metiman

BG2 had a tutorial? I play that game at least once a year, and I don't remember that. Not saying you're wrong though. Is it right at the start of Chateau Irenicus? I should really do a BG2ToBSCS playthrough in honor of this project. Just don't have the time right now.

I never insinuated anything of the kind. I didn't say that people who want a tutorial are illiterate or even stupid. I think I can be fairly confident that anyone who is responding to a post I made can in fact read and understand English. The simple fact is that there is no legitimate reason to make a tutorial for intelligent players who like to read. It's everyone else who would want/need a tutorial. It's just simple logic. Is reading a manual really so difficult? It's not like you even have to read the whole thing all at once. Usually just the first 20-30 pages is more than sufficient to at least start the game. Normally I wouldn't care whether they made a tutorial for people who prefer them, but in this case it's a waste of resources. if this weren't supposed to be such a word-heavy game I could see an argument that some people just don't like to read (even if they are excellent readers with large vocabularies). If it were an action game I could see the argument that action gamers just want to dive right into the action as quickly as possible. But it is going to be a game with lots of text and it is not going to be an Action RPG like Diablo, Dragon Age, or Skyrim. So certain things can be assumed of Obsidian's audience for this title including a fondness for reading and a desire for a slower, more strategic style of combat. Also, IIRC, none of the IE games had tutorials. You were expected to read that nice paper manual that came with the game box if you had trouble immediately figuring out the controls and interface.

Ugh. Dragon Age again. Some of you seem like you've never played any non-Bioware games. You could have used ToEE as a better example of what you are asking for. I liked it in ToEE and I did play enough of Dragon Age (just barely) to experience the same sort of thing. I like it, but it doesn't seem absolutely necessary to me. I'd rather have more branching paths after you start the game. It also does somewhat limit the plot because you have to make different initial stories mesh with the main story thread. But then all branching somewhat limits the plot.

When I think of a finishing move I think of either some long animation during which you are not controlling your character or one of those ridiculous pirouettes where they would have been impaled through the back when they were in the facing away part of their stupid gymnastics-while-fighting move. I guess I'd be okay with twirling around like a figure skater as long as the player character is killed Every. Single. Time he does it. I guess there could be some kind of communication problem here just because not everyone has played DA:O. I just went on youtube and searched for dragon age finishing moves. I saw one with a dragon and one with an ogre. They seem to be lengthy custom animations. I didn't see any stupid pirouettes at least. In both cases the player character sort of jumps on the monster to stab it. The dragon through the head and the ogre sort of on his chest. It isn't as bad as I thought, but it does mean a loss of control. Well at least I assume that the character didn't manually jump on top of the dragon's head. That was the first time I actually saw the Dragon model in DA:O. It actually looks pretty good although it moves too fast to really appreciate it. I like how big it is compared to the pc and how it can leap around to go for a ranged attack. it also reminds me how much of an action/arcade game it really is. I hope the Unity engine can deal with a large variety of creature sizes like that. BG2 had huge dragons. So hopefully it's not a problem.

It doesn't matter whether a typical person receives a paper manual. Most people do have printers and can just print out the digital version. Or read the digital version on their computer just like pirates are so used to doing. It's also inevitable that paper versions will be available on Ebay for very little once the game has been out for a while. The point is a tutorial is a waste of resources. Whether a tutorial is easier to understand is questionable, but even if it is true so what? The existence of a comprehensive old style game manual has already been announced. The resources to make one have already been commited. A tutorial is redundant if you know how to read and if you don't know how to read or just hate reading you are going to hate this game anyway for its walls of text. Just like with PS:T, many people will be turned off by having to read so much in a computer game. For the rest of us a manual is perfectly adequate and IMO far superior to some cheesy tutorial made for console-kiddies or illiterates.

Not everyone on this forum has played DA:O. It is a totally different kind of game from the IE cRPGs. Assuming that someone has blayed BG2 or any of the other IE games is reasonable. Assuming that people have played DA:O is not. So many of us will have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I played DA:O for maybe an hour before uninstalling it permanently. And my only exposure to DA2 is through reading Vince Weller's excellent review. I don't recall any sort of finishing moves. I just recall studying the game rules for hours before playing and then being shocked at the boring filler combat with the same cannon fodder enemy every single time. And everyone walking around with ridiculous blood spatters on their faces. I don't like finishing moves. It reeks of console-style fighting and control is taken away from you. I should be in control of the weapon at all times. An alternative that I like would be having more than one way to swing your sword. Control over whether you are doing an overhead swing or slashing sideways swing or a stabbing motion would be nice along with different to hit, damage, and speed modifiers depending on what kind of weapon you are using. Then you can design your own 'finishing moves'. I don't care about my character looking cool (and much too competent at lower levels) on screen. I care about strategic fighting. Some kind of gibs animation when you kill from critical hit would be nice if it isn't too much work. I also like spurts of blood animations that are proportional to the amount of damage in the attack as well.

I'm not sure why this would be considered a Bethesda thing. Maybe because they don't have a main storyline? At least not one that anyone cares about. So all you are left with is joining factions. Many cRPGs allow you to join factions and do quests for them. I agree that ideally this would be tied into the main story like in BG2 when you had to decide between joining the thieves guild or the vamps. I don't see any harm in independent storylines (aka quests) for a thieves guild or whatever as well. As long as the mini-stories are well written and designed. FedEx quests are a waste of everybody's time. Tasks that are considered work in the real world, such as delivering a package, are not fun in a game. Ever.

I've always hated how IE games tended to control difficulty. I liked to always leave things at the standard (core?) difficulty where the standard rules were followed and where AoE spells damaged the party, but sometimes I wanted a bit more challenge without resorting to the enemy not playing by the same rules. 50% more damage is a very clunky way to increase difficulty. Both sides should have to play by the same rules. I found FONV to be much too easy on the standard difficulty level and hated having to resort to enemy cheating to make the battles at least a little bit challenging. I agree 100% that difficulty should be 'itemized'. That you should be able to individually adjust the various factors that make a battle more difficult without resorting to the enemy not playing by the game rules. Increasing enemy damage across the board by some percent for instance just is not fair. Allowing the enemies to cheat is not fun, and I really don't see the need. Anyone who has played BG2 vanilla and then BG2 with Sword Coast Strategems installed can easily see that such cheating is not necessary. You can make the enemies smarter. You can increase their hit points. You can increase their number per encounter (a method that I particularly like). For monsters you can even increase the damage they do as long as the damage variations can be accounted for in the narrative. For instance, maybe on difficulty 7 you encounter a lot more ancient dragons than on 4. The increased damage and hitpoints is explained by natural variations in the species. OTOH, with humans, you cannot simply arbitrarily increase their damage. Their weapons are not built in and they should have to use the same tables as the player. It makes no sense that the same sword does 1-10 points of damage in the player character but 2-20 damage just because someone other than you is wielding it. Same goes for magical damage. If a fireball causes 1-6 points of damage per level for the player character it does not make sense for it to cause 1-10 points of damage per level when the enemy is using it. I'd also like to see the differences in difficulty be more finely adjustable. There should be more than 3 or 4 different levels of difficulty per category. I think a scale of 1 to 10 or even 1 to 100 would be nice. And, yes, this kind of stuff is worth spending development time on. Combat is a core part of RPG play and actually has much more replay value than a good story. PS:T is my favorite computer game of all time, but I haven't played it for many years. I continue to replay BG2 and ToEE however at least once a year because the combat is so much fun. Good strategic combat is resistant to becoming boring in the same way as playing chess. A narrative OTOH, especially a suspenseful one, can become boring after playing it enough times to anticipate everything. So I do think that combat mechanics are very important and shouldn't be ignored just because MCA manages to write an intriguing and suspenseful story.

I loved D&D (2nd Ed.) as a child, but I didn't really have anyone to play it with. My friends weren't interested. Only once or twice did I have the opportunity to play with a group. I occasionally bribed my sister in some way to be the player while I DMed, but mostly what I did was intensively study the beautifully illustrated DM Guide and Player Handbook and Monster Manual and modules like Tomb of Horrors and The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and draw my own dungeons on graph paper. Immersing myself in all those tables and charts and numbers was great. I don't particularly care about the level progression curve so long as the progression curve data is published. It doesn't have to be a table. It could be an algorithm or an equation, but I do like to be able to anticipate how close I am to the next level. I do hope there will be levels. For me, progressing to the next level is part of the fun of RPGs. I don't like the system Bethesda uses for their games. The idea of practice improving your abilities is logical, but it shouldn't be used exclusively. It might be nice as an added flavour to a more conventional leveling system though. Standard experience tables or the equivalent algorithm or equation weighted at 90% and the Bethesda way of practice-makes-perfect weighted at 10%. One thing I don't like about Bethesda's system is that it rewards you for going through the motions of , say, swinging your sword, but standard experience tables already reward you for swinging your sword by giving you experience for actually killing the enemy. I think swinging your sword in a way that leads to success is a more important lesson to learn from than merely blindly swinging your sword without doing any damage. The Bethesda method also seems to remove some of the strategy involved in character creation and level progression. I like the fact that thieves progress faster than other classes for instance. I think one of the problems Bethesda has is trying to simplify/streamline more traditional systems in a way that seems logical to them without actually testing whether or not their streamlining made their game less fun to play.

I associate tutorials, especially in-game ones, with consoles--with the dumbing down of computer games for people who can't be bothered reading a manual. I've always loved reading game manuals before starting a game. Sometimes, as in BG1, I enjoyed the manual more than the game itself. I took it on a trip with me and was studying it intently in anticipation of my first playthrough. It's one reason that I really want a printed manual for this one. The only reason to have a tutorial is if you are not planning to publish a well written manual. I would much rather they spend the time they would have spent on the tutorial to make a better game manual instead. The fans of this title are not afraid of reading. I think at least that much is clear.

http://www.cereproc....pport/live_demo Speech synthesis has gotten suffciently good that I purchased the cereproc Stuart voice for converting ebooks to audio books. It's not perfect, but it's not half bad. Better than many bad voice actors that you sometimes find narrating audio books, particularly in science fiction. After listening for a while it starts to seem close to a real person to me. I think Stuart, Sarah, and William are the best voices. The area at the top of the screen is where you can type in text and hear it read by the various voices. It would be nice if Eternity were speech synthesis engine friendly. Although the voices aren't quite good enough for me to actually request for them to spend any time on a speech engine hook.

That's probably because the writers were male and had a hard time writing them from a female perspective. Historically the supply side has been mostly male, but the demand side is mostly female. Also there are a lot more female gamers now than there used to be, which is awfully lucky for Bioware. Who else would buy their games? Maybe the founders left because they realized that their RPGs had somehow morphed into romance simulators and they were so ashamed they decided to move to some remote island in the South Pacific. EA itself is more thick-skinned. As long as the money keeps rolling in they're happy.

Threads are sort of like computer games. To be interesting there needs to be at least some fighting. Some conflict. It's boring when everyone agrees with each other. And besides, this thread is often on the first page. It's hard to resist clicking on it, reading some outrageous statement from a Biowarian, and feeling my head explode in nerd rage. This is a game that some of us have been waiting for for a looong time. Biowarians already have a game company dedicated to their needs. As for the male love of porn. Yes, it is true, but I don't think most of us take those naked mods too seriously. Surely no one actually plays the game that way (unless they are playing ironically). It has already been mentioned how women are behind nearly all of the fan made romance content, and sadly those things are taken seriously. Personally, I think you girls have taken the wrong approach here in getting your romances added in. Instead of arguing for romances on their merits and preaching equality of the sexes you should be arguing how unfair it is that the male designers just completely ignore the needs of girl gamers who must have romance. If you accuse them of being sexist you might be able to get a few token romances thrown in.

Are you implying that if, for instance, the Christian god, I am that I am or whatever, would actually appear for real in a public place and start announcing commandments that people would become less religious? Surely not. Believing in a proven God who has actually shown himself is still believing in him.

It is when they deserve it. Why is it so hard to just hire a good writer? I don't get it. It's certainly not that they can't afford to hire competent writers. They just don't care.

Why not just make two versions of the game? One for the men and one for the women. The female version of the game would be chock full of romances written by actual females (not by MCA). The male version would not have any romances that aren't a part of the main plot, but it would have an extended story that results in the same amount of overall development time. I used to think it would be a great thing if more women liked to use computers and play computer games, but it has turned into a curse. Men and women simply don't like the same kinds of stories. Hollywood has figured this out already. They have films, like Sleepless in Seattle or other RomComs, that are specifically targeted toward women where they don't expect to have any male viewers at all (with the exception of the ones who are forced into it by their wife/gf). Unlike Bioware, the Obsidian designers seem to be mostly male. I can't imagine any of them are too thrilled with the idea of writing romances. Surely that's not what they signed up for. It's like getting a job at Sony designing the next AIBO robot dog and then finding out they also expect you to clean the toilets. I guess that might be why hiring an extra writer was mentioned. Presumably some woman who doesn't mind writing that sort of stuff. Incidentally, it's hard for me to imagine any self-respecting man begging for romances in a computer game. Romances are a girl thing. You may as well wear lipstick and pink panties.

Good writers don't create their characters from archetypes/stereotypes. Full stop. And the cliches listed in the poll are all awful. Those stereotypes may be good for developers like Bethesda or Bioware, who don't have any writers on staff. Obsidian doesn't have that problem. Also, it's presumptuous of you to even suggest such things.

Perhaps a meta-dungeon could be seen as all of the narrow winding passages that the game designers/programmers have to mentally go through to actually make the dungeon. Or maybe the Obsidian offices could be seen as a meta-dungeon. A dungeon that is used to make other dungeons.

Only if it is not a core value of cRPGs. Are you arguing that romance is inherent to what makes an RPG an RPG?

I hated the questions in fonv. If that sort of thing is included I hope it will be optional.

I'd just like to point out to Merin that there is a difference between an overgeneralization and a straw man. It really gets tiresome to constantly be reading the term everywhere. Strawman, strawman, strawman, strawman. Everyone who disagrees with you about romance minigames is not setting up a strawman. You might want to refresh yourself on precisely what a strawman actually is so that you may stop embarassing yourself.

Why even have a good or evil path? Why be so judgemental? Why is it important whether one action is labeled 'good' and the other 'evil'. Whether a character's choices are considered right or wrong should be judged by each individual in the world and the more popular ideas of right and wrong should be related to cultural beliefs. If you go around impaling babies on your sword, probably most people in the society would see that as wrong and dislike you for it, but there would also probably be people who regarded it as a good thing. Presumably someone who dislikes babies. Instead of right or wrong I think there should just be choices which are either popular or unpopular. If you make very unpopular choices the consequence will be that the majority of people in that society will dislike you. They may even hunt you.

There is a lot of good music in this thread but I think Astral Calm may be my favorite. Thanks obyknven.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRtIUv3mTO8

Does being a Morrowind fanboy damage your vision? Obviously bad creature designs are obviously bad. I also don't get the distinction between regular fantasy monsters and alien fantasy monsters. Either way they are just something that an artist thought up. It's not like we have any real alien creatures to model.