PrimeJunta

Essentialist thinking is fundamentally flawed. It is applicable to nothing. Apply it, and you end up counting angels on pinheads. Deductive reasoning is applicable to some things, but because of the inherent limitations of knowledge, it's useless without some independent way to validate the conclusions to which it leads. Without it, they're just cathedrals in the air. I just did. Quantum events are uncaused, or self-caused if you will. Or can you show otherwise? (As Yonjuro pointed out, of course, that link in your chain is already invalidated by your posited causeless First Cause.) I take that as conceding the point: that you believe, on faith, that the Universe has a beginning. Thank you. In a closed system. That does not preclude order arising from disorder locally. We see that happening all the time. It just means that the total entropy in a closed system rises over time. Uh... right. I didn't actually understand a word of that. Me neither. We have a lot to answer for.

I'd back Steampunk 1877.

Since we're still on this tangent, here's an alternative model of the universe for you guys to consider. P1: A universe exists independently of any observers. (Premise I accept on faith.) P2: Consciousness exists as a quality of the Universe. (Premise I accept because I possess it.) 1. Sentient beings impose categories on the universe. A sentient being can draw a line around a part of the universe, associate it with other parts of the universe she has similarly delineated, and designate that part as 'a chair.' 1a. There is nothing inherent in the chair that makes it a chair. It is just a label. The same chunk of the universe could also be designated "trash" or "firewood" or "the watchtower of my pillow fortrtress." 1b. Such categories and signifiers are arbitrary. The choice of particular categories and signifiers is made for convenience only. 2. Knowledge and meaningful communication become possible when various sentient beings come to a rough agreement among themselves about which signifiers are associated with which parts of the Universe. 2a. Categories like "self" or "mind" or "rationality" or "sentient being" are also signifiers associated with chunks of the universe, nothing more. 2b. "The self" or "you" or "I" have no inherent existence, indepent of other categories. 3. The only noumenon is the Universe. 4. I can know it in only two ways: direct experience and categorization. 4a. Direct experience is not communicable. At best, I can direct someone to perform the same actions I did when experiencing something, and hope that she experiences something similar. 4b. Categorized knowledge is communicable, to an extent, using the shared system from (2). 5. Since the categories are largely arbitrary and do not reflect anything inherent in the Universe, any such knowledge I can attain is necessarily flawed: the designator is not the object. 6. Therefore, absolute truths and certain knowledge is unattainable. At best, we can have approximations of it. Sometimes good approximations. 7. Whereof you cannot speak, thereof you must be silent.

@Kveldulf, yes, Plato and Aristotle are outdated, and Aquinas was a complete dead end. For a good critique, I recommend volume I of Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies. It's too long to go into in a forum post. Essentialism is dead. 1. I am pointing out a counterexample. You state as your premise that every event has an effective cause. I am pointing out an event which has no effective cause, which demonstrates that your premise is invalid. 2a and 2b: I am proposing two alternatives for your presupposition. How do you determine that yours is the correct one, as opposed to these two others? (N.b.: I do not need to demonstrate that either one of these -- or some other alternative -- is true. You, however, do need to demonstrate that your cosmic model of time with a beginning is, or your chain of logic will fail. Please do so or concede the point.) 3-5 What does thermodynamics have to do with this? 5b. I have not agreed that an origin exists, but let's, for the sake of the argument. Why can something rational not arise from something irrational? We can certainly observe order arising from chaos, such as a snowflake crystallizing out of water vapor. Seriously, Kvedulf -- the Middle Ages are over. Catch up. I recommend a heavy course of reading, starting with Schopenhauer, Husserl, and Popper. Essentialist metaphysics are dead; phenomenology and nominalism are where it's at. Edit: Bluntly put, Kvedulf: you're rationalizing an irrational belief here. It's not pretty. I have a great deal more respect for credo quia absurdum. It's intellectually honest.

I voted Call of Duty only to annoy people who get annoyed at that sort of thing, 'cuz they totes deserve it. What is it anyway, some kind of army game?

Science is an immense body of knowledge about the universe. That's far more than a "practice" or a "methodology." Methods and practices are a part -- but only a part, and not the most interesting part IMO -- of that body of knowledge.

It's a hell of a lot more than just a methodology, Walsingham.

It's rather sad if science has become something you choose to believe in rather than something you try to understand IMO. I agree. And both are rather far off this thread's.

Valuing (and assessing) information always climbs back to something more absolute - more unmoving: you have to have an understanding (that derives from an absolute) of why to value something in order to really value it..... The Argument from Efficient Cause: There is an efficient cause for everything; nothing can be the efficient cause of itself. It is not possible to regress to infinity in efficient causes. To take away the cause is to take away the effect. If there be no first cause then there will be no others. Therefore, a First Cause exists (and this is God). So in other words, even in business school, a perspective of faith (premise), dare I say morality, is critical to learning and teaching. Oh, jeebus. That's a broken chain of logic if I ever saw one. Philosophy has advanced a bit since Plato and Aristotle, y'know. (1) Consider a lump of uranium ore. Observe a nucleus decay. What is the efficient cause of that particular nucleus, rather than some other nucleus, decaying? (2) Why is it not possible to regress to infinity in efficient causes? For example, what if the Universe (in some sense) is infinitely old (in some sense?) (2b) How about a circular chain of causes. What if time is circular rather than linear, and the Universe's ending is the cause of its beginning? How do you rule this out? (3), (4), and (5) follow from your flawed premises; therefore they are necessarily flawed. (5b) Why is the First Cause necessarily God? Edit: your first statement is also incorrect. You do not need to have an absolute point of reference to be able to value or assess information, or anything else. You can always value or assess it relative to other, relative points of reference. Which is what we all do, even Platonists like you -- the only difference is that you mistakenly believe your relative points of reference are absolutes.

"All truths are relative, including this one" is not self-contradictory, nor is at an absolute statement. It is a useful premise, however. I believe the hunt for absolute truths is a huge waste of effort, so it's simpler to assume that they don't even exist. For most practical terms, highly certain, highly unambiguous relative truths behave similarly as absolute truths (should they exist) anyway. We can base our lives around them just as easily, without getting mired with counting angels dancing on a pinhead. Also, even if you don't accept the premise, it's a looong stretch from "Some truths are absolute" to "proposition P is absolutely true," for most propositions, at least most propositions that you can teach at school. I.e., I do not believe that it is the business of school to teach absolute truths, because on closer examination they would almost certainly prove not to be absolute, and probably not to be true.

Truth is a highly problematic proposition. If you believe there is such a thing in a final, absolute sense, you're already mistaken. It's worse if you get that at school.

In a perfect world, maybe. With some really good teachers, certainly. In the world we live in, though, the purpose of school is indoctrination: to turn kids into good obedient little citizens consumers. In particular, with regards to teaching history, to turn them into good obedient patriotic unthinking cannon fodder laborers.

Macs and Linux boxes running a graphical shell are also personal computers. Been a whiles since "PC" has been synonymous with "Wintel."

@Sensuki IMO that's kind of the worst of both worlds. You lose the role-playing/character-concept-support aspect of attributes, but keep the way they bork up the mechanics. So a strong NO on that one.

@Bryy. Once more. Multi-platform designs are inherently compromised. One of the points of the PoE Kickstarter was that unlike most games today, PoE would not have to be designed as multi-platform, and therefore PC gamers would get a game designed from the ground up to be playable on a PC. This is why I and many others get irritated about calls for a console port. It's disingenuous to argue that it doesn't matter if the PC one is done anyway. It certainly does matter. For one thing, if PoE is a success, there will be sequels, and if there is a console version, and the console version is a success, then the sequel will almost certainly be written as multi-platform to start with, and we're right back where we started. No. Console. Ports.

I'm pretty sure Josh is aware of the role-playing aspect of it. He's clearly put a lot of thought into naming the attributes and attempting to connect the names to the effects, and is fully aware that the Intellect-base damage connection is problematic in that respect. As to powergaming, I tend to do it too, which is why easily exploitable systems bother me. But that's neither here nor there: the design function of having attributes is to support role-play and character concepts, so it's nonsensical to argue that their role-play and character-concept-support aspects don't matter. That's what they're for, so of course it matters. If you're not interested in this aspect, by all means refrain from discussing it and concentrate on finding ways to minimize the harm the attribute system does to the mechanics instead. Although I don't think you've managed to improve on Josh's proposed system at all, I think it's good to have that discussion, so carry on, pal!

Actually, Sensuki, I disagree. The names do matter. Think of the reason we have the attributes in in the first place. They're not necessary for getting the mechanics to work, or for character, class, or gameplay differentiation. All of that could be done more smoothly through classes, skills, perks, and talents. They're there to support character concepts. They define what kind of character you want to be. "Herbert is smart but clumsy, strong but a little fragile, stubborn and not easily swayed, and annoys people a lot." Oh, OK, INT 16, DEX 8, STR 16, CON 9, WIS 14, CHA 8. I.e., the attribute names are extremely important IMO, and it's also important that they describe some identifiable and relatable aspect of the character being built. This is a tough equation to balance if you also want to avoid obvious dump or pump stats. And it does mean you'll have to find some rationalization to connect whatever mechanical effects each of them has to whatever characteristic they're supposedly describing. This isn't simulationism. It's about role-playing. This is naturally a much bigger deal in tabletop gaming, but I suspect it's a big part of why many of us are drawn to the genre on computers as well.

The French differed from the British in the way they approached their colonies. The Brits went for classic divide-and-conquer subjugation, co-opting the native elites but never intending to give the masses any more rights than they had to, whereas the French wanted to turn their colonies French. The French modeled their empire on Romanization -- they way the Roman empire absorbed and acculturated all of its conquests. I remember reading a memoir by a Senegalais who went to one of the new schools the French built there, reading a history book starting with "Nos pères les Gaulois..." This is why the remnants of the French empire were absorbed into the French polity. That difference in administrative status doesn't change the reality of the DOM-TOM any, though. They're still imperial remnants. History is mostly taught really badly at schools. It's a tool of indoctrination; of getting kids to believe that their country, of all countries, has the most righteous, just, and glorious history. About justifying the atrocities committed in your country's name, and nurturing grievances about wrongs perpetrated against it. Building actual understanding about the past is rarely a high priority. I've checked out a bunch of schoolbooks about history from a variety of countries -- including my own -- and they're all bad. You especially shouldn't trust what they say about your own country, or countries with which your country has been at war. Which, for countries with imnperial histories, means just about everyone, sadly. I think it's a bit facetious to say that the age of colonialism or the age of empires is still ongoing. Historical periodization is based on identifying a dominating factor; if we have to wait until all traces of it have disappeared, ages drag on for a really long time. There's still a Pope but that doesn't mean we're still in the Middle Ages; there are still uncontacted, isolated peoples and unexplored patches on the map here and there, but we're not in the Age of Discovery anymore, European antiquity ended more than a thousand years before the last heir of the ancient empires fell in 1453, and the empires unraveled after World War 2. </end tangent>

I'm kinda interested in it for one reason: choice and consequence. If the game gives you no options to be selfish, callous, cold-hearted, ruthless, bloodthirsty, vengeful, or whatever, then any altruistic, empathetic, warm-hearted, caring, forgiving, etc. options won't be options anymore. They'll just be a railroad you follow, which defeats the purpose of a RPG IMO. (I don't like comic-book binary black/white good/evil though.)

Gunpowder, steel -- including relatively high-grade crucible steel -- and long-distance navigation were all invented before the printing press.

Oh please. They've made it abundantly clear what they mean by the period, and it's definitely not 18th century America. Both Arcanum's and Fallout's tech levels are easy to describe in terms of eras in a single phrase. Arcanum is "swords and sorcery world undergoing the Industrial Revolution," whereas Fallout is "1950's retro-futuristic mixed with modern gun nuttery." Good settings are internally consistent. The logic they follow may not be entirely real-world logic, various laws of physics can be suspended as needed, and new magical metaphysics can be introduced. Even so, even fictional technologies, to be believable, should follow their own logic. Both Arcanum's and Fallout's do. Fallout's tech did not appear from nowhere; we get to interact quite closely with the ruins of the corporations and national research institutes that developed them, and even get an idea of the kind of scientific and technological breakthroughs that made them happen. The fact that it's not hard sci-fi (i.e., the physics doesn't hold up) is immaterial. Likewise for Arcanum. We actually get to meet some of the most important inventors of the age; the James Watts and Thomas Edisons. I don't see it as a problem that PoE's world doesn't have a printing press. I would see it as problematic if, say, there was no explanation for gunpowder. I kinda doubt that's gonna happen, as we already know something about the history of metallurgy in PoE's world -- animancy, the discovery of skein steel, the lost lore of ... what was it again, that one dwarven forge that produced its brand of uniquely good steel, and so on. It seems to be an extremely dynamic era, with new discoveries being made frequently. I like that. I agree that we shouldn't get too hung up on the "Renaissance era" thing, but I think such phrases are useful to describe the overall flavor of the world.

I'm pretty sure it's possible to get it to work, but the libraries are bound to be different. The feature would have to be ported specifically. Anyway I'm sure Obs know what they're doing; the mouse works just fine on most Mac games I've played so it'd be a bit strange if PoE proves a problem.

I intended the phrase to describe apparent performance requirements, not aesthetics. I like the look of the game a lot. I'm generally much more impressed by consistent aesthetics than special effects, actually, and think most games would do better to make the most of less demanding graphics tech rather than push for the latest and greatest in skin pore and fur technology. If that makes me a graphics whore, then so be it.

The devs have repeatedly described the world of PoE as "colonial or renaissance era, minus the printing press." I would suggest you take your objections to them.

Do people really think they will be able to play this game on more than 3-4 year old computers?I really think so. What we've seen of the graphics so far looks high-end for about 2003. I'd guess a high-end computer from around then should be able to run the game just fine. If anyone still has one that is.The overall look without zoom maybe. But firstly the details are much better, this are 3d models afterall not sprites. Combined with a hd/full hd resolution we end up with high cpu and ram consumption. Also I highly doubt the lightning Obsidian shown was made in DirectX below 9. I would say dx11, but lets assume it's 9. Any graphic card without dx9 is out. Also there was a hint of physX used so card would need to support that. I would say minimum would be 2cored cpu with at least 2 GHz, 4gb ram, DirectX 9 (if not 11) and physX compatibile card.So the "I can run BG2 so I will run PoE" approach is not gonna cut it. ToEE came out in 2003, and it used the same basic techniques -- 3D models overlaid on an animated, pre-rendered 2D background. That's from 2003, and ran great on mid-range hardware of the day. PhysX doesn't need hardware support on the card. It just makes it run faster. I doubt the physics stuff in PoE will be heavy-duty enough for it to make a visible difference. I would be willing to make a friendly bet that you can run PoE on a top-of-the-range 2003 computer reasonably well. Say, Athlon XP or Pentium 4 Northwood, GeForce PCX 5900, and as much RAM as it can take.