Death Machine Miyagi

Any RPG fan who hasn't played them really, really, really, really needs to do so right now. Go to GoG.com. Buy them. Right now. Also: The BG series and Torment are greatly enriched by he abundance of mods released for them. Get those, too. But I would be honestly surprised if there were any great number of people donating who haven't played them. They're old, but they're not Wasteland old.

I never played much Icewind Dale. At its release, it was marketed as much more of a straight-forward dungeon hack than BG2 or Torment, and straight-forward dungeon hacks bore me, so I never bothered with it. PS:T had one of the best computer game stories ever, if not the best, but was lacking combat-wise. BG2 combined epicness with open-endedness, and with all the mods released for it is one of my most played games of all time. Nevertheless, plot holes, weak story threads and inconsistencies abounded, especially by the time of Throne of Bhaal. The subject of how they handled the Bhaalspawn storyline can be rant-inducing for me. Give me the epicness and open-endedness of BG2 with the consistently well-written story of Torment and I will be a very happy Japanese killing machine.

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but there is another thing I like a lot about minimal voice acting: the dialogue can be customized to all sorts of different characters. In all these fully voiced games, your character has to have some base common denominator by which they're identified so that the voiced dialogue has something to call you. For example, Neverwinter Nights 2 had everyone identify you as a Harborman, or the Kalach-cha, or the Knight-Commander, or whatever. Ultimately this has reached the point of...say, Mass Effect, where your first character and every character thereafter will always be a guy/gal named Shephard. With simple text, you go back to having your own name and your own background, circumscribed only by what the writers can write rather than by the audio. CHARNAME lives! Give me either no audio or a minimum of it for flavor. Either works fine by me. But for this kind of game, fully voiced is a waste of both resources and flexibility.

Having more money.

Kreia, for me, is the textbook example of how to do influence badly. You HAD to get influence with her if you wanted a big chunk of the storyline to be comprehensible, which meant you were actively punished for not paying lip service to her philosophy. That meant doing exactly what you wrote above...follow a FAQ or rigorously choose dialogue that might be completely alien to your character, all in the interests of getting in the good graces of a manipulative Ubermensch wannabe. Very obnoxious. This is also my thoughts in a nutshell. 'Influence' should not derive from 'agreeing with every word they say.' Maybe that's one route to influence...but what about a route that involves intelligently challenging their beliefs and perhaps changing them over the course of time? As an example, in Mask of the Betrayer, what if you could either agree with Kaelyn the Dove that the Wall of the Faithless must come down or become a sort of philosophical sparring partner with her, winning her respect not with blind agreement but by forcing her to critically examine her own ideas? What if both of these routes offered roughly equivalent influence gain? This of course is a lot more intensive in the writing department than dividing it into 'agree with them (+ influence)/disagree with them (- influence), and of course there would be NPCs who would very much have a 'with me or against me' attitude for whom agree/disagree would in fact be the best influence pattern. Nevertheless, for some characters....especially if you could change their point of view over repeated arguments rather than with just one sidequest or whatever...it would add a ton of depth while allowing you to play your character as you liked.

You know the drill. Pat the NPC on the head and give lip service to his/her cause and they'll love you, get new dialogue, get stat bumps, etc. Punch them in the gut and set fire to their family and they'll get disgruntled, leave, or try to kill you. Makes perfect sense, really. But it can have some major weaknesses. In the worst cases, it feels like you're being rewarded for genuflecting to a character's viewpoints and punished for standing up for any contrary views. Before long, if you want the rewards of high influence, your character is like a sleazy politician, searching the dialogue tree for the exact right response that'll get you the biggest haul of influence, everything to everybody and yet a hollow shell of a character. You can avoid this behavior, but the game often effectively punishes you for it through influence loss. I have other thoughts on the subject which I'll post when its not 6:54 in the morning CST and I haven't been up all night from insomnia, but until then I open the floor to thoughts about NPC influence: what works, what doesn't, what you'd like to see, what you hope to never see again, etc.

I don't disagree with the rest of your post, but um, a romance isn't exactly an extra bit of character interaction. We're looking at 3-4 months at least, and I honestly don't blame the naysayers when they say (specifically) that the resources might be better spent elsewhere. More power to Obsidian if they decide to do it, but honestly? Nothing against them if they don't. Resources are PRECIOUS. I think a big problem in this thread is that the concept of in-game 'romance' is being slung around in all kinds of ways, ranging from the extremes of the Bioware approach to just a few lines of dialogue, so let's speak in the narrowest sense: how much time do you think it cost the development team of Planescape: Torment to put in the Annah romance? I'm guessing not long. And yet in doing so they gave more depth to both the Nameless One and Annah. Nothing more than subtext and a single kiss was needed. Not the most satisfying CRPG romance, of course, but in such a case I think less is definitely more.

Six months? For a little bit of extra character development and interaction? Come on, now. What do you think they're doing, making FMV sex scenes? They're not friggin' Bioware...or I hope to hell they aren't, anyway. Basically, this would only be the case if the folks at Obsidian were to decide to make romance options a whole lot more important than I think most sane advocates for them would find reasonable. They don't need to be an overbearing element of the plotline, and in fact making them as such is one of the reasons why Bioware's approach has gotten so obnoxious since Baldur's Gate 2. One of the primary stated development goals of this project is to "pay homage to the great infinity engine games of years past: Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale." Two out of those three games included romance subplots, though Torment's was admittedly pretty tacked on. All of this said, though my arguing here may suggest otherwise, romances for me are a minor quibble. If done well, I would be happy to see them. I find they make the game world richer and give your character more personality. If done poorly, they're a cancerous tumor that should be excised quickly and ruthlessly or risk destroying the game with their overbearing awfulness. If not done at all, no great loss. But the notion of dismissing everyone who finds any value in them as a sick weirdo hoping to get off on humping his/her imaginary girl/boyfriend, as seems to be the subtext for some comments around here? Give me a break. If I can read a book involving sex and romance without being a pervert, I find it bizarre the same standards don't apply to a well-written game.

Depends on how seriously you take it. The assumption you and metiman seem to be making here is that to pursue a romance subplot in a game means that you must long to keep a love pillow of the romanceable character in your closet. In other words, enjoying an in-game romance means you're a sick puppy who can't separate fiction from the real world. What if you just like the greater depth of character introduced by characters who are not arbitrarily rendered into sexless automatons? What if you find a world which lacks one of the most driving forces behind the actions of humans everywhere less engaging than a world which acknowledges and represents that drive, even for your character? Frankly, while I perfectly understand the people who don't want anything to do with it personally, I find the notion of opposing it even as an option and belittling those who disagree bizarre.

My character is unattached. Both of the above characters are unattached. Sexual orientations of the characters in question are compatible. I have been wandering the wasteland with the above character for ages. Why wouldn't hitting on them be an option? At the bare minimum, why would the subject never even come up with them, even for a moment? Its precisely because I know the difference between a computer game and real life that hitting on fictional characters of all kinds doesn't bother me. It adds depth to the game and character interaction and gives my character more personality. That's a good thing....so long as such interaction is optional. Pfffttt. ED-E is my robot. Whatever command I give, he follows, right? And he has that very large and powerful laser gun under his belly.... Oooooohhhh...Assuming the position.

Like anything else, depends on how well its done. Bioware-style romance increasingly makes me gag. That being said, I found it kind of disconcerting when I couldn't seem to hit on Arcade Gannon as a gay male or Veronica as a gay female in New Vegas. I wouldn't have even minded if they shot me down for whatever reason, but to leave it entirely unacknowledged felt unnatural.

; Welcome to the Order. Choose a unique title for yourself. Check the first post for details. ありがとう。 Just figured out that, no, the title isn't something I change in preferences. So I shall be Obsidian Order's Devourer of Souls.

32. Best RPG? Too tricky. Planescape: Torment - Favorite Storyline, a bit lacklustre combat wise Baldur's Gate 2 - Favorite RPG combat (at least when appropriately modded), storyline that too often felt like an afterthought next to killing things Fallout - Favorite atmosphere, first game too short, second game had too many atmosphere-killing breaks in the fourth wall for the sake of now badly dated jokes And so on. But since I value a good story above all, something so rarely seen, I guess PS:T wins.

I'm in. If I become a member, Miyagi promises not to pound all of your faces into hamburger. Unless provoked.