J.E. Sawyer

No, in Fallout 2 you could make Stimpaks and Super Stims with similar recipes and Myron. Stimpak: 1 Broc Flower 1 Xander root 1 Empty hypo Super Stimpak: 1 Fruit 1 Nuka-Cola 1 Stimpak The Leather Belt requirement is new for F:NV and we substituted Mutfruit for "Fruit".

I think crafting focused on creating supplemental consumables from commonly-found items and keyed off of skill prereqs = good. I also don't see the point to using crafting for making non-consumables, especially high-end weapons. In an open world game, putting ingredients throughout the environment encourages the player to pay attention to the environment for things other than packs of raiders. Using skills as prereqs allows certain utility skills with infrequent use (e.g. Science) to have more application outside of scripted events. The only major thing I'd change about F:NV's crafting system would be to allow the player to pop up the crafting recipes (to check ingredients) anywhere.

My point was that standards are low, not that there is no overlap between popular success and "elite" approval. It's true that McCarthy sells well and is generally well-regarded by critics. That still doesn't change the fact that the public at large has said with their wallets time and again that the bar set by Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown is perfectly acceptable. Going back to games, while many gamers may prefer higher quality writing, they certainly don't reject a ton of writing that's pretty awful. A lot of developers have a difficult time convincing publishers that writing is worth serious investment. It can be a hard argument to win when there's little evidence to suggest you need strong writing to sell and review well. Can game writing be improved? By leaps and bounds. Could game writing be popular among the hoi polloi and critics alike? Why not? Are gamers really driving us to do this? I don't think so. Even the people who trash game writing apparently still buy the games with the writing they hate.

I don't think you're going to find a universally-liked (or disliked) author, but the point is that the public at large does not have high standards for writing across a variety of media. I am recalling something I recently read, an exchange of insults between Faulkner and Hemingway: Faulkner: "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" EDIT: I also find Eco to be pretty long-winded. There are sections of Foucault's Pendulum that border on the unbearable for me. Baudolino has a similar problem, but was not interesting enough for me to push through.

The comparison was between Dan Brown and Eco, since Da Vinci Code is similar in a lot of ways to Foucault's Pendulum, but with things like "symbology" in place of "semiotics", but if you don't like Eco, feel free to insert any other contemporary author who is a better writer than Dan Brown but sells poorly/is not well-known!

If you're interested in knowing more about Battleheart (assuming you don't immediately dismiss it due to the art style or because it's an iOS game or because you don't like real-time tactical games), this is a pretty comprehensive review. It's not a deep game, but it is well-executed and I think it's certainly worth the $2.99 asking price. http://toucharcade.com/2011/02/07/battleheart-review/ More importantly, I think it demonstrates that it would not be particularly difficult to make an IE-style tactical RPG for iOS.

'Grats on having narrow tastes, I guess.

I was talking about Final Fantasy: Tactics.

Cool. Your loss. It's still one of the best turn-based tactical combat games/"RPGs".

I'd go so far as to say that gamers in general have pretty low standards when it comes to writing quality. Then again, we live in a world where Dan "Symbologist" Brown is a household name and Umberto Eco is, relatively speaking, a fringe figure, so I don't know that gamers are unique in setting the bar low.

If we are to conflate illustration style with game quality (why?), 2D illustration and comically-drawn characters should be indicative of an excellent game.

IWD on an iPad would be awesome. I've been paying a real-time party-based "RPG" on my iPhone called Battleheart. No role-playing whatsoever, but the mechanics feel like a cross between an entirely real-time IE game and Tower Defense. EDIT: There is a video on the GDC vault, but it is premium content.

You are absolutely correct that it adds no new gameplay (unless you count the challenges, which are sort of meta-gameplay). If new weapons/ammo subtypes/mods are not your thing, this is not the DLC for you. Though the core game did have a ton of weapons and ammo types, there were still a lot of base types that had no uniques, or no mods, or ammo types that had few or limited subtypes. This DLC is mostly to expand that set and fill in the gaps, especially if I think the user base has a justifiable criticism of the gap. The new items are also more than just late game weapons/mods/ammo. I tried to cover the spectrum. I didn't want this to be something that's only for level 40 characters with 200,000 caps. With each of the new weapons or mods that we introduce in GRA, I've tried to make the bumps more than the sort of 5% or 10% increase I criticized in my GDC talk (one of the other things I said in my talk is that ME's ammo types were actually differentiated very well, in contrast to individual base weapons). For the unique versions of existing weapons, if I've dramatically increased one set of capabilities, I've tried to leave some hole for the base weapon to continue filling, which is also what I tried to do for the base game. Often this is the ability to take some mod that the unique weapon cannot have (e.g. the Gobi Campaign Rifle cannot be suppressed). I'll have to wait to see if it works as I planned, but my goal was to expand and complement the existing lineup without making core weapons obsolete.

This is reflected by the fact that GRA costs 40% of what any of the previous four DLCs cost.

I'm not an expert on weapon DLCs, but I think this one rates pretty favorably for the money.

It's over two dozen weapons + new ammo subtypes + mods + new combat challenges and achievements.

Actually if I were a super cyber security dude whose arms were already completely artificial, being able to launch/retract blades forward or backwards from my forearms without using my hands would be pretty useful, I'd think.

I am going to address this specifically. I brought this up in my talk as a specific caveat: I am not advocating turning all RPGs into ones that feature real-time core mechanics. Let me restate what I wrote earlier in this thread: if a developer is going to make a game with real-time first person shooting mechanics and is going to ask the player to manually aim at their targets, the developer should make that mechanic feel good. Inflated spread doesn't actually make the game easier for anyone; it makes it harder for everyone. Similarly, if a developer is going to make a game with real-time direct-control melee combat, the developer should make that mechanic feel good. Going "halfsies" ? la Morrowind doesn't make the game easier for anyone. You're still manually moving around the target and manually swinging the sword. The difference is that when you hit -- maybe you actually don't! If you're going to make games like the Gold Box series, IE games, or ToEE, make the visual/audio/text combat feedback clear (which really is the player's window into what's going on for such games) and avoid the pointless reload-fodder of all-or-nothing events like the olde tyme Disintegrate spell I cited earlier. Honestly, though, I don't think many publishers are interested in funding those sorts of games unless they are free-to-play/browser or mobile games. If a publisher wanted us to make one, I'd have no problem doing it. I'd still make the sort of strategic gameplay and mechanical chaos revisions I suggested.

The inverse happened in IWD2: needing to provide magical versions of every weapon at every level of power due to 2nd Ed. AD&Ds/3Es excessively narrow weapon specialization rules. The result: people complaining that there are tons of magical weapons in every dungeon and every store. Here's an even better idea: don't force specialization to narrow a player's choices to literally 1/30th of all of the available weapon types. That way the designers won't have to create three+ magical versions of every weapon and players can specialize with greater confidence that they'll find appropriate equipment. Also, yes a larger problem with IWD was that it was tuned for people familiar with AD&D. I was there for the entire QA process. There were fights that Kihan Pak and I breezed through on the first try that infuriated and completely blocked testers. Let me repeat that: there were professional game testers whose job it was to play AD&D CRPGs who were completely blocked by fights in the original IWD, unable to proceed. In contrast, other testers and some developers (notably Kihan and I) had little to no difficulty with these same encounters. I think this is an odd assumption. I think people play RPGs because they enjoy RPG gameplay, not because they tried to play an FPS or an action game, failed or didn't like it, shrugged their shoulders, and decided to "settle" for RPGs. RPG players may or may not also like/be good at FPSs, action games, or a variety of other genres/gameplay types. This is too general a critique. In my talk, I gave specific examples, like the shooting mechanics in Deus Ex vs. the shooting mechanics in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Given a choice between the shooting mechanics in the original and the shooting mechanics in the new game, I doubt many players -- RPG, FPS, RTS -- would choose the former -- because it feels terrible. If you're going to ask players to aim the reticule themselves, you should probably make it feel GOOD. Are there people out there who prefer the shooting mechanics in ME1 to ME2? Really? Because in ME2, they basically just made the shooting feel more like a "regular" FPS.

Even tabletop players know it's better to have an attack/weapon that does more dice of damage than one with about the same range but fewer dice. For example: a spell that does 6d4 damage vs. one that does 4d6+1. Even though the latter has a slightly higher average (and max), the former will result in a smaller bell curve. An even better example is a 2nd Ed. longsword +1 vs. a broadsword. Ignoring the obvious additional benefits of a longsword +1 being magical and being more likely to hit, 1d8+1 has a broader bell curve than 2d4. Generally speaking, more reliability = better than. In my talk, I didn't advocate completely eliminating randomization, but I did advocate eliminating extreme randomization and randomization that allows for "uncontested" re-rolls via reload. E.g.: lockpicking, speech checks, crafting checks, etc. A good combat example would be the "Old School" Disintegrate spell. Make the save or you're annihilated. It's an all-or-nothing spell. People used it to great degenerate gameplay lengths in old Infinity Engine games to kill powerful enemies on the first round of combat. If the creature made the save, they'd just reload. It's all-or-nothing mechanical chaos. Newer versions of Disintegrate simply do a lot of damage on a failed save, with less damage on a successful save. Still potent, but not live-or-die, and less likely to encourage save scumming in a CRPG environment.

The basics are correct, the specifics a little mixed/muddled -- not that they're important at this stage. But yes, the black hound was a hound of ill-omen (in the lowercase sense) and reminder of guilt. Its physical death at the opening of the story was when its spirit latched onto your character, using him or her as a guide through the world.

Glad you like it.

In many of the SC games, you can take down/avoid enemies in many different orders, and/or use distractions to lure people away in whatever order you want. Hitman: Blood Money is also great for this sort of gameplay.

Random behavior is anathema to good stealth gameplay. It is specifically the reliable limited intelligence of AI that makes the situations feel interesting and rewarding to overcome.

I've never known a person who likes MGS stealth mechanics who also likes SC stealth mechanics, or vice-versa. Personally, I've never liked MGS stealth mechanics and always loved SC stealth mechanics. Both have their own idiosyncratic absurdities, but for me it comes down to which is more enjoyable to use.