Jymm

I admit I enjoy heroic games. As others have said, the real world is full of lots of gray and myriad evils ranging from banal to incomprehensibly vile. And there is very little most of us can do every day to make a dent in that. I enjoy that games give me a sense of agency in changing the reality, often for the better. But the supervillain thing is definitely overdone. If it feels a little too much like Tolkien's apocalyptic evil then its time to go back to the drawing board. These stories _can_ be done well. Just like FPS games can be done well. But you're going to have to be ten times as awesome to stand out because its just been done so many times. Localized heroism and personal stories are a good option. Having different factions with different motivations you might or might not agree with is also a nice way to go.

I find that as game development has come along and graphics have gotten more detailed these little seemingly insignificant things become more obvious. So seeing adventurers walking through town in the same "armed and dangerous" stance as their dungeon crawl was easily excused in 1995 because in your head you just corrected the image. But now with less and less left to the imagination we become irritated by these incongruous behaviors. "Why aren't I getting arrested walking around whiffing this glaive past everyone's face?" On the totally off-topic conversation about the Traveller character creation mechanics it reminds me of Twilight 2000, one of my all time favorite games. Same concept where you start as a youth but you don't know how old you'll be when World War 3 kicks off. So you might have a strong, fit, but inexperienced teenager if war breaks out after round 1. Or you might have a weakened but fantastically skilled veteran if you last to 55. Its party-based, so you can roll up a whole bunch of these guys and keep the mix that makes the most sense. Maybe its nostalgic, but I enjoyed it.

I also agree with the OP. There are a few good examples of games that do this right, but plenty of examples where people get lazy. Now with Bioware games of late a lot of this has to be driven by voice acting concerns. You have to write all the dialog early and get is all prepped and recorded with significant expense and logistics concerns. So while I don't love it, I accept it for the moment as part of the cost of what I find to be immersive, top-notch voiceover. With what Obsidian is doing here with PE, they will remove the voiceover restrictions. That means as long as they can spare enough basic writing and scripting time to implement 6 response options then its no problem. At some point there will be a trade-off between how flowery they can make these simple side-quests vs. the total number and content of the quests. I will cast my vote with you that 25% fewer quests that are all 50% better written would be a win.

Too much of the same thing gets boring. A universal truth, I suppose. If all the choices are obvious black / white choices then you pick your character's general alignment and play without really thinking, and that's a shame. If all the choices are always gray and lose / lose then you can easily decide the answers don't matter. So while I like some good, complicated dilemmas where you aren't sure of the outcomes and nobody seems on the level, I think you need to mix that up with a few good / bad options that are clearer. That way players keep the faith and stay invested even in the ones where they can't see the obvious answer. As was brought up I believe in another thread, I also find the option interesting where many of your choices impact only relationships with others, rather than some global alignment meter. That can make for some less obvious choices or ones where you have to weigh what is best for a friend vs what is best "morally" or for a larger group of strangers.

Well, maybe that's why Witcher 1 works better than Witcher 2, IMO. Because in the first game you don't KNOW that all the choices are bad. So you sweat it more. Or at least I did.

The witcher 1 is one of the few games I've seen that really nails the morally gray quandry. Witcher 2 is almost as good, but not quite. Everyone has blood on their hands, each side can tell you a convincing tale about why the other side is wrong. In the end, you just have to choose the one you believe most or flip a coin. And then hours later they give you the cutscene on what happens. Is the town herbalist really an evil witch, cursing the town? Well the town is clearly cursed. But the pretty witch can tell you a convincing story about these ignorant superstitous townspeople. And the townspeople certainly are ignorant and superstitious, that much is plain. [spoilers for witcher 1] In the end you can either let them burn her at the stake on scant evidence or you can kill all the townspeople to save the "innocent" witch. And just to make it more sordid, you can exploit your situation to sleep with her before you save her. OR sleep with her and then betray her and let them burn her anyway! [spoilers over] Now that's nasty business. And its the same with a dozen other plot points including the main choice between two deeply flawed but idealistic factions. Its the only game I've seen do gray decisions right. I told a friend Witcher makes Bioware properties like Dragon Age and Mass Effect look like Disney plots by comparison. And now that I've said all that, I often prefer my moral decisions at least a little more tipped than that. I like being heroic and playing _everying_ in sordid, murky shades of gray leaves me feeling kind of sickly after awhile.

This thread is too funny to take seriously, but I'd be OK with some fat characters. Its not gonna be a lot in pre-industrial world, but still, most games have only a couple very limited body models.

I'm not sure KS can be distilled to a binding contract. The line creators get about requirement to fulfil projects is pretty slim. In order for an accounting liability to exist they would have to be able to value up all the expected rewards and put that on the books. Its clearly not an equity stake because Kickstarter makes it clear you get no ownership in the product. So it would have to be a cash asset with a liability to deliver the reward tiers. What about things like the reward to play D&D with Obsidian staff? Their cost to deliver on that is near zero. So is their cost to deliver on naming an Inn for you. I'm guessing for tax purposes they have to treat it more like a donation, and its not going to a tax exempt 403c, its going to a taxable corporation. Where's a tax accountant when you need one?

I learn to pick out the barks that matter (like "I'm dying!") in most games. There definitely is a balancing act though. I wouldn't want there to be zero barks because they give the NPCs a little more personality.

I'm not going to quote Sylvanpixie's entire post because its mammoth. But its a good treatise. I'm generally in the promance camp because I think it doesn't hurt anything. I wish they were more often written better, but in general I find any expansion of the gaming medium beyond the narrow confines of shooting or stabbing something to be good, on principle. But reading your post gives me pause. Having played many of these games with multiple characters of different genders, I have to admit that the addition of the romance plot does seem to lobotomize a character in an uncomfortable way. Seeing a single NPC from the eyes of a PC who has no romantic value to them really opens your eyes to how forced their behavior was when the chromosomes were flipped. The preposterousness of the 'opposites attract' trope I also agree with, and its definitely part-and-parcel of the entitlement problem. And that alone is almost enough to convince me to cross sides on this one. The fanbase often tends to be so immature about this stuff. Hell, the gaming audience has a massive entitlement problem already, and now we're letting the fans become the publisher through Kickstarter? This could be entitlement squared. So while a big part of me wants to keep trusting good writers to polish their art and give us more reasonable representations of this common human aspect, perhaps its too much to hope for. Maybe if they succeeded the folks at Obsidian would just be punished for their efforts by a horde of ungrateful, overly entitled fans. And if they again wrote shallow, fanservice "romance" plots then they would have contributed nothing to the greater whole.

I actually mostly approve of romance plots, but I think I prefer this plotline even _more_. :D

Gotta say, the AH was a draw for me to want to kick up my backer $$. Because I hated Qara for example in NWN2. So I played the whole game without a mage just so I wouldn't have to deal with her. (and it still occasionally made me deal with her. Grr.) I want Obsidian to create interesting, memorable characters. And if they go forth and do that with gusto then some of those interesting, memorable characters I will personally detest. And that's OK. I like that the world is full of people who I like / dislike, respect / dismiss, etc. Maybe its me, or maybe its my character concept that clashes. But with the AH in play I can safely toss that loser on the curb where they belong and not gimp my mechanical effectiveness. I would of course _prefer_ to have a party full of the three dimensional written companions, but I love the option to bail on one or more as needed. If the puppets fade into the background somewhat and seem like "silent partners" then I think I can handle that OK with my own immersion. Some people are like that in real life too. But you know, YMMV.

I think the closeness of the poll reflects a lack of nuance. Like many here I'm OK with some amount of repopulating over time, but I hate spending all evening clearing out a section of map and then the next time I have reason to visit there I have to grind my way through meaningless combat. And I'm not a huge fan of level-grinding either so the XP reward lacks appeal for me personally.

I understand lots of people like crafting skills, but I personally detest them. I groaned when I saw that as a stretch goal. I just mentioned in a different thread how some gamers use a feature to ruin their own experience. I ruin my experience with crafting. I can't resist picking up all the junk crafting materials and hauling them around and then I'm trying to make things out of them and figure out recipes and whatever. Its all so tedious and yet I... can't... stop. There are the materials of useful stuff just lying around, free for the taking. I could just pick up these flowers or this mushroom and then later I could make potions and sell them or tote them around for 100 hours of gameplay. And its FREE. I can't just leave it there. I know its irrational. So you don't do anything irrational? Ever?! So if you are going to put in crafting, let me invest zero skill points in it and then don't even SHOW ME any of the materials. I can't identify any of them because I have zero crafting skill. Ahhhh. So much better. Now that I'm through with that sidebar, I have a much stronger affinity for the talking skills. And while someone will probably cry horror over this, I think its important that it be a trade-off. Only some characters will want to take these skills because investing in them means not investing in some other skills. Then I have the feeling that I'm really getting a reward for my investment when I can talk a clever way past a scenario or open up new lines of interesting / amusing dialog.

This totally doesn't belong on the poor PE forums, and there are XCOM forums here: http://forums.2kgames.com/forumdisplay.php?76-XCOM-Enemy-Unknown-General-Discussion Please do bring up your concern there because I have shamefully save scummed some of the really tough missions in XCOM. I won't admit that on their forums, but its safe to admit that here, right? :D If you really truly can't get multiple saves then you have a nasty bug or have inadvertently turned on ironman mode. Back to the topic at hand though, I understand your actual point. There are times when a mechanic is introduced to try to mold player behavior. This is an interesting dance between developer and player because they want to guide you to ways of playing the game that _will_ be fun, but they can't predict every player's reaction to features. There are interesting documented cases where a feature is consistently used by some set of players to ruin their own experience. And post release all the devs can do is shout impotently at their screens saying "just stop doing that and you could have FUN with this!!" So in an effort to try to avoid those kinds of issues they often try to put subtle or not-so-subtle guideposts in on how the game is intended to be played. It can be very hard to get that mix right. As Josh just said, watching people try to play it will often reveal things that seemed very different in design than they do when interfaced with a human player.

I picked up AP for $4.63 retail on Amazon (with Prime!) a few months back. It was definitely worth well more than I paid for it, though I am glad I didn't pay full price. There are several annoying bugs and some balance issues. And while the dialog is decent the voice acting really isn't so great. I was always amused by the emails and other written dialogs but then the same tone / content would fall flat when spoken. In general I'm a big fan of voiceover, unlike many PE backers. But I'm a big fan of _good_ voiceover. If you can't afford quality then better off with the text. While tempting, I did not opt for the full beard and swamp hat. I did constant five o'clock shadow and the hooligan cap and it was also very worthy. The modern-day spy theme was a good concept in a sparse genre. And the execution was close-but-not-quite. I too am sad that we won't see another.

It is definitely interesting how the old school devs / games are what is funded. My inner economist says that this was an idea whose time had come: the people who grew up playing these old school games are now in their peak earning years and frustrated that publishers continue to target the teen (male) market almost exclusively. They weren't willing to bet that we still played enough to make these games profitable. So we're voting with our (now more plentiful) dollars. And a guaranteed sale before the game is even launched is worth well more to them than a hypothetical sale later. So the developer can sell to the consumer directly a promise to deliver the game for a fraction of what it would retail for if funded traditionally. Kickstarter also gives them unprecedented ability to perform price discrimination / differentiation. Traditional boxed retail is one game at one price. Then they have added various collectors editions that toss in a small crate of extras for 50% more to get a bonus from hardcore fans. Kickstarter takes that to a whole different dimension. There are tiers for every conceivable level of excitement for the project. So they can extract from the contributor a much larger percentage of what they would be willing to pay for the product than any retail game ever could. I might be willing to pay $500 for someone to make a new Twilight 2000 game, but I have no control over that in traditional publishing. They either make it or don't, and if they do then I pay only $50 retail for it and dance in the street. But the truth is it never gets made and so my money goes uncollected. Kickstarter frees up that potential.

OK, this update was awesome. I LOVE The Hall of Adventurers and the ability to create additional characters to fill a gameplay hole left by my refusal to work with a companion I hate. If you cross 2.4 Mil then I'll up my pledge just to help get you to 2.6!

Great post Chris. To follow up on Stiler's comment, I too felt one of the most hopeful lines in your original post was that "companions should be optional". I feel a lot more agency as a player when I can tell this sociopathic arse to take a long walk off a short pier rather than have him follow me around being a total prick for the rest of the game. And when I replay a game with a different character I may take a different view of a particular companion. I can't stand traveling with the paladin when I'm playing a rogue and he keeps getting all offended at my actions. But maybe I like that paladin plenty when I'm playing a cleric instead. So making each companion fit a very specific role can make it hard to do with out certain ones. I know that personally, rather than picking the character type I want to play in may RPGs I instead play a test game or scour the internet to learn about the companions in detail and then custom build a player character who can complement the companions I can tolerate / enjoy. There are many times I have specifically chosen to play a character type I wasn't really that into for purely mechanical reasons. I hate all the mages in this game so I must play a mage or else my party can't survive. You're experienced professional developers, so I'm sure you just yawn at all our irrational fears. But count this as one vote for a final balancing pass on the companions to ask yourself: What would happen if the player chose to play [each possible class] and refused to travel with [each possible companion]. If the answer to any of those is "the player is screwed" then try to tweak things. Thanks for listening.

Man I hate the internet. If someone wants to play the game on easy because Obsidian knows how to write characters and tell a story then why are we _compelled_ to mock them and get high and mighty about it? Sigh. I'm never going to play a game on hardcore mode. I have a wife and kids and nowhere near enough time to dedicate these days to getting that good at the gameplay. I'm also very unlikely to play on easy because I've been doing this for years, played a number of the infinity engine games and would like to face at least some threat and tension in my gaming experience. But my playing it on some middling difficulty has no impact on you. So easy should be easy and we should welcome those players if they are contributing money to producing our long desired game. And in return maybe the casual players will eventually learn to tolerate the hardcore fanatics.

I'm one of the only people who wanted more voice parts, eh? I personally really enjoy well acted RPGs, and its one of the main things you can't easily mod in later. The community can always add more quests, more texts, more content of all manner assuming they give us a toolkit. Ah well, I clearly lost this vote.

I'm not desperate to be able to kill party members, particularly not at any time. That said, I positively HATE being stuck with companions I personally can't stand. Overall I liked NWN2, but I despised a few of the companions and you can't even tell them to take a long walk off a short pier. Several of them I definitely would have killed if given the option. Instead they are just always there at the inn, being a-holes! I found that intensely aggravating. The OP brought up DA2. You can part ways with many companions in DA2, including the Anders example. He still shows up later and people still refer to him as your friend, but in general the plot works and you don't see him for many hours of gameplay if you tell him you want nothing to do with him. And the same holds for many others. I'm OK with that structure.