Death Machine Miyagi

I'm gonna go set some girl scouts on fire anyway. Just in case.

Sure. Obsidian can make an excellent and non-buggy game. It is entirely their ball to drop. Yeah, but that's boring. I was thinking something that involves setting girl scouts on fire or something. Is there a way to get from setting girl scouts on fire to more copies of PoE sold?

Earning $4 million+ in Kickstarter backing is awesome. A fine thing. Yet Having PoE sell like a latter day Baldur's Gate 2 would mean we might see more games like it, not to mention an even larger and more in-depth sequel. My motives for wanting PoE to be a huge success are essentially selfish: I want more CRPGs that play like CRPGs used to play like and that can only happen if people are convinced such CRPGs can still sell very well. Any suggestions for how to make this happen that don't involve fraud, violence or terrorism? Or at the very least very mild forms of those things, with light prison sentences?

I'm a night person. I would reverse that question.

It isn't rational, I know, but to me at least going into a character editor felt like cheating because I could instantly give myself 18 in everything. I didn't earn those stats, I just gave them to myself instantly. Meanwhile, if I spent a bunch of time rolling over and over and over again, it felt like I had put in the time to have earned whatever ridiculous stats I ended up with. And no matter what those stats were, they were almost certainly shy of 18 in everything, so there was still a degree of compromise involved. Those ridiculous stats were a product of blood, sweat and tears. I won them fair and square, dammit.

Sorry, but I'm having traumatic flashbacks of rolling and rolling and rolling and rolling and rolling until I got something like 97 points total to distribute. And yet not considering it cheating because, hey, that's what the game gave me. After 500 rerolls. *whimper*

And I think that's actually the key. It would be nice to have more NPCs who are there to listen to your take on things as much as you are to listen to their life stories, giving you both an interesting relationship with the NPC in question and a chance to define who your character is and how he/she thinks.

The trend in CRPGs for many years has been on greater interaction with the NPCs in your party. I've noticed, though, that 'greater interaction' tends to be translated to 'the NPC has some horrible issue or secret from their past they're dealing with and you help them get through it, particularly if you have an interest in sexual intercourse with said NPC in a Bioware game.' Sometimes you can decide in what direction they change, but the principle remains roughly the same: the PC takes the role of party therapist, with everybody slowly divulging their dark secrets and tragic histories. If you want to get to know the NPC, pretty soon you're going to stumble across that tragic back story and become the comforting, nonjudgmental friend they confide in. I think this is a cliche that deserves to be screwed around with, and I hope to see PoE do it. How do you distinguished posters believe it could be played with and yet still keep interaction with the NPC interesting?

The Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings 2. I have ambitions of placing Lollys Stokeworth, the secret mastermind of the entire series, on the Iron Throne.

There are plenty of games that don't need a story, true, or just need the bare minimum to offer an excuse for action. And there's nothing wrong with that, just as it isn't wrong if there are some CRPGs which are nothing but dungeon hacks. But that is really, really not the direction I'm hoping PoE goes.

I couldn't disagree more. Dungeon crawls without interesting stories or characters are boring as all hell, and a regression even from the pretty shoddy storytelling typically seen in games today. I would rather the more imaginative designers start gaining the conviction that they can tackle practically any subject or evoke any emotion a book or movie can, just in a different way more suited to the medium they work in. I'd rather designers start gaining a bit of self-respect in regards to their ability to tell a genuinely good story, with genuinely interesting characters and a genuine ability to grab people beyond the game mechanics, rather than mindlessly accepting the John D. Carmack view that 'story in games is like a story in a porn movie, expected to be there but not important.'

How is it possible that anyone who has been here for more than a few months has anything left to say on this subject? The thread poster has 3 posts, so unless he or she is a sock puppet bringing it up is understandable, but I can't figure out the rest of you folks.

I anticipate this thread will either be locked or hit 20 pages.

I'm not sure it's much better to just say 'games can never do this right, so let's never try.' The gaming industry has enough spineless people recycling the same thing over and over and afraid to try new things as it is.

Romance discussion seems to be like a virus on these forums, infecting even the most tangentially related topics.

Most of it, actually. But yes, like a lot of games, it falls apart near the end and turns into a boring combat slog.

Yeah, I know. And I'm sure that the freedom and open world makes up for it for some people. For me, it just makes the whole experience boring and empty. If every character is free to do everything, then no character has any way of defining him/herself. For example, if I can claw my way to become head of the wizard's college or whatever and not a single NPC seems to give a fuzzy wet crap about it, the accomplishment seems a bit hollow.

Just got through playing it again for the first time in many a year and I was reminded of just how much a game is improved when it has a ton of reactivity. Options can open and close wildly depending on what clan you are, what disciplines and skills you've put points into, how you treat people, whether you have a high or low humanity. All kinds of things. And the game doesn't half-ass it, either. If you're playing as a Malkavian, you don't every once in awhile get some NPC remarking upon it. It's almost easier to note the characters who don't have a reaction to your insane babble and, all through the game, there are easter eggs thrown in for Malks. The same goes for Nosferatu, who rarely meet an NPC who doesn't have something to say about a hideous monster coming up and talking to them, especially if they're mortals, and who have to spend a much larger portion of the game wandering through the sewers since even their appearance causes a masquerade violation. Other clans are less differentiated, but even there every clan gets a chance at different dialogue or new options on multiple occasions, particularly if they're talking with an NPC who is also part of their clan. Figure out that the Nosferatu guy is using his ghoul to trick you into killing someone for him as a Ventrue and he'll express annoyance. Figure it out as a Tremere and he'll express anger and disgust. Figure it out as a fellow Nosferatu and he'll beam with pride. I've noticed that, along with Deus Ex, Bloodlines is one of those games they say someone reinstalls every time you mention it. My guess is that the above is the biggest reason. The game responds to how you play, and does so in a way that goes above and beyond the call of duty. I can't imagine how much work that must have taken, but it makes the game much, much more interesting. By contrast, I remember one of the things that soured me on Skyrim was how little people cared that I was playing an Altmer, despite the whole region living in terror of the Thalmor. Even other Altmer never seemed to notice or care. The PoE related point: I really, really hope PoE goes out of its way to make the game feel different depending on who and what you are. I can't overstate how important I feel this is. I've been intending to make my first character a female rogue from the Vailian Republics, a dashing swashbuckler sort with a mercenary attitude who always tries to talk her way out of situations first. For every time someone in the game recognizes that I'm from the Vailian Republics, or that I'm a rogue, or that I have been using a diplomatic disposition, or that I'm a female, or that I'm aligned with this group and not that group, or whatever else differentiates my character from just being an arbitrary arrangement of statistics, the game will get a +1 in my regard for it.

PS:T is a gaming example of Roger Ebert's saying that 'it's not what a movie is about, but how it's about it.' An amnesiac 'chosen one'* discovering his past self was a bad person may not be original, but the way it was handled certainly was. And really, that's what it boils down to; having a familiar plot isn't a bad thing, since there have been so many stories over the course of human history you're almost certainly copying something or other in terms of the basics, but handling it in the exact same way you've seen it handled a billion times before suggests the writer is either unimaginative or lazy. *Not so sure TNO counts as a chosen one, since he chose himself and his journey is entirely about him and his decisions, not some grand prophecy that he will save the universe or whatever. He's hardly a Harry Potter or a Luke Skywalker.

I deliberately killed off Ashley on Virmire to avoid this. You know something is messed up when the only way to avoid having a romance is to either be a complete **** or murder the romanceable NPC.

I've always found this a strange argument. It gives me the distinct impression that, somewhere at the dawn of history, there were CRPG Grognards rolling their eyes at the notion of playing a game where you have 'relationships' with NPCs or 'talk' to them in any meaningful way rather than just hacking them to pieces. I mean, geez, who needs to talk to a bunch of virtual friends? It's creepy. Truth is, game romances themselves aren't bad, anymore than having characters with richly detailed personalities and back stories is bad. I welcome any chance a game gives me to give my character more personality, just as I welcome more personality from NPCs. It's just that Bioware has reduced it to a formulaic and extremely simple dating sim rather than making it interesting in any way, which has left a lot of people with a sour impression of the idea. My opinion is that it could be done well, if someone were willing to take risks and make it more involving than 'play the therapist and get a fade to black sex scene.'

Right. The sense I've gotten from statements by J.E. Sawyer and MCA, at least, is something ranging between disinterest in CRPG romance to outright hostility to it. As such, if they had to write a romance, I expect it would be done half-hardheartedly, at best. I don't want half-hearted writing. I want good writing, and the best way to get good writing is to let the writers make the game the way they want to make it. Unlike a lot of people, though, I'm not opposed to CRPG romances in principle. I'm just opposed to them the way they're typically done. Bioware has kind of soured the idea for a lot of people, and I can understand why, but I approve of any chance a CRPG gives me to flesh out my character and his/her relationship with others in an interesting way.

Stop crapping on my CRPG elitism.

I'm glad the game is getting good publicity, but the only reviews I expect I'll value in regards to PoE are those done by old school CRPG nerds. If you think 'CRPG' and the first word that pops into your head is 'Skyrim', as I suspect is the case for a lot of modern gamers, your opinion is disqualified from consideration.

In fantasy, realism means establishing some rough guidelines over the course of the story for the way things work in that world and sticking to them. If you do at some point break your own established rules, make the fact that someone is breaking the rules as unbelievable to the characters in the story as it would be for us if we saw some guy in the real world start levitating under his own power. More often than not, the rules amount to 'the same as in our world unless otherwise noted.' People who don't eat starve. People who don't drink die of dehydration. Only women get pregnant. Armor is heavy. Gravity exists. The sun rises in the day and sets at night. And so forth. If those rules differ, you'd best make it clear well before you use it as a major plot point. If you don't and then plead that 'it's fantasy, so anything goes', it's just plain bad writing.