[Spill your blasphemous opinions on CRPGs here]

Inspired by Tajerio's point on AD&D (it should be D&D 3.5, but who's counting?) and NWN2, I'll add:

-I love that Josh & Co is making so many changes to the game system for PE. I don't want a rerun of the classic D&D iterations for this game

 

Someone once told me that everything after the original first edition counted as AD&D, and I have never been able to get that lie completely out of my head.

 

I too am overjoyed that nostalgia =/= copying.

[Spill your blasphemous opinions on CRPGs here]

- Baldur's Gate is a tedious grind and Minsc should be shot

 

Hear, hear.

[Spill your blasphemous opinions on CRPGs here]

- I hate stealth with a fiery passion.

- AD&D is a horrible basis for cRPGs.  I firmly believe it held back NWN2 (agree with you Indira on its quality) from being an even better game.

    - Subpoint: Vancian magic is hilariously awful as a game system.

- Bad combat hurts a game with a good story more than a bad story hurts a game with good combat.

- Tabula rasa is a really stupid way to start off a player character.

- BioWare's average character is more interesting than Obsidian's average character, but Obsidian's best characters can't be beat.

[The Case for Romance.]

Nonek, do you wear a monocle and smoke a pipe when you post?

 

I imagine more of a dual-wielding pipe scenario.  Though I'm not sure where the inevitable Scotch goes.

[Race and gender affecting gameplay]

 

 

Well... no, the racism of colonialism is still directed outwards at different (and newly discovered, often as not) nations and cultures, as opposed to the modern hate-thy-neighbour form.

 

That's not to say that there aren't counterexamples to what I'm talking about from that time period and earlier. The 11th century was not a good time for the Ashkenazi.

 

 

It's also worth noting that most modern "hate-thy-neighbor" racism isn't possible without colonialism/imperialism creating societies that mixed white Europeans with Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, and that one of the cornerstones of racism is basically the belief that the people against whom prejudice is directed DO in fact constitute a separate society/culture.  I honestly can't think of any modern "hate-thy-neighbor" racism that simultaneously isn't directed against people of a different color AND doesn't originate before the Renaissance.

... except for the specific counterexample that I gave to my own argument?

 

 

Well, the Jews in Europe are kind of an exception to everything because Jewish is an ethnic, cultural, and religious descriptor simultaneously.  I would say that the society of the Ashkenazim, for the most part, existed in parallel/tangent to Latin Christian society without being a part of it.  It's also really unclear as to whether the prejudice of Europeans against the Ashkenazim was racial or religious--personally I think religious prejudice was more the driving factor.

[On the class struggle and the coming victory of the proletariat]

One thing that would be centrally important: how easy/necessary is it to get training in tapping the power of one's soul? Historically, there have been innumerable intelligent people who were held back by lack of education--if education is as necessary for soul power, then a class system could easily develop in which the soul powerful don't rule the world. If, on the other hand, formal training isn't essential, then it would make much more sense for there to be a preponderance of the soul-powerful at the top, all else being equal.

[On the class struggle and the coming victory of the proletariat]

*long piece of mostly BS from Orwell*

 

Whatever you think of that, its food for thought in a world where someone might be able to harness earth-shattering power not through being born in the right class but simply through study and practice. Not sure if the developers would be willing to think things through to that extent, though. That would require some seriously extreme dissection of your typical fantasy setting.

 

So I guess the crossbow, infantry discipline, rocket-propelled grenade, and portable SAM don't count for much then.  Jeez was Orwell ever a pompous idiot. 

 

Not to mention that the centralization of the state in most of Europe has proceeded on a upwards trajectory since the Renaissance, irrespective of weapons technology.

[Questions about choices in PoE]

This idea that every single new RPG needs branching story in order to have meaningful choices is extremely detrimental to storytelling.

 

I don't dismiss the idea here, but I don't quite understand.  Obviously it's not necessary that the story do the Witcher 2 thing where there's a big huge branch after chapter 1 (though the extent of the branching is a little overstated, since you end up doing a lot of the same things).  But don't there need to be some narrative branches as the result of some choices for those choices to be meaningful?

[Idea for Multiplayer/co-op]

Well, let's look at the sales numbers:

 

" As of 2006, total sales for all releases in the [baldur's Gate] series was almost five million copies"

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur's_Gate

 

"Planescape: Torment received widespread critical acclaim upon its release,^[50] but only made a small profit."

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape:_Torment

 

Icewind Dale 1 and 2 also both sold very well and spent a lot of time a the top of PC game sales.  Planescape?  Didn't sell.  Even Fallout, one of the greatest games in PC history, was a niche game that didn't sell anything like the Infinity engine games.  Fallout 2 sold an awful 200,000 copies.  

 

Bottom line, BG almost single-handedly saved the PC gaming industry.  And it was on the backs of D&D fans, many of them playing multiplayer on their LAN's or via direct IP connect.  The devs had no way of gauging how popular this was.  They downplay it because they don't want to code it.  

 

So what's being made here is another Planescape, at very best, and no successor to the BG series.  It may be a good game.  But very few people will ever play it.  You'd be lucky to get to the 200k units threshold.  

 

Those sales figures are accurate, yes.  I'd venture to guess, though, that the principal reasons BG did better than Planescape were, in no particular order: the much more familiar setting of the Forgotten Realms, the superior combat, and the more standard fantasy main plot.  I'd be hard pressed to agree that multiplayer was a huge component of its success.

 

Also, it never ceases to amaze me how one difference between PoE and the BG series leads people to the conclusion that PoE can't be a successor to it.

[The Case for Romance.]

Imagine if G.R.R.Martin decided Ned Stark should go back because he was totally awesome and it's too bad we don't get to see his manly beard anymore. The story would just be chaos and the plot would become meaningless.

 

 

I might have chosen a different example to make that point.  Probably a good writer, who doesn't think that all the smoke blown up his posterior means that droning on and on endlessly is exactly what he should do.

 

On topic: THERE ARE NO ROMANCES IN THIS GAME.  THIS DISCUSSION SHOULD GO ELSEWHERE.

[what is your worst rpg game ever played?]

Jade Empire is the only RPG I have ever played that I never finished.  I just loathed it from the first ten minutes, and gave up after four or five hours.

 

Two Worlds is also wretched, but at least I got to the end of the main quest. 

[Race and gender affecting gameplay]

Well... no, the racism of colonialism is still directed outwards at different (and newly discovered, often as not) nations and cultures, as opposed to the modern hate-thy-neighbour form.

 

That's not to say that there aren't counterexamples to what I'm talking about from that time period and earlier. The 11th century was not a good time for the Ashkenazi.

 

 

Ah, ok.  I see your point, but I still disagree.  From the European perspective at least, direct, sustained, and broad contact with people who weren't from Europe or the Mediterranean basin brought about a change in prejudice, from being principally ethnic (we hate these guys, but they're still Caucasian) to being more racist (we hate these guys and they are all different kinds of colors).  And the empires they built were institutionally racist in a way that Europeans had not been before colonialism.  And all of that went on well into the twentieth century, and outwardly directed racism (without the imperialism generally) is still alive and well today.  Look at rhetoric directed towards China, or the way Western nations often talk about African nations, for examples.  So I don't think the distinction between the racism of colonialism and modern racism is really a fair one.

 

It's also worth noting that most modern "hate-thy-neighbor" racism isn't possible without colonialism/imperialism creating societies that mixed white Europeans with Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, and that one of the cornerstones of racism is basically the belief that the people against whom prejudice is directed DO in fact constitute a separate society/culture.  I honestly can't think of any modern "hate-thy-neighbor" racism that simultaneously isn't directed against people of a different color AND doesn't originate before the Renaissance.

 

I think this does show that there are a number of ways Obsidian could go here--is the basis for prejudice going to be cultural (Glanfathans v. Aedyrans), racial (mountain dwarves v. boreal dwarves), or special (elves v. dwarves)?  Or, probably, parts of all three.

[Race and gender affecting gameplay]

Elevating the importance of race is 21st (or 20th or 19th or 18th) century goggles, to a certain extent. A white man born-and-raised in 14th century Venice would have a lot more in common with - and a greater sense of kinship and connection to - a black man of the same background than he would with another white man from 14th century Novgorod. By the same token, I'd expect a Vailian elf and a Vailian dwarf to get on a lot better than a Vailian elf and a Glanfathan elf, who have no common culture despite their genetic similarities.

 

This is a bit of an essentialization.  Attitudes towards race varied hugely by time and place across the medieval and Renaissance worlds--you could find nasty racism that would be at home in the twentieth century without looking too hard in the medieval world.  It's worth noting also that the Renaissance era and the era of colonialism also saw racism rise dramatically and start to become recognizably modern, and that's PoE's historical equivalency period, isn't it?

[On the class struggle and the coming victory of the proletariat]

I never whine. I lobby. Sometimes I'm strident, sometimes I'm not. Why would I try to argue for things I don't want to see.

 

 

As I used to say to my mother in my teenage years when she'd accuse me of whining, "I can't whine because my voice is too low.  I complain loudly in a baritone register."

[On the class struggle and the coming victory of the proletariat]

 

I love it. Given possibility, I will be aristocracy's biggest  nightmare  headache... or hangover, depending on the context and nature of my PC exploits. Power to the people and all that nonsense.

 

Also:

 

Speaking of Arcanum, I have a feeling the class struggle and the race issue could be strongly intertwined. In our world, the supposed 'inferiority' of black people was used as the basis for their subjugation to whites for centuries. Yet it was a prejudice based on pseudo-science and ignorance and those who believe in it nowadays are treated as bigoted idiots. 

 

Arcanum had a different issue, and so might PoE. What do you do when there is genuine and obvious differences between races, beyond superficial appearance? What do you do if one race is objectively dumber or weaker or more prone to violence than others? If a given race is physically strong and mentally weak, then might it actually make perfect sense for them to be relegated to the ranks of lowly workers, serfs, peasants and so on?

 

Not that we know enough about the various races to decide if such a large difference will exist. 

 

 

I doubt that any of PoE's races are going to be markedly more or less intelligent than any of the others.  My guess is that they'll be physically and psychologically different from one another but not in terms of brainpower.  That would tend to open up a bit of a can of worms if dealt with in a realistic manner.  

[Dragon Age: Inquisition]

Point-slightly-not-found I'm won't cut my nose off to spite my face - if it's a good CRPG I'll pick it up. Probably on my PS4, in fact.

 

But if there's too much fan-service and core 'Biowarianism' on display, it's not as if there's a shortage of decent games to play is there? I'm a strategy and RTS gamer too, plus I'm pretty excited about new genres (for me) like The Division and Titanfall. I'm also an ARPG player -the new Diablo XP looks good, as does Grim Dawn etc.

 

So my expectations are high, and if not met, won't overly concern me. OTOH if DA3 gets good reviews from gamers I trust I'll be all over it. But I don't trust a single word Bioware says about their games. They are epic mongers of hyperbole about their titles and, indeed, their content. They will paint game 'A' as game 'B' and I've been burnt before. So we'll see.

 

And of course there's PoE.

 

Makes perfect sense.  My perspective's different because I basically don't play anything but CRPGS, grand strategy, and the unique genre of BioWare RPGs, so I'm constantly tempering my expectations.

 

Also I have found the silly things BioWare do in their games, which I think come under your 'fan-service and core BioWarianism" label, to be amusing in their shortcomings rather than offputting.

[Dragon Age: Inquisition]

 

Are you going to play Dragon Age: Inquisition?

 

I don't know is the honest answer. I'll see if there's a demo. If it veers back to DA:O territory enough then perhaps.

 

 

Manage thy expectations!  That's how I enjoyed DA2 for multiple playthroughs--I knew it was never going to be an old-school RPG and thus it was quite fun.  Demand that things be that which they are not, and you'll always be disappointed.

[Update #72: Death Godlike and Expected Ship Date]

 

 I know of Aloth, Cadegund, Eder, Sagani, Pallegina, Forton, and the Orlan Cypher (Don't know if we have a name). I haven't heard of the last companion, but may have missed it or forgotten it. I am assuming it is a Amaua character seeing as that is the only race not represented by the current list.

I actually like half the names. Normally, I just roll my eyes at fantasy names because they try too hard.

 

 

Emphatically seconded.  The names we know so far sound like names people could have.  Not a name someone thought would look really cool with a couple extra apostrophes.

[The Case for Romance.]

 

While I hate romances in WRPGs; I find the trolling from the anti romancer in this topic a bit childish and pathetic.  No doubt it's easy to see who's not mature in this topic.

 

The po-faced humourlessness of the promancers is a consistent feature - I of course except people like Bruce who 'gets it.'

 

And when did trolling become 'something I don't agree with?'

 

 

The instant somebody on the Internet disagreed with somebody else and needed a strawman.  Come on now.

[Race and gender affecting gameplay]

 

Of course, if you don't want an intelligent world then that's different.

 

And i thout that only people or animals coud be "inteligent", but now i know that world it self can also have intelect ...

 

 

Shorthand for "intelligently designed and internally consistent world," of course.  But I'll take any reason for 'Cube and Chris Tucker.

[Petition for comprehensive modding tools]

I would be all for them releasing a set of mod tools if it's easy to do in terms of licensing and time.

 

But if it costs more than one or two days total work then no thanks.  I'd much rather have the work go into the base game than have it go towards letting non-devs do things to the game after it releases.

[Race and gender affecting gameplay]

 

They did write in an article, "Pillars of Eternity will delve into themes like "racism and more pervasive racism than just bold-faced racism", explained Sawyer, "like social racism or institutional racism". Class problems will be explored, and there will be an ongoing struggle between the religiously minded and the technological."

 

So hopefully they will not only have it happening around the player, but towards the player as well. 

 

This sounds astonishingly worthy and dull. When I play a fantasy game the last thing on my mind are urgent social issues. I get enough of that everyday in the r/w.

 

 

I don't think Obsidian's going to shove a social justice campaign down your throat.  But I can't see how anyone could make an intelligent world without having this sort of stuff.

 

Of course, if you don't want an intelligent world then that's different.

[Update #72: Death Godlike and Expected Ship Date]

Also, speaking of types of Godlike... are there just going to be different types (Death, Earth, etc.) and that's it? Or are they still going to be a sub-type of the various races? What I mean is... are there going to be Orlan Death Godlike, and Aumaua Death Godlike? Just curious.

 

I second this question.  Saying "this is a Death Godlike head" while leaving off a race descriptor is a touch confusing.

 

The stuff in the update is excellent as usual.  Really love the detail in that blacksmith's shop.

[No romances confirmed]

 

They did promise memorable companions as one of their core "spiritual successor" planks. I think it's premature to worry that they're going to renege on that, even if romance is out.

 

I rather worry when romance becomes the only way of memorable companions. Or when people think it is the only way.

Now Obsidian has the chance to prove once and for all that this does not have to be the case.

 

 

I completely agree with the sentiment, but...hasn't Obsidian proven this already?  Kreia and Kaelyn the Dove are two of my ten most memorable companions in any game ever, and ain't no romancing going on there. 

[No romances confirmed]

 

I really sincerely doubt that Obsidian's going to hand us a dystopia.  The premise of the Fallout series is postapocalyptic, while the premise of PoE is a Renaissance-esque age of discovery and exploration.  Dystopia's far more appropriate in the former setting than it is in the latter setting.

 

Although the post-nuclear apocalypse setting is inherently dystopic, the experiences of the...you know what? I had typed a long argument here, but it's better summed up as this:

 

Fallout 1+2 didn't have kids being tied up and set ablaze and people semi-routinely shooting themselves in the face over how grim things were.

 

The setting matters far less than the general writing styles of the time.

 

 

 Frankly, I thought New Vegas was quite deliberately taking the piss with a lot of the grimdark.  I also don't think that a prevailing writing style of the time is going to sway the PoE team overmuch.  They seem a pretty independently minded group.