Death Machine Miyagi

Because I find the implicit viewpoint underlying flagging kids as invulnerable obnoxious. I don't mind having no kids at all and I don't mind having kids who can die. I do mind when a game is apparently so contemptuous of its audience that it thinks it has to protect them from seeing and doing morally objectionable things, even when it makes gameplay come across as absurd.

I said "it's unrealistic now". Because graphics have become better, everything is less abstract and the media attention is also much higher. You all know how often video games get blamed for this and that. Video games have to prove themselves all the time, and wishing for the ability to kill children because you want to be a psychopath isn't helping. Like I said, there's a reason GTA doesn't have children. Because even for a game like that, there are things that it can't and shouldn't allow you to do. As for consistency: Depends on the implementation. If you can hit them and nothing happens, sure, that's weird. But if you can't even hit them because your character just won't do it, that's a whole different matter. Because then it doesn't say "they're invulnerable", it says "your character doesn't want to do that". And in that case you should ask yourself "okay, so why do I want to do it?" Another thing to consider: If they run to safety as soon as a fight breaks out (which most of the more vulnerable and weak NPCs should do anyway), and you would have to actively pursue them in order to hit them, then the situation doesn't even come up in the first place. Unless you so desparately want to play a psychopath who kills children that you run after them. In which case... I don't know, I have no sympathy for your cause. Those kids who exploded into bloody giblet chunks when you unloaded on them with a minigun in Fallout 2 were decidedly non-abstract, or at least not much more so than I expect any potential kids in P:E will be. And if the media can accept beating old women to death with baseball bats and the like in M rated games nowadays, I'm pretty sure they aren't going to raise appreciable hell over killable kids in a non-mainstream title aimed almost entirely at old school gamers, at least if (as with BG2 or Fallout) its not a major part of the game; they just die when you hurl a fireball at them, like anything else. As for the notion of your character refusing to kill kids, that idea makes my skin crawl just reading it. Hopefully they excise kids from the game altogether before taking such an obnoxious, preachy attitude and essentially lecturing the player through the character for trying to do really evil things.

So unrealistic that it was perfectly possible to kill them in all of the Infinity Engine games I've played, if you don't have the misfortune of living in Germany or some other such country with an excessively censorship-happy government. Killing children was also perfectly possible in both of the original Fallouts. In fact, some of the most horrific critical hit text in the game came from doing things like targeting a child's eyes with a high-caliber weapon or breaking a child's arm. There was even a perk called 'child killer' that resulted in the vast majority of NPCs shunning you if you possessed it. I don't like NPCs being immune to attack because a moral guardian somewhere thinks that the video game is going to make me want to kill children in real life. Or whatever the logic is.

An RPG based on The Wire would be very frustrating. Just as you're about to solve a quest, you'd get a message like: QUEST FAILED: Your funding has been cut/your superior officers tried to follow the money trail/your target has been killed by someone else/someone up the chain of command wants to do pointless street rips instead ...and so on. Then they'd kick you over to the boat unit or pawn shop for being a pain in the ass.

項目永恆: 周年快樂!

library wing babiez Amen. If P:E has books that can be picked up and read, the stronghold library should really have some empty bookshelves to store and collect any books you find.

In the original Baldur's Gate, you could go to Durlag's Tower, a centuries-old ruin intentionally turned into a nigh-impenetrable deathtrap by its insane former master, and find books in its dusty, abandoned library talking about political events in Shadowdale that took place in the last year or two. Were people breaking into the dungeon just to restock the shelves with more recent titles? Perhaps a group of adventuring librarians with a overzealous dedication to their duties? I don't know, but it left me feeling very confused. In other words, I agree. Sensible locations and sensible books for those locations are both very nice. Though I suspect the issue isn't high on their priority list.

Do you think this applies to the writing of guys like Chris Avellone, as well? That is, the people working on the game we're waiting for currently? Because Obsidian has had its bad writing moments (I can't get through one of Ulysses' overblown monologues in Lonesome Road without gagging), but in terms of awful writing they've never been Bethesda, thank god.

Brevity, I think, is important here. I'm still playing a game, after all, and if I'm going to be interrupted in my questing by some flavor text I'd rather it be easily digestible so I can get back to my quest with a minimum of fuss. Splitting longer stuff into multiple volumes works well, I think, and was the approach BG took. So you could have a 'History of the Free Palatinate of Dyrwood pt. 1' with maybe two or three paragraphs and just spread a bunch of books like that around, so the interested can read them a piece at a time without getting bogged down.

The Baldur's Gate series had lots of these. One of the first items you pick up is a History of Halruaa for a quest in Candlekeep, just a few paragraphs discussing a country you will never visit in-game and which has zero impact on gameplay. There were books like that scattered all over the game, completely meaningless in terms of gameplay but which added a sense of the greater Forgotten Realms actually existing outside of the main plot of the game. I'm curious: who here stops to read things like that? If there's a semi-detailed history of the Free Palatinate of Dyrwood lying around someone's house in P:E, will you stop to read it, for flavor's sake? Or do you think of that kind of thing as a boring waste of time?

Irenicus could have been a lot more interesting if he had followed through on the promise of the first dungeon: a creepy, torturing psychopath with a ridiculous amount of magical power , yet for some reason he seems to be actually interested in helping you tap into the full potential of your godly nature. That made him very intriguing to me on my first playthrough...right up until I reached the point where it was obvious he was just trying to steal my soul for his own selfish purposes, at which point he dropped a few rungs in my esteem for him as a character. I believe he would have made for a much more interesting villain if he had only been a true 'villain' for a good character, whereas for an evil character he would have turned out to be a kind of ally with a genuine and macabre interest in helping you tap into Bhaal's power, for whatever given motivation. As it was, when his true motivations came out you were railroaded: this man is your enemy, it's you or him, and you will end the game hitting him with large magical weapons and spells.

People with a high tolerance for giving out very large sums of money for questionable causes. Or, in other words, people I wish were friends of mine whenever I run out of money.

No offense, but this makes zero sense to me. More (free) content = less interest? Modability = pirates will ruin everything? Pirates will do what they'll do regardless of mods. And if having lots of mods kills interest in sequels, someone should alert Bethesda before they lose any more money on their horrifically mod-ridden Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls series. God only knows how much better Skyrim might have done, financially speaking, if Bethesda made sure the game strictly forbade people to add anything or change anything.

Timeframe? I was completely oblivious to it (only spent a short amount of time on Interplay's forums. I mean, Sawyer made his own mod for FONV, but I don't know if that necessarily means that Obsidian is actively trying to woo modders. Dave Gaider created the Ascension mod for Throne of Bhaal, which basically completely overhauled the final battle of the series. This must have been around 2002 or so. I remember the Bioware of old being absolutely stunned by Dark Side of the Sword Coast, one of the first mods ever made for the original BG. It wasn't very good, but I think they were just bowled over by the sheer effort involved in modding the original game from scratch, no tools at all, apparently a much trickier business than modding the sequel. All in all, if Bioware wasn't actively supporting the mod community, it certainly seemed to recognize and appreciate it.

It is? The topic is how evil P:E should go. Deciding which evil is an evil too far, and where evil acts fall on the spectrum of horribleness, is exactly spot on topic.

In general, the offensiveness of rape has less to do with how serious it is (personally, as horrible as rape is, I'd still prefer being raped over being tortured to death or even simply being simply killed) and more to do with class and taste. Is it irrational to be more offended by rape than, say, someone's head being blown off or someone being tortured? Possibly. Yet there simply isn't any denying it; when you explicitly introduce rape into a story, you have to walk on eggshells in a way you wouldn't with just about any other crime. Allow the PC to do it and you've pretty much crossed well beyond the lines of good taste, even if the PC is allowed to do any number of other horrific things and no one blinks. My guess is that it's because, in comparison to people who have been tortured or people who have had their heads blown off, there are actually quite a lot of rape victims out there. They could be friends or family or neighbors. They could be people playing the game. It's a horrific crime without reasonable justification, without adding any 'badass' credentials to a character, that leaves the victim still alive and lingering on what happened to them. And unlike exploding into ludicrous gibs, it's common enough that it's possible it hits home a lot harder than exaggerated violence of other sorts.

I've done evil BG playthroughs and that's usually how I approach it. Evil playthroughs also get a solid advantage NPC-wise: Edwin, Viconia, Korgan and Sarevok are the best NPCs in the game for their respective classes. An evil playthrough still very much feels forced, though. You're still considered the 'Heroes of the Sword Coast', no matter what you do. When BG2 starts, Jaheira will still recount your heroic actions righting wrongs and doing good from her cell, even if your behavior in BG1 was completely the opposite. If your reputation plunges too low, the game becomes unplayable as you end up endlessly harassed by Flaming Fist or Amnish guards, who turn EVERY neutral NPC on the map hostile. Punishing the character for being cruel is perfectly natural, and in fact not having serious consequences and a whole lot of people ostracizing you for being a monster would be unrealistic. But the punishments must feel organic to the game and not a punitive decision by the designers that evil players should be discouraged through crap rewards and the game being unplayable.

I think you are wrong about that, most do it is simply because it's faster and because they get bored of the doing good stuff/want to try the evil playthrough. There is a reason why every game offers a "evil" choice, the only problem is that not every game makes it interesting. I'm talking real life, not video games. I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities for Stupid Evil in P:E, being a douche just for the sake of it even if it amounts to shooting yourself in the foot, as that seems the default kind of evil for most CRPGs. And I'm sure plenty of people will have fun with that. What makes evil interesting, however, is when it's tempting even for people not indulging their sadistic streak. Have the player seriously miss out on something really good for not being tempted into doing something monstrous. Or have the player shunned and hated for doing the right thing. Mix it up a little and all of a sudden moral choice gets interesting again rather than an endless series of 'kick the dog and be hated or pet the dog and be loved' decisions.

You also get a smaller reward, lose access to the follow-up quest in the graveyard, don't get to see the town put up statues of you and your party on the town fountain, and otherwise get treated like an all-around heel. BG2 is one of the worst implementations of an 'evil' path ever, with a very large proportion of the choices amounting to 'do the good thing for a massive reward or do the evil thing and shoot yourself in the foot.' Newsflash, Bioware: outside of a minority of sadists, people are tempted to do the wrong thing primarily because evil can be very profitable, not because being a douche is a reward in and of itself. If meth dealers earned the equivalent of a McDonald's salary, while charity workers earned millions, we would see a drastic drop in meth dealers and a massive increase in charity workers. Doing the right thing is only a meaningful commentary on a character's integrity and morality if doing the right thing is often hard and unrewarding, not if it pays off massively over and over again in comparison to the more ruthless options.

This is indeed a great fault of many CRPGs, particularly from Bioware. 98% of the time, the 'necessarily evil' route turns out to be just you being a prick to no good purpose, since there's an alternate good solution to a given quest that actually makes things better all around. There are exceptions: I was a big fan of the decision to make the 'honorable' Dwarven king in Dragon Age the one who would run his people into the ground through his unyielding adherence to stilted traditions and the caste system, while his utterly ruthless and amoral alternative would lead his people to reform and recovery. Overall, though, there needs to be more of a chance for the 'evil' PC to play the role of the machiavellian master of realpolitik doing monstrous things to advance a goal...and in many cases actually having results as good or better than a PC who goes in for the ultra-idealistic route. Paragon Shephard's actions should have blown up in his/her face on multiple occasions, yet they rarely if ever did. Underneath the flimsy pretenses, it was just the same weak Bioware approach to morality that has marked virtually everything else they've made.

I don't want to see an option for the PC to rape anyone or anything like that, which would indeed be in horrible taste and a pointless waste of time and resources for shock effect, but child killing? I not only have no problem with in-game child killing, but I would be disappointed if it isn't in the game. P:E is ostensibly an homage to the late 1990s-early 2000s era of CRPGs, most of which were perfectly happy to make children killable, at least for the U.S. market. If it exists in the game, then in general you could kill it, which is how it should be. By contrast, the immortal children route of recent RPGs breaks immersion and feels almost insulting when placed in a game intended for adults. It isn't like rape; the situations in which kids were slaughtered in old CRPGs were often so over-the-top they went from horrifying to comical in a way rape never could. Casting meteor swarm on a bunch of orphans or going through the Den with your minigun making every thieving kid you see explode into ludicrous gibs can be really funny, in a pitch-black comedy kind of way. It's something they should keep, if they can.

How many projects can a single man work before he gets burnt out? Doesn't the man already have Wasteland 2 and P:E on his plate?

I'm ambivalent about their using the name 'Torment', given that it has no real connection with the first game, but this definitely isn't just some Black Isle Studios-style money grab where they slap an old name on something completely different to sucker money out of the unsuspecting. As Infinitron mentioned, they might not have MCA, but they have a lot of the other big names associated with the first game. Honestly? More and more I'm just happy to see a game studio openly looking to use P:T as a model for a new game. Whatever happens, that that is happening is a reassuring sign.

Actually, I'm playing Baldur's Gate through again, as evil aligned PC with evil aligned NPCs. Baldur's Gate does not work this system "right." Sure, the town guard attack me, and sure some conversational tidbits and the dreams I have point out my inner darkness as a character. However, bumping up the cost of items at stores a ludicrous amount is simple favoritism. There's far more incentive for a shopkeeper to charge me LESS as an evil PC than as a good PC. What I mean to say is this: An evil PC that murders, betrays, and generally raises chaos should (if anything) be given DISCOUNTS out of fear, or tribute to avoid being SLAUGHTERED by me. I shouldn't have to pay something like 100,000+ gold for a simple +1 magic item for no other reason than I murder people who disagree with me. Good players could recieve discounts, however, aren't seedy shopkeepers more likely to try to take advantage of their good nature? On my evil playthrough I'm relying on drops/quest rewards for potions/igear, I simply cannot afford to dish out hundreds of thousands in gold for crap items. It is not balanced, and there is nothing fair about it, especially when compounded with the lesser total quest rewards I'm getting for being evil. Trying to argue that playing Evil in BG does NOT yield less net quest rewards over the course of the game is straight up false. The game rewards you for being good, plain and simple. Also, making a subtly nuanced alignment system sounds great in theory, but the amount of effort to make choices/consequences that are "realistic" would seem, to me, to take such a great amount of effort/care that every RPG I've seen with an alignment system is really just good/evil (Dichotomy is simple). So I'm just hoping it's balanced dichotomy. I've said this before, but the handling of good/evil in the BG series is one of the worst seen in RPG history. You WILL get fewer rewards when you're evil, you WILL pay many times the cost for even regular items, you WILL find that your 'evil' tends to amount to 'being an huge ass to everyone you meet without any real thought for what it gets you', and you WILL find it nearly impossible to play the game when you reach the lowest levels of the reputation system (since you face not only infinitely respawning guards, but everyone else on the map, including unarmed civilians, going hostile as well when they show up!) Baldur's Gate should be taken as an archetype of how not to handle playing as a bad guy. It's very obvious that the developers gave all the carrots to the good-aligned and all the sticks to the bad, as if they couldn't stand the thought of their players not being goodie two-shoes.

Please never give me another cut-and-paste dwarf companion who swills ale, has a beard, loves fighting, uses an axe or warhammer, hates elves, speaks in a Scottish accent and so forth. Not even if he wants to be a monk and beat people up with his fists.