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Wrath of Dagon

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Everything posted by Wrath of Dagon

  1. Exactly, gameplay mechanics all work together. As far as stealth, what about the guy who doesn't want to sneak and wants to go in with guns blazing? Giving him the same amout of ammo as the stealth guy would be limiting player choice. Different character builds should be able to account for stealth vs combat preferences. Also Invisible War had the opposite of inifinite ammo, it actually doled out the ammo fairly sparsely. Games with dedicated ammo don't know which gun you prefer, so they give you lots of everything, with the result being that you're never in any real danger of running out of ammo, at most you might have to go to your second favorite gun.
  2. I don't think srounging for ammo is such a fun game mechanic that it has to be in every game, especially an RPG, which already gives you lots of things to do. So long as you have to reload, you'll have to take aimed shots instead of spraying everything with bullets, which is the main function of limited ammo. I have to say I didn't miss limited ammo in Mass Effect at all, in fact it was nice to be able to use the sniper rifle whenever the opportunity arose, and not have to worry about running out of ammo. Ultimately limited ammo is just another thing which needs to be balanced with everything else in the game, and most games solve the problem by giving you too much, to the point you're never really in danger of running out anyway.
  3. DCotE's story is actually on par with the source material; characters and situations are similar to ones we find in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. I'm talking about how the story is told through gameplay, not just the story itself. You can say you have the feeling of being there in many games, the problem is most of them are lousy at telling a good story. My point about DCotE was that it did a wonderful job of not only putting you into the shoes of the protagonist, but telling the story through the protagonist's experience; in other words combining the best features of books and games, hence my reference to a book come to life, there aren't many games you can say the same about. Loss of sanity effects I thought worked extremely well at making you feel like you are the protagonist and creating a tense and dangerous atmosphere.
  4. I'm not saying Lovecraft's writing is bad, in fact I started reading him after I played the game, then lost the book and just bought a new one, I'm just saying I found the game to be a more powerful experience. For example, in the escape from the hotel, it really feels like you're trying to escape, you're in danger yourself, you're not just reading about someone else's experience, although that can be gripping too. When you're firing the cannon at Dagon, it really feels like you're there, the game is so imaginative and well made. In other words, the game felt like a book come to life, with me as the protagonist, what can be cooler than that!?
  5. Why, what do you find so great about the source material?
  6. I'd rather they concentrate more on gameplay than graphics. I think graphics will be good enough, and art design is more important than the technical quality.
  7. Even adding some lines which lead to the same outcome would add to the illusion that you have more choice. Also why not implement it so that you have variable number of real choices, sometimes 2, sometime 4, depending on the situation? Anyway, I don't think it's a huge deal and we'll have to see how it actually works. As far as a voiced PC, if you can see and hear you character speak, to me it creates another character I can relate to. With a silent PC I just have a feeling I'm playing as myself. Nothing necessarily wrong with either one, they both have their advantages and disadvantages, overall I prefer a voiced PC though.
  8. It's rare for the dialog system to really support nuanced responses. Usually similar responses just lead down the same path in the dialog tree. Also you usually only get a good and a bad option, with sometimes a neutral, so this won't be much different. I agree though it would be nice to have a variable number of options, instead of always having three, that will start feeling a bit artificial.
  9. I don't see why, depending on how a conversation is going, you might want to change your stance. Like if you see your threats are working, you may want to back off a little, or if your professionalism isn't working, it may be time to switch to threats. Also if you feel it makes more sense to keep the same stance, you can do that too. They said it's going to be similar to solving a puzzle, so that actually might work pretty great, the gameplay might be really conversation focused for once.
  10. Really? Of all the things that I think video games offer, "more powerful" storytelling is not one of them. A video game will never hold a candle to my professor telling me stories of his time in the Vietnam War. Or my father telling me how he met my mother. Oral storytelling, to me, will always be far more "powerful" than video games will ever be. Play Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, it tells a story better than it's source material (don't get the PC version, it's buggy and there's no patch), play the Shalebridge Cradle level of Thief: Deadly Shadows, then tell me the story telling is not powerful. The problem is very few game developers have learned to tell a story through an interactive medium, and because of the crude tastes of most of the public it doesn't usually pay anyway. Adventure games can pace the story quite well, in RPG's it's more difficult, but there are other advantages. Obviously movies didn't replace books, and games won't replace books and movies, but each medium offers something unique from others, and each can be incredibly powerful in the right hands. Btw, I didn't mean that the best game story will necessarily be more powerful than the best book (it's apples and oranges anyway), but for certain type of story telling video games offer advantages other media can't match.
  11. Patrick, you just restored my faith in Obsidian. Those so-called journalists really need to be more careful about phrasing things. (Walks off whistling a happy tune.)
  12. Video game stories can be more powerful than any other media, because the player becomes the protagonist in his own story. Unfortunately most developers still see stories as a way to justify the gameplay, instead of the primary goal of the game. When they do claim to give primacy to the story, they seem to think that telling the story means passively watching cutscenes in between all the shooting.
  13. That's because you need both. The same words can have different meaning depending on the tone, so the dialogue wheel is an attempt to convey both the tone and the content. Unfortunately often ME summaries were an attempt at either humor or at surprising the player with what the PC would actually say. Not necessarily a bad idea in general, but it sucked for roleplaying.
  14. I think it's much worse than that, this apparently has a massive dialog system which you're barely allowed to participate in. Those other games were adventure games, you couldn't make any decisions related to the narrative. DX is also different, in that you only got to choose when there was an actual decision to be made, but you knew exactly what you were going to say. ME I didn't think worked too bad, the only issues were the summaries could've been a lot more precise, and always having exactly 3 choices instead of a range got annoying.
  15. This certainly makes it sound like there's not even a summary: If that's not the case, somebody please verify, because this game has just gone from my "most wanted" to "probably won't bother".
  16. Is anyone else horrified at the dialog system? You don't even get a summary of what you're going to say, all you can choose is the stance!? That's just a step away from the game randomly choosing responses for you!
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