anubite
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Posts posted by anubite
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DA > BG
Anyone who thinks BG had more tatical and stategical combat to either D is fooling themselves. I mean BG fighters had no combat options at all while DA series warriors had all sorts of abilities.
Fighters have abilities in DA? I'm pretty sure mages do all the work.
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Are romances in?
For 320 BioWare points you can buy a friendship token. For 800 BioWare points you can buy a flirt token. Friendship token can be traded in for a 1% chance at romance, flirt tokens for a 3% chance at romance.
This is... a joke, right? Right?
Also, guess what game is coming out soon!~
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Alan, will we be able to get top-down view in DA3? Please let someone over at BioWare know that it's kind of necessary for PC users who aren't using 360 controllers to manipulate spell positioning.
As far as wave combat is concerned, I hate enemy spawning. I think it's a cheap way to ramp up difficulty. Make monsters difficult in the properties they have not, by having a trigger spit them out at you faster than you can kill them. It's maybe an okay mechanic if you want players to conserve resources, but there were no resources to conserve in DA2 - spells had low cooldowns, potions were dime a dozen, et cetera.
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“Today’s gamers are a lot less patient. They expect a lot more from the developers in terms of features and so on. Even for menus that are easy to use. For a lot of things that weren’t as extensively developed back in the day. For example: control inputs.
“It took a while to learn the complex controls. Numbers 1,2,3,4 – There were different types of peeking: peeking forward, peeking sideways, peeking upside down. They had all these things that were very complex and it worked for the hardcore gamers, but a lot of people backed off early on because it was very difficult."
It makes me wonder who approves this kind of **** PR. Why do developers go out and give these kinds of interviews? I have absolutely no interest in buying this game after reading comments like this. They're just shooting themselves in the foot; openly admitting to dumbing down and trampling all over what made old games great - just for what - for some perceived concept of "hardcoreism"? Instead of attacking "hardcore" and making it actually accessible, game developers take all "hardcore" functionality out until all you're left with is a skeletal stale experience.
So people are afraid of challenging-looking things - big ****ing deal. That's human nature, to fear the unknown. Convince them to try it. Show them why it's fun. If you can't do that, why do you have a job?
Is this developer doing this out of regret? Is he asking for forgiveness? If I were Square, I'd pretty much forbid any interview that isn't simply fluff. Don't give us any cold hard facts, we'll just make anti-hype for this game. It's not as though "casuals" read "hardcore" gaming journalism and actively look forward to a game where there is less feature and functionality -- because they think they are stupid? In a best case scenario, a casual will read this article and feel almost offended.
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It would be nice, in general, for potions and consumeable items to be designed with creativity in mind. The way I'm envisioning the OP's idea - every spell in the game has modular properties (but this takes a lot to program well). Potions/consumeables could radically alter these modular properties, for instance, making a fireball spell shoot 3 fireballs instead of one, or a circle AOE becoming a "cone" AOE in exchange for added damage. Neat as a system like that would be, it would be pretty intensive to pull off, from a programming and art stand point, you'd need to account for any possibility of combination and debug it.
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I was able to aim my AOE spellsa with my mouse.****. Can someone tell them that there exist people who play with a mouse? Look at how he manages that AOE reticle with the 360 controller - that's exactly how DA2 handled. You cannot aim an AOE reticle straight on with a mouse. They better let us have control of the bloody camera this time.
There are scenarios where I can literally not get my AOE reticle to hit more than one enemy because it "sticks" to them. Imagine you have a very small circle AOE - in order to hit 3 units with it, it needs to intersect 3 targets. DA2 is built so your cursor "snaps" to the nearest target. If you are looking "dead on" at enemies (for instance, in the fight against the Arishok), you cannot zoom out your camera or even ****ing tilt it slightly - the end result is your AOEs are too small to hit anything but one unit, but they are big enough that they COULD hit more than one unit, if you have explicit control over them - if you had an isometric/top-down view. I realize now that a 360 controller would not have this issue at all.
It's hard to describe, but it happened a lot in my playthrough. I have a clip of it in my overly long poorly structured video on why DA2 sucks (in my signature), if you really don't believe me. It does happen - it's related to how the camera is positionined in most shoebox levels, for instance, if you sit on a stairwell, AOEs are easy to use, but on flat terrain where the camera sits (looking at an almost 2-dimensional perspective on your foes), it's often impossible to get precise aim. Shows you how little effort they spent to make the game a PC title.
I hope they don't repeat this stuff. The game looks okay right now as a purely action game, and maybe it will be fun, but it doesn't look a thing like a strategy RPG, ne'er mind Baldur's Gate. It's safe to call DA3, at least for now, a pure to form ARPG, like Tales of the Abyss.
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The problem with Thi4f is they have openly admitted to making the game "cinematic", rewarding you with exp for headshot skills, and probably scrapped any sense of tension by allowing you to instantly kill enemies with QTE melee attacks.
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****. Can someone tell them that there exist people who play with a mouse? Look at how he manages that AOE reticle with the 360 controller - that's exactly how DA2 handled. You cannot aim an AOE reticle straight on with a mouse. They better let us have control of the bloody camera this time.
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First Barkley footage trailer.
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And to be fair, a lot of the DLC BioWare has put out hasn't be worth $7. Not that I've played any of them, I admit, but I have youtube'd a majority of them out of curiosity. For one thing, they've been ruining DA:O and DA2 with all those awful twink DLC items. I mean, yeah, you don't have to use them, but it's rather disgusting the best items in both games are all DLC and they're the best by huge margins. Not even comparable to the base game items.
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TW2 closed off a whole zone based on your choice in the first act. BioWare hasn't ever done something like that. I find TW1/TW2 to be "middling" games - they aren't perfect by any means, but they're fun enough for a once-through. That's more than what I can say about a lot of games these days... It helps TW2 has free DLC while DA2 has bucket loads.
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I think it's important that everything has value and is compelling, but if all things are equal, then we may not have a compelling game (if all options are equal, in theory, there is no good or bad option, hence the game "wins itself" though, in practice, this may not really be the case). We shouldn't outright destroy min/maxing, as many people enjoy it, and video games are about gaming a system, finding an optimal solution. The point though, is to make optimal solutions difficult to find (or close to impossible to achieve).
True. But that's one of the reasons we use "balancing" to describe what we're going for. When a scale is balanced, both sides of it are equal in weight. They aren't simply equal. You could have 5 lbs of gold on one side, and 5 lbs of wood on the other. If you want to make arrows, the gold isn't very useful, but the wood is. If you want to trade for money/items, the gold is probably much more useful. They'll even be different shapes and sizes, densities, colors, etc. The important aspect is that they share a certain equality.
That the factor you're equalizing is weight, with a scale, is unimportant. It's just an example. The point is, if you give someone the choice between two things, then those two things need to be equal in some wy. You're suggesting they are, even with all their differences. Ranged combatant, or melee specialist? Those should both be equal, if you're offering them as mutually exclusive choices. If the cost of specializing in ranged weaponry is relatively sucking with melee weaponry, and vice versa, then you offer 70 instances throughout the game where melee weaponry works best against your opponents, and 3 in which ranged works best, then you've lied. Even if it's just an imbalance in your encounter population, it translates into "ranged weaponry is absolutely, quantifiably less useful, no matter what, than melee weaponry."
None of it is about making sure an arrow does the same damage as a sword, blow for blow, or that a ranged specialist can do all the same things as a melee one. That's why the word "viable" gets tossed around so much. It's hard to put your finger on exactly what kind of equality you're looking for between any two choices in a game, because it's so specific-dependent. So, it's very easy to use "viable."
What you say makes sense, but only to a small degree - I guess I'm looking at this strictly in a mathematical game theory sense.
A vague two player game: Sort a stack of pennies in some specific way, where a player loses when he's forced to make a specificly-sized stack of pennies by the other player.
In a game like that, where turns alternate between players, there exists an optimal solution that will allow either the player that goes first or last to always win. In a way, you're "beating the game" when you know this optimal solution. In a sense, the game is balanced, because P1 and P2 can make the same moves as one another... but not every action is really viable. Every action is equal, but it's not, because there exists an optimal solution.
We want to avoid solutions which ask players to make shallow, optimal, always-right choices, because we want our players always engaged in the game, levying their options, thinking ahead a couple of steps, to determine if their choice brings them closer to victory. If there exists an optimal solution, then no thinking is required once you have found it. The game no longer engages you, because you can win automatically. The game has been simplified into an algorithm, a narrow series of steps to win. The optimal solution might contain some amount of flexibility on the part of the user, there might be two or three choies that are equivalent in terms of bringing the player closer to victory, but it doesn't truly mean the game is "open" - the optimal solution is there and the player isn't having fun, because he is basically forced to take it. There is never an instance where a human wants to take an inoptimal solution to a game where an optimal solution exists (in Chess, which may or may not have an optimal solution, players may feint/fake each other out by making poor immediate decisions, for instance). Chess is considered a "balanced" game, though the side that goes first has a +2% win rate, I believe, over the side that goes second.
So... looking strictly at Chess, I can see there is a compelling argument to have a "fully balanced game" - because people enjoy Chess. I'm not a Chess player, so I don't really know what's alluring about it. I don't know if there are particular strategies that simply aren't effective/viable - but that's sort of what I want to say... If we tell everyone who plays Project Eternity that any decision, any idea they come up with, is balanced, and viable, and equal - then we have a rather easy game on our hands. Saying that "wood isn't gold" is all wel and good, but how does that translate into balancing a game? If a team of mages is just as effective as a full team of warriors, then our choices don't matter. I think we want choices that do matter.
Paradoxically, if we make it so that only certain parties and builds are viable, we have also removed player agency - because we have decided that only certain things are effective. This is what I'm trying to say I guess, that you need to stride the line between "everything is equally effective in some capacity" and "only these builds are acceptable to playing the game effectively". Nobody really likes to play "gimped" unless the game isn't providing enough challenge for them, and we want the game to be naturally challenging, so players should always want to find an optimal solution for our game, hence, effective strategies should exist, strategies that are more effective than others, but we should not go out of our way to make other strategies pointless.
What does all this babble translate into? Um...
If we make Project Eternity and a bunch of players discover a build which is effective, that utilizes heavy min/maxing, we should allow it. As designers, we shouldn't go out of our way to penalize players who want to game the system. But, at the same time, while designing the game, we need to try as hard as we can to provide hard choices, especially at character creation, that make abuse a challenge. I guess my babbling could be simplified as: abuse should be hard, but not impossible. If abuse is impossible, I think we've taken the fun out of the game. If abuse is easy, then we've also taken the fun out of the system. Arriving at that particular balance does not necessarily mean all choices have equal weight - because a game where every "path" has equal weight has as many solutions as there are paths, meaning, a player can never do wrong. So, we should make sure there are weak skills and abilities and such, but that, they have the potential to be abused by players to actually be good.
Yikes, I'm still babbling. I haven't simplified anything at all. Maybe this is why most game devs put their fingers in their ears when it comes to reading forums regarding their games.
I think Pokemon is the best game to think about when contemplating some kind of turn-based ideal (notably, because Pokemon is a simple game): move1, move2, move3, move4, item, run, pokemon1, pokemon2, pokemon3, pokemon4, pokemon5 are the only options you can make in a single turn (where pokemonN represents switching to a pokemon in your team): You can clearly chart out every single possible player choice and analyze what is the most optimal choice. It's why in theory, an AI for a pokemon game could always win and it's probably why Nintendo has so much bull**** RNG in the game's mechanics - to prevent situations where there exists an "I win" pokemon team. Each pokemon in the game can be used effectively and they all have roles to play, certainly some are horrible at what they do and could use fixing, but the game has some semblance of balance. It's one of those games where all of our choices (at least as far as we can tell) are not equal, but there still exists no apparent optimal solution (ignoring legendary pokemon I guess, they sort of kill my argument), and also yet, there are clearly bad choices to make all the time, in regards to building teams and in regards to actually battling. The optimal solution to a 2v2 singles pokemon fight might be Rolling Kick, Psychic - but if I switch to Gengar in the first turn, you just lost. Pokemon is about prediction and mind games, as a result, even against the AI.
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It always bothered me that Joker was never a robot, or at least a cyborg. It would explain why he would be used to pilot a ship, then.
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I think it's worth mentioning that Obsidian gets so much interest that I don't think they have any openings -- unless you already have experience. Everyone wants experience, which is the conundrum.
You might want to start making things for TF2 or the Steamwork shop. Find a game that needs HQ textures or models and get to work. Get some items submitted. Heck, Wasteland 2 was running a competition a few months ago - you missed your chance there, you could have had your models in a game, which you could slap on your resume. Look for stuff like that.
Yeah, definitely look around sites that host indie developers. Find a team, start making stuff for them. If the project works, you can cite that as experience.
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I think it's important that everything has value and is compelling, but if all things are equal, then we may not have a compelling game (if all options are equal, in theory, there is no good or bad option, hence the game "wins itself" though, in practice, this may not really be the case). We shouldn't outright destroy min/maxing, as many people enjoy it, and video games are about gaming a system, finding an optimal solution. The point though, is to make optimal solutions difficult to find (or close to impossible to achieve).
If low intelligence characters have hit chance penalties until they have "average" intelligence, players are forced to consider getting intelligence on their character. Or, they might want to invest in items which have higher natural hit chance, or perhaps, take skills which greatly increase hit chance - or maybe there's a unique passive skill that removes the penalty from low intelligence. This also makes sense to a degree - there is a minimum amount of intelligence you need in order to actually throw a punch. it's not something someone without some amount of discipline and knowledge can do correctly.
It could also be that people with low intelligence are more likely to injure themselves using weapons. That might seem silly, but people who lack intelligence are often foolish and reckless.
Heck, it could even be that having low intelligence as a warrior raises your critical chance (warrior-only passive?), but it also lowers your hit chance (or gives you a chance to hit yourself instead of your opponent?) as a result, making low intelligence not necessarily a good or bad thing.
It's unlikely my ideas will be implemented. But I've been struggling to hobble together an RPG. It's rather hard to find the right set of mechanics - there are lots of things that can work, the trick is finding which ones work well together.
If PE has the right amount of story content, it will at least make intelligent/wise PCs that are warriors compelling.
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Perhaps there should be penalties to players that attempt extreme min-maxing, if your intelligence falls below average, you have a hit chance penalty. If you have below average CHR, you have a dodge penalty. Et cetera. These penalties increase as your stats fall further and further below average. You don't receive a bonus for raises non-combat stats, past their average values? That would at least make it enticing to raise these stats. And, you could add some passive skills which negate these downsides, so you can min/max if you want, it's just a bit more costly to do so. Inherently, mages get hit easier and carry less, so they have reasons to raise STR/Dex or whatever, even if they don't use those stats offensively.
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I'd say it's still in flux at this point, but the intention is to give the most experience for just doing the quests.
The main problem with stealth in IE games is your whole party usually cannot stealth, so... even if you could bypass content and get experience, this means a single party member must do all the work. If a given quest is "kill this person" or "get this item that is guarded by horrible monsters" (where getting the item breaks your stealth or is held by a monster), that kind of solution just doesn't work.
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I agree the "bombed out wasteland" thing can only last so long. They're already making a Road Warrior game, it won't be long until "bombed out wasteland" is "bombed out" in the eyes of the general consumer - like zombie apocalypse ****, or "future/modern warfare" .
The nice thing, is that Fallout invites some potential zaniness. You could totally do something like Bioshock one, in a sense - a crazy group of survivors from a vault made this whole new society using ridiculous technology and you can explore it. For instance, we could take to the skies in Fallout 4 and explore a society of airborne crazies. Or maybe, head into space? Maybe someone's colonized the moon.
Naturally, you still have the blasted wasteland stuff, but you have less of it - you vary it with the chance to go somewhere new.
Actually, it would be an interesting story to say something like - before the war, the US sent astronauts into space for one last space mission, to prepare for a last-ditch effort to salvage the US government, or something. Maybe it contained the current president as his staff? Only, they saw the destruction on earth and all just decided to enter cyrogenic freezing capsules on the ship? Decide to come back centuries after the world had "fixed itself"? Only, all the crygenic tubes failed, save for your character. You're a former cabinet member of the president of the US?
I'm not big on Fallout lore, so I dunno if this would make any sense, but that's the general idea. You start out in space, on a space station. Then, you descend to Earth. A twist like that could be interesting and fresh.
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I really like weapons which have nasty downsides on them - it really makes a game fun, trying to exploit that downside to take advantage of what the weapon/item offers.
Armor that constantly reduces your life while worn, but massively increases your defenses? Put it on in a boss fight and devote a healer to that one character, or something.
Yeah. I'd say, it's harder to make items with downsides interesting, because party members can always negate an item's effects. If you're wearing armor that degenerates your health, a healer can always take care of that. If an item decreases your attack speed, just have an ally haste you. Et cetera - it's much harder to make an item impactful. It really has to have a unique effect that cannot be trivially negated.
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From what I understand, it maybe that they aren't formally announced because they haven't formally agreed because formally, nobody has any money? Or perhaps, these developers are working with other companies full time at the moment.
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lol yes, I agree, they should be called squares, I'm trying to think of a single mage we have met... oh, well, Wynn was alright, if a bit prudish at first.
Thank you for the clarification. So we aren't "inquisitors" in the historical sense, but "inquisitors" in a judicial sense. I guess that's okay, though maybe I was being hasty in disliking the "Inquisitor" idea. I mean, how many people have played Liberal Crime Squad? I'd be best friends with BioWare if they made 3 dimensional medieval version of that!
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Yes, but we're embroiled in a war with the mages, that was instigated by the events of DA2. Won't we be hunting heretic mages that are possessed/almost possessed by abominations?
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I'm confused about the design decision here. Why do I want to be an inquisitor? Inquisitions aren't nice things. In a best case scenario, I'm a "good inquisitor" - going around barging into people's lives to hang potentially murderous mages that are likely only interested in preserving their own freedom and well-being (becoming monsters only to do so). Granted, DA2 did well to demonize mages by giving them almost inhuman unsympathetic personalities, but the very existence of an inquisition breeds more "heresy". Wouldn't the "most good" option be to disband such an inquisition?
What's the motiviation for me to inquisite? We're not doing good here, we are in essence the antagonist, if we play the forming of an inquisition, instead of the conflict of forming one vs not forming one - but it seems like the formation is already decided with no input from us, the player?
Don't get me wrong, an inquisition sounds like a fun game mechanic, but in the context of roleplaying a character who might have any number of potential moralities... it's plain to see that an inquisition can easily do more harm than good. We are very much enemies in the eyes of the mages and it's hard to take this mage/templar conflict seriously given what damage DA2 did to making the mages seem human at all. Does BioWare expect us to treat mages like they are darkspawn, irredeemable evil insane ****? It's certainly more offensive to me than any lack of homosexual romance, or any other controversy. This comes in the political strife that is facing the world as of late, with our own kind of inquisition taking place - a cyber inquisition.
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I think people are too critical of Origin, since it took Valve several years to finally get Steam "right" nevermind that it is just big one DRM. The only difference is that it has a friend's list built in and some other nice features (like mod support). Pretty much, Valve plays a long term game, which they have won. People like Steam - whether that's something we should praise or not is up for debate, but Origin still has much catching up to do. People just perceive it in a too negative light (that whole "scanning your computer stuff" did not help one bit). I expect a lot of people to "protest" a forced Origin for ME4/DA3.
It's just another symptom of EA as a whole failing to project itself correctly. People don't see good deals on Origin, they don't see a good service, and they feel resented when a game they might want to play requires it. Their desire to play DA3/ME4 is already significantly reduced, because of the drama over DA2/ME3. That won't prevent everyone from playing it, but EA is going to lose a lot of sales from the combination of these factors. It hasn't made any positive steps to correct its image either. Even Capcom gave away that free Megaman fangame. You know things are bad when a Japanese company is more sensitive than EA
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RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS
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I've been following the game since it was put on kickstarter. It looks like a stupid joke game, which is going to make it a tough sell, but if you watch the tournament from EVO (and last year's EVO), it looks very fun. It's got a lot of deep mind game mechanics to it. I'm honestly more impressed with it than Super Extreme Turbo Unlimited Edition Street Fighter, in terms of design.