grotbag

I got a 360 just to play Deadly Premonition. I understand how you feel I actually played it on the 360 the first time. After that I ordered the Japanese import version for the PS3(because I just had the 360 for a brief time)and played it until I had collected every single trophy I just love the game because of the same things grotbag mentioned. I was looking forward to this release as well, but I just watched 2 new gameplay footages and the character voices seem to have changed. York sounds like a 15 year old now! Damn it, why the hell would they do such a thing?! Really? I just tried one of the videos and he sounds the same as ever to me. You think the pitch is higher than before?

'Inspired' is a polite way of putting it. At times it's merely cheaply derivative (it has a 'pot lady' in place of a 'log lady') or copies parts of Twin Peaks in a ludicrously over-the-top sort of way that doesn't understand what made the source material so good. Its unworldly, socially-incompetent and insane Agent Cooper-inspired lead, however, I think is fantastic. He's the most charming antidote I can imagine to the tedious industry fallacy that games need to be an insecurity-exploiting power-trip with a badass superawesome brooding hero to make the player feel 'cool' by proxy - partly because the deeply ropey writing lends him an offbeat, bizarre personality, but also because of some quite inexplicable brilliance in the character concept, especially in how it handles the player/player-character relationship.

That doesn't really follow, though. Expressing the desire for the series to go back to its earlier incarnation doesn't mean that you have a chauvinistic inability to enjoy any games that aren't turn-based or isometric, just that the essence of what you admired in these particular games has been lost, weakened or mismanaged by the franchise's transition from turn-based RPG to Bethesda-typical open-world game.

Perhaps it's asking too much of a really dreadful tone-deaf Blade Runner reference, but I'd like to question the common sense of an advanced post-apocalyptic society spending their time obsessively creating and managing anatomically-perfect human-replica androids with adult-level artificial intelligence to perform basic manual tasks for no particular reason.

This a funny example, since the much-loved original novel had no romance in it at all; Hitch was forced to come up with some rather silly plot contrivances (that whole business with the handcuffs, for example) in order to accommodate Madeleine Carroll as a love interest. But again, I think we did already have this exact debate, with most of the same points being made, just a few pages back.

Yup, totally - I'd just argue that all of these experiences are far less demeaned and corrupted by being made into a challenge, partly because in reality they're one-sided personal experiences and partly because in reality they are challenges. Winning a physical contest or a fight is a challenge. Getting a good price from a shop is a challenge. It's all about you overcoming the obstacle, and actually, the obstacle is nebulous, because it's all about you. Saving the world is every kid's self-centred fantasy, and again, it's a challenge, and it's all about you, it's ego-driven. Placing a 'romance', in which two people are supposed to fall in love with one another, mutually, into the context of an interactive experience turns it into a one-sided challenge in which it's all about you getting a certain response out of that same 'other', overcoming the obstacles of their not displaying affection for you, and that's far more troubling, because love isn't meant to be like that, it's the sociopath or the narcissist or the plain creep's way of looking at love, with the other party and the other party's displays of affection quite explicitly as a prize to be won through the correct behaviours. A real love affair by definition involves two actors (or more. If you're very lucky); putting it into a game results in one actor (the player/PC) and one pre-programmed reactor - a passionate tale of one man and his database. It's turning a meaningful mutual experience into a solipsistic fantasy - turning sex into masturbation if you like - which is what makes it more concerning than your other basically harmless examples. I meant a blank slate from the writer's point of view, sorry. As in they're not writing the character as falling in love with another character, they're writing the character as falling in love with a vague arbitrary blank space which the player's character can then step into when they boot up the game. Which is pretty awful, I think.

Look, if you're going to start reading something into a perfectly innocent story about a group of sailors hunting for sperm on the high seas I don't think we're going to get anywhere with this.

Sure. I didn't mean to indelibly associate the two. By 'emotional attachment and even sex' I meant 'emotional attachment or even sex', but honestly, I find the 'emotional attachment' bit even more of a concern. Well, I don't think your plan can do anything more than obfuscate the fact that this so-called 'love story' is a reward-based game by making it a more complicated and therefore naturalistic reward-based game. So player characters have to be brunette or gnomish or under the age of 24 for the romance to trigger - it doesn't change anything significant. The player is still involved in a challenge in which the aim is to successfully win the fake affections of a fictional character through a proxy. That's not going to become less deeply problematic or Lars-And-The-Real-Girl-ish just because there are more specific conditionals required to win; it's just chipping away at Pygmalion's statue to make it more life-like.

I might get some of these wrong but: pretty much all of Beckett. Definitely some of Borges. Kafka. Moby-****. Tristram Shandy. Arguably Joyce? A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. If you're into that sort of thing, Blood Meridian. Life A User's Manual. Fernando Pessoa. Robinson Crusoe. The Old Man And The Sea. To Kill A Mockingbird doesn't include any significant functioning romantic relationships as far as I can remember. If On A Winter's Night A Traveller... ...no, there's tons, (and, sure, plenty more that do concern itself with the mechanics of love in painstaking detail) but I think this tangent misses the point. Even in a very soppy romantic story in other media, let's say Jane Austen, a highly-talented artist creates two fully-formed fictional characters who display such empathy and humanity and who seem to mesh so well together even in their flaws, so perfectly as individuals, that the reader sincerely hopes they'll find happiness with one another. In an in-game romance, the artist isn't creating these two characters. They're creating one character who needs, at certain pre-set points if the player chooses the correct options, to pretend to be overwhelmed by the affection and charms of a total blank slate, and the audience is not invested in the tension of whether or not these two stars-aligned perfectly-matched individuals will find happiness together because one of the individuals is a puppet under their total control and because that NPC will always put out for anyone who chooses dialogue options ABBC and gives her a flower or rescues her once she's been kidnapped by the blue dragon, you can check it on GameFAQs. This sort of thing is never going to result in a genuinely, objectively great love story, because by the very token of being an interactive experience it has to be a (usually-dialogue based) predetermined challenge in which emotional attachment and even sex are presented as rewards for the correct forms of play. The paradigm's just inherently bust. ...okay, that was my last rant on the subject. Promise. Sorry.

I think there's a fairly clear and substantial difference, at least in terms of character, between a system that says 'You spared the life of Old Ma Kettle. As a result, your companion Amelia Kettle is grateful towards you' and a system that says 'You spared the life of Old Ma Kettle. As a result, Amelia Kettle would like to have a conversation with you where she toys with her hair and asks if there'll ever be something between the two of you because she's been finding you attractive for some time now.' In short, I think having general reputation amongst your companions rise and fall according to this cause-and-effect system is simplistic but basically fine - it's a management mechanic that simulates the player character's leadership skills (or lack of), their ability to flatter and manage and control their team, and it can basically make logical sense so far as motivations go (you kill an orc. Your orc party member becomes unhappy. Fine.). Having a party member automatically become attracted to or fall in love with the player character as a direct result of a cause-and-effect system has nothing to do with how real-life love works and, really, it's rather odd. The party member turns into a kind of bridal Tamagotchi.

Romance, as it appears in RPGs with full player choice, compromises the writing of every game it appears in. Yeah, every single one. It doesn't celebrate love and recognise an incredibly important part of the human experience, as some people are suggesting, it demeans it, because no matter how good the writing might hypothetically be, there's no way of getting around the basic situation that the player is participating in a mini-game in which the aim is explicitly to choose the right dialogue topics and perform the right actions and successfully make a fictional character with pre-set responses pretend to fall in love with your character. By its very nature, it ends up taking love and turning it into cause-and-effect emotional pornography, an artificial playing-out of an 8-year-old's conception of love as a ritual with pre-determined steps (If I give Suzy this flower, she'll be my girlfriend!) in which the winner gets to hear the robot tell them how attractive and heroic and loveable they are. It's Romeo & Juliet, if Juliet was a sockpuppet on Romeo's own wrist. Because it isn't the presence of love that's the problem, it's the player's agency which makes the whole affair tasteless and perverse. No matter how hard the player squints and sucks in their breath and roleplays it, the player character is not a real character. They're a projection, a figure that's entirely defined by their actions and their statistics; their actions can be reacted to, their statistics can be acknowledged, but there's not enough to them to make them worthy of anyone's love, fictional or otherwise - and every time an NPC character is forced to say, '(CONDITIONAL MET: ROMANCE) Oh, PLAYERNAME, I never thought I could fall in love with a RACENAME, least of all a CLASSNAME, but I just can't get over all of your UNSPECIFIED POSITIVE QUALITIES', that character is compromised; it ceases to be a purportedly living, breathing personality and becomes a Marilyn Monroe-bot who's there to gratify and flatter the player. ...you know, in my opinion.

Monte, I've always enjoyed your posts, but I think you're pushing far too hard towards making this issue a libertarian conflict of personal enjoyment rather than a debate about the practicalities of XP. You're arguing that if a player feels the dopamine-maddened urge to reach level 100 early by exploiting the game's mechanics instead of playing through a balanced challenge, no designer should have the temerity to attempt to restrict them by introducing a tighter XP system that limits this kind of behaviour. This just isn't right. If a player chooses to enjoy a game by feeling a rush of faux-achievement as the progress bar dings up faster than it should be, building an overpowered character and trampling over every challenge in the game, then they can take 30 seconds to use a level-up cheat code. It should not be demanded of any game's designers that they keep the base system baggy and vulnerable to exploitation in order to keep the players who enjoy exploitation happy, on the grounds that this won't affect all of those players who are willing to self-impose the restrictions that are aren't included as part of the product itself. Their job is absolutely to impose rules, and to impose limitations upon the player. Your argument just seems...to take your argument to the most absurd extreme, it seems a bit like arguing that the makers of chess should include a Godzilla piece with every board, because some players like to give up on the tactical challenge of the game and take out Godzilla and knock over all of the opposition pieces and win in a single turn, and what right do any of us (apart from their poor opponent, presumably) have to question how they enjoy playing chess? The restrictions of levelling-up and character creation seem to me to be pretty fundamental to the genre and so a tight XP system which rewards different playstyles sounds ideal - if you want to remove those restrictions, you can always find an easy way to do so, but it shouldn't be offered up as part of the base game. (Presumably by now the thread's moved on six pages and this post is totally redundant. Still.)

To the first point; MotB and NV both featured two non-humanoid party members with limited equipment options, a la Morte, and in both cases the game supplied them with new items/abilities to balance out their lack of normal equipment through interaction and quests rather than through standard loot (Morte, of course, had his insults too). There's no reason at all to make a link between full party creation and generic NPC party-members, just because of loot-tables.

Seems pretty obvious that this poster repeating exactly the same spiel (are the developers gay, we have a right to know/Anita whateverhernameis/I just heard the latest news on 4chan) as Troller/Nigro is just Troller/Nigro astro-turfing and agreeing with himself. God knows why he bothers, but there's no point engaging with him, peeps.

No, it's a tonal issue, isn't it? Factional dealings and political manoeuverings, done well, are gripping, but because they're character-driven and based in human needs and wants and motives, they can feel very grounded (which is a good thing, in some cases; you don't want every NPC telling you, 'Adventurer, I'd like you to wipe out the Red Fist gang. For, uhhh, reasons beyond your limited mortal comprehension'. There needs to be some sense of grounding in a familiar medieval-fantasy setting to try and make it feel fully realised and living). Too much focus on it, on the other hand, can push the fantasy-world towards the banal; it's hard to develop a sense of otherworldliness and strange enchanting wonder when you've spent the past six hours negotiating with the two groups that are buying up property around the docks because they want to control the grain trade.

This is certainly a threatening possibility. I too am glad that this game will free the modern RPG from its crippling dependence on turn-based gameplay and bring some diversity to the genre. In case you're serious - no, come on. There are some people on this forum arguing dogmatically in favour of various gameplay tropes, just as there are those who make their own arguments simply by referencing those grognardish 'vocal groups' with their darned unreasonable 'nostalgia' and 'opposition to progress' rather than bothering to dig in and discuss the actual pros and cons. But there's plenty of genuine debate going on - before it was locked, I thought the cooldown discussion thread was incredibly over-crowded but had some interesting and sensibly argued opinions on all sides. What bloated that thread, without adding any genuine value to the conversation, was this kind of hand-wringing meta-commentary upon the commentary that obscures the thing itself. 'You guuuys, stop complaining - we have to trust Obsidian!.' 'You stop complaining about our complaining! What are you saying, are you saying we shouldn't express our opinions? Huh? What are you, a sheeple?' 'Well, I'm just glad Obsidian knows better than to ignore all you neckbeards. Hurrah for Obsidian! Perhaps I'll make an 'I SUPPORT OBSIDIAN' thread just so they know all of us support them.' 'WHY IS EVERYONE GETTING SO EMOTIONAL AND OVERREACTING?' No forum or debate really benefits from this kind of hyper-neurotic fourth estate clogging up the issues at hand. A fourth estate which, of course, I have now contributed to and even commented upon at obsessive length, making me the very worst culprit of all. Such is the nature of the vicious cycle.

I think this is right. It's problematic being asked to give an unequivocal answer to a question that I'm not sure completely represents the issue. But to at least attempt it; backtracking across a level over the course of 3 minutes to get back to camp is probably not fun. For anyone. Once your party's safely back in camp, and you're taking a moment to get all of them togged up, healing them back to full health, assigning them the right spells for the job now that you have a better idea of what you're facing, then rubbing your hands together and saying, 'Right; I'm prepared now. Let's have another go at that lich' - that is fun, self-evidently. Call a 'we need guns; lots of guns' experience, if you like. It's exhilarating in its anticipation of a more successful, more informed expedition back down into that dungeon, it engages the player, and it's rewarding. It doesn't necessarily justify the 3-minute slog, but I'm not sure it could exist if the resting area wasn't distanced, however symbolically or in the shortest of ways, from the dungeon itself.

It's a bit of a misleading example, since the wizard in D&D will have low-level spells which would be wasted on the high-level monster and which they don't therefore need to conserve during the cheaper fights - and if nothing else, you can give them a sling or a stick to poke the goblins/rats in the back of the head with. They never have to be literally standing fallow, and they haven't been ruined, they're simply not bringing out the big guns every time combat occurs. But no, I don't think I see the problem with what you're basically presenting. The cleric won't be casting healing spells every single time a party member's damaged in combat, because the spells are a precious resource. The mage is not casting Epic Apocalypse causing, like, 1 gazillion points of damage against every roomful of goblins, because his spells are limited; the fighter who tore through those same goblins may well end up 'standing in the corner' in the big battle against the dragon while everyone else deals the damage, because he has rubbish Will and he failed a check. The rogue will be less help fighting against that iron golem than disabling traps and picking locks. Is it really a cause for complaint that every party member is not equally useful in every given situation?

Well, I suppose I referenced 'info-gathering' with the mention of a library, but the bulk of my comment was referring to basic communication to the player via design. If the player party wanders into a cave and sees dragon eggs, they probably ought to start equipping their rings of fire resistance. If the player party spots the village guards standing over the remains of a rust monster near the town gates, they're probably going to presume rust monsters will be in the surrounding wilderness and plan accordingly. This concept definitely isn't exclusive to the Witcher. All of which is besides the point, because my argument wasn't that this sort of design necessitates 'Vancian' spells. My argument was that this sort of design can overcome the concerns Josh Sawyer raised about 'Vancian' spells without too much difficulty, and that it's, by-and-by, a good attitude towards design. ...right, but the TES series utilises a first-person perspective and favours trekking through that vast wilderness. You're talking about a sense of recognition and comfort that comes through playing in that first-person perspective - spending hours on end simulating being lost in a barren landscape, then seeing a landmark faraway on the horizon and feeling good about it (which is obviously far more suited to first-person than to isometric). Or, to put it another way, you're talking about good atmospherics making the wilderness/dungeon feel threatening and the place-of-safety feel comforting; I'm talking about achieving something similar, but grounded in the actual game, by limiting the party's resources so that the player really is in danger if they don't retreat from the former to prepare and recuperate in the latter. Well, no.* I didn't mention realism, and I'm not saying that NPCs shouldn't be allowed to attack you specifically in built-up urban areas. I was talking about the pacing of the RPG, and the importance of the breathing-space, the resource-hub, and the sanctuary; a place of safety or relative safety in which the player can plan and recover before heading out into a dungeon or wilderness, which has often, but not always, been a town. I thought I made it clear enough by putting alternatives to town (camp/temple/resting in wilderness) every time I used the word. *I mean, I probably could... Again, not literally a dungeon. My only point there was that the second Dragon Age game would hurl mob after mob of cheap bandits at the player party whenever they stepped out onto the streets of the city hub, time after time, place after place, to pick up a fetch-quest or buy potions, resulting in an astounding monotony of tone and lack of definition, and that it could only get away with this absurd padding without becoming physically unplayable because its cooldown system meant that the party, give or take a few potions, would begin and end every fight in exactly the same condition, with exactly the same abilities. There's no real need for sanctuaries or places of recovery, since the party never degrades in any meaningful sense from battle to battle, and in the wrong hands this can allow for a cycle of combat and cutscenes ad nauseam with no sense of value to the player's decisions to use particular spells or abilities, and no real point to long-term planning, since the party's back to its full capabilities once the next wave of thugs appears a few seconds later. Well, all right, then.

J. Sawyer's talk about 'going in blind' being a negative, being forced to reload, etc, as a strike against memorising spells, seems slightly wrongheaded. I think someone mentioned earlier the idea of giving the player signals about what lay ahead, but it doesn't even have to be that explicit. The D & D player party wanders into an ancient temple filled with many-eyed statues. 'Aha,' thinks the player who's both engaged in the world and actively planning ahead, 'I should prepare for beholders. Let's head back to that old gypsy caravan and pick up some scrolls/open up my mage's spellbook and figure out how to counter them/maybe try and recruit that mad old wizard back at the inn so I have some scope'. Perhaps a local villager has the head of one of the local monsters on their wall; perhaps the local library contains scribblings about viable tactics against such beasts. If your party's about to face a central villain, presumably they've heard a little or seen a little about the spells and defences they're likely to use. There's absolutely no reason, in short, why memorised spells should lead to save-scumming or blind guesswork, so long as the encounter and dungeon design is good, and as long as the world is communicating with the player. That's not an inherent problem with the system. A great joy of the RPG genre always has been the play on heading into the place of relative safety in order to prepare for the place of danger. The party returns to town/rests in the wilds/heads for the local temple, and prepares themselves as much as humanly possible for whatever challenge they believe they're coming up against next - they build up their resources, then carefully expend and conserve them as they enter the dangerous places (You fool! You just wasted your one Cataclysm spell on that Feeble Earthworm! etc). Memorising spells works splendidly with that dichotomy, though as we've seen here you can then get into concerns about the ease of resting, etc, and can even subvert it for genuine desperate thrills (aargh, we've just been ambushed with no healing spells left, how will the Heroes of Bummington get out of this scrape?) whereas cooldowns, depending on how they're implemented, can kill it stone dead. With cooldowns, the town/camp/tavern/temple/safe-place loses the entire core of its identity. You lose the sense of relief as you limp back into the cobbled streets of Thingy - why would you be relieved? Your spells are all ready and waiting once again; your party's main requirement is now to survive battle-to-battle, not to survive long enough to reach that place of safety or to be able to rest. The only real remaining purpose of the non-dungeon-area is to serve as a shop/loot-storage-area; it's merely functional, it's no longer a blessing. And actually, it's interesting that the cooldown-based Dragon Age games were forced to try and invent dubious reasons to try and keep the safety/danger dichotomy relevant (you have to rest in-camp, because dying in combat can sometimes give you a small HP reduction that can only be removed in camp! You have to go home because you're not allowed to talk to your party members outside of home, for some reason!) before giving up entirely and making the town itself a dungeon; every time you step outside, thirty muggers attack you. Once you're done killing them, the merchants standing around will become selectable again. Something very special is lost in the process here.

Real investment in a permanent injury system - I'd love to see a game that made them interesting, serious and involved enough in character-building and the gameworld for players to want to keep going with their newfound disabilities rather than instantly reloading, a little in the manner of losing an eye to the doctor in Fallout. Your PC sustains a hideous scar across their face in a vicious combat? It's a vulnerable spot from now on, but it makes them look scary - they gain a few points in intimidation. Mangled leg? They limp a little more slowly but there's fragments of MONSTERNAME-blade in the wound that twitch whenever MONSTERNAMES are around. Permanently blinded? The PC loses almost all of their dexterity/equivalent points, but if you stick with your injury for an absurdly long stretch of time rather than getting it cured, eventually your character's senses develop to make up for the deficiency, gaining bonuses to perception, etc. Stuff like that.

I didn't manage to track down the interview, but judging by his pedigree, I imagine Wolpaw's coming at the idea of choice from the angle of a mostly linear game, with a compact cast of characters, and a multiple-choice ending where running down a corridor or choosing a particular option causes NPC X to die or the PC to shoot their own mother by mistake, etc, etc. From this angle, I think he's completely right - the game's narrative is so strict that it becomes difficult to invent different ways for it to conclude plausibly and satisfyingly. But conversely, the more effort you put into placing the game's narrative into the player's hands, into making the narrative rise out of and react to their actions in-game, the more likely it is that it's going to satisfy them no matter what they choose, because it's their choice. (Will it satisfy the player if the game ends with an assassin murdering King Bumfluff in a cutscene and the courtiers crowning the player as successor? Perhaps not. Will it satisfy the player if they can end the game by murdering Bumfluff and taking the throne for themselves? Hell, yeah - they chose to do it, didn't they?) It's far harder work, obviously, and it requires a deft but gentle touch on the writer's part, but it's definitely worth it, and it seems to be something Avellone and Sawyer have been thinking about as an approach to their storytelling, with their oft-quoted discussions about J.E. making enemies of two factions in New Vegas and then setting them upon each other. Obviously there can't be an infinite number of choices in-game, but I think it comes down to developer philosophy above all. Game writers shouldn't really be telling the story; they're setting up the chess pieces so that the story can function once the player boots up a new game, they're building a framework and pre-empting what the player's most reasonably likely to want to do in the situation the writer's placed them in, and the 'satisfying' endings will rise naturally up out of those. That way it doesn't come down so much to 'Okay, endings, endings...er...the player finds themselves in front of a console. If they press button one, Megatron escapes but they get to save Princess Penelope, if they press button two, the Death Star explodes but they can never return home to Kansas' because the game can reach an organic conclusion once the player's achieved whatever task they've settled on, whether that's leading faction X to victory or ascending to godhood. (And almost as importantly from the developer's perspective, you don't then become immensely over-confident, start declaring that the game's narrative is 'your' story and not the player's, so you'll bring back minor characters from the dead on a pointless whim if you want to, before forcing the player into a state of absolute impotence for the next twenty hours because you can't have them making choices that would ruin the 'awesome' twist you've set up ten minutes before the end, *cough*, Bioware, *cough*.)

Haaang on. You're coming at this from the perspective of someone who wants their character's role-playing to be as realistic as possible. From this perspective, removing stats from the equation is quite clearly far, far more limiting than including them, because you're killing off character definition to behaviour alone. Realistically, two different people committing exactly the same deed will not receive the same reaction. Realistically, someone who's skilled in the ways of deception will always be able to pull the wool over your eyes with less effort than someone who isn't. Realistically, charismatic hero-types will always be supported rather more enthusiastically by their local communities than hideous foul-smelling crones, no matter if both of them were witnessed giving a coin to that orphan. I don't think there's anything wrong at all with what you're positively advocating - in a game with unlimited resources, it'd be brilliant if player characters who are suitably cunning but not particularly good at lying could construct elaborate hoaxes to frame NPC1 for NPC2's murder, instead of testifying that they'd seen NPC1 do it, or whatever - but it seems incredibly strange to want all of this complicated work while also removing stat checks from dialogue, when the end result is that you aren't allowed to, say, create an uncharismatic character who behaves ethically but never gains the trust of those around him, because you've taken away the player character's innate qualities and replaced them with player behaviour alone. As others have said, in an ideal world, a mixture of both would be great - something like Arcanum's reaction modifier, but less immediately beatable. PC is naturally likeable? (+reaction). PC completes a quest for the NPC? (+reaction). There's a rumour going around that the PC's used his speech skills to have an affair with the innkeeper's wife? Well, the PC is handsome; perhaps the innkeeper should be jealous... (-reaction)/Ha! That ugly CHR1 devil! Not a chance (reaction unaffected). Stats don't limit dialogue any more than they limit anything else; they define the playstyle, they provide masses of replay content, and they give the player's choice of character genuine value within the game world. As many, and as varied and inventive, conditionals during dialogue as possible, plz!

Counterskills in dialogue, whatever their nature, would be a lot of fun, and hopefully break down the instinctive urge amongst players to click on the Persuade option every time for insta-benefit. Oh, so you think you've tricked that old merchant into revealing where his treasure's hidden? Too bad you weren't perceptive enough to gauge his reaction, so you didn't realise he'd successfully sensed your motive and he knew what you were up to all along. Now you're going to get acid flung in your face when you try to open that empty chest. Just depends on how much work they want to put into the dialogue system, I suppose.

Yeah, conditional encounters are something that can help to really bring pleasure to world travel. SoZ's trigger-based system, most recently, wasn't ideal - you ended up mining the map - but something similar really plays to the nature of the party-based RPG with nothing more than a quick skill/trait check, and it provides almost limitless opportunity for invention (your priestly figure's given a tip-off by a fellow of their order, your magic-based fellow senses arcane energies in the air, your tracker spots a potential ambush, your high-strength brute's spotted by a wrestler challenging passers-by, you haven't recruited anyone with good perception skills so it rapidly turns out that your entire party's wandered blindly into the lair of a high-level monster...)