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AGX-17

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Posts posted by AGX-17

  1. Super Robot Wars Z3.

     

    GTA 4 still, just going through it doing stuff I didn't do the first time.  Perhaps should also try a clean run that involves me not killing people needlessly.

    Is that even possible in a GTA game? Also, using the phrase "clean" to refer to a GTA playthrough is comically inappropriate.

  2. Hey, AGX-17 is totally right... Obsidian should make a Call of Duty clone... after all, we only need products for the great mainstream right. There's no other way to make profit?

    There are no successfull indies, Minecraft is a lie... Space people didn't cough up $35 million for a new game... all a lie.

     

    What I still don't understand though, and please do explain me, is why so many iso-RPG's are funded lately (original sin, torment, pillars of eternity and wastelands 2) and how they *each* got around 3 million.

    Did I say that? No. Your strawman arguments should at least resemble the the statement you're trying to fallaciously attack. Where, precisely, did I state that Obsidian should not aim to create games that they and their fans want?

     

    I said that isometric CRPGs aren't products with mainstream appeal. It wasn't the masses of CoD and Madden players that ponied up their money for P:E's kickstarter. PC gaming is a dramatically smaller sector of the industry as a whole compared to consoles. Are the kickstarter badges in my profile invisible? Or are you just ignorant out of a fundamental misunderstanding of economics?

     

    In a span of two years, CoD4 sold more copies than every BG game has in the 15 years since its release. Every subsequent cawwadoody game has moved a similar number of units. The reason why so many crpgs are funded lately is because of kickstarter. If these games had the same sales potential as AAA products, they would never have needed kickstarter to be made in the first place.

     

     

     

     

    This will show if the Iso-cRPG model is sustainable or if it will never be more then a kickstarter funded game.

    Isometric CRPGs are not a model of any economic system that has ever or will ever exist. I don't recall ever having the interest on a credit card determined by a saving throw.

     

    If you need kickstarter to fund your product, then it's not a product that has great mainstream appeal.

     

     

    *Ahem*, I am surprised you backed this game. The 'Saving Throw' you so mock is a derivative of the large-scale successful 'Dungeons&Dragons' pen-and-paper game and cRPG's success was the effort to transfer the table-top game onto your PC's monitor. Even those games that did not have the 'Wizards of the Coast' license where very influenced by pen-and-paper games.

     

    You are wrong, the consumer market is out there, the thing is, the good games to buy are not there.

     

    Stating reality is not the same as expressing an opinion. And I wasn't mocking saving throws, I was making a joke about the fact that someone would refer to isometric RPGs as an economic model. Please take an economics class someday so that you will understand what an economic model is, and why a video game genre is not a model of economic activity.

     

     

     

    The genre is niche. Where did I say there was anything wrong with that? Oh, right, nowhere. The fact that I backed the kickstarter should make that obvious.

    • Like 3
  3. Typically you would just compose some dark atmosphere music that really isn't thematic or has any strong motif at all.

    What's your education in music theory? Well, whatever, what kind of motif are you talking about? Are you looking for a stronger melody or what?

     

    Ignoring, of course, the fact that this is all a matter of subjective opinion.

  4. This will show if the Iso-cRPG model is sustainable or if it will never be more then a kickstarter funded game.

    Isometric CRPGs are not a model of any economic system that has ever or will ever exist. I don't recall ever having the interest on a credit card determined by a saving throw.

     

    If you need kickstarter to fund your product, then it's not a product that has great mainstream appeal.

    • Like 1
  5. Spring has sprung and although it's quite lovely out the smell is what I can only imagine would be the scent of an old dirty porn set

    Either you haven't had enough sex in your life or you've got some kind of creepy synesthesia if you think the offal of human groinal regions and sweat smells like spring flowers.

     

    The potential joke based on the fact that flowers are fundamentally sexual organs is lost when you've actually been in a room reeking of human copulation.

  6. Tendered my resignation, today. Lasted three years, eleven months. It's not nearly as grandiose as 'tendered' and 'resignation' sound. Hard work and loyalty get you nowhere, I have discovered, so might as well jump off a cliff and see how deep it goes. If I had kids, I probably wouldn't do scary things like this, but, c'est la vie. 

     

    Looking forward to the Masters golf tournament this weekend, if nothing else.

    Brown-nosing and networking are what get you ahead.

    • Like 1
  7. The Walking Dead season 1.

     

    I like this game for what it is. I could never enjoy gameplay so streamlined in the long run though. I also feel that some of the situations are contrived.

    "For what it is"? That strongly implies some sort of unstated corollary like "I like it in terms of **** standards, this is premium fecal matter, as feces go."

     

     

    Anyway...

     

     

    Finished B:I Burial at Sea ep. 2. Quite good overall, although it was clear that the connections between it and the original game were just made up on the spot, the idolization of Bioshock's faceless protagonist was just weird. The ending totally clashed with the established paradigm of infinite parallel universes.

     

     

    I don't think the writers at Irrational ever considered the fact that infinite parallel universes means there are infinite universes in which Booker DeWitt was Father of the Year every year for the entirety of his life.

     

    • Like 1
  8. Checked fedex tracking for an import game I preordered. It went from Lantau Island, Hong Kong to Chicago Illinois, meaning it flew right past me and will double back to meet its projected monday delivery.

     

    Also an old man just walked down the street backwards when I looked out the window while typing. Not like "temporarily" backwards, more like "I left my house or apartment or mental institution walking backwards and I'm going to keep walking backwards even if it kills me" backwards.

    • Like 1
  9. While I share your dislike of FF X-2 (that game, for me, marks the moment where the Final Fantasy series fell off a cliff, quality wise), what exactly makes western RPGs any more "legitimate" than Japanese RPGs?

    I'm willing to bet it will boil down to lack of player agency. As someone who wasted their childhood/early teens playing JRPGs in the 16 and 32 bit console eras (I could only really stomach action-oriented games on my elder brother's NES,) I'd say lack of player agency is the primary flaw there. Also, GRINDAN

     

    I would totally consider buying a RPG made by the samurai on Mt. Fuji.

    You'll be buying nothing in that case. Fancy landmarks don't grow rice or soy. The romanticized vision of the far east prevalent in the west is comically impractical. Zipangu's vast hoards of gold never existed in the first place. Sado island's nothing more than an obscure historical tourists' spot. The Sanzu river is no use to anyone living.

    • For whatever reason, I enjoyed Fallout 3 more than Fallout:NV, overall.
    That's enough for now.

     

    This is the first time in this thread that I was legitimately offended. This is coming from someone with triple-digit playtime in F3 and the Tale of Two Wastelands mod for NV.

     

    The NV game balance is just inexorably superior. Even without F3's superior environment/atmosphere/level design it's just more fun to engage in combat in NV (which is the heart of the game.)

  10. I'm currently playing New Vegas interspersed with "watch the fedex tracking data" waiting for Super Robot Wars Z3: Hell Chapter to arrive from Lantau Island, HK. Will probably still be playing NV ad infinitum regardless.

  11. When I started thinking about cRPG's from an outsider's perspective I realized how ridiculous the genre is. Filled with mathematical and abstract nonsense to artificially separate a chaotic reality into a micro manageable segments.

    If you were in the IT field, math, physics or the like, it wouldn't seem ridiculous based on the visibility of mathematical functions. Math is the method of understanding the universe. There's no pre-existing chaos in the non-reality of a game, because it was all crafted by human minds. It's real reality that is chaotic, and math is the ultimate means of quantifying it. If you play a brofist brass-balls spess muhreen shooter, there's math going on unseen for every action you make. Every shot made is a vector; the vector is defined by the numbers representing the player's location and direction in the 3D geometric space (also maths.) One of the differences between rpgs and other genres is some/more of the math is revealed to the player.

    • Like 1
  12.  

    Yep. The biggest problem with modern games is that they try too hard to appeal to the widest audience possible, and most of the time they treat that audience as stupid.

    Yeah... it also sort of undermines the cohesiveness of their design. It reminds me of trying to pick a color to paint something.

     

    "Well, we could go with blue, but some people don't like blue. We could go with orange, but some people don't like orange. Let's just go with ALL THE COLORS, TOGETHER!" Then they end up with a muddy grey, and wonder what went wrong. "We should've gotten all the people with each individual color as their favorite! Why didn't we?!"

     

    To appeal to the widest audience possible, one must inherently appeal to a stupid audience. A bomb is far more effective at widespread devastation (i.e. sales) than a rifle, after all.

    • Like 1
  13.  

    Kangaroo rat, right? I want one of those. They're so cute.

    Actually it's an Egyptian Jerboa.  They are fairly closely related to Kangaroo Rats, though.

     

    No, it's an example of parallel evolution. Like how some ancient mammal's genetic line eventually became bats (Chiroptera,) while birds (Aves,) descended from/were closely related to dinosaurs (and arose long before class Aves.) They're both warm-blooded, equipped for flight, both fly around eating stuff, but they're not closely related, they're simply the result of natural selection. If there's a niche, something will fill it, sooner rather than later. The fact that mammals fill any given niche is thanks to pre-rodentia's apparent survivability, which in turn led to us.

  14. I'll caveat that. VO can only set the scene well when it's done as part of a greater scene. Characters interacting with the background, pacing about, and reacting expressively and not with 5 stock animations. I'm not sure why RPGs fail at this, but I suspect part of it a pacing issue with the way choosing dialogue works as well as just how much dialogue and cutscenes they have to do. They have to cut back and it ends up looking like the Star Wars prequels. Sitting, standing, walking, shot/reverse shot.

     

    An inexpressive Shepard sitting on a crate while the camera cuts between him and Garrus who is flailing at buttons that don't do anything isn't contributing much to mood for me. It's nice to hear about reach and flexibility in voice, but the body language is completely dead.

    An inexpressive Shepard sitting on a crate while the camera cuts between them and Garrus who is flailing at buttons that don't do anything? Sounds awfully familiar.... Can't quite.... put a finger on it.

     

    Although, from a purely fictional standpoint, you're probably supposed to believe that mashing buttons is the only way to make spaceguns on spaceships work right while they're not being fired. Sort of like how you're supposed to believe there was a coherent three-act structure to the Mass Effect series.

     

     

     

    • Like 2
  15. Level scaling is good tool to keep game's challenge level on certain point, in games which have player character that gets stronger when game progress. There is three typical ways to implement it on general level, first is to make it static, meaning that level scaling is hard coded in game and enemies level don't changes with player's character's level,  this is very well suited especially in games that have linear path, second is dynamic one, meaning that enemy characters level change when player's character's level changes, this is well suited in open world games, where player's path can't be known beforehand, third is hybrid of first two, usually meaning that there is critical path where enemies level depend on player's character's level and optional challenges that have enemies with hard coded level, this is well suited on semi open games, like IE games.

     

    But in Oblivion dynamic level scaling was implemented poorly in how it take into consideration player's character's progression, as player that advances his non-combat skill first find him or her self in situation where his or her character fared much better against enemies on same area before s/he progressed his or her character's non-combat skills. And even if you level your character's combat skill first you will found out that your character's combat prowess weakens as soon as you start to level up your non-combat skills. In addition to that Oblivion's level scaling made exploring and finding rare non unique items and money quite useless thing to do as your friendly neighborhood bandits carry glass and daedric armors and weapons. And it don't help that combat in the game is quite pointless if you don't want level up your weapon skills, as you can just use invisibility spell and run past all non-quest related enemies and not miss anything, which make closing Oblivion gates quite uninteresting thing to do as there was nothing to even to be found except the gem that closes the portal. So at the end Oblivion's level scaling mechanics caused that there was little sense of advancement in player's character's combat prowess, which is usually one major appeal in RPGs and it also caused that looting and exploring become much less important thing in the game, which is another typical major appeal in RPGs. And that is why is say that Oblivion has very broken level scaling.

    Level scaling isn't inherently bad, it just limits opportunities to make large risk/reward gambles. The biggest problem with it is that, if enemies always keep pace, why bother having levels at all? If the game can be readily completed by a lv1 character, what's the point of a lv20 character?

     

    It lacks dynamism and challenge.

    • Like 1
  16. Seeing the official trailer for Edge of Tomorrow has put me in a mood. The mood for science fiction. Tried binging through TV Tropes for a new series to no avail, so now I need your recommendations. I want your hard science fiction, I want your soft, I want your space opera and science fantasy, I want your wagon trains to the stars, I want your cyber and steampunk, and I want your military science fiction. I don't really care for your post-apocalyptic, however. I want time travel with stable time loops and without, I want your aliens of both rubber forehead and starfish design, I want your ancient evils from beyond the galaxy, and your human aspirations for guided evolution. Movies, TV shows, anime, novels, just recommend them to me.

     

    I don't just want, I need.

     

    Or we could just discuss stuff. Like how the new Battlestar Galactica sucked after the first half of season 2 or how just how incredible Farscape is.

     

    Is the final season of Babylon 5 worth getting? And how is that Stein's Gate anime I keep hearing about?

    Doesn't your local library have a sci-fi section? Even if you're not into "the readings" there's plenty of sci-fi out there.

     

    Personally, my go-to is Super Robot Wars, although it's not available in English. God doesn't exist and was provided/replaced by a mechanical goddess created by the lost tribes of Israel to protect the Earth from Lovecraftian horrors before they left the Earth to become the dominant galactic power? Works for me.

  17. Hey guys, it's my first post and topic on here, so here we go.

     

    I was wondering when a game gets developed there is an immediate urgency to make a game playable for the lowest common denominator, and granted that's the right thing to do since that's where the money is. But speaking for people with beefy rigs I hope there is some fun stuff built into the settings as well, like uncompressed textures and even super sampling, all the crazy stuff should be built in so there wont be any need for custom profiles.

     

    Anyway, maybe this has already been taken up and beaten to death, but if not I would love to know what kind of statement, if any the team has done in response to this.

    What part of hearkening back to the golden age of CRPGs made you expect "cutting edge graphics to justify the $1k I dropped on that Titan Black"?

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