Jojobobo

I couldn't be bothered to paraphrase so I thought I'd just self-quote: I'd like to see this, and I think forming an abusive relationship would be a great way of exploring mature themes because it's relevant to contempory issues and it would get under a lot of people's skin. Sexism and racism are fine but they are all variations on what is at it's simplest being unpleasant to another person; targeting and actively abusing a PC requires a lot more participation then a character going around saying "You Orlan have stupid ears and like to kiss your sisters", etc. Also having to comit a crime or work with a particularly malignant criminal organisation to achieve a good goal might also be interesting (such as how an under cover cop might have to witness unspeakable things yet maintain his composure and not do anything about them in order to crack a particularly difficult case).

I think a language barrier might be interesting to introduce, forcing you to maybe hire a translator or have a certain companion to understand anything of what another culture is saying. I think culture specific, rather than race specific, language barriers would be the best - but of course some cultures could very well be entirely homogenous when it comes to races.

Thinking about it a bit more, if Obsidian really wanted to play with fire they could allow the character to develop abusive relationships (I'm thinking verbally, not physically) with others or even develop a romantic relationship with someone just to have sex with them and then sack them off. The trouble is people seem to think if these things are options in games then the game itself is advocating it as a lifestyle choice, which it simply is not - people are often mordibly curious (as in interested, but not wishing or desiring to mimic this behaviour) about these choices for exactly the same reasons as people are interested in watching a gory horror film or researching a particularly inhumane historical government. V:tM~B allowed the player to create a ghoul (essentially someone who becomes slavishly enamoured with the PC because the are - in a way - drugging them to feel that way) who you could abuse verbally and kill any time you chose, they also allowed for torture at a few moments in the game (but not with a character you were romantically involved with) so it's not like there is no prior examples of content like this being in a game. It depends how far down the rabit hole of mature themes the dev team want to go. I for one would like them to reach the bottom. EDIT: Just thought I'd mention being abusive should not be without consequences, like a companion eventually getting sick of it and trying to kill the PC.

Hey whoa, Team Rocket cut off Slowpoke tails - that was pretty intense. *Sheds a tear for the poor Slowpokes*

Just like Harry Potter. On a serious note, I think all the top three forms of relationships are viable but I must stress that developing a meaningful relationship should be difficult. Far too often in RPGs as long as your character is nice to someone in the opposing gender they'll fall in love, or if it's of the same gender they'll make friends (or start a gay relationship, etc.). In real life people are often more guarded than that, it takes time to wear down defenses people have made whether those defenses stand in the way of more personal relationships or simple friendship. Or to throw things on their head, maybe you'll form a relationship with an NPC easily that you believe is genuine and they'll cheat on you/reveal they have been manipulating you all along - leaving you feel burned as the player if they succeeded in sucking you in. Relationships should be allowed to crumble sourly just as they can in real life, maybe a former friend and party member could end up being your greatest enemy. Sex on the other hand I guess should be more easy, people have sex plenty of times on real life for various other reasons than to build a meaningful relationship with someone. But it doesn't need to be made a huge deal of or glorified (eyes on you Witcher) and perhaps cultural beliefs should stand in the way (or you know, general unwillingness - not everyone should be promiscous). Furthermore maybe the player character will get a come-on by someone they find unattractive (old, ugly, etc.), not anyone who seeks sex from the character needs to be a bombshell. Lastly though relationships should be available for party members, I'd like to see them with non party member NPCs. Some PCs I'd imagine might get pretty tired of their other half being there all the time, just like some people do.

I don't think all villians should be charismatic. Some people are just stupid and mean, even those in leadership roles, and have obtained power by fear and bullying their way to the top. A couple of charismatic villianous characters are fine, but not every bad character should be so charming that I think if I was playing an evil character I'd give them a high five right about now. A degenerate brutal pyscho can be at times more evocative than a debonair devil's advocate style smooth talker.

I don't think these encounters necessarily shouldn't exist, just that there should be reactivity (and not in the way of pure level scaling). So say some scally comes up to you and goes "Give me your stuff!", if you turn him down and your average level is a lot lower than his then he'll attack - he's an opportunist, why not? On the otherhand if your party is clearly superior and respond in a way that is essentially "Would you look at us, you're embarrassing yourself" he would say something along the lines of that he was only joking and please could they not hurt him. Then later, when all your characters (or the majority) are asleep in the local inn and have taken off all their equipment he'll come into their room with 10 other burly thugs and say "These are those people who thought they were far too strong for me, let's gut 'em" and as such a much more challenging battle would ensue (so the game has reacted to your level, but not in the cheap way of slapping more powerful equipment or greater skills on a single guy). I guess a third option would be asking the mugger for work as he seemed like your sort of guy, you get the picture I guess complexity and reactivity are the key to making these sort of things special, but these things do take time so level scaling may be the easiest answer resource-wise.

I think it would be interesting to have complete free choice as to which one you go to first, but have both being important in the main quest. It might mess with quest states a lot, but it would be very interesting.

Reminds me of Jaime Lannister, so I like this idea. Sort of like there is an expectation of how knights (or Paladins) should behave, but how closely they cleave to this expectation and how well they keep the fact that they are not living up entirely to their oaths hidden from their peers or the public remains to be seen. In this regard, the majority Paladins would have to start out with good intentions to begin with to take such oaths but over time it allows for cynicism and flexibility as to how they interpret their oaths to creep in - instead of them being morally inflexible saints like they are in a lot of IE games. Also some could become Paladins so that people assume they're chivalrous, when really they're anything but and they're now in better situation than most to manipulate others. They would be your "evil" Paladins. I'd also like to see a conflict between class and some backgrounds - in this case say a Paladin takes an oath to be celibate but comes from a society that's freely polygamous, when they return to that society later in the game they'll receive a negative reaction from others who believe they've turned their back on their past.

Having to split your party up and have them perform different tasks at once to solve a quest - is this a good idea? Something someone said in the unwinnable monster thread made me think on this and I thought it would be pretty cool; say you're trying to open a door to mysterious dungeon, and all at once you need your thief to enact some complex dexterity focussed manoveur with switches in one area, your mage to cast a spell on an occult engraving on a wall in another, and your fighter/barbarian/combat monkey to make a sacrifice on an altar somewhere (or less class focussed activities, but you get the gist). If this is not done simultaneously, there would be no other way to gain entrance. I think this would be interesting, too often in party based games does one member have all the focus and the rest are just there - existing but not performing any function. In a broader sense, as others have suggested, sending party members off to do something specific (gather intel, etc.) or having party members on separate maps you can navigate to would in my opinion be cool. Thoughts?

It really depends on how it's done. The monster or whatever should be able to be dealt with in a fashion if it's not killable such talking it down, sneaking past it, etc, which many have already suggested. Or maybe you could have it so that if you charged in to a battle you would die without a chance, yet the monster had some sort of anathema that meant if you were clever you could defeat it in some sort of way (even if you didn't "kill" it - maybe you render in harmless or banish it somewhere, etc.). This should probably only be in the game once though, as it could be annoying/frustrating.

I'm pretty sure in one of the interviews someone mentioned that they should allow options to make the game workable for one handed people; so I'd be surprised if they tailored a set of controls for people with only one hand but had no options for left handed people.

Naah, I got lazy. But yes that is a nice example of how Arcanum dealt with it.

People are only talking about strength and constitution decreasing with age, maybe different races should have different attributes that get reduced with age. So for the dwarves as they age their dexterity decreases - they become stiffer, less agile on their feet; the aumaua might lose intelligence as they age due to dementia like effects, etc. It would be one of those touches that would help make the races more separate in feel. Even if changing PC age isn't an option, different kinds of age degeneration might be fun lore wise.

So I was curious if this issue bothered anyone else or not: Say you are given a quest, and it is forever out of your means to solve because of how you've built your character. You didn't realise this when you accepted the quest, and now you don't have a save you can revert to before you took it on as the realisation it is now impossible only dawned on you quite late. Short of killing the quest giver which for this example you don't want to do - maybe they're a really useful merchant or something - you cannot fail the quest. It is always going to be there in your journal, staring you in the face for the rest of the game, almost mocking your inability to accomplish what a different character could. This bothers the crap out of me for no particular reason apart from I like resolution. Even if I fail a quest, that's more resolution than not being able to do anything about it at all. I hate looking at pointless quest entries in my journal every god damn time I open it up, and there's quite a few games where this has happened to me in the past. Does this irritate anyone else or is it just me? Solutions that spring to mind are for one have all quests solvable by any character type or if they're not then the quest isn't open to that character type in the first place. Or just have another means of failing the quest short of killing the quest giver. Maybe there are others, I don't know and I don't particularly care; all I care about is there is some means of resolving every quest for every character even if that means failing the quest. /rant

Not having read the entire thread I don't know if this has been touched on, but anyway. I do think main quest NPCs should be killable, but I also think there should be multiple NPCs who you can progress the main quest with (ideally three or four). That way if you did find someone horribly insufferable then you could kill them and still progress. If you decide to kill all the main quest givers, then too bad, but why would you want to apart from maybe a single time for laughs?

I don't think older characters should have more "wisdom", wisdom is something abstract and not really related to character capabilities (well, unless they make wisdom an attribute of course). More skill points would be the way to go, as it's hard to argue against the fact that an older character simply has had more time to learn things than a younger character irrespective of how wise they are or not.

I'd like to see the monsters and architecture of different regions to be inspired by different cultures - past or present. A whole island with a Greek theme going on would be cool.

An elf modelled around Patrick Bateman. It would be the coolest thing ever.

A day and night cycle just like Pokémon. In fact the more features from Pokémon that can be used the better, imagine capturing Orlans in P:E balls and then making them fight to the death - that would be awesome.

Depends how detailed the NPC sprites are going to be and how in depth their animations are. If you can clearly see what they look like and what they're doing there's not a great deal of need to describe that.

I do agree that combat barks shouldn't be overbearing. Still at the same time I won't be happy if I don't have a character who shouts out something like "I am INDOMITABLE!" every once in a while.

I want to play a morbidly obese Orlan - so fat they can barely move and have speed penalties. He'd be a barbarian, and when he was raging he'd roll down hills into people's legs.

CoD, natch. *makes machine gun and explosion noises like a child*

Maybe you could have an age scale in the game, where on one end your character is young (higher attributes due to fitness, less skill points due to lack of worldly experience) and on the other they are old (lower attributes yet more skill points). Might be fun to play an oldy. On a related note, different races should have different age ranges or a different starting age if that were to be fixed (which I think is something curryinahurry was touching on). In Arcanum for example a young mature half-orc was supposed to be aged 10 originally as orcs just grew up faster (where for elves this age was 200) - but this had to be taken out of the game due to the character being able to engage in sexy times and the uproar it would have likely caused.