Slaunyeh

Women can do anything men can do, while wearing chainmail bikini. Now that's gender equality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe he meant the Vatican (and even there, I'm not so sure).

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.

To emphasise this you would not, for instance, swing a two-handed sword in the same way you would a one-handed sword. Every 2-hander demonstration I've seen have involved a lot more stabs and slashes with the blade, because if you tried to swing it you'd die. A two-handed sword used correctly is a surprisingly defensive weapon and very good at parrying or deflecting attacks.

Oh gosh, pet peeve incoming: IF orcs were to be included, I'd like them to be orcs. The word bring some expectations with it, and if you try to be all hip and 'oh-gosh-look-at-how-different-we-are' about it, everyone just ends up confused. Are orcs primitive brutes? Are they honourable samurai? Maybe they are both because half our writing staff didn't get the memo! If you want to have orcs, they should be, well, orc-y. If you want something unique and special and different, but vaguely orc-inspired... go ahead. Just do everyone a favour and don't call them orcs. There. I didn't rant for twenty pages. I call that a win!

Sure, let everyone be killable. Just let Biff the Understudy take over the role of any important plot NPCs that are no longer with us. Seriously, Biff the Understudy needs to be in the game.

I'm not really a fan of how monks are usually presented in D&D-esque fantasy settings, largely because they feel so tacked on. It works better in a setting like Exalted. That said, however, I have managed to create something cool with the monk class in D&D. My elven heavy armoured, halberd wielding fighter/monk whirlwind of destruction was awesome. So some of the aesthetics of the classic D&D-like monk can work well, but in its' entirety it feels a bit silly. IMHO. That's not to say it can't be a good class. I just think the setting designers have to take extra care to make them fit into the setting (and maybe be a little less traditional).

I'm for. While I could generally go both ways, and handing out xp "the old way" wouldn't be a deal breaker for me, I like the idea of having alternative ways of completing objectives, and making it less about murdering the countryside. That, and it's usually a pain to balance "murder everyone" against some sort of "killed nobody" xp bonus achievement at the end of a quest (not to mention the motivation of sneaking through a quest to get the "killed nobody" xp bonus, and THEN murder everyone on your way out, to get both. ). I'll be interested in seeing how they pull it off.

I don't think that's actually true. I mean, whether you have save points (or some similar mechanic) or can save whenever you feel like it, you can still retry every encounter. One may be slightly more inconvenient than the other, but if you're defeated in an encounter you will have to to retry it, whether you have to jump back three encounters and start over, or you just have to replay the one you lost. One option just makes you hate your life more than the other. I'm sorry, but I can't see any argument for picking the more punitive option. Secondly, if an encounter is absolutely crushing me, I don't see how being able to save is really going to change that outcome. If I get defeated I will have to retry the fight anyway and I'd probably have to try different tactics next time, no matter what. Being defeated because I do something wrong is certainly frustrating enough for me. I don't need the game to also kick me in the shin and say "oh, and because you suck, you also have to replay the last half hour". Finally, if I really wanted to kill the challenge of the game (which I don't believe the save everywhere option does, anyway), what's that to you? With one option, you're free to make the game as challenging as you like, while I can make it as challenging as I like (as far as saving the game affects the challenge at all, that is). With the other option, I have to play the game your way. Why pick the option that only favours you when you can pick the option that favours the both of us? (and if your answer is "because the option that favours both of us will inherently break the entire game", we have truly come full circle in this discussion. )

I play Dark Heresy. A lot. So I like my games pretty dark. That said, for a fantasy game like PE, I'd liked the Arcanum level of darkness. On the surface, the setting wasn't terrible dark, but the plot got pretty creepy on occasion. Also, gnomes suck.

We definitely need playable lichen. It is time to discard the mammalian cultural imperialism that is so prevalent in current gaming culture, and embrace the symbiotic union of fungi and plant. Hooray! *ahem* I may have misread the topic.

Dungeonoutgrowthitis is actually a very serious ailment, and clearly the guy isn't doing too well. Fortunately, for him, the dungeon is only, like, 20 inches across (otherwise he might have trouble getting out of bed).

I don't think you will get a constructive discussion as long as your argument boils down to "anyone who disagrees with me obviously doesn't know what's good for them." (And, seriously, can we drop the 'saving your game is cheating' argument? It's not doing anyone any favours.) I'm still waiting for anyone to explain how saving anywhere will inherently ruin the game, the game design, and everyone's enjoyment of the game. Last time we asked, the response was something like "oh, you can't explain how, but it does". Sorry, but that's not good enough.