PrimeJunta

Once. To close the portal. Which can't be closed by any other means. For no other reason than "because." Seriously, there is no explanation as to why the sword of Gith, and no other sword, and no other method, works for that purpose. To close. A portal. Which is pretty much a basic magical technology in Faerun. There are portals all over the place. What's so special about this one that it can only be closed with the sword of Gith, and why the sword of Gith, when the Githyanki had frack all to do with the creation of the portal, the Guardian, or even the Weave? The Githyanki are a humanoid race formerly of some other prime material plane, currently residing on the astral plane. They have no special connection to the Shadow Weave, nor the Weave. It makes no kind of sense, and has no kind of explanation. NWN2 doesn't have good story, full stop. But why??? Why is the SoG the "password" in your analogy? The Githyanki did not create the Guardian, nor the portal, nor anything related to it. Their only involvement with the KoS is that the KoS apparently raided their strongholds on the astral plane – which is yet another thing that doesn't make sense, since the KoS is supposed to be guarding Illefarn, which is on the Prime Material, not the astral. In fact, in the evil ending we find out that the KoS stops his invasion at the ancient borders of the Illefarn empire. What in the name of Mog was he doing fighting the Githyanki on the astral plane??? But you don't actually NEED the ritual of purification. As stated, I didn't use any of it a single time in my last playthrough. It doesn't even do anything particularly special; nothing that you can't do as well or better with the standard spell selection Elanee and Zhaeve have anyway. It's another big ol' DM-leading-you-by-the-nose thing with no internal logic to it. They didn't even bother making it mandatory to use it in the end battle – how hard could that have been, they already even had the statues in place? Tangent – the end boss battle. They could've at least made that cohere with the rest of the story, with only tiny modifications. Instead of destroying the statues, you would've had to use each part of the Ritual on the appropriate statue; after that, the KoS would become vulnerable to attack but only with the Sword of Gith. At least that way all that bother with the sword and the ritual wouldn't have been completely pointless. Oh come on. This isn't just any sword we're talking about. It's the silver sword of Gith. An artifact. A unique artifact. So powerful it has all these wack abilities even when reconstituted from about half the tiny shards it broke into. "It just broke, duh" makes no sense. That'd be like Sauron's Ring of Power getting destroyed by being accidentally stepped on when on its side. It would make sense if, say, the KoS is such a badass that it can shatter even an artifact weapon – but then it would make no sense that that very artifact weapon is supposed to be the only thing capable of hurting it. (Except, of course, in practice it's not, since any ol' magic sword will do the job just fine.) Again, it doesn't make any sense. Massive plot hole. I mean okay, The Lord of the Rings has the deus-ex-machina eagles ("why didn't they just fly Frodo and the Ring to Mordor and save everyone a lot of bother?") but that's just one thing in a story that mostly stays with its internal logic. The NWN2 story is just riddled with this thing. Target-rich environment. (Uh. I wasn't even meaning to get into this, but you're actually defending this turd of a tale? I know twelve-year-olds who write better than this.)

Wel-l-l... another quick google turns up a bunch of sauropods with weights between 35 tons (conservative estimate) and 100 tons or more. The largest elephant ever shot weighed 12 tons, and an average bull elephant is about five tons. So that would make these sauropods about 7 to 20 times more massive than the average bull elephant. So how much is a lot lot?

@Nonek, the dénouement was better than average, but in at least The Witchers, the endgame gameplay was same ol', same ol'. I.e., mobs of mooks to wade through in sequence followed by a set-piece multi-stage boss battle where you had to push the right buttons in the right sequence to win. PS:T had the same, except that it was possible to talk your way out of the multi-stage boss battle if your stats were high enough. I'm really. tired. of that template. Is fun endgame gameplay really too much to ask? Is a set-piece multi-stage choreographed boss battle the only climactic ending you can give a game? I should hope not!

It would be a very different kind of game than the ones we're used to seeing. Combat would be lethal, and if you want to avoid the obvious result – save-and-reload-fest – you'd have to develop mechanics around that. Some ideas, from more to less obvious. * Super-effective healing, magical or otherwise. Consider the late Iain M. Banks's Culture novels. The Culture has technology so advanced that they can fix anything as long as your brain is more or less intact, and they can even take a real-time backup of that, with a neural lace. It just takes a few weeks to grow you a new body. The advanced humanoid races in that universe also have capabilities to control their metabolism and shut off pain. * Avoidable combat. Add other systems with which you interact with the world. Since the potential cost of combat is so high, you would want to avoid it whenever possible, and only get into it when you're pretty sure that the odds are in your favor. When asked how he managed to survive all those hundreds of duels, Miyamoto Musashi is said to have replied "I only fight people weaker than myself." * Mostly ritualized combat. Consider a world where combat is governed by a strict code of honor. You have duels, tournaments, and jousts, but they're set up in such a way that armor is much better than weapons, and the winner is determined by adjudication rather than death or maiming. Actual fights to the death would be narrative climaxes, where all your dueling and jousting experience would be tested for real. * Super-effective defensive capabilities. Consider Dune and the way shields work in it: lasguns are as good as unused because a lasgun intersecting a shield produces a nuclear-level explosion, killing everybody; projectile weapons are mostly useless because shields stop projectiles flat, so combat is mostly hand to hand, and the challenge with that is the ability to feint effectively so that you're able to get a strike that's slow enough to get through the shield to hit its target. Combine a few of these and I think you could make a pretty compelling fantasy or high-tech-sci-fi world. It would probably have a good deal less combat – at least to the death combat – than any of the cRPG's we're used to seeing. Perhaps about as much as we have in sci-fi and fantasy novels and films, which is still a quite a lot really. (As an aside, one trope that's getting a bit threadbare is the one-man army – i.e., your hero that kills his way through hundreds or even thousands of enemies. Too much asymmetry.)

IMO the very existence of multi-classing indicates that something's broken about the classes themselves. If you can't have satisfying gameplay within the classes you've set up, why not do away with them altogether and just let you pick abilities from ability trees as your character develops? AD&D was almost but not quite fatally broken as a system. D&D3 was entirely workable, but still riddled with patches and kludges thrown in to work around its failures. Multiclassing (and the kludges associated with it, like XP penalties) are just one such example. I prefer P:E's approach. I would like a classless and XP-less system even better. Just award character points directly as you go, and let the player spend them on abilities. Then throw in a few trainers with some special gameplay – quests, for example – that lets you open up new ability trees. More or less like The Witcher or VtM: Bloodlines, only minus the XP, and with a broader scope. It would even be totally feasible to base this on D&D mechanics, with feats, spells, skills, hit dice, saves, and so on. Just assign a point price to each of those and set them up in nice hierarchies and you're golden.

Yeah, I'm slightly nervous about this part. Endgames tend to suck, endings tend to suck worse, and Obsidian as a studio and many of the P:E devs individually have a history of fantastic games with endgames and endings that range from let-downs to disasters. In fact I'm kinda hard-pressed to think of games with endgames/endings that don't follow the "wade through masses of mooks, then have a boss fight where the boss keeps resurrecting N times or until you figure out that you need to smash the statues/close the portals/break the jars/jump through the flaming hoops with a triple Salkow, then have an explanation" template, which I think is frankly bad. Let's see. Fallout. Yeah, Fallout. Now that was a good ending and endgame. Erm. Hm. Let me think. :thinks: BG? No. BG2? Nope. IWD? Nope. NWN or any of the expansions? Please. MotB? Nope. KOTOR 1 or 2? Nuh-uh. VtM:B? Nope. Okay, Planescape: Torment, with qualifications. The very very very endgame and ending did not follow the template and was in fact brilliant, but there's way too much wading through mooks to get there. I mean come on, that's just lazy and shows a lack of imagination. Yeah, that's about it, really. Why is it so damn hard to make a good ending and endgame?

Oh, Micamo, Micamo. You're wasting your talents. The NWN2 narrative is what's known as a "target-rich environment." Good point here though: "Of course. The problem here is that it's not the player defeating the bad guy. It's the DM's Ultimate Villain of Ultimate Badness versus the DM's Ultimate Artifact of Ultimate Power. It's masturbation: The player is just there to watch, and unless they stop playing or participating in the plot their input doesn't matter at all." This is a common mistake in cRPG's, and I hope one P:E manages to avoid. Edit: and to add insult to injury, you don't actually NEED those doodads of ultimate power. Or OK, technically you do need the sword of Gith to close that portal, but the King of Shadows gets hurt just fine with any ol' weapon or spell you're packing, which pulls the rug out from under the whole thing. Okay, now I'm doing it too.

@Micamo, in P&P the "15-minute workday" isn't much of a problem, as the DM can always adjust things situationally to keep things interesting. The rules bend as necessary. What's more, P&P D&D combat is so cumbersome that you can only have about one or maybe two combat encounters in a session anyway. Computer RPG's don't have this kind of inherent flexibility, so exploits become that much more... exploitable. The caster/fighter/rogue imbalance is a flaw in the rules, though; as JES pointed out somewhere, having to make up your own rules to make a game workable kind of indicates a problem with the game. (As an aside, is there a D&D campaign anywhere that doesn't have house rules?)

@Woldan, uh, as opposed to, say, magic fireballs? Early RL grenades were highly unreliable and troublesome weapons, because of the difficulty of making a reliable fuse. Without that they'd tend to be duds, or explode too late, or go off in your face. I think the renaissance tech level was a great idea; it's underused in fantasy RPG's, and the period had enormous variety in weapons and armor. With magic thrown into the mix and firearms considered specifically as an anti-spellcaster weapon, it gets even more interesting. I'm quite sure that balancing grenades, explosive traps etc. isn't any harder than balancing spells, various soul powers, martial arts, technologies and so on.

If there are werewolves, there have to be silver bullets. Else I'll be demanding my money back.

I'm waiting for cloaks to make a comeback. They're bound to. More practical than coats, plus they look way cool.

Yeah, you're right, you do need to have a feel for the spells before rolling up a sorc. Once you do, though, I do find them lower-maintenance. But I still stand by my main assertion – different circumstances need different spell lists, and I do want to switch between lists rather than individual spells. If I'm going into an undead-infested dungeon, I need one set of spells; if I'm fighting a horde of orcs, I want another set of spells, and if I'm facing a few powerful casters, I want yet another set of spells. I'll want lots of arcane defense and disjunction spells against the latter, for example, whereas I won't need them at all against the orcs. Just going with a fixed list fleshed out with some scrolls is... sub-optimal, shall I say. In PnP this is no problem of course; my caster-players keep a bunch of lists they've prepared and just announce which one they're memorizing. Effectively grimoires.

Yeah, sorcerers are much lower-maintenance than wizards and arguably more fun if you just want to get on with the game. Wizards for hardcore D&D geeks really. I like playing them too; with some thought you can just make them ridiculously powerful. I like the P:E grimoire thing, by the way – it will let us combine the fluidity of playing as a Sorc with the situational optimization you get as a Wiz. When playing as a wiz (or cleric, for that matter) I pretty much play as if I had two or three 'grimoires' I'm switching between – except that I have to hand-manage it spell by spell, which is a drag.

@bonarbill, the cleric is my favorite D&D3 class. They're wonderfully fine-tunable with the domains, and spontaneous conversion gives a lot of tactical flexibility too. If it was up to me, I'd have dropped the druid as a separate class altogether, mixed in the best druid spells as domain spells, nerfed the domains a bit but given three instead of two. A druid would be just a cleric with plant + animal + one elemental sphere. As an additional benefit, you'd get differentiated earth, air, fire, and water druids.

I think another four million bucks might do it. Probably not though. Firearms were in from the first Kickstarter pitch. Cadegund – the armored priestess – was rocking a blunderbuss in the first concept art. The tech level is renaissance minus the printing press. If you don't like it, then P:E isn't the game for you.

Yeah, OK, granted, rest-spamming gives mages an effectively unlimited supply of those support spells. I consider that such an egregious exploit that I don't do it; it's the only way I intentionally gimp myself in NWN2. (Perhaps that's why I liked the MotB spirit-eater mechanic so much – it meshes well with the way I already play the game, imposing just a little bit more discipline than I impose on my own.) Even so, I'll take a divine caster over an arcane one any day of the week, up to level 10 or thereabouts. From there on out it is a matter of opinion. I agree with the larger point though – the way your first companions are saddled on you is bad. Neeshka only makes sense if you're neither a rogue nor a mage nor cleric with Knock; Khelgar only makes sense if you're a squishy. The game really should have given you a caster from the start if you're not one yourself.

I agree with (1) and (2). Re (3), D&D mages are pretty much baggage at low levels. From level 5 on they have some limited usefulness. You get your first arcane caster not much after that. Re Elanee, I agree about the stats (not to mention the writing, yech), but she's actually one of the mechanically most useful characters in the game. Druids have IMO the best all-round spell selection of all the classes (almost as good offense as mages, almost as good buffs as clerics, some of the best low-level debuffs, e.g. Entangle, and enough dispels to get the job done, and of course the best summonings), plus they can tank; also being an elf she gets proficiency in longsword. She greatly obviates the need for a mage IMO. If they had optimized her stats, there's a good chance she would've been significantly more awesome than the PC, which would be kind of depressing.

More MotB impressions. My anti-romance stance: confirmed. I'm still playing as my aasimar lawful good Doomguide/Cleric. Got to the point where Gann declares his love for her. Boom, awkward dialog plus a situation that really, truly does not flow from the narrative. Felt like a real hard landing and I stopped playing, and now I don't even feel like getting back to that game. Simply put, that romance effectively ruined the game for me. (To my recollection the Safiya romance had the same effect on me when I was playing as a male PC, only that was so much later in the game that I made it to the end.) So. Please. No romance. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Kill it and bury it at a crossroads. This is an epic, heroic adventure, not a high-school soap opera. Second: I do not like the influence mechanics. I find myself gaming dialogs to avoid losing influence, or to gain influence, instead of staying in character. This happens for two reasons: (1) the influence mechanics are based on simple, linear reward/punishment, and (2) they're transparent. The perks you get for high influence are significant and interesting, and the game tells you when influence goes up or down, and you can check where you stand with each of the NPC's at any time. This is a classic Skinner box mechanism -- pull that lever, get a candy; pull the other, get an electric shock. When I game, I game – i.e., I try to play the game as efficiently as I can. That means I'm extremely susceptible to these mechanics: I try to find out how they work and then play the system for maximum reward. In a simple, binary Skinner box situation, that means that the game is effectively playing me, not the other way around. The only challenge is to discover the 'right' way to play the game. With a game that allows unlimited saves and reloads, this becomes worse since the easiest way to find that out is just to save/reload repeatedly until you get it 'right.' Moreover, in MotB, this mechanic is in direct opposition to one of the main themes and attractions of the game, i.e., the way it explores ethical choices and their consequences, and devotes a lot of effort into writing in ethically complex situations and a variety of defensible ways to resolve them. The influence mechanics favor one, specific set of choices over other sets of choices, introducing effectively "right" and "wrong" answers. That's bad, especially with the complex and well-written characters. The game is simultaneously treating the characters as characters – individuals with complex motivations and sometimes surprising reactions – and systems – things you interact with in certain ways to get desired results. I would have preferred a game where (1) the influence mechanism was completely under the hood, and (2) the consequences of influence would have been richer than just gain influence/gain reward, lose influence/don't gain reward. I think the devs were aware of this because they put in some "macro" choices, e.g. that two of the NPC's are mutually exclusive. They could have played this up a lot more, for example made the NPC's react in opposing ways to more things, and to introduce "conflicted emotions." In the simplistic system they have, an "agreeable" action cancels out a "disagreeable" one. They could have tracked both of these quantities independently for each character, and tied specific reactions to either of the totals or the difference, depending on context. They could also have set things up so that you can't max out your influence with all the characters. The upshot of this system would have been that you'd have to decide what kind of leader you are. You could go with strong personal ethics, and let the followers fall where they will: you would probably gain one devoted follower and lose many or all of the others. You could be a diplomatic peacemaker -- i.e., avoid doing anything disagreeable to any of your companions, which would mean that you could probably keep all of them relatively happy but none of them would become truly devoted. Or you could be a narcissistic manipulator, saying whatever you think each of them would like to hear, which would rack up both your "agreaable" and "disagreeable" scores for your companions, yielding interesting love/hate relationships. They could've written in specific dialogs where you could argue your case to an NPC, giving you the opportunity to reduce your "disagreeable" score with them. In other words, I think the influence system in MotB represents a bit of a missed opportunity. It would certainly have involved significant effort to get it right, but the characters are so good they would have deserved it. As it is, I think it's an ugly wart on all that beautiful writing. I do hope P:E does this part better.

@Micamo, I like your vitriol.

Another thing that bugs me about NWN2 OC is how timid it is. It does take some steps towards subverting/deconstructing the hero tropes -- e.g. by giving each of the "heroic" companions a flaw, and perhaps by not having your traditional "happy ending" -- but it fails to go anywhere beyond the first tentative steps in that. They could've taken the "creepy stalker druid hippie control freak" thing so much further, or the "conflicted, horribly remorseful, damaged paladin," never even mind Ammon Jerro who could have been a genuine tragic hero in the Greek sense. But no. It sort of flashes the possibilities and doesn't go anywhere with them. I just started MotB -- at the beginning of Chapter II -- and am, once again, struck at how the writing in it is miles and miles and miles better. Not to mention the voice acting -- Kaelyn, Safiya, Okku, and Gann are all just perfect. The things I still don't like about it? The dopey pyrotechnics of epic-level D&D and mmmaybe the murky way the Spirit Eater mechanic is presented. I vaguely remember how it works, but if I didn't I would have a hard time figuring it out. (Also my aasimar-cleric-doomguide is just way too powerful for her own good; I figured I'd open up that epic battle with Okku's army with a few area-effect spells, and the poor little furry thing surrendered when I was just getting started. I hadn't even gotten around to him yet.)

@Sabotin, generally speaking I agree. However there is a use for metaphysical 'absolute' good and evil in cRPG's as well. For example, magic items or spell effects tied to it. A holy sword that deals extra damage against evil creatures, or an unholy aura that causes the good to despair are worthwhile narrative/game elements, but to make them work mechanically you need to know where you stand on the good-evil axis. They're also much overused, and badly used, in computer games, so if P:E won't have them I won't miss them. But there is still a case to be made for an absolute morality meter. KOTOR/2 worked this into the narrative rather nicely actually.

Yeah, I think it would make sense to keep it within the dialog system itself. Tying it mechanically to, say, killing things would probably make it too gameable. Might make sense to tie it to quest resolutions though.

Except internal, perhaps. What would you think about a dialog system where the conversation options available to you shifted based on your past actions, for example?

None of the alignments as such are dumb. Many interpretations of them are. Counting it by "evil points" and "good points" is also.

Hear hear. If anyone can do it, it's Obsidian. They have villains with complex yet understandable motives. No need even to go hyper-ambitious with it, just give us an option to play as a ruthless, end-justifies-the-means type, for example, with consequences to match. Mustache-twirling I-kick-kittens-because-I'm-ebul is just dumb. For ideas on how NOT to do it, just see NWN2. The "evil" options in that were just random and pointless and made no kind of sense, either relative to each other or to any character concept other than raging psycho who shouldn't have been able to get out of West Harbor before being locked up for his own good. I feel a rant coming on. Take the very beginning. You get the option to slit the throats of some characters you dislike but who have not done you any actual harm. Which is a completely psycho move. No sane person would do that. A sane but cruel person might toy with them a bit to get back for the bullying, but that's it. That nets you 3 "evil points." Three. And Bevil just stands there and disapproves, then continues with you like nothing was the matter. You also get a spitload of "evil points" just by being pouty and impolite when demanding rewards for, oh, I dunno, saving a couple of kids from being eaten by wolves. Conversely you get 10 "good points" for sending in your Greycloaks to defend a village within your demesne against bandits -- even though, as the baron of the lands, that's your bleeping job, never even mind that keeping the lands safe is insanely profitable. MotB did the evil thing much better; at least it provided you with a meaningful and concrete motivation for your psycho behavior, and didn't just reward plain ol' ordinary nicencess with scads of "good points." You actually had to pull of some real duck moves to get seriously evil, and even those moves made sense from a ruthless, end-justifies-the-means perspective. Ranting aside, I'm feeling pretty confident about P:E, given the writers, especially the involvement of George Ziets and the fact that he's one of the main plot guys. Eric Fenstermaker is responsible for much of the writing in Chapter II of NWN2 though, but since that was the least awful part of the game, writing-wise, I'm not too worried about that either.