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Frenetic Pony

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Everything posted by Frenetic Pony

  1. Frenetic Pony
    I utterly despise the explicit "(lie)" next to dialogue options, why is it there? What possible scenario would it be useful? I remember such a dialogue from KOTOR "Are you prepared to accept the Jedi code?" 2 options were "Yes" "Yes (Lie)" There's no difference in gameplay impact. It could have just been "Yes" and then I decided whether it was a lie. Somehow the other option, to lie explicitly, bothered me. Maybe because it didn't actually feel like lying. It was, ironically perhaps, telling the truth in its own way.
  2. Frenetic Pony
    As a sorceress, Qara was a useful companion. But any time you have someone in your team who is not a team player, it feels more like a waste of time rather than roleplaying all the "conflict resolution". It's like watching an episode of "The Apprentice". Personally, I could have done without her attitude. I remember her for all the wrong reasons, to the point where I built my own sorcerer and played the game without her, just so I didn't have to listen to her. Her voice was like a cheese grater against the side of my head. Same with Neeshka. Hey, I loved Neeshka as well! My NWN 2 party was usually her, Qara, me, and swapping someone. At least you remember them, and could avoid them if you liked. That, I suppose, at least shows a solid character. Some NPC you remember, has a definitive personality, and can either take on or avoid as you wish. If you end up with an NPC you HAVE to have, that's bad because who's to say you enjoy them? If you end up with an NPC you don't remember at all, then what was the point of them? As long as there's a wide variety of NPC's to choose from, and they're memorable, then that seems good to me.
  3. Frenetic Pony
    On the other hand, I'd have to disagree with much of the bashing of NWN 2's cast. I loved Qara. FIRE! Fire everywhere ahahahaaaaa! Having an actual manian on your team was fun. As was Bishop, who at least seemed intelligent, and Ammon Gero. Even Sand was good, because it was so easy and fun to dislike that prick. On the other hand I don't really even remember much ABOUT KOTOR 2's crew, even though I replayed it so recently. Kreia was, sort of forgettable. I dig that she was supposed to be some nuanced, other take on the force, but I didn't see much to here besides "I'm manipulating you". Visas and etc. are ALL just, they're weird but seem odd for the sake of being odd, not memorable AND odd.
  4. Frenetic Pony
    Bao-Dur Perhaps the most annoying NPC I've ever been forced to have in a party. Recently played KOTOR 2 again, and I wanted to bash his head in every moment he was in the party. His voice was screetchingly painful to hear, his attitude was, agressively passive. Say something, choose something, stop... being you and die! Just fantastically grating, even more so than Elanee (NWN 2) or "The Bioware guy" (Alistair, Carth, etc.)
  5. Frenetic Pony
    An adventure based economy give you incetive to go out to kill monsters to get better loot which will help you kill more monsters to get better loot. It's a very basic loop that you're stuck in, but you're doing something, accomplishing something, and it works. When it doesn't work is when you have no motivation NOT to kill everything in sight, because more money right? But maybe it would get too repetitive, but you're passing up money! I suppose then, that the real solution is to not make any dungeon or area filled with too many enemies or get too repetitive. Or, or rather AND, make smaller, fodder like enemies carry an equivelant amount of money/loot. In other words, the most common enemies should give you so little gold that you don't even want to bother killing them for it. This removes the dilemna of "I'm not interested in wandering around killing these guys, but if I don't I pass up all that money!" Without removing the basic incentives for exploring every nook and cranny in a dungeon or getting more loot to kill more guys to get more loot.
  6. Frenetic Pony
    Going for too long doing the same thing. I think that's one of the big reasons many enjoyed Baldur's Gate 2 more than Icewind Dale 2. IWD2 was always all combat, all the time pretty much. BG2 had better pacing in many areas. You got interspersments of story, buying items and levelling, solving a puzzle or two, checking for traps and etc. All inbetween combat encounters. One of the worst dungeons I've ever encountered was from Dragon Age that failed at this. The same enemies, the same art assets, for two+ hours. It was nauseating by the end, enter a room that looked the same as the last, bash the same enemies, retrieve the same loot, move onto the next. My brother quit the game because of that dungeon, I almost felt like doing so and only pushed through because I enjoyed the story.
  7. Frenetic Pony
    Here's something about every IE game, every enemy just sits there and waits for nothing until you come along and bash them in the face. It might be nice to see them doing other things. One obvious oversight was no alert from noise, drawing enemies out via aggro was a very effective strategy. Having one that sees you yell, and draw others seems needed so you can't clear out an entire building/cave of them by aggroing one by one. But beyond that having the enemies do something little might be interesting. Have patrols wandering around, drinking ale, sleeping, etc. Just to give them a bit of life beyond targets waiting for you to stomp on them, and maybe have some interesting combat scenarios. Patrols might be bad for someone scouting with stealth, or easy to get past if they're sleeping. Maybe the enemies aren't armed and have to rush over to get their weapons? Catching them all at once by charging straight in might be better in that scenario. A lot of little stuff could be done.
  8. Frenetic Pony
    Of course it doesn't matter if there's stealth resources. Lockpicks (try lockpick, fail roll? Lockpick breaks.) Invisibility potions, etc. If combat is hard enough to require use of X or Y that takes money to replenish, that shouldn't stealthing your way past something be just as hard and take just a much? In general I mean. I doubt it would be practical to balance every area so they're just as hard and require just as much for each approach. But as long as it's balanced OVERALL then if you're a powergamer on the hardest difficulty you at least need to determine which area is which if you want to get as much out of it as possible.
  9. Frenetic Pony
    I do definitively dislike prophecises. Been reading the Riyria Revelations, and while I really liked the first book I'm not sure when I'll pick the second book up again, as I put it down about thirty pages in after a prohecy came into play. "Well gee, thanks for ruining my suspension of disbelief by taking away the illusion of choice from the main characters." I put up with it in Harry Potter, because it was kind of more clever than usual. But I still despise it. Which brings me to another trope that I generally despise, that of an interesting character turning into the "good guy". Ok, I was fine with it in Star Wars and Han, it was Star Wars. But it's the reason I stopped reading The Dark Tower. The main character in that series starts out as INTERESTING, a unique guy that's different from you average protagonist. By book 3(?) he's 90% of the way towards being a goody two shoes white knight. And that's another reason I stopped reading Riyria, the two main characters go from interesting somewhat amorale types towards "the good guys yay!" almost immediately in the second book. I know it's not "rpg" specific, but if you've got interesting characters, for the love of everything KEEP THEM INTERESTING. I don't want another story about how someone turns their once complex worldviews and utterly relatable self interest around to being some do gooder hero to all. I, at least, just get bored and tired of them as characters.
  10. Frenetic Pony
    Will there be branching paths? Ehhhh.... the only games I've seen do branching paths well are things like Alpha Protocol and The Walking Dead. But that requires a lot of time and effort, and a rather linear gameplay scenario. Since it seems Project Eternity will be more open ended, I'd rather see multiple endings (if anything) for subquests rather than any truly branching path, which might necessitate a lot of work on the main quest that could be going to side quests instead.
  11. Frenetic Pony
    Playing Dragon's Dogma right now, and honestly I like the way health is handled therein. You get your health bar and heal spells and thousand plants you shove down your throat to heal yourself. But if you take too much damage part of your health goes down and can't be restored until such time as you go to an inn. Meaning as you wander about the amout of health you can restore via random forest plants and spells gets lower and lower until you simply have to back to town and stay at an inn to rest and get it all the way back up. It's a nice balance between no health restoration (not the type of game PE is) and regenerative/infinite heals all the time, which is kind of... ADHD like in that there's no medium term risk/reward, you're always 5 seconds away from being back to perfect and so don't need to think about anything beyond about the next 10 seconds.
  12. Frenetic Pony
    Why just follow D&D lore, which is what is being talked about here, down the rabbit hole? Ok, so souls exist, they're things, they're semi understood. What are the undead? The undead are, assumedly, soulles bodies. There's something a slight bit different anyway. So who commands souless bodies? Not people who are commanding souls, because the undead don't have any. So any class with say, healing spells, should be able to command the undead yeah? Imagine they're brought to life by the same sort of healing magic, soulless abominations and whatnot. But wait, there isn't healing magic! So who can command the undead, is there even undead at all? Maybe not! Why grab ALL the cliches if you don't have to after all? So maybe undead are... different than soulless monsters? Maybe they're bodies with the souls of bad whatevers in them. Demons, monsters, what have you! So then, whatever class has magic that can manipulate other souls can then manipulate the undead. I'd say, call it binding a soul of some evil thing to a soulless body and there you are, a monster thing. But since it's bound the bond can be weakened or broken or commanded or etc.
  13. Frenetic Pony
    A grid with tabs would be neat! Works well for web browsing among many other productive software interfaces, may as take what you can get, it would useful for finding items quickly anyway.
  14. Frenetic Pony
    Can't see a stilleto? May I point you to a cool little demo call "phone wire AA" http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=3D&ID=89 Or rather, just anti aliasing for very thin objects, it's not actually anti aliasing, and it really is dead simple. It just makes sure objects that are really thin don't vanish entirely by, instead of you not being able to see them, fading them out via transparency the farther away they are. So that way, the object, like a phone wire in many games, doesn't get smaller than a single pixel, and so doesn't just vanish (and possibly pop back in).
  15. Frenetic Pony
    The simple equation here is that you need to hit a range, where players can fail, perhaps greatly on the hardest difficulties if they do the "wrong" things, and succeed greatly if they do the right things. This includes how you build out your party. If there's no "wrong" party balance, then alternately there's also no "right" party balance. There's nothing to win, and it becomes an aesthetic choice rather than an interesting, strategic one. And an aesthetic choice should be fine for lower difficulties. Players there might just want to have the npc's they think are the most fun to have around, and choose the powers they think are the coolest, all without regard to how the party works together. But for higher level difficulties I suspect players are going to desire, even expect that optimizing each characters build with respect to the party as a whole to be incredibly important. This is an area where DIablo 3, among many other modern RPG games, went wrong. They see simply that there's a section of players that don't enjoy the challenge of building out there characters in an extremely optimized way; and so they get rid of that. This completely ignores a large section of players that DO enjoy optimizing numbers and character builds. A game can have it both ways if the work and effort is put in, but many game developers don't even recognize that otpimization players are even there (loud and vociferous as some may be). Personally I hope Project Eternity is a game that can accomplish both goals.
  16. Frenetic Pony
    I enjoyed the Baldur's Gate 2 style of getting legendary items, it made them feel more special to have to collect all the unique peices and then take them to an appropriate character. But obviously if there's any other, non epic crafting to be done it's just going to be a hassle and doing it yourself would be a lot less annoying. Though, for those who have played it, Kingdom's of Amalur had a neat way of allowing you to customize what exactly you were crafting. You had components that gave various stats to the eventual item when put all together.
  17. Frenetic Pony
    The angles thing? Not doable, sorry. The entire level, whatever it is you are on, is rendered out to a single texture and designed SPECIFICALLY to be played from the angle set. Other 2d isometric games could be and were changeable in angle because they used multiple sprits layered on each other. IE and PE are a single huge texture, you'd have to take 4x the storage, a lot more bug testing, a lot more design just to get in something that wouldn't be terribly useful (have to test each thing for each angle, etc.) Zooming, sure! It's doable easily, I've had fears about image quality if there's not several resolutions to choose from of pre-rendered textures, fears that are 99% unfounded but I'm sure they've checked for themselves either way.
  18. Frenetic Pony
    Was great when he made the Morrowind soundtrack... Is now so bad I question thine sanity good sir! (Internet glove slap) But no, there was poll about this earlier, very few votes and I'm happy to agree with such a poll. No Soule, please.
  19. Frenetic Pony
    Only one ending!.... OPPAN GANGMAN STYLE! And then every character from the game appears and starts dancing.
  20. Frenetic Pony
    Of course! Minsc would hardly have been Minsc if he could yell that justice is near and things about his boot and boo!
  21. Frenetic Pony
    I'd always been annoyed that the D&D low light vision stuff never worked in the IE games. So... now they could! Better vision in the dark... A normal vision distance in the dark while others get reduced, or non low light vision gets a reduced chance to spot hidden stuff? Both? Obviously a torch negates that for the distance of the light, and may be perfectly doable... in a variety of ways. And it could be rather interesting to boot. A dungeon where light attracts baddies you definitely don't want to attract? Another dungeon, a long one, where light keeps away enemies that would otherwise just kill you eventually, and your torches keep going out. A lot of possibilities for such. Or they could just not be done at all.
  22. Frenetic Pony
    How about, just no vampires at all? Because they're lame and I end up rolling my eyes everytime a vampire shows up. Absolutely the lamest and least interesting of mainstream cliche monsters out there. I'm certain I'm not alone. Come up with something else instead. Here: A crazy soul eating monstrosity thing, that takes power from consuming multiple souls into itself, growing more twisted and powerful and insane with each soul it devours and imprisons. That's cool, that's original, that works with Project Eternity. I'd much rather see that than some... probably would totally offend people that like vampires opinion I have of the stupid things.
  23. Frenetic Pony
    This was due to technical limitations, having to do with not turning the game into a stuttering mess/crashing/etc. Since computers have advanced a full decade (via Moores law being 32x as powerful) I'd love to see an option just to keep all bodies laying around permanently.
  24. Frenetic Pony
    Don't like either, don't think they add anything really substantial whatsoever to gameplay sice you have no direct control over them, nor does manipulating their stats via levelling/gear seem interesting. But others like them, and it's not like I'm really bothered by them.
  25. Frenetic Pony
    So here's a popular mod that generally comes out for RPGs, one where you get party members that start at level 1 so you can level them up how you want from the beginning, rather than starting at your level. Of course this might tick some Roleplayers off, so that's why there's a poll. Of course maybe it could just be another in an ever growing list of options you can tick on or off before a game starts.
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