Merin

I have zero problem with M rated games using nudity and/or sex. But I don't need it. And, overall, I'm an advocate of "fade to black" in almost all cases. Even more to the point, I'm an advocate for most games to not even get to the "fade to black" moment... personal preference. As am I. Fourteen years now. I have a daughter. I don't think this is really relevant. It's like saying that people only play GTA because they haven't managed to go out and steal a real car yet, or an FPS because they haven't gone to war yet and got to shoot real people yet. Being lonely or in a bad relationship is not necessary to enjoy romance in entertainment media. Just like being a satan worshipper isn't necessary to play Dungeons & Dragons, despite what the media in the 80's told everyone. Soldiers play FPS. Football players play Madden. You don't have to be lacking something in real life to enjoy experiencing simulations of it as well. I think most of us, regardless of pro or con, agree with this. The ones who'll be the problem, pro or con, are the ones demanding their way.

Temple of Apshai shout-out, woot!

No offense to the The Sharmat, but I do feel it is kind of unfortunate that the thread that gets to stay the discussion about romance is the one with this weirdly worded and intentioned poll.

I don't need a morality meter... but I want there to be consequences. If someone runs around murdering others and stealing things, bad things should happen to them. Just like if someone runs around stepping between bullies and victims, bad things should happen to them.

You should think about the fact that when you are in combat, your brain is also part of the process. A good strategy in combat means victory. Success is a balance between your character statistics and your skills as a player, your ability to understand the mechanics of the gameplay and use that knowledge to succeed(try to send a mage with low hp and no armor in close combat, for example). So, the dogma of saying "I want to have that character succeed or fail on tasks based on HIS skill, not mine", is something you should recognize that is limited in scope. I get to choose what my character does... but not if he succeeds. In role-playing, at least in my opinion but I know many other RP'ers believe this as well, you are trying to decide what your character would do in a given situation. But you aren't trying to decide if they succeed. So, using your combat example, I think my character would swing his sword. I tell the game to have my character swing his sword, and whether he hits or not is decided by his stats. I don't want to swing the sword for him (like TES games or DA2, for example, which still uses stats to determine overall effect but still.) Similarly, my character comes to a computer that is encrypted. I decide that my hacker character, who has a high level of hacking skill, will try to break the encryption. Then the game decides, based on his skill, if he succeeds. I don't want to solve a word puzzle or mini-game... as fun as those can somtimes be (BioShock has ones I enjoyed) I'd rather not have them. So, yes, I make DECISIONS for my character on what they will try to do. My character, I'm shaping their personality. But I'm not also acting like the master of proficiency and probability - I don't want to be my characters hand, nor the dice for that matter.

Like KotOR - press the X button the hand-holding NPC tells you. Whatever.

For the love of replayability - a stand alone tutorial that teaches you how to play the game that you can choose to play or not. Preferrably a separate thing in the start menu but, at worst. like KotOR 2 where you can skip it. If anything kills replayability of a game like, say, Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age 2 or... okay, those are bad examples of games you'd want to replay, but good examples of annoying forced tutorials at the start!

dlux, I understand your frustration. Believe me. But calling them "whiners" isn't productive. Don't sink to that level, it weakens your argument.

It's an opinion on whether we think they should or not. Kick It Forward is voluntary. And they get to choose where they donate that 5% if they choose to donate. I'm not going to hold it against Obsidian if they choose not to pledge - especially since they are already donating to several projects on KS. Now Tim and DF, however... last I looked they hadn't donated to anything, so if they don't pledge either... I'll be a little less enthusiastic about supporting their next KS. KS is a community of mutual support, not a marketplace of competition. Part of the attraction for developers is the freedom to not answer to a publisher, yes, but also the support they feel from each other. Often the biggest donators to KS projects are other KS projects - and for video game developers specifically, other video game developers.

There is very little I like about NWN's design, so by default I have to choose BG's UI. That said, as dlux said, I think the DA:O UI is better.

I know I'm getting it - but I want rarity of magic. The fighter with the magic sword should feel darn lucky!

This is personal preference, not a decree from on high - but, for me, I want to play a cRPG to create a character, select that character's abilities... and have that character succeed or fail on tasks based on HIS skill, not mine. If he has a high agility and many levels of balance, I shouldn't have to manually maneuver him over a beam... he should be able to walk it based on his skill. Conversely, if my character has a personality of a rock I shouldn't be able to mini-game him into convincing by argument a guard to let him pass.

Over 25... heh, is that supposed to make those of us at the upper end of that feel younger or older? I'm 36. Favorite RPGs - gah, uhm, I'm gonna use the plural in the question to avoid picking a favorite Wizard's Crown, Alernate Reality - Dungeon, Knights of Legend, Wasteland, Pools of Darkness, Fallout 2, Icewind Dale, Freedom Force, Dragon Age: Origins, Alpha Protocol Ten too many? EDIT - and I feel like a goon now for not mentioning Bard's Tale 2 and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. *sigh*

Watching form afar used to be romantic... then, around the late 90's, it became "stalkerish." Clearly there's need for protecting people from real stalkers... but in the realm of fiction, I think it's a bit much to jump on a common trope and call it creepy.

Kicking It Forward is a brilliant initiative, IMO. Not only is it sharing success with others, giving others opportunity... giving back to the community that supported you, even... ... it allows creativity, as opposed to marketability, to rise to the top. Kickstarter donations do not happen with hopes of a return on investment, so any project that Obsidian or inXile or other successful Kickstarter campaigners choose to back will be based on their belief that those new projects are worthwhile and should see the light of day. It helps build a community of cooperative developers instead of competitive developers. It's part of a paradigm shift, one that I urgently hope will continue.

I am no fan of Dragon Age 2, but why is this scary? That was one of the things that I actually thought was an improvement on DA:O. Now, the implementation was not the best (Isabela at the bar for ten years is about as bad as the Alistair and the dwarf merchants living in you camp for a year) but just about anything is better than the bad implementation of Option 3 (see Jade Empire - you recruit close to a dozen people so they can sit in camp and "sing kumbaya for you" while you take one along at a time to meditate for you.) Dragon Age 2, in some ways, mirrors Baldur's Gate 2 - when not in your party, they go off somewhere other than invisibily following you around. BG2 being better that if they weren't actively in your party, actively contributing, they actually weren't "recruited" and continued on with their lives regardless of you. DA2 tried to narratively give you that feel, but the party selection screen always broke that immersion for me.

I also think people should look at how different Fallout is from Arcanum is from Icewind Dale is from Vampire: The Maquerade - Bloodlines... there are different ways to do things. If you are a fan of most / all those systems, have a littel faith in Obsidian to be designing something cool that will be fun.

Several people have mentioned V:TM-B as an example of how some of this works. There are also many PnP RPGs that don't award for killing. I mean, go all the way back to TSR's Marvel Super Hero game for many of these concepts. 1 - you received Karma (that's games XP) for stopping crimes, for saving people, for doing good deeds, for being a friend... and lost karma for killing, stealing, etc. 2 - It also had some different stats - not just different names for them, but different concepts of attributes: one of the only games I've seen that has a "Fighting" skill, separating phsyical strength from innate self-defense ability; Intuition and Psyche, splitting what Wisdom usually represents into two (I feel) clearly separate things. Point - there are different ways to do things than the D&D model that so many fantasy RPGs follow As far as how is XP given without killing things, there are so many ways this can be done. Games are computer programs which use equations, and one of the most simple concepts is the "if-then" statements, which gamers would most often recognize as being used in plot flags. So instead of the games if-then looking at "did creature die" it can instead look at "was encounter successfully completed" which then checks a list of possible success conditions, and returns a "true" if any of the conditions are met (are all the creatures dead? did the player's party reach the other side of the bridge? either being satsified means the players have succeeded and gets the encounter XP.) The only way this COULD be considered a problem is if you consider an open world, free-explore map with randomly generated creatures. How can pre-defined goals be set up if it's random? Well, for one, we don't know that PE will be this kind of game. But, for two, when the random creatures are generated, a random encounter can be generated using the same lines of code. IF party approaches sector X,Y on the overworld map, CHECK for random creatures - IF random creatures EQUALS TRUE, generate encounter conditions It's not rocket science. It's computer science.

Great update. Obsidian seems to doing everything right, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Story/side quest hooks. That's their main purpose from a developers POV.

It pairs down the number of skills from 3E, so instead of Hide in Shadows and Move Silently you have just Stealth, and instead of Jump, Climb and Swim you have Athletics. It also advances them differently. You don't add points every level - you are either trained or untrained, which gives you a +5 bonus, and then all your skills (trained or untrained) go up as you level. Otherwise, checks are made the same - d20 vs. a DC. You can take 10's and 20's. Etc. I can't stand 3rd ED. And if there are parts of 4E I cannot stand, it's stuff that 3rd introduced (no class restrictions for races, unfettered multi-classing (as nerfed as it was in 4E, you still could do anything into anything from any character, more or less), skills and feats.) I had a group of friends who all preferred 4E and we played a lot. Then many of us moved around the same time.

If you ignore 4E for a moment (and most D&D fans will - I prefer 4E, but that's a distraction) Magic system - you have the same spell slots for light, magic missile, armor and charm person. Utility spells versus combat spells, and damage spells versus defensive spells. Even the addition of cantrips and orisions doesn't change this up much save put the most useful utility spells (detect magic, light, etc.) into a separate category but later levels the same thing will still happen. Skills - Knowledges are in the same set of skills as sneaking, performance and crafting in the same set as tumbling and concentration - skills used largely outside of combat drawn from the same resources as they used primarily inside combat --- (I realize this is a bit broader, as you can sneak or tumble outside of combat, but you practically never use knowledge or craft in a fight) Feats - Skill Focus, Skill Training, and any non-combat feats draw from the same number of feats you can choose as combat-oriented feats. So, yes, separating combat skills and such from non-combat is different from D&D. And while there are optional rules and house rules for XP for things other than killing monsters, outside of 4E your primary source of XP is killing things. So, again, moving away from D&D. You might have a different view... but once the magic system is announced (and, I'm willing to be it ain't vancian) it'll be even more NOT D&D. That's assuming you think it works. I enjoyed much Basic, 1st and 2nd ED D&D in my day. And I really like 4E. But I'lll be happier for Obsidian to make their own way with their own unique mechanics that fit the game, world and story they want to tell! What 3E did was add a lot of restrictions to character creation, not freedoms. Prior to 3E you could use the optional non-weapon proficiencies, if you wanted to , in 2nd ED. Or, like 1st ED, you could just create your character and tell you DM "My character is a very talented horse rider who also breeds horses and knows all the heraldry and pageanty as he wants to be a knight someday!" and the DM would say "Okay, cool" and you role-played as such without needing codified rules for that. Being a cRPG, we'll need rules so the mechanics can work with such things... but, tabletop? You really probably only want rules mechanics and dice rolling for things where you want a chance of failure, usually due to some kind of direct conflict. But I digress.

I know you were just using them as an example, but I think doing away with D&D stats would be a big step in the right direction... and I don't mean just renaming Strength as Might and Constitution as Endurance or some such... but giving character attributes that fit the game mechanics they want to design, not vice-versa. I'm not even going to try and give examples of this - I'll let Obsidian come up with what they will. However, to the finer point you are trying to make... I'm for trade offs, but not necessarily the cliche trade-offs. And your proposed system is something along that line, so in essence, I agree with you. I don't want the ability to make a super-strong, super-fast, super-tough, super-quick, super-smart, super-personality character. Each character should have strengths and weaknesses. But it shouldn't have to be strong equals dumb or smart equals flimsy.

I am actually quite ecstatic with everything from Update 7. The further from D&D, the better. Seriously, though, if you're realism simming, of course training more in gunplay will not leave you as much time to practice basket weaving... but for fun and game balance (at least for those of us who don't enjoy managing spreadsheets or find enjoyment in weighing the pro's and con's of two unlike things drawing on the same resource (do I cast Alarm or do I sharpen my sword for the next day, I can only do one in the given time, gah!)) I think separating combat from non-combat is the right way to go. I also have never been a fan of XP fo killing things. I like XP for solving problems. Given my druthers, there'd be no XP for stealing things, either. But that's me.