slopesandsam

1. If you honestly don't get the point of my "rambling unrelated mess", I can't help you any further. But I will offer another ramblin, unrelated mess: In my teens, I spent a lot of time on the Usenet (it was the 90s), and I spent a lot of time engaged in heated debates. I considered myself very clever at the time, and I quite enjoyed the feeling of destroying someone with my amazing arguments. I'd hit that "Post" button with a feeling of real satisfaction, like I'd just delivered a killing blow every time. Only the thing was: I wasn't winning any arguments. I was making a fool of myself. My understanding of the topics I was arguing about was rudimentary at best, and my ability to parse the more complicated aspects of the issues I was engaging with was severely limited by my then-narrow worldview. Fortunately, I got older, and hopefully somewhat wiser. I know, that story was completely unrelated to anything going on here. I just felt like telling it. 2. I have elaborated, at great length, on why the joke is transphobic. Nearly every word I've written in this thread has been about why the joke is transphobic. Maybe another example would be illustrative here. This video (very NSFW language) is of Louis CK performing standup comedy, and he uses a number of words that are ordinarily considered extremely offensive. This video does not offend me. It doesn't seem to have offended many people at all, given that I doubt you've ever heard any public outcry about it. So why does it get a pass, when a lame limerick that doesn't use any offensive language doesn't? Well, because Louis CK is pointing out an irony in the use of the term "n-word". And it's funny because it's true - it's just that most of us haven't thought about it that way. What it doesn't do is perpetuate any stereotypes about black people - in fact, it erodes some of the illusions white people have about themselves. The limerick, on the other hand, goes with the age old stereotype that transgendered women are gross and weird and that you'd better watch out, because they might be disguising themselves as REAL women to get you in the sack. 3. Ah, so your argument is that the Nazi sympathiser is offended by something completely unrelated to Nazism? In that case, sure, if their complaint is legitimate, it genuinely doesn't matter that they're a Nazi Sympathiser. I'll still abhor their white supremacist attitudes and opinions, but yes, Nazis can be broken clocks too. 4. "Not tolerating intolerance IS intolerance" is an absurd semantic argument. And the difference between tolerating those who a different from you and tolerating those who do not tolerate those that are different from them is that the later is harmful. 5. If you genuinely identify yourself as a GamerGate supporter, I doubt that anything I say to change your mind. Anyone who still supports GamerGate is, at this point, being willfully ignorant. Matt Taylor wasn't asking for anything - he most likely just hadn't thoroughly considered the message he would send his female co-workers (and millions of people around the world one he appeared on TV) when he decided to wear that shirt. And it was precisely because he landed a probe on an asteroid that he was held to a higher standard than the average guy who wears a shirt plastered with images of scantily clad women. Brad Wardell I've never heard of, and if what you say is true then it does sound like he has been unfairly maligned. And if the vocal minority have given him hell then that is, indeed, terrible. It doesn't, however, negate my point that the movement towards inclusiveness is much larger than that. An overwhelming majority of Americans now support gay marriage - but all those many millions of people don't all jump on twitter to harass anyone who opposes gay marriage. Larry Correla is someone I don't know very much about. I think that using a slate to game the Hugo awards was a trollish way to go about making his point, and aligning himself with Vox Day, an unrepentant piece of human garbage, doesn't give me a good impression of him. However, I don't know enough about him or his views to know whether he can fairly be called a racist (although being married to a black woman is not an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to saying racist things.) 6. There is most certainly a vocal minority of extremists on my side whose views and opinions I mostly disagree with. In fact, the sentence you quoted is me explicitly saying that. I'm not sure how you misinterpreted it as the opposite. 7. Equality and diversity are inextricably linked. If there were no diversity, there would be no point to equality. And if your idea of diversity is that people who are against equality should be heard too...well, you're absolutely correct. I believe very strongly in Freedom of Speech, which means that everyone, no matter how vile their words, has the right to say them. But just because you have the right to be heard doesn't mean you have the right to be listened to. If what you're saying is intolerant, misogynists, homophobic or transphobic, everybody else has the right to ignore you. Or to tell you that you're full of excrement.

I love how you still haven't answered to any argument I presented to you. How and why is that irrelevant. Explain it to me. What I see there is a literal bigot complaining about being offended by a joke. Yet you completely disregard that because it caters to your crowd. Something that I have seen massively increasing from people in favour of Social Justice. There's an old saying: "Even a broken clock is right twice a day." What this means is that even an unreliable person can occasionally be correct - even if only by accident. Let's say that I was a compulsive liar. Everything that came out of my mouth was a lie - except that one day, I said "If you don't eat food, you'll starve and die." Would you immediately disregard everything you know about survival and refuse to eat food anymore, just because if I said it, it must be a lie? No, because you already knew that you need to eat food in order to live, and the fact that an unreliable person said it doesn't somehow make it untrue. And by continuing to eat food, it doesn't mean that you automatically start believing all the other things I've said, either. Well, the same goes for opinions. I, and a great many others, already believe that it is wrong to make jokes that cast transgendered people in a negative light. That someone who also believes that all men should be killed also said it does not make us suddenly change our opinions. Nor does it mean that we agree with the "all men must be killed" opinion. You betcha. The difference here is that a Nazi Sympathizer would be arguing that Obsidian were being intolerant of their intolerance. That is laughable. No, we should not tolerate intolerance. Does a joke were a chicken crosses the street abhor poultry? Does it promote animal abuse? No? Then why does this one promote intolerance against transsexuals. The difference is that chickens are a) not a marginalised and maligned group of people, and more importantly b) not people at all. Once again: Are we talking about the same movement who managed to kick the biggest achievement in space exploration in this century and make it about a damn T-Shirt? We are talking about the same movement right? I cant tell if you are either so removed from reality that you don't see that Social Justice is on its way to becoming a full-fledged cult where dissenters and disbelievers (LISTEN AND BELIEVE) get attacked for having the wrong views. Or if you are simply okay with Social Justice operating that way because "its for the greater good". Once again I think you should read "The Wave" if you haven't done so in school, it may be an eye-opener about thinly-veiled fascistoid movements. I have read the The Wave. It's a book about how our tribal instincts can override our ability to reason objectively and even our moral compasses. And it doesn't just apply to fascist movements - all movements and political groups can fall victim to it. It happened just recently with GamerGate, where the misogynistic agenda became so inextricably tied up with the whole ethics in games journalism agenda that it became impossible for GamerGate supporters to defend one position without defending the other. In that case, the majority of people eventually decided to distance themselves from the misogynists, and GamerGate as a valid social movement died. This does not mean that there aren't still valid points to be made about the state of games journalism today, though. You are arguing that the same thing has happened on the other side of the fence - that a loud minority of extremists have come to dominate the movement towards inclusiveness. And you've even given an example of when the tribal instinct overrode reason and common sense with the story about this Jian Ghomeshi (who I haven't heard of). This is anecdotal evidence that tribal thinking can effect anyone, and I'm not going to deny that. It can. Where you're wrong is thinking that the vocal minority of what you've dubbed "SJWs" is leading this movement, or controlling it in any way. It's not. The movement towards greater inclusiveness is much, much larger, and the vast majority of people in this movement do not think that all men should be killed. That's why you can see an article on Polygon.com titled "Obsidian removes offensive limerick from Pillars of Eternity", but you don't see any articles titled "Opinion: All men should be rounded up and killed." The problem, from your point of view, is that the other side seems to be winning. And because you perceive the other side as being nothing more than a tiny faction of loud extremists, you think that the only plausible explanation is that this tiny faction wields a disproportionate amount of power, and is able to get their way just by shouting loud enough. In actual fact, the other side is much, much larger than that tiny faction of loud extremists. The most likely explanation in this instance - and every instance where something like this has happened - is that the people working at Obsidian are part of the larger majority who also believe in inclusiveness, and have done what they wanted to do in order to be more inclusive.

Several years ago, Intel released this ad. Before it was released they realised it was bad and tried to pull it, but one media outlet still published it. The reason I mention this particular ad is because it seems like an apt comparison to the limerick situation. Why? Well, because any reasonable person can look at that ad and see what Intel intended it to mean: the runners represent the fast processors, which are reading to spring into action for your business. It's even believable that it might have been vetted by a handful of people who didn't realise it was problematic (although someone at Intel eventually did, given that they tried to pull the ad before it was published), because all they saw was the intended message, and weren't thinking about any other connotations. However, even if you don't notice it at first, once it's pointed out to you that this is a picture of six black men in poses that look very much like they're bowing down to one white man, the racial connotations of the ad become obvious - prominent even. If you could somehow guarantee that the people who made this ad, and everyone who ever saw it, remained ignorant of the unintended racial connotations, you would have grounds to argue that the ad is harmless - because it would be. But you can never guarantee something like that - and, indeed, as soon as the ad was published a whole lot of people immediately pointed out the racial connotations. And so here is the thing: Once you become aware of the racial connotations of the ad, standing by it, arguing that it's harmless, that it should be taken as it was intended and not as it's been interpreted, is no longer a position that a reasonable person can take. Claiming that the ad is okay is, at best, claiming that the racial connotations just don't matter, and at worst, saying that you endorse the racial connotations. Knowing about the racial connotations makes it morally impossible to simply shrug them off. The reason this seems so much more clear-cut than the limerick issue is because we have all grown up in a society that abhors racial intolerance. We've been conditioned by a lifetime of input from both people we know and all kinds of media to be sensitive to racial issues. We have not, on the other hand, grown up in a society that abhors intolerance towards homosexuality or the transgendered - but that's starting to change now. And so whether the problematic nature of the limerick was pointed out by someone on twitter or says that all men should be killed, or a howling internet mob, or one person working at Obsidian who said "Um, hey, maybe we shouldn't put this in our game", the point is that once you know about it, you can no longer defend it without implicitly endorsing it. Obsidian's version of what happened is almost certainly true: the content wasn't vetted properly, and they've now corrected their mistake. But even if that isn't true, that doesn't mean that Obsidian caved. What it means is that someone pointed out why the limerick was problematic, and once Obsidian knew and understood this, they took the moral path. There is no conspiracy theory. This movement isn't being driven by a howling mob of crazies (even if that howling mob actually exists). It's a much larger and broader movement than that. Society is changing, that's all.

Only in the sense that, like every other limerick or joke ever written, it is "clearly, unambiguously" capable of offending someone in the world. Not in the sense that it's unusually offensive, or that offending someone in particular was the author's motive for writing it. For example, the lame "tomato crosses the street and becomes ketchup" joke? Clearly and unambiguously offensive to someone who is grieving for a loved one lost in a traffic accident. And the extent to which authors should be expected to not hurt certain feelings, should be tied to how reasonable those feelings are. Consider "offense" that is taken as a result of having internalized conspiracy theories or having developed chip-on-shoulder syndrome from excessive participation in echo chambers like parts of twitter and tumblr. You're right, pretty much anything will offend somebody, somewhere. And nobody has the right not to be offended. But just because you have the right to offend someone doesn't mean that you have to exercise it. The important difference here, though, is that this joke is at the expense of some of the most maligned and marginalised people in our society, and it makes them feel more maligned and marginalised. So yes, it gets special treatment compared to jokes at the expense of those who aren't maligned and marginalised, or content that is more broadly offensive. Someone who stands up and loudly yells "I HATE [insert pejorative here]!!!" is easily dismissed. Everyone can instantly see that they're a bigot, and can be safely ignored. Jokes like the one contained in the limerick are more problematic precisely because it isn't immediately obvious why they're offensive, and the contribute to an overall acceptance of similar jokes and sentiments when they go unremarked. Which is why multiple commenters have noted that "a majority of people on this thread don't think it was offensive". Think about that. If you're a trans gamer, you see this thread, and see that the majority doesn't see any problem with the joke, and you feel unwelcome. This is not a case where people are taking offense because they've been living in echo chambers or internalised conspiracy theories (although any any group there will be extremists and conspiracy theorists, but they're always a very small minority), it's simply people who understand that the world is overflowing with this sort of sentiment, and reducing it by one less lame limerick helps to push that boulder up the hill one more inch. No, it suggests that accidentally sleeping with someone contrary to one's sexual preference is awkward. Which is neither bigoted nor "anti inclusive", it's pretty common sense. Straight cis people should respect LGBT people's identity and sexual preferences, but that does not mean that they should be expected to deny their own sexual preference. Refusing to hire a gay person or voting against gay marriage is intolerant and bigoted; feeling grossed out by the thought of f***ing another man yourself, isn't. Except that the limerick does not contain the nuance you are projecting onto it. Yes, what you say is true. But this limerick singles out a particular and marginalised sexual orientation, and marginalises it. Whether or not this was the author's intention is beside the point. It's how it is read. It's the sentiment that comes across. It's whether it seems like Obsidian endorses it. That's what matters. Even if you interpret the "woman who turned out to be a man" in the limerick as a trans person, despite the fact that this interpretation is not the most obvious in context and that the author has denied it - why does constructing a fictional situation automatically have to mean promoting the idea that all people of some category are always like this? ... Don't intentionally propagate stereotypes that you know others are afraid of as part of their belief system (even if you think it's nuts), but also don't go around the world (or Internet) with a chip on your shoulder throwing a tantrum and accusing people of malice whenever you find something that superficially matches a taboo of your echo chamber. Again, the argument is not that the author intended to make some blanket statement about the evils of trans people, it's that they make a casual comment that reinforces an already pervasive idea. The author probably didn't think about it that way, the majority of people who read it didn't think about it that way - but the reason they didn't think about it that way is because this idea is already pervasive. The whole point of calling out the limerick as offensive is to try to make people think and question the things they take for granted and have never really thought about or questioned. It's not malice that is the problem in this particular case, it's unthinking assumptions about what's okay and what isn't. Is it okay to make offhand jokes at the expense of the maligned and marginalised?

Whether the person who tweeted the original tweet has toxic views of their own is not relevant to this issue. It is possible for a person to have some entirely reasonable views and some entirely despicable ones. If this person believes that all men should be killed or put into concentration camps, then that's a toxic viewpoint that I ardently disagree with. But the point about being inclusive is valid, and one I (and, evidently, Obsidian) already held. Just because someone who believes that all men should be killed also made this point does not make it invalid.

Anyone who believes that Obsidian "caved" to some sort of external pressure on this needs to go have an epiphany or two. 1. The limerick is clearly, unambiguously offensive. Not only does it suggest that sleeping with a man is an act so disgusting that someone would commit suicide afterwards, it also promotes a stereotype that the transgendered pretend to be cisgendered in order to sleep with cisgendered people. 2. I understand how such a poem can seem innocuous. Most of us have heard similar (and much, much worse) jokes before, many, many times. A similar joke even appeared on HBO's Entourage several years ago. What's the big deal? Well, the big deal is that most of us aren't really conditioned to notice the deeper implications of these jokes. I wasn't until fairly recently. But if you're a transgendered person, the world is already full enough of jokes, comments, assumptions and outright vitriol that all say "You are not welcome here." 3. What do I mean "You are not welcome here?" Can't anyone who is offended by the poem just ignore it and enjoy the rest of the game? Ideally, yes. But probably no, the game would be tainted. I bet every person reading this can think of at least one thing they really liked which was ruined when the discovered something upsetting about its creator. And by leaving the poem in, Obsidian would have been implicitly endorsing the sentiment of it. 4. The most likely explanation for what happened here is exactly what Obsidian have said. When you're working on a project as enormous as PoE, is it that hard to believe that a handful of things slipped through the cracks? This patch also fixed a major bug that slipped through the cracks, and yet nobody is suggesting that Obsidian released the game like that because they'd already vetted that bug and decided it was okay, until someone on the internet kicked up a fuss about it. The most likely explanation is that Obsidian were already a company who wouldn't want to say something like what was said in that limerick, and would have changed it before release - if it hadn't slipped through the cracks. 5. As a general rule of thumb: if a joke appeared on Entourage, it was probably lame, cheap, mean-spirited, and offensive.

An idea I like, which may be something just only tickles me and isn't popular among others, is making the second Big City a subterranean one. And even better, putting it at the bottom of a dungeon, so that rather than receiving a cool new sword or whatever by killing the dungeon boss, you instead get access to the city. And so the obvious connection here would be to put this city at the bottom of the mega dungeon. That's something I would think of as being very cool. Just wanted to see if anyone else liked the idea.

I do not love the screenshot. I think I made it clearl elsewhere that I prefer more stylised graphics, though. And it's not that I hate it or anything. It's just that I'm always hopeful that games I want to play will eschew photorealism. So it's not like I'll hold it against the game or anything. At this point, I'm used to everything going for photorealism.

The Chanter sounds like an attempt to implement the magic system Chris Avellone mentioned in this interview. Is that the case? Because that sounds pretty cool.

This is exactly what makes games unfun. Trying to please every person who finds something "offensive" and people who supposedly speaks for all members of a group. I like how you pretty much said women are brainwashed sheep who are being repressed by the man to be strait mens fantasy. I mean, it could not be that women can think for themselves and LIKE to be attractive and know perfectly well that they are sexulizing themselves because they want too. Nope, must be tv, video games, movies...etc. You say I did not prove what I said, even though I used a REAL WORLD sample location to make my point. Do not believe me? Go to any place in the US where a large number of people (men and women) that is not religion based and tell me what women wear. oh wait, I forgot, women are sheep who cannot think for themselves according to you. This is the worst type of feminest argument, women are either with you, or they are brainwashed slaves to the system which you must free wether they want it or not. You know what? You're right, my post did imply the woman-as-sheep assumption. That wasn't my intention. Getting into what my intention was is...dicey. I'm a heterosexual male, and so I don't want to speak for women. But put as simply as I can, society is overwhelmingly geared towards the objectification of women. Just how much so is something a lot of people (including women) don't even notice, because it's normal to them. So my point was less woman-as-sheep, and more everyone-as-sheep. I include myself in this group. I'm hardly super-enlightened. I've just had some things pointed out to me, quite recently, by people who are. It also wasn't my intention to imply that the media is to blame for society's failings. What I meant was that the media is a very powerful tool, and can be highly influential. Any reduction in the objectification of women in any media is a good thing. However, I am absolutely in favour of women (or anyone) being allowed to dress themselves however they like.

The comments from Sawyer are very encouraging about the approach PE will take to female characters, and how they are dressed. The comments from many other forum members are not. The issue here is not one of realism, it's of equality. The objectification and marginalisation of women in pretty much ALL media is an ongoing issue. I think many people would be surprised at just how much portrayals of anything in movies, games, TV, etc, can affect how they are perceived and treated in the real world. This issue hasn't gone away, and still gets brought up, because it's still a very real issue that needs to be addressed. Expanding further on this will probably be counter-productive. And also lengthy. A lot of stuff has been written about this. But an example I have seen used in this thread was something like, "if you go out on the street you can see women everywhere who have clearly dressed to accentuate their boobs". This isn't evidence that supports your pro-boob armour argument, rather, it weakens it. The whole of society currently screams at women, through computer games, TV, movies, music videos, everything, that their value as a human being is tied to how attractive they are. Any media at all that undercuts that stereotype is a good thing. Obsidian should be lauded for approaching this issue the way that they are.

My argument was simply that people should be allowed to enjoy something the way they want to enjoy it. And asking for what they want is not a bad thing. I was not making any particular claims about how PE will eventually turn out, my comments were specifically directed at the other forum members who were being dismissive or rude about players who want to experience story above all in their games. My own personal opinion is: Good gameplay and good story really support each other. Good gameplay can and should make the story more immersive, and good story makes the gameplay more compelling. I intend to play PE on what will hopefully be a well balanced "Normal" setting (at least the first time, I will probably be tempted to try out the harder difficulties). And I do believe that Obsidian have an excellent track record insofar as storytelling in games goes, so I trust them to produce something that I will find compelling. I also suspect that whatever "easy mode" turns out to be, it will likely satisfy a majority of the minority who want to play this game purely for the story. However, I believe very strongly that people who just want to experience the story, or play the game any weird way they like, shouldn't be shouted down or ridiculed. I think story is the most important element in games. I think games are a vastly under-utilised storytelling medium, and that so many otherwise excellent games are made with only cursory nods towards narrative is something of a tragedy. I happen to also like good gameplay. If I can get a game that does both really well, and ties them together, that game will probably be one of my favourites. But I'm not about to disparage someone who doesn't value what I value in games.

So? Comic books traditionally have very different settings and plots to your average book. Just look at the backstory of any major superhero. I don't like that particular kind of story, but that doesn't mean that a person who wants to read such a story without any artwork to distract their imagination doesn't have a legitimate complaint. They're a market that's not being served by any books. (Or rather, many books, because I'm betting there's at least a couple of books that ape the comic style by now). The arguments about whether story should follow gameplay or whether gameplay should follow story or whether (ideally) they should serve each other are all peripheral. Whether the devs have the time or resources to implement particular features is also a different argument - one that nobody but the devs can weigh in on with any authority. The big issue with this whole topic is that one group of people are dictating how another group should enjoy their media. Someone who cheats their way through a game to experience the story has just as much right to play that game as someone who presses escape every time a story-related section occurs so that they can get back to the gameplay. And there should be nothing offensive, or threatening, about people asking for a feature that you will not partake in.

1. My comment about disdainful comments wasn't directed at Sawyer, but at some of the other forum members. I feel I should also re-iterate that I don't mean this as a harsh rebuke. Obviously there haven't been any responses like the firestorm of awful that occurred when that female Bioware employee expressed a similar stance. I just don't like people dismissing such ideas out of hand. 2. Ease of implementation is an entirely different subject, I think. If scaling the difficulty of the game to where some players can (if they choose) breeze right through combat is difficult/impossible to do without it impacting on the integrity of the game, that is a reasonable excuse. But it's also a reasonable excuse for not implementing any feature. 3. That a vast majority of players will want to experience the combat element (an unproven statement, but I would also guess that this is the case) isn't an argument for excluding the minority who don't. You could just as easily say that a vast majority of gamers don't want to play an old-school isometric RPG, so Obsidian shouldn't bend over backwards to make one. And obviously I don't know the numbers, but I would bet that the number of players who will play PE on the more extreme difficulty settings are also not a majority.

I don't particularly like some of the responses I've seen to this, and similar sentiments. There hasn't been any abuse or vitriol, which is great, but there is definitely a certain amount of disdain. I'm a story-driven gamer. In my particular case, I also really enjoy the gameplay elements of RPGs, and I foresee myself trying out some of these increased difficulty modes (although I'll be doing that after I've done a complete playthrough). For me, unlocking the story as a reward for completing gameplay challenges really works. However, I don't see a reason why someone shouldn't be allowed to play a game purely to experience the story, or why they should be disparaged for it. Saying something like "go read a book or watch a movie" isn't helpful - or even cogent. Experiencing a story interactively - even stripped of its combat elements - is another experience entirely. That's something I think a majority of RPG fans can agree on. It might also be that the story told by a particular game is not one you can experience anywhere else. So I think asking for a mode that removes combat, or (more likely to be implementable) one that makes combat vanishingly easy is a perfectly valid request. Real time with no pause necessary. Real time with no action on the player's part necessary. It's not the option I would choose, but I'm certainly not going to belittle someone who does want to play the game that way, or fault the developers for including that option, as well as their more difficult modes, in the game.

I actually far prefer creating only a single player character. Having deep, interesting companions is one of the major selling points of PE, for me. Not that I oppose giving other players the option of creating an entire party, it's just that I would never play the game that way. Characters into which the developers had breathed life and emotion? Or a bunch of empty puppets whose stats I'd juked?

Chris Avellone gave an interview shortly before the Kickstarter was kicked off in which he described his vision of a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment. So when I first saw Project Eternity, I assumed that I was backing that vision, and made my pledge. When I did some further reading, it became apparent that my assumption was (at least partially) wrong. I was disappointed, but I did not regret my pledge. An isometric fantasy RPG is definitely something I can get behind. But I also have the urge to jump into these forums and rattle my spear and yell, "Make it weird! Make it Planescapian! Give me deep story and strange, unique companions! Give me items like the Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon!" Which is, of course, so much noise. The whole Kickstarter concept presents a strange new paradigm, I imagine, for the developers. Having fans involved with the creation of a game from its inception must be as much harrowing as it is useful, if not more. In each of us there is an almost painful desire to see the game we most want to play become a reality. I could go into some detail describing my dream RPG. It would borrow much from PS:T, but throw away the D&D rules. The character creation system would be much more like S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and the world would be more open. Just to scratch the surface. But, I have no doubt, that the more specific I got, the more people would disagree with my particular vision. That's a long-winded way of saying "You can't please everyone." But, more specifically, its probably also true that you can't please anyone, not fully. As someone who writes fiction every chance I get - a medium where the creator has control of everything down to the tiniest details - it's very obvious that creating a work that is 100% pleasing even to yourself is a near-impossible task. So I have to wonder just how useful listening to the fans is, versus the developers following their own visions. My feeling with Kickstarter has been that it is finally a chance for developers to do what they want to do, and not necessarily to simply become beholden to their fans in place of their publishers. I gave money to Double Fine based purely on my trust in Tim Schafer's vision. He will not make my ultimate adventure game, but he will almost certainly make something that I very much want to play. Similarly, I was disappointed when I figured out that PE was not to be a PS:T-like game. But I am excited to see what the people who have made the majority of my favourite RPGs (I'm trying to think of a favourite RPG that someone on the PE team wasn't involved with, and I've had to reach all the way back to Ultima VII) come up with. And, until I can personally rustle up the $10 million I'd need to have an RPG tailored to my personal tastes, I'm content to sit back and let them do their thing. I'll still hold a candle for that spiritual successor to PS:T, though.

The interview I was talking about is here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09/07/story-time-with-valves-erik-wolpaw-pt-1/

There was an interview with Eric Wolpaw (writer of Portal 1 and 2) that I as reading recently where he talked about the problem with creating multiple endings to a game. Paraphrased, he said that coming up with just one good ending was hard enough. Coming up five or seven or ten would be impossible. So as a writer, you wind up with a percentage of your audience (and likely the larger percentage) walking away feeling unsatisfied, or even betrayed, by their experience, if you write a game with multiple endings. I'm one of those gamers that other gamers find really annoying, because I care about story more than just about anything else in a game (I may not be so unique on this forum, I imagine, but when talking to a larger, non-RPG specific group, I often find I'm very much in the minority). I have played all the way through games with terrible gameplay, simply because the story was good enough to suck me in. And, I've given up on some critically acclaimed, very popular games with finely tuned, awesome gameplay, simply because there was no story there to keep me interested. And when I think about the games that I love the most, all of them have been games that locked me into a story. Planescape: Torment forced me to play as the Nameless One. Half-Life 2 is more of an interactive movie than any of the awful full motion video games that called themselves "interactive movies" back in to 90s. In fact, the interactive nature of games makes them a better medium in which to tell stories than most others. The immersion factor is orders of magnitude greater than you can get sitting passively in a cinema or turning the pages of a book. Unfortunately, there's a bare handful of games that actually do tell good stories. The point I'm getting to here is that RPGs represent a pretty big dichotomy between storytelling and gameplay. On the one hand, it's pretty clear that what players really want is choice. They want to be able to customise every aspect of their character, and they want a game that allows them to make meaningful decisions throughout their playtime. But at the same time, with RPGs there is an expectation of storytelling that does not really exist in other genres. And I think most of the time where RPGs fail is when these two elements conflict to one another's detriment. The ones that succeed usually do so by favouring one or the other. PS:T had choices, yes, but not so many that the player could derail the story (although it does have more choice than you'd think would be possible while telling such a robust tale - one of the many things that makes it such a classic). Fallout 1 favours choice more, but it does so by compartmentalising the story into relatively discrete sections (divided mostly by location). It does so masterfully, and the epilogue at the end describing the outcomes of your actions in each area was (in my opinion) one of the greatest gifts to RPG storytelling in history. But it doesn't have the enormous sense of personal history that you got with playing as the Nameless One; you were never more than Vault Dweller #n. You can probably infer that I would prefer to play as a character whose place in the world is important to the plot, rather than a random victim of circumstance. But with this post I'm not intending to push that particular agenda with regards to Project Eternity. Although I actually suspect the mechanics are already in place for PE to do both. The cycle of souls concept lends itself to the idea of the player character having a past life rich with backstory, even while their current life has been completely constructed by the player. However, the purpose of this post was really to provide some food for thought, and to see what other backers thought.

I definitely prefer a classless system. The best one I've encountered is the system from Fallout 1 & 2. The Skyrim one, for instance, disappointed me, because it eventually became apparent that you didn't have to actually make any hard choices - you could become a master of everything if you were willing to do a bit of grinding. I wouldn't mind if the classless system included lockouts. For example: you can choose to wield a two-handed weapon in each hand, barbarian style, and thus gain access to a "Double-Fisting" branch of the skill tree, but the "Stealth Attacks" branch is now closed to you forever. That sort of thing. I can see where a classless system might become unwieldy in a party-oriented game, but it seems to me that you could give the potential companions classes of a sort by having them already partway along the road to a particular set of skills when they join you. Thus, you might meat a wizard who has already lost access to the more advanced combat oriented skill options, but still has the entire set of magic skills for you to choose from as they level up. Does this make sense? Footnote: Another thing I really liked about Fallout 1 & 2 were that the base stats didn't change throughout the game. Those states really defined your character, and dictated what skills you could channel points into and be effective. It was a much more versatile system than a class-based one. One of the many disappointments in Fallout 3 was that they changed this, and gave you stat points to spend as you leveled up. This made for an entirely different type of game.

Having read through all the posts that were posted overnight, I feel like I need to clarify further: 1. I'm not advocating that PE be a cartoon. 2. I am advocating that it looks like a cool fantasy painting. However, I do not have a particular artist that I'm pushing. Pretty much all the examples that had been posted to this thread would be awesome looking if translated into a game. 3. If the graphics wound up being very stylised, and looking very much like a painting (like, you could actually see the "brushstrokes" on the screen) I would be overjoyed. But I'm aware this isn't everyone's thing. 4. A happy medium, I think, is the environment art from Diablo 3. Ignore the character and monster models, those appear to have been done in a different art style. But the trees and leaves and grass and waterfall and cobbles all look gorgeous. (Note: this is not a recommendation for Diablo 3, I thought it was a pretty sucky game - the environment art was pretty much its only redeeming feature.) If PE came out looking like that (preferably with character models that matched the environment art) I would be very happy.

My arguments was more that DA2 was visually better than DA:O, not that it was necessarily visually awesome compared to other games. It was just an example where the developers went for realism the first time around, learned their lesson, and did something more stylised on their second attempt.

1varangian, that first screenshot you posted is pretty much the epitome of what I don't really want to see. Bland, boring, uninspired. I think I may have thrown people off by using the word "cartoony". To clarify, what I'd really love to see is a living, breathing, moving, fantasy painting. Something like this, come to life.

Well, when I say "cartoony" I don't mean Saturday Morning Cartoons style. I don't think the artistic style of say, Sam & Max Hit the Road would suit a fantasy RPG. However, if the graphics of a game were designed to match the picture you linked, I would probably describe that as "cartoony", even if most other people wouldn't. It's going to be a style that looks more like a painting than a photo. But if you try to make your graphics photorealistic, then the best possible result you're going to achieve is whatever the limitations of your technology are (and given that even AAA games haven't achieved true photorealism yet, then games with lower budgets are going to have pretty big limitations in that area). However, if you turn away from photorealism, then you have the option of working within your limitations, and producing something that looks really cool. Another good example would be WoW. The graphics on WoW look really dated now (and they were behind the curve already when they first released WoW back in 2004), but the last few expansions have still managed to make the new zones and character models (relatively) pretty to look at, because they started going for a more stylistic approach, rather than trying to wrap degraded photos around blocky models.

I'd HEAVILY argue that point. DA2 didn't look better artistically. Nor do you see to remember DA:O correct if you call that one photorealistic. I wasn't saying DA:O was actually photorealistic, I was saying it wasn't stylised at all. The characters in DA:O were as close to realistic as they could get with the engine they had - which was not very realistic looking. Or: the character models looked pretty terrible. I would argue with you that DA2 looked better than DA:O. It wasn't the pinacle or stylistic graphics by any stretch, but they definitely improved their character models by painting them with broader strokes. For a more concrete example of stylised graphics that look gorgeous (and I can't believe I didn't think of this game when I was typing up my original post):