Stun

Ooh! Wow. I missed this thread. I'd like to say I'm fashionably late, but I'm not. I just friggin missed this thread. I just discovered it Right now. Sure, If they're dim-witted knee-jerk reactionaries. Which they definitely proved to be. Because She's Right. She's spot on. Nevermind the fact that she makes those comments as a Bioware writer, who has every reason to hold such a viewpoint (Ironically enough, the only thing you *can* skip through in a bioware game is.... the cutscenes. Ie. HER stuff.... the stuff that She and the other Writers have written. Go Figure.) Oh, and since when is giving the player a gameplay choice in a video game ever a bad idea? But forget all that noise. The fact of the matter is that DA2 (for example) would have been a MUCH better game if it had a skip combat button. I know *I* sure as hell found myself wishing I could skip past those stupid, boring street fights every night in Kirkwall. Didn't you?

A crappy hand-holding system where Finger of Death, Disintigrate, and Slay Living = False advertising. A silly, non-believable system where Bandits, thugs, and murderers say they're gonna kill you, but suddenly display mercy, by just knocking you out. A laughable system where hungry savage beasts with big sharp teeth don't eat you. They just knock you unconscious....for sport.

Well, in the BG and IWD games, your companions can be chunked. They die and their portraits flat out disappear, so you can't even ressurect them. And of course, if your main character dies, the game IS over. You must reload from a previous save if you wish to continue.

Yep. I have no idea why just about every gaming company has collectively decided to pretty much scrap perma-death from games. There are 2 types of gamers in the world. Those who want perma-death, and those who simply reload when a battle turns fatal. So...OK, Am I missing something, here? These two types aren't mutually exclusive. A perma-death system effectively satisfies both groups. Oh that's right. I forgot. There's a 3rd group. The Gaming companies themselves (who shall remain nameless) who love to tie your companions directly to the contrived main plots of their games. These companies don't want perma-death. Because if one of your companions suffers perma-death, the plot gets broken. So the solution (their idea of a solution) is to make combat non-deadly....like Golf, or some other non-deadly sport -- instead of doing what they should be doing, Which is: not writing stories where everyone in the player's party is friggin plot critical in the first place.

In the IE games, there was a 'select all' button that became quite useful for those easier fights where you didn't feel the need to stop and assign everyone a unique action. For example, you come across a group of about 5 Orcs. No need for micro-management in such a situation. Simply click "select all" then point your curser at one of the orcs, and your entire party will just start attacking the orc you clicked on until he dies, then they'll automatically move on to the next orc, then the next, then the next until there's none left.

I hope that doesn't mean too much micro management, and that they can handle their inventories on their own if you so please. Or better yet, have a large shared party inventory, instead of being split between multiple characters. God I hope not. Never played a game with decent enough AI that I could trust my companions to intelligently "handle their inventory on their own". In systems like that, your companions inevidably make the most retarded choices. They'll use up the charges on their best wands when fighting.... goblins. They'll chug down all their healing potions when the fight is almost won. They'll use up all their summoning devices regardless of the threat in front of them etc. And shared inventory? Kill it with fire, as you guys like to say, here. No. The way the IE games did it worked well, and with a little bit of 21st century tweaking, they can take the IE systems and make them work VERY well. PS: Micro-management is a loaded term. There's a negative stigma attached to it that doesn't do it justice. How about "Full Control". Yeah, when I'm playing a party-based RPG, I want full control.

I'll gleefully say yes to every conceivable type of environment. And to the unconceivable types too. I'd rather this game not be one of those "theme" type games like Icewind dale or whatever, because inevidably one gets sick of seeing snow all the time. or Deserts all the time, or forests all the time. Give us every type of environment you can think of. Give us a sprawling urban slum that we can get away from as we head towards a thick forest that we must pass to get to a desert, that gives way to a frozen tundra with igloo filled villages at the base of a massive mountain range, which houses a cavern containing an underground dwarven city, that goes so deep that we start seeing rivers of magma and races of subterainian monsters not yet documented by the civilizations miles above them.

Cool thread. The bulk of my gripes have already been mentioned over and over here, so I won't be overly redundant by posting a list. But there is one thing I don't want to see in PE, which hasn't been mentioned yet (or at least I haven't seen it) Big Numbers. Armor Ratings in the 1000s, Attack scores in the 1000s, and of course Damage scales that start at double digits and go all the way up to the 1000s. Here's an example. In DA:O, an armor rating of 42 was....Great. it represented the pinnacle. Neither you nor the enemies could get much higher than this. Fast forward to DA2... where you start the game with an armor rating somewhere around 300. And by midgame if your armor rating wasn't in the thousands, you really weren't armored properly. By end game it wasn't at all unusual to have an armor rating of 2,956. Ridiculous. Whats the point of such a high number system, when the exact same Armor effect could be achieved by using smaller numbers? Actually, there's an answer to that. True story: This was brought up on a thread at BSN and got a developer response (Mike Laidlaw I believe) He flat out said: "We use big numbers because gamers like big numbers. Big numbers evoke emotional satisfaction." I say BS to that. What he means is KIDS like seeing big numbers. Kids can relate to big numbers because 10,000 looks more 'awesome' at first glance than 50. Never mind the system itself. Nevermind the fact that 50 can actually represent something more powerful than 10,000.

I have to say, my favorite party member in NWN 2 was Bishop. Especially because of what happened during the seige. And Bishop ego-strokes the Player all the time. He tells you from the start that he respects your harborman toughness. Then later he happily accepts his role as your "tracker".... then at the end of the game, even as he refuses to fight by your side, he still gives an entire speech about how great you are.

LOL I predict that within 2 days, he will have received about 1000 #1 candles in the mail, and more fan art than his office can ever hold.

If it's using the same engine as wasteland 2, then you're going to be disappointed in the Zoom feature. It doesn't zoom in nearly as close as you apparently think it will.

True. If you're looking "down" (toon is facing the camera) you can see that your character is wearing silver covered armor, and a helmet with horns, or the purple elven chain. Can you see the texture and design details of any of that (let alone the fact that your gloves don't match your boots)? Nope. But You could if you zoomed closer... to maybe 5 feet away and at eye level... no wait, those games didn't let you do that. And neither will PE. This whole discussion is so much ado about nothing.

You do if you're playing a halfling. lol And even if you're not. TOEE has cloaks. Totally visable, sure, and they manage to overshadow and cover pretty much everything else you're wearing. So the "important" issue becomes "what's my cloak look like?" Well, I really liked the look of Senshock's cloak. and the Fire temple cloaks look nice too. But I'm certainly not going to wear either one when I just got done crafting myself a Cloak of resistance +5.

Played them all so many times that I no longer measure their replayability by how many playthroughs I've done. Instead, I just count the number of Years I've been playing them. Except for IWD2, which I've only played once, because it bored me to tears (I still have nightmares about the ice temple)

I suspect many here are going to be sideswiped by reality when they get the game and are suddenly reminded of something the devs have been pointing out to them from the start: Isometric top down view. In the spirit of the IE Games. Meaning, being concerned about the color schemes of the gear that your 2 1/2 inch tall toons are wearing seems to be just one step above utter pointlessness. Unless you have robotic eyes.

Sure. Those two games feature a monotonous, boring cycle of fight, then watch, then fight, then watch...from the tutorial to the credits. If their stories had actually been any good, though, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. Because we wouldn't remember anything else about them. (more on this below) As for cutscenes, unless we're talking about cinematic combat finishing moves, cutscenes don't serve any purpose beyond driving a story. They are, by definition, the absense of gameplay. You cannot do anything but watch them. Overall, I don't know. I sorta agree with you. The first time I played DA2, it felt like a bad MMO. Combat DID kinda feel overbearing in relation to the story, but IMO, that probably has more to do with the story just being an unengaging mass of literary kaka, instead of Combat being the focus of the game. Because the game Does drip with story. Even Varric's weapon is used as a story theme. I will point out, however, that for me, unless a game's story is absolutely mindblowingly fantastic (Ie. Planescape Torment's), I will need some form of competative diversion (ie. decent combat) to keep my attention, otherwise I see no point in sitting in front of my computer to play the damn thing, when I could, instead, lay in bed and read a book, or lounge on the couch and watch a movie, both of which tend to do stories a lot better than games do.

It just can't be done. Even aside from the funding/budget/time needed to create such a "mode". Because we're pretty much looking at mutually exclusive philosophies. A game with a "no combat" mode would have character classes but no point to them. Whole pages of combat skills that go completely unused. Whole questlines that wouldn't make sense. Whole categories of loot that the player would find useless. Whole crafting and alchemy systems that serve no purpose. Whole areas/levels that would be empty. Whole sections of Lore that would be broken. An entire game's beastiary that would suddenly not exist. And then.... they'd have to compensate and add about 300,000 more lines of dialogue, or 500 more puzzles, and a whole slew of more non-violent quests. They'd have to, because otherwise, it'd be a painfully empty experience, since the mode in question just gutted 60% of the game., or more. No. They'd have to make a seperate game.

Funny, cause I see it exaclty other way around - it's all gameplay and no story nowadays. Mass Effect, for example, in my eyes sacrifices most of it's storytelling heritage for the sake of linear shooting corridors. Won't even mention Dragon Age. And newest Obsidian creation, Alpha Protocol, suffers from it too, to some degree - albeit rewarding the player with better dialogue, scenario and nonlinearity. What you're describing here is simply the effects of bad level/encounter design coupled with a tedius, one dimensional combat system contained within games that otherwise focus entirely on a story-driven cinematic experience. You cannot with any semblance of honesty describe ME3 and Dragon Age 2 as anything other than Story-foccused and story-driven.... not when gameplay is interrupted every 3-5 minutes with a cutscene. Not when half the recruitable NPCs are 'romanceable'. Not when spoken line word-counts are something like 700,000+. Not when the game itself forces your own character to spew out lines, and sometimes whole monologues, without your input.

*shudder* Lets see. Combat Class Options - you had 3. Mage, Warrior, Thief. But you couldn't be all 3 at the same time, or even 2 at the same time. Instead, you could only access ONE at any given time. Combat Style Options: Virtually none. Ranged weapon combat was not in the game, until you trudged your way through the most intentionally monotonous dungeon ever created. And then, you got a single NPC who had the ability to shoot off Bolts, from his non-removable crossbows.... and nothing else. In the meantime, you had a party of six, 5 of which could only engage in melee combat, so 90% of all fights were a messy, untactical clusterf*ck, unless you had the 3 avaliable spell casters sit back and fire off spells, in which case, fights became really really boring, really really quick, since all enemies move in slow motion, and 99% enemies are the melee type. Enemies: There were 2 types. The spell casting type, and the mindless hack-hack-hack type. The spell casters were both the rarest and the easiest, since You could just have Morte instantly disable them with his Litany of Curses, turning them into mindless melee types... which is the type of enemy that dominates the game. ALL are one dimentional. ALL simply attack you and their attacks do nothing but straight damage. Enemies don't stealth. Enemies don't employ tactics. Spell Casting: Surpasses even DA2 in the dumbing down department. Only 2 spells in the entire game pose a friendly fire threat, and one of them is a cleric spell, which can only be cast by the games ONE Cleric. Combat Equipment/Armor: none. Your nameless one is a naked warrior, theif or mage... from begining to end. That's right. Your AC was something like 9 or 10 for a good portion of the game.... And, no ranged combat ability. meanwhile, no armor customization for Morte, or Dakkon, or Ignus, Or Nordom, or Vhailor. Only Grace and Annah had a choice of 3 armors each, which all look exactly the same, and avaliable in ONE Shop only. Exciting. Is this *really* your preferred system? Really? It's garbage. Even If my ideal game contained very limited combat, I still wouldn't want this sort of system.

Planescape: Torment didn't have "limited combat". It simply had a combat system that was so god awful that the story *had* to eclypse it, otherwise the game would have never seen the light of day. You could, if you wanted to, rack up a higher body count in that game than you did in IWD. All enemies respawn in PS:T, remember? And. . . . again. Have we forgotten Update #7? There was never a point in time when the Devs ever entertained the notion that PE would be a standard dungeon crawler. Since day one the goal was always to make it one of those games where both combat options and non-combat options were avaliable to the player.

I thought Tim Cain's Update #7 would have by now put to rest these arguments of: "Can I has a skip combat button plz?"

And with this, we inch our way closer to the the "too good to be true", jinx zone, where all games die. Quick, release update #10 and make it something horrible, to bring my anticipation/expectations back down. But seriously, this is the best update yet. Got me to double my donation.

No Sale. If you're a Dev working on the game, then the challenge should apply to you. Period. No reason to so quickly accept gender inequality in the interest of "coolness". Especially when there's a simple workaround. If you're a female dev, and you can't grow a beard, then you should have to run to the nearest costume shop and buy one, then wear it to work every day during the development cycle. I'd be ALL for that, and I'd up my contribution considerably.

In the IE games Damage *was* mostly related to your skill. Well, your skill and your strength score. A standard Longsword did 1-8 damage. But if you had 18/00 strength, you added +6 damage to this, and then if you had grandmastery in longswords you added another +5. So leaving out critical hits, your max damage with a long sword was 19. And if that sword was +5 then your max damage would be 24. Not a huge difference. What ends up pushing it over the top, though, is when Devs decide to Throne of Bhaal it, like say, that +5 sword also does 2d6 fire damage and then stuns the victim. Or worse: that sword is a +6 Vorpal Halberd that does 3d6 additional poison damage, and then magically insta-kills on 20% of all hits.

Non Magical Full plate was the best armor anyway in Bg1, because you could wear a ring or cloak of protection with it.