kinda besides the point here? Thought the idea was games that were well-received but that you just can't find yourself bothering with for specific (perceived or actual) reasons.

A relatively recent example of a game in a series that I like that I won't touch is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I shy away from all explicitly "open world" games because they tend to offer a repetitive and flawed/disappointing experience after about 10-20 hours of gameplay for me (the exact mark seems to be different for everyone...some people start feeling it after a pretty short while, such as myself, while others can play it significantly longer before games like this and, for example, the Elder Scrolls series, start to really feel that way). Sure, those first 10-20 hours might seem incredible, but games like this always eventually leave a poor impression by the time you finish with them, and I just don't really want to bother with that - it's not what I want out of Zelda. Throw in absolutely terrible voice-acting and copy+paste content throughout the entire game, and I really just can't be bothered. So it's too bad that Nintendo has announced that BotW will be their blueprint for future installments. Guess that means no more Zelda for me for the foreseeable future.

Hey, if you guys want to make your definition of RPG more or less strictly about character stats, that's your business. For me, equipment instead being that factor and something that you'll definitely be changing and messing around with throughout the entire game while otherwise meeting the definition is pretty much good enough for me (and many others) to call it an RPG.

Something I love about Stalker is tying all your combat stats purely to equipment. Anything else that cannot be handled by your equipment is left purely up to your own skills as a player. This is something that I wish other RPGs would at least try out and experiment in combination with real time action combat systems. I really wish there was a mod for the 3D Fallouts that did something like this for the combat abilities, and removed silly damage and accuracy scaling completely as a result. That would increase my interest in those games tenfold...as opposed to now, where my interest in them is roughly nil. It's so stupid and frustrating for me to have first person shooting mechanics tied to stats: a gun is a gun, and it should handle how YOU handle it in combination with its physical form factor (and consequent physical limitations)...and the projectiles should shoot at the same velocity and with roughly the same force and accuracy every time. It'd be nice to play a 3D Fallout like that...and where the combat system is much more brutal for yourself and enemies alike. Instead, these games have a "this is somewhat/fairly challenging" stage that happens at the beginning of the game, and a "I am a god of death for no real apparent reason" in the mid to late game. I just can't really be bothered with such silliness. Stalker, consequently, is much more my jam.

The developer more or less dissolved a few years back (owner of the company laid off virtually everybody, as I remember it), and only recently sorta reformed, with nothing about Stalker since then.

Total conversion projects almost never pan out (...and I think basically none for Stalker ever have), so hard for me to look at it objectively while knowing that.

I thought we were in "random video game news" and was having a serious brain problem situation trying to decipher what you were on about. Backdoor dealings involving Obsidian and Honda, what?

I think you can just change the file extension to something "less suspicious" (i.e. a txt) and it will be accepted. Sorry to hear that, Calax.

This is a mod, yes? Can't imagine it's not, given how many re-used sounds there are from previous Stalker games that I heard.

RIP former Raven Todd Heap's 3 year old daughter, whom was accidentally run over and killed today.

I wanted to watch this when you originally posted it, but forgot about it, so now I just did. That was pretty cool.

Well, yeah, the game hasn't been released yet.

Yeah, that's more like a regular song than orchestrated music, which I can appreciate. RE: vocals in video game music: I'm super picky about vocal-work in general (misophonia and a broad dislike of most voices in general, sadly...), so it's nice when I find *any* music with vocals that I like, whether game music or not. The MOTHER soundtrack instantly became one of my favorite game soundtracks because it has vocal work that I like (which is especially surprising, because it has a variety of different vocal and music styles - and combine that with having probably the best tunes the NES had to offer to begin with!)...but for the majority of cases, I'm unlikely to particularly care for it. The first song you linked, for example, I didn't mind the first vocalist, but the second one instantly grated on me. Combine that with a really basic and repetitive, er..."melody", and the song just didn't do much for me, .

No, it's just weird...it's like, I listen to early game orchestral music like Jet Force Gemini, or even Baldur's Gate...as well as occasionally a newer work like Super Mario Galaxy...and it's like, these songs have actually interesting melodies and compositions. I listen to something like your Nier song, or the vast majority of a Souls or Elder Scrolls game, and everything just sounds super generic and samey to me. Don't much understand the appeal, and never have.

I wish I understood the appeal of the majority of orchestrated game music. Where are the melodies? At least this has a little vocal work, which makes it a little more interesting than a two second drum loop for 90% of the song as it otherwise would've been...

The thing that I hate about Watcher's Keep, is that I always do it way too early, like Chapter 2 of SoA early, so that it's a real challenge, particularly when you throw on Sword Coast Stratagems and the 50% XP reducer mod. And then I finish it, leave and go to Spellhold and realize that I'm ludicrously overleveled, and I lose interest in that playthrough. Should really start using that SCS component that makes it so it's not accessible until ToB...I always think I won't do it, and then I do. Whoops.

By people who aren't even a part of the group in question. Not that I don't think Jews themselves wouldn't be offended, mind you - given that it's still recent history enough where brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, grandparents of still living people were mass murdered on an industrial scale, I imagine it's still a rather touchy subject...along with people who were affected by other deaths as a result of Hitler's actions (...among others') and World War II. All things heal with time, one way or another, though...but for an event of this magnitude, surely it's not much of a surprise that the hurt from it would be felt beyond even our own lifetimes...a good 2% of the world population dying is a pretty significant event, and it's not even been a hundred years since. I wonder for how long the Black Death was talked about by those who survived it...and from them, the succeeding generations in stories passed down. Strange. I even opened up a direct link to the image itself, but it's just frozen.

How do you figure that they...er, figure that? On a side-note, I could swear that your avatar used to be animated. Am I crazy?

Pah, there are plenty of people more evil than Hitler! They just don't have the same power and resources to execute* upon it as much as he did! *Hmm, not the best choice of wording, now that I think about it.

Yeah, it wasn't really Holocaust denial...more like, pro-Hitler - or something amounting to a defense of him in comparison to Assad, at least, .