Grimlorn

I don't think someone asked the question: why do people don't want romances in game? It's been answered to death. It's never been done well. It's cheesy. It takes resources from other parts of the game. All the romance crowd can say is, yeah it's bad in most games but that doesn't mean it will be here. It makes no sense. Why keep trying to do something that doesn't work? And people keep using PST as an example, but there wasn't really romance there. Most, if not all, the romance crowd is from Bioware. They want the same things they ask Bioware for. Romance all companions. Romances where there are fights with your love interest, romances that have story after you bed them, romances that can fail, but when they fail you become platonic friends and there are stories for that. This is what the romance crowd was asking for in previous threads, and at a certain point you have to say enough is enough and this is ridiculous to ask for.

You could just as well make a gimped char with "bought" stats, for an example a mage with 18 stre and 10 intellect. or a Fighter with 8 strength and rest in wisdom and intellect. They will be just as gimped as badly rolled char. That's true.

... Sounds a bit strange that. So all creatures are the same challenge, no matter the level? Ick. Bit extreme and I doubt we'll see it here. They're too afraid of upsetting players and/or lazy. Their strength is really just with designing big, unique worlds. Combat and encounter design has always been bad in their games (haven't played Arena or Daggerfall) and with Skyrim they removed all stats, making it more of an adventure game than a RPG. I'm really surprised it sold so well, but I guess it just shows how important visuals are to mainstream gaming. Main quest was terrible too.

The thing about rolling stats is I think it makes it harder to balance the game because you have to make it easy enough for gimped or average players to beat the game while everyone just rolls until they get high rolls for their characters making it a lot easier to beat the game. If you have a set number of points to spend then the developers know what stats you'll have and how to design challenging combat for those characters. If people want to play gimped players maybe just don't spend all stat points at character creation or use a trainer to adjust them, but I see the point in it being more fun to roll a low number and play it that way instead of guessing how much you should gimp yourself. I guess they could make the rolling range really small to compensate for this (like a range of 5), but i don't think that would be as fun. The difference between 20 or 25 points.

None of that stuff you describe improves the RPG. It just improves the graphics and gives you more to look at. All that stuff costs a lot of development money. I don't think the camera zooming in really mattered in DA because when you went to talk it zoomed in and showed your character talking anyway, so why not keep the whole game in isometric? Trying to control a party in a fight in any other camera other zoomed in camera view is a pain in the ass. There's been a huge shift with people asking for better graphics, visuals with characters, voice acting, etc. People forget this stuff costs a lot of money and takes away from other aspects of RPGs like character creation/development, party size, combat, dialogue, story, length. Pretty much all the things that make RPGs great reduced in favor of eye candy, voice acting, and making the player feel good by making the game easy enough for anyone to beat. Dumbed down fits this perfectly. These are the people developers like Bioware cater to. This guy can't even figure out how to equip weapons. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JplWWFtkdjY&feature=player_embedded

Yes Yes and Yes. There is no reason for this. It would screw up their money and double their server fees with Steam and GOG. And I bet only a handful of gamers would want this. I mean I've never heard someone ask for a DRM free game and also say they like to use Steam, so they want both games. Can't you just buy the game off GoG and upload it to your Steam games anyway?

Probably on the same level as those games. I don't think it should be easier. If you're having trouble with those games, I don't know what to tell you, maybe these games aren't for you. You can probably read a guide or faq on them and see if you can learn how to do better. Pause and issue commands before combat starts.

No, they are not. In any way. Take the "romance" out of PS:T and what do you have? The same game minus something completely innocuous, minor and unimportant. PS:T had romance? I would call some small dialog choices with Annah and FFG romance. ...that and...oh, say half of the main theme / motivation of the whole game (Deionarra). No biggie. I wouldn't even consider Deionarra as a romance. She's dead. She was used by an evil incarnation of TNO. There was no love story there. Just the unrequited love of a ghost. When people are talking about romance, they're talking about pursuing relationships with their party and having sex with them.

hehe. Bioware validates their opinion and panders to them so they all think their crap should fly in every game and game forum.

Oh god no. We don't care about accessories and what clothes our characters wear. There hasn't been an evolution. Only a devolution. That's the whole point of these kickstarter projects to get back to making great RPGs and not focus on graphics and cinematics.

You realize that was just tacked on to pander to LGBT crowd right? Why in an action shooter would you want to listen to someone complain and cry about their dead significant other. Gay or not. I guess it worked though because not everyone realized they were being manipulated. It would be like the Expandables going to get coffee and the coffee guy spending 10 minutes crying and talking about how his bf died.

Don't heterosexuals also breed gay people?

Won't that make it a bit one-sided? The hope is that the people who don't want LGBT characters in Project Eternity will turn their attentions to other subjects. If you ostracize people who aren't in favor of something, doesn't that just change the message and make it seem like everyone is in favor of LGBT. I don't care either way and trust Obsidian to choose what they want to include, but a lot of this is just people lobbying for LGBT in a game and doesn't really deserve a thread on the subject. I mean I could see LGBT stuff discussed in off topic but on a game developing forum?

These kickstarter games have to be successful and well received for it to be a revolution. Even though developers didn't pay to develop the projects, they still have to make money to fund better projects. If the games aren't well received then no revolution and it goes back to business as usual with publishers. I've seen quite a few kickstarter projects that I doubt will be good. Just hope that doesn't sour people to kickstarter before W2 and Eternity are out.

By "plot difficulty" I mean how easy it is to end the game's plot prematurely. The easier it is, the higher the difficulty. Your killing an NPC in Morrowind ends its plot prematurely. Since it is quite easy, obvious, and the game does not give any warnings before it, Morrowind falls into "hard" difficulty. If you don't like game over choices, change "game over" from the poll to bad ending/less endings available/less desirable plot/handicap for protagonist/etc. I don't really mind the freedom Morrowind had. I just don't think you should be able to make a decision at the beginning of the game that makes it so you can't complete the game and you play through 20-30 hours more to find out. I'm definitely for choices and consequences though that you can make at the beginning of the game that affect the middle or end of game. Just I'd prefer the player to be notified if they killed a plot important NPC and can't beat the game now.

I don't know why they're so adamant about it either. It makes no sense. Obsidian has included gay characters in their games before. So why petition Obsidian for them here? It implies they're not gay friendly enough. I have seen the 300 page threads on Bioware on these subjects so they're probably from there. Bioware really opened the floodgates with these people.

Because I'm going to narrow down the discussion to a different topic. Contrary to popular belief, there is more to talk about with reguards to sexuality other than "should it be included." Yeah lets make a LGBT thread for every little discussion about Eternity. How should we implement sexuality in the game? How should my sexuality affect combat? How should my sexuality affect my companions? How should my sexuality affect how people view me? How should my sexuality affect the story? etc.

We don't need 2 gay threads on the front page. You can't just keep creating threads on the same subject.

That's one of the reasons why there shouldn't be any romances. Because as soon as there are romances, then there is every type of sexuality asking for romances with every single companion. It then becomes like Dragon Age 2. Just leave all this crap at the door and focus on what matters. Building a RPG.

That's true, but that still doesn't answer the question of how resources should be divided in the project to try and include a transgender option. Unless you want the world to react to your player's transgender status (which would be tough to know unless they checked under the hood) what's the difference between a player picking an option on the character creation screen and just using their imagination and declaring, "My character was born a man, but chooses to live as a woman" and then picking the outward appearance appropriate for their choice? The difference is developers have to spend time and money on putting that option into the character screen that could be put elsewhere. This is a game, not a statement on politically correctness. If you can choose trans, then why not bi, why not gay, etc. It opens the floodgates to every group of people having an option at the character screen and it changes nothing. You can't please everyone and it's foolish to try.

This poll makes no sense. There's a difference between the freedom to kill any NPC like in Morrowind and plot difficulty. If you killed someone in Morrowind that was necessary for the main quest, I think a message would come up that said you could no longer complete the main quest. That's not plot difficulty imo. There shouldn't really be any here. Not in the way I think you guys are implying. If you want the game to have a more sophisticated plot/story compared to other RPGs released today, that's fine. But there shouldn't really be any plot difficulty in the way you describe.

Yeah but if they have to go to execs for more money, the execs will want the IP and they'll own it. Rather keep it with the developers instead of the publishers who would eventually turn it into an action RPG series. I meant the execs of Obsidian, not an external publisher. Even a smaller company like Obsidian has its "game" people and its "business" people. The game people have to convince the business people that their project is worthy so the business people can fund it. Sometimes the business people say no, so the game people rise up and eat the business people's first born child. It's a symbiosis that must not be interrupted. I wonder if they do have money people. I always assumed that publishers were the money people. Otherwise developers could keep IPs in house.

Imagine a developer makes game A during 2012; releases it at the end of the year. By and large, the money they are paid by the publisher supports their costs during 2012. When the game comes out, those payments cease. They might get a small (and I mean small) cut of the profits or a flat sum, usually based on metacritic / sales. But generally, what they need to do is make sure they have another contract lined up, so that as soon as game A is finished, they can start making game B in 2013; and then, they'll be paid by the new publisher for that. The rest of the money from the sales goes to the publisher, the distributor, the middleman like game stores, etc. Yes, it really is like that. If you buy a $50 game, you will very rarely see the developer take $20 or $30 of it. You can find more exact breakdown of who gets how much on Gamasutra, but the basic gist of it is that counter-intuitive as it may seem, most developers really do live hand to mouth; even if your game just sold pretty well, if you don't have another contract lined up, you might need to let people go. (Recently, Obsidian had to let dozens of employees go because Fallout: New Vegas only got 84 on metacritic not 85, and they did not get their bonus from the publisher. Never mind the game sold 5 million copies.) OK, but without a publisher contract right now, how will they maintain the studio until project eternity see the light? They have South Park right now. Thought they were working on something else besides PE too. So they are still doing publisher contacts right now.

Yeah but if they have to go to execs for more money, the execs will want the IP and they'll own it. Rather keep it with the developers instead of the publishers who would eventually turn it into an action RPG series.