Death Machine Miyagi
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Everything posted by Death Machine Miyagi
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People willingly put Origin on their computers?
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It's not that I have anything against strategy guides, but we're a long way from the 90s and in practice I'm not sure how much sense they make these days. How much sense do paper strategy guides make in a world with GameFaqs?
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34. One of my earliest memories is coming home from (presumably) kindergarten and playing River Raid and Pitfall on the Atari, but I suppose that doesn't count for computer gaming. So for computer gaming, dredging my memory, the earliest I can remember is playing Oregon Trail at school. And getting really irritated that I kept getting my entire family killed. Also, not surprised by the results so far. I expected a good portion of the people who would have nostalgia for the Infinity Engine games would typically be around their late 20s-early 30s.
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Ahh, I remember feeling really old just before I turned 30, as well. Now I'm older than that by a few years and yet very much do not feel really old, or at least don't let the thought bug me. You get over it. The thinking about it, anyway. The 'getting older' part just keeps getting worse, alas. I'd actually be surprised if the majority of backers around here weren't at least in their late 20s. There are people who will be going to college in a few years who weren't even born when the original Baldur's Gate was released.
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CRPGs and Endings
Death Machine Miyagi replied to gkathellar's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Does PoE really need a grand ending? We're getting a limit on levels like in Baldur's Gate, so presumably they fully intend to follow up with a PoE 2 if PoE doesn't crash and burn. I hope the whole story line set in motion by PoE gets a grand and suitably satisfying ending when its done, but until then they just need to gracefully segue into whatever the next part of the series will be. -
Regardless of how it works in Forgotten Realms, I'm not sure how this issue relates to the fantasy setting of PoE. The post-death situation here seems to be reincarnation, with the rules behind that reincarnation unclear and subject to all your standard religious interpretations. That makes evil behavior considerably more comprehensible. That and the lack of anything like 'Detect Evil' spells. I always wondered why in D&D worlds they didn't have low-level clerics perform a mandatory alignment check on suspected criminals. I mean, that whole trial sequence in NWN2 would have been really short if someone had just thought to cast a spell on the PC that reveals he or she is Lawful Good. I doubt you could retain Lawful Good status after massacring a village.
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Part of the reason they aren't going for full voice acting isn't just budget. It's that full voice acting limits both how much content you can add and your ability to change content down the road, not to mention making things a pain for modders. You can't have everything. Either you have an RPG with an enormous budget that allows for full VO and other such expensive extras, but which then necessitates the game be more streamlined and watered down to appeal to the biggest audience possible, or you have a niche RPG with a smaller budget which is highly detailed and has lots of content but lacks bells and whistles. If you want the former, Bioware will always be there, but I'm glad to see we're getting more of the latter.
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No you wouldn't. You'd come up with rationalisations why your behaviour is exactly how that "God" intended you to act. Just like people have been doing since the dawn of time and are still doing right now. This isn't some esoteric guessing game, we know exactly what happens. Seriously, we've got thousands of years of evidence for this. If the scenario is 'I know God exists 100% and I know 100% what he's demanding of me', then I would change my behavior to match the demands of the psycho omnipotent entity who is threatening me with eternal torture for not complying. What you're describing is how people operate in the actual world we live in, where such certainty does not exist, no matter how much people might like it to. In our world, if there is a God, he's pretty relaxed about clarifying the rules for people, at least until after they're dead, which leads to the behavior you describe. Moreover, in the real world, if I ever become convinced I know God exists 100% and that he's ordering me to do something morally repulsive, I hope my family has me institutionalized before I can actually do it.
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Ever read a history book? No, they wouldn't. Mostly they'd just rationalise it away as them not really being evil. I think the big problem is with characters in settings like Forgotten Realms who are card carrying evil people, of which there seem to be an awful lot in fantasy and virtually none in real life.
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I sure as hell would. If I knew God existed who sentenced people to heaven or hell forever after their deaths based on their choices, then I'd modify my behavior accordingly, even if what God demanded seemed morally repugnant to me. I mean, what are you aiming for by defying the omnipotent, omniscient creator of everything? A sort of doomed moral victor status against an opponent who can't possibly be defeated, ever? Is that really worth an eternity of suffering? If you say yes, do you think you'd still have the same opinion after ten trillion years of it, knowing that that ten trillion years can't even be measured as the tiniest fraction of how much more time you'll be in agony? But I also sure as hell couldn't bring myself to be anything more than terrified of such an entity. It would be rather like living in an inescapable and all-knowing totalitarian state: you may do what you have to do to avoid being targeted and shipped off to the concentration camp or Gulag or what-not, but inwardly the only thing pushing that behavior is fear of retribution. But wow, this probably isn't the right forum for that discussion. I'm guessing it's going to get moved.
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There are number of lines I'll "miss" from the BG games, because I've heard them so often. "Me will crush you. Crush you to goo!" Or else "Me will smash your face!" "So I kicked him in the head until he was dead. Mwahaha!" "Don't touch me. I'm super important." "Prepare to be eviscerated, fool." "In the name of Looolllth, we fiiighhhtt!" And so on. God, Baldur's Gate was a hammy series.
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A rogue, probably. I'm increasingly getting the image in my head of a swashbuckling mercenary from the Vailian Republics, bigger on stealth and wit than brute force or magic.
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It wouldn't bother me very much if there were no voice acting at all. I'd rather have no voice acting at all than some of the crap I've heard in other games. So yes, if you're not going to have much voice acting, make sure what you do have doesn't make me burst out laughing in the middle of what's supposed to be a serious scene.
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This is bugging me, too. I was planning on playing a Vailian, who according to my understanding look like this: Gimme some black portraits, Obsidian. I want to be a Vailian swashbuckler-type character.
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Setting aside whatever tweaks need to be made to make stats balanced, which is what the beta is largely about anyway, you don't have to make every build optimal to make every build viable. Trying to make every build optimal would be an exercise in pointless frustration, I agree, but in a single player game optimal builds aren't as important. Plenty of people will play character builds they think are fun even if they can't lay waste to enemies as efficiently. Still, yes, even making every build viable is a tall order. I wouldn't be surprised if a great number of builds end both inefficient and boring. I respect the attempt, though.
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Elf Portrait
Death Machine Miyagi replied to gamerdude130's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
At the time TSR was run by Lorraine Williams. From the stories I've heard, working there probably kinda sucked. Screw you, Lorraine Williams. Wherever you are. Also, I remember having the Complete Book of Elves as a kid. I don't remember a strong reaction to it at the time, but I did grow up to despise elves and all they stand for. There may be a subtle causal link I haven't acknowledged. -
Geez, thank you for reminding me of that Seriously, I'm bit in denial about whether I regret my decision to get the key before I learned size of beta or not xP I have no regrets. I'd rather play the complete game unspoiled. I'm actually kind of ambivalent about watching anyone else playing it because I'm nervous there might be plot spoilers. Way back in the day, I remember playing the demo for the original Fallout. It used one of the maps from Junktown, there was no music and it had a plot which had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot of the actual game. That's kinda what I'm hoping will be in this beta; dialogue and such changed so as not to spoil anything in the actual game, but all the mechanics in place so they can test them and get them working correctly.
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In those games where you can be actually evil, Bioware usually tries to throw something personal into the mix to justify why you can't sign up with the enemy. An evil character in BG can't join the Iron Throne or side with Sarevok because Sarevok is trying to slaughter all the other Bhaalspawn. An evil character in BG2 can't side with Irenicus because Irenicus wants his/her soul. An evil character in Knights of the Old Republic can't defect to the Sith because he's Darth Revan and Malak wants him dead. An evil character in Jade Empire can't side with the villains because he's the last spirit monk and the only real danger to those villains. And so on. The problem is that, as often as not, you don't know about these things until well into the game. Why wouldn't a Revan who is openly indulging in every kind of dark side act try to defect to the Sith the moment he is let free from Dantooine? Before he finds out he's Darth Revan, there is zero explanation for why he can't even try this.
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Even if that's how you feel, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What do the combat mechanics and the lack of exploration have to do with the plot? Probably not much, but I need to insert my rant about MotB somewhere :D As for it being a good example for Evil campaign, not it was not. At least not by the example earlier given how an evil guy might become King. MotB only let you consume people with a arbitrary mechanic that said "oh now you are 2 point more evil because you pushed this same button again", and that is not much different than random minor quests in Baldur's Gate were you could lose some reputation if you chose an evil choice. It is still not a true Evil campaign. Actually, the really evil stuff is only available if you are consistently evil throughout most of the important plot points in the game, so I'd say it did a really fine job at that. I only really discovered what a magnificient bastard you could be in the final part of the game several years after release, which is a shame. Or how about the part where you devour the soul of a bear god and then use its pelt to fuse together a mass of evil souls into a new companion? Then potentially let that companion devour other people you stumble across and add their souls to its collective? Great fun. All in all, Mask of the Betrayer was quite good at letting you play not just a villain, but really a character with just about any motivation ranging from pure altruism to complete selfishness. This was because the PC's drive to get rid of or master the spirit-eater curse, at the bare minimum for themselves, made sense for anyone and everyone.
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Even if that's how you feel, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What do the combat mechanics and the lack of exploration have to do with the plot?
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You wouldn't need two paths. Mask of the Betrayer taught us that. All you need is a central goal which is not intrinsically heroic or villainous. The spirit eater curse provided plenty of incentive for either a hero or a villain to find its source, since it was going to eventually devour your soul either way. Finding a way to rid yourself of it was morally neutral. How you reacted to that curse, however, determined whether you were playing as a hero or villain. You could fight your impulses or give them free reign, help those around you or devour everything in your path. I wish the mechanics of that had been handled better, since it was indisputably less frustrating to reign in your hunger rather than dealing with your spirit meter constantly going down, but the principle was sound. Compare and contrast to the original NWN2, where the goal was to stop the King of Shadows. The simple question of why my Chaotic Evil Priest of Bane would give a fuzzy rat's arse about whether the King of Shadows swallowed up the Sword Coast was never quite answered. This was the central quest and you had to follow it if you wanted to keep playing.
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It depends on where the second game takes place. If you do a BG2 and move the story a few thousand miles away, then any differences in the plot between villains and heroes might be fairly handled by the tried and true 'whatever your character says happened in dialogue is what happened' method without the need for too many major changes. Like Revan's gender and alignment being based on your first chat with Atton Rand. I think it would be absolutely awesome if Obsidian made PoE so you could legitimately play a villain, as opposed to a guy who is still saving the world but just being a huge **** about it along the way, and we could follow that path from the first game in this series until the PoE equivalent of Throne of Bhaal.
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Bioware morality choices in a nutshell. I know some people thought they did better with such things in DA:O and the Mass Effect series, but I still noted a recurring theme of 'do good and lose little to nothing or do evil without much benefit just because you're a sadistic ****.'
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If I came across an abomination of nature like Death Godlike backed by five armed to the teeth companions, I would run like hell or hide before they saw me if at all possible. I doubt any important NPCs will do the same in-game.
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You couldn't really play a Drow in BG2. You could play an Elf with Drow skin color, but no one would ever react to it. You could play a Drow in Obsidian's own Neverwinter Nights 2, though. I didn't get very far playing one, but on the whole, from what I saw the impact this had on the game was minimal. A few dialogues were changed, but in order to properly convey the response most Forgotten Realms surface worlders would have to running into a Drow they'd have had to write special dialogue and behavior for just about everyone in the game. Same would go for playing a Duergar or a Tiefling or any other notoriously exotic and/or malevolent race. I applaud them for the dialogue they did change, as it would have been all too easy to simply ignore it. I can't say I'm extremely optimistic about reactions changing dramatically if you play a Death Godlike, but one of the things I like about Obsidian is they've shown on several occasion a love for putting in exactly that kind of reactivity when they have the time. I doubt it will come up in every conversation, but I'm certain it won't be completely ignored like the Dragon Age Blood Mage example you cite.
