anubite
-
Posts
491 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Blogs
Posts posted by anubite
-
-
Fundamentally, failing a pickpocket is not fun. You probably get some kind of (likely very harsh) social punishment, plus you also don't get any loot.
A pickpocket is fun only if a success nets you something worth the risk. If the risk is small, the reward must be small. If the reward is small, who cares? If the reward is large, the risk must be large. If the risk must be large, we must prevent save scumming. If the risk is large, then this means a large percentage of people who specialize in pickpocket will fail to get the item they desire from the target. The end result is most people will be paralyzed in fear at the idea of using it. Allowing them to save scum is the only way the average user will consider using it, but save scumming is gaming the game. It's kind of a stupid mechanic.
It's a fundamentally broken system in a cRPG. In a pen and paper game, I guess it's fine.
Stealth on the other hand really has no place in an isometric cRPG. Every cRPG I can think that offered it... I never once was able to use it. Namely because it's only really effective if your entire party can stealth. If they all can't stealth, then it can only be used to initiate encounters. Maybe I could see it being used to allow thieves to access certain levels or rooms that are guarded by monsters, in order to spring a trap on them or something, but that seems like an awfully niche function of the skill. Theives generally aren't good at initiating fights, since they get focus fire'd...
In a pen and paper game, I can see it working becaues the way the game is played is totally different. But stealth in a cRPG is just a hassle that's hard to design around.
-
I find myself hard to agree with any sort of "internet justice", it's a bit too much of a mob mentality with a lot of potential for wronging innocent people.
That said, I am also totally against censorship on the net. That's why I find attempts to control the behavior of communities an affront to the web - they might be well intentioned, but any sanctioned censorship is going to inevitably push people away. Everyone has a right to speak their mind. Personal attacks have no grounds, of course, and game developers should establish clear policy for that sort of thing, but to some extent, you have to let players express their frustration.
Too often, I see people downvoting unpopular thought, censoring it, and preventing it from being "upvoted" or brought back into the discussion. It's kind of a negative feedback loop.
-
I haven't played it, but reading all the user metacritic reviews turned me off hard.
From what I gather, it's an ARPG with some 'attempts' at different systems that just don't work out.
-
I'm really confused now. A lot of the information revealed today contradicts what were told months ago. I get they added a whole year onto the development cycle, which is great, but I'm wondering how they're going to accommodate a game that was supposed to be shipped this Fall with all these new features. You know what I mean? BioWare is your typical AAA developer - they have a pre-planning phase and then a planning phase. **** gets nailed down early and then the game is built up for that. If you try to shoe horn huge new mechanics into the game mid-development, you'll have growing pains, or worse.
I guess all I can do is speculate on the ramifications of that. In general, some good design decisions, but don't buy into some of the double-speak here - they say we can equip items on our party members again, but they're still limiting us. Party member X will only have light, medium and heavy preset aesthetics for armor. I hope that doesn't also mean they're limited to what items we can put on them. What care more about is what I can equip, not so much how I or my companions look look like, but it's still somewhat troubling. That kind of mechanic I'd expect from a budget RPG or a jRPG. I mean, one of the draws of doing 3-dimensional games is you can swap armor pieces around - sprites are heavily imited. But by sticking us with predefined looks, why even bother? It'd be cheaper just to give us some really pretty sprites, lol.
I'm also concerned by the lack of actual gameplay footage, just pepole sitting behind computers. This game was supposed to be ready this fall so... why the hush hush? A bit troubling. But maybe they're going to revamp everything combat related?
-
I don't think a main-line Fallout game can be set anywhere else that isn't the United States. Even Alaska or Hawaii would feel off.
Not knowing Fallout's lore outisde the US, I think the most interesting place to set it would be Germany. You'd have a lot of differnet culture elements - they recovered from WW2, split up, and then the cold war started and then whamo. I'd imagine we'd see a Nazi-aligned party, a Socialist/Communist party, and then some more german (or French/Spanish/Russian?) cultural groups fighting for dominance.
-
DA:O is what the OP basically describes.
You open a door, turn a corner or leave a loading screen and you're engaging in dialogue with some seedy ****. Two prompts later, they're in your face and you're stabbing them to death.
DA:O doesn't let you run away from encounters:
A) party is too slow
B) levels are too small
C) enemies are too fast
D) enemies never de-aggro (and clip through closed doors to boot)
And it doesn't usually let you talk them down.
It's symptomatic of games today because there's this perceived notion that if you aren't hitting people over the head constantly, the game is boring. It's this unconscious design decision that spawned the likes of Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
Action needs to be weighty and tense for it to actually matter. Older RPGs are better at making action matter, about building it up and about giving players a choice to pursue it or to escape it.
It's why Dark/Demon's Souls are so popular - combat is tense. A lot of old MUDs I've played with can create this same sort of tension by making monsters powerful, rare, and enigmatic. You're always turning the corner, looking warily ahead of you for an enemy, never sure what they will do to you when you find them. Infect you with an awful disease? Maim and cripple you? Maybe set you on fire so that even if you kill it, you lose all your health burning afterward.
But when combat is always just around the corner, always one step away... it loses all value and meaning. It just becomes about the grind. About levels and classes and junk.
I imagine PE willl be closer to Dragon Age in how it treats combat. But I'm not sure. It's not that bad to have an action-focused game, but, ideally, I agree it can be handled much better.
-
EA is disliked because it's perceived to be anti-consumer, not because it dumps toxic waste into the ocean. Companies that do that **** deserve to be eradicated off the face of the earth, but those companies don't tend to interact with large numbers of Western consumers anymore.
EA keeps up this perception by:
-Pioneering and expanding upon things like online passes
-Dropping game support [shutting down servers] after short periods of time
-Significantly reducing dev cycles in order to pump out lower quality games anually
-Using focus groups and success anecdotes to steer game development (instead of game development being designer-driven):
*tacked-on multiplayer
*tacked-on DLC
*tacked-on pre-order bonuses
-The wholesale purchase of successful independant studios (and then the successive destruction of them through these practices)
-The use of 'deflection tactics' when confronted with criticism - when something doesn't work, it's either ignored or a scapegoat is used to distract consumers
-The fudging of numbers and statistics to mislead investors and consumers
Basically, my history with EA is that I started playing PC games with the Sims / Sim City. The producers of those games became apart of EA. I continued to support those games, but gradually my interest waned when each new interation failed to impress. I didn't blame (and still don't, really) EA for what I perceived to be a declining quality in those games, so I moved on. Fast forward to 2008. I had been following Spore's development and was really excited for it.
Unfortunately, if you followed Spore's devleopment at all, looking at the final product was like a slap in the face. It was basically all a lie. I felt like I had been lied to. It didn't help that it came with Draconian 3-installations-in-your-lifetime DRM. Not that the DRM really mattered to me after the fifth hour I played it - it was around then I got to space and realized the game was dead to me. I uninstalled it and said, "Nope, never pre-ordering another EA game again."
That was just the beginning, but it really woke me up to what EA was as a company. If you read the whole debacle that was Spore, you can see all of what I'm talking about. EA either directly poisoned that project, or its policies and executive culture did so passively. It's not that I'm exactly accusing EA of being intentionally mal-aligned, I just believe everything they touch turns rotten. It may just simply be they have a bad culture and reduces productivity and poisons development teams.
BioWare is basically a culmination of all of this. It feels like they are in sync with EA, or are puppets with strings tightly wound around them. As a consumer, I don't trust them anymore.
I think that is partially why everyone is so acidic around these games and BioWare. It's what they represent that upsets us.
I don't think anyone genuinely cares about homosexual romance in BioWare games. Why do a lot of people (trolls, rather) harp on that specific subject? It's because, I think, they perceive it as nonsense. Does it matter who you get to **** in a video game? Um, no. It really doesn't. Not with the way BioWare designs their games. You could have the choice to **** Saren or The Illusive Man in the Mass Effect trilogy and it'd have no impact on the story. It's like playing Fallout and telling the merchants where your vault is located and it having no effect on the game. People want to see BioWare invest in the reactivity of their RPG, not in the number of diversity of romance options.
And yes, DA2 was spawned largely in-part because DA:O took too damn long. I do not understand at all how the project took as many years as it did and it makes absolute sense EA would clamp down on their studio, "No, you cannot spend another four to six years making a game."
RPGs cannot be AAA projects. I think that's the fundamental problem. With development costs for AAA games as they are, you cannot justify making a classic RPG. What EA should have said was, "Drop the console support." Console support adds too much overhead - you need to produce the game and its engine for Cell/360 architecture and x86. You need multiple control scehemes and you need to make your game run on terrible hardware specs.
RPGs should be low to mid budget titles that use older engines and more 'already constructed' assets. Because once they become AAA titles, they pretty much have to become action titles with little substance to "succeed" in the eyes of a major publisher (which is basically "Five million sales" at this point in time).
Fast forward to today and we have DA3 which is being hailed as some sort of Skyrim knock-off. It feels like nobody has learned their lesson here.
-
4
-
-
DA2 was meant to be a "personal story" but I never really got caught up in any of the "personalness" - I mean, your sister/brother is taken from you in the first act, Gamlen is an asswipe, and Leandra is a weak-spirited woman who looks like she could curl up into the fetal position at any moment. Maybe it's just a flaw with the entire narrative of DA2, but I just couldn't connect. So, every family scene was just awkward, forced, badly foreshadowed or poorly built up, or all of the above.
Although it would be interesting to have a personal story in a medieval fantasy, DA:O was built up to be about the Darkspawn and the political schemings of one man. It was discovering and defeating ancient and mundane evil.
The family stuff just doesn't fit.
Every scene involving blood mages, templars or Hawke's family... I just wanted to be about the Arishok. The game just wasn't going to carry all of the plot threads coherently, because they were all about different things. Hawke's family troubles have little to do with Mage/Templar conflict besides what's shoved down our throats. The mage/templar conflict has little to do with the Qunari. The family conflict also has nothing to do with that.
The way they should have built DA2 up was with the Qunari. Flesh them out. Build up their landing (don't make it this sudden awkward appearance), build up their political angle, make us empathize with what they want, then give us a choice - side with them or side against them. That's how it all shoudl have played out, with other minor conflicts as sprinklings ot teasings for DA3.
Realistically, they had less than a year anyway. The decision to have so many story threads with such a small development budget was very poor.
I'd say, KOTOR2 worked. It has similar development problems, but it worked largely in part (well, okay, in hindsight it works, I think we can all agree the launch bugs killed the game's chance at significant financial success) because of its strong character-driven focus. Kreia was a great centerpiece character. The Arishok was perfect too - the major antagonist, with an interesting spirituallty-centered doctrine. Except, you have just a few conversations with him and then you kill him and it all just feels largely pointless, especially since it has little to do with Acts 1 or 3.
-
3
-
-
I think any attempt to curtail save scumming / reloading is just going to fail. If the mechanic is so fundamentally wrong that it forces a reload then preventing said reload means players just won't take the risk.
Pickpocketing in most games, even if it ends up not being something you spam reload for, is imbalanced. You either get way too good unique loot by doing it, or you get garbage trash and it's not fun/woth the effort.
I could see pick pocketing as a context-sensitive skill, where you can only pickpocket certain story-related NPCs under story-related events. But then, the skill is rather restricted and limited.
Auto-success won't work, we'll either have rewards that just aren't worth pressing the button for, or players will reload until they get a specific item they wanted to pick pocket, or, we'll be giving players with pickpocket way too much easy money.
If pickpocket must be implemented, it should ideally only work against enemies that can fight back. You shoudl be forced to pickpocket in combat, where there is risk attached (you're wasting turns stealing).
-
An ability every 3 levels? What's the max level? I imagine it's a multiple of 3? Or is it 20?
-
I didn't like modal ability spam in DAO/DA2, mostly because it felt like you had to use them and that it was pretty arbitrary (You often couldn't have 2 similar modal abliities active at once). It didn't help that 4 characters in a game meant one of them was going to play itself if you focused entirely on modal abilities of that class.
I hope obsidian will avoid the trap of, "Oh, I have one modal ability and since I can't stack them all there's no reason to invest in the rest of them available to this class."
In an IE-game, where 6+ characters are used, it's fine if 1-2 play passively. That's the thing I think - it's not that active abilities are bad - it's just active abilities are symptomatic of developers copying WoW and reducing max party size, which in turn is much less interesting of a game overall.
I think it's fine if classes are designed around active abiltiies -------- BUT. BUT. These active abiltiies should not be something you SPAM like in WoW. <Active Ability X, Y, Z> are not your substitute for an autoattack. They don't exist to make you feel more engaged in the game. They exist as STRATEGIC ELEMENTS. Your choice to use ability X is a choice. Sometimes, it's better not to use them. I think this needs to be emphasized as a design goal.
Mages and other spellcasters are maybe the exception to this 'rule', since they can only do damage through abilities.
-
Melee-Mages are pretty fun in Path of Exile, notably because you can use Blood Magic to make it so your spells cost life instead of mana. A simple passive skill like that can be all it takes to make a melee-mage viable - you no longer have to pump points in a stat which raises your mana and can instead focus on health and spell damage. Such an idea is also possible to balance because it makes your spells cost health, which means you're hurting yourself while a mana-using mage would not be. The imbalance in POE with BM though, is that it's a bit too easy to stack %-based life regen (negating the downside of BM).
I think melee mages need to reinforce the idea of using weapons though, not simply using touch-based spells or conjuring weapons. PROC-based passive/active skills are a good way to do this, ie, a passive skill like:
Your critical strikes with <weapon type> always reduce the cast time of your next spell by 33%. Stacks up to three times. Lasts 7 seconds.
Such a skill is easy to balance, because it asks players to get balance their character for accuracy, attack speed, critical strike chance, and spell damage.
The MAIN issue with a gish though, at least in a cRPG that doesn't offer randomly generated loot, is providing equipment which functions well with them. Even if you have random loot, it can be a challenge as well. Gishes aren't very fun to play if all the melee weapons and plate you find don't favor your build (ie, don't provide any spell bonuses). It's also very boring at times when items feel too diluted. Hybrid classes are always harder to balance than purer ones, since they need a mix of several stats to function, so I think it's important for hybrid-class items (or skills?) to provide additional stats that pure classes don't get. But, in order to prevent hybrid classes from becoming too good, hybrid items should also have steeper or more frequent penalties to them (they're cursed, or simply require higher attributes to utilize or have certian restrictions).
-
1
-
-
So you can't directly edit weapon/spells with the editor. You have to open up some text files which contain the loot tables and edit those.
-
I don't imagine Obsidian always does it, I just titled it that way so it'd get hits. Making a big claim will get a response out of somebody.
And I don't necessarily fault Obsidian for how NV turned out. Some of the lines were jarring, but when I played it, I didn't let it bother me, because it was basically a AAA game (a lovely one at that), and I know where priorities lie when you have so much writing and voice acting to do.
But I don't think I'm asking for something expensive here - unless what I'm saying is going misinerpreted. Yes, it might add a few seconds onto certain lines to include a "how are you" or a "who are you again?" or just a "Hello" onto the initial greetings of a given NPC, but that cost doesn't exist in an unvoiced game. Well, depending upon implementation there can be a cost. But there are some NPCs in NV, as well as many other RPGs, I don't think the blame can be squared on Obsidian alone, but just that, it's a common trope for NPCs to be loose-lipped when they probably (realistically) wouldn't be. It's the kind of trope that seems meaningless to fret over, and if you're making a AAA game, I'd agree that it is (99% of your consumers won't notice), but if you're shooting for perfection here, which, I don't know if it's really possible, but...
Can they just say Hello? I mean, yes, it might be odd to have the same NPC say hello to you if you talk to them ten times in a minute, but players will have to actively go out of their way to see that. I'd rather the line say Hello that it not say Hello:
Hello, have you seen that giant dragon that crossed into the city a few minutes ago?
Have you seen that giant dragon that crossed into the city a few minutes ago?
Which of these "obligatory NPC providing exposition" lines is better if it's the only line that NPC will say? The first one. If NPCs can only be static creatures, I'd rather they'd politely greet me, unless they're an impolite street urchin or whatever. It just feels like the second line is often chosen for whatever reason - and it's a sort of subtle psychology - reminding you that the game world isn't "real". Sure, an NPC spouting the same line over and over isn't real at all, but I find the first iteration: <greeting> <gossip> - even if it's all contained in the same line - to be better than <gossip>.
That's my main point. It's a tiny nuanced detail and maybe it has no bearing at all on anyone's mind. Maybe it's a small trifle that really has little to do with making a good game (instead of trying to do the impossible and make a "perfect" one). I can agree there are better things Sawyer or other developers could spend their time on... but there isn't any cost if they do it from the get go. I suppose it might be too late - NPCs might already have their lines already written at this point.
But even so. If everyone can close their eyes and imagine for a moment a perfect RPG - I think we'd all agree it would allow you to converse deeply with the static residents of a settlement. If you needed to milk someone for information, walking up to them and saying, "What's going on?" Might earn you a glare or a wary expression. You'd greed an NPC, offer to assist them or perhaps they would you, and then you would learn a rurmor or two from them. It's not as though a system like this hasn't been done before, I'm vaguely aware of some old MUDs that have had this kind of functionality. I mean, it's maybe not all that exciting, but it can be done.
It's not what I'm asking for though. I think a simple <greeting> can be enough in most cases.
-
2
-
-
I don't think the world reacting differently to different races that are mechanically identical is weird at all: The races look different, which is more than enough to get reactions out of folks in the real world. And I'm not saying that races should have no physiological differences, just that in most cases I honestly don't think they're big enough to justify even a +/-1 bonus to a roll, like a -2 CON penalty or a +2 Craft (Weaponsmithing) bonus. I'm very much a proponent of the "fluff-first" school of roleplaying: Make the fiction first, then design a ruleset that reasonably and faithfully matches that fiction. If the fiction justifies a mechanical difference then I'm all for it, but the difference between elves, dwarves, humans, gnomes, half-orcs, half-elves, and halflings in the fiction (in most settings anyway) just isn't big enough to justify such a differences.
Perhaps race shouldn't incur any attribute bonus, but simply allows you to have an easier time with specific factions. If you're human, humans get along with you. If you're elf, likewise. There might be elf-lovin' humans, but they'd be few in number. Certain quests should also react differently to your race.
If there must be an attribute shift, perhaps it should be in picking a background for your character? Kind of what VTMB (attempted) to do - you get a penalty to certain skills and a bonus to others if you pick a certain history for your character. Or you can go vanilla and have no bonus/flaw.
Though, in VTMB your "race" (rather, clan), is your most significant choice. It shapes the entire game for you, as well as providing very specific active skills and attribute bonuses. It's even more different in the table top game, where no 'monster race' plays the same as any other.
-
Giving each race/class combination a unique effect means a lot of dev time and potential imbalance. It won't sovle the issue of "best class for each race" issue.
It doesn't need to be unique advantages, just advantages and disadvantages. And it seems to me that you're proposing the exact same in you post. E.g elf rogue do more damage, human rogues are better with support spells. Versatilty rather than one race being absolutely superior in one class.
I was being too general. But in a round-about way, I suppose I do agree with the concept, but the solution can't simply be, "Make sure every class/race combination has a different bonus." Because that's complicating balance, not simplifying it. There's bound to be an optimal solution if we try something like that.
-
There's depth and breadth, but I think there's also a certain lack of verisimilitude being referenced in the thread.
Depth and breadth need more writers and/or more time.
Verisimilitude in some of the examples above could be handled by a Quest Board or a reputation/fame threshold that prevents someone who is neither known locally or nationally to be approached by random people and told their deep dark "I keep skeevers in my basement illegally and wolves have gotten in and are killing them" secrets.
Right. But in my original post I'm careful to point this out. I'm not asking for depth or breadth, I'm talking about how you word simple one-liners to be less jarring.
Some reactivity to your actions is something they should already be planning for though. I needn't remind them of that.
-
2
-
-
Giving each race/class combination a unique effect means a lot of dev time and potential imbalance. It won't sovle the issue of "best class for each race" issue.
The root of the issue is...
Games that give racial bonuses tend to give very specific racial bonuses. If they give non-specific bonuses, like +attributes, the issue is that a given attribute favors a given class. If beign a dwarf gives +2 to STR, then that means mage-dwarfs have no appeal. If the racial bonus is an active ability, there tend to be more useful active abilities than others, and there are those that synergize best with a particular class.
if PE is using a "unified attribute system" then they sidestep some problems with racial bonuses. If STR gives magic damage, attack damage, and ranged attack damage, then a dwarf is best as an offensive mage where as an elf might be better suited as a utility mage.
The point of this thread is that we want hard choices. When the game is in its beta state, and it's clear that Elves make the best rogues, it makes sense to change (nerf) whatever is causing that, or to improve (buff) all racial versions relatively. Elves could make the best offensive damage rogue, but maybe human rogues can utilize rogue support spells better.
-
2
-
-
I absolutely hate the "like" or the "upvote/downvote" system. It silences genuine debate and allows threads to be locked that have genuine effort and content. It's a popularity game. Pointless threads about funny memes get +50000 upvotes and critical threads with unpopular, but factual argument get insta locked in 20 downvotes. It just doesn't work. It's the worst kind of public censoring.
-
Casual is a pretty nebulous term. When I think of casual, I tend to think of flash games or iOS games. If you own a PC and can get an application properly installed and running, you're probably in some other demographic.
-
Well, okay, the early part of BG1 is rough. I think I do more running away than I do fighting. But after a certain point, I only felt the need to move units when I had to heal them and they werne't likely to live standing still.
-
I would expect chosing your race to matter, but it doesn't need to matter THAT much. In Shadowrun Returns, for instance, the race you pick only effects your attribute caps. This does restrict how you can build some races, but an elf gunner vs a human gunner isn't that big of a difference (I don't know how it is in the tabletop, though).
If races are only cosmetic choices, it's kind of pointless. But races don't need to offer attribute/skill bonuses. It could just mean, playing an Elf means people naturally think you're loathsome and it makes certain quests harder for you. An impact like that is great. Because you're a dwarf, a lady dwarf during a quest thinks you're cute, so she gives you a bonus quest reward. Stuff like that is probably more fun than a simple attribute bonus.
-
3
-
-
I don't think there's anything we can do about it. We can post and say to that user, "Stop it." But as users of a forum, we have little notoriety or power. Developers can try to empower regular users, but that just comes with abuse.
Riot's "tribunal" system is broken, honestly, because players get regularly banned for playing ranked games with sub-optimal champions or builds. You shouldn't be punished for playing a game the way you like to play it (I frequently lost LoL ranked matches when I played it, because I mained Evelynn, and by the way, I was good at her, but people would purposefully sabotage games and report me for playing the 'worst champion in the game'. I got several notices from Riot to stop whatever it was I was doing, even though I was legitimately playing the game, carrying games where my team didn't blow up whenever I picked her). I don't think empowering the average user will do anything more than create chaos.
Developers hold the cards here. They need to realize that frankness is appreciated on the internet and not double-speak.
If you are developing a game and you are going to release a nerf patch, you pretty much need to put out a youtube video, or at least, sticky a very large, very comprehensive post. You need to post facts, figures, data, and analysis - you need to explain the community why you've done what you've done. You also need to provide a means for the community to respond, ask them to challenge your work, to find a better solution. Discuss the better solutions in a follow-up youtube video, or post.
This sort of interaction is obviously exhausting, but the more the developers interact with their customer base, the better a game they will produce. You can't insulate yourself and you can't put a bunch of spin to how you develop. If you're honest, people will appreciate that, even if it's not something they want to hear.
Of course, even going to these lengths, you will still have a user or three who are belligerent. I think it's up to the developer to single out these posts and higlight them to the community as incorrect ways of communicating and to rationally pick them apart and explain why they are wrong for making threats. A lot of people who use the internet are children, by the way, who are still learning the rules of decorum. Patience and tolerence are expensive to maintain if you're constantly berated, but I think it's the only way.
-
No, they can't "auto-ban" people because that would be pretty shady. Nobody would play their game. They want plausible deniability for permanently banning accounts.
I don't think it merits imprisonment.If death threats come from a particuarly impassioned player... again, notice my word choice. You shouldn't take death threats lightly and you should try to encourage constructive behavior in your community, but you shouldn't overreact.
So what kind of action against an "impassioned" player making death threats isn't overreacting? Deleting the threats? Banning the poster? Calling the police because you've been threatened?
I understand feeling passionately about a game, but why would we want to excuse the actions of a person who feels that the correct response to announced changes in a game they like is threatening to kill the people who make the changes?
I don't think releasing a patch that rebalances a gun merits someone issuing death threats.
What value could that person possibly offer to any community - real or virtual - if their perspective of "what is important in the big scheme of things" is so skewed that a patch that makes a gun action a little bit slower - even in anger - seemed reasonable?
(I should add that generally speaking I don't necessarily think every death threat issued online needs police involvement, but really I can't find a lot of sympathy for those who find that their death threat issued on twitter landed them in real life trouble).Valve has made comments on player behavior. In their experience "extremely passionate" (ie irate) users that go out of their way to talk to them offer some of the most useful information they can acquire, once they can calm them down and make them positive contributors to the community. I forget which podcast it was, but I think it was when Gabe talked to the people from the Nerdist.
=
The thing is, barring incidents where people bring their "real identity" into play, most people still use the internet as a means to communicate anonymously; through handles. It is easy for players to attack ideas and words, it is easy for people to write harsher things about what is being said. They have less restraint because they can't see your person.
Unless developers are being addressed by their full name, they should probably consider death threats to be a part of the lingo. "Your ideas suck." It's this frankness that people are uncomfortable with. Some people are perhaps blown away, because they see it as an attack on their person. But the internet only lets egos come into play when someone wags theirs about. People aren't concerned with egos, only the content of speech or action. When someone is saying that the developers should die in a fire for releasing the latest patch, they aren't doing it in a spiteful, loathsome way, beliving the developers really need to suffer the nine hells for whatever trivial thing they have done - they are being berated for the choices they have made in developing the game.
While it's better that players express themselves in a cordial manner, I don't think the internet is a place for manner and I like that we can be so frank to each other without feeling the need to worry about tromping all over egos. This asks that some people abandon such things when they enter a public forum, but isn't it better we judge the content of speech and not the speaker? By saying we should "police" others to say "positive things" or what not, we are basically asking for self-censorship.
It's hard to distinguish genuine death threats from non-genuine ones, so it's hard to know which death threats are ones we should report to the authorities or not, but if personal information isn't being thrown about, I would say that it should be on the developer's part to have a thick skin and to bear it. Or, alternatively, to close down the forum and give up communication with his or her fanbase - it's only going to end badly if you overreact, even if you're justified in doing so.
Why I hate combat in RPGs.
in Pillars of Eternity: Stories (Spoiler Warning!)
Posted · Edited by anubite
It's been a while since I played NV, but if memory serves, you could treat getting to Benny as a killfest, just murdering everyone in the Casino. I'm sure some players played it that way. Obsidian has a history of making climax parts of their games dialogue heavy instead of combat heavy - you can see that in Alpha Protocol, KOTOR2, etc.
It's true that smart design can overcome the combat grind, but smart design cannot be easily made algorithmic. If something isn't algorithmic out of the gate, then you're basically asking designers to make multiple scenarios possible for every theoretical conflict. This is very tricky and expensive to do, in terms of time. You need to carefully balance the game as well, because if the option fo avoiding combat is too expensive, players will feel they are "forced" to always fight. If the means of avoiding combat is too easy, you've also trivialized a large part of the game.
I think what you want is just basically... non-linearity. Non-linearity is expensive. Dynamic non-linearity is not something I have ever seen a game do (but I believe it can be done). My own personal idea for dynamic non-linearity just uses a basic tree structure, where each conflict is a node on a tree. An algorithim adds branches to a conflict as it sees fit. But really, any attempt at generated non-linearity is going to feel a little stilted - notably because computers don't understand English too well. At the end of the day, designers still need to provide the game program with hard coded responses of some kind. You just can't generate genuinely human responses to in-game actions to actions you perform on NPCs. They have to all be accounted for and programmed - Dwarf Fortress is sort of doing this.
I think it's better designers hand-build non-linearity. This means there WILL be some sections in a game where you'll have to fight, because fighting is the easiest kind of resolution to default to. It's also the most time-consuming, so it "feels impactful" to a majority of players. As long as critical parts of the game are non-linear, I think it's fine if there is inconsequential combat in other parts.
In real life, outside of full-blown war, physical conflict is a rather dangerous and last-resort solution. Even the most skilled or powerful person runs the chance of dying when they try to resolve an issue with a gun or a knife. I think we've had enough games with tense combat to know that it's fun when a game is sparsely decorated with actual fighting, just that, it's hard to make combat sparse and keep a game's length and content strong. What do you expect players to do? Is the kind of thing a developer is thinking - there's only so many dialogue trees you can throw at a player before they feel like they're in a bloody visual novel. I don't think everyone looking forward to PE is expecting a Choose Your Own Adventure - not in the strictest sense. I think we all want a blend of these ideas, tactical RPG gameplay with some writing-heavy bits and some choice-heavy bits; finding a balance.
If PE were a first person game, where you had no party, I'd say, maybe some non-violent conflict could be about exploration. You need to get to Kirkwall, or whatever, but it's behind a giant mountain. I haven't seen too many games take clmibing/hiking/swimming as serious challenges, but something visceral like that could be a good substitute for conflict... but it doesn't really make sense in a party-based game, or in an engine which can't provide players a lot of flexibility. Suppose getting to Kirkwall requires you to climb a mountain with a party of adventurers - yet half of them have horrible climbing skills. The engine would have to allow you to move forward in some capacity? Can you pull them up? Can they use ropes to climb up? Maybe you have to leave them behind? But then, you need to balance combat for a situation like that?
Pen and paper games can allow for a massive amount of flexibility in conflict, because you can easily abstract it as a series of dice rolls against various skills and between all that you fill in the content with a story teller's words. A computer simply cannot do this algorithmically. We need actually intelligent AI to do this (and there's nothing to suggest it's coming soon, I personally think anything close to resembling real intelligence (capable of speech and thought) is organic and can't be simulated with binary logic).
tl;dr? Allowing for a 100% pacifist route in a cRPG is a massive undertaking. I'm not sure if resources can allow for it. Maybe if we had NV's budget at stake, but we have a budget 1/10th as much here. Best to allow for players to skip a large percent of combat if they're clever, or implement cheap (but balanced?) solutions for players to avoid combat.