Death Machine Miyagi

Never played DA2. Heard too many bad things, and one of those things was that both sides were a**holes and therefore indifference set in. Not what I want at all. Call it rather that I would like another story like MotB. When I chose to side with the Betrayer's Crusade, I was quite enthusiastic about it...even as I was more than a little uneasy, because by a number of in-game accounts 'victory' in this crusade would basically mean disaster for everything else. Maybe true and maybe not, but it made a goal I was genuinely interested in supporting something that gave me second thoughts. Choosing the opposite approach of defending against the Crusade would have the same result. Yes, you're protecting everything else, but you're also supporting a form of hell for people simply because they aren't 'believers.' Again, a cause you can both sympathize with and have second thoughts about. In short, no, I don't want a world full of a**holes and I have to pick the least a**holish. Push it the other direction. I prefer a world with largely sympathetic choices, none of which are 100% sympathetic. Of course, the devil is always in the details and both kinds of stories can be done well and done badly. But grey done well is, IMHO, always going to be more intriguing than black and white. Black and white makes things easy on the player or reader or what-have you. Grey does not. That doesn't mean black and white is bad. Its just not as interesting, all other things being equal.

The non-video game world has pretty much forever turned 'vampire romance' into a grotesque thing, scarring to mind and soul alike. Well...with the exception of the occasional gem like 'Let the Right One In', but that only worked precisely because it had an extremely sinister subtext to it.

Then I think all that there is to be said is that we have very different ideas about what makes for a strong storyline. I've had plenty of RPGs in which there is some cackling bad guy at the end, blatantly there to be opposed and nothing else. Just about any Bioware RPG you could name fits into this pattern, often with villains so ludicrously over-the-top in their evilness that I can never take them even half-way seriously. To me, it gets old. I'm not saying that every faction should be just as nasty as every other faction, nor that some factions shouldn't be much more on the light shade of grey even as others tend towards the black, but I like to be challenged in regards to what I believe is right...or, more appropriately, what my character believes is right. I like my moral dilemmas complex, as complex as the real world, because I've already played a ton of escapist RPGs during my life where any and every problem can be solved by hitting the evil people with swords, whereas I've played only a few that actually made me think things through before I made my choices. But that's not really thinking. Its more appeal to the emotions. No matter who he is, what archetype he falls under, you still aren't required to put much thought into, say, Sarevok beyond, 'Here is bad guy. Kill.' And yet how spotless does a faction need to be before you can call it the 'heroic' side? You obviously didn't like the options presented by the NCR, Mr. House, Caesar's Legion or even the Yes Man ending. The NCR and Yes Man endings, especially, struck me as having a lot more good stuff than bad stuff. Do they need to be completely white for you to care if they win? Ahh, but whatever. I suspect this is just a difference in taste which can't really be logically argued. You like clean and straight forward good vs. evil, I like grey and tough choices about who to support. Never the twain shall meet and all that.

Disagree. I do think there is nothing wrong with having some evil villains, people who are very obviously 'bad', so long as their motivations are understandable on some level. The real world has plenty of these people, from murderous dictators to drug lords and serial killers and so on. It would actually be unrealistic not to have them. But what you're describing feels too much like 'I'm just here to play the game, don't make me think too hard!' Or, at least, that is the vibe I get whenever I encounter clear-cut black vs. white morality tales. If the antagonists are obviously evil, and your side obviously good, then all the rest is just beating up the bad guys, right? You don't have to question anything. You don't have to consider whose motivations make the most sense, who has the best arguments, who has done what good and what evil. There is the Dark Lord Who Must Not Be Named in his Dark Tower doing Dark Things for Dark Reasons and there is your scrappy band of heroes fighting to stop him and save everyone. The brain never once enters into the equation. And yet, ironically, it has historically been precisely this attitude which has given rise to some of the worst and most barbaric behavior. Precisely because the brain never once enters into the equation when you already know the other side is 'evil' and you are 'good.' I much, much prefer to have multiple sides, each with their good points and bad points, each with arguments that make some sense and some aspects of their approach that are unsavory, ala New Vegas. If we have an NCR, they should be both champions of democracy and the rule of the law, while at the same time being imperialists bringing 'democracy' at the point of a gun and often for their own reasons. If we have a Mr. House, he should have a genuine plan for how to rebuild society and save humanity while also being a ruthless dictator who cracks down coldly and methodically on all potential challengers. If we have the chance to rule on our own and possibly create a better society that avoids these extremes, it should come at the possible cost of creating anarchy and instability throughout the area for some time to come. A game world is more interesting when it provokes thought rather than absolves us of the need to think. 'There's big bad Sarevok who wants to kill everyone and make himself a god, go get him!' is less interesting than 'Here are a bunch of people who each genuinely have their own vision of the best society, who do you agree with and want to help, if any of them?'

You can and you can't. There's an NPC on Werewolf Island who is a pretty blatant, if extremely short-lived, love interest. The NPC's gender changes based on your own and you give him/her flowers and he/she gives you a kiss and so on. That was pretty much the oncoming wave of Bioware Romance in its infancy.

I said this in the earlier thread, but I think the word 'cliche' is inherently negative. The implication is that its overused to the point of being dull and uninteresting. There are no good cliches, by definition. The word we should be using for 'good' cliches is 'tropes.' A trope can be good or it can be bad. Its simply a commonly seen pattern in a work of fiction, one you can expect to be recognized. It does not carry any inherent connotation of being dull and uninteresting.

The ancient civilization that was once advanced and powerful but suffered some terrible cataclysm that caused it to disappear seems almost a staple. I would hope they do something new with it, but once-great civilizations are not merely a fantasy cliche, as the Roman Empire would suggest. Perfectly fine. Really, almost any cliche is alright as long as the writers put a bit of thought and distinctiveness into it rather than just regurgitating it from countless usages in the past.

She did kiss him in a fairly non-sisterly way.

Ahh, but I kid. Let's see...I like the cliche of the nobody rising to becoming a powerhouse of destruction over the course of the game. Gives you a good sense of accomplishment when you start from nothing. Really, a lot of cliches I can think of are the sorts of things that almost go unmentioned because they're so obvious: areas specifically designed for different power levels, mages having a lot of power but being fairly fragile, and so forth. They work fine and should be kept.

Well, I know it sounds a bit cliche, but I would like for my character to be raised in a small village by a mysterious foster parent shortly before that village is attacked and destroyed by unknown evil forces. I will then be informed by an eccentric wizard with a long flowing grey beard and a wizard robe and hat that I am the Chosen One destined to face and defeat an evil that has awakened after being sealed away 10,000 years ago and is dedicated to destroying the entire world. I will face this villain and his legion of orcs accompanied by an ale-swigging bearded Scottish dwarf who hates elves and uses an axe and a warhammer, a 500 year old pointy-eared Elven ranger who is both a master bowman and at one with nature even as he laments the slow disappearance of his people, a wild and wacky gnome who adds a touch of comic relief with his wild and wacky antics, and perhaps a quiet but intimidating anti-hero who will slowly reveal his dark past to me over the course of our adventures. My main character should be strongly pushed towards using a sword, in preparation for a super-powerful magical sword that will be given to me during the course of the story which is the only thing that can defeat the Evil One, and during the story the shocking revelation that the Evil One is actually my father will be unveiled at a dramatically appropriate time. Later, after fighting my way through the fortress of the Evil One and defeating him, I will hesitate to strike the killing blow despite murdering tens of thousands of his minions previously, because if I kill him I will be just like him. I will spare him, and as I turn around and walk away he'll try to attack me again and so I'll kill him in self-defense anyway. Then the Ewoks and I shall dance! EDIT: Paragraphs are for sissies.

That was really the 'selling point' that made Irenicus a good rather than great villain. He had some great lines and a great VA, even if his motivation was really lame. Yep, it turned out later it was just the essence of Bhaal trying to goad you into 'accepting your heritage.' Would have been much cooler if it had actually been Irenicus, with his own motivations for wanting to see you embrace that heritage... But anyway, yes, I really wish you could have called the Elf Queen out, loudly and vigorously, for thinking that the best way to rehabilitate a man who tried to murder everyone in your city so he could be a god is to leave him his power but take away his soul, then kick him out for the rest of the world to deal with. Brilliant plan, lady, can't imagine how it might go wrong.

Bioware has this really irritating tendency to telegraph upcoming 'plot twists' as loudly and obviously as possible. Just how many times does Ms. Water Dragon need to show up with a vaguely worded 'The guy who has sent you out to kill the Emperor is actually just manipulating you' before it sinks in and the later 'surprise' is ruined?

I've said this in some other thread, but Irenicus was the promise of a great villain squandered. The entire first dungeon, where he talks about your 'potential', followed by the dreams where he is seemingly 'instructing' you in embracing your destiny as a Child of Bhaal, give off the impression that he has some deeper motive which may not necessarily be at odds with your own. He almost seems to want to help you, in his own twisted way. Assuming you're playing a nasty, evil character, of course. Then you reach Spellhold, he steals your soul with much evil gloating, and you're put solidly on the railroad tracks towards saving Elf City, hacking him into bloody bits and getting your soul back. That's the kind of thing that shows, even in the golden age of Bioware, they were still never the equals of BIS or Obsidian in regards to writing villains.

The use of the word 'MMO' on this board should be punished by public flogging.

Fat acceptance is for sissies. Fat supremacy is the future. This in particular needs correcting. Don't get me wrong, I want elves in P:E to be depicted much like elves are depicted in most fantasy fiction; nigh-immortal, haughty, absolutely deadly, living at one with nature and the world, with a culture and civilization we poor humans could only dream of. But I want the P:E elves to be hugely obese. I want them to speak of the superiority of their people to we short-lived humans even as they gorge on a platter of fried chicken and a tub of ice cream. I want to see them laugh and jiggle merrily as they fire their long bows or fight with their long swords, rolls of sweaty blubber glistening in the forest sun. I want to see tree houses buckling and collapsing to the forest floor from the weight of their inhabitants. I want fat elves. We are now a fat world. Anorexic elves, so often depicted as 'superior' to humans, send the absolute wrong message. I want to know I can be an elf and still polish off an entire tray of enchiladas single-handed.

If there is one thing I hate about BG2, its this. The game never has a moment where you aren't urgently being pushed towards a main plotline goal. There is never a time when you can just relax and explore without feeling like you're dropping the ball on some greater issue, be it your little sister being tortured in Spellhold or Give me a little peace in the plot to do my random questing, you douchebags.

But this isn't an indictment of good planning. Its an indictment of bad planning. Its an indictment of coming up with a well-realized plan and then throwing it all out and coming up with a completely incompatible plan when the time comes to start. All would have been well if they hadn't decide to change the story for each installment and instead figured out a rough trajectory as to where they were going. This doesn't mean they need to sit down and plan out all the sequels in excruciating detail before planning for the first game even begins. All they need is a few rough goalposts of what they intend to happen in the future, major events they want to see happen and major things that are going on behind the scenes. George RR Martin always talks about it like this: its like a cross-country trip (ehhh...speaking as an American); you know you're starting in, say, Los Angeles and ending up in, say, New York. You know along the way you'll be visiting the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore or stopping in to see relatives in Chicago or Atlanta or wherever, but you don't know every restaurant you'll stop at or hotel you'll be staying at. You establish a few big things you know are coming and plan for and allow a ton of flexibility for little things so you aren't crippled in regards to creativity down the line. But you stick to the plan. And if you don't, you shouldn't blame the plan you didn't stick to. Here you and I differ strongly. I think KOTOR II would have been a worse game without all the clues hinting at the 'True Sith' and what actually happened to Revan, even with the reality that we never got a KOTOR III and what we did get in the way of a KOTOR continuation was lamely executed on all levels. It was precisely the fact that KOTOR II felt less self-contained than the original KOTOR that made it feel like a richer and more involving game to me, even if it all came apart at the seams in Act 3. Just after you posted, Corvus Metus said this: When Tolkien started dropping references to the Necromancer in the Hobbit, he did so with no clue whatsoever that he was going to write Lord of the Rings. He referenced the Necromancer, a villain implied to be far greater and more threatening than Smaug, with no intention of wrapping up that storyline. Later, in Lord of the Rings itself, he references Morgoth as a greater evil than Sauron with no intention of explaining or wrapping up that storyline either. It was only years or decades later that the Silmarillion was released and explained that little plot thread a bit. Perhaps to some people such connections are frustrating when there is obviously no intent to give them immediate resolution...or even explanation. For me, they're great because they help make it clear there is a greater world out there beyond what you are currently seeing, greater threats beyond what you are currently facing, and yet because the world is larger than your problems there is no need to get into that just yet. And yes, that even holds true when they can't finish it properly, IMHO. If there had never been a Lord of the Rings, the references to the Necromancer would still have made the Hobbit a richer book. Even without a KOTOR III, I actually prefer to pretend all the 'revelations' TOR had about the KOTOR plotline didn't happen and just use my imagination to picture what was planned. Certainly I don't think KOTOR II is a lesser game for its implied menace lurking beyond the horizon without ever being seen. Just the opposite, in fact.

Which actually makes it even worse. You see, it isn't just my assumption that they were meant to be the Five; my understanding is that the developers, when the question was put to them by a confused fan after ToB was released, claimed they were meant to be the Five and were left generic because the design of the Five hadn't been determined yet. I don't have a direct quote, though. Just what I've heard when the question came up previously. I suppose I could be wrong, but given how sloppy the design of ToB was in general I doubt it.

Anyway, the direction this has gone is slightly beside the point. Whatever planning they do for a hypothetical sequel years and years away, they will have to make one decision now: whether to design the game with a self-contained character arc ala the Vault Dweller or design it with the expectation that that character and at least some of his companions will still be adventuring in any potential sequel. I personally prefer the latter for this kind of game, but the former has been done extremely well by Obsidian before, so I won't offer any complaints if that's the road they choose.

Well...yeah. I don't think the book model is exactly what they should do either and I agree a game should be primarily self-contained plot-wise. But I think Obsidian's own KOTOR2 provided a fairly good example of how foreshadowing in a game can be cool while still containing the plot to that one game. There's a lot of foreshadowing throughout about some unnamed evil that Revan went off to fight and felt was such a terrible danger that he took truly extreme measures to prepare for it. Yet, aside from those ominous hints, there is still no doubt Darth Nihilus, Darth Sion, and Darth Traya are the main enemies of the game. The future is suggested but the present plotline is still most important. A pity the people developing TOR had very little idea as to what to do with all that foreshadowing. Ah well. True, we don't know if there will be a P:E 2. We don't know whether the game will sell well enough to warrant one. I don't think that's any reason to hold off in preparing for the possibility of it, though. Baldur's Gate had its level cap and its unfinished Bhaalspawn storyline that was just begging for a sequel and a more definitive ending...but if it had tanked in sales and there had been no BG2, would that have been reason to consider preparing for it a mistake? I don't think so.

That's perfectly alright. To each their own and all, and I hope P:E has the great gameplay of the Infinity engine as well. I don't agree, though; I love the gameplay, but I love the gameplay more when there's an interesting story behind it, and on the whole video game stories suck the big one precisely because you can get away with having an awful story in a game so long as you have great gameplay. I gave money to Obsidian largely because they tend to be the exception to that rule. They like telling good stories. Here is their chance to tell a great one, and it will be all the greater with a little forethought.

I was suspecting someone would say something to this effect, but I really hope Obsidian isn't thinking this way. The most infuriating thing to me about how the whole 'one part in a trilogy' routine has played out in CRPGs, in practice, has been how little planning seems to be involved. I've bitched about this in other threads, I believe, but I shall bitch again because it deserves to be bitched about and I enjoy bitching about it. Take the transition from BG2 to Throne of Bhaal. They end BG2 with an ominous council of green-robed guys who speak about how 'Gorion's ward is too powerful' and they 'should have acted long before now' and so forth, ending with a menacing declaration that 'the Bhaalspawn is doomed, there is no escape!' and a scroll up to reveal a symbol of Bhaal on the table. Spooky foreshadowing. I'm sure anyone who has played BG2 remembers it. But apparently the developers didn't. Those five white guys in green robes? Supposed to be the Five, a group that includes a dragon, a female, a female drow, a fire giant...Oy! They apparently made them generic in the ending video because they hadn't decided what the Five would actually look like at that point. They, of course, never even bother to stop a half second and explain why the actual Five are about as wildly different from the guys you see in the cinematic as you can get. They just shrug it off and push on forward. And that seems to be the unofficial mantra of waaayyy too many video game writers: don't even bother to check what you said or showed about a subject in your earlier games. if you introduce something and its either a complete Deus Ex Machina or wildly contradicts something that came before, just shrug it off and push forward. Planning ahead is unnecessary and you can play it by ear when the time comes. Only a few whiny fans will care. By contrast, consider that there are writers today, authors of book series and the like, who have major events they've been working up to planned out several books in advance. Years and years before a character is first seen by the reading public or a major event unfolds, there are hints and suggestions and implications, foreshadowing of all sorts building up to that unveiling. As a result, when the event occurs or the character appears, it is that much more satisfactory and what came before becomes that much richer in hindsight. I want to see long-term storytelling in P:E that bridges games, but just as important I would love to see long term planning in P:E, planning in which a good number of important plot points and ideas for the series are dreamed up years and years before we may actually see them. To use a comparison, if this were Fallout 1 in development right now, I would love to see subtle clues lying around hinting at the existence of the Enclave and the actual purpose of the vaults, years before their first official introduction in Fallout 2. Let major points of the series be understood by the developers from the very start and given the appropriate foreshadowing and the storyline will be better for it..

Closure is important. For example, I think killing Sarevok in BG1 was a good point of closure. The Bhaalspawn plot is just beginning, really, but that entry point to it is sealed in a satisfactory manner when you finish him off. One story ends and, it suggests, the greater plot begins. Ideally, anyway.

Of the Infinity Engine games, only Baldur's Gate was planned from word 'go' to be the first installment in an overarching plot line The Nameless One's story ends with PS:T (barring a massive cop-out) and Icewind Dale...well, not qualified to talk much about Icewind Dale, having never finished it, but my understanding is the story told begins and ends in the game itself. MCA seems to suggest they're going for the Baldur's Gate approach. They fully intend to make sequels, if the game is profitable, and expand the world. Makes perfect sense, really. What isn't quite as clear is how your character's story fits into this. The world may expand, but that says nothing about the story. Will we have a character who makes the jump to the sequel, as in the BG series, continuing along a massive story that bridges two or more games? Would we find ourselves importing characters and dealing with level caps and all the rest of the things that made it possible to play BG from the first game to Throne of Bhaal? Or will the second game have your character be the Chosen One to P:E's Vault Dweller, or the Exile to P:E's Revan, a spiritual successor at best? Perhaps a better question: which approach do you guys prefer? Massive game bridging story or each game a self-contained entity, with the world being the constant rather than the plot and the character?

Never bothered to use autopause. I pause manually as needed. I did try to rest as rarely as possible, even as a mage. You have no idea how much of a headache this approach was on my first run-through of Durlag's Tower in BG1.