PrimeJunta

@BruceVC Nono, this thread is here to demonstrate how much the Obs fanbase hates romance so we can make sure they won't include it in PoE2. Perhaps we can resolve this with a dance-off. vs

All of the IE games except PS:T pretty much required hot-swapping weapons. Good luck fighting golems or some of the tougher IWD skeletons with swords or spears, for example.

Sorry, Hormalakh, but that sounds kinda dumb. "I want to play at higher difficulties but can't be arsed to figure out how to play the game most efficiently." If a game is balanced to be hard, then to beat it at higher difficulties you should be expected to do some work figuring out how to win. If you don't want to do that work and just want to enjoy the ride, then play at the lower difficulties, that's what they're there for. FWIW I won't start out at hard difficulties. I'll start out at Normal, and will only crank it up for replays, when I know how the damn thing works. Manuals are good though. Also, as far as I can tell the thing seems pretty commonsense -- a rapier won't work against heavy armor but an estoc will, but an estoc will be kinda bad against a nimble, lightly-armored enemy. The other adjustments seem eminently sensible as well -- a single one-handed weapon is more accurate, a shield makes you harder to hit but slower, some weapons are good all-rounders whereas others are designed for specific purposes. I don't think you'll need to do a lot of arithmetic to be able to play reasonably efficiently.

@BruceVC and others -- IMO you're discussing the wrong question. "Should romance be a part of cRPG's" is too general. "Which cRPG's should feature romance" is a better question. IMHO romance does not fit most cRPG's. It did not detract horribly from BG2 or NWN2 OC because it had so little impact; it was just a half-dozen glued-on dialogs per character scattered through the game, which you could easily ignore. OTOH it has made a huge mess of every BioWare game post Jade Empire. Take Mass Effect for example. Because they had to put in scads of romance, they turned the Normandy into a high school summer camp. I've recently been playing ME2 (finally) and it's actually impossible to play Shepard in the most obvious, natural, logical way -- a tough-as-nails warship captain requiring discipline and military etiquette, as in, crew snapping to attention when s/he enters the room, addressing him/her as "sir" or "Commander," and not taking every opportunity to share details about their sex lives/species-specific mating rituals, plus awkwardly-written flirts. (Never even mind overt disrespect. I should've had the option to throw Miranda in the brig for the remainder of the mission--or, hell, space her--over the way she talks back.) That's a direct consequence of romance-centric party interaction writing. The disciplined military atmosphere would not have been conducive to romance, so they didn't write in that atmosphere, even though the damn thing takes place in a war, or a warship, with everybody in uniform. The only role-playing options that writing added were options to romance different crew members. If you're not interested in romancing any of them, you're left in the cold. I would not object to a cRPG where romance was written in from the ground up, i.e. where it was a fundamental plot driver and motivation. PS:T was arguably just this and it was brilliant. I do object--strongly--to shoehorning romance into games where the fundamental plot drivers are something completely different--a curse, defeating the ancient evil that has risen again, finding the McGuffin, destroying the McGuffin or whatever. The Lord of the Rings would not have been improved if Sam and Frodo had declared their undying love for each other while crawling up Mount Doom.

Man, Obsidian just can't win. Change something from the D&D formula, like add firearms, howls. Make something obviously derivative from the D&D formula, like klonebolds or spiderflayers, howls. Although it's probably not the same people howling.

But all those stories were entirely linear, and had no impact whatsoever on the world at large. You could do all of them, become master of all guilds, complete all quests for all factions, and none of it affected anything in the least bit. That made the whole thing feel hollow and pointless. If none of it makes any difference and there's nothing to discover but another dungeon that looked just like every other dungeon, and more monsters and bandits just like the other monsters and bandits you've fought, why bother?

@namelessthree in #165 -- I strongly dislike empty choices in cRPG's, like the dialog lines that sound different but end up in the same place. This is one reason games like Oblivion or Skyrim leave me completely cold. The only way anything in them means anything is through make-believe, yet it's still so constrained that there's no room for genuine creativity. I enjoy make-believe role-playing tremendously if other people are involved, which is why I play tabletop RPG's. I find it pointless in a computer game, and beyond pointless in a single-player computer game. It's also lazy design; giving the appearance of breadth and depth when in reality there isn't any. This is why I like the sound of P:E's reputation mechanics a lot. While the immediate consequence of your hypothetical dialog would still be the same, the line you chose would feed into your personal reputation, and that personal reputation would have an impact down the line. That suddenly makes the exercise worthwhile again.

If they want meaningful feedback on stuff like talents, a certain amount of character advancement has to be in. You could do that with an "arena" type demo, or you could have a section with optional quests and accelerated XP awards. (I'm looking forward to the commentary but won't play the beta. I prefer to go straight to the real deal.)

@Prince of Wales, that's usually known as "rape," not "getting laid." I mean, I had heard that some people have difficulties making the distinction, but still...

They already said elsewhere that they want to encourage players to post Let's Plays etc., so that would imply "no." Keeping track of so many NDA's would be a major PITA too.

Why not?

Or, rather, did not get shafted. :ducks:

Corrected link.

I wouldn't mind if Obs hangs a big NO KISSING sign on their front door. The promancers have Bioware. Surely antimancers deserve a champion as well?

I won't play co-op/MP because there's nobody I want to play with. I will probably give D:OS a spin at some point though, but going by what I've heard it doesn't really seem to be my cuppa.

I must be turning into an old fart because I have no desire whatsoever to express my sexuality in a freakin' computer game. I'd rather express my homicidal and larcenous tendencies.

Gotta say I liked George Ziets's ideas for a BG3. [ http://new.spring.me/#!/GZiets/q/414930203056307948 ]

@namelessthree It's generally considered good form to lurk a bit and generally familiarize yourself with the environment before jumping in. Otherwise you might inadvertently step in some doo-doo, which is kind of what happened here. I for one appreciate your intentions and the generally good grace with which you've handled this thread, but srsly -- you wouldn't have had to do much homework to notice that this is if not exactly a minefield, at least a field recently inhabited by a large number of ruminants with poor digestion. For example, type "romance" into the search field at top right, and then notice the large number of locked threads about it. Bit of a giveaway that, really.

You're right, they can and they do. However, the extra stretchgoal poll was not quite the same thing, as it wasn't about a design decision but about funding. To my knowledge they haven't polled about design decisions, even if they have floated a number of trial balloons. Look at T:ToN. They did call a poll about combat style. The upshot was that (1) when they made the poll, they already had a clear design preference, which they stated, (2) the poll was nearly evenly split, and (3) it caused a lot—like, really, a LOT—of bad blood among the backers. Many RTwP partisans felt that inXile was unfairly skewing the polling by indicating where they stood, and when the poll was nearly evenly split, a lot of them were really, really upset. The poll was a mistake.

@bonarbill I thought the poll was a bad idea. The question ought to have been settled through playtesting if the designers couldn't make up their mind about it. Trial balloons are not the same thing as design by poll though. If a designer wants to find out what the general feeling is about a particular idea, there's nothing wrong with floating it and seeing how it goes down, or up, depending. Polls are bad though because they create the expectation that the result determines the design, and a secondary expectation that other similar ideas are also decided by poll.

Design by committee is a terrible idea. Design by poll is worse.

Sorry, dude, but your original post was too about romances (plural), not roleplaying options in general. You did assert that no romance = no roleplaying options, but that's an obvious non sequitur. If you had been concerned about roleplaying options, then you would have written a completely different post. Romance might have been mentioned in there somewhere, but it would not have been the main theme. Like this, for example: "Hi folks. One thing's been bugging me about P:E from the start. It's all been very mechanically oriented, and most of the stretch goals were stuff like a megadungeon, a stronghold, and more character classes. I really enjoyed the relationships I built with my party members in PS:T and BG2, and I'm concerned Obsidian might be neglecting this aspect to make a more IWD-like dungeon crawler thing. What are your thoughts on that?" Had you done that, I'm pretty sure you would've gotten a warmer reception here, and the discussion would've been better too. 'Cuz the romance thing with P:E is the to end all 's.

I'd prefer the Mac version as well, although booting my iMac into Windows is no huge chore. The funny thing is that the Mac versions/ports tend to actually work better than the Windows ones, when present. Shadowrun Returns runs more smoothly, the GoG port of IWD2 is way better than running it on Windows, and so on.

Here's another crude example of "different but equal." Suppose fighters are great at killing living enemies but suck at destroying undead, and priests are great at destroying undead but suck at killing living enemies, and a game has roughly equal numbers of both, but with some encounters only living enemies, others only undead, and some mixed. Personally I like it this way, and going by what we've heard, it sounds a lot like how P:E is intended to play. If you have barbs as the front line, you'll breeze through encounters consisting of a large number of average-strength enemies but will have a much harder time facing a few tough ones; if you have fighters in the front line, vice versa. If you have a mix, you'll see a more constant level of difficulty. Having some classes be objectively weaker than others annoys me, because why would I want to play an objectively weaker class? If I want a higher difficulty, then I'll just crank it up in the settings. If that's not enough, I'll go in with a smaller party. If even that's not enough, I'll solo. I have a hunch that P:E is going to be tough enough that very, very few of us will manage to solo it at Trial of Iron and Path of the Damned. Personally I do not see the attraction of playing with an intentionally gimped build. It sounds like an unnecessarily convoluted way to raise difficulty when there are settings in place to do explicitly that.

Frankly, I think that from Obsidian's POV the so-called public beta is marketing only; something they're doing because that's increasingly become the expectation with this type of thing. They've got their internal QA, they've got the publisher's QA, and they've been doing this for a very long time. It's too late in the process for the public beta to provide much meaningful feedback that could make it into the game, and since it's only a small off-critical-path portion of the game, it's unlikely to catch a large number of bugs either, most of which will only manifest in particular places in the game. This is qualitatively different from how inXile did it; they really did throw WL2 out there early enough that player feedback could make a material difference. Which was a brave thing to do, because by definition the game was not in great shape at the time and it showed in the feedback.