Tagaziel

Neither KotOR2 or Fallout: New Vegas have amnesiac protagonists. Thought you might want to know. Also: a role playing game requires you to role play. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT.

Uh, no. You're forgetting that you express your character through the dialogue choices and stat/skill/race choices you make. Are you expecting the developers to hand hold you through the game, providing convenient dialogue options to a handful of pre-set background choices? Or are you going to take a blank slate character, define the background and role play them, ie. make choices and build the character how they'd develop if they were real? Every dialogue choice and character statistic should help to define the character, with the game reacting to them. For example, I created Viraya for my latest playthrough in New Vegas (http://tagaziel.blogspot.de/2012/09/viraya-background.html) and the game is hardly generic. I make choices in accordance with her character and background, with the game supporting and reacting to them. I let Dean live, personally, but Viraya did not. The game supported making this choice and reacted to it. In a broader sense, playing with a female character is subtly, yet distinctively different from playing with a male character. Another example is Planescape: Torment, where the Nameless One is a tabula rasa for the player to create their own character. The previous incarnations are pre-determined, that is true, but the current one is completely blank, with its contents determined by the player's decisions and reactions. Oh hey, putting words in the mouth of others. Who would've thought. You are confusing role playing with play pretend. Don't do that.

Separate fields for name/surname could be interesting, but a bit restrictive. Not all cultures have last names.

So posting feedback is bad and Obsidian should work in a bubble, isolated from any and all outside input? Amusing. Even more amusing is your claim about a "wandering band of Internet protesters." There is no great feminist conspiracy manifesting in rogue bands of protesters plaguing the boards. People are simply growing tired of the male gaze dominant in most games and voice their concerns. Hell, J.E. Sawyer, the Project Leader, voiced his displeasure with the boob plate, rendering your point moot. Obsidian is known for subverting RPG mechanics and cliches. Sometimes they need to be reminded of it, particularly in cases of boobplate-with-tit-tips.

This isn't the developers' problem. Tabula rasa is a slate upon which the player writes himself, creating his own background for the character, personality, quirks and so on and so forth. If the end result is a "walking set of statistics pretending to be a character," then that is the player's failure, resulting from not grasping the concept of roleplaying.

Boobs, boobs everywhere.

I hate to link to Wikipedia, but... I looked it up, trying to figure out if Bayonetta is actually a parody... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonetta#Development I can only add one word: wat.

I recall that Chainsaw Lollipop is purposefully campy and oversexualized, to parody this tendency. Don't quote me on that, though. Cass is a fine example of a female character done right. Reasonably attractive, though hardly extra beautiful, temperamental, but within and with reason, wearing good, practical clothing.

If I read correctly, since women don't play hardcore RPGs as much as men, male gaze is ok? Why should female outfits be all sexy? What purpose does it serve, other than objectifying and sexualizing them? None. It's pure pandering towards the male part of your audience and alienating the female. Canegund's current outfit is plausible, fits the setting and is appropriately feminine without being demeaning.

Atheism can be interesting as a method of fighting the gods. If they are using your world as a field of battle, why not choose to erode their power by robbing them of support, devotion and (assuming that it's relevant) a part of their power?

This is easily reflected by game mechanics. Looted armor is damaged (reflecting physical damage as well as lack of proper fitting) and wearing it incurs penalties or doesn't protect enough. This is fixed by a trip to the blacksmith/field repair (fitting and patching the suit).

http://madartlab.com/2011/12/14/fantasy-armor-and-lady-bits/ I went over the thread and I'm surprised nobody posted this article yet.

Do you really fail to understand that Obsidian would be essentially giving out two games for the price of one? It's very bad business, since nothing would prevent anyone from giving their spare serial out for free to another person.

We are assuming that we are in the context of the thread, don't we?

You can put value on life. Everybody does that, all the time, but denies it. A researcher working in CERN is far more valuable, than a wife beater pissing himself in front of a TV in a drunken stupor. Angela Merkel is worth more than a random warlord in Somalia. There are also historical examples, such as the "Women and children first" policy that contributed to the atrociously high male fatality rate during the Titanic disaster. There are many, many more examples. We speak of equality, but we do not practice it. It's impossible.

Planescape Torment did it right: there was no "optimal" road, being good usually meant lower monetary rewards, while being a scumbag was generally more profitable, but also shut off some quests.

http://www.falloutwiki.com/Fallout_Wiki Help out here, for a start

I would. Worthwhile people should only sacrifice themselves, if the net gain is greater than zero, i.e. sacrificing themselves to save a library holding the collected, priceless knowledge of many generations or a town whose inhabitants and infrastructure is vital to the region or significantly improves people's lives by providing workplaces. Sacrificing important people for a village of replaceable peasants is foolish. I can understand delaying the enemy long enough to allow the people to escape, but paying with life for that? Too steep a price I say. Choices have to be made, together with calculations. We cannot assume that every life has the exact same value in these kinds of situations. A general is not worth the same as a private - why should that be false for civilians? Also, Luckmann, I sincerely hope you're not the same guy I ran into earlier, who claimed that Alfred Rosenberg was a rational theoretician of a rational doctrine called national socialism. That'd make everything you post pretty skewed.

A companion for a village? No. A companion for a nation? Maybe. Sacrifice should not be an arbitrary move forced on another. Greater Good is a decent concept, but ask yourself: is a village full of bumpkins even remotely comparable to a person who accompanies you on your travels and has likely accumulated knowledge and experience sufficient to make a world better?

Thank M'Atra someone mentioned it. TES has been hammering the exact same plot device for years. As for different starting locations, I think it could be solved simply by having all the characters see the event in the same place, but later wake up/travel to/be apprehended/pull a Ciri to a location determined by their race.

I just recalled the following: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/15,000,000_Gold_a_Day It'd be interesting to factor this in, should any Transformation spells be included in the game. Crashing the iron market? Magical economic terrorism? Awesome.

Ten years is worth consideration. Three to five? Why not have Obsidian release it for free IMMEDIATELY? Gaming is not a right. It is a privilege. If you can't pay the full sum, there are sales, discounts, used games. However, suggesting that Obsidian cut off a stream of revenue for a bunch of people feeling entitled to games is, well, asinine. Particularly when you consider that sales for good games (that aren't overmarketed blockbusters tailor made for maximizing day one sales, e.g. Call of Duty) stretch over a longer period of time.

The simple requirement of having free hands will fix that. Not much you can do with bare fists against, say, a wyvern.

Wizardry 8 included an interesting take on spells - in addition to the standard spell point pool, it also included power levels, even for high end spells. It was an interesting alternative to memorization. Personally, I'm in the mana/health camp. I fell it simply flows better and doesn't penalize low level wizards as much as memorization does. I also think we are working a bit from the ass end, mixing lore and gameplay. A good gameplay system from magic should be created, before building up lore to explain it. Magic resources aside, what about limitations for mages? I always found the arbitrary "mages can't wear armour" rule kind of absurd, as it has no real rational explanation. How about removing limits, but tying failure possibilites to equipment? Eg. you wouldn't want to cast lighting wearing plate armour, or flame-based spells wearing highly flammable robes.

http://lparchive.org/Knights-of-the-Old-Republic-II/ Here's a damn good Let's Play. It's absolutely brilliant and includes cut content!