Stevenaap

It's funny you should mention the Transcendent One (TTO). Torment was very much about a personal journey, TTO wasn't revealed till the endgame IIRC and the game didn't suffer from that at all.n In fact I would argue that having an antagonist at all is kinda cliche. Of course Kotor 2 had several and that worked out pretty awesome as well..

I'm not opposed to it per se, but I'm wondering how can it be legendary if it was just crafted?

I think most people are agreed, VO for every line of text would be much too expensive and restrictive. However some lines for major characters would be awesome, if only to get a feel for how the writers envisioned them and for general atmosphere..I'm specifically thinking about the Ravel dialogue in PS:T here, LOTS of text with just a few lines of VO, but those few lines added LOTS of flavour.

Definitely, it adds flavor to the NPCs. The PC usually has special and unique abilities why shouldn't the same go for NPCs?

At the very least I would like quantitive information, e.g. how much does increasing the strength stat benefit, or just how much better is sword x compared to sword y. I don't particularly care about showing the calculations themselves, Fallout did it right I think. Stats were shown and their effects were explained in the manual, damage done and status effects were also shown, but attack rolls weren't shown a la BG.

I don't get it, it's just useless Live Action Role Playing? Care to elaborate,what do you mean? It's shorthand for the brand of "role playing" that infests Oblivion and other games of its ilk - saying it does not matter that the game does not support your choices in any meaningful way, you can do it yourself in your head (without any response from the game environment, mind you) and it is just as good. Like you can "play" town guard in Oblivion by killing one for his armour (muhahaha) and than roam the roads and kill bandits, while taking periodic breaks to report to your superiors (who do not recognize you as a guard but that never mattered to these people) DO. NOT. DO. THIS. Well I agree that in general Oblivion et al. are a bit of a mockery of RPGs, I don't really go for that whole sandbox experience either. But there the problem is that it messes up the narrative pretty badly. As long as the narrative doesn't suffer though I don't see the problem. As I said you can't expect the game to acknowledge everything about your character; so I'm totally fine with filling in the blanks myself, that's pretty much a definition of roleplaying in my mind..

I don't get it, it's just useless Live Action Role Playing? Care to elaborate,what do you mean?

Still though, I wouldn't soon roleplay a transgender character, but I would say it would be as easy picking a female avatar and roleplaying it as a male character or vice versa of course. After all isn't that the point of roleplaying, filling in the blanks in your head?. Now I can understand it might be weird if your transgender character looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger or had cupsize DD, but presumably elves for example wouldn't have that particular problem..

Aren't the elves androgynous enough as they are (going by standard fantasy tropes) to roleplay a transgender character? I'm asking because I'm not really sure what you're asking for specifically?

You're not wrong there, the classic 3x3 alignment grid is pretty restrictive. I would think evil characters see themselves as looking out for no. 1..more likely than not they are self-serving and egocentric, not being evil for the sake of being evil. There's actually a nice article about alignment sytems here you guys might find interesting: http://easydamus.com/alignmentreal.html

I think something can be said for both, but that's not really the point. of course "EXPLICIT racism, rape, child killings, sociopathic disorder, cannibalism in poor areas, and many other taboos" exist in reality, but I don't think adding a sprinkling of misery to the fictional world of PE would make it more realistic per se. Actually I think it's more important for a world to be BELIEVABLE than realistic and that's all up to good world building. There's very few if any RPGs that I would call realistic, but the best once are believable because they are consistent and a lot of effort went into the details, regardless of the setting.

Hear, hear. I'm kind of confused, why are people expecting these ultra violent "themes", if you can call 'em that, all of a sudden? Is it because of the witcher? I don't think the titles any of the members of the dev. team worked on in the past featured that kind of explicit violence. Well I mean sure you could hit a child in the nuts with a sledgehammer, but otherwise I think fallout played it rather coy and so did all of the other titles. Which also brings me to the next point: PS:T which was generally lauded for it's mature themes wasn't dark and gritty, it got it's appeal from the complexity of the themes and its imaginative world-building. What reason would you have to expect or want the level of grittiness described in this thread for this game?

No thanks, you just want gritty and dark. And that's cool BTW but don't confuse it with maturity because a game needn't be gritty and dark in order to be mature or vice versa.

That is a pretty homophobic statement I'm sorry say . Certain miniscule communities, are you kidding me? The homosexual population is estimated at around 2-10% of the population, that does NOT constitute a miniscule community. And of course the aim isn't to cause controversy but rather to promote acceptance homosexuality. On-topic, I think I'd rather prefer no sex scenes at all, I've yet to see one that wasn't hilarious,crass or just plain sexist. Actually I'm deeply ambivalent about romancing companions in general. I'm getting kind of tired of the whole 'date simulator' mechanic i.e. pick the right conversation option twice and you get to shack.

-Gender equality/politics Honestly though, I care more about how well themes are explored than specifically which ones. IMO lately mature themes have become some sort of buzzword, but instead of actually exploring said themes games just pay lipservice to them. 'Lookit there's the whores, slavery and child labor.. voila mature themes' add some lame trolley problems and you've got your 'moral choices'. Say what you will about DA2, but it did actually explored some very 'mature' (whatever that means) themes with varying success. The Qunari culture was very well explored with the Arishok, examining the PC's actions from a completely different moral frame of reference without resorting to awful good/evil tropes. Also the blood magic theme, even though it was rather ham-fisted and handled rather poorly toward the end, offered the PC's lots of moral dilemma's which were hard to into a classic black/white morality.