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PrimeJunta

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Everything posted by PrimeJunta

  1. PrimeJunta
    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.
  2. PrimeJunta
    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.
  3. PrimeJunta
    I thought the water looked particularly good actually.
  4. PrimeJunta
    @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.
  5. PrimeJunta
    :raises hand:
  6. PrimeJunta
    @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.
  7. PrimeJunta
    Bah, browser games are the future.
  8. PrimeJunta
    @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.
  9. PrimeJunta
    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.
  10. PrimeJunta
    Tried to submit an error report as recommended, but that failed. I feel for you.
  11. PrimeJunta
    Clearly needs an upgrade to giant space hamsters. Try miniature ones, they take up less space.
  12. PrimeJunta
    Same here. The POST comes back with a 302 FOUND instead of a 200 OK and some content, which can't be right. Could be we're just overloading the poor thing.
  13. PrimeJunta
    I voted no. The project is big as it is, and expanding the scope can't help. Put all that stuff in the expansion instead; I'll happily pay for it there.
  14. PrimeJunta
    Everybody gets military training in the Dyrwood. Even the spiders.
  15. PrimeJunta
    The spiders scuttle in a most satisfying manner. Well done.
  16. PrimeJunta
    It's been a long while since the last sandbox game I truly enjoyed. That would be Morrowind. Everything since then has been a severe disappointment; so much so I didn't even bother with Skyrim. I'm really looking forward to this though. Combining strong writing with a sandbox hasn't been done well since Fallout 2. If anyone can do it now, it's these guys.
  17. PrimeJunta
    Jeez, Sensuki. You have been using words like 'deceptive' here. Others have used 'lying.' These denote intent to deceive. I haven't seen anything indicative of more than a dev team tripping over their feet releasing a low-priority side project. They've announced some dates, and missed them. That is all. Point being: if you're accusing someone of malicious intent – "deception" –, I would expect you to provide evidence for that malicious intent, and I would expect that malicious intent is the most likely explanation for that evidence, rather than just confusion, human error, miscommunication (internal or external) or whatever. I would also like to hear some remotely plausible theory as to why they'd want to be "deceptive" about this sort of thing. I.e., under what possible circumstances is it to their advantage to intentionally lie about the release date of their backer portal? Short version: put down the shovel and climb out.
  18. PrimeJunta
    What if they thought it was going to be ready on Nov 27?
  19. PrimeJunta
    Yo, guys. Software developer here. "Missing a release date" is not the same thing as "lying." Releasing stuff always has a degree of unpredictability. Eventually if you do it long enough, you'll get to the point where you can do it pretty predictably on high-priority stuff. Even so, you sometimes miss release dates on lower-priority stuff. Here's a story of the kind of thing that can happen. Fictional, but very much based on how sh1t actually happens. Kate, Dean, and Triss are making a game at Chris's company. In addition, they want to make a fan website. Kate is responsible for coding, Dean for UI and graphic design, and Triss for making sure everything works. Of course, their main jobs are with the game, so they agreed to do their bits for the website whenever there was a bit of slack in their schedule. Kate did the coding last summer. Dean did the graphic design in August, then got Kate to implement a few little tweaks over September. Triss made a test suite for it in October, and suggested a few improvements which required a few hours of work from Kate and Dean each. They did those on two afternoons in early November. They thought were ready to go. Then Microsoft released MSIE11, and Triss noticed that some stuff broke on it unexpectedly. Unfortunately both Kate and Dean were up to their armpits in game code at that point and couldn't get to work on it immediately. However they agreed that it was probably a little thing that could be done at the last minute, so there wasn't all that much risk of schedule slippage. They went to Chris anyway to give him a heads-up. Chris agreed that it was more important to keep the main project running smoothly and OK'ed the slightly risky last-minute fix. The stuff Kate and Dean were working on the game was just a little hairier than they thought, but they pulled an all-nighter and got it done with time to spare for fixing the website problem. Which they did, and said that the site was good to go. Chris announced this on the fan forums. There was just one snag. The fix broke Triss's test suite, and after their all-nighter, Kate and Dean had simply forgotten to account for that. When Triss ran the test suite, it failed spectacularly in the first test. She knew there was probably nothing wrong with the site and the tests just needed an update, but couldn't be sure. So Kate, Dean, and Triss went to Chris again. He decided not to take the risk, but deferred publication of the site until Triss's tests proved that it worked. And the fans raged.
  20. PrimeJunta
    I've been circling this for a while, and I hate to say that this completely unrelated piece of art pushed me over the edge. They just got funded too.
  21. PrimeJunta
    I'm thinking of stuff like the guy who goes smoothly from a dwarf noble who doesn't even speak to the plebes except through an intermediary, to someone who comfortably rubs shoulders with characters of all races and social classes, just like that. Or the city elf persecuted by human nobles who then happily interacts with... human nobles. There's a massive missed opportunity for character development there. The plots themselves matter much less IMO.
  22. PrimeJunta
    I voted DAO and "medium." Mostly because I thought the origins in DAO were a great idea that was left sadly undeveloped. I especially liked the dwarf noble and city elf origins. The trouble is that that was pretty much that; the themes explored in the origin stories never really came up later, with even only cosmetic differences in the way stuff played when you returned to the area where you came from. This is, however, not a particularly high priority for me. I'm fine with blank slate characters; I would like the world react to the visible features of the characters.
  23. PrimeJunta
    Ah, good, normal "disagreeing with Karkarov" services have been resumed. I was getting worried here for a bit. Anyway, basic UI scaling isn't hard. Just design the bitmap UI art assets for the maximum scale you want to support and scale them down. This is actually easier than something they're doing anyway, i.e., making a UI that works at different screen resolutions, so UI elements that depend on screen size will have to scale to that, and their content, anyway. To make it user-controllable just add a way to adjust the scaling factor. Things only get significantly more difficulty if you want to support screen sizes so different the same UI just can't work on them, e.g. smart phones, tablets, and desktop computers. That'll require a quite a bit more work, in practice two or three different UI's with only the base code shared, and very likely a bunch of code written specifically to adapt to things. (Speaking from personal experience here.) Fortunately that's not going to be a concern with PE. Re the playing on a TV screen thing, I think the main problem with that is the controller, not the screen size nor viewing distance. The UI could easily be scaled up so text is legible from six feet away, but I don't think many people would want to play using a mouse and keyboard while sitting on the couch. You'd need a UI designed to be used with a controller, which the devs have said is not a priority (good thing too).
  24. PrimeJunta
    That's a snotgurgle, Tamerlane, you philistine. This is a troll.
  25. PrimeJunta
    "Turn-based is bad because Fallout" is not much of an argument IMO, any more than "RTwP is bad because Planescape: Torment." I'm in the TB camp for party-based fantasy cRPG's with full party control because I found the best TB combat in that genre that I've played (ToEE) much more enjoyable than the best RTwP combat I've played (IWD, SoZ). That said, I won't tear my robe and sprinkle ashes on my head if they decide to go with RTwP in the end. If the rest of the game lives up to its promise, I'll tolerate even badly broken combat.
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