PrimeJunta

Yes, but why would you want to kill them? Doesn't driving them off work just as well?

Uh... why would you want to kill them?

@LadyMuck, lucky your point (1) was the first stretch goal for Torment: Tides of Numenéra. They did originally write the PC as a woman though.

@Razsius, we have different tastes, that's clear. Do you find it disturbing? I don't find it disturbing. No accounting for tastes. I dunno. I play games for fun. I like games that seize my imagination or have really good "visceral" gameplay. I cannot into games where I'm just asked to larp... unless there's an exceptionally interesting world to discover. What's got me scratching my head is that Arcanum's world ought to be just that, exceptionally interesting, and I ought to have fun discovering it. But no, it just doesn't do it for me. -- Also, Arsène Lutin was just my latest character. I've also played a tech-related gunslinger, a powergaming mage, and a combo swordsman-magic-user. I hated the combat with all of them, which is why I finally tried Arsène, figuring it would be essentially a "skip the combat" button so I could appreciate the rest of it, but ... no. I always seem to get up to level 10...15 or so, and then lose interest.

I got up to about level 15 FWIW. Shrouded Hills, Blackthorn, Tarant, that one decaying fief down south, that one town at the coast with the statue problem, and a bunch of dungeons including the one with the annoying golems that wreck your swords if you try to h2h them. Think I ground my way through that one once too, but I still wasn't having much fun.

I didn't particularly like the gameplay, nor did I particularly dislike it. It's certainly nothing so special I'd play the game just for it. It would've been more than adequate had the game itself been more interesting. My problem is I thought the characters, universe, and story were bland, predictable, and generic, so it just failed to grab my imagination. Come to think of it, that's more or less my criticism of Baldur's Gate -- not imaginative enought to grab my imagination, and the gameplay while "fine, I guess" isn't good enough to grab that part of my brain. Cf. Icewind Dale -- also fairly vanilla swords-n-sorcery-ancient-evil story and setting, but much more fun to hack through. On my second playthrough now; this time I'm powergaming with a F (greatsword), F/C (mace), F/C (hammer), T/F (large sword, locks), T/F (axe, traps), F/M (bow) party, and still having a lot of fun doing it. Which makes me even more puzzled about why I can't like Arcanum, although it is the exact opposite -- it's a unique, imaginative, and unusual universe, characters, and story. I ought to like it. Why can't I?

I didn't care much for ME, although it didn't evoke any huge antipathy in me either. I thought it was unimaginative and boring, except for a few bits very late in the game. Also repetitive, with tons of filler, and really boring loot (and too much of it). Never even bothered with 2 or 3. Nothing to do with the mechanics or the fact that it's a genre crossover; I often quite like those. Nice voice acting though, especially FemShep.

I think achievements are more interesting for game devs, actually, since they work as telemetry about how players actually behave (as opposed to how they think they behave). This can be useful. It can also be turned into a mill that grinds everything down to the lowest common denominator. There's no reason these milestones need to be visible to the player though. Personally I dislike them.

True, Fallout was broken too -- but it wasn't quite as badly broken, because (1) the main questline didn't leave a breadcrumb trail to the power armor and turbo plasma rifle, (2) even if you metagamed and beelined for them, you'd have to do a fair bit more adventuring on the way (compared to the scope of the game), plus the water chip time limit gave an incentive to focus on that for the early part of the game anyway, and (3) you never reached a level high enough to make things truly absurd. Put another way, you were driving the same rusty heap in both games, but Fallout had you on a leisurely weekend trip on some scenic byways, while Fallout 2 threw you on the Paris-Dakar. It could handle the former but fell to pieces on the latter.

@Sacred_Path -- If you look at a game like a kitchen appliance which you can "objectively" assess simply by checking its performance against a list of features, then all that makes sense. On the other hand if you consider a game to be in the same category as, say, a novel, a play, a film, a TV series, or some other product of creativity intended to seize the imagination, that laundry-list approach strikes me as frankly silly. I do not treat games like kitchen appliances, and find the idea of "objective game reviews" utterly wrong-headed to start with. I'll take an informed, well-expressed opinion over it any day of the week.

I can answer that for my part. I have two reasons I actively dislike FO2, despite having completed it a number of times. Short version: trash combat with crazy balance issues, and way too much carp for its own good. Edit: and @Malekith by the way, I played FO2 first. I was startled by how good FO was in comparison when I played it later, after I had finished FO2 once or twice. The combat system in the Fallouts isn't very good. It's very heavy on thresholds, which means that you either do zero damage, or a megaton of damage. Plus, the enemy AI is just plain bad. The upshot is that the difficulty is either "fall asleep on the keyboard" or "insta-death." These threshold effects get worse as you go up in level. The original Fallout was relatively short, which meant that things only got kinda wonky near the endgame, so most of the game you were experiencing something like decent combat. With Fallout 2, this system breaks down pretty quickly. The early game is both tedious and punishingly tough (especially if you're not powergaming), after which it switches to a state where areas are either fall-asleep easy or insta-death hard, right up to the endgame -- it's insta-death hard if you haven't done most of the optional content, and fall-asleep easy if you have. So my experience with FO2 is that in the early game I'm playing kite + creep'n'save against trash mobs, which is tedious, whereas in the late to middle games I'm figuring out by trial and error which order I'm supposed to play the areas (and quickly getting bored because it gets so easy). Second: there's too much stuff in the game. On the one hand they've made caps and loot matter by making ammo for the most high-powered weapons scarce and expensive, so there's a strong incentive to packrat; in addition, you get the car with the trunk where you can dump things. But merchants have limited caps & other lightweight loot. The upshot is that I spend way more time than is fun on inventory management -- just trucking stuff to merchants and sorting through the junk I have in the car, on me, and my mules. More tedium. The same applies to the larger scale of the game as well. There's really no reason for me to visit many of the areas, other than metagame ones ("I need the XP"). When I last replayed it -- after an interval long enough that I didn't remember much about it -- I was just following the clues of the main thread and got my Advanced Power Armor before even having visited some of the main areas. There goes the challenge, and the incentive to visi them. Too much stuff, and it's not connected up properly. Bottom line? FO2 could have been good. It has its moments, but it fails in the execution. The areas don't hang together, the level cap is high enough that the character development and combat systems collapse, and it's way, way too exploitable. It's not as much fun as FO in the narrative/story sense, it's much, much less fun in the combat/character development sense, there's much more tedious busywork, and to have any fun at all you need to "metagame" continuously -- by creep-and-save, by a priori knowledge about which areas to visit in which order, or with exploits that make you way overpowered for any point in the game. If the resulting gameplay was really good this would be tolerable, but it isn't: it merely switches from bad and frustratingly hard to bad and mind-numbingly easy.

Only? You, son, do not know the meaning of loving a game.

Sure, whatevs. Poke away, I don't mind -- I was asking for it really. Again, I just don't see the point of cluttering up the public thread with it. It's a leetle off-topic, don't ya think?

Never said you did. This was fun for the first few rounds, but if you have a problem with me, please send me a PM so we can sort it out there; I don't see any reason to burden this thread further with demonstrations of our respective wit.

Dagnabbit, Arcanum again. I really, really, really, REALLY want to like it. WTF am I doing wrong? I just play it up to about level 15, and then lose interest. In theory it has everything I should like about a game, and I've enjoyed games with worse combat than this... er, I think... but just... no. I can't get into it. I think I'm having the same problem as with BG -- I just can't bring myself to care about anything or anyone in the game, so it just feels like do-this-do-that busywork for no compelling reason. I thought maybe it was the frustrating combat, so I did some reading up on how to make it the least painful possible, and rolled up Arsène Lutin, the gnomish charlatan's protégé with a minor knack for magic, proceeded to Harm my way through the early game, then watched my faithful band of minions mow down everything in their path. And that got boring. WHYYYY? I'm SUPPOSED to like this for cryin' out loud! Wacky world, steampunk, magic and gunslingers and a victorian vibe and great music and out-their characters and... I just don't. If someone has ANY ideas on how I can get my imagination in gear with this one, all suggestions are welcome. Please? PS. I bought that Book One of the Malazan series. No comment yet, but that may follow. Thanks for the recce everyone.

Re IWD, it's a game I enjoy purely for the "gamey" aspects. The story is the bare minimum to keep you going from place to place; it's not that much better written than the dialog in BG, but then you're not really asked to give a spit about it. You do what you gotta do. I'm playing just for the next levelup, the next bit of cool loot, the next bit of way-cool scenery, and the next combat challenge the game is going to throw at me. I'm really digging the way the combat is balanced. Really. Best IE game experience so far in this respect. It's tough enough that yeah, I do need to reload a fair bit when things go pear-shaped, but not so tough that I'm replaying every encounter -- even every "boss" encounter -- and I get a real feeling of danger and adventure, and a real feeling of satisfaction either when I guessed right about what I was going to encounter and prepared accordingly, or managed to adjust my tactics to win anyway. And it's diverse, with a changing mix of enemy types and maps. It's good, clean action-RPG fun.

Yup. Couple aeons in a hell realm for me for sure. Now, was there anything else?

Since we're talking scores, I loathe numerical scores given to games with a passion. Games aren't toasters. They're products of creativity. I wish scored reviews of anything that involves more subjective assessment than rating a home appliance were staked through the heart and buried at a crossroads. And yeah, I have had to assign those numbers. I still hate 'em.

Oh, and about that epic thing -- the word's usage has shifted a quite a bit, but when someone says it, at least I think of something grand and sweeping, where the fates of nations are decided, heroes rise to triumph over impossible odds and all that commotion. In that sense PS:T wasn't epic. It was more of a tragedy really.

I know! It's terribly un-Buddhist of me. Buddhists are supposed to be calm, serene, compassionate, self-effacing, humble, and all that commotion, and also terribly understanding of other religions, even silly ones. I'm a terrible Buddhist![1] I don't know how deep MCA is into Buddhism -- as in, if he's ever practiced it. But whoever wrote it grokked that stuff. Also it isn't necessarily Buddhism, could be Advaita Vedanta as well, on the level they appear in PS:T the concepts are similar enough. The Dusties are a bit like an uncharitable Hindu caricature of Buddhists actually. So maybe he's really a closet Hare Krishna. Anyone have a photo of him in robes banging a drum at an airport? (Bad PrimeJunta! Bad! There I go making fun of other people's religions again.) [1]Or I would be, if I identified as Buddhist, which I don't. I may be too old to take on an identity like that.

Dafuq? Where did that come from? I don't think any of my favorite artists are Buddhists, and I'm pretty sure none of them are New Agers. They do rather tend to be full of themselves, that's for sure. But then in my experience that applies to converts of every stripe, whether it's to Christianity, Communism or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

You have a deal, @Razsius. However I'm still in the middle of Icewind Dale, so it'll have to wait until I finish that. I'm liking it more all the time by the way -- it's completely straightforward and unpretentious, the atmosphere is great, and the combat challenges are just the right mix of easy hacking mixed with tricky situations. It's challenging without being frustrating, which is a tricky balance to hit. Right now I'm playing at a bit of a handicap as I just dualed my thief to mage so I have nobody in the party able to disable traps, but a couple more levels ought to sort that out. If you need any tips on playing PS:T, please let me know.

The dicussion about Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment in that Good, Bad, and Ugly thread (which describes the thread too pretty well IMO) got me thinking. I can easily list, say, five or ten games that I really, really, like. I think I can see a pattern there, even though they're, on the face of it, a pretty eclectic bunch. My question to you is: what's your list, and is there a common thread there? What is it about them that makes you like them? Here's my top 10 -- not in order of preference; I couldn't sort them from number 2 down: * Planescape: Torment * Deus Ex * Mask of the Betrayer - Rome: Total War with the Total Realism mod - NetHack - Dwarf Fortress * Vampire: Bloodlines * Fallout * The Witcher 1 * The Witcher 2 For a surprising number of these (I've starred them), if asked to describe them, I'd say something like "well, the gameplay is kind of meh [or insert some other significant but more specific criticism of the gameplay], but man, it really grabbed my imagination. Put another way, it's clear that as much as I like to gripe about deficiencies in gameplay -- and as much as I'm hoping that Project: Eternity will have the cRPG game system to end all cRPG game systems -- ultimately, for me, it's really not that important. If gameplay isn't so badly broken that it's still able to carry the content, and the content is worth carrying, I'm pretty happy. And, conversely, the best game system in the world isn't enough to get me hot and bothered if the content in it is unimaginative, generic, badly written, or just not worth the trouble. How about you?

That was a very sweet post, Razsius. I think my problem with BG may be... a mirror image of your problem with PS:T. With PS:T, you're unable to switch off the critical part of your brain when it comes to game aspects, and so the "gamey" flaws are constantly jolting you out of the experience and frustrating you, so you're never able to get to the parts of the game that make it worthwhile. With BG, OTOH, I'm unable to switch off the critical part of my brain when it comes to the writing aspects, which means I can't make myself care about any of the characters. They just don't come alive for me.

Colin McComb on what they were thinking when writing PS:T.