KenThomas

Yeah I often find in games with difficulty settings I need to jack up the difficulty by the end of the game because once points have been allocated to a particular playstyle things just die too efficiently to be much of a challenge anymore. With maxed points in ranged skills every shot goes to the centre of the crosshair and then it's just scope in, pew pew the head and move on. Or, you jack your stats in magic, cast the same couple of spells every combat with the same result. What's your opinion about games with diminishing returns on stats where past a certain point it starts to cost 2 skill points for every increase of 1 on the character sheet etc

Yeah I believe games like that are balanced around people who don't try to optimize their characters, because optimized characters got way too easy way too fast, even with the difficulty jacked to maximum. Oblivion especially I felt I had to be super super specific and careful about what skills I was using because level ups were coming whenever I'd raised a certain number of skills and that affected my base stats. It pretty much meant you'd have to plan out crafting in alchemy to be an entire level because otherwise you'd lose the chance to use any points you might've earned in strength etc.

Okay fair enough but I think many people are bothered by the fact that there are some extremely popular games out there that don't even seem to put effort into dialogue and storyline. If nobody speaks up to say it's not okay with them, all that says to game makers is that it's okay to make games into a series of side quests driven by a thin premise to continue you churning your way though. Diablo, world of warcraft and Skyrim are all like that, some of the most popular games ever. When I play them I feel like there's not much point. I want to see my actions have an effect on the game world, especially in a single player game. I found the Mass Effect games and Fallout New Vegas to be far more satisfying. Skyrim is dumbed down because they removed attributes, several skills, made progression quicker, and made everything too reliant on silly perks that shouldn't even be perks (like % damage increase). Not because skill progression is actually relevant to the actions your character performs. Think about it. What's more dumb: - Kill a monster in any way you want, get XP, level any skill you want or - Only gaining a skill increase if/when you actually perform a task that warrants it ... The XP way is for kiddies who want too much freedom. "i'm a mage, but I should be able to run around with a hammer at any time and still improve my magic skill" The skill increase on use way only works if all methods of combat are balanced from the start of the game. The problems I've seen with it in the past is that mages in particular are unable to kill all that they need to kill before they run out of mana, forcing them to have to use other fighting styles until their character gets more powerful. Later in the game they then have these skill points into martial fighting styles that are completely useless to them. Most people play those games as an archer or warrior simply because you might run out of mana, but you never run out of muscle. Being able to play a martial character from the beginning of the game and create a statistically perfect stat distribution in the late game but being unable to do the same thing as a magic character is a significant design flaw. If someone did things like running away all the time to try to let their magic recharge to continue fighting in that style, it would take twice as long or more to level up the same amount. Oh and let's face it, I HATED feeling like I was locked into only using a very specific set of skills in order to have my character be a certain way later in the game. It felt like work.

The magic system sucks in the elder scrolls games. Always has, always will. Also, ever since Morrowind they've gotten away with remarkable lack of depth of any kind of story in their games. Their writing is always very 2 dimensional and they fill their game worlds with copy pasted stooges. "I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee."

i guess europeans are more die hard fans of oldschool cRPG. especially russians and poles. at least they have huge communities for post-apocalyptic games (and cRPGs). Apparently euros have better taste at the very least. After all, someone had to play diablo 3 and this crowd doesn't seem like the type.

Edmonton, Alberta

IMO a mega dungeon would be sweet if it's crafted with inspiration and the different parts of it all have a purpose. Extra long hallways that are there just to take time to walk through are silly. Generally in any dungeon I think part of good design is; -easy to find ways to get down, but harder to find ways to get up. If you are able to drop through the floor somewhere, guards on the floor below should be mostly looking the wrong way as you've gotten behind them. That should last until you open a door that's unguarded on the side you opened it because then you've gotten to the spot in the level that's past where you dropped in. -Traps should be present and should work both ways. You should be able to use traps against the inhabitants if you've noticed them before tripping them. Good AI design would have them knowing and avoiding the location of their own traps, but you could use that to force them to eat an AOE spell since they'd be unwilling to cross that section of floor to escape. -The dungeon should have some kind of purpose in the game world. Jail is an overused idea, I'd like to see something more like a manufacturing centre that perhaps is making use of lava vents for an essentially infinite supply of heat. Perhaps a stronghold of one of the major factions in the game including several ranking members of that faction. If it ends up being a monster's lair, I'd like to see the rooms used for something even if its only storing captives for breeding purposes. Endless tunnels of pointless rock would be nice to avoid. -Some kind of fast transit inside the dungeon itself once you've obtained the proper keys or opened the proper doors. It's unrealistic to expect that in order to get to the commander's headquarters of whatever this place is an underling is going to jog for an hour around the most circuitous route possible of every level. There should be a short way guarded by the toughest enemies and toughest traps. Desire to clear out the entire place should come from a desire to ruin its functionality, ie killing craftsmen, burning equipment etc. otherwise, you run into problems later in the game because that centre was restaffed and is still doing whatever its purpose is. -Quest items that get picked up there and are able to be used outside of that setting. IE plans for a weapon prototype that you could take back to your faction and manufacture for your side's use. Eggs of the foul creature that can be tamed and bred by your faction eventually into soldiers or mounts or something. Information on where other resources might be located. The names of people who are working as spies. The kinds of things that people would store in a location assumed to be secure. Some of them you should have to interrupt an NPC before he can dispose of them.

oh I see, you're THAT guy! I do recall some smarty pants being involved helping you refine your ideas and adding new ones, not to mention that this is exactly what I was talking about when I said Realistically the framework was already there. At most WE (jerkface) :D maybe helped refine a concept or two.

I was too tired last night after watching it to comment at the time (stayed up a bit past my bedtime haha), but yeah the fact that one of the iconic games of that decade started off as Tim Cain having to buy a pizza and sit around the interplay offices after hours for volunteers to work on it really tells a story. He was talking about how Fallout came to be, but in talking about the whole process, it really did highlight some of the extreme challenges that can be put in dev's way by publishers. Here's some highlights that i remember from that video: -Fallout initially started off as an unpaid project of volunteers comprised of people who just happened to work at interplay. There was no official support or monetary compensation for their time until later on. -The administration did not understand what they were trying to do, they didn't think it was going to be a good game or that anyone would want to play it. -Not only were they disinterested in the project, at one point they wanted to kill it just to get the guys working on it's focus off of that game and onto other ones. -Because the administration's jobs were to run the business and generate income, they were too far removed from the process to understand it could be something special and treated it as more of a nuisance than anything, at least at the beginning -When Diablo came out, the publisher went "hey, there's something that's selling copies, change your game from turn based to realtime and make it multiplayer!", wasting tons of development time as they tried to shoehorn Fallout into that niche. Thankfully they weren't realistically able to, because that would've been a horrible move. It would've been written off as a Diablo clone, sold very few copies and then the publisher probably would've said afterwards: "see? Nobody liked it. Good thing we made you put in multiplayer and realtime or it would've been a COMPLETE write-off!" 28:00 -It was still never given full support, even near the end of the project. Playtesters were volunteering to come in passing up time and a half pay on the weekends if they did other projects to playtest Fallout instead. He talks about that at 17:23 of that video. -Given 2 weeks to completely redesign and recode the combat system when they ran into liscencing difficulties or they were going to be cancelled by the publisher 37.00 There are a few things but I want to get on to saying; this was in the 90's. Publishers these days are even more bureaucratic and removed from the games being made. Quite a bit actually as far as I know. Decisions are still going to be made based on metrics and projections and whats come before. The thing that publishers don't seem to get is that duplicating what's out there simply never sells as well as something new. They'd rather go with the safe dollars though that people will be willing to "try" and then get bored of rather than taking a risk on a game that's different and seeing it completely bomb. That's why games over the last 15 years or so are so homogenized. Nothing that doesn't fit a well known market doesn't get the green light. Unfortunately, it has been the culture for long enough by this point that you can tell game developers have had the attitude of "well, its just the way things are". I'd imagine that pre-kickstarter anyone who complained about what a raw deal they were getting by having a game cancelled or being resource starved was just given a sympathetic nod and a shrug. It becomes clear pretty quickly why developers would want to start using a system that's completely fan funded and fan accountable. At least that way the people funding them are the ones who are actually interested in the game and who will be more likely to evaluate the game based on its ideas. Don't get me wrong, there WILL still be lots of know it alls who will write or link to articles saying why one idea or another of the upcoming game is going to be "the worst thing ever" and in that sense it's not all that different from publishers pointing at metrics of why they should be making Diabdutyrimeffect. They should however be at least moderately balanced out by the people who can see the potential and at least it'll be debate rather than expensive suits nodding in unison.

Nevermind. I'm a few minutes in and I'm pretty sure im going to end up watching the whole thing. This is interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa5IzHhAdi4 I'd love to, care to give me some time spots that I should focus on or do you want us to watch the entire hour in order to support your post?

Aside from the obvious? Publishers don't make games, they just finance, distribute and market them.

Surely good real time tactical games (with or without pause) exist: Myth, Dawn of War 2, Total War (during battles) et similia, and hopefully Project Eternity will be one of them, but the point nailed down by Catmorbid remains true: if you have a party of 4/6 characters with a large number of abilities, spells and active skills, you need a lot of pauses to handle with them; so what's the point of having a real time with pause system? You don't gain the fluidity of a full real time system anyway, and a turn based system (with an high killing ratio for both party members and mobs) can assure you a faster pace and an unmatchable control over the action. To be honest, I can't find a single reason to prefer RTwP in RPGs (but still, I never unistalled Darllands from my HDD in the last 10 years ). Is it just a matter of presentation? Does TBC "feel" too slow? The new X-com doesn't... Betrayal at Krondor is an example of an RPG where turn based combat worked fantastically. That said I don't want them to change their vision. I just want them to get RTwP right.

DA:O's RTwP system is in my opinion one of , if not the worst ever iteration of that system. It absolutely forced the player to pause the combat constantly, thereby also stopping all sound and killling immersion in the fight. You weren't allowed to queue ANY actions, and their "tactics" system had very few slots. In order to get a decent gameplay experience, you either had to put all of your characters relatively rare skill points into tactics, or what most people chose to do is mod the game so that way all characters had 20 tactics slots. I do not approve of any system that handcuffs the player into needing to use a third party mod to even get decent functionality out of it. Once you had the slots the tactics system itself was totally decent, allowing you to specify a set of circumstances for the NPC to preform certain functions. My problem was that if you didn't specifically tell them to do something either through a script or directly in the game, they absolutely would never ever do it. Mages with full arsenals of spells would stand there auto attacking. AI written to be about the level of Forrest Gump would've done significantly better. It didn't make for interesting gameplay, it made for a pointless chore. Sure, once you got to a high level and could script in several "if-than" scenarios everything was peachy. Until then you had to deal with your special ed characters while seething about their stupidity on the inside. Enchantment? ENCHANTMENT!

Oh god. I am SO tired of the word "democracy" being thrown around to justify selfishness as though you not only deserve what you're demanding, you also have the moral high ground. $20 dollars does NOT entitle you to have your ass kissed. For you it's a choice and an investment where you're deciding that you're getting a deal by paying 20 dollars for a game now that would likely cost you 60 dollars later. Congrats, you got the game at a 66% discount. You don't need more than that. The reason $140 is a decent cutoff is because that is the level of money where people's rewards start getting a little bit disproportionate to their investment. Those people are clearly not just doing it for selfish reasons, they're also wanting to help the company. Honestly I'm looking at the reward tiers right now and anything $65 or below is a pretty damn good return for that money. I'm sure lots, in fact the majority of those people also wanted to help the company out, but let's face it, they are being AMPLY compensated.

EDIT: You can read Obsidian's comments here (just keep scrolling down for September 18th comments starting with "@Steven" for the initial comment and then scroll up to a comment addressed with "@fredgiblet" to see the comment I quoted above). To see it in context, you're going to have to look through the comments of the kickstarter page. Please. He was obviously either contacted by the publisher after this story got featured on sites like Kotaku with an angry "you TOLD them what I SAID???" or figured he'd voluntarily do some light damage control before he got an angry statement like that. If I were CEO of a company I wouldn't be in a huge rush to burn bridges either. The forseeable future might not have them needing to use the services of said publisher, but who knows what the case will be 5 years down the road?

I think that this puts accountability where it should be. Directly from the fans to the developers. Dev's having to constantly be accountable to publishers has truly ruined games in the past. The main problem is that publishers care way more about return on their investment than they do quality of the final product. That means they will try to push products out according to time metrics that show them they'll hit sales goals and they'll try to wedge it into a quarterly earnings report so that they look good to their stockholders and get their bonuses. This eliminates that conflict of interest and puts the focus on the game itself, which can only be good for both devs and fans.

This topic has totally convinced me. My knee jerk reaction was "during scripted" but now it's kill anytime. Consequences should indeed be there, but if you're playing someone who's Chaotic Good, imo it makes perfect sense that you'd kill someone that's evil rather than let them continue to bring the world down with their presence. Surely other good companions would not only understand this but may even approve. Obviously other evil or even neutral ones would lose morale and fear for their own lives.

At the very least I want to be able to see what effect increasing a stat is having on my character. A detailed character sheet on level up would be preferable at minimum. My preference would be things spelled out in detail in the manual. If I don't know how effective one thing or another is going to be it bugs the crap out of me. I don't like being forced to go to joe blow's site to read up on what his "opinion" is on what stats are good. I want facts.

Yes, very much so. I don't find anything particularly enjoyable about Diablo 3. Skyrim wasn't that great either but it was definitely the better of the two in a battle of the "I can't explain the popularity of this aside from marketing" titles. Seriously, New Vegas and the Mass Effects are the only games I played that had good and interesting storylines within the last 8 years or so. Dragon Age Origins had a fairly extensive amount of text etc but not a lot of that was very interesting aside from the characters of Morrigan, Shale and a few different scenarios.

I'd like to see some environmental challenges, like walls shooting spikes on a timer, pressure plates that set off a spell in a different part of the room which freezes lava for you to walk across, spiked logs swinging from chains across your path etc. Doing that all the time would get frustrating pretty fast, but it might be nice to have the occasional room o death leading up to an intelligent enemy in their domain or to get to some kind of treasure that has been protected by all those traps.

All of this other stuff is fine, but one thing I'd like to avoid is too extensive of auto combat. Playing anything other than a mage far too often gave you a whole lot of nothing to do in fights.

I don't think the people who have pledged to this kickstarter are part of that "wrong reasons" crowd. Almost all of the discussion I've seen are from people who respect this game developer. Many people consider Obsidian to be the most creative of the dev companies. That's the stance I take. As for the things that they've been bashed for, ie games released with bugs, who knows where the fault for that lies in the dev/publisher relationship? EA for example became known for releasing buggy names no matter who they had developing them because they forced games out before they were ready. On this project all the accountability will come down to Obsidian and it'll be interesting to see what the finished product will be like.

Definitely cool ideas Eleneithel. Those are pretty creative limitations. Typically in rpg's if not given significant restraints the mage always becomes the character that has absolutely by far the most effect on a battle.

Obsidian is more well known than those examples. The project they're making is also more ambitious. Until now kickstarter has been viewed as a funding concept for "indie" games. This could be the tipping point for it becoming common practice for funding mainstream ones.