Tamerlane

WAT. ... WAT. Oh sorry to upset you, divine dungeon master of "it's all in my head I don't need xp", but I do want xp for accomplishments as it represents the character's growth. If you're referring to the "there are rewards other than EXP", I meant things like items, abilities, companions, the +1 wisdom you get from talking to a random stranger in a random bar in an unimportant part of town. If not, I shall repeat my earlier WAT.

On linking EXP to quests reducing the importance of exploring: ... What? I... unless I'm totally misunderstanding, this is just a complete and utter failure of imagination and memory. It works only if you define quest as strictly "clear-cut thing that person in town tells you to do". What if the only way to find some quests is by exploring? You know, like what happened all the time in the IE games? It also works only if you define "reward" as "EXP", but... eh. On this: WAT. ... WAT.

A whole bunch of, "Stop playing the game wrong!" and some other stuff I can't quite follow.

Unless someone's speaking entirely in rhyming slang, it doesn't really compare to the different dialects of a lot of other languages...

To validate playstyles equally. BBBAAARRRRPPPPP. Wrong answer. Why validate something with little risk and involves a win-button skill dump versus a massive battle? Why design stealth as a win-button skill dump?

And a giant mother****ing cooking minigame.

Cliff Racers. I demand nothing but Cliff Racers.

This seems vaguely relevant... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tapXxi2lpEQ

... wherein people argue about the inclusion of a basic aspect of human interaction.

I'm hardcore! I deserve more!

I like Brent and all, but... too many chefs something something I don't know how to proverb.

What? No. That's... that's terrible. The only good thing I can say about that is that it gives me warm memories of playing Twisted Metal 2, where you couldn't go past a certain area - I think you could only play up to the Minion fight in Amazonia, the lava level - unless you were on a certain difficulty. I loved the game in spite of that, not because of it. I... no. No.

The PC getting betrayed by someone named "Astir"? Srsly though, I want an incarnation of Ravel.

OH man, Story of gaming right there. I swear in Dragon Age my character herself said, "Oh, it looks like more darkspawn." and I was all like, "YOU THINK?!". That had to have been the worst case of this problem in any game ever made. Swear it was a traumatizing effect. I don't think Dragon Age II even worked on fixing that... Hell mighta been worse... Anyone know if DA2 Had a larger or smaller beastiary of creatures then DA1? I think it was smaller. They lost genlocks, among other things. The non-monstrous enemies expanded significantly, though. But damn near everything fought the same. Commander-type enemy with auras and ****, melee enemy, ranged enemy, assassin, and mage. That's it. That's all of them. Every single enemy you face will not just fall in to one those archetypes: they will be one of those five exact enemies, only with different amounts of hitpoints. Every mage even has identical spells (teleport, invincibility, small attack spell, great big attack spell), none of which are actual spells that you can use. Except for the mages that aren't actually mages, they're just regular ranged enemies with mage models and attack animations. And the monstrous enemies largely followed the same pattern. Melee spider and ranged spider. Melee skeleton and ranged seleton.

Horses. Wagons. And why we never get to play with them? Daggerfall!

Yeah, I couldn't finish it. Most of my knowledge of the game - and all of my knowledge of its sequel - is culled from The Dark Id's excellent LPs. Also, I can't stop looking up these god damn weapon backstories:

Anyone ever play the game Drakengard? I hope not. That game was ****ing awful. But it's also my go-to example of "this is some dark ****, yo". The main character gradually descends from "last hope of a defeated nation" to "homicidal monster". Your allies are pedophiles and cannibals. The sky itself breaks open, sending and a limitless horde of voracious fetuses into the world to devour its inhabitants. And the weapons! There was this huge emphasis on collecting weapons, and they all had their own elaborate and pointlessly nihilistic backstories. Unfortunately, the game was awful. Looked terrible, had a nonsense plot, was grindy as hell, and just didn't play well. It had a sequel that did nothing to improve the gameplay and replaced the charmingly omnicidal protagonist with the most generic JRPG **** you'd ever meet. The PS3/360 game "Nier" is also a pseudo-sequel to Drakengard and is actually a legitimately good game with mostly-not-terrible gameplay, a coherent plot, and some of the most depressing **** I've ever encountered in the New Game+ section. Sadly, the developer folded shortly after the game came out.

They marketed DAO as "dark fantasy", if my memory serves. Which basically meant that everything got splattered in really awkward looking blood. EDIT: Though they did start going the body-horror route with the brood mother, I'll admit.

Exactly as much as is appropriate, I guess. Range and variety is important.

Sweet Jesus did Diablo 2 have beautiful items...

This is an interesting one to me. See, the controls of the old IE games (and of DAO and I think NWN2) had a lot of similarities to standard RTS controls. Left click to select. Right click to move. Hold left mouse and drag the cursor to make a selection box. Shift-click on a character/unit to add a character/unit to the present selection. Ctrl-click to remove it. Even the use of 1-to-= to select characters and groupings of characters is similar to the RTS control group. But one thing that is standard in the RTS world that never showed up in the IE games was shift-click to queue commands. Tell a unit to move to an area then shift-right-click somewhere else to have it move there immediately after. Or move to an spot then use an ability. Or use shift in conjunction with the attack command to have your units focus fire specific enemies in succession. Or order a unit to cast a spell then shift-right-click to queue up his retreat immediately after the casting. Basically what you mean, yes?

Most NPC's are only unkillable in Skyrim because they are part of a main, or major quest. As soon as those quests are completed they are killable. (In cases were they are not, it is most often a bug or oversight on part of the developers, the Unofficial Skyrim Patch mod fixes a lot of that, and more. The mod is easily installed through steam if you don't like extra hassle.) Those unkillable flags aren't so much as to protect the NPC's from the player but from them getting killed by dragon attack and vampire attacks and such. Which is a good thing, because the NPC's sense of self-preservation is non-existant. Oh trust me, I remember the pain of searching for a quest-related NPC in Oblivion for an hour or two, looking him up online, and finding out that he had a nasty habit of falling off a bridge and dying. But Jesus Christ, man. I've conquered a quarter of the damn country for the Stormcloaks. I'm pretty sure the commander of some random Imperial army camp in the middle of nowhere shouldn't be flagged essential at this point. And the unofficial patch did nothing for that particular issue. Looked very silly, me rampaging through a camp in werewolf form, killing everyone except the commander despite the thorough mauling I gave him. Wonder if those soldiers ever respawned, or if he's still just sitting there. Alone. Maybe talking to corpses on the ground.

This is a recurring problem for me in most any fictional universe. "That's a word we imported from Yiddish! It doesn't make sense in this context!"

As long as we don't have 108 playable characters... You can have 107 of 'em. All I need is my Gremi-bro.

That is all.