PrimeJunta

Day-um, they found a way to make pointy-eared humanoids badass. Mad props for that. Now all you have to do is find someone with a voice like Benedict Cumberbatch doing a Scots accent. I expect Benedict Cumberbatch himself would kind of blow the voice-acting budget out of the water. Unless he's a backer himself of course. You never know...

Helm cannot into reading. (

I've been replaying Fallout 2 for the first time in many years. I honestly didn't remember much of it at all, so it was almost like approaching it afresh. I do know the game system well enough to be able to roll up a pretty brutally effective character though, and I did remember that in much of the early game firearms and ammo are scarce and that there were some fun quests that you could only do if you were good at unarmed combat, so I took those into account when creating my character. So off I went into the great wasteland. And realized -- again -- how far Fallout 2 falls short of its promise. I thought I'd bring it up here because a lot of the Fallout 2 team is working on P:E, and there are pretty big structural similarities between the two games, despite the very different setting and different mechanics. Both games are big and sprawling in scope with a variety of different locations, both feature something of a blank-slate main character, both are combat-heavy, quest-heavy and writing-heavy, and both have heavyweight role-playing mechanics with deep and broad character development options. So, specifically what, I hear you asking? First off, the combat system. It worked well enough for Fallout with its relatively limited character development scope, but breaks down completely in Fallout 2. Basically, the upshot is that combat is either boringly easy (you almost never take any damage while getting frequent one-hit kills on your enemies), or almost impossible (you take massive damage every round and are likely to be one-shotted), with only a very narrow band where it actually presents a tactical or gameplay challenge. I'll leave the why and wherefore as an exercise for the reader, but hint: it's the armor system and the crit system. Second, the "macro" structure of the writing. A lot of the "micro" structure is great, with memorable, interesting dialog, varied options, interesting characters, motivations, goals, twists, secrets, turns, and so on. But a lot of it has nothing to do with you. I played in a fairly freeform fashion, following the nicely set-up main quest with the occasional diversion when something caught my interest. It almost completely bypassed some of the major locations in the game. I haven't even visited NCR yet, and I was just handed the piece of kit that makes me invincible in combat except to the end-game bosses. From this point on, all combat in the game is mindless chore. What motivation do I have now to go sort out the differences between the crime families in New Reno, or even pay the NCR a visit? It's nothing to do with me, and I've nothing to gain from it; I don't know or care about anyone involved, and I barely even know these places exist. (In fact, there are locations on the map I don't even yet know about.) So the only reasons I have are meta-game: LARPing a good-guy out to solve everybody's problems for them, or completionism or other some such. So, how would I fix this? One, fix the armor system and crit system, and add a cost to the use of overpowered items. The Power Fist uses Small Energy Cells. What does Power Armor run on, sunlight? If it used one charge of Small Energy Cell for every few steps you took, you'd actually have to think about when to use it -- Small Energy Cells being scarce and very expensive. Two, tie in the optional sidequests to the main quest and/or the character's motivations in some way. They can and should still be optional of course, but there should be some reason for you to care about the politics of Vault City, New Reno, or NCR, or the relations between them. Maybe somebody from one of them did you a big favor and then got killed by another of them, or maybe someone there has a shared personal interest in something you're doing for your main quest. Lots of possibilities. Three, give better hints about the relative toughness of the different areas in the world. For example, take Redding and Broken Hills. One of them is a really "easy" area. The other is a pretty damn "tough" one (until and unless you have one of the game-beating armors anyway). Yet the game gives no hint whatsoever about which is which. This is perhaps one of my pet peeves in this type of game -- I want the option of exploring really dangerous areas above my level, but I want to make this an active choice, not something I blindly stumble into. Don't give me "you're too low level for this quest." Give me "Hey kid, that's a really bad area you're about to wander into. You sure you don't want to grow a beard first?" I'm not too concerned about system balance, what with Josh in charge and so on. However I am slightly concerned about "writing overreach" -- cramming in so many quests and so much content that the game loses focus and becomes basically a mishmash of things with no motivating force to keep you going. There is a balance to be struck between on-rails storytelling and free-form exploration. Fallout 1 hit it very sweetly. BG2's Athkatla was close, closer IMO than Fallout 2. But "more of everything for everybody, or at least a lot" is a great electioneering slogan but not necessarily great game design. I hope P:E wan't fall into that trap.

Counterexample here. I've played them all except 4.0 (anyone need a boxed set of the basic rules, only been read once?) and my order of preference is 3.0 > 3.5 > D&D 1.0 > AD&D 2 > AD&D 1. Reasons? First off, none of them as game systems are all that hot. Its strength is and always has been in the huge breadth, depth, quality, and variety of lore, settings, supporting materials, and inspiration. D&D 3.0 hits the best balance between simplicity and richness of stuff to do; 3.5 breaks compatibility for no very good reason and makes it tricky to use a lot of the stuff that was made for 3.0, without really bringing much of value to the table. AD&D 2 is a slightly less god-awful version of AD&D 1, which as a system is abso-bleeping-lutely horrible; unintuitive, clumsy, unnecessarily complex, with moments of glory alternating with unbelievable dopiness. The original D&D is way better than AD&D because it keeps its eye on the ball -- it's a narrowly scoped, simple, lightweight RPG system for a very specific type of gaming. What's more, the only D&D that's actually halfway suited to a computer game is 4.0, which is why I wouldn't want to play it on tabletop. The D&D based cRPG's were good despite the game system they were running on, not because of it. Even D&D 3, which is decent (although not superb) as a tabletop system, is a bad fit for a computer game, and AD&D is just bad, full stop. All of the D&D based cRPG's would have been much better games with game mechanics designed ground-up for them, retaining only the lore and settings from the D&D franchise.

I'm hoping Mask of the Betrayer in terms of writing style and variety of settings and encounters, but without the dorkiness of epic-level D&D.

I liked the relationship with Triss in The Witcher 2, and the one with Shani in The Witcher 1 wasn't horrible either. Both of those pretty much required a protagonist with a clearly-defined personality and history though. I remain doubtful about whether such a thing could be done well enough in an "open protagonist" game like this one, and downright skeptical about whether it would be a worthy use of scarce writing resources. Even so, I am gonna vote on this one...

Yes! Polynesians kick ass all across the Pacific, and who else can you say that about? Also they're way underrepresented in games.

Yes, Gregorian chants FTW. Also IMO the world is a slightly better place if it holds a Premontrian Canon Regular who enjoys computer RPG's. Give Brother a break, folks!

His abbey checks out. They're Premontrian Canons Regular. Canons are kind of like priests who live in a monastic order, so it's quite possible for a canon to refer to himself either as a priest or a monk in good faith. It's a slightly unusual arrangement though as in most orders it's one or the other, as I understand it anyway.

+1 for pain. Torment is copyrighted, so can't use that.

Yah, perfect balance -- or parity of choice if you will -- is a mirage. But if balance is good enough that there's going to be a period of vigorous discussion about which build/party is "the best" with a relatively broad spread of contenders, then that's already pretty good. Certainly way better than in most games. Also VtM:B did that bit pretty well -- the various bloodlines were genuinely differentiated, and it was not obvious which clan was "best." They just had different attractions. I played with most of 'em, and enjoyed all of them, Ventrue the least though.

I have no idea how the spirit meter thing worked in MotB since I never played it. Surely there's a better way to implement, though. Creative and simple but not overbearing, I think Obsidian could come up with something nifty. And I wouldn't want the concept to become a main part of the storyline or anything, just something that gives flavor and maybe even illustrate how souls work in the lore. The basic mechanic was pretty simple. You hungered for spirits to eat. You could either feed that hunger, in which case you learned wack new abilities, e.g. feeding on the spirits of living beings, not just, well, spirits, but that meant you got hungry for them faster and also some of the stuff you learned to do was incredibly vicious. Or you could suppress it, in which case you learned ways to keep your hunger down and keep it under control without having to do anything outright crazily evil, but you didn't get those wack new abilities either. One side effect was that you couldn't rest-spam anymore, since the meter went down a quite a lot when resting. I suspect that's what caused all the whining. I considered it a good thing OTOH.

Oo. Tough one. 1. Fall-from-Grace, 'cuz I still have a huge crush on her. 2. Dak'kon, 'cuz he's the deepest-thinking cRPG companion ever. 3. Kreia, because where would we be without at least one of MCA's dominatrixes of a certain age? 4. Sulik, because grampy bone. Also I want to see what Kreia makes of him. 5. Gann, because damn, hagspawn. How cool is that? Did I mention Fall-from-Grace?

@IndiraLightfoot: You, ma'am, have excellent taste. The only one of your list I'd quibble about is #1, on the TANSTAAFL principle. Open-world games have pitfalls that more linear ones don't, and it's a good deal of work to work around them while keeping the game playable; these workarounds come with their costs as well. Restricting the openness of the world somewhat will make it easier to write in tighter and better structured story. I very much enjoy open worlds with dynamic features and emergent gameplay, but I also very much enjoy tight narratives especially if the storyline branches in meaningful and interesting ways. Both of these can also flop: an open-world game can become a herp derp what do I do now sandbox, and a constrained-world one can become an interactive novel. Bottom line: I'm cool with either if it's done well. Open-world with emergent story à la Fallout is great. Partly constrained world with branching story à la VtM: Bloodlines is also great. Other than that quibble, I'll happily sign onto your list.

They've said hand-painted portraits, so presumably no animation. Think it would be a bit of a waste of time IMO. Hand-painted is good. There might be an option to import your own though so if they support animated GIF or animated PNG you could always roll your own.

I hear they dug up some Viking graves in Britain recently and discovered to their surprise that a good many of the warrior graves -- the ones with weapons and shields in them -- held female skeletons. So it looks like the Swedes had their womens' lib thing going already back then.

The more I think of this idea of yours, JFSOCC, the more I like it. It would even be pretty easy to do. Presumably you've already got the vicious dialog in, so you could just start by disabling the most "good" lines, then as the curse progresses gradually reduce your options until you've only got the most despicable, low-down, vicious choices left. And add a few more balls-to-the-wall-deranged-evil lines here and there for flavor. You wouldn't even need to code in any extra companion reactions, since presumably they'll already react to those vicious choices anyway. Then write a nice little sidequest to uncurse you, and you're done. Seriously, that's one of the best ideas I've heard in a while. Hmm, maybe I can steal that for my PnP campaign; I'd just have to recruit the goody-goody player so he'll be in on it, and then watch what the others do when he suddenly starts acting out of character...

Good one. "Tea anyone?" "Yes! Verily I will drink the blood of my enemies from the skulls of their children!" "Uh... you feeling OK?"

Am I the only one who liked the curse in MotB? 'Cuz I did. I thought it was great.

Just to point out, that's not actually the case. There are various cultures which have had belief in magic where the magic was in no way diabolic. Hooray for being a bit of a theology and mythology buff Such as the common Christian belief that prayer or other activities like a pilgrimage to Lourdes for example can sometimes cure incurable diseases. That's a cure disease spell right there. Anthropologically speaking anyway.

I'm partial to certain Jack Chick tracts meself...

Thinking about this a bit more... besides or in addition to a wall of numbers, what other ways would there be to communicate this information to the player? How about sound? Suppose the sound for a hit consists of two components, a "clank" of a weapon hitting armor, and a "thunksquelch" of it doing unpleasant things to flesh. Could you mix these together dynamically so that the sound you hear would be a composite, with the loudness of each component determined by how much damage got absorbed or went through, and the total loudness determined by how much base damage the strike did? I don't know squat about sound engineering so I've no idea if this would be workable in practice. Just an odd idea.

There is a case to be made for a separate skill, which reflects your ability to identify and bestow enchantments. It would make more sense to connect your ability to identify magical weapons to your ability to craft them, for example, than to a catchall "Lore." Maybe a master in Lore could identify an en-runed axe as The Valkyrie's Kiss, forged by Fane the Dwarf, forgemaster in Gubenheim, for the berserker Hrothfjellir Skullgrimsson to aid in his quest to slay Fastolf the Frost Dragon... but you'd need an enchantment master to divine that it provides frost resistance (30), +2 damage (+5 with armor penetration +10 against dragons).

OK, thanks for clearing that up, Arkeus.

No, I don't know. That's why I'm asking. Not all games tell you that info, you know.