PrimeJunta

Socialist Realism is only good for kitsch value. A cRPG should not stoop to that. All forms of bigotry make for good story and setting material. Utopias breed few heroes and make for boring stories. What I don't like is gamemakers oblivious to their own privilege who just make their imagined worlds pander to that. I have no fears on that score however, knowing who's writing for P:E. I also don't like transparently didactic stuff, even if I agree with the politics. There's always a subtext, but I don't want it rubbed in my face TYVM.

That's one of AD&D 2's flaws. Mages just get way overpowered at higher levels. You can't make a game without dominant strategies like that in a system so badly flawed.

To each their own. I hated DA:O combat. Partly because of the MMO-esque mechanics, but mostly just because it was so. endlessly. repetitive, and so heavily reliant on the "neener neener" ploy, i.e., materializing waves of enemies around you or plonking you in the middle of an ambush. BG2, on the other hand, had rich, varied, and occasionally interesting combat challenges that made the most of the horrifying mechanical mess that is AD&D v2. So for combat I'll take any IE game over DA:O.

I'm all for naked people in P:E. I just want the nakedness to make sense -- and I would prefer not to have nakedness for the sake of titillation only. There are circumstances where it makes sense to be naked or nearly so, and circumstances where it doesn't. There are even circumstances in which it makes sense to go into battle naked, or nearly so. What doesn't make sense -- and, what's more, what's extremely threadbare, clichéd, and tired -- is the trope that mean wear full plate and women wear chainmail bikinis, or that men wear breastplate shaped to deflect blows, and women wear breastplate shaped to show off their breasts. In short, I'm all for naked disembodied spirits, naked berserker warriors who paint themselves blue, hoplites who go into battle in a tightly-packed hot sweaty formation carrying nothing but their shields and spears, naked wild dancing witchy rituals invoking spirits, deities, or other powers, naked orgies, naked baths, cultures where people go more or less naked in their everyday life, and Cap d'Agde. Just no boobplate, chainmail bikinis, or no-ladies-over-21-allowed. That is all.

@Ulquiorra, I can direct you to a couple of Tumblrs in case you need to educate yourself about female anatomy.

I like problem-solving in games. Puzzles... yes and no. If they're too transparently puzzle-ish, i.e., there's no or very little in-game rationale for them being there, they tend to jolt me out of the game. I think that's what first comes to mind when you think of a puzzle. But if P:E turns out to have lots of challenges that need smarts, knowledge, color perception, tone perception or whatever to solve, and if they're well integrated into the gameworld, I'm all for it. The toughest ones, or at least the ones that would otherwise lock out, say, colorblind, deaf, or tone-deaf people, are probably best left in optional areas. There can be too much of a good thing of course. Wouldn't want P:E to turn into an adventure game.

I'm all for optional, hard to reach content. They flesh out later playthroughs brilliantly. Even better if there's some of such stuff that's only accessible to particular character builds. I had a lot of fun looting the Death God's vault in MotB for example.

Must-read essay on Sparta and that homoerotic movie you're talking about.

On a second reading, maybe I will play a monk after all at some point. And I will name him, Thelonius.

I think the "different eras" look makes perfect sense for P:E's Conquistador premise. The Vailians are clearly Renaissance, whereas the others are more "antiquity." This mirrors the New World in the 1500's.

I think JES answered that rather nicely. Using your soul's powers takes a lot of dedication and training. A wizard's training is not like a monk's or a cleric's. A monk can't suddenly start using a wizard's skills any more than a martial arts master can suddenly start using a master watchmaker's skills. It takes a half a lifetime to become a master watchmaker or a martial arts master, even if both skillsets are "powered" by the same thing. (I'm liking monks a lot more after that explanation BTW.)

Sawyer: "I like strawberries. Strawberries are tasty." Gfted1: "Sawyer hates strawberries." Reading comprehension FTW.

Heh. I thought the Ixamitl looked obviously Mexican-Aztec. Interesting how different impressions people are getting from those little figurines. Google.

Ixamitl sounds more Aztec than Maya to me. Axolotl, Mictlantecuchtli, Tlaloc, Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl...

I also notice the men don't have their dongs hanging below the hem of their khitons. Sexist!

That depends on how much control we get over the AI, and how easy it is to override. It wouldn't be hard to make an AI script that would have the monk behave relatively reasonably most of the time. I.e., not keel over dead because he's too dumb to use those wounds on his own initiative.

Re the monk, I'm still waiting for the cultural underpinnings before deciding whether I like them or not. (Currently leaning towards "not" FWIW, but that opinion is very much subject to change.) The mechanics sound cool enough, but whether it'll turn out weeaboo or not depends on how it fits in with the rest.

I love the cultures. The Vailians remind me of an article I read somewhere on (IIRC) Namibian fashion, which is based on repurposed Prussian styles from the colonial period. Great job on the Aedyrans too. I like the printed (or woven?) patterns on the khitons and togas. Nice late antiquity vibe there without being a slavish copy. If anything, I'd like to see you go a bit crazier with the styles and colors. The Vailians could be even more flamboyant with brighter colors and bolder patterns, and the Ixamitl wouldn't mmmaybe need to hew sow closely to their real-world inspiration. Also, hat plumes can never be too big. Never.

D&D 3 druids make great solo or small-party characters. They have boss summoning abilities and animal companions, almost as good self-buff and debuff abilities as mages and almost as good heal/defensive magic abilities as clerics, and even un-buffed they fight as well as or better than clerics (the limited equipment selection doesn't mean much when some of that equipment is perfectly viable). And for scouting they can shapeshift into something discreet. The trick is not to min-max. Have above-average scores in everything but Cha and Int. Don't over-invest in WIS, use items instead to bring it up to the level you need to cast your spells. You don't need more than 14 WIS to start with, and can bump it up as you level up. Try it once in, say, NWN 1 or 2, where you can't have a full party. You'd be surprised. They're almost as lethal in every situation as a character optimized for that situation, at every level. I can't think of another (standard) class that manages that quite as well, although mmmaybe a well-optimized cleric is close. Of course at high levels you can create crazy multiclass/prestige class combos that might inch ahead, but it's usually a slog to get there. So short end of the stick, no. Not in D&D 3 at least. Druids are powerful.

Food mechanics are like any other mechanics. If done poorly or they don't fit the setting, they're annoying, pointless busywork. If done well and fit the setting, they're exciting, interesting, and add to the experience. NetHack is an example of a game with food mechanics done well. You don't just get hungry and have to eat (or starve to death). Using magic or wearing rings makes you get hungry faster, but there are magic items that slow your digestion. Eating particular things has effects, often permanent effects. Eating a red dragon will give you fire resistance; wolfbane cures lycanthropy, carrots cure blindness, apples cure sickness, eating a ****atrice will turn you to stone (i.e., kill you); fruit and vegetables can tame ponies and horses while meat can tame cats and dogs; you can choke on your food and die if you get greedy; starving yourself or overeating exercises or abuses your abilities, which will rise or fall over time accordingly. And so on. Making good use of comestibles becomes an essential gameplay element, not just a matter of stacking up on food rations so you don't run out. My take? I'm all for food mechanics if they're done well and contribute to the game. But if they're there just to limit resting or some other balancing purpose, then... no, please, find some other way.

It's funny how things link up. Going off on a tangent, but I hope you'll forgive me – this isn't a hugely busy thread so I'll take the risk. I'm currently reading a book called This Is Your Brain on Music. It's about the neuropsychology of sound and music. One of the claims the author makes is that music is a game of expectations. We absorb the conventions of our musical culture already when we're very small, and when we get into different kinds of music, we set up schemas for them. Then, when we listen to a piece of music, we anticipate what's going happen next – the next note or chord, the next phrase, the next movement, and so on. However, a piece of music that conforms perfectly to the schema is boring. A skilled composer will toy with our expectations, build them up, then surprise us; make things that almost but not quite conform to the schema and leave us in tension, which s/he may or may not eventually resolve. This, erm, struck a chord. I just listened to a Leonard Cohen record which has a song on it, called Nightingale. The lyrics are heartbreakingly sad: I built my house beside the wood So I could hear you singing And it was sweet and it was good And love was all beginning Fare thee well my nightingale 'Twas long ago I found you Now all your songs of beauty fail The forest closes 'round you The sun goes down behind a veil 'Tis now that you would call me So rest in peace my nightingale Beneath your branch of holly Fare thee well my nightingale I lived but to be near you Tho' you are singing somewhere still I can no longer hear you ...but the melody is a light, happy, major-key tune that hops, skips, and dances, instrumented with bright sounds and a quick tempo. This creates a tension that makes me tear up, every time. (Which, incidentally, is the same thing that happens at the conclusion of Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungs – Walhalla has been burned down, the gods have fallen, Siegfried and Brünnhilde are dead; it's as dark an ending as you could possibly imagine... but the music swells, glorious, golden, uplifting, full of joy and hope. Again, whoa, dude. I almost tear up just thinking of it.) I think this principle applies just as well to narrative. We have a certain schema in mind for, say, an Infinity Engine style fantasy role-playing game. I'm pretty sure that most of us would find a game that conformed exactly to that schema pretty dull. (DA:O did, just about, and I found it terribly dull; I didn't even have the strength to finish it as a matter of fact.) A really great game is something that takes that schema, applies it enough to, as it were, let us get our bearings, and then subverts and defeats those expectations; surprises us. There can be no delight without surprise, and I find a game that never delights me a complete waste of time.

Yeah, PS:T is the quintessential mystery narrative. Structurally it's no great shakes IMO, and falls flat towards the end IMO. It wants to be a double-arc, but the second arc – post-Sigil – isn't anywhere near as good as the first one. There are good ideas there, but it's sorely lacking in depth and the kind of loving detail Sigil is so filled with, and the sub-stories in it are fairly predictable, linear, 1-2-3 affairs. Frankly it smells like "we ran out of time and money" to me. (Cf. Malachor V.) (Speaking as a rabid PS:T fan here – despite its failings, it is my favorite computer game of all time, by a long way.)

IMO DA counts as single-arc because the main objective is clear from the get-go. We know we have to kill the archdemon and stop the blight pretty much from the get-go. That objective never changes, and all the sub-plots serve that goal or are diversions from it. Also IMO Fallout – the original – is a near-perfect illustration of how it should be done. The entire story unfolds by discovery: there's nothing but the structure of the world itself pushing you into any particular direction. You start out knowing nothing about the outside world, with a simple but urgent objective. You pursue that objective by exploring the world and discovering things about it. And once you achieve it – where a game would normally end – spit gets real. There's a minimum number of choke points, a world that feels like it's just there and you're interacting with it, yet there is real narrative structure there as well. Also as an aside, IMO Fallout 3 completely failed to grasp how this thing works. That world felt just like a big, big mess of quests and puzzles set up exclusively for your benefit. I didn't even bother finishing it, and perhaps sadly I never got around to NV because it turned me off to the whole thing. Perhaps I'll pick that up one of these days as it appears it's much better.

Computer games, especially cRPG's, have the potential to tell stories in completely different ways from linear forms like books or films. I always get excited when a game actually takes advantage of the possibilities of the medium. In my opinion, a traditional single-arc story in a game is a wasted opportunity. I would like to see the story unfold through non-linear discovery; branches where decisions close off entire mini-arcs. Anything but the usual. Also, very good post.

Yeah, I was talking about sexualization as well. And I'm quite aware that I'm in the minority here! Re The Witcher, I think it's interesting precisely because it embodies both a lot of what's wrong about women in videogames, and how it can be done right. What's more, The Witcher 2 is much better than The Witcher in the good, and has dropped a great deal of the bad. What I thought most jarring about The Witcher 1 was that the writing didn't really mesh with the visuals -- Shani, Triss, Abigail, and a quite a few others were well-written, complex characters, but they all looked like drool-worthy 17-year-olds; the babydoll nighties were especially corny.