aluminiumtrioxid

2/10, definitely would not get trolled again.

Gromnir wins the thread.

Pretty much this.

I really want a game set in Evil Slaver Blood Mage Empire, but on a second thought, I can kind of understand why Bioware doesn't want to open the can of worms that portraying the human sacrifice-y-mindrape-y slavers as protagonists would mean.

If we're talking paladins, I'm more interested in how big the Bleak Walkers are on unconventional warfare. Like, smearing **** on arrows and catapulting plague victims to the middle of the enemy army in order to spread diseases, or using all sorts of nasty psychological warfare (say, unholy rituals to plague the dreams of my enemies with unspeakable horrors). Or am I expected to be an honorable fighter who just happens to accept no surrender from his enemies and butcher everyone within reach?

*sigh* Well, when there's a considerable amount of resistance against concepts like "let's try making sure that all skills are equally worth the investment a player might make in them", I'm liable to agree with you.

The lack of combat xp means that there's a different xp system in the game, which SW feels is better, therefore he includes it on his pro list. The lack of romance means - in Bruce's book, mind - that there is... no romance. It's not like there's a different romance "system" implemented to replace the "classic" way. (Mainly because romances aren't systemic exercises... ) So it's a feature that is missing, instead of being replaced by a different feature that serves its purpose. The fallacy you seek is in the fact that other venues of NPC interaction are opening up, therefore there is indeed a different system that serves its purpose. But Bruce thinks that romances are a type of NPC interaction that deserve to be treated separately from "generic" interactions, because he's weird like that (but still likeable ), so that's not gonna convince him. And there we have a stalemate, because subjective feelings can't be penetrated by logic, no matter how one tries. Edit: removed unnecessarily rude and inflammatory remark.

Your ability to flawlessly prove through formal logic that you're right, while simultaneously missing the point entirely continues to astonish me Edit: in all fairness, there is faulty logic there, but it's not in the part you are riffing on. And that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not telling people "stop liking what I don't like". Where did that come from? tsk tsk. *thinks carefully* You actually are right! You aren't telling people to stop liking what you don't like, you are telling them to stop not liking what you like! A world of difference

Well, you can go around saying "stop liking what I don't like!" in people's faces, but that's liable to achieve nothing aside from wasting your own time Edit: ninja'd by tajerio, who actually put it in a more eloquent manner.

...But these are fairly tangential regarding his core argument, which goes "the exclusion of a feature is valid as a pro if its exclusion also implies it being replaced with something better". Whether that something is objectively better bears no relevance, because this is a subjective list, therefore if he feels it's better, it is replaced by something better from his standpoint

Ah, Hiro, you shining paragon of rationality Your relentless tenacity is just too much, I think I will now have to bow out and leave you guys to settle this thing between yourselves.

Don't get me wrong, your examples are perfectly valid, but having a few pre-scripted interactions where you can gain more by playing goody-two-shoes doesn't really mean that the game as a whole supports a pacifistic playthrough. If you sneaked past every encounter yet chose the (indeed fairly lucrative) merciful options where the game did offer you a choice, I think you'd still end up underleveled. Yes, we don't know if it is a better system, but that doesn't mean someone can't bring it up as a personal pro in an admittedly subjective list. (Btw, since there isn't going to be a "switch combat xp on" option, we still won't know whether it's a good fit for the game or not, even after we do play it. Furthermore, we have more than enough examples of previous RPGs where this approach worked fairly well.) ...SInce I was the one who brought up the example of PS:T as a game where the existence of combat xp didn't mean "being forced to slaughter left and right", I really don't get why you feel a need to point out that not everything is BG/IWD centric? (Also, you might wanna take a look at this before screaming "fallacy!" at everything...)

...Totally offtopic, but are you the same Lioness from the Onyx Path forum?

Thanks for repeating the best criticism of DAO! (The voice actress doing Leliana is a native French speaker!) So it's official: true French accent is even more jarring than the fake! Or a true French overacting a French accent for a game. I'm pretty sure she has a decent accent when speaking normally. Here's a French woman (former French first lady Carla Bruni) speaking English (skip to the 4 minute mark) without trying to "sound French": *snip* Well, it doesn't sound nearly half as bad as my thick eastern-european accent, so I guess I've got no right to complain about the French *shrug*

I'm gonna believe your claim that BG2 didn't make you horribly underleveled, but it still did occasionally this kinda irritating thing where you go asking around, playing Petyr Baelish and pulling off a very cool treacherous moment, feel appropriately smug when it rewards you with a sizeable heap of xp, just to find out on a second playthrough that the "go in without a plan, smash faces" approach yields even moar, 'cause kill xp. And yes, PS:T rewarded pacifism. On the other hand, IWD severely punished it, while BG2 sits somewhere in the middle, so it's not that bad of an example. And he did explain why he feels "no combat xp" is a pro - it's because he feels it's replaced by a better system.

Thanks for repeating the best criticism of DAO! (The voice actress doing Leliana is a native French speaker!) So it's official: true French accent is even more jarring than the fake!

Don't hate on them, I like smug rogues. Hell, I (almost exclusively) play smug rogues. (Even when they're wizards.) But I like them even when they're stealing my thunder.

That's not necessarily true (wasn't true for PS:T, f'rexample). Mind, I'm all for "no combat xp" - worked well enough in Deus Ex (a game literally about shooting people) and Vampire: Bloodlines, but combat xp in itself doesn't mean a systemic need for violence. (Disregard if original sentence was sarcastic.)

I think people in general tend to like genre-appropriate romances. Romances in Alpha Protocol were cool, because "womanizing super-spy" is a character concept with strong resonance in pop culture. (Although I personally think they could have been written in a more tongue-in-cheek style. The game had this fairly gleeful attitude towards engaging in nonsensical spy movie tropes, they could have pumped a bit more of it into this aspect.) OTOH, fantasy romances tend to be... not worthy of emulation.

Yes, yes it does. ...And that's a feature because...? Only if you lack imagination. They send a moron out to get killed if you create a character with low INT, the overseer has specific dialogue for this occasion. There are many reasons for being chosen, they're not all about being the most capable. Well, the validity of other character concepts doesn't make the lacking-in-imagination character concepts invalid, does it?

C'mon, he looks cool. In sort of a shady porn actor-y way, but still.

The answer to 1-2 is, I guess, partially "it's supposed to be an IE successor game" and partially "thematic coherence". I think there is value in differentiating between characters who draw their special powers from their connection with nature / personal faith / study / martial practice, even if they all fuel this with the power of their souls. Also, you can have fun class-based reactivity you couldn't otherwise. Also, godlike (especially death godlike) are awesome. As someone has so eloquently put it, "(they have) bony scabs that have grown over the void that exists on the Death Godlike's face, the hole from which all that darkness leaks out. I think if you removed the bony growth all you'd see is darkness tingled with the essence of death leaking out from a hole in thier face." You could totally write at least half a black metal album's worth of lyrics around that

But it does punish you for tagging the skills that are equally useless in early and late game (gamble immediately jumps to mind). Also, since your character was chosen to enter the outside world, it's kinda reasonable to create a character from the standpoint of "what would be useful in the outside world" - he was chosen for a reason, after all Also this*. *only in a less confrontational tone, 'cause I'm a laid-back guy like that

Or 3) they could give out xp for exploring areas, or 4) let exploration in itself lead to quests without forcing you to engage with quest giver NPCs?

Well, if the game clearly communicates that this is a gamble, I see nothing wrong with that. But it didn't. ... But how could it not be a gamble? Energy weapons would be the most expensive guns in the game ~excepting miniguns, and that makes them rare by default, no? True enough, but based on the info the game hands out to you ("It is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Anything might be out there"), basically every skill except melee weapons (you get one at the start, doesn't require ammo which might or might not be rare outside the vault), outdoorsman (it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland, knowing how to survive there will surely come in handy) and perhaps stealth (wide utility, universally usable on all enemy types) is a gamble. (Worst of all, even these skills are somewhat underpowered.)