Aotrs Commander

Wait, does this mean we can't task-switch in-game? That's... mildly irritating. Not really as annoying as it could be (as my Win 7 drive is specifically for games, so the only thing I'd likely to want to be switching to is Firefox - all the documentations and CADs modelling is on my Win XP hard drive), but it is a bit. (It's not like it's the only game I've found that to be mildly annoying on. I think SotS 2 doesn't like it either (won't go back to fullscreen from windowed if you do without restarting the game, and I've played 95 hours on that, so..!) One presumes that if this is the case, they did because they found the game's unstable if Alt-tabbed...?

PoE was desined to be as big and expansive as Baldur's Gate II and Planescape:Torment. (Which also did not rely on full voice-acting, and the latter of which (pending playing enough of PoE to make judgement) is about the best RPG ever.) You can't do that with full voice acting (maybe if Obsidian had gotten Star Citizen's budget...!) because the long and the short of it is... voice acting costs money. And not just paying the voice actors, but money in the time required (since it basically locks you into what is recorded, or you have to spend more money getting line re-recorded). It's basically a practical limitation. Yeah, DA:O and whatnoit may have done it... but then again PoE is expected to be fairly significantly longer than that (and probably done on a smaller budget). I'd rather have a larger, longer game than needing to have every bit of dialogue voiced. It's not like being forced to read it instead is a really arduous task. (That said, I can quite see the problem if someone is dyslexic, of course; that is a bugger, unfortunately.) Still , PoE has not made any secret of the fact - and if this is the third time you've run into your problem because you didn't look into it... Also, the old-school grognard in me (who, when pried away from playing TIE Fighter and Dungeon Keeper and all the Sierra/Tilted Mill city-builders, actually appears to have gotten the game he wanted in the style he wanted) is jumping up and down and shouting something about lawns or something....

Well, you can at least just click the heading at the top once you've picked them at least one and go back and change/tweak each bit without having to redo everything in order (had you discovered that?) I spent... an hour, maybe more, futzing around with it yesterday, trying to work out what I wanted to play (which, to be fair to Obsidian, is something of a triumph, because the answer wasn't instantly "wizard, because special effects are pretty" like basically every other RPG the frst time around...!) and fiddling with appearances and portraits an whatnot.

I'm not sure what you refer to as "female super model", but when it comes to a hooded rogue, there can be *plenty* of personality in the portrait. Fun fact: that guy and one of the voice sets from IWD 2 (I think male rogue 2, the thin, evil-ish sounding one who says "my body can'rt keep pace with the blood leaving it!" when he go badly wounded (which happened quite a lot) whom I used for a Fighter/Rogue, The Black Dagger buried so memorably into my head, he remains thus far the only characte created for a computer game tha has made the transition to table-top RPGs. (It's more usually the other way around.) So, I think I have to say "hell, yeah!" to your comment...! I never thought to look for custom protraits before I started yesterday (it might have made the tortuous process of picking a character more easy, since a few ideas I abandonded becaue I culdn't get a portriat to fit...) In the end, I just plumped for the Legolas-looking fellow as a Cipher, because I just couldn't pick between my vritually-always-pick wizard or rogue (since that was what I last played in DA:O), so I thought split the difference. And I figured if I don't like any of the companions or somehting, I can always pick up a pale elf female elf wizard later...! Or possibly a Tauriel-clone Elf fighter, because I, for one, loved the Hobit movies...!) (That said, I only played for about a half an hour yesterday, if that, by the time I'd actually generated a character...!)

GOG can't really let you do a pre-load given that they're DRM free. How are they going to stop you from playing before the release? *skulldesk* Of course, that's, like, the whole point, isn't it? (It was a bit late last night when I looked at that..!) Like I said, though, it's no big deal, really, as it wouldn't have gotten me playing it any sooner anyway.

Hm. I thought GoG might have let you do a pre-load too, but apparently I should have gone for a Steam key... (I'll grant you my choice was fairly arbitary...!) I was half-planning on setting it up to load overnight, but nevermind. (Mainly 'cos it took five hours at the weekend to download the latest Star Citizen gubbins...!) Eh, no great loss (especially since I thought it was due out of Friday...!) I am not really likely to be able to get to do any playing tomorrow anyway because of time and my wargames (so I guess I'll set it up to download when I get home tomorrow afternoon and it can be doing that while I'm out using my TIE Interceptors to slaughte rebel scum.) I probably won't be able to have a proper stab at it until the weekend either way. I've waited two-and-half-odd years, I can wait a few more days...!

Disappointed... but unsurprised - this sort of thing happens. Part of the point of Kickstarter was so that the devs are not under the thumb of a company wanting to rush a game out before it's finished, so I'd rather the game be released when it's finished and not before. Mostly I'm disappointed because this will still be the first Kickstarter game to come to fruition and I've been WOEFULLY short of new games this year. (Like, I think with this being pushed back, it means I will have bought about... maybe five...? All year? I think?)

How bad is the games industry that my first thought on the ARM was "well, it could be worse, I suppose... And better than some..." I can actually see the value in acting the posing out (I know they did in such stuff like Avatar). Heck, when I was doing my infantry CADs model for 3D printing, I ended up going into the garden and grabbing a hoe or something to work out how you pose a rocket launcher...

Honestly, I was not expecting April 2014 in the first place. I as more expecting "sometime in late 2014", as these things always take longer. It'll take as long as it takes. I'm good... And without publishers breathing down their necks, hopefully we can avoid a KotR2/NWN2 incident where it seems a bit rushed at the last minute (well, in the latter case, right after that final boss-fight; which was, I'll grant you, by far the best I think I've seen an any of these RPGs, because we got everyone in on it.)

And this is why we like you guys! That seems like an eminently sensible way to go about things; it gives your primary (story) character - like you had in BG/BG2, and a good way to lead in at the start of the game, where you have plenty of narrative play, but also the option to use the NPCs and/or make your own, and come to that, even filter in characters if you suddenly desparetly want a mage or something later down the line! That is a really excellent idea - though, as they say, that's what we're payin' you for! Is this like Might & Magic / Bard's Tale / Mars Saga/Mines of Titan? While interesting, and I'm not against it per se, it does feel a bit like a factory churning out adventurers... and it usually existed in games where, especially at lower levels, mortality was pretty bad. But you wouldn't need to use if at all, if you used the fully-fleshed out NPC companions. I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that instead of companions (or that the companions would come from the guild), or even the expectation that your hired advantures would have any more personality than they did in say IWD (which is exactly what you gave them, in your own head!) it'd just be one more option you could use. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I like it; it has a certain appeal, like some of the various JRPGs do (thinking of Disgaea mostly). ... Or Pokemon... (I would not consider this a bad thing...!) And, at the end of the day, some of us just love generating characters. It also might give you something to spend all that inevitable excess gold on when you get to the end game...! ... Yeah, Obsidian, you probably ought to have an upper limit to how many characters we can have sitting in our "inactive party" thingy, so that some of us don't get too carried away...!

Well, to be fair, having an uber-leet NPC come along and solve the quest for you isn't very satisfying (and it's a trap that some DMs fall into with their NPCs) from a game-play perspective, and even if they accompany you it's easy to get overshadowed if they're several leagues of power above you. Most roleplayers (tabletop or otherwise) are generally not big fans of some non-PC dude coming in and stealing all of the lime-light, and it's very difficult to get a balance right, outside of a purely narrative enviroment. It ain't easy to do the Fellowship of the Ring in an RPG game, really, and I don't think you should probably try. So if you're going to show the PCs are not the biggest fish in the pond (not a bad idea, since you could sow the seeds for the prequels), you have to be very careful about how you do it, and it's better done narratively than via gameplay. Interacting with someone who either is or turns out to be the next BBEG is not a bad way to go about it if you must do it gameplay wise; via combat really isn't.

Actually, you could turn the whole pointless idea of achievements into something useful if you perhaps granted some bonuses for doing certain things. (Like if you kill X number of Y monster, you get a Z bonus to do something to them.) That would be a neat little thingy. I'm sure you could come up with cleverer ideas than that, but it's got potential. (Though probably not enough to warrent coding in practise on a relatively limited budget.)

I don't think the inclusion of timed quest should be much of a problem, unless they happen simultaneously. Or are over a particularly extended period (like the whole game plot.) If you run into the woman being dragged off, in the practical scheme of things, unless you are already on a timer, there'd be no reason not to go after and deal with that sidequest right there and then. (Well, probably.) And if you choose not to, well, that's still a deliberate a decision, and most importantly, it still puts the control of the game mostly in the hands of the player. You can choose to do it then or not (and if not suffer the consequences (which would be the "other bit of the quest" perhaps)). Now, I'll grant you, it would probably be helpful if it was laid out at the start in the manual or something that when it says "you better hurry" on your quest journey, it means it. (Even if it says "be aware that some events in your quest log may have a time limit to complete.") And so long as the game sticks to it, it'll all be golden. The problems arise when you start to get to the point where there's two or more timed quests going on at once, and the player has to start actively managing their time (I have to go here, do this, then here and do this or the timer will run out) and you end up with Persona 3 Syndrome in miniature (where you just use a walkthrough) or at best, the player feels like they have to rush through the game to do it all (whether this is actually true or not), as a lot of players, myself included, just don't find being put under pressure like that very fun. (And this is leaving aside the fact people sometimes want to do a "perfect" run.) So, timed quests are fine, so long as you still give the player some control, and aren't placed at silly places. (Like for example, on exiting a big dungeon/boss fight when half the party needs to be healed up back in town or by resting or something and/or the party is totally laden up with kit they need to sell before they can carry any new loot.)

I actually like the progression of power, and getting more toys to play with at the end, and the feeling of greater power... (Sometimes bigger numbers are more fun.) That said, it's more about relative (end-to-start improvement), than absolute power (whether at level 20 you're Superman or not) (which is easy to adjust, if you want to bring in Things the PCs (preportedly) Cannot Kill, just make 'em +50% or more of whatever the level cap is. That said, I don't it's a good idea to have high-level NPCs like Drizzt or Elminster floating around anyway, because a) people will want to kill them if they're there and b) there needs to be a really good reason for them being there and not doing the quest themselves (the Realms was especially bad for this kind of name-dropping that I think you can really do without) and c) all-too-easily leads to showing off how uber that character is to the annoyance of the player (this last doubly-applies to tabletop RPGs, but even games designers can sometimes do it too.) BG 1's power curve was pretty awful, but fortunately, all the IE games thereafter were vastly better at it. A curve like Torment or the IWD would be fine, though I think at bottom level you could do with makign the characters less fragile than they were in AD&D especially. (Mind you, Obsidian have done that before anyway, e.g. KotR 2 where you got like +20 hit points at level one for being the Exile or something.)

Dungeon Siege used a more amenable system for, at least, levelling your weapons and spells sensibly, as did Spellforce (but of course, they used a mana system, so you could could spam spells just as much, and they were mainly shooty-type spells). The JRPG Grandia I and II also used a similar use-or-lose it (well, use-it-or-don't-improve-it). Which were better than the TES way - but both of which were also combat-only engines. The TES system is definately a poor way to do it, though, even within that style. I spent the first several hours of Morrowind jumping everywhere, and carefully planning out what skills to use in both Morrowind and Oblivion so I didn't lose anything on a level up (and, of course, totally wasting my tie in the latter because Oblivion's level scaling was abyssmal...!) As, for my entire twenty-off year gaming career, I have played predominatly played Rolemaster and several versions of D&D (and Warhammer FRP to a lesser extent) on the tabletop, and all my favourite RPGs are level-based (all Biowares, all IE games, Witcher, all the JPGs - though again, the later is all combat-based), you'll forgive me if I say emphatically, I want to spend my skill points/talents/whatnot, because that's half the fun of progression and levelling up. Autolevelling skills just isn't anywhere near as satifying. Get XP from everything, "spend" XP on everything... (I imagine it also makes it somewhat easier to balance the game for the devs, since there is a narrower range of character capabilities at any point, as opposed to the difference between a guy who's just wandering through the game and one that's optimising the system. Because people WILL optimise the system, either because they like it, or because they feel they're missing something if they don't. And it's not a bad thing in either case.)

I think Torment did it perfectly. You got XP for killing stuff, yes (sometimes a fair bit), but the really big rewards tended more to come from roleplaying, conversations and quest goals. (As well as disarming traps, learning stuff (e.g. spells).) I might even go as far as saying grant some XP for reading in-game books (or finding and opening them, anyway!) a la DA:O or something. Sneaking past guys XP might be harder to implement, but if you could do it, I certainly wouldn't begrudge it. I will say that I think party XP, as in NWN2/KotR2 (et al), rather than individual character XP is probably the best way to go around it; unless there is a very high level cap so that people can genuinely solo it without hitting the limit, as you could do in Torment. (You wouldn't want to do that in BG 1, or NWN 2, really.) Which I also totally can get behind. I fondly remember my second playthrough Torment as the Nameless Nutter, and scamming every last drop of XP I could find, soloing most of the time, and then grabbing Xakkon or Morte one at a time for their character-driven conversation XP and then ditching 'em out again until I needed to do it again; and finally finishing the game at level 60-odd, with 25 in every stat but charisma (which was 23), and having so many hits (about 600-700 of something daft!) and regenerating so fast that the last boss couldn't actually kill me, even if I stood there for about five minutes letting him try...!) Good times! (Of course, that does skew the balancing curve right out, so I won't be disappointed if the party XP.) Actually, you could maybe do it both ways - award party XP, but the amount you get is divided by the number of characters you have, maybe. I dunno. (Mostly I'm just thinking that the problem with individual XP is that if you want to swap a companion character out for part of a quest (e.g. that companion's personal quest or something), if you haven't been using them, they may be way too low level, and it's not like you'll likely be able to grind them up a la JRPG.)

I'd like to have my cake and eat it too... The proper, fleshed out companions are a must (so you could play with just them+PC), but I think it'd be nice if, like BG/BG2/IWD etc you you had the option to could create more than one PC (or a whole party). (I played through BG 1 about 2.5 times, and I don't think I ever used the "proper" NPCs once.) I wouldn't imagine it'd be particularly difficult to implement, either. One assumes you'd have your "main character" who determines all the plot stuff, and then be able to just generate some extra bodies to fill out your ranks if you wanted to. (I mean, the secondary guys might be a little more flat in the roleplaying department, but that's sort of not the point, is it?) A bit like in the last NWN2 expansion (something of zephyr? I can't for the unlife of me remember the name at the moment), except that instead of the more limited NPCs there, you'd have fully fleshed-out NPCs, and then you'd just mix and match your party with your characters and the NPCs maybe. It's certainly a nice thought! (Of course, it does lead to potential game balance problems if you wanted to run a party of just mages or something; but I sort of don't see that as a problem; if people wanted to do that and it made the game a breeze, I don't think it would really matter so much, since it's the player whose setting thier own difficulty.)

I still hold Torment at arguably the best RPG (though I'd qualify BG2, Dragon Age: Origins and ME 1+2+3(less those last fifteen minutes or so) as fairly close behind). I think it just hit a perfect storm of excellence, and one of things that made Torment work was the highly unusual setting. It was my first exposure to Planescape, and while I'm not really that enamoured of it - for Torment it worked perfectly. I don't think you could equal Torment in that respect with a more "traditional" RPG setting (though Jade Empire came fairly close in that regard, and part of Morrowind's charm came from it's unusual environs). To get to that level of wonder and sense of exploration, you'd have to do something truly unique again. (I personally still have dreams of a fantasy RPG set entirely on an alien world, populated by nonhuman races; no sci-fi elements, just fantasy as it would have been if it was no Earth-derived.) I'm honestly not expecting Eternity to come to Torment's ridiculously high standard - partly because that's be rather too optimistic and setting up for disappointement - and partly because with a more "traditional" setting, it's got to work that much harder to get there. (Both NWN2 and DA:O suffered from this - I loved both when playing them, but afterwards, they felt more... forgettable is not quite the right word, too harsh, though it's close; ME and JE, with their different settings, had a touch more traction, I think. It's a bit of a surprising thing for me to find myself saying, since I'm a die-hard Tolkien-derived sort of fellow.) If we something up to BG2's standard, though, I'll be more than content!

I didn't even know who Aller's voice actress was until after I finished the game for the first time. Nor did I particularly care either way. (And, besides, at which point, I had other axes to grind...!)

So what is the problem with people voicing their opinion against romances? That in truth is what I find most fascinating in these topics. There is no problem with people saying "I don't like romances in games" or "I don't think romances in games has ever been done well" or "I'd rather almost anything else be in the game before romances." No more problem with it than with people saying "I love romances in games" or "I think most romances in games have been done fine" or "I need romances in the game more than almost anything else." Opinions on good or bad, what should be included or not based on personal preference stated as such, are valid. If you think I'm saying that you can't say you don't want romances in the game, then I apologize for whatever I said that made you think that. Make your voice heard! I think why the parts of this debate that get heated and somewhat aggressive is sometimes the WAY in which some people voice their disagreement; it's okay, for example, to say "I don't like the romances, I'd rather not have them in the game, and spend the reources/time somewhere else", nobody should have a problem with that. But it's less so to say "I don't like romances, and I'm going cast aspersions on those of you that do", as some of the more...vocal opponents have implied (or atimes - and not necessarily here, but in other threads - have come outright and said). For a kickoff, all that leads to is annoying the other side, who get defensive, and then the other guys get defensive and it degenerates into people arguing about how they're arguing (which is usually barely just this side of civil) at best or outright flame wars and bans at worst. (And note, so I'm being explicitly clear, this equally applies to both sides; I stated this way around as it has been my experience in these threads that it modally happens that way around, but that is far from absolute.) We shouldn't have a problem debating pro- or anti-romances, even passionately, if we all try to remain extra polite (more than usual, because this is clearly a thorny subject people are passionate about) and everyone is entitled to their opinions (which are all equally valid), but let me appeal to everyone and say, let's just do it really politely, okay? Some people have made snide remarks (not entirely unjustified!) about how these debates at BSN get unpleasant, yes? Well, let's set a better example, then shall we? (And then we can all feel smug and superior that Obsidian fans can be more civilised than Bioware fans or something. Despite the fact probably most of us are both...!)

TwinkieGorilla, I think you're too readily equating romances entirely to sex; especially given that the latter was most availble, in all it's completely moribund skip-to-loading-screen glory in Toment (where, had you a mind, you could have had heady-school-boy-giggling pretend sex with large numbers of the readily available Hive prostitutes...) If you want to make the comment that there should be no sex of any kind in the game (because you personally don't see the point), then I would largely agree with you. But the whole fade-to-black is likely as explicit as you're going to get in an isometric sprite game; it's not like we'd be getting the often-slightly-awkward sex scenes like in DA:O or ME; so any titilation factor is, like Torment or BG2, entirely present (or not) in the imagination of the player (and if they are so inclined, there is nothing stopping them fantasing about that regardless of whether the game content allows it or not. And what people do or do not find titilating is entirely their own business (provided it's legal), and the concern of neither you nor me, nor our place to judge.) As we've said, most of us who like to a romance are interested in it for the character interaction side of it (and indeed romance is but only one route - possibly not even the best one - to do that.) So, is it the (implied, in this case) sex you are leery of, or the character interaction? Or merely the fact that in most cases, it's not handled especially well? Would you be okay with, instead of any romances, if the game let you form close friendships/comraderie with your companions, a few moments of bonding between characters?

I think the answer is largely, as has been said priorly, that it adds another section of interaction with your party members (and the interaction between party members, is at least for me, a large reason as to why I prefer party RPGs to rogue-like-ish things). There are, I think, a fair number of folk who would happily pass on the romance aspect if, instead, you got the ability to form deep friendships with your characters (or, to use that popular word I rather abhor myself "bromances" *shudder*). If you got to the level that they achieved in Torment with party interaction, I suspect actual concrete romances would probably not be missed all that much by many.

I do umpteenth the call for realistic (for the given degree of "realistic") weaponry and armour. Historical gear is a good place to start (since weapons were designed they way they were for a reason), and if you're having (militarily, not necessarily culturally) not-Romans, they should be armed like Romans would be, but this does not mean one needs to keep to strict historical accuracy; as priorly mentioned, this isn't Earth. But so long as it's at least within a reasonable order of magnitude of realistic, I'm okay. And a few scattered unique OTT items wouldn't be bad, either. And while a few glowy magic items would be cool (I likes me my flaming/frosting/lightning-ing swords), I concur that not all magic items should. (If the coding wouldn't be likely to fiddley and time-consuming to do, what would be really cool is to have weapons like Glamdring and Sting, i.e. basically bane weapons that glow in the presence of their targetted enemy. That would be unfathomably cool, but probably too much of a pain to code in practise.) This is in large part because battles were fought in formations with dozens/hundreds of men. The logical thing to do is include them and then have some of the bad guys fight in formations too! (You can blag - and I do in my D&D 3.5 houserules, that shield walls offer better protection against area spells like fireball or something. It is a bit bovine excrement, really, but it sorta vagule credible, and I really do like the whole Roman Legionary shtick.) I also agree that, if possible, wizards should have some nice robes and fancy hats. I don't think I've ever played a wizard with a proper Gandalf hat...! Speaking of headgear, helmets ala the IE games would be nice; some with full-face coverings, and some without (and I don't mind a few horns/wings on the helmets (which BG/BG2 also had) - within reason - because if nothing else, it helps distinguish the characters! (In other news, when I get around to playing Witcher 2 (which is sitting installed, EE'd and just waiting to be played when moods strikes me), this discussion means I might actually be paying more than cursory attention to the weapon and armor design (which probably would have passed without comment otherwise!) so thanks for mentioning it...)

I say go with the earlier IE games on it, and have 'em, and have 'em no more invulnerable than anyone else. Murder is murder is murder, so if you let the player run around with the ability to murder every living soul in the village, then children should get no more of a pass than anyone else. (It's also worth noting the double-standard in citing children as vulnerables that need extra protection when the elderly never recieve the same, and they are often just as vulnerable, given that the vulnerability issue is why child murders tend to be viewed more harshly). At the end of the day, it's doesn't matter what age the person you murder is, it's still murder. There should be (as in earlier IE games - well BG/BG2 anyway) harsh but plausible consequences for being a mass-murdering nutjob (especially since you're most likely doing so for either a) for the kicks and giggles or b) to squeeze every last XP out of the game...! Which is fine, in either case...) but if you are going to allow it at all (which many later games simply didn't, removing the problem), then you should apply the same standard to everyone. Regardless of age, gender, species, hair colour, height or any other differentiation.

I hate hate HATE timed games, because I have to rush through the game and that feels more like work than fun usually. It's always hanging over my head, and it just detracts from the fun to varying amounts. I just flat-out don't want to be under pressure (all through the game), it's just not what I play computer games for. It doesn't, to me, add urgency, merely unfun hassle. It's also more likely to make me play through with a walkthrough (especially if there is lots of "missable" stuff1 - Persona 3 is a great game, but I'm following it through on a by-rote walkthrough, because that's still more fun that whittling about getting it wrong as I would otherwise (especially given how very tight on time you are.)) Notable point: despite being apparently considered better than the original game, I have never completed Mask of the Betrayer for the simple fact that rushing around because of the soul-eating thing made it feel like too much hard work for something I emphatically play for stress-relief. (I get what little under-pressure fun I want from playing tabletop wargames; I don't play computer games for the same thing.) I like the dramatic timing, where the game waits for me. So I REALLY don't want a timed main plot, because there is an above average possibilty it'd make it literally unplayably unfun for me. HOWEVER, though I am not fond of the concept at the very best of times, I will acquiesce to the fact that having some timed quests (or timed portions of quests) would be acceptable. So long as people have said, it's made obvious that this really is a timed quest (as people say, NPCs saying "you must hurry" when it's not true is a bit silly, and tends to merely make for some metagame humour where the players goes "get to it in my own time, thanks...!" and then goes off to fetch the barman's missus' left shoe she left way back in the forest somewhere...). I'm definitely not fond of the idea of "if you don't do it now, there are consequences" for anything other than those few quests, though - otherwise you end up right back at the carefully planned walkthrough so you don't miss anything/optimum time management. And I don't want to miss anything. Experience has shown me that I rarely play any game more than once or twice (heck, Torment is the RPG I've played most, and I've only played that through about 3 and a half times), so while some level of replayability is nice, I just plain don't want to miss things on the first run. So yeah - some timed things would be okay - and even appropriate, given that the IE did have some - but definitely not the majority of the game, and double-especially not the whole of the main plot. 1That's another thing I generally dislike, areas you can't get back to that contain powerful items/companions whathaveyou that if you miss the first time you can never get, because it means more walkthroughs. Now, I'm not so dead-set again it as with timing, and there are places where it is useful or advisable to do that (Lothering in DA:O springs to mind), but it shouldn't apply to the whole game. Of course, the IE games were in general, very good at avoiding that, or at least telegraphing it so you knew (it's more something JRPGs are fond of, as they are very good at trying to add busy-work or trying to get you to play through the games endlessly).