[Project Eternity needs to be tactical: so umm none of the following?]

I don't want to turn this thread into... another dragon age thread and I can certainly agree BG/BG2, after a point do become, brainless slaughter fest, DA:O is just way too clunky for me. From the camera, to character movement speed and turn rate, to the fact most fights are ambushes or near ambushes (enemies go hostile only a few feet from your party)... most of the tactics in DA:O revolves around you kiting enemies, spamming AOEs or disabling them to death with CC, all of the difficulty stemming from the fact harder difficulties just double an entire enemy group's life pool. Certainly, a few fights, namely the Broodmother, can be a little tactical, and it's certainly a huge step up from DA2... and certainly, there aren't too many tactical RPGs with similar enough combat to compare, but both BG2 and DA:O could have done their tactics a lot, lot better. It's just, DA:O's flaws stand out far more due to the level design/camera. BG2's flaws are mostly related to party balance... which is a pretty tricky thing for very late game in an RPG.

[What are you playing now?]

So, at what point do people have to start using the spoiler tags?

 

I honestly don't know and although I do try to tag things I think are actual spoilers (Dumbledore dies, Spike dies, etc.), certain things to me are just... a given. If you're playing a popular game or reading a popular book, don't use the internet for a week. Those two characters dying TWD is very old news at this point (their deaths were also practically telegraphed a mile away), I may as well spoiler tag all my posts from now on? I mean, I could tell everyone how Planescape Torment ends, and lots of people pick up that game for the first time every day. Sorry, I guess I've never understood the point of spoiler tags - I always click on them even if I don't know the spoiler. People hiding parts of their posts looks ugly too

[Piracy and DRM]

IP fishing at popular torrents might still have some success though, a lot of pirates are kids I think and don't really bother with stealth. At least until all those filehosting sites that went down with megaupload are back...

 

You cannot actually disguise your identity while using a torrent. The only option is to use a VPN to access it, which costs money. Pirates don't want to spend money, so they obviously are not going to purchase a VPN to pirate "safely". (I suppose one other option would be to use TOR, but you'd get like 1 kb/sec download rate, if that -- have fun)

 

It would be trivial to get everyone's IPs from a public or even private tracker. If a company wished to, they could try to sue all these people. But they would have to prove, case by case, that the IP address used to download something illegally

 

1) was actually owned by the peroson accused (someone can steal your ip, like if they have a laptop outside your house and catch a wifi signal or something)

2) was actually doing it deliberately

3) does not own the product they were pirating (it's not pirating if they already own the product, they're entitled to a backup copy by law)

 

And you must prove all these things to a juror who is likely to be close to ignorant about the internet, torrents, viruses, IPs, identity, etc. it takes an expert to determine these things; reasonable doubt is not hard to prove in these cases, that it was really deliberate piracy. This is why people pirate, because they know that it would be expensive to be prosecuted by these companies (who just lose more money by going to court) and they know these standards are not enforcable by most legal systems.

 

Taking people to court "as an example" will not stop people from pirating either, because such people always believe, "it won't happen to me". So taking these people to court rarely renders money (they don't have enough you can sue for to make up for the damages of going to court in the first place) and it's not going to curb the ever-growing popular opinion that media is "free to share".

[Name a single writer whose work you hope most influences the story/tone of P:E]

Moby ****, specifically, not Melville for me then, as Melville's other works aren't quite like MD.

 

It may seem like an odd choice, but I think Moby **** would have an excellent structure for PE's narrative. You have fantasy (whales being more than they are; representing something greater about the soul or humanity) merging with reality and betwixt moments of narrative, you have scientific pieces about whaling or whales - which would make a lot of sense for a game like this. You have moments focused on narrative, but you weave in moments where things go off tangent, a character explaining some complex psuedo-science that the PE world uses to make its muskets work, or rant about why some odd food eaten in some major city is terrible - moments of ordinary story interwoven with facts about the world, given to us by an interested/biased narrator. Basically, info-mercials or academic discussion mixed in with story. Some games already do this, though they do it passively by giving us codexes/books to rifle through, they don't try to integrate it into the narrative in an interesting way.

[What are you playing now?]

Lee is suicidal. Although charging through the horde is a strategy, it has the highest chance of death.

 

He was also pretty much already dead at that point, so it's perhaps why he only had to kill a few zombies instead of a majority of them. Before, they could sense him pretty well, but I guess the infection and his already almost-dead body covered in blood was enough to neutralize most of their interest.

 

TWD was a pretty big disappointment for me.

After they killed Doug/Carley off I realized the developers had no interest in making our choices matter. Will they even use all the choices you made about Clementine for part 2? Will it influence her behavior or choices at all? I seriously doubt that much.

 

TWD has been an immense financial success. For what it is, it's a decent zombie drama, but to call it a game is an overstatement. It barely has any features. At least BioWare lets your choices impact what color ending cinematic you get.

[Name a single writer whose work you hope most influences the story/tone of P:E]

Authors for their ideas? Or authors for their style...?

 

I agree mystery is absolutely necessary for this to be pulled off well. You can't tell a good fantasy story by telling it. You need to show it. And you can't possibly show us everything. So show us what you can and have us infer the rest. Don't treat the audience like they're unable to do this, even if they really can't. Leaving things left unsaid creates a mood unconsciously, even if it's not understood.

 

Video games aren't books, so you can get a ton of mileage out of audiovisuals. VTMB accomplishes more in the sound of a car alarm and its ambient apartment music than I got playing through the tutorial mission of Kingdoms of Amalur.

 

Of course, don't be oblique. Give us detail. You need to give detail to build a world. But don't explain. Show. Make us accept what is being shown.

[Lockpicking Mechanics]

Swinging a sword is not a process. It is an action.

 

Nitpicking this point - you're wrong. Any martial skill is a process. Or at least, you learn any martial art this way.

 

With a kick aimed towards an opponent's knee, you learn the process. Lift leg, extend foot, pull foot back, re-ground leg. If you don't learn this process, you have no form. You're wild, executing what your body believes to be a kick. Marital actions are structured, they are not wild or innate to humans. They are not motions that come naturally.

 

Swinging a sword in the martial sense requires practice. You simply cannot pick up a sword for the first time and swing it correctly, under any martial system I know of. There is form. How you hold the blade, how you maintain your stance, how you strike and where. There is a step by step process you learn for wielding a sword and making a simple strike with it. Every strike is made with this learned process, which is increased in speed until it seems smooth, one motion instead of 10 steps. In time, after much instruction and practice it might become merely an "action" and not a process, but any action can be broken down into a process. Infinitely many times. All things are processes in the world, down to the molecular level and even further down below that level, to who knows how far.

 

As for lock picking, there is no reason to waste development time or a player's time doing a mini-game to open a door or a chest. This isn't an ARPG, this isn't an action game, this isn't an adventure game, this isn't a lock picking simulator. There is no value to adding a barrier to opening doors and chests when there certainly will be one already: a character skill-based check.

 

The only thing is, I would suggest we emulate 'real life' by structuring how lock picking works. Many PnP games have systems like this, but basically, let's say there are 5 levels of the lock picking skill

 

Dunce

Dumb

Bad

Good

Master

 

 

When you find a chest, you get one opportunity to open it with your lock picking skill. Anyone, even anyone without a skill in lockpicking, so long as they have a tool to pick with, can attempt. Dunces can open Master Locks. But, the chance of doing so is very, very low. Master Lock pickers will always suceed to open chests below their mastery level and have a chance to fail against locks greater than or of their level of mastery. If you fail to pick a lock, you can attempt to use a spell to open it once. If you don't have the spell or you fail with that, you can force open the chest. Breaking the chest has a chance to destroy items inside it and requires a character with a large strength pool to open it.

 

Some chests should be open-able with a special key which can be obtained by answering a riddle, killing a special foe, finding it in the dungeon, etc. - point being, no mini-games, but give us many opportunities and strategies to opening locked things, with various levels of consequence and difficulty.

[Project Eternity needs to be tactical: so umm none of the following?]

I'm not advocating for the removal of ambushes, it's just, in DA, you enter a room that half the time locks on you, and entraps you surrounded by a dozen enemies at once. In this small room, with slowly-moving player characters, you literally have one strategy: sit there and take it. That is probably a larger flaw with DA:O and DA2, rather than it being ambushes (in both games, there are a very limited number of strategies available to the player at all) exclusively, but ambushes themselves do not invite much strategy. It's basically gut reaction, "Oh ****. I'm surrounded without any preparation. What will I do?" This can be exciting especially if tension is built up (you know people are chasing/stalking you and are going to eventually ambush you, you just don't know when/where), but it's very cheap and hurts the game when done too often. You have to make ambush-based encounters less difficult by default, because you have limited available strategy. A tactical game where tactics are often limited is silly. Ambushes are like jump scares in horror games - keep them limited.

[Project Eternity needs to be tactical: so umm none of the following?]

Bg2 is very tactical. When you're fighting Ithilids, you know it. You know to open the door, your whole party prepared. You know to expect some chaos thrown at you from those hulks and you know to pull your melee fighters back if they get intelligence drained. Rooms with these foes are often designed so you can close doors and lock Ithilids inside if things get too messy. You also have a lot of room for kiting when you first open the door/enter to a room containing these foes, enough time to react even though these enemies are shrouded behind fog.

 

I've been replaying DA:O and DA2 and I think the reason why THESE rpgs aren't tactical is because most of the fights fall under these conditions:

 

You enter a room. Enemies do not go hostile, you can't do anything to them, until you're smack dab in the middle of them. Foes like bandits or spiders that descend from the ceiling. You basically cannot get your positioning down, you're completely caught with your pants down. This means most strategies involve spamming radial AOE spells and carrying a lot of tanky fighters instead of squishy classes. This also means that classes that focus on debuffs or single target abilities are significantly inferior to classes that have tons of AOE (rogues are pretty darn useless in DA:O for non-boss encounters, you only take them along for treasure chests it feels like).

 

You open a door, monsters come pouring out. It's the same story, there's a barrier. You need to open it before you can fight these monsters. You cannot de-engage these enemies once you open the door. You can't close it in time, even if you could, the enemies still stay hostile and lock you in combat no matter how far away you run. Yesterday, I opened a door in the fade and two mages proceeded to stun lock me death with the combination of freeze-->paralysis-->prison-->freeze. I literally could not do anything because I couldn't even see what was in the next room until I opened the door.

 

You clear a group of enemies, a dozen materialize out of thin air and/or come pouring out from adjacent rooms for another wave. Wave-based encounters are fine, but it's extremely deceptive to at all times not know how many enemies you are fighting. In BG2, this kind of encounter would be terrible, because you wouldn't know when the best time to use a spell or ability would be, due to cooldowns. Should you save it? Should you burn it? Will more enemies come? You really have no idea, and that's okay every once in a while, but this happens way too frequently in the DA series.

 

Every encounter happens in a closed room. You cannot manipulate enemies to fight where you wish them to, easily. This effectively makes making traps utterly worthless.

 

In order to have tactical large-party combat combat work, I think PE designers should endeavor to:

 

Telegraph encounters. Tell me what kinds of enemies I will face. When. Where. How. Why. Give me time to plan a tactical-strategy! If I'm not given the opportunity to, I certainly won't be able to. If you must ambush our party (it's hardly an ambush if it happens 1 out 3 encounters), telegraph it's going to happen so I can plan appropriately. Otherwise, this hurts the game, because I need to tailor my party so that it's adept at dealing with constantly fighting in melee range of foes. This can be as simple as letting us SEE enemies before we can engage them.

 

Let us disengage from most fights. Maybe closing a door seems kind of silly, but I shouldn't have to reload the game from my last save so I can have metaknowledge to deal with encounters. If you're going to hide enemies in rooms or not make them appear until I'm standing in the thick of things, show me this is going to happen and where enemies will appear.

 

Design dungeons to be more than highways. Bridges, pillars, corners, tight corridors - natural cover or areas designed for us to lay traps and lure enemies into them. If the environment consists of square rooms and wide halls, there really isn't much strategic opportunity.

 

Give us choices. Don't make us slog through every room. Lay out dungeons so that we can pick to fight Ithilids or we can pick to fight Beholders. If you make dungeons too linear, then we can't make strategic sacrifices based on our party's aptitude.

 

Give us environmental-context abilities. Doors are one, but traps innate to a dungeon, or drawbridges, or other nick-nacks, give us environmental-specific ways to deal with encounters.

 

Give us ways to boost our party's mobility. Nothing hurts more I notice in DA than being slow. It's very hard to do an about-face, to get people rapidly into positions where they won't die, when everyone moves clunkily and slowly. I don't think kiting will be an issue in this game, but if that is a concern, let speed boosts be expensive or risky to utilize constantly.

 

These suggestions are based more towards the player, but perhaps, monsters should have their own strategic/tactics as well. Do have high enemy variety, but don't let enemy variety sky-rocket right away. Keep enemiy variety low in an area until players are comfortable with how each kind of enemy works, then start expanding.

 

Don't give one enemy too many abilities. How do you know what will be thrown at you? How do you know what to focus on? How will you react to something constantly changing? Give enemies abilities that are diverse, but make them distinct. Ithilids are distinct, hulks are distinct - they have unique abilities, but they have really only two functions (attack/drain intelligence, attack/chaos). Together, they are very lethal, which invites the strategy of peeling them apart. In my earlier example, a single enemy probably shouldn't have freeze, paralysis and a prison spell (unless it's a unique/boss foe), because in large numbers you have very problematic, obnoxious encounters where you cannot do anything.

[Piracy and DRM]

I recall there being one European country that recently legalized a person's right to download music. Or was it Brazil? I forget. But anyway, it doesn't really matter whether something is legal or not, people will try to pursue civil damages for copying copy-righted material.

 

I think people have demonstrated the flaws of the copy-right, how it has been grossly abused by companies, especially in the US, where many things have been extended past the 75 year limit.

 

The fact is that an entire generation now has been raised under a lose idea of "ownership of media". That the idea of "fair use" has been overblown (its definition is fairly nebulous at this point, is parody even sacred anymore?). Companies are seeing this as a "war" that they need to win. Given how other wars (like the ones on drugs) have turned out recently, I can't help but shake my head at the short-sightedness.

 

There are many good reasons to do away with all forms of copy protection. Having most software open-source would certainly be a massive boon for the industry. Hiding and building walls is hurting the creative spirit... the same spirit that brought about this technological revolution. But of course, with trust, there is a price. And we can't really trust everyone to have goodwill. There's no easy solution, but the best solution is to understand this much: When people covet beauty, ugliness arises. When people covet what they cannot have, piracy arises. When people can just have what they want, they might be more willing to support those who brought them the things they liked. They might see creators as allies and not capitalistic enemies. There might be grossly more harmony in just giving in, than trying to dominate. Of course, this could backfire, though under what circumstances I'm not sure.

 

Indie game developers would do well to know they exist partially out of good will. Destroying that will probably all they need to do to bring about their own ruin.

[The Magical Realms of T]

Where will it end up? I dunno. Their stretch goals will decide that. Anything involving the licensing of celebs to have their likeness in the game or extra content would be great. Someone even suggested using some of the money to persuade Barkley to play the first game...? Not sure if that's such a grand idea but it's pretty funny to think about.

[Piracy and DRM]

DRM doesn't stop pirating. It just incentivizes it. End of story.

 

Piracy rate is <10% and the people who pirate will continue to do so. Just don't even think about those people, you simply cannot punish 90% of your consumer base to try and lock down 10%. You simply can't anyway, because pirate groups can break any DRM you make, no matter how ingenious you think it is.

 

It's also nonsense to have pirates IN your consumer base. They aren't purchasing your product, just ignore them. As far as you're concerned, 100% of people who play your game pay for it. There's no "theft" or "missing profit" because chances are, pirates weren't going to give you money even if they couldn't pirate it. Why do publishers think they are clairvoyant and know that because 10,000 people pirated their game, it means they lost 10,000 sales? It doesn't mean that at all.

 

No one can bankrupt activision by pirating the latest Call of Duty game 1,000,000,000 times. There is no money lost when someone pirates a game. The loss of revenue is only a potential one. A "what if".

[Piracy]

According to Ubisoft, piracy rate of PC is 95%. Given Skyrim's sales numbers for the PC, this would mean something like 50-60 million people pirated Skyrim, twice as many people who play CoD.

 

Such exaggerations are enough to make you shake your head at anyone who uses piracy as an excuse not to do something.

[The Magical Realms of T]

 

I backed with $10. I expect you guys to do the same

[Anti-Dragon Age 2?]

I do have an introduction which explains my tone. I am not trying to be "arrogant" however, there is no "accepted" or "universal" theory to most things, let alone art (if video games are an art, if game design is an art), however, we can still be critical of them and present arguments. If the arguments I present in my video are not sufficient to back up the theory behind them, that will be for the viewer to decide. Video games in their current state are still developing and it should not be wild at this point for people to put forth their ideas as how they "should be" developed. Consensus can only be reached after a sufficient amount of structured debate and analysis, of which I have seen little, at least for public consumption. Perhaps there is literature I'm not aware of, where people in the industry have analyzed Dragon Age 2 for its faults, but I believe I will be the first to be putting out in plain view all of its faults for examination. I will be accompanying my findings with my own "opinion" but I think there is a very large disconnect when the word "opinion" gets mentioned.

 

Everything is everyone's opinion. Facts, I feel, are hard to pin down. Yes, there is a Queen of England. We can go see her today if we wish, we might call this a fact, but to what degree is it a fact? What if she's really NOT the queen of england, but some kind of impostor, who's been fooling us all along? As silly as it sounds, there is such a thing as 'unreasonable disbelief', but the degree at which we say something is sufficiently reasonable or not, can vary.

 

My opinion is not simply the statement, "dragon age 2 is a bad game" - my opinion is a long, drawn out argument that uses evidence from dragon age 2 as well as evidence from DA:O (which I have also recently replayed), VTMB, BG2 and other RPGs/cRPGs. The point is to compare DA2 to these other games, point out what THEY do well and try to explain them using my analysis. Then it's to compare that understanding to DA2 and explain WHY things don't work.

 

Perhaps I should structure what I posted above better, by analyzing the openings for VTMB, BG2 and other games. Though, I'd like to keep the running time of this analysis under one hour, as it is it's going to be tough keeping this thing at a reasonable length for people to consume and I do want to be very specific and point out some of the flaws in DA2 by example. Urgh. In any case, DA2's opening scenes are integral that I examine in depth, I'm not sure I can do the same for every good RPG ever. If I only try to compare DA2 with one other game, I will simply be accused of wishing DA2 were that game, which isn't the case at all. I want DA2 to be its own game, but I want it to be GOOD AND BE ITS OWN GAME.

[Baldur's Gate enhanced edition]

Hmm, they look better than I remember. I think they would be passable... though maybe not. I mean, this is for tablets right? Tablets have pretty big resolutions, if they couldn't upscale those movies then they'd look horrible stretched on a screen that large.

[Baldur's Gate enhanced edition]

Go play BG1, the movies, while great for their time, are ugly as sin to look at today. Your average consumer, ignorant of how old BG1 really is, would likely be thrown off by their bad quality. They might consider the work "unprofessional" or shoddy, had they stayed in. They could even disturb 'immersion' I guess.

 

I think MOST of us end up skipping these movies after a certain point, so I suspect they are not all that important. But... well, it's hard to say one way or the other whether their removal was justified. It does seem like nitpicking though.

 

How is the EE besides that?

[Anti-Dragon Age 2?]

First draft of a (small) part of my video analysis. I'd love to get some feedback on it, even if it's only trolls telling me it's just my opinion / it's bad. Right now it's mostly words, kind of messily broken up, but the main point that I'll be delivering is in there, the video evidence for my points in my possession, though obviously not displayed here.

 

The tone here is very informal, with too many air-headed likes/i means, but that and the grammar, and probably most of the informal stuff, will be cut out, though a some of it will linger, just so I can hopefully entertain while still being analytic. Polished youtube poop still has to be poop.

 

My video analysis is divided into two major parts, part one is about the roleplaying aspect of the game - namely why the world of DA2 doesn't work. My second part focuses entirely on the "gameplay" - the itemization, the classes, the spells, character advancement, strategy and tactics, boss fights, enemy variety, and more.

 

 

 

 

People have misanalyzed RPGs. I don't blame them. But their understanding is critically flawed.

 

RPGs are not about characters, story, or choices. That is not their central focus. Those are prominent elements in them, yes, but an RPG is not merely a choose your own adventure game.

 

Roleplaying games are about worlds.

 

In order for a world to be plausible, which is necessary to have a good world for an RPG*

(add some note here that there may be an "implausible" RPG-world, something zany or wacky, but ultimately it is still consistent unto itself, even if it may seem 'un-possible' to the reader)

 

we need to accept the universe being shown to us. A good RPG presents its world in the same way a good orator presents a hypothetical question. A scifi, fantasy, western, dramatic, romantic, and/or gothic otherly world is a hypothetical question. "What if the world were really flat? And it were populated by elves. And humans were in this setting too and they built cities there and had to deal with water flying out into some strange abyss." That there is a fantasy world that an RPG would take us to AND let US explore.

 

But in order for this to work, the audience first needs to accept the hypothetical question. We must admit there must be something familiar to the audience to pull them in. Although we can disorient the audience with things that are completely bizarre, human imagination will only go so far. We can fatigue our audience. To create utter nonsense with language, symbols and images - birdsong - is so disorienting, that the audience will simply reject an implausible world. Perhaps this is narrow-minded of them, but our imagination is vast and powerful... Powerful things need restraint, or they will bring ruin to themselves. We must refine our thoughts in order to accomplish anything.

 

Dragon Age 2 does not present a plausible world. It does not present us with something refined that we can immerse ourselves in.

 

First, we must visit all the physical locations of Kirkwall - the places the audience sees with their eyes, hears with their ears and walks across with their virtual feet. I will demonstrate that each location of Kirkwall and its surronuding landscape is implausible to the audience.

 

Tutorial World - [obligatory batman sound segway] Holy mother of environmental artist interns batman! Who in god's name made this map? BioWare! I understand... that you were rushed, but this is...

the tutorial level. The stuff you must have shown at E3? I vaguely, maybe recall seeing a trailer with this art and I was just confused.

 

We're standing in black, blasted earth. Like... I mean, we're in the blasted lands, or some kind of mortal hell. What happened here? Did a fire scorch all the plant life in a fifty mile radius? Is there a volcano near by? What mineral is this? Basalt? I don't think we're on an island and I don't see a volcano anywhere. I mean I know it's cliche, but a little molten lava here or acrid fumes would do so much for this landscape, it'd at least give it some context. The sky is kind of dark... maybe there was an eruption somehwere.

 

So we're surrounded by this black earth for no apparent reason and we came through this narrow valley with our family. We're treated to a sight out by a ledge after killing some darkspawn and we see ... a bridge. I have no idea what this bridge is, especially if I'm a newcomer to the dragon age universe, and if I look into the distance all I can see is ground shaped by an artist's 'raise texture' tool.

 

See, this is so jarring for me as a player because I grew up on Starcraft and Warcraft 3's world editors. Amazing programs they are still today, I'm sure I'm not the only one who grew up trying to make beautiful landscapes by randomly rubbing the cursor at dirt. I'm always so amazed by environmental artists and what they can do for some video games, but this is by far one of the most amateurish landscapes I've ever seen in a triple A video game. If the draw distance were greater, and this strange white myst weren't obfuscating the horizon, I wonder what kind of landscape lies beyond that bridge, what we could see. Could we see darkspawn ravaging the country side? Could we see the shadows of cities burning? It would not be realistic at all I think, to see clearly burning in the distance, as perhaps most settlements are far from here, but it would be an effective image for the new player, to show them the PLAUSIBILITY of this world, that hypothetically, this is a fantasy world where an quasi-undead or ancient evil is destroying civilization.

 

It's not like BioWare didn't have opportunities here. Ferelden is not a bad fantasy setting, at least from what we saw with DA:O. What potential this location had, to show us the true extent of the destruction afflicting this fantasy land... to see it so squandered is truly baffling. I suspect that is the kind of feeling most players have during this area, baffling. Kind of like an empty wonderment and dizzy excitement.

 

But instead we aren't really given any question here. We see black, smothered dirt beneath our feet. Which by the way, looks awful. I'm running a decent computer here with most of my settings on high, and although this youtube video may not give justice to what I'm saying, do believe me when I say the landscape here is very bland, muddy, smooth, shapeless, and difficult to reconcile with. The environment does not seem plausible to me. ESPECIALLY since we're introduced to it after a moment of hyperbole from our narrator.

 

I think it is absolutely necessary to return to this element later on, but for the discussion of plausibilty right now, our dwarven narrator is really hurting the game here. I know most people thought Varric was the best part of Dragon Age 2, but in the beginning, where you have a real tutorial, where you're given skills

and fight dark spawn randomly, when your sister's breasts are magically enhanced and you're killing hundreds of darkspawn effortlessly... and it's kind of like my japanese animes and Varric is revealed to just be making all this up for his audience, some french dominatrix, you might immediately wonder here if this setting is real at all.

 

It is certainly very dreamlike, though I do not believe this is BioWare's intention at all, this landscape is so vague and not well grounded, that with Varric's earlier behavior, the audience must begin to question what the hell is going on here. What is the question? What is the world we are in? What is this universe? Inside a dwarf's mind? Does it really exist? What makes it different from our own world?

 

These questions only become more compounded on later in the story - because for instance, Varric was never here with us in this scene. How could he ever properly narrate it? This cannot be his recollection because he was never here. If we are not witnessing his testimony coming to life, then is he repeating the beginning of the story as Hawke told it to him? Or is he just entirely making this all up?

 

Although an untrustworthy narrator is a lovely device for a story, introducing many interesting elements and possibilities, here it counfounds the genre. Action games are like action movies. Fantasy games are like fantasy movies. BioWare's previous owners are said to have agreed to work with EA, to shoot for larger budgets for their games, because they wanted to make them more cinematic. BioWare's ethic was to make their critical cRPG, Baldur's Gate, and turn it into Lord of the Rings, except... as you know, a video game. However, what Tolkien has taught us, and finally what literary scholars have begun to agree upon, is that fantasy worlds require what is known as, a "suspension of disbelief" - a concept Tolkien expounded upon with Lord of the Rings, a concept he wanted to expand into the concept of virtual, living world.

 

Dragon Age 2 is only doing a disservice to itself, by using an unreliable narrator here. The goal is to make a plausible world, but they've only muddied this. I don't even know how real this location is, or if anything here really happened at all. This is so espcially jarring if you played the previous game. Flemeth looks nothing like she did in the previous game. The timeline is also screwed up - I guess this is all happening during the previous game? While the warden was still on his or her quest? Or maybe it was before it? Before when the battle was lost at Ostagar? But then again, aren't we fleeing from Lothering as it is destroyed? Lothering isn't destroyed until after Ostagar is, in the previous game. Suffice to say, we have no temporal or logistical idea of where we are, what we're doing, or where we're even going. We're just blindly running away from these monsters with no apparent motive, plan, or idea.

 

And then we meet Aveline and her husband. I don't understand this, why did a Templar in his uniform break away from the rest of his brothers? Were they slaughtered? Is he just a coward? I guess that's more a consistency problem, I mean, I would be under the impression that Aveline, knowing her character later in the game, would be a soldier trying to fight the Darkspawn, not a defenseless civillain fleeing for her life like a coward. But we don't know these characters yet and we don't know what any of this means if we're a new player. So I'll just carry onto my next gripe.

 

We agree to help Flemeth with this vague task that she refuses to explain. And because of the dialogue wheel we can't really interrogate her about what all this means. Why I as the player cannot simply refuse her help and find my own way down the stupid mountain at my own peril is a minor one of plausibility - and I guess - this is important to note - that people believe choices to be so integral to RPGs because if we DO NOT have choice, the world feels less alive to us. We begin to ask ourselves, "Why must I kill the evil demon king? Can't we just do X, Y, or Z?" If an RPG allows you try X, Y and Z, to succeed or to fail based on these choices, the world seems more alive, because we can interact with it, we can explore this hypothetical question. We can believe that the situation, the world, its setting and characters are plausible. We have to kill the demon king beacuse we the player cannot find any other way, we resign ourselves to doing it just like some narrative hero would.

 

So we accept Flemeth's help regardless, oh and wait, I'm forgetting the most important part here, the thing that is just so jarring here --

 

We are humans. All of us, well, except maybe Flemeth, but all of us are seemingly human by our appearence, speech, and mannerisms. Yet, no matter what you do here, Carver or Bethany bite the dust.

 

Hawke seems to have absolutely no emotional attachment to this sibling, because all of your choices are immediately about moving forward, stoicly looking at a corpse, or being angry at Mother and saying, "Get a grip, he/she's dead, who cares, let's get out of here."

 

Hold on, how am I supposed to roleplay here? My sister or brother just died, we've been travelling for days, with who knows how much rest or food. I'm probably exhausted and confused and my sibling has died and I'm just supposed to act like some dettached space marine here? What? This is so inhuman and bizarre that I as the audience cannot reconclie any of this. This is even more confusing... Varric is telling the story, so why can't I feel his influence all that much on it? This part of the story SHOULD be vague because Varric is the one telling it and not Hawke, but I would expect Varric to interject his feelings of family in here, which are thoroughly explained through the entire game, but instead... we just have stoicism. It is just absolutely confusing. And even if Varric is transferring his emotions here into the story, how am I supposed to roleplay? This is supposed to be MY story not Varric's, or at least, that's the impression I got, by playing RPGs for the last 20 years of my life. That if a story isn't mine, it's part of a larger group's - but I am at least a part of that group. In a good RPG I do not mind at all if I am simply a pawn in another's story, but my story is still mine within that larger gestalt. Here, I'm like a puppet for Varric's thoughts and emotions, if that is even true. In a worst case scenario, I'm playing a role BioWare has forced me into, or I'm trying to roleplay as Varric's imagination. After giving me the freedom of moving my avatar about, after having nothing about my character previously established, I am just supposed to accept that I have no feelings for my siblings.

 

And then Aveline's husband is revealed to be tainted. We have to give him mercy and kill him. I can do it or Aveline can. For this playthrough, I kill him. Aveline is somber, but also, awkwardly stiff. Her display is... I mean I know this isn't a soap opera, but you just can't treat human life this way. We expect humans to care about other humans. If they DO NOT then this is something that is established in our fantasy world. The hypothetical question for Dragon Age 2 is, "Suppose there is an ancient evil destroying civilization AND humans do not feel emotion for their loved ones." I would expect Aveline to be more broken up and I would expect Aveline to not "get over it" over the course a boat ride, continuing to linger by my side. Why does she stay with us after I basically murder her husband? A normal person SHOULD feel some amount of anger or dislike for the executioner of your loved one. I would expect her to have difficulty reconciling her feelings of loss with my noble action of ending her husband's life. I don't believe Aveline's emotions, her reactions, are real. And yes, I know she's supposed to be a "stoic, tough soldier" - but come on, this does NOT seem real.

 

See, we can have an "unrealistic" story. I am not clamoring here for some kind of fixed, static "real world" logic in my video games, I just want a plausible world. It is plausible that we can have an "unrealistic" world, but we have to be shown and/or told of this. What I'm talking about is ver...ver...versilimilitude. Our world is NOT like their world in the ways the hypothetical, socratic question specificates. If we were orcs or trolls and didn't care about our family members dying on us, I'd as a viewer chock this up to trolls or orcs being unattached to family. But since these are humans, we as an audience have an expectation that needs to be satisfied in an appropriate manner.

 

This scenario IS NOT PLAUSIBLE. This would not happen. Maybe it could, maybe, but I as the viewer do not accept it. I mean, anything can happen and I acknoweldge there are people out there who hate their family and wouldn't care if they all died in a fire. There are psychopaths that kill their partners without reluctance. But these characters are not presented to be like this in the beginning of the story and nowhere else throughout. Aveline is demonstrated to be caring, awkward, fierce, loyal, loving and strong. Hawke can be... a selfish authoritarian, a righteous hero or some kind of sarcastic anti-hero, but nowhere even in all three of these possible Hawkes, is a lack of concern for family ever shown. I played this game as a "red" Hawke, picking mostly aggressive options and towards the end of the game, he demonstrates some attachment to his mother.

 

As a result, I reject this world, it is not real. It is fake. An illusion. It could not happen, ever. This is someone's stream of consciousness, or maybe a dream, but it's not a world I can be immersed in, because it has yet to feel real. This entire tutorial zone should have just been cut from the game, it only serves to completely break its beginning, getting started all on the wrong foot. If Hawke and Aveline are psychotic then this should be established immediately to the audience. But since their characters are apparently straight forward, it's hard to reconcile their inconsistent behavior.

 

Okay, so I've laboriously explained why this scene is so messed up. But what happens next in the blink of an eye is what's really jarring.

 

Firstly, Flemeth will not escort us the whole way. They even joke of this, that 'we cannot ride on the backs of a dragon. We'll be seen!' Which I suppose could be a bad thing. That is even assuming we would want to risk flying several thousand miles above the ground on what may as well be a wild animal.

 

So how do we get to the next scene? We never actually find out. Did we teleport? Worm holes? Did she eat us and carry us across the border?

 

The next scene has us on a boat. Where did we get the tickets, the faire, the money for this boat? Surely the number of refugees leaving Ferelden must have skyrocketed the price? Where was this dock? Was it not overrun by dark spawn? How were we so quickly able to acquire passage? Did any time pass? What happened during the moments leading up to this scene? These questions may not enter your audience's mind directly, but their unconscious can FEEL this disconnect. It's very jarring to go from a vague black landscape to the ocean, since we didn't even see it in the distance back there. This is what I'd say is BioWare trying to pull a fast one on us. They didn't want to go through the trouble of actually making us go to a dock and interact and all that, so they just threw us onto a boat and hoped we wouldn't notice it, that we'd just buy it - that Flemeth would entrust us with some phylactery of hers and that the boat wouldn't capsize and doom her to the bottom of some sea.

 

But I digress. What hurts me the most here is that we're on a boat. This scene is very interesting and suggests so much possibility. Boats are amazing literary devices. Many games have used them in the past. Even Baldur's Gate 2 had us using boat, acquiring a faire to take us to a crucial place. Boats can have slaves, captains, workers, all walks of life really, on them. It would have been THE perfect location for us to acquire new party members, of interesting, fascinating ferelden origin, before we get stuck in the Free Marches the rest of the game. It also would have provided necessary CONVEYANCE for the theme of leaving ones home and starting a new, we could have had a scene standing out by the bow of the ship, watching as Ferelden fades away into obscurity. very little would be a better mechanism for sending the audience on a journey to a new world, than using a boat.

 

But instead this entire thing is glossed over. Instead, we get blacktar level. It could have been cheaper just to give us a boat-based level, you know? Surround us with water and make us fight giant squids or something.

 

But anyway, plausibility. Boat journeys, especially long ones, are tough as hell. But apparently everything went fine and we're here in Kirkwall now! See, this is incredibly jarring. We are now on the docks of a city. How plausible is this location? Are we still dreaming? Have we finally set foot onto solid soil?

 

Unfortunately, I do not think so. We haven't met varric yet, and we won't even until another supposed year of time. The meaning behind all these scenes is mostly lost, because it's hard to believe it's happening.

 

The main problem I have with this landing dock though, is the lack of communication. As punk youtuber RazorFist points out in his reaction video to Dragon Age 2 a while ago, "The best way to be understand a world is to speak to its people." And here, we are robbed of this. I don't mind set-dressing NPCs in my video games, many great games have done this to give players the illusion of size and liveliness.

 

But here, we should have gotten a welcome party of some kind, a few NPCs to ground us in this new place. But instead, we talk to a man who says we can't come here. So we walk right on past him anyway and we meet another man who says we can't stay here go away. And then we learn we can bribe our way to stay in the city and that we have an uncle here who we just wait around for, for three days, who can arrange us with some dirty businessmen to hook us up with enough money to bribe our way into the city.

 

I don't think I need to go into any detail here. The plausibility of this world is still not well established. We just got off this boat, somehow had enough food and money to just sit around waiting for three days for some supposed uncle to find us, and we somehow able to be recruited by some criminal organization just like that. Then, we are treated to a one year time skip. A timeskip, by the way, which was JUST as long as that 3 day skip we just endured. So, as far as we're concerned right now, time has no meaning. Three days may as well be three years. This is just so upsetting. Playing this game will make you nauseous.

 

As if to make things worse, everything that JUST happened is now mostly meaningless because this one year time skip has completely disconnected whatever tethering we had to with the world. The plausibility of this world now comes into greater question, and really, perhaps this whole time, I should really be explaining what plausibility really is - I mean, ALL things are plausible. Human imagination is immensely powerful. But a fictional world is ONLY plausible when we believe it to be so. Our belief in this world, that we believe it is possible to exist in theory, stems from our integration with it. We are not integrated into this world at all. There are no literary, physical, audiovisual cues to get us to believe this world exists. Everything done so far as done the opposite in-fact, we have established nothing, presented conflicting information and otherworldly human behavior and locale, and are now finally informing our audience that they know about this world already, they've been living in it for one year now even though our audience really hasn't.

 

And apparently, we know all the merchants in the square because we shop from them every day and nobody gives us an appraising look because, well, they've seen us around town! They don't even have to introduce themselves to us, because we know them already, obviously.

 

How jarring would it be, for you to wake up in a town you've never been to, to be greeted by men on the street and to dash into a diner only to be asked if you'd like your usual. You would certainly feel mad, wouldn't you? Well here you should feel no different. This world cannot be real, in your eyes. I don't care how much you like Dragon Age 2 or thought it was a pretty good game, there is no way you were immersed at this point in the game. If nothing else, this entire beginning sequence is quite possibly one of the worst executed in all of modern video game history.

 

[how to make your rpg work]

Dragon Age 2.

 

"blah blah blah"

 

Why didn't you post this on Bioware's forums? It's a rant obviously aimed at Bioware and Obsidian wasn't involved with Dragon Age or 2 in any way (unless there's some massive CRPG destruction conspiracy going on behind the scenes.) I don't know where you might have gotten the idea that PE would be taking its cues from Dragon Age 2, anyway.

 

Because BioWare social network is North Korea of the internet.

 

end of line

 

 

Another DA2 rant. Yawn.

 

It's not a rant about DA2. It mentions about what it did wrong and I learned from what it did wrong.

 

What I've demonstrated applies to ALL RPGs, or should, if they are to be called RPGs. RPGs are ABOUT their worlds more than anything else, DA2's world was not convincing - it wasn't plausible, consistent or conveyed.

 

What DA2 does wrong is very important. But it's not my focus of this topic - it's to remind Obsidian to focus on conveying the images, the sounds, the feelings of PE's world - as well as a logical consistency to its world and people. Perhaps I'm preaching to the choir, but eh, why not. It's the internet. Perhaps I want validation, or my points disproved, which I don't see you doing.

Do you know how utterly arrogant you sound? It doesn't lend your message any credence. Basically you read like a troll.

 

As with any game, DA2 had its good points and its weaknesses. I personally found it entertaining enough to play it to nearly the end. It has some design elements that remain appealing to me. What you need to do is accept the fact that it is mainly an action RPG.

 

Huh? But it's not an action RPG. Anyway, I do acknowledge it does a few things right, like some of the Qunari scenes. What you sound like to me is an overly sensitive fanboy. You just have to accept that the game is bad and why it is so; because you can't put your fingers in your ears and ignore it. You have to acknowledge the game's flaws. You have to talk about it.

 

I'm not unintelligently just "hating" on DA2. I JUST recently replayed it for the second time to make this analysis. I'm studying the game. Examining why it sucks. Because it does. So that we don't make a game like it ever again.

 

I'm making a video that will expose all of DA2's flaws and HOPEFULLY BioWare will see it, though it seems it's already too late, from what we've heard of DA3 so far... they're making the same mistakes they did in DA2.

 

Anyway, just get over it. The game is bad, this thread isn't really about that. It's about conveyance, plausibility, consistency and simulation.

 

If you want to argue how DA2 has one of those 4 elements, I'd be happy, no I'd love to hear it, as I could use it in my analysis video, but so far, I've not found enough evidence that DA2 has these elements in any significant degree. Or, you could try to consider a good RPG that has NONE of those elements, suggesting that my initial analysis wrong, that RPGs don't need those elements to be convincing and/or good.

 

I don't exactly want to turn this into a DA2 thread... unless it's constructive discussion about its flaws/merits, as I have only done in this thread. Instead of whining about how I'm hating on the game, why don't you construct an argument about the features Obsidian should take from it? I'd say DA2 is probably one of the biggest lessons Obsidian could learn about RPGs today. It's very... provocative.

[Update #33: PayPal Ends Soon! Current Developments]

Duos the God(dess) of Plurality

Duos appears as a pallid man with soft features.

Or as a dark-skinned woman with hard, bony features.

Duos enjoys riddles. All of his riddles are related to the concept of duality and dualness.

Duos claims he does and does not exist.

Duos believes in the concept of balance. But enjoys finding people whom are extreme.

His riddles are usually aimed at the righteous and the wicked. He delights when he can confuse them and is angered when his riddles are ignored or easily solved.

His goal is usually to make the one he is tormenting question his/herself, to the point where he can convince them to do an "about face" - changing the charitable scholar into the murderous book-burner. Or the other way around.

 

Lune the God of Ignorance

Lune often appears as a blonde human, entirely ignorant of the world.

He is immortal and a god. He is so powerful, he can grant any wish he desires. However, he can be killed. When he does die, due to not eating/drinking or being killed by someone, he is simply reborn after some period of time, as another blonde human.

He is completely unaware of his power.

He does at times, understand speech. And is even capable of it himself. But most of the time, he does not know language.

The only thing he does know, is that he knows nothing. He knows only that, for certain.

At times, his senses suddenly stop working. He may stop seeing, hearing, speaking, feeling, smelling - any or all. They eventually return.

Lune does have long term/short term memory, though at times, it can be fickle. He can forget everything all at once. Usually, he speaks of the present moment or topic at hand, rarely dredging up the past or thinking towards the future.

Ironically, legends say that Lune, when he does speak says profound things that change men. For all his ignorance, he must know more than he seems to?

It is also said, that he has been abused by the powerful. He can be tricked into granting wishes or empowering or murdering or helping others.

 

Near the Crow God

He is the god of crows. And usually appears as one, or so they say.

He can only speak in one-word sentences, though he seems to completely understand any language spoken to him.

He blesses the dead (then eats them) and defends murders of crows, when threatened. Some territories are "protected" by him and are sacred to crows. Massive numbers of crows will nest here, making huge, tranquil societies of this odd bird, or so they say.

Near loves silver and will do favors for offerings of silver at sacred places for crows. His powers are enigmatic.

Those who have ravens or crows as familiars would do well to earn his favor.

[how to make your rpg work]

I think that when making an RPG work, the designers need to allow the player to consistently role-play the PC how they see fit. What I mean by this is they need to avoid fleshing out the PC for the player or trying to tell the player what the PC's motives are, as these should be up to the player. The PC should never surprise the player, never have knowledge the player does not, and never do anything that the player does not consent to.

 

I generally agree with this, though I don't think it hurts to give the PC a previous history that you as the player are expected to roleplay. Of course, having a blank slate works, but having an interesting backstory can add some interesting conflict to the story (eg you were raised by wolves).

[Attributes - Fixed or Increasing?]

I prefer systems where attributes remain as fixed as possible. You can increase your attributes, but it's difficult, requiring some very specific items/gear/passives/bonuses. Attributes should be powerful, rigid, but not immutable.

 

I'll leave Obsidian to decide what's best... but here's my own world

 

STR - Increases damage with melee weapons by a lot, ranged weapons by half as much. Increases the "maximum burden" of your character (so if you have high str, you can use plate armor no problem with no penalty). Increases the chance of stuns with physical damage.

AGI - Increases attack and cast speed.

DEX - Increases chance to hit with weapons and chance to evade vs weapons.

CON - Increases maximum life and mana/stamina/energy regeneration (where stamina/energy are the resource for skills that don't use mana, if there is such a thing).

INT - Increases spell damage. Increases chance to critically strike with weapon attacks (and possibly spells).

WIS - Increases max mana and gives slight magic penetration (so you can pierce magical resistances on gear)

 

Notably I think there should be many passives/feats which allow you to scale your character in interesting ways. Here are some things I have in mind that may seem familiar...

 

Finesse - Dexterity increases melee weapon damage as if it were strength if it is higher

Nimble - Dexterity increases your spell damage as if it were intelligence if it is higher (being dextrous should make you good with complex spells, I think )

Blood Magic - Use life instead of mana for spells.

Barbarian Magic - Strength increases your melee damage and spell damage but does not increase damage you deal with ranged weapons or increase your maximum burden.

Sage - Your wisdom increases your stun chance for physical damage and attack speed.

 

Basically, feats/passives for altering how you can build your characters' attributes -- would be really nice. Also nice too, is having at least two effects per attribute, one for spell casters, one for non-spell casters. This has the bonus effect of encouraging hybridization (if your mage is very intelligent, he can still hit reasonably hard with a dagger, since he'll get criticals often) as well as encouraging the use of diversified builds, breaking down min/max syndrome (you can have a warrior that focuses on intelligence and strength or dexterity and strength or agility and strength or even wisdom and strength).

[how to make your rpg work]

Thats true, for many the DA series has become a paradigm of how not to produce an RPG

More like it's become the boogeyman of RPGs. Don't do ___ because the ghost of Dragon Age will get you!

 

*giggle*

 

But yes, I do understand that my "simulation" comments may be outside the realm of PE's budget. I was NOT however suggesting we turn PE into M&B:Warband.

 

MY MAIN POINT IS THAT DA2 DIDN'T HAVE NPCS REACTING TO YOU LIKE THEY SHOULD. If you're going to have civillian NPCs in your game, spend five minutes to give them enough AI so they simulate proper civillain behavior! Gosh! BG2 did fine with a relatively static world, though it WOULD have been a more immersive game were it not so static.

 

I am not proposing we turn PE into Dwarf Fortress, but that we be mindful of systems we can have because this is a computer game and not a PnP one. We can add systems and SHOULD where we can, to simulate the world. Having non-player entities and having the player be subject to certain world-systems, do build immersion, although I do agree such systems could be buggy and backfire, simple systems, like civillain behavior, are absolutely necessary.

 

Personally I am fine with what the OP says in the first post. I am slightly baffled as to why it was needed to mention Dragon Age 2. You don't need examples of good and bad world building to talk about ... world building. That said like many topics I see on the forum I realize Obsidian is comprised of people who have been doing this for a long time with a strong vision of what they want to do with this game. That said, I trust they don't really need the OP's advice, regardless of the fact that World Building is a key foundation block for a good RPG.... or most good games period honestly.

 

If I want to learn about or educate someone on good world building I sort of prefer the classics though and I lend them my copy of the AD&D 2nd Edition World Builders Guide.

 

I apologize for using DA2 as an example, but it's basically "garaunteed replies" - which I like - also, I do need to use examples of both bad/good world building, because I can't talk in high language on a forum, it's going to jump over everyone's head. I need to provide concrete examples of what I'm talking about so everyone can be clear of what I'm saying.

 

Anyway, I can attribute the thread's negativity to my lack of description.

 

I'm actually doing a video on this subject. Hopefully will finish it soon. I suppose I'll post it in this thread when I'm done.

 

I'm sure none of you want to hear my horrible voice prattle on about what I think is important about RPGs, but I assure you I'll be providing enough video evidence from... you know, video games, to hopefully dredge up my points a bit better. You're all welcome to have dissenting opinions, but... I think such opinions have less value... when they don't try to use evidence. No offense, I mean, I'm guilty of this as well, it's hard to cite a video game, after all, but I think we're only going to be able to make intelligent points about video games by citing them, after a certain point. I'm not trying to simply state my opinion, but show Obsidian why my way of thinking will produce a better game. By you know, copying games that work.

 

And yes, yes, PE is just supposed to copy BG2.

 

And I'm sure it will be a fine game if they ONLY do that.

 

But we've learned a lot since BG2. We can improve upon what IE games did. And by improve, I don't mean copy Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, or Social Games. By improve, I mean learning by using other RPGs. VTMB, Mount and Blade, NWN2, DA2, DAO - all have important things to contribute when we examine them. That doesn't mean turning PE into a non-BG2 successor, it means acknowledging that we can improve the genre. That it's not nostalgia talking. That isometric cRPGs can work in a modern setting and can be "modernized" without turning them into slop.

 

What I think we have learned, over the years, is that good RPGs have believable worlds. Believable worlds come about by good emergent systems, or by good writing. I think this is why Morrowind is so beloved and Skyrim/Oblivion are so detested. I mean, Skyrim/Oblivion had detestable guard/prison systems. They really break your immersion when someone teleports half a continent away to arrest you for that mug you stole in some guy's tavern. Or when infinitely respawning guards come after you to kill you.

 

Obviously, bad systems will kill immersion. Buggy systems less so, but will too, but good emergent game design will enhance immersion far better than an amazing plot. An amazing plot is alive only for the first time you play it. Amazing choices can only be so deep - it's hard to write a branching narrative that is complex and will entertain for many playthroughs.

 

Computers can make RPGs be very dynamic.

 

And I'm not saying we should cast away good plot or good characters, just that we can enhance both by adding as much simulation as we can afford to.

 

I think... I mean this is obviously impossible right now, but the ideal way to simulate the "Game Master" for cRPGs, is not to try and write/hard-code some crazy choice-consequence series of plots, but to make something like L4D's AI director and combine it with Mount and Blade's economic/warfare systems or Dwarf Fortress's society simulation. Again, this is way out of scope for PE, but the idea I think it theoretically possible - that we could have a psuedo-random cRPG that doesn't give you "kill 10 rats" as quests over and over, and it would be immersive. That is obviously a very different game from what PE wants to be, but PE can be what it wants to be and more than that, if it's mindful to implement cheap simulation where it can. That is my suggestion, but probably my better points are my original three. I'm not putting emphasis on them, because I... I think - or hope - Obsidian already knows how important good world building is.

 

VTMB succeeded because WOD is an amazing world.

DA:O was rocky because BioWare was creating a whole new world. And they got a few weird mechanics and story elements and got started off on the wrong foot, but delivered an okay game.

In DA2 they really fell apart in the world building, which is what the draw was to their games.

Mass Effect is so beloved because it has a pretty... well, it has an okay universe. It's not ideal at all (way too many humanoid alien races for my liking), but it's plausible and consistent and it has conveyance! The prothean focus was really well done. When the reapers became though... squid ships and protheans were no longer the main focus... ME2/ME3 began to crumble. ME2/ME3 definitely have a huge lack of conveyance and consistency, though ME1 provides enough plausibility most people can enjoy the series.

[how to make your rpg work]

Symbolism isn't something that you're supposed to describe verbally; that's the whole point. DA2 didn't describe why there were giant golden statues but it didn't need to; they were, as you said, symbolic. If conveyance is explicitly stating what everything means then Torment most certainly did not have it.

 

I think we're talking about the same thing. The audio/visual cues in games aren't explained, but they convey a theme.

 

My point was that Dragon Age 2 has poor conveyance because their symbols don't mean anything. The slaves... the golden eagles? None of that has any meaning because none of it is integrated well into the game. The symbol is there but what it means isn't conveyed. I'm convinced it doesn't have a meaning, it's just set dressing for the game, unlike in VTMB - where you know the clinic has the sounds it does, why it's designed the way it does - it's designed to represent oppression, to represent dark times, to represent a dirty, dingy medical facility in an urban setting, which fits in well with the gothic imagery of vampires and the "coming apocalypse". This theme only grows the longer the game runs on.

 

Dragon Age 2 has these golden symbols, but they have no context, besides Kirkwall being narrated to us that it was "built by slaves" - we never learn any more detail about who these slaves really were, what the descendants of these slaves are really like, or how any of that even matters in the overarching plot of mages vs templars. Are the mages slaves? But slaves back then didn't rise up and brutally kill their oppressors with blood magic? It's hard to give the symbols any context or meaning; the're just THERE. There's poor audio conveyance because it's inconsistent. Kirkwall is supposed to be LOADED with refugees - yet we scarcely see any the entire game; we don't even HEAR the sounds of crowds, or muggings, or suffering, we just see beige dusty houses and an underground section with sewer pipes. There are multiple quests in VTMB related to hospitals, blood, suffering, the poor, and sickness, which help to further give symbols meaning, which results in the abstract idea in video games as mood or atmosphere.

[how to make your rpg work]

Where are you getting realism from? VTMB is hardly "realistic". DA2 isn't bad because it's "unrealistic" it's bad because it isn't consistent.

 

And although PST may have an unusual setting, it has conveyance. Granted, I haven't played it in /forever/ but if I must.... I could prove that it has all three qualities I mention in my original post.