Death Machine Miyagi

Sounds great, especially if said challenge feels fair to the game and not like the game is just cheating all to hell to beat you. Also, on the subject of cowardice, I'm really hoping P:E will have no fights like the first fight against Malak in KOTOR: that is, a fight where you spend the whole thing beating the living crap out of your opponent only for the game to inform you that 'he's too much for you' and you have to run away (i.e. the plotline demands that you can't win, so you 'lose' no matter how easily you were winning). Nothing feels cheaper than that.

'Coward' may be the wrong term here, since coward doesn't imply a careful tactical approach towards an overwhelming enemy so much as running away shrieking like a little girl. There needs to be more chances in games like this for your main character to wet himself and run away begging and pleading for his life from any given fight. Maybe evade a powerful enemy by having him leave you alone out of contempt for your complete lack of dignity.

I don't see what is wrong in a high fantasy to have bikini plate mail wearers. You see everyone already is supernaturally strong. Why would a sexy strong free woman NOT wear one When she knows she can best orcs bands in combat and put anyone down that talks smack. It's subjective I suppose but if you want my opinion on it, it's because it looks incredibly silly. It isn't even really subjective. Plate mail exists to protect the body from incoming attacks. Leaving large open holes in plate mail so you can show off some skin is incredibly stupid, even in high fantasy. You might as well not even bother wearing armor at all. Well there's always the "magic" argument. Which has it's problems too. This argument requires a couple things. A) A creator who feels it vitally important that his suit of magic armor for women affords both complete protection for the wearer and the ability to show off her **** on the battlefield. Not saying the will isn't there, of course; just because a male wizard has a high intelligence score doesn't necessarily mean he's always thinking with his brain. But in practical terms, such an enchantment seems more like something out of a bad parody of high fantasy than anything else. And of course a female wizard might make such a thing, as well. But, setting aside the possibility she's a lesbian, that seems less likely. B) A female wearer who does not object to marching onto a battlefield looking like a stripper. Not saying such wouldn't exist somewhere, but I would suspect your average female warrior in a quasi-medieval world would have a hard enough time being taken seriously without taking such an approach. No, I'm pretty sure bikini plate mail is a primarily male fantasy. Really, is there any such explanation that would not be a paper thin excuse to keep the female characters barely clothed? I can't think of one. Certainly 'A Wizard Did It' wouldn't help much.

Any game of this sort requires a dialogue tree, with about three options. For example, if an NPC asks, 'Are you hungry?', you would be given a choice of how to respond, such as: 1. Yes, I'm hungry, thank you! 2. Yes, I'm hungry. 3. Yes, I'm hungry. Also, you're stupid and ugly. Each of those responses would result in the exact same outcome and likely even the exact same NPC response. But hey, your agreement that you are indeed hungry has been phrased in a way which is slightly different! Choices!

If P:E was aimed at the lowest common denominator, it would be a Bioware-style 'action-RPG'...which is to say, not really an RPG at all so much as a third-person shooter in which you're asked every once in awhile to either save a kitten from a tree or set the tree and the kitten on fire. And the kitten would be a romance option.

I don't see what is wrong in a high fantasy to have bikini plate mail wearers. You see everyone already is supernaturally strong. Why would a sexy strong free woman NOT wear one When she knows she can best orcs bands in combat and put anyone down that talks smack. It's subjective I suppose but if you want my opinion on it, it's because it looks incredibly silly. It isn't even really subjective. Plate mail exists to protect the body from incoming attacks. Leaving large open holes in plate mail so you can show off some skin is incredibly stupid, even in high fantasy. You might as well not even bother wearing armor at all.

The specifics are less important to me than who is making it and under what circumstances. The people making it have turned out a lot of great stories, settings and characters in their RPGs. The circumstances are that they are now beholden to no one...not LucasArts, not Bethesda, not anyone...except for the people who pledged their money. I'm just excited to see what this group can do with that.

I kind of like this idea but for the fact that it sounds like a lot of railroading. What if my character doesn't want to have kids? What if my character has no love interest, or my character is gay, or my character is a psychopath who would sooner butcher and devour a potential mate rather than produce offspring with him/her? What if my character just prefers the life of the wanderer over the ol' ball and chain, finding the idea of settling down with husband/wife and a gaggle of brats absolutely nauseating? Basically, the sequel would all hinge on your character being the family type. Not that games like BG2 didn't railroad you to the point of absurdity, but in general I think that's something to avoid if you can.

Even without the extreme power differences D&D entails...even in the context of a setting where such power differences don't exist, where the rough equivalent of a 30th level character is still vulnerable to a random guy with a sword or a gun....having a character who has survived all the challenges you would have faced by that point would still make him a legend and still make fear the appropriate response when he shows up gunning for you. I don't find anything juvenile in recognizing that, nor anything wrong with finding satisfaction in just how feared and dangerous people recognize you to be. To remove the absurd power differences, you may not be Cthulhu, but you're at least Jesse James. Some acknowledgement of that only makes sense.

I'm in favor of killable children, as my posts in this thread have indicated, but I can see the viewpoint of people who oppose it. Even though I am, in principle, strongly opposed to treating any such topic with kid gloves, there are things that could be put in even a 'mature' game which to me would be a step beyond good taste. I just genuinely have a difficult time seeing child killing as one of those things. The worst things you can put in a game aren't the worst things you could do in real life; for example, something like genocide is probably the most horrible thing you could do in real life, but I wouldn't bat an eyelash if a game offered me the chance to completely annihilate....say, all the Orlans in Dyrwood or whatever. The worst (or perhaps just most uncomfortable) things you can put in a game are the things that somehow legitimize extremely horrible behavior a significant portion of the customers might actually do at some point in their lives. It doesn't matter how many toddlers you kill in a game, no one but a complete psychopath is going to kill kids in real life, and if they do kill kids they have problems a good deal deeper than anything the game put them up to. As such, to be honest, most of my experiences with child killing of games past have felt like very black comedy more than anything. When that mouthy kid in Hong Kong in Deus Ex told me that he knows the Dragonhead and could have me killed if I kept talking to him, I did not feel bad when I launched a white phosphorus rocket at him and he ran around the screen on fire before collapsing as a blackened husk. No, indeed. I laughed, loudly and heartily. Same when those kids pickpocketed me in the Den in Fallout 2 and I reverse pickpocketed high explosives set on a countdown into their inventory. I don't consider myself psychotic. I never did such things in 'serious' runs. I certainly wouldn't laugh watching real kids burn to death or explode. But the way it usually ends up in games, it's so over the top that it goes from horrifying to blackly hilarious. Since the kiddies in P:E aren't likely to be photorealistic, I'm guessing it would be the same here.

There is a place for that, but I don't think it's in a serious, story and atmosphere centered RPG. Ego-boosting and virutal peenus waving does not belong there IMHO. In a hack-and-slash like Diablo? Why not? Framed like that, you make it sound so juvenile. I think it's just an enjoyable reminder of how far you've come since Candlekeep. For those who started playing Baldur's Gate at its release, and finished ToB after its release years later, it was a nod to the fact that you're no longer a struggling adventurer but the next best thing to Elminster, one of the most powerful individuals in the setting. For the record, the opposite is just as absurd and feels weird. Mask of the Betrayer featured an entire party of some of the most powerful people in the Forgotten Realms. One of them was just some random hagspawn locked in the jail, with no explanation for why he was so powerful. Another was a Red Wizard of Thay, not apparently of very much importance in the hierarchy of that organization. No one had ever heard of you. This made some sense, considering you were far away from where you did most of your levelling, but to be one of the most obviously absurdly powerful people in Faerun and remain anonymous for long seems a stretch. Certainly after you take down an entire army of spirits and defeat a bear god there should have been notice taken. But no. Random people would get in lethal bar fights with you...and hold their own against your epic level party. Gnoll guards and Red Wizards apprentices appeared who could single-handedly wipe the floor with entire parties of regular-level adventurers; they were neither afraid of your borderline-Elminster level character nor were they aware who you were, no matter your deeds. In short, most of the game played out as if consciously trying to forget that you're no longer an average joe adventurer, but rather the next best thing to a demi-god. Rather than acknowledge the fact of your power and leave regular enemies appropriately terrified of facing you, it just buffed the regular enemies until they were epic level, too. That's not only unsatisfying, it makes no sense.

A couple random thoughts. I have more, but these'll do for now. 1) As has been mentioned, it's possible to have very high levels, and be extremely powerful, while still being vulnerable. My level 50 character in Fallout: New Vegas could make mincemeat of Deathclaws at range, but if I pissed off an entire nest of them, so many that I couldn't shoot fast enough before they closed the distance? All it took was a swipe or two and I was dead. And even very weak enemies were dangerous if they had access to high explosives. A PC should never become so laughably overpowered that combat with lesser enemies involves those enemies trying desperately just to hit you, let alone damage you, while you could leave the room to go have a drink or read War and Peace only to come back and find them still ineffectually swinging at your unmoving PC. I agree with this. Still, I think its fair to say that well before lvl 50 F:NV was a cakewalk, which was disappointing. 2) While overall I think most people agree lower level stories are easier to make interesting, there is a rare pleasure to be found only in 'epic' levels: namely, the occasional reminder that you're no longer the plucky underdog setting out to change the world with a cheap long sword and a suit of crappy scale mail. You are Cthulhu. You are pain and death incarnate, a living legend that should set any sane villain who isn't similarly godlike to wetting himself the moment you arrive. ToB had a sequence where you invade the underground layer of a Drow elf Bhaalspawn. Every once in awhile it would cut to a scene showing said Bhaalspawn and her minions absolutely losing their s*** at the realization that they're under assault by Gorion's ward, and desperately trying to think up some way to stop you while their panic grows and grows. After an entire series of having every two-bit villain smugly treat you like they were going to crush you effortlessly, it was deeply satisfying to realize just how scary my charname had become to those who stood in his way by the time of the last expansion pack. This can be overdone, of course, but the occasional moment of realization of just how powerful you really are and how far you've come since the series started can be really fun. If we ever get to that, I hope there are a few moments of that sort.

Yep, but that's precisely the best time to talk about them. By this point, I'm guessing a very large proportion of the main game is set in stone and nothing we discuss about it could possibly change it. But talking about stuff that we won't be seeing for quite a while allows for the possibility of someone putting forward a really cool idea, and some developer at Obsidian seeing it and saying 'Hey, that's a really cool idea', and then BAM, the P:E sequel/expansion of the distant future is improved. At least its possible in theory.

Melisan, the Five and Draconis... i quess They were all men. In green robes. How do you know that, since they wore robes and all that? Only two of them spoke... They all had the same face of a white guy and were human-sized. There is precisely one human-sized white guy in the Five. And none of their voices matched any of the Five. And they were discussing 'the Bhaalspawn' as if the entire room wasn't already filled with Bhaalspawn. I dunno. I just find it a huge stretch to match those guys up with the enemies we face in ToB. If that's who they were intended to be, then it seems obvious the robed guys were the equivalent of a placeholder until Bioware figured out exactly who they wanted your opponents to be in ToB, which is still very sloppy.

Melisan, the Five and Draconis... i quess They were all men. In green robes. The official answer is, I think, Bioware just forgot about them. If there's one thing worse than non-existent foreshadowing for important events, it's foreshadowing that foreshadows something the writer forgets about in favor of something he/she pulls out of his/her ass. But, of course, the bar for decent writing in video games has been set so low for so long that people just kinda accept these things.

Nope. Look at real life. Or pretty much any novel not licensed from a leveled rpg. A soldier, veteran of 20 years, can still meet a lot of challenges. That's because real life isn't an RPG. In playing an RPG, above all a fantasy RPG, most people expect their character to be a great deal more powerful at the end than the character was at the start. Whether this is quantified with 'levels' is optional, but the steady increase in power as you gain XP or whatever else will almost certainly be there.

I actually completely forgot about Hordes of the Underdark. That was a great game, too.

Not having levels at all would certainly help. Not really, unless you turn the RPG into not-an-RPG and remove all the cool abilities and equipment that come as you make progress through the game. Sooner or later, whether such progress is officially represented by levels or not, the characters are going to start becoming so powerful that challenging them will become difficult.

Assuming we eventually get an expansion pack or the like which is the equivalent of Throne of Bhaal or Mask of the Betrayer, an expansion which takes our party to the realms of near-godlike power. Throne of Bhaal screwed up both in terms of story and in terms of gameplay. Their solution to providing a challenge to epic characters was to make every two-bit mook you run into also borderline epic level, and armed with an absurd amount of extremely powerful magical equipment. Either that or to throw wildly implausible enemies at you, such as a fellow Bhaalspawn who was an adult dragon with an adult son (jesus, just how long ago did Bhaal start planning this thing anyway?) Likewise, in terms of plot, everything felt thrown together at the last minute. Despite knowing that their entire Bhaalspawn premise entailed a final resolution of that overarching plotline, the developers lurched into ToB like they had completely forgotten that particular story would have to have an ending. So they threw some random epic-level enemies at you from out of nowhere, gave you an extremely feeble plot twist, and ended it about as predictably as could be imagined. Meanwhile, Mask of the Betrayer does a fantastic job, overall, on the plotline...in fact, a much better job in that department than the game it was 'expanding.' A full-scale attack on the Wall of the Faithless, a struggle of (well, in theory) downright cosmic importance, felt like exactly the kind of thing epic characters should be doing. Unfortunately, however, they too featured absurdities like epic level gnolls guarding an academy or epic level Red Wizard 'students.' And, of course, you're so powerful at that point that most fights can be quickly resolved with 'hose the area down with epic level area-effect spells and watch everything die.' But that opens up the question: what should they have done? Realistically, what exists to provide a challenge to an entire party of level 20+ characters that doesn't come across as more than a little forced? What kind of storyline is appropriate to characters who are so absurdly powerful? Or should P:E even follow in the D&D's footsteps that far, allowing you to become so powerful by the time you reach the extreme upper levels?

ToB provides a number of guidelines of what not to do. 1. Don't make your 'hidden' villain so blatantly obvious the player guesses it the second they see her. We don't know this woman, we've never heard of her or seen her, and yet the developers expect us to accept on faith that she's a 'guardian of Bhaalspawn' who is out to protect us? And really, whose genius idea was it to start the whole expansion pack with a big stone head basically telling you straight out 'someone is going to pretend to be an ally but actually be an enemy', then follow it up with Gromnir (the NPC, not the poster) telling you flat-out what the villain's real plan is? 2. If you are going to make your 'hidden' villain blatantly obvious, don't railroad us into believing her and being suckered by her plan because your expansion pack's plotline doesn't work otherwise. 3. High-level play should not mean 'facing an entire army whose regular foot soldiers are equipped with +3 weapons and armor', though I understand that its tricky making an interesting game for a party composed of characters who are above level 25+. Obsidian actually fell into this trap, too, in Mask of the Betrayer with its epic-level gnolls guarding a Thayan academy and absurd crap like that. 4. Foreshadowing. Jesus, but they dropped the ball on this one; they desperately needed to provide some foreshadowing. You never hear once of 'the Five' or 'Mellissan' during the entirety of the series beforehand, or even of any other Bhaalspawn (except the teleporting guy and Imoen), until suddenly you're dropped into whole armies these people have assembled out of nowhere. Is it really too much to ask of game developers to sit down and really think about how they're going to end a series with an overarching plotline, rather than just making something up at the last minute? And so on. There's more, but some of it has already been mentioned above. I'll give ToB this, though; it has an awesome soundtrack, the most epic music in the series.

Decent voice acting adds to the immersion, unquestionably. Unfortunately it also adds to expense and linearity. I'd rather have an RPG in which there are a whole variety of ways to solve quests, and a whole variety of major changes to gameplay depending on your actions and decisions, than an RPG which blows a big chunk of its budget on making sure every NPC voices their dialogue. That's exactly one of the things that has led to Bioware's decline in recent years, since they care more about making sure the player never has to read anything than they do about making the player's choices actually affect anything. I wouldn't even be bothered if they axed voice acting entirely...but probably the best middle ground here is precisely the Infinity Engine approach of strategic use of voice acting rather than every piece of dialogue being voiced.

It's worth going to the Fort when Caesar offers amnesty no matter what faction you support, IMHO. Especially as a female courier. The guy who runs the arena won't let a female courier fight there. Tells you to "know your place, woman." The female slave I mentioned earlier also tells you she overheard some of the legionnaires talking about "trying you out", very clearly not in the context of a fight. There's hardly a killing spree in gaming that is more satisfying and ironic than what follows a female courier paying a visit to Caesar's Fort.

On the same subject, I've rarely had a game of Fallout: New Vegas where I made it to Caesar's fort and could restrain myself from murdering every legionnaire in sight. Seeing slaves and soldiers dying slowly from crucifixion, slave women forced to carry huge loads on their backs, meeting a slave who outright tells you that sexual assault is pretty much a given for any female slave who isn't too old or too young (and sometimes that's no protection, either), and the cherry on the top of the entire moral revulsion sundae is Melody, a little enslaved girl who asks you to get her teddy bear back and who can expect a future, if not a present reality, of constant rape and physical abuse for the rest of her life. You can rip her teddy bear to pieces in front of her eyes, incidentally. You can subject her to such severe emotional abuse for the sake of a minor bump in Legion fame or just for sheer sadistic giggles, then go on to help the Legion rape and murder their way across the Mojave, creating countless more slaves just like her, doomed to a life of suffering and fear. But you can't directly kill her or anything. I mean, that would be psychopathic.

It's not just that invulnerable kids are obnoxious. It's that I find the whole dispute nonsensical. It's like demanding that dogs be removed or hidden in places where they can't be hurt because puppies are so cute and innocent. Or demanding that references to genocide or rape or slavery be removed out of respect for the victims of these crimes. That's all fine if we're dealing with a kid's game, but this game is explicitly for grown ups, people who (I would hope) could deal with seeing an animated kid die on screen. I mean, it's not like we're talking about a kid's torture porn simulation here, or a long and involved quest that demands you leave a trail of butchered toddlers in your wake. You hit them with a big sword and they fall down, like anything and everything else.

There is no such thing. The most controversial games are often huge hits. And remember, while often games feature rasism/sexism/whatever, the only ones who seems to care are idiot bloggers with no evidence it affects sales. The most controversial game of the last years was ironicaly Mass Effect 3 with it's idiotic ending, and not because of some sosial issue. For better or worse, evidence shows that gamers in general don't care about these things as kotaku would have you believe. Right. I'm finding the implicit assumption in this thread that the gaming landscape has changed dramatically since the late 1990s, in regards to child killing, a bit unconvincing. Is there a single shred of proof for this, beyond people's gut feelings? If anything, games seem more violent and provocative than ever, and games often seem to almost court controversy. Not that I expect a non-AAA title like P:E would ever garner the attention of something like Call of Duty allowing you to massacre an entire airport full of civilians.