Death Machine Miyagi

There's doubt and uncertainty, but of a different variety from our own. There are an abundance of religious beliefs in our world that address the afterlife, promising everything from everlasting bliss for true believers to reincarnation into some higher form or whatever else, but all of those are striking at the same fundamental fear: the cessation of existence. A whole lot of people really don't like the idea of ceasing to exist. They want to believe they will continue to exist in some form or other. The people of PoE don't seem to have that as something to fear. They may not understand the rules surrounding it, whether their actions actually impact anything or not in regards to the way they return, but the existence of souls which continually return to the world seems to be accepted as incontestable fact. Without that conscious or unconscious fear of oblivion, I would imagine attitudes towards death and religious teachings regarding it would differ drastically from our own.

To know it and know it with the same certainty a modern person knows of the existence of gravity. Plenty of people believe in reincarnation in the real world, but it's just that: a belief, subject to the same doubts and skepticism as any other religious belief. For the people of the world of PoE, it appears to be proven fact. For starters, I have to imagine it would change people's perception of death a great deal. A lot of the dread would be removed if you knew you would be coming back before long anyway.

I understand this viewpoint, but for me only real ***holes of the series are Joffrey and Ramsay. They are vile just for fun, while others usually have some reasons behind their deeds, be it greed, self-preservation, old grudges, lust for power, etc. Even Cersei gets some sympathy from me as she just happens to be bad combination of stupidity, pride, jealousy and paranoia, which in a way makes her not responsible for her actions. She's just lost in a game that's bigger than she can handle and aforementioned qualities make her incapable of realizing her true situation. I often feel bad for her even if her misfortunes are mostly her own fault. SPOILERS UP TO STORM OF SWORDS AHOY! And on and on and on. You could make a similar list of atrocities for just about every name I cited, and as of recent Ramsay Snow is making a very impressive effort to surpass all of them. Some of them, like Cersei or Viserys, have freudian excuses of varying validity. Ser Gregor apparently suffers from migraine headaches, which I'm guessing wouldn't hold up well in court as justification for gang raping little girls. Regardless, eventually the relentless atrocities of the worst characters get to be so over the top that it ceases to be horrifying and starts to become darkly comic.

May be it is your opinion of them that what they do is atrocious? Sounds like that to me. Perhaps you have a way of seeing into Martin's mind that I do not possess, but whatever he does works for me. I think this boils down to taste. Advice I can give you is, if you dont like it dont read it. Oy. I actually said I do like it, which is why I do read it. Being annoyed by one or two aspects of a series you otherwise love doesn't mean you throw the whole thing out.

Not as big a market as it might seem at first glance, since a big chunk of China loves its gaming piracy. They may play the game if it has a Chinese translation, but they won't necessarily pay for it. i'd be extremely happy to see PoE in 正體中文. Not sure if the Taiwan market is big enough to justify that, though.

Yeah. I've heard GRRM say that he likes writing 'grey' characters. And certainly SoIaF has quite a number of those, such as Jaime Lannister or Sandor Clegane or Stannis Baratheon. Characters who have their good qualities and their bad qualities, though the latter are often so bad they would automatically classify the character as a straight villain in almost any other series. What he doesn't seem to acknowledge, however, is his very obvious fondness for characters so morally black they make Sauron look like a girl scout. Honestly, it sometimes seems like a good portion of his characters are in a 'biggest ****' competition with one another. Queen Cersei, Joffrey Baratheon, Viserys Targaryen, Roose Bolton, Ramsay Snow, Gregor Clegane, Vargo Hoat, Amory Lorch, Walder Frey and most of his family, pretty much every Bloody Mummer, just about the entire society of Slaver's Bay, probably a number of others I'm forgetting...these are characters who are often so over-the-top in their atrociousness that it strains credibility. I sometimes wonder if GRRM walks around thinking up the most horrible things he can possibly imagine a character doing just so he can have his villains do it and make the reader hate them more. Unlike some others in this thread, I enjoy SoIaF a lot, but I have to say this part of it eventually does get rather tiring. It almost seems a cheap trick when you have to have your villains perpetually being as repulsive as possible to make the audience root for the more sympathetic characters. Dany's character arc, in particular, seems almost designed to make her more barbaric behavior look better in comparison by having her enemies be as completely unsympathetic as possible.

#1? No. Not even the equivalent. There is no cuddling in PoE. #2? Very likely. They've already said characters will leave your group if you do something too objectionable to them. #3? No idea.

In places like the firewine ruins, I would usually just send in a fighter type and a thief, the former to kill those endless hordes of goddamn Kobold Commandos at range and the latter to detect traps. Everyone else just sat at the entrance. It made things much less annoying.

Old paradox released bug-ridden games and then followed them up with free support for months or years on end. You didn't want to buy a Paradox game on the release date, but in a few months you'd (in many cases) have a fantastic strategy game on your hands. There has never, to my knowledge, been a time when Paradox didn't have time for bug testing and polishing. Its just all the bug testing and polishing was done after the release, which understandably put a lot of people off. Still, that strategy also won them loyalty. There are plenty of companies more than happy to release buggy games, make whatever money they can and not give a second thought to the customers afterwards, since fixing the problems is apparently judged more costly than letting them linger. Think Lucasarts and KOTOR 2 or Creative Assembly and some of its more recent Total War titles. In that context, it's a relief knowing you're dealing with a company that won't just take your money and tell you to go screw yourself after. With CK2 and EU4, I agree, they've turned a corner and now release functional, much more user friendly games from day one....then still follow up with years of patches and support, even independent of the DLC.This is a massive improvement and I'm happy for it. I think what you're presenting is a false dichotomy, however. I don't think it's 'nickel and dime our customers for everything they have' vs. 'release buggy, unpolished games.' If anything, just as their continued support for their games wins them good will, I think selling a DLC that contains portraits, music and all the rest for $15 would win them more loyalty than selling the same but chopped up into pieces so you have to pay more, bringing in short term money but irritating their customers. Personally, I'd be happy to buy a complete DLC right out the gate with all the new stuff included in one bundle for a flat $15, if only to support a developer I like. Instead, I'm put off by Paradox's approach and pretty much always just wait for the Steam sale and end up getting everything I want for even less than $15 anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if there were many others like me out there.

I've seen this sentiment before I just really don't get it. What's wrong about selling it in separate pieces? I have more than a few friends that couldn't care less about unit sprites, music, and face packs. Why should they have to pay the extra $5 to $10 dollars just to be able to get the expansion stuff they want? It's not like if they included them all in one pack the price would remain the same. Regardless, that's not how it will work with PoE. When I see a whole crapload of unit packs being sold for $2 a pop, with another $2 for music and $2 for portrait packs and $2 for this and that and everything else, I don't get the sense that Paradox is helpfully separating content so as to limit price for customers who aren't interested in all their content. I get the sense they're deliberately separating content so as to inflate price and force people to pay more than they normally would if they want the complete package. You really think it would destroy their bottom line to add in music to a map pack with a few new events and gameplay mechanics they're currently selling for $15?

I was thinking of playing a human, but the more I think about it, the more appealing a dwarf sounds. Specifically one who defies tired cliches, like a female beardless dwarven mage who speaks with an Italian accent and drinks tea.

I've played way too much Crusader Kings 2 in my time and my history with Paradox games goes back to the original Europa Universalis. I beta tested the original Hearts of Iron and Victoria. Paradox and I get along just fine, on the whole, and I'm quite happy Paradox was chosen to help PoE reach the unwashed masses. With that thought in mind, I would ask Obsidian to avoid doing what Paradox does with their more recent titles. If you've got an expansion, don't chop it up and sell it in separate pieces. Crusader Kings 2 regularly sells the expansion itself, the new character models for the expansion and the music for the expansion separately, alongside a whole crapload of $2 unit packs and such that seem like they're designed to bleed you for as much as they can get. It gives me the disturbing feeling that I'm dealing with microtransactions, which conjures up traumatic memories of my experiences with EA games. Not that I really expect Obsidian has any intention of going that route, but the association with Paradox conjured up the thought. Still waiting on that Steam sale to get Rajas of India. $15...pffft, what do they think I am, made of money?

I agree. They're not. Consumers expect a high quality, fully polished product already, so such stretch goals only invite PR headaches. When a dev says: "give us another $300,000 and we'll make everything more polished", the first thing that pops into my head at least is.... well what happens if we don't give you another $300,000? Are you going to give us a half-assed, less polished product? Fair enough, but the first thing that pops into my head as a consumer when I hear '15 dungeon levels!' or 'two huge cities!' is "Wow, those things sounds spectacular in theory, but I wonder how much quality is going to suffer for the sake of all that quantity." Quantity is easier to sell to people because you can tell people exactly what they're getting in the abstract, even if in the reality it ends up being pretty damned underwhelming. It brings in the money, but I don't find it wise to get very excited about it because we've yet to see what '15 dungeon levels' or 'two huge cities' will actually look like and play like. Winning people over by promising them quality is trickier, as providing specifics is much harder. The Torment example you cite shows that. How are they supposed to give specifics about 'reactivity'? Yet I would be much more content knowing that the designers aren't rushing and blowing lots of time and money to meet the letter of all this cool stuff they promised, but instead using their time and money to make it actively awesome and memorable rather than merely functional but technically meeting what they said they would do.

I got that with the dungeon... 15 still sounds a bit too much to make a proper balance/feel/storyline... Exactly. Making 15 levels of dungeon that maintain a high quality from beginning to end is really, really hard. I'll take 5 levels of superb quality with lots of interesting story and well-designed traps and monsters over 15 levels of generic dungeon crawling. I may be in a minority, but after a certain point I would have been much, much happier with stretch goals saying things like 'at this level, we'll have enough money to polish all the elements we've already added to a mirror shine, making all the stuff we've already promised work that much better.' Not adding more and more and more features, but promising that the features they've got lined up already will be that much more awesome, play-tested and balanced. Stretch goals like that aren't outwardly impressive enough to get people to open up their wallets, I suppose.

Best of all possible worlds is a game with a simple and easily approachable design which nevertheless supports a massive variety of strategies and styles of play, and all while still providing a serious challenge. Not holding my breath for P:E to provide all of that in one package, especially since setting all of that up in an RPG is a whole different ballgame than setting it up in a board game, but kudos if they manage it. If they have to sacrifice something, though...I think I've had enough 'streamlining' in my CRPGs for one lifetime. If 'easy to learn' ends up translating as 'homogenized', such that every playthrough feels about the same regardless of class or race or weapon selection or whatever else, I'll take daunting complexity any day over that.

In addition, VO instantly crosses the line from 'good' to 'bad' when it starts to limit other content. If you have the option to make lots of interesting quests with an abundance of unique ways to solve them, and instead cut a bunch of those quests and give only one or two solutions to the ones that remain so you can afford VO for every piece of dialogue, your priorities suck. But yeah, BG2 without David Warner's voicing Irenicus would have been a much weaker game. Strategic use of VO can improve a game tremendously.

Think that was Grobnar. I associate the term 'Grognard' with the kind of wargamer who prefers computer games that look like this:

I like that they aren't pussyfooting around and pretending the game is something it isn't to get the maximum number of buyers. "Don't like reading anything longer than a twitter post? Then go buy another game." I support this message. EDIT: Not important, but I always thought Grognard was very specifically a term used to describe old school wargamers. Never heard it used to describe old school RPGers.

Probably human.

I had to double-check to make sure it wasn't April Fools Day. But whatever. Obsidian has to pay the bills, I suppose.

No, I agree there isn't much point in arguing this further. I can argue with Jarrakul's criticisms because I see where he's coming from. I can't argue here because it feels like you played an entirely different mod.

I thought this conversation was sounding a bit familiar. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60787-project-eternitys-longevity-will-be-determined-by-its-modability/ In that thread, you made a list of components that were a part of SCS you considered 'game breaking', all of which could be skipped. You ignored components of the mod (the majority of components) that didn't support your case. When called on this by myself and others, you didn't respond directly except to later post another dismissive post about BG mods. If you don't like mods, that's fine. To each his/her own. But at least don't pretend like you gave the thing a fair hearing only to overlook the vastly improved AI, intelligent spell usage, enemies calling for reinforcements, broken items being moved or removed and so on because allowing Yeslick to use axes 'breaks the game.'

AD&D 2nd edition was the first edition I was old enough to know about. Looking back, it was pretty awful in a lot of ways that I didn't fully appreciate then because I had so little to compare it to. The world is better off for having moved on from it.

Comments like this and the one about the final battle in Throne of Bhaal being too difficult are making me feel Hardcore™. But then again, I haven't played BG Enhanced Edition, so perhaps its a lot harder than vanilla BG. Or, probably more likely, you're just struggling with an unfamiliar ruleset, as you say. A hopefully helpful suggestion for the future: in BG1, missile weapons are God. Everyone in the party should have one, with plenty of ammo in your backpack. Hit and run is much more efficient than getting into a knock-down-drag-out fight in which the enemy actually gets the opportunity to hit you back.

Every component you listed can be skipped by pressing the 'N' button when it asks if you would like to install it. They're also an extremely tiny proportion of what the mod does.