Wrath of Dagon

I believe that's a sub-skill of pimpin'

SirPetrakis, you've made so many wrong assumptions in your post I don't even know where to start. You'd pretty much have to negate every sentence to arrive at some semblance of the truth. Let me just point out I haven't played a PnP RPG in my life, and I already said an RPG is about player choice, not about combat.

It's the player who makes choices, not the character, so I'm not sure how Duke Nukem fits into this. In a wargame you're not playing a character, so you're not making character related choices, so that's not an RPG either.

@Ghost OK, so the truest RPG's have all kinds of C&C, you can affect the entire story, have multiple approaches to everything, etc. I haven't actually played any of those. Then you take a step back, you can't really affect the story very much, but the game is made up of quests, and you do have a couple of ways of completing the quest, so you still have some choice. That would be KOTOR. Then you take another step back, and almost all your choices are limited to dialog and its immediate aftermath, because the structure of the game is too linear to accomodate anything else. Sure there are some quests, but almost all are bad. That's Mass Effect.

That too. My taste is beyond reproach.

I'm glad you see my point. As far as providing reasons, I did link to my review already for those who are interested. It's always frustrating to see that most people on forums seem to have missed the day in elementary school when they explained the difference between opinions and facts. Jenny wears a green dress - fact; Jenny is pretty - opinion.

That those who don't share my viewpoint are wrong.

So you can't just spout any old crap and expect people to know exactly what it is you are trying to say. If I create a product, and someone points out an error in the product, I'd like to know what it is so I can correct it. If it's not an error, it's just something they don't like, then frankly I'm not likely to care. I already pointed out plenty of faults in ME, unless you think the only possible problem in a game is a bug, since that's objective. And I've yet to see anyone explain why the faults I pointed out aren't faults.

Yes, so what?

How am I doing that, am I holding a gun to their heads? May be I should throw a hissy fit and threaten not to buy the game unless it's done to my exact specifications, as per usual forum protocol.

To avoid endlessly repeating myself, here's my review on Bio forums, towards the bottom of the page: http://masseffect.bioware.com/forums/viewt...=125&sp=285 The fundamental problem as I said is that ME is too linear to offer any meaningful player choice. If you want every single flaw pointed out, you can read the parody in my signature. Amazingly though the author thinks the game is brilliant.

Can you honestly not see that this is your opinion? There's a massive number of people who would beg to differ that Mass Effect is a "badly designed RPG". Most importantly, if Obsidian doens't share your opinion of Mass Effect, you're just pissing into the wind anyhow. Of course it's my opinion, what else would it be? What amazes me is that people don't see something so obvious.

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php?topic=338.0 How does this address FF7, Diablo 2, or System Shock 2? Among others on the list. I don't believe that they are, although I have to admit I'm judging them without having played them. Just because someone says a game is an RPG, doesn't mean that it is.

I didn't say anything of the sort, and AP looking similar and having a similar concept to ME is my own opinion, not one I borrowed from journalists. Why is stating my honest opinion whining? Anyway, I believe developers need to see why ME is a badly designed game so they don't repeat the same mistakes.

Does that exclusively encompass plot-related choice? What about gameplay choices? If the answer is yes to the first, that excludes a lot of games that many (most?) would consider RPGs, including Darklands and many of the old Gold Box games. Additionally few RPGs provide "real" choice - most simply provide the illusion of choice but still take you through the same essential story regardless of your choices. Not to knock them - I love RPGs (duh) but I think you may be misrepresenting the difference between, say, the level of choice in Mass Effect and the level of choice in other games. Well, they always provide some real choice, you may not have much choice in the overall story arc but at least you should have choice in doing individual quests. Plus a well executed illusion of choice still qualifies as choice so far as I'm concerned. One of the big problems with ME was that it failed to provide meaningful choices to the player because of the on-rails structure of the game.

Well, several games in your first list aren't RPG's, so it makes it kind of tough. To be meaningfully an RPG, the game has to be about player choice, I'll return with a more formal definition in a little bit. Edit: Found it: http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php?topic=338.0

I did say what I hated, in the same post I said it completely fails as an RPG, you need to read more carefully. I already explained it in that thread, again you're not paying attention. And Redfield, I don't need anyone to tell me what to do. Having an AP developer say ME is good concerns me, since it could mean we'll see the same kind of thing in AP.

Nice amounts of C&C? Did you play a special C&C edition? And I didn't say it wasn't an RPG, because technically it is, I said it completely fails as an RPG, though it does make an average cinematic shooter.

That's like saying "Because I liked it!" What was good about it? If that's considered good, AP better be 10 times better, because honestly ME completely fails as an RPG, is mostly on rails, is shallow and half-baked, and features some extremely amateurish design.

I wish people would stop being so obsessed with graphics. That's what's ruining games right now.

Name one. It's true, AP does look similar to ME both in concept and graphics. I'm hoping Obsidian knows how to do it right though.

IMO, RPG is about player choice, not combat, predefined character, or companions.

Can you promise a real RPG? *cough* ME *cough* Some of these reviewers are way too obsessed with graphics, and don't even understand what makes a game an RPG. Btw, is the character creation out of the box UE3, or did Obsidian have to make any modifications?

The reporter may just be talking out of his ass, but I always suspected AP is using whatever tools were created for ME, the characters and some of the screens just look too similar, and apparently you have to provide a lot of extra code for UE3 before you can actually build a game on it.

Hopefully the AI is good enough, I won't have to. I suspect that's true on normal difficulty or lower, but may not apply on hard difficulty, especially if AOE spells damage your own party. Also there are things like putting out a fire by invoking a storm, or spreading grease and setting it on fire, and AI may not be smart enough to do that on its own.