Waywocket
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Posts posted by Waywocket
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I guess I need to rephrase to be more clear that I'm interested in delivery method more than creation method. Your links do tell me how they'll build the game but I want to know if the Linux version will be tied to Steam, will I get a tarball, .rpm, .deb, etc file to download or something else?
To be perfectly honest, rpm and deb would be the worst possible move they could make for linux users, it would be as wonderful an idea as the loki installer, which gave everyone an awesome graphical installer that looked great, until glibc no longer supported the features used in the installer and gtk 1 was dropped from a distribution which crapped out any attempt at running the installer as it was intended to work. That event left people wondering how to install their games through the shell commands of make self (which the loki installer was just a gui-wrapper for).
In 10 years Obsidian is not going to repackage the game so you can play it on Ubuntu farting ferret, and you'll want to play the game, however dpkg will barf on a deb made on the current Ubuntu lactating lemur release (RPM has the same problems and worse given the various incompatible forks of the RPM project).
So, until the open source community figures out that backwards compatibility and interoperability between distributions are important features of the consumer desktop, you should stick to asking for tarballs or Steam which will hopefully include the dependencies of the game.
This, of course, is assuming Valve doesn't go bankrupt like every other company that has attempted to support consumer oriented linux.
This post is complete nonsense almost in its entirety. Pretty much the only valid point is that specialised installers are generally a bad idea, but using standardised packaging methods are the solution to that problem, and to equate those two things is a grotesque mischaracterisation.
A deb or rpm package is the moral equivalent of a tarball, plus a manifest that allow the package manager to know what files have been put where, so it can do things like uninstalling, upgrading, and checking that no other package tries to overwrite those files. A package can also specify that it depends on some other software, typically libraries that are dynamically linked into the application, and it can specify the version(s) that it requires. When you try installing a package and it produces dependency errors, that means that the package in question declares a dependency on something you don't have. If you just had a tarball, that wouldn't magically make the dependency go away; it would just mean that you don't know about it until you try to run the program and it crashes.
The best way to improve backwards compatibility is to statically link the libraries used where possible, and include whatever dependencies you need in your package; that's a completely orthogonal issue to the packaging format used - if you can make a tarball whose contents have no external dependencies, then you can make a package with no external dependencies, only now you have the benefit that the package manager knows about your software.
(BTW glibc has never broken backward compatibility, nor has the deb format TTBOMK; I'd be very surprised if rpm ever has.)
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Also, I don't get the "adventurer's tavern." Just let people load a custom party and don't bother with it please. I'd rather the in-game content was more focused and in my mind the adventurer's tavern is a way to waste resources (devs, artists, etc.) that could be going to improve the actual game content and game on a problem that could be solved by using character creation 6 times and take like 30 minutes of 1 developer's time.
For some of us it's a major selling point. You would have to be a fan of the Icewind Dale games to appreciate it though.
Agreed. To me it was the best part in the Icewind Dale series. Adding the possibility for us to have both BG and IWD style companions in one game is brilliant. Everybody wins.
Er, IWD didn't have that. It had exactly what khango is suggesting, so not sure quite what your point is.
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I pose that, limiting the locations where the player may save, would greatly limit save scumming in general.
This is the worst idea I've ever heard. Your idea is bad, and you should feel bad.
There is no discussion that can possibly be had here. You can't get anywhere sensible from this starting point. It's moronic, awful, unspeakably terrible, a repetition of the worst game design errors ever made.
Go away and play on your XBox or whatever it is you do for fun, rather than trying to ruin other people's games with your idiocy.
/ignore
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I'd be very surprised if it didn't hit three million anyway - a bigger question is whether it's possible to get as high as double fine, which doesn't look enormously likely, but not out of the question.
I really liked the last two stretch goals for Planetary Annihilation, which were an orchestral score and a project documentary. PA had an even bigger upturn at the end than most game Kickstarters (which tend to have a large boost in the last day or two), so I think those stretch goals probably helped.
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While I like FoW, I'd also like enemies to be allowed "shouts" that draw in other combatants within hearing range. One of the flaws of BG is that you could move forward in small increments and draw in only a subset of the combatants, allowing you to steadily whittle the enemy force down without exposing yourself to significant risk.
Some of the AI mods added exactly this, and it worked pretty well IIRC.
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I think the sound of a game is more important than the graphics, and can often be the most memorable feature. A major factor that helps define how much I enjoy a game is the quality of its soundtrack and ambient sound. I'm probably more likely to play a game based on how it sounds than on any other single factor.
A focus on the highest possible sound quality is therefore extremely important to me, so I'd be in favour of an orchestral recording so long as it doesn't come to more than a couple of hundred thousand.
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Smoothness
IE games ran at locked framerates due to the use of sprites (same as Diablo 2)
120Hz monitor and a CRT that does 120Hz as well
Used to it from FPS games I guess, you need at least 125FPS in cod4 (250 optimal) at competitive level.
My Titan Quest runs at mostly over 120FPS but when it sometimes drops below 100 there's a noticeable visual slowdown even on a lesser refresh rate.
I highly doubt it's even humanly possible to detect a difference unless there's some very fast motion on-screen. In fact most of the time unless there's sufficiently fast motion you'd just be drawing the same thing again, so there really is no difference, detectable or otherwise. Try playing BG2 in GemRB some time, it can get to hundreds of FPS, but you'd never notice because for most of those frames there's literally not a single pixel on screen that's changed
. With a game like this I'd be surprised if you could even notice the difference between 30fps and 60fps most of the time.I'm not saying that there is no difference in general, or that you're making it up when you say you can notice it (I have on very rare occasions wished I could play WoW at 120fps myself), just that in this circumstance I'm highly skeptical that it would make any difference.
Also if there are pre-made animations (not sure if that's something we'll be seeing) it wouldn't make much sense to render them at a frame rate that can only be displayed on a monitor that costs more than most people would spend on an entire computer.
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I had asked Feargus how much advancement there would be in PE on KS. I was worried that since this was gonna be part of a series, there there might not enough advancement in the first installment. According to Feargus, leveling in PE will be comparable to like 12ish levels in the old IE games. This leaves room for more advancement in a sequel.
I'm ok with that amount, but I don't know how I feel about them planning things in this game around the assumption that there will be a sequel. Just seems like a bad idea.
I disagree - unless it's taken to the extent of intentionally not doing cool things because they're saving them for a later game that might not happen.
As long as it doesn't actively harm the gameplay in the first game it makes a lot more sense to plan for a sequel than to try to bolt one on to the end later.
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Why is there even a discussion
Because if everything people suggest here were made optional then the first thing every player would have to do is wade through 400 checkboxes to figure out which options they want. And I think this question is one of the ones least amenable to being made an option since it has significant implications for encounter design. Though I guess they could disable FF on super-easy mode (let's call it 'storybook mode') and not even bother about balancing the game for that mode.
Having an option for disabling FF seems sufficiently extreme that it feels a lot like just having an option for 'automatically win fights'. Well maybe we should have that too in storybook mode...
That is not true, and you are just being hyperbolic.
I'm really not.
How do you design encounters if you know that some people, on otherwise identical difficulty settings, are going to choose one option that makes combat several times easier than otherwise? I don't really think you can. I think the only option is to design for one of those settings and accept that the other is either going to be trivial or brutal depending on which you picked. Can you imagine how trivial BG2 would have been if you could just throw a fireball into a crowded battlefield whenever you felt like it?
Having it tied directly into the difficulty setting is more workable because generally the encounters are going to be balanced differently there anyway, but even then this would make such an enormous difference that it would mean a huge jump between settings.
I'm not in principle against having this sort of feature baked into the lower difficulty settings, as long as the standard difficulty is balanced assuming normal rules, but having a toggle-able option sounds terrible.
Oh, I also think it would be nice to have a FF toggle independent of difficulty level. Ideally, all the options (spawn numbers, AI, FF, resting restrictions - if resting is needed, please god, not this! ;-) - and so on) should be toggles. As you increase difficulty levels (easy, normal, hard, superterriblehard and such, that appropriate toggled should be activated. If there is something someone doesn't like, they can turn it off. Or on. Or whatever.Read around this forum and see how many controversial ideas people have which they think have no reason not to be a toggle. If you say 'these are the four options there should be' that's all well and good, but what about a guy that wants a different four options? Whose opinion is more valid? Do you decide to put them all in? You could spend an hour at the beginning of the game just deciding what options to tick! It would be impossible to have all the combinations gameplay tested because the combinatorial explosion would mean that there could be literally millions of variations.
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Why is there even a discussion
Because if everything people suggest here were made optional then the first thing every player would have to do is wade through 400 checkboxes to figure out which options they want. And I think this question is one of the ones least amenable to being made an option since it has significant implications for encounter design. Though I guess they could disable FF on super-easy mode (let's call it 'storybook mode') and not even bother about balancing the game for that mode.
Having an option for disabling FF seems sufficiently extreme that it feels a lot like just having an option for 'automatically win fights'. Well maybe we should have that too in storybook mode...
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I give it a C-. Could troll harder.
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An example of a bad dilemma which felt stupid and forced:
Fairly near the beginning of The Witcher there's a point where you have two options. One is to allow a group of terrorists (that you may well sympathise with to an extent, but are very clearly terrorists) to smuggle weapons into the city, and the other is to turn against them - possibly even to butcher them; I don't recall for certain. The choice felt forced and unnatural because both options were clearly stupid and there was no middle ground. In my experience this is how 'dilemmas' in games tend to work out, but in reality there's almost always middle ground.
I'm trying to understand your point, so please bare with me. Assume that you, as a Witcher, came across this group of terroists. How would you handle the situation/ how should this situation have been presented to you? Or is your issue with the situation itself? If so, what was wrong about the way it was handled?
Well this one's actually fairly simple in that I don't actually want to hand them over to the corrupt guards who are likely to torture and abuse them, but there's no way in hell that I want to help them get a load of weapons into a populous area.
I'd like some possibility to make an attempt at persuasion, or inspect exactly what they're trying to smuggle in and make a more informed decision, or even to threaten them if absolutely necessary, or basically anything that would fall between the for <--> against gulf. At the time my personal response was 'your cause has some merit, but you guys are bastards; find a better way to sort this out that isn't just endless pointless escalation'. Just because two groups of people hate each other doesn't automatically mean that I should have to pick one to side with and one to screw over.
It's very uncommon that there really is a choice of two extremes like this in reality, and stands out to me as something that's obviously a game mechanic designed to increase the level of drama. Not always, but often enough to be a real pattern.
(I'm happier if the choice is more of a 'do something' versus 'do nothing' rather than two arbitrary somethings.)
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Realistically I think dilemmas are a crutch for not-so-great writing. They almost always feel forced.
That's a pretty ridiculous blanket statement, especially when it comes to video game writing.
Games themselves could be easily seen as a series of dilemmas and problems for a player to figure out.
Okay, give me some examples.
Examples of what? Problem and dilemma solving in video games?
Yes, done well. Basically something where the player has to make a choice between two options that sound like they would have outcomes undesirable for the player, but where the decision feels realistic and not like you're just arbitrarily told to make a choice between dying by fire or drowning, if you see what I mean.
I wouldn't count situations where the choice is between options which are obviously evil but benefit the player, and ones which are obviously good but don't, because I think a dilemma has to have more to it than 'this is good for me, but that is good for you'. I realise we may disagree on that point.
An example of a bad dilemma which felt stupid and forced:
Fairly near the beginning of The Witcher there's a point where you have two options. One is to allow a group of terrorists (that you may well sympathise with to an extent, but are very clearly terrorists) to smuggle weapons into the city, and the other is to turn against them - possibly even to butcher them; I don't recall for certain. The choice felt forced and unnatural because both options were clearly stupid and there was no middle ground. In my experience this is how 'dilemmas' in games tend to work out, but in reality there's almost always middle ground.
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So, serious question: why are we talking about this? What do we want to get out of it? I don't really understand this discussion but I might have a better idea if those were spelled out to me.
I think its a question of balancing the difficulty. Do they design the encounters assuming you are resting between every fight or do they design encounters assuming you only rest occasionally?
Well if we're talking about encounter design in that way, then I'm definitely in favour of assuming you only rest after a sensible timeframe, but not enforcing that. After all, it's no fun if you get a couple of really unfortunate rolls in a fight but the game forces you to press on because "that shouldn't have been much of a challenge", and I don't see healing up after a hard fight as abusing a game mechanic.
(This kind of mirrors my feelings on the encounter design in IWD, which has for example a group of goblins in the first area, and if they happen to hit a thief or a wizard then they'll one-shot them. You can try to keep any party members with <8 HP back out of the fight, but the goblins all have ranged weapons, and they outnumber you. A couple of lucky hits and now your party is completely boned.)
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This would be Baldur's Gate, you can save & rest at any point in the game.
As a point of order, that's not true at all. There are loads of places where you can't rest, and in the wilderness areas (where you typically can) there's about a 75% probability that you'll be attacked partway through the attempt.
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Without resting in the game it wouldn't have been the same game, instead it was released to have that feature. What if the developer's had gotten cold feet and removed the feature from the game? Would it have been the same experience? Would we even be talking about it today?
What would that even mean? You're talking about having an entirely different magic system? I don't think it would have been anywhere near as good if it had used a mana-based system, which was the only other system in common use at the time.
It simply means that Baldur's Gate would have been different game without the Rest mechanic, and from reading your post we agree/are on the same level.
Fair enough. I'm not sure where you can get from there though - I guess you're just trying to point out that the system used by a game has a large bearing on the enjoyability, even if the plot, characters, etc are the same.
To be honest I don't really get why there's so much discussion about preventing rest. I mean, what's the goal? Just to make the game harder? I don't see how it would do that, but I do see how it could do the opposite.
Let's look at Baldur's Gate: at some point you've fought through as much as you can take, you have no spells left, and your party has 15 HP between them. At this point basically your only option is to find somewhere safe to rest, and do so. What does it matter if you've been awake for 8 hours to get to that point, or 48? If you can't rest for another 8 hours, pretty much your only option is to leave the game running for an hour of real time while you do something else. It's not like you can just say 'I'll be hardcore and fight on anyway' - you'd die the moment any enemy lands a blow.
If instead you use something other than a rest mechanic to throttle the rate at which people cast spells, what does that actually gain? In all the games I've ever played that's led to less downtime required, not more.
So, serious question: why are we talking about this? What do we want to get out of it? I don't really understand this discussion but I might have a better idea if those were spelled out to me.
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Realistically I think dilemmas are a crutch for not-so-great writing. They almost always feel forced.
That's a pretty ridiculous blanket statement, especially when it comes to video game writing.
Games themselves could be easily seen as a series of dilemmas and problems for a player to figure out.
Okay, give me some examples.
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Without resting in the game it wouldn't have been the same game, instead it was released to have that feature. What if the developer's had gotten cold feet and removed the feature from the game? Would it have been the same experience? Would we even be talking about it today?
What would that even mean? You're talking about having an entirely different magic system? I don't think it would have been anywhere near as good if it had used a mana-based system, which was the only other system in common use at the time.
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I doubt they're likely to know for some time. A this stage we don't even know what delivery mechanisms Unity will support for Linux, or if that entire problem is left to the individual developer.
(Of course the engine choice doesn't mandate any particular method, but if for example the IDE has a 'click here to build Ubuntu package' button, then that's the kind of thing that might be an influencing factor. For what little it's worth, the only Unity game I know with a published Linux version is Rochard, which is distributed as 64/32-bit tarballs. That might be taken to imply that the Unity IDE doesn't have a built-in method of generating anything more specific, but who can say.)
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Overall, that is the sort of moral 'dilemma' I support.
I disagree strongly. I hate when games provide you with moral dilemmas in which both possible options are clearly stupid. For this example, where's the 'rescue him then turn them all in to the proper authorities' option?
Realistically I think dilemmas are a crutch for not-so-great writing. They almost always feel forced.
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I thought the camera in DA:O was unforgivable. It's clear that they never actually intended you to play the game with a pseudo-isometric viewpoint, and just added that in as a ticklist item; I can't think of many games where I've felt so much like I'm fighting the camera. Dragon Age also committed the crime of locking your viewport to the region immediately surrounding your characters. Overall it had the effect of making the game feel like a cheap console port, which might not be far from the truth now that I think about it.
In general, I've found that games which allow you to rotate the camera are universally awful, because the designers start building the levels on the basis that you're perfectly happy to be spinning the damn thing around every three seconds, making camera rotation completely non-optional. I never, ever, want to be required to mess about with a camera in order to play a game, unless you count scrolling the viewport.
(This issue is the number one reason that I don't like modern RPGs, even the ones which are generally highly regarded. The Witcher would probably have been a great isometric RPG; as it is I could never motivate myself to finish it.)
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If they announce a proper box for the CE, then that could be what makes my decision to upgrade to that tier...
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Wow, that music was top notch. Even better than Inon Zur, which is saying something!
Maybe it's just me, but I can think of at least 3 other composers known for their video game scores I'd rather hire than Inon Zur.
I wonder if they're the same three I'm thinking of...
(Actually, I'm thinking of four, but I'm pretty sure the fourth isn't one of them. No wait, five. How could I forget Darren Korb?)
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If your desire for delayed consequences is due to "save scumming", that's not a good reason for this planned single player game. But of course, I find amusing that people need Iroman mode to accept the dead of their character and not load an older saved game. What forbids them from just deleting the save file themselves if the character dies? The same thing that prevents them from making back ups of their Iroman mode save file: nothing.
In any case, I was (maybe foolishly) considering as a given that actions would not only have inmediate consequences in PE.
It's not to prevent save scumming per se. It's more to allow for a more authentic or genuine role play where the PC just has to deal with the consequences of his or her actions. But, when you get immediate outcomes of certain decisions, it tends to make (some) players gravitate to decisions which gives the highest XP or loot...
But when you have options where one outcome is obviously 'better' than another, but you don't know what the consequences are until 8 hours later, all that leads to is a non-trivial number of people consulting a walkthrough every five minutes so that it doesn't happen again.
It's far better game design if the player's actions have consequences in that there are changes to the state of the world, but without there being outcomes which are obviously better than others. For a simplistic example, if I side with one guy over another, then that shouldn't mean I miss out on a quest line two chapters later, but it might mean I get a different quest line, as long as neither outcome gives phat loot that the other doesn't.
. With a game like this I'd be surprised if you could even notice the difference between 30fps and 60fps most of the time.
Update #20: Lore Tidbits, Campaign Almanac, Big Ol' Stretch Goals, and... Environment Screenshot!
in Pillars of Eternity: Announcements & News
Posted