PsychoBlonde

Actually, I would really like this feature. Running into a narrow valley and then suddenly *fwwt, fwwt* you're taking damage and you can't tell who's shooting at you . . . I also hope they do some interesting stuff with up/down in the game and so forth. I'd really like to see abilities that let you circumvent switchbacks and so forth, so that if you're in that narrow valley getting plinked by archers, maybe your wizard can d-door to the top of the cliff and throw a fireball. Or maybe he'll manage to get himself skewered 15 times. All kinds of options.

Please do.

I'd just like to note that not everything needs to add directly to the story in order to add significantly to the game, and having systems like these in place does allow for storytelling options that might not otherwise exist. I thought Dragon Age: Origins would have been a superior game if the battle of Ostagar took place toward the end of autumn and the darkspawn advance was slowed to a crawl by the advancing winter. It would have explained why you had time to run around and do all that stuff yet it was still urgent to get it done before spring. Plus the misery of being constantly on the road during the winter would have been an interesting touch, and I think it would have been interesting to have the final battle at Denerim taking place against the background of spring greening. Plus the color palette used in a lot of the game had a very autumnal or wintery feel.

The absence of straightforward "romance", sexism, racism, and "class" struggles. Oh, and very little use of four-letter words. One of the things I liked about the character of Fenris in Dragon Age 2, for instance, was how hard he would try initially to be fair to you about mages even though it was obvious he was an emotional wreck underneath. It gave him a weirdly flat affect when you first met him. Anders' initial flat affect just felt like poor voice-acting, though, so it's hard to say. But what I most like to see is people treating subjects with calm seriousness instead of feeling the need to make constant jokes about sex or (worse) dissolve into hysterics. I HATE it when the writers idea of "maturity" means "people act like they're in The Real Housewives of Eternity". Adults DO NOT act like that. The most telling sign of maturity is when you start to qualify your statements instead of spouting all kinds of absolute generalizations. If you want to see real adults reacting to stressful situations, watch, say, Chopped on Food Network. Even in the throes of hideous disappointment, people are polite and respectful, most of them remain cheerful and take their defeat in stride. Most of the real emotional display comes from the people who WON, not those who lost. Dial up the subtlety. You have to tell someone that their husband was killed in battle? Instead of "OH GOD, WHATEVER WILL I DO!!!! *sob*" How about "I . . . thank you for telling me. Please, if you would . . . I need some time." Oh, not that there shouldn't be hysterics and lunatics around, just that they should be anomalous instead of ubiquitous. Oh, and don't make me play a 16-year-old PC who is an uninformed boob and has never read a book or traveled outside of StartingVillage. Let me play as the Wise Voice Of Reason and Knowledge if I choose.

I don't have a huge preference on how it is implemented mechanically (as long as it's done in an interesting way), but I do think having at least some language barriers in the game could add a lot. One potentially interesting mechanic might be to translate a certain number of words based on your character's Int or language skill, so then you, the player, get to try and figure out how to respond. So a low int character would get: Fre selthenarl bi kath devre dragon mer elain! whereas a high int character would get you: You smell like kath devre dragon elain! Whereas an actual member of the race/culture would get: You smell like rancid dragon piss! Edit: Although, it occurs to me that localizing this might be a nightmare.

I do find that in Dragon Age and Mass Effect and other cinematic games, the opportunity to use just a facial expression or body language for communication is ignored. Another one that bugs me is that they have a voiced protagonist in these games, so they pretty much have no choice but to give the protagonist SOME personality, yet they don't take advantage of the opportunity to have the PC be a fully-realized character. I don't mean fully-dictated, I mean, fully-realized. They still have dialog like this: Tali: I am on my walkabout. (I forget the exact term she used, bear with me.) Shepard: I've never heard of this. Tali: Oh when my people reach a certain age, we leave and travel through the galaxy. We seek out valuable resources which determine our status when we return. Shepard: oh. Moving on. Instead of: Tali: I'm on my walkabout. Shepard: You think tracking the Geth will be of value to your people? Same information conveyed, half as many lines, and Shepard isn't portrayed as somebody who's never been outside of Podunk, Iowa. When the PC is unvoiced, you can get away with having their major contribution to conversation be an endless list of: 1. What's that? 2. How do I get there? 3. How many do you need? 4. I don't know what that is. 5. Tell me more. When the PC is voiced and animated, lists like that look and sound idiotic. It becomes vital to for the PC to deliver just as much characterization and information as the NPCs do.

I don't consider graphics to be the be-all and end-all of the game's "mechanics". In fact, they're usually pretty far down my list as far as important mechanics go. I want the most updated possible of user interfaces, primarily. I want to be able to move interface elements around at will, hide those I don't want, bring up those I do. I want to click TWICE to activate any ability: once to select the ability, once to target it. Being able to click once would be awesome beyond belief (they managed this in NwN 2 because you could set it so selected abilities auto-targeted your current target). Three times is tolerable but not good. Anything over three requires an interface redesign. I want to be able to assign hotkeys like a mad typist. I want to be able to scroll through available targets using only the keyboard or the mouse wheel. I want to be able to play the entire game without moving my hands from my preferred positions on keyboard and mouse. Compared to stuff like that, who cares whether they have active shadowed bling-mapped turbo-shaded auto-zoomed whatever-the-jargon'd one-inch-high characters or ones from two technology passes ago. NOT ME.

I find quite a bit of emotional intensity in Dragon Age, but probably not where you'd expect (and it's different on different playthroughs). I don't think this sort of thing can be made fully consistent. The best you can do is to throw a ton of darts and hope some of them strike a nerve. When you try to make big darts, they are usually laughable or squirm-producing when they miss.

That's lovely and realistic and doesn't work at all in the lovely and UNREALISTIC top-down view where the entire world is a black fog until you physically go walk into it. It's not like you can climb a hill and stare off into the distance in an isometric game. It just doesn't work. Think in game terms, not in "real life" terms. The problem with stealth scouting is that the game is often designed in such a way that stealth is VERY limited in its usefulness and implemented in such a way that it will get you in trouble more often than not. I'd like to see some options for scouting which are actual advantages instead of just an enormous risk. Granted, I'd like to see some options for stealth that are actual advantages instead of an enormous risk. DDO does this quite well, for instance, you can use the Bluff skill while stealthed to pull enemies away from their group without triggering anyone else in that group. You can also initiate Assassinate attacks (provided you are an assassin rogue) from stealth, instantly killing many enemies. There is a distinct difference between being stealthy and being invisible. Light conditions matter. It's actually quite fun--a good rogue in DDO with patience can pick off entire groups of enemies a few at a time, but it by no means makes them the Uber Class, it's quite balanced.

One thing that would sometimes bug me in Baldur's Gate was that there was limited ability to scout--if you stealthed your rogue and sent them on ahead, frequently they'd get spotted and ganked before you could get the rest of the party to them. That, and enemies had exactly the same visual radius you did. This was particularly bad for encounters that would trigger dialog, because the INSTANT you got within range of them, they would start talking and you had no chance to do anything useful with your party formation. I think it'd be really cool if there were some modes in the game that let you alter your visual range, so you could see enemies without triggering them. Maybe tie it to specific classes, like stealth for rogues and farsight for rangers or whatever.

Yeah, if I were going to do it, I'd concentrate it in the areas of the game people could be expected to visit over and over (towns, outlying farms, roads) and fill the other areas with evergreens, hostile rocky environments--all kinds of dramatic landscape where you wouldn't have a lot of seasonal change, and what you would have could be covered easily by changing the weather animation from "rainy" to "snowy" and MAYBE putting down a couple dabs of snow here and there for effect. If you were even smarter, you'd put in some prepared splashes of gravel or mud, and then all you'd have to do would be to palette-swap those to a white version. Probably a good 85% of it could be automated, and it'd only take some attention in those few town and road areas.

Also, historically, the percentage of people who had the know-how and means to produce weaponry was much, much smaller, and the weapons themselves weren't mass-produced. So if a mage made a magical firearm, he'd probably have that firearm on him or nearby him until someone took it from his cold, dead hands. It wouldn't be the same as a mage making 5000 of the things and selling them to every yahoo who wandered by. Even if there is a relatively small weapon-producing population, the absolute numbers may still be very large. A group of adventurers doing a LOT of traveling and encountering a LOT of opposition may be able to amass quite a collection.

Most of my playthroughs of Baldur's Gate take at least 150 in-game days, which should be at least one if not two seasonal transitions. PE is going to be a bigger game, AND if they use a resting mechanic that's not centered around 8 hours, plus having the augmented travel times, it'll probably take significantly longer. It's not a hugely expensive thing if you design for it from the beginning--all you have to do is have a palette swap for trees and grass and a snowy version with a couple of snow piles, and they're already talking about having background animations and so forth. You just make it so that in the "spring", the grass is a lighter green and some of the trees have white/pink/purple flowers on them, with speckles of color on the grass. In the summer, everything is a deeper green. In fall, you get orange and gold colors. It doesn't have to be this huge complex thing in order to look really cool--in fact, it'll probably look better if it's more subtle. Put in a few party comments like "ooh, it's cold this morning" or "gonna be a hot day" and you have a functioning season system for very little effort. You can even drastically reduce the effort by having only a few areas with significant deciduous foliage, and tons of evergreens of all sorts.

Having areas be different during the day and night dovetails very nicely with you always arriving in the day and being able to "sleep until dark"--so you can explore the area on purpose during both the day and the night. Gothic had great NPC schedules--they'd be doing their stuff but they were always around the same location so they were still easy to find, and the little houses didn't have doors (there was ONE, count it ONE area transition in the ENTIRE GAME) so if they were inside sleeping you could actually stand in the door way and shout at them to wake them up. Now, if they have schedules like in Oblivion where people will randomly walk halfway across the map every couple of days, yeah, that sucks. You NEEDED the quest helper to find people in that game. In Gothic, you didn't. (Gothic also was much more exploration-based so there were a lot fewer quests that involved repeatedly talking to the same person.)

Most RPGs seem to have a significant problem with this whole day/night concept. Oh, sure, there will be changing light levels, and at night it's dark, but there are still numerous manifest absurdities like: 1. When you travel between areas, you walk all day and all night, sometimes for days, until you arrive at your destination, usually at 3 am, and always EXHAUSTED if the game (Baldur's Gate, imma lookin' at you) has a fatigue mechanic. 2. Stores close in towns but in non-town areas everybody apparently stays awake and alert at all hours, just in case someone wanders by in need of a quest or some dialog. 3. Day and night last EXACTLY THE SAME LENGTH OF TIME. 4. The rest system is set for you to either rest a set amount of time (wasteful), or to rest a certain number of hours, making you do math in order to not waste valuable daylight hours. So, here's some suggested fixes: 1. Travel times should assume that you will stop when it gets dark and not resume until it gets light. If you really want to go nuts, there could be a "forced march" option (assuming that there are any times when it actually matters whether it takes you 14 hours or 24 to get from point A. to point B., if there aren't, who cares). This will also mean that you will arrive at your destination DURING THE DAY. Granted, it might be like, 2 minutes from nightfall, in which case, yeah, it makes sense that your party would be fatigued on arrival. But this should be pretty dang rare. 2. Areas other than towns should be different during the day and during the night. Anyone here play the Quest for Glory games? Wasn't it cool how, if you went wandering around outside town at night, you'd get jumped by much nastier creatures, and other odd night-related things would happen? Yeah. More that, please. There's no reason why the day/night change just has to involve it being darker or lighter or oranger outside. You could have weird mystical glows show up around ancient ruins. Nocturnal animals could come out. People could make camp and get some sleep. 3. This is not true anywhere on Earth except for 2 days a year. It can't possibly be that hard to code a variable day length based on the time of year. Also, changing seasons would be really, really, incredibly, awesome. Indescribably awesome, and this is something you could actually do reasonably well with this kind of game setup. I'd suggest having some transition animations (like the day/night cinematic in Baldur's Gate), but that don't just do day/night transitions but also seasonal transitions. Generally when there's a big seasonal transition, there's a change in the weather that results in thunderstorms/rain/snowstorms/a hurricane. I'd be perfectly happy and I think maybe a lot of other people would be, too, if when it comes time for the seasons to change, you get a little popup about it being the "first snow of the year" and then it switches to the snow-covered area version. The more subtle seasonal changes (spring-summer, summer-autumn) could be handled pretty easily with just some palette color swaps on trees and (maybe) grass. 4. Let us rest until "time of day" (dawn, noon, nightfall, midnight) instead of a set number of hours or a chosen number of hours. And for chrissakes have the stores open at dawn and close at dusk instead of, like, 9am as in Oblivion or Skyrim. That was bloody annoying. Or just let us sell our stuff (maybe for crappy prices, hah) at the taverns, they're open all night anyway.

Tons. Dungeons and Dragons Online has an excellent mechanic for this--you can only rest at special "rest shrines" which are placed at infrequent intervals, and depending on the difficulty setting you chose when you entered the quest, there's a cooldown on the shrine or you may only be able to use it once, period. It doesn't hurt that ALL classes (not just casters) have access to abilities that can only be recharged by using a rest shrine, so deciding whether or not to use a given shrine is not a caster-centric mechanic. There are also a TON of subtleties to the way this works in DDO. Sometimes, when you pass a shrine in a given quest, it's not possible to come back to it. Some you can only get back to if a caster in your party has the Dimension Door spell. (Which is awesome, by the way, it's fantastic to see a computer game get some actual USE out of these kinds of spells.) Any active effects you have up on your character (except some very special "lasting" effects) disappear when you rest--but they don't go away when the person who cast them rests. So you will see casters burning through their remaining spell points at a shrine buffing party members, then rest to recover their SP. This mechanic ALSO means that the game can contain fights where in order to get buffs over the entire party, your party healer or caster might have to burn half their SP bar. Resource management is a very fun and interesting part of DDO. Attrition is a lot of the game, particularly since the way the game is designed you really want to do a quest all in one go--you lose so much experience if you have to leave the quest and go back in that it's better to just start the thing over from scratch. Or, there's the suggestion I made in the Degenerate Rest thread I created. It is possible to have a viable resting/preparing mechanic of some kind without any sort of something-per-rest system, whether it be spells, smite evils, wild shapes, whatever. You can also make this mechanic in such a way that while it requires people to eventually rest, it also discourages them from doing it really often. Gothic had a fantastic rest mechanic based off the fact that it was just REALLY FREAKIN DARK at night and even with a light source you had a good chance of getting lost/running off a cliff/running straight into six wolves which would tear you to pieces. You did your adventuring during the DAY in that game, and you went and found a bed to sleep in after dark. (You had to rest in a bed.) The fact that you got your health back from sleeping was incidental. (Oddly enough, since the NPC's were often using the crafting stations during the day and interfering with you, it was usually more advantageous for you to do your crafting at NIGHT when they were in bed.) They also did a good job of managing the convenience of this because you could just "sleep till dawn" (or sleep till dark, or sleep till noon, or sleep till midnight--there were some things you needed to do at particular times of day). It was pretty much instantaneous, and you didn't have to do any math to figure out how many hours to sleep in order to get up when it was light enough to adventure without missing any of the day. It was about a thousand times better than the day/night/sleep mechanics in, say, Oblivion--for instance, in Gothic you had to actually run everywhere until fairly late in the game. This was actually really fun--the game "world" was very small but also incredibly convoluted so it didn't take long to get anywhere but there was always tons of cool stuff to mess with on the way. The fast travel you got was actual teleport, so it was still the same time of day when you arrived as when you left.

My favorite has to be escaping from the Peragus IV outpost in KotOR2. I really do enjoy the more puzzle/maze oriented quests in DDO: The Pit, Spies in the House, the Crucible, Chains of Flame, The Chamber of Raiyum. What I DON'T enjoy is trying to do those quests with a group of people who don't know what to do and then won't or can't follow instructions and then whine incessantly about how bad the quest sucks.

What's this "should"? According to whom? For what purpose? If you actually LIKE to play the game by letting the chips fall where they may, then you don't have to RESIST doing so. So what you're asking for is the ability to select a mode that FORCES you to play in a way that, by your own admission, you DON'T enjoy? Fine, whatever. It never ceases to amaze me how people invent reasons for themselves to feel guilt about things and then expect somebody else to come along and fix it.

Erm, what ASPECT of the combat are we talking about, here? Because I couldn't pick an answer due to that bit about it having to be "challenging". For me, the combat needs to be *fun*. This is not the same thing as being "challenging"--getting your keys out of the toilet after someone flushed them is challenging. It is NOT fun. I'm pretty good at making my own fun, but the game does need to help me by providing a lot of diverse and interesting options for me to fiddle around with AND an incentive to fiddle around with them. A good user interface is also essential. But "challenging"? This is usually used as a synonym for "requiring fiddly exploitation of the game mechanics". It doesn't mean the game is more interesting, fun, or complex.

Are you KIDDING me? In Lothering after the fight with Loghain's men, you can walk straight up to the bartender and say "Sorry about the mess . . ." There was an (extremely) rare random encounter in the overworld map where you could find "The One Ring". There was also one involving an axe stuck in a stump that could not be removed. When trying to talk to a merchant about Sten's sword, if Sten would present you could turn to him and say "Rip his arms off" There were at least a dozen movie and book references, if not substantially more. I'm all for references. Granted, the degree of subtlety kind of depends on what you're doing at the time.

Well, assuming you weren't playing as the Evilist Bastard Who Ever Lived anyway. Which you could TOTALLY do. Granted, if you're evil and evil things happen, that might still constitute a happy ending. Not a conventional one, mind you . . . It'd be nice if people distinguish between "good" and "happy" though.

Dualyield? Is that, like, one nuke in each hand? Sorry, I couldn't resist. Sorry. I'll go now.

And tequila comes with a lime.

"More or less" happy != conventionally happy. What kind of an ending is "well, I got my soul back, but millions of people will continue to suffer horrible torturous dissolution in the afterlife, many through no fault of their own." Yay.

Overused, and they were uninspired when the Greeks came up with them. Honestly, most of them sound like stoned frat boys trying to impress you. "Wait, wait, how about this . . . it has the WINGS OF A BEE, the HEAD OF A TIGER, the ASS of, um, a . . . FISH, and the, um, the . . . the . . . BODY HAIR of a SNAKE!! YEAH!!!" "Dude, snakes don't have body hair." "Body hair MADE OUT OF SNAKES, I meant!" "Duuuuude."