PrimeJunta

I would love an alt-timeline dieselpunk turn-based RPG. Inspiration: Century Rain. Other than that, I'm good with pretty much anything other than genericwesternfantasyswordsandwizardsohmy or genericspaceoperablastersnadspacemarinesohmy. Nothing wrong with those as such, except that they're way overdone.

I actually quite like the evolution of Total War. I'm fairly hooked on Rome 2. Campaign play is finally more than just a side dish. Diplomacy is actually meaningful – I can secure some borders by forging alliances while keeping my expansion options open. Building choices are actually meaningful; not just "build everything as fast as you can." Agents contribute meaningfully to gameplay. Navies are a meaningful strategic factor. Terrain topology and concealment actually works, so you can meaningfully spring surprises in battles. Combined-forces battles work. Full-army morale works, so winning battles is all about breaking the other army's morale rather than just slaughtering the bejeezus out of them. And so on. (Edit: gotta brag -- I just won a pretty tough battle yesterday against an army that was much bigger, led by a unit of war elephants. I focused my peltasts on the elephants, which killed the general, dealing a major morale blow. When their heavies engaged my heavies -- spread out in a thin line -- I sprung just one heavy unit out of hiding to hit one end of their line from behind, and focused my peltasts on the same knot. They routed, freeing up the two melee units to hit the next one, then the next, and the whole line unzipped beautifully. It was a close call though; by the time it got to the end, my unit at that end of the line had routed, but it was enough. Not so proud about how I got into that fight in the first place though; that was a mistake on the campaign map...) That said, I only jumped in at Patch 7, so I have no experience of the (apparently) horrifyingly incomplete state it was in upon release. Another series which was on an upward slope was NWN. NWN OC was frankly bad. NWN HotU was a pretty decent dungeon crawl. Despite its flaws, NWN2 was better than either fo them. MotB was a real high point, and I very much liked the direction SoZ took, although it fell flat in the execution (killed by way too slow loading times IMO).

@Måndagsbarn I have a Mac, actually. And I don't like the locked-down hardware, closed-garden app store, etc. etc. on it either.

I disagree. Let's see why. It is buggy. There's also not much, uh, game to the game. Just an extended dungeon crawl and endless bugbears. Admittedly pretty dungeon and beautifully-rendered bugbears. I agree about the flaws of D&D, especially low-level D&D. Getting to level 2 was a genuine chore. Right. This may be a bit long, but you asked. First off, my thoughts on D&D as a system. I kind of love/hate it. I've DM'ed PnP D&D since... 1985, I think. All editions except 4e. Mechanically it ranges from godawful (AD&D, both editions), to passable (1st ed, 3d ed). I won't go into the details of the why and the wherefore of it. However, one thing D&D does do well -- especially in the later incarnations -- is support a vast range of character builds and special abilities. D&D3 has feats, spells, and spell-likes which are genuinely fun, and hooks them into characters which play really differently. In PnP D&D, that is. The fighters plant themselves to hold a line, while your rogue sneaks behind to backstab the enemy mage and then dodge back into the shadows, while your ranger shoots them full of arrows, your cleric buffs and heals, and your wizard looks for an opening to blast them with something nasty and area-effected. Good fun. ToEE is the only cRPG where you can actually effectively do this. Coordinate an entire party in a meaningful way. Because it takes micromanagement, and the party has to do its thing simultaneously for it to work. The closest approximation to this type of tactics in a RTwP game I've seen has been in IWD, and that only because the maps are specifically designed with, say, choke points your tanks can hold while others do their thing -- and even there, rogues are pretty much useless because you'd still have to micromanage them, which means you won't be micromanaging your casters, which means that either they'll be doing nothing (if you're sane and have switched off their AI casting), or doing something horribly unsuitable, like dropping a fireball right on the rogue as she's sneaking back. The combat in ToEE requires actual, meaningful tactics -- like a group of polearm-wielders controlling a choke point as a phalanx, while ranged and support characters do their thing from behind. D&D has quite passable rules for reach and attack of opportunity, which build on feats like Cleave, but they don't actually mean anything in a RTwP game. TL;DR: The thing about ToEE isn't that it's a particularly good game (it isn't), but that it shows the potential of what TB combat could be when combined with a rich, complex system of character-building mechanics. I would love to see a cRPG with equally rich character-building and combat mechanics, but without D&D's deficiences, and with TB combat that lets me make the most of both. PS. Why is it OK for a sequel to have completely different combat (e.g. Fallout 3 vs Fallouts 1 and 2), but a thematic successor must have the same kind of combat to qualify? I'd think it's more the other way around.

@Karkarov, I did not want to imply that someone who doesn't like PoE style games is an idiot. I don't think someone's taste in games is a very good indicator of that.

Yeah, they could do better than "the dungeon collapses and you're all dead, neener neener." That said, a good ending doesn't have to be happy IMO. PS:T's endings were brilliant, and "happy" isn't a word I'd use for any of them.

I'd throw a hundred bucks blind for the Saint Christopher of Avellone Goes Wild RPG. More if the pitch was good.

:me raises hand: I think PoE would be better with turn-based combat. Reason: ToEE. It would be nice to get an actual game with the combat one day. I like RTS, but it's better suited for actual, y'know, RTS games. Where you fight more or less by positioning a number of more or less identical units, after which their AI takes over. In a party-based cRPG, each unit is unique and different and the major part of the fun is managing their unique and different special abilities. This is a natural better fit for TB. My favorite combat in strategy games is Total War. My favorite combat in party-based cRPG's is ToEE. PoE would've been better with turn-based combat. Now the best we can hope for is best in class for RTwP. That's not bad, but it could've been better.

I apologize. It was an attempt at humor. Perhaps not one of my strong suits. Welcome back, Helm.

Impressive, the miracles of modern medicine.

Okay, who are you and what did you do with the real Helm?

I was thinking more the other way around. I.e., if you can afford a console, you probably already have a low-end PC capable of running PoE, so there's really no point to a console version. Console games tend to cost more, too. And if you're low on money, you're more likely to have a PC than a fourth-gen console.

I'm sure I'll tire of re-stating this at some point, but here goes one more time. Save-scumming isn't the problem. Games designed for save-scumming are. If the manual says "Save frequently and in different slots," the design is broken. Many of the IE games were broken in this way. It was simply not possible to play without saving often and in different slots, and reloading repeatedly to get through many combats. Not until you had trial-and-errored the solutions and already knew them anyway. I liked the combat in IWD because it didn't do this all that much. There were just a couple of boss fight type things that played this way; most of the fights felt tough but fair. Same thing with ToEE, once you've figured out the mechanics of combat. BG and BG2 were really bad in this respect. IOW, I should certainly hope that the game allows unlimited saves, which by implication lets you save-scum to your heart's content. If you enjoy that sort of thing, then knock yourself out, I don't care. But I would like the game to be playable without save-scumming, once I've played enough to have figured out the systems and mechanics. (As an aside, I also intensely dislike people who whine that a game is "too easy" because it doesn't force you to save before every fight. That kind of design doesn't test your skill, only your persistence, and persistence in the face of a computer game is not much of a virtue as far as I'm concerned.)

I have nothing against controllers. I am against the design compromises that will inevitably happen if you make a game that is playable both on controllers and with mouse+keyboard. One or the other will feel gimped, and it's usually mouse+keyboard. A control scheme is more than just a re-skin, it has implications deep into the systems. Put another way, make PC games for PC's, and console games for consoles, and everybody will be getting a good experience. If you enjoy both types of games, then buy both devices. It's not like they're hideously expensive these days.

I've asked it before when this comes up, but, I'll ask it again. How many console owners do you think don't also own a low-end PC capable of running PoE? Of those, how many do you think would be interested in playing an isometric party-based cRPG with lots of reading mixed with tactical combat and character-building?

I'm pretty sure the voice actors' wages aren't even the main cost item. Using lots of voice will force them to nail down the dialog early enough to get the recordings done, processed, and integrated into the game, whereas with limited voice acting they can keep on tweaking the dialog until Gold Master... and even beyond. What's more, a fully-voiced isometric game would feel very weird. You really want to stare at the screen with a couple of midgets in the middle of a landscape perhaps waving their hands, and listening to VO? I wouldn't. You'd have to go with Fallout-style animated talking heads (FO1 and 2 here, natch), which is another big animated can of worms. So no, no no. Even more than a console port, this would actively make the game worse, not better.

True, that. It'd be cool to see some still water for a change, with maybe just the occasional circular ripple when a drop falls in. I wouldn't prioritize that over a single branch in a dialog tree though.

I thought the water looked particularly good actually.

@skeet: TL;DR: Niche games are different because they only need to worry about appealing to their niche. Console ports explictly serve the mass market, and bring mass market pressures on them, and thereby reduce their niche appeal. I want both niche games and mass-market games to exist. Therefore, I only have a problem with mass market games if they crowd out niche games, and I have seen that happen too many times with console ports. Therefore, no console port TYVM. Yeah. Fifty Shades of Grey sold a beellion copies too, but it's still shyte. Nonsense. The "natural evolution of a series" is what happens as the world gets bigger and deeper and collects more lore, as technology becomes more capable, and the team making it gets better. Going for mass appeal is a conscious decision, and usually involves removing things that are "too hard" or "too difficult to understand" or "need too much reading." Thing is, there will always be games appealing to a mass audience. Why wouldn't there be? That's where the big money is. That's totally fine by me. What's not totally fine by me is if there are no niche games. I.e., games designed to be played by people like me. And a console port does seriously endanger those games. This happens through the dynamic of Metacritic and the gaming press, which is much bigger on the console side. If it's moderately successful, it'll create pressure to make the next one more palatable to console players. This has happened over and over again. Deus Ex, Elder Scrolls, the entire devolution of BioWare, and so on and so forth. I repeat the question from my previous post: how many console owners do you think don't have a low-end PC capable of running PoE? How many of those do you think are the kind of gamer who would enjoy a game in the style of PoE? Why do you keep a cage full of miniature space bunnies in your attic? Don't you see the poor things are suffering? (I pulled that out of my arse too.) Again: how many console owners who would probably enjoy the type of game PoE is going to be do you think don't own a low-end or better PC? Yeah, that's it. Not. Once again: I have nothing against the existence of Fifty Shades or Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter. I only have a problem if they crowd out The Star Fraction, Transitions, and the Malazan Book of the Fallen. I know of no example where a series that did get ported to consoles got better -- i.e., more to my subjective, personal tastes -- after being ported, whereas I can list a dozen examples off the top of my head where it got worse, and it got worse in specific, easy-to-point-out ways.

:raises hand:

@skeet, IMO The Elder Scrolls are a good demonstration of how console gamers ruin games. Morrowind was still pretty good really, but the series went down the drain with Oblivion. Surprise surprise, Oblivion was the first one of the series designed from the start to be portable to consoles. They made it that way because the console port of Morrowind was surprisingly successful. I don't like consoles either. I don't like the locked-down hardware and walled-garden approach. I don't like the control schemes. I don't like the marketing. And almost all console-first games are a royal turn-off. Finally, even if you can plug a mouse and keyboard into a PS4, does anyone seriously think that a PS4 game that requires them would not be dead in the water? Especially since PoE will have relatively modest system requirements, meaning it ought to play perfectly well on low-end PC hardware. How many console owners do you reckon don't have a low-end PC or Mac? TL;DR: No. No, no no no. No.

Bah, browser games are the future.

@Micamo, and I'm hoping it won't. Animations are expensive, and these look more than good enough – way better than the IE games anyway. I hope they'll put that effort into polishing and improving the content instead.

w00t, it went through. Just got the shipping confirmation for my Jolla phone too. Today is a good day, from a materialist consumerist POV anyway.

Tried to submit an error report as recommended, but that failed. I feel for you.