Micamo

If only game development was ever that easy. That's an utterly massive amount of work to be doing with a (relatively) small team, and you're assuming there will never be unexpected issues that crop up along the way. Games much less ambitious with much larger teams and budgets frequently take 3-4 years to get out the door: If anything I'd say the 2016 estimate is rather generous.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you're seriously expecting to see this game before 2016, you need professional help.

First, D&D-style attributes are, well, just as bland and terrible for this sort of thing. They're really ambiguous and don't nearly capture all the nuances. Like, what exactly is the difference between a high-Wisdom character and a high-Intelligence character? Ask 5 players and you'll get 20 different answers. Does Charisma include how pretty the character is? If it does, then does the archetypal "spoiled princess" (pretty face but a self-centered brat who couldn't empathize her way out of a paper bag) have a high CHA score, or a low one? Is my high INT wizard character really good at logic puzzles, information retention, and/or research? (Believe me, these are not in any way correlated.) The fact of the matter is the stats on your sheet only line up with the fiction of your character in the way you imagine they do. The character isn't the stuff on your sheet or even the concept you have in your head, it's what comes out at the table that matters. A well-designed ruleset can help with this process of bringing out an interesting character in play: A badly-designed ruleset acts as an unnecessary straightjacket. (Note a single game can have both good and bad parts.) Second, in D&D especially these things aren't in conflict. Your character build feeds and is fed by the character concept: Your concept determines what you want your build to do, and the choices you make for your build can help further refine your concept. CharOP isn't (fundamentally) about obsessing over the numbers like an accountant to make sure you get as many pluses as possible, it's about looking at the ruleset and asking "What kinds of awesome can we do with this?" Just look at an example like the Nasty Gentleman.

Why not?

Even if this *were* a problem, which it isn't, it's easily fixed just by being creative with the names and descriptions. E.g. I could easily see an attribute that affects to-hit chances with weapons as well as to-hit chances with spells (IIRC P:E is using a 4E-style defenses system instead of saving throws; sub with save DCs if I'm wrong) being called "Discipline." A character with a high discipline is careful and exacting about how they go about things, while a character with low discipline is sloppier, more reckless.

1. I don't think these attributes are supposed to be literal representations of the characters' physical and mental traits the way D&D's ability scores are. 2. There's no need for monsters to work off the same set of stats as PCs. Plenty of TTRPGs embrace PC/NPC asymmetry and I see no reason P:E couldn't do the same.

In A Wicked Age runs with a similar idea for its character stats. Instead of Strength, Dexterity, etc. it uses the following: Covertly Directly For myself For others With Love With Violence You assign dice to each of these stats. When your character does something, pick 2 of your stats that apply, then roll their dice. As usual with Baker's games the mechanical implementation leaves much to be desired, but the concept is solid. I'd be down with it if P:E took this route.

Y'all are probably gonna hate me for this, but I didn't like King of Dragon Pass. I felt like I was just watching a bunch of numbers going up and down without much understanding as to what any of them actually meant or what I could do to affect them. It's like playing Tamogachi, except instead of taking care of a puppy I was taking care of a lovecraftian horror beyond mortal comprehension. "BELLKSLKJLJKSLKJSKJLJELKRLKJS!!!!" "Umm, are you hungry?" "LKJSFDOUIFSDUOIWREOIISDFUIOLKJSDUOI!!" "Uhh, have some steak, I guess?" "RJJSJSJRJREUIUIDIUIFUDUIDFER!!!" "I'm so confused." Maybe if I hopelessly floundered around with it for 100 hours I'd start to get the internal logic behind it and start to have fun with it but, uhh, no thanks. That said, if I understand you correctly it sounds like you just want scripted random encounters like (some of) the ones in Fallout. You just want to keep the interesting ones and dump the boring "some radscorpions pop into existing around you and attack" ones.

It's not removed, it just works differently now due to the way the new quest marker system works. The correct format is "movetoqt [QUEST ID]".

This isn't so much a divide between "Western" and "Eastern" as it is a divide between "Good Design" and "Bad Design." Empathy for an NPC comes in many forms and can be a powerful tool when used correctly, and there are many, many ways for it to go wrong. Final Fantasy 13 is a good example of a game that tries really hard to make you empathize with its characters and just fails on every imaginable level. Thing is there's only so many lines you can include in a game (no voice acting greatly expands this budget but doesn't make it infinite): You can choose to spend this dialogue budget on a small number of very deep NPCs, or on a large number of relatively shallow NPCs. Persona goes for the former and Skyrim goes for the latter, but as far as I'm concerned they're both valid approaches. The advantage of the latter method is that it allows you to create a world with scope, which is where I think Bethesda really shines as a developer. Compare how Skyrim feels when you're just wandering around exploring stuff and how it feels when you're doing the main questline listening to NPCs monologue what you need to do next. I don't think it's so much about companions being evasive and more about pacing. It's better to space out meaty interactions instead of giving them to you all at once in a giant dump. DAO somewhat had this problem where almost every conversation option you could have with a companion could be done pretty much as soon as that companion was recruited. If you're anything like me, you go through every last one at the start, then check back after every story event to see if they have anything new to say and get frustrated as they rarely do.

Aria always seemed to me like that 11 year old punk who starts selling pot in the halls at middle school and thinks he's a hardcore gangsta. Nowhere near as cool as she thinks she is. The writers were trying to hard to sell her as this badass mastermind but I just never bought it.

Also, this is very much a way of poisoning the well. If you make all the NPCs the player tries to talk to just waste the player's time, the player will stop bothering to read what the NPCs have to say. Then when you throw in an NPC that's actually interesting and you intend for the player to speak to, they'll just skip right on by them because they'll assume they have nothing important to say. This isn't just a theoretical either: This exact problem is what turned me off from Sacred. What's the point of having a big open world to explore and dozens of NPCs in each town to talk to if all of them say "Leave me alone" and "Why are you bothering me?" I eventually gave up on talking to NPCs in that game altogether. And once you take out that, you just have the ****ty lootgrind mechanics and... well... I'll stick to Torchlight, thanks. This is one of the reasons why they started putting exclamation marks over people's heads to indicate you need to talk to them: It's easier to give the player a filter so they know who they need to talk to and who has nothing to say, than to make a world interesting enough that the player will actually want to take the time to explore it.

This. Especially in AAA titles that like to make up for bad writing and direction by throwing money at the problem by hiring the most expensive actors available. With this in mind, I think FO:NV did a relatively great job at striking a balance between natural-sounding conversation and using its lines efficiently. Using written prose instead of spoken lines gives you a lot more freedom, but sadly full voice acting is the industry standard now.

Does she do anything later? As far as I remember she doesn't have any further relevance after that meeting with albatross. I guess that thing you can have Mike say about St. George and the Dragon was pretty cool, but the only thing notable about Sis herself is just how out of place she is in the world being constructed in that game.

Basically, you want more of Torment's cranium rat tail collection quest, less of Baldur's Gate's "A <Monster> stole my <Magic Item> while I was travelling through <Location>, please go get it back."

My problem is this "humor" of "Ha ha ha look how terrible this campaign you're playing is" doesn't make you witty, it makes you a bad DM trying to use irony to cover your ass. Don't worry guys, I'm totally being horrible on purpose so it's okay! I'm not really gonna respond to the rest of your post because, while I agree with your general thesis that you can make what's essentially a fetch quest interesting and meaningful by giving it proper narrative context, the side quests in Baldur's Gate are a really, really bad example of how to do this.

I never said "mechanics don't affect the aesthetic of play at all", I said "there are multiple ways to reach the same aesthetic." I firmly believe you could capture the aesthetics of the IE games, the important part, while ditching or replacing all the superficial bits. You don't need the D&D ruleset, isometric perspective, RTwP, classes and party management, or any of that. However, *having* these superficial bits doesn't mean you'll capture the aesthetic. Compare SMB3 with the New Super Mario Bros. series: The latter has all the window decorations of the former, but it's unplayable garbage. Take, for example, Hotline Miami and Super Meat Boy. It's hard to explain what I mean precisely since the feel of a game is a rather ephemeral quality, but although their mechanics are different in just about every aspect, the aesthetics of play are mostly the same.

Here's an idea: What if, everytime you entered a new area, you gained a journal entry with some common knowledge or mythology about the area for you to read, if you want? "Today we saw the End of Arothen. Legends say, back when the gods fought war over the right to rule creation, this was the site of the death of the greatest among them, whose demise left this scar upon the land. They even say his legendary greatsword still rests here, but no one who has searched for it has ever returned..." I'm sure a professional writer can come up with something much more evocative and interesting than that, though.

Don't Starve does a pretty good job at it: For the most part, items that degrade are items that require non-renewable components to craft. Take the example of Flint, which is required for basically every tool you use for collecting stuff: Flint never ever comes back once you pick it up, to get more, you have to go explore a new part of the map and hope you find some. This limits the amount of time you can spend in a safe area camping the renewables: Eventually, you'll run out of flint and need more. It's only one of many systems used to encourage a healthy amount of exploration of the map instead of falling into a routine.

Why have quest rewards at all? No, really. If the quest is interesting, you don't need to dangle a bag of XP and Gold in front of my face to make me want to do it. If you make a location interesting I'll want to explore it just to see what's there. And if the quests/locations aren't interesting, then what exactly are the rewards accomplishing?

Honestly, I think this is just one more reason XP needs to die in a fire.

The bland, meaningless fetch quest has a long, loooooong tradition in RPGs. The very first CRPGs being developed had literally nothing but. There's certainly nothing recent about them; If anything newer RPGs have fewer of them than old ones did.

It depends on what you mean by "how a game plays." If you interpret "play" as the literal motions of the mouse and keys, then yes, ruleset is a big part of what determines that (the other major factor is the UI). However, I think it's more useful to interpret it another way: How does the game feel when you play it? For the sake of discussion let's define the feeling of playing a game as that game's aesthetic of play. The aesthetic of play of a game is (partially) determined by its mechanics, but you can arrive at the same aesthetic of play through multiple routes. To make an analogy, if the aesthetic of play were a bowl of ice cream, the mechanics would be the spoon. Mechanics are the method by which you experience a game, not the game itself. Mechanics become meaningless when dissociated from the aesthetic they're intended to create: The spoon doesn't get you very far if you have nothing to eat with it. Likewise, you can serve the same aesthetic with radically different mechanics and different aesthetics with the same mechanics applied in a different context. Just look at how different in feel the IE games are when they (mostly) use the same engine and ruleset.

Only if you assume quest choices and backstory to be mutually exclusive: What if we used the same development resources to implement backstory *and* quest reactivity? Like, let's say there's a quest where you have to talk to this Orc chief, Grug: If you do another quest to make Chief Grug your friend, then there's an alternate solution to the first quest. What if, however, you could make "I'm friends with Chief Grug" part of your backstory at chargen and be able to get that alternate solution without having to do the befriending quest?

I really like these sorts of mechanics in games, but there are two things I'd hope the Eternity team manages to avoid if they go with this sort of thing at all: 1. If you have multiple starting locations, don't make the same mistake DAO did. That is, don't introduce a plot in the prologue and then throw it under a bus to not be resolved until way, way later in the game (or not at all). Especially not to replace it with a much less interesting and emotionally engaging plot. I remember being all excited to explore the Mage/Templar thing after finishing my origin story when I was playing DAO for the first time, then being dragged away kicking and screaming to join the grey wardens. I didn't care about Caelan or the Darkspawn, dammit, I just wanted to go to Aeonar and save Lilly! The majority of the origins had this problem (Human Noble and Dalish Elf didn't, only because they were so boring the Darkspawn crap was actually an improvement). 2. If you have background traits, don't make the same mistake NWN2 did. Your background trait gets mentioned like, once during the harvest festival (so to see it at all you have to play through the tutorial), if even that, then it gets ignored for the rest fo the game. This is actually really common in CRPGs that let you choose things that represent your backstory, it's only briefly acknowledged during the beginning and then quickly becomes irrelevant. I suspect it's a symptom of the larger development problem that the middle of a game is usually what gets done first, with the beginning and end of the game done last (and rushed to get the game out the door, at that).