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Slaunyeh

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About Slaunyeh

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  1. Women can do anything men can do, while wearing chainmail bikini. Now that's gender equality.
  2. I laughed. I recently (like a month ago) finally let myself get convinced to buy and play Planescape: Torment, surely all the hype wasn't wrong despite everything I had read from a critical reviewer or knew from the liberties it took with the setting. Then I sat down and played the game and found out, nope, it is easily the most over rated game Obsidian has ever been involved in and has more bad gameplay decisions in it than you can shake an entire trees worth of sticks at. News Flash: That you don't like the game, doesn't mean that everyone else are wrong. To me, Planescape: Torment has the best story ever told in a computer game. No contest. It may not be your thing, which is fine, but calling it "over rated" is just like saying that a lot of people don't hate it so they must be wrong. We're not.
  3. Oh is that what it is. It felt like a much too specific term to just mean "save whenever you want like just about every PC game ever", but in 'that other thread' no one seemed to know where it came from. So, thanks for that.
  4. Oh, there are several logical flaws with Skyrim's armour system, and I certainly wouldn't advocate adopting it. What it did manage to accomplish, however, was the ability to equip "old armour" because you liked the look, without suffering tremendously for it. Assuming you spend your points to that end. That, as a concept, I think it important. In a perfect world, armour wouldn't improve significantly throughout the game, and different types of armour would have different pros and cons so your choice would largely be based on what you wanted to accomplish. I'd rather see character choices improve your abilities through the game than improvements being strictly gear-driven. Instead of starting the game with leather armour, and ending the game with leather armour +10, I'd rather start the game with leather armour and end the game with Leather Armour of Something Useful, while having picked up abilities that increased my armour by +10 while wearing light armour. Or some such. Fortunately I'm not a game designer, though.
  5. The armour system in Skyrim was actually one of the few things I liked about that game. Your armour rating had an arbitrary (and secret) cap which was pretty dumb. But it also meant that you weren't required to grab the heaviest armour in the game to max out your armour stat. With the right choice of skills and perks, you could wear just about whatever suit of armour you liked best aesthetically, and still end up near or at the armour cap. I'm not sure it was entirely intentional by Bethesda, but this created a system that essentially divorced the appearance and function of your armour. As long as you build for it. I liked that. Not that I think that system should be copied over directly, but I think there's some inspiration to take away from it.
  6. But this is a game designed by humans for today's technology and not for an unimaginable future supercomputer capable of flawlessly simulating an entire universe, so your options will always be restricted to what the designers can create. I'm not sure why today's technology would be inherently worse at this than the technology of the past. Or why technology would be a factor at all. It's not about supercomputers generating an infinite amount of content. It's about presenting dialogue as 'motives and opinions' neutral as possible. The game shouldn't go out of its' way to tell you what your motivations are for accepting a given quest. Or how you feel about something. It's a writing issue, not a technology issue. I think games like Fallout 3 and F:NV manage this pretty well (at least I never felt alienated by the dialogue). On the other hand, Guild Wars 2 is a particular good example of how not to do it. And games like Mass Effect and The Old Republic goes out of their way to hammer home that you're not playing your character. You're just tagging along for the ride (admittedly, for those two games, this is a limitation of today's technology). I hope Project: Eternity will allow me to play my character, rather than letting me play a character belonging to one of the writers at Obsidian.
  7. I'd like more descriptive text, as in Planescape: Torment. Especially if the amount of detail presented was based on, say, successful perception checks and whatnot. Also, vaguely related to this topic, I recall a review of Planescape: Torment back when the game was released, which reached this great conclusion: "Too much conversation, not enough roleplay." To this day, that's still one of the funniest things I've ever read. I'm not sure what the reviewer consider "roleplay", but it probably involves clobbing cranium rats while sitting at your desk dressed as the Nameless One.
  8. If the game asks me to make uniformed character advancement choices, it better dang well offer some kind of way to alter that choice. If the game ends up being magically better than all other games at informing the player about the consequences of any given choice, then by all means. No such system is necessary. But I'll want to see that before I believe it.
  9. I vaguely recall enjoying Alpha Protocol a great deal, but I don't actually remember much of anything from the game, oddly enough. Maybe I should replay it.
  10. To quote the Discworld novel, Small Gods: "We get that in here some nights, when someone's had a few. Cosmic speculation about whether gods really exist. Next thing, there's a bolt of lightning through the roof with a note wrapped round it saying 'Yes, we do' and a pair of sandals with smoke coming out. That sort of thing, it takes all the interest out of metaphysical speculation." Of course, the Discworld also have an atheist god, so. Yeah.
  11. I went with "Yay!" because I like turn-based games (*sigh* alas poor Fallout, I knew him well), though I'm really perfectly happy with PE being a classic non-turnbased game.
  12. Please try something new. But don't try something new and label it as something old and expect us to get the subtle differences without some really thorough documentation.
  13. I have only one request to make of Obsidian in regards to druids (and magic in general): If you're going to implement some form of shapeshifting, please make it functionally viable and not god-awful. If you can't figure out how to make shapeshifting functionally viable (which I am guessing must be really hard because I can't think of a single successful example right now), come up with something that isn't shapeshifting, instead.
  14. Uhm, I'm pretty sure orcs were created by Tolkien (unlike, say, elves and dwarves that he just put his own spin on). Anyway, that isn't my logic at all. What I'm saying is that when you say "orc", everyone is going to have some basic expectations associated with the term. Not necessarily the exact same expectations, but the word carries a lot of baggage. There's a really tiring trope plaguing most current fantasy settings of being oh-so-different and look-how-we-subvert-classic-fantasy-tropes (note the irony). My "logic", as you call it, is that the further you deviate from the 'classic' orc, the less people will instinctively know what the heck you are talking about, and the more you have to explain everything. Eventually you get to the point where you might just have called your race something else to avoid the initial confusion. I guess I have to make this point clear though: This is not an on/off switch. I'm not saying you have to recreate Tolkien-esque orcs down to the last wart or you should call them something else. In fact, I'm not even convinced that Tolkien's orc is necessarily the 'default assumption', anyway. But at some point it just gets silly. Especially if you've not been good enough to communicate this to your own writing staff, so that some stories will involve orcs being classic orcs, and some will have orcs being the pink fluffy sheep that they are in your setting (or whatever). As much as some people go "bah, Darkspawn are just orcs", that's exactly the point. They are the DA:O setting's equivalence of orcs, but they aren't particular orcish. If they had been called orcs, the differences would have caused more confusion than benefit. There's no reason for them to be orcs, unless they are actually, you know, orcs. In short: The advantage of having an orc race in your setting, is that people will have a general idea of what they are about, so you save some explaining. All you have to do is focus on how orcs fit into your setting, and perhaps how your orcs deviate from the norm (for instances, orcs don't absolutely have to be chaotic evil. Maybe they have been somewhat 'civilized' in this time frame). The disadvantage of having orcs in your setting, is that if you really imagined something completely different, not only will you have to detail everything about this race, you also have some default assumptions actively working against you. That headache is entirely unnecessary.
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