PrimeJunta
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Everything posted by PrimeJunta
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The boss fight is a computer game trope that should be buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart and garlic in its mouth. They're contrived, artificial, and tedious. And they're not at all the same thing as a tough encounter that flows naturally from the narrative. King of Shadows = boss fight. Akashi = boss fight. Baron Firkraag = tough encounter that flows naturally from the narrative. Yuan-ti temple in SoZ = tough encounter that flows naturally from the narrative.
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More like "can't be done." PnP is not the same as cRPG. However, mechanically a support class can be extremely rewarding in a cRPG as well. You're the leader -- the one who makes the decisions, gets the attention, and perhaps smooth-talks stuff through... and you're way too important to get your hands dirty beating people up. Instead, you inspire and empower your friends allies servants slaves while intimidating cowing terrorizing your enemies.
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:me raises hand: I'm pretty sure Sancho had more fun than Don Quixote. I've made "support" builds in various cRPG's and had fun with them, e.g. that skillmaster in SoZ I've mentioned several times. I also ran a PnP campaign where one of the players was a noble and high official and everyone else were his retainers or slaves. That worked out really well; the players really jumped into the roles, with the staff doing all kinds of underhanded stuff behind the boss's back, manipulating him, pulling him out of scrapes, and so on and so forth. I.e. I'm very much in favor of the support role for priests. If you want to play a more warlike godlike type, just pick a paladin. Also the D&D3 cleric broke the game. I played them too, a lot, simply because they were so awesomely powerful and versatile -- in fact, the D&D cleric is the closest D&D gets to a classless class as you can build a huge range of perfectly workable and diverse builds with it. Why is this bad? It's bad because it means that every time I built a cleric -- again -- it meant that I didn't build something else. All the effort that went into those other classes was wasted on me. Therefore, it is my strong preference that classes are (1) roughly equal in value, and (2) clearly differentiated. This way I'll get enjoyable gameplay from all of them, not just by finding out which one is best and then sticking with that. Having a clearly overpowered class like a D&D3 cleric is just as bad as having a clearly underpowered one.
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The problem with NWN1's writing was not quantity.
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Well somebody here is special, that's for sure.
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:me raises hand: I also take his posts seriously, and I don't think he's trolling. Which doesn't mean I agree with him. He is a little excitable and gets somewhat personal when upset, but if that makes him a troll then I think you'll find a quite a few in this very thread.
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Am I the only one here who really doesn't give a damn about community engagement?
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To go off on a tangent... well, a little. I minmax, like, a lot, in RPG's. It makes it difficult for me to get into them actually because as soon as I realize I've made a mistake, I have to start over, and I make a lot of mistakes, so by the time I manage to come up with a build I really like, I'm already bored. This is worse if the game mechanics are in conflict with the game story or content. The famous 'ludo-narrative dissonance.' I just started a replay of KOTOR 2 with the restored content mod (hadn't played it with the mod before), and it's hitting me big-time. The mechanics give extremely strong incentives to light-side or dark-side from the get-go, but the narrative is all about challenging the whole light/dark split and perhaps even the Force itself. I.e., I'm torn between wanting to explore the story -- role-playing -- and wanting to beat the game mechanically. This dissonance is significantly reducing my enjoyment. I would have found it much more enjoyable if a "gray" alignment would not have been unambiguously less powerful than a light-side or dark-side one, but would instead have had different but unique advantages of its own. Ultimately my solution was to roll up a bruiser Guardian with low WIS and CHA who doesn't even use Force powers much at all. With him, I can gray away as much as I like, and STR and CON 18 (D-packages FTW!) gives enough advantages in combat that that's fun too. I'm finding that much more enjoyable, and am actually playing in-character, which is very nice. It's just a shame I had to more or less ditch the distinguishing core mechanic of the game to get there. A 'gray' Consular would be seriously gimped! I'm fairly certain that Obs would have designed the mechanics differently had they had that option, but they had to work within the franchise. I love the writing in KOTOR2, but perhaps it would have been a better game had they not written against the grain of the mechanics, if changing the mechanics was not possible. P:E doesn't have this problem obviously, which is one more reason to look forward to it.
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Gfted1, question. Are you being intentionally obtuse or just genuinely blockheaded? People have explained to you numerous times what degenerate tactics mean, yet even now, after all this time, you can't even get the word right, let alone the concept. What gives?
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Getting pretty speculative, but... I would expect that it'd be easier to build characters that don't have glaring weak spots in P:E than in the D&D based games. A fighter's Will is extremely weak, for example, and it's quite hard to get around this limitation -- even impossible, depending on what magic items are available. This kind of thing can make soloing much harder if there are situations where that weak point gets hammered (as there should be IMO). P:E's "no dump stats" approach should let players create characters that emphasize strengthening their class's weak points over specialization, which would help. On the other hand we don't know how hard the game is going to be overall; if the toughest challenges need a character that's optimized to play to his strengths, then the "generalist" soloer will be at a serious disadvantage. (BTW, for the record, just so you can say it happened once -- I've changed my mind on the topic due to this thread. I no longer think soloing would necessarily be six times harder than playing with a full party. Thinking it might be something like three times harder, which should certainly be doable for a hardcore player, even if the base difficulty is hard enough not to be a cakewalk.)
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Well, his avatar is the late-to-the-party hippo, so I suppose it's understandable. Still, get on it Lephys! If you haven't played these, (1) you really have no clue what P:E is about, and (2) you are in for some seriously awesome gaming experiences... if you manage to get over the steep initial learning curve. All of 'em are pretty punishing if you've never played one before. At least I died... a lot... until I figured them out. They're much tougher to get into than the NWN's IMO, although also more rewarding (except MotB, which is IMO the only worthy IE game successor in that series.)
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Seconded. BG2 is a great game. If P:E can manage half the quest and world diversity and character development options, it's going to be a worthy successor. If it manages to improve on it in some concrete ways, it's going to be a classic.
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Wel-l-l... I see what you mean, but I think a lot of the time quality can even be quantified, or at least expressed in terms unambiguous-enough to be workable. Bug count and severity per median gaming hour is a fairly basic and simple metric. The more "creative" qualities of a game can sometimes be fairly unambiguously assessed as well, at least at a basic level. If writing, voice acting, art direction, or animation is just plain bad, for example, most observes will agree that it's bad, occasional outliers aside. Things do get more subjective once things rise above that minimal level of course, which is what you were talking about. Thing is, with computer games they rarely do. Most computer game writing is at best romance-novel quality, art direction straight-to-DVD movie quality, voice acting daytime TV quality, and so on. Which is why the ones that do go past this level stand out. This is why I am such an unabashed Obsidian fanboy actually. Their creative work does generally rise above that minimal level, if not in every area at least in some. Now that they've managed to not screw up the basic level, things are looking mighty fine.
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Most are. The least healthy components are lipids which may mess with your LDL/HDL cholesterol balance. If you drink filter coffee most of 'em get caught there. I dislike filter coffee and like to live dangerously so I ignore that and just make the coffee I like. My source is here [ http://www.duodecimlehti.fi/web/guest/arkisto?p_p_id=Article_WAR_DL6_Articleportlet&p_p_lifecycle=0&_Article_WAR_DL6_Articleportlet_p_frompage=uusinnumero&_Article_WAR_DL6_Articleportlet_viewType=viewArticle&_Article_WAR_DL6_Articleportlet_tunnus=duo11080 ]. It's in Finnish, unfortunately, but it does contain an English summary and links to other articles. If you're really interested you can try your luck with Google Translate too, natch. Duodecim is the main medical journal in Finland; it is peer-reviewed and considered relatively high quality academically.
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