JFSOCC

Despite my practically empty checking account I've bought it. That's Hype for you. Edit: my downloader crashes often and downloads about about 1kb/s

Saving and loading. Simple as that, you cannot "abuse" it. It's single player game. It has nothing to do with difficulty of the game or the experience of the game. If I want to check every dialog option before making my final decision, that's my business. That pretty much sums it up right there. Why do people care so much about how someone else plays a singleplayer game. Because we want this game to be fun, not just for us, but for everyone. And while we can't prevent people from ruining their own game (as they are allowed to do), If it's within the power of the game designers to encourage players to play the game in a way that will be more enjoyable for them, why shouldn't they?

Like the Builders in thief? I'd enjoy a god of lost causes, god of the underdog, and a lady luck. I also thought Terry Pratchett's take on gods (Small gods) was pretty interesting.

I want a god like Q from start track, constantly bored with his omnipotence and therefore constantly trying to find something to entertain him. Whether that's screwing up your day, (like a bored kid using a magnifying glass to burn ants) or manipulating those lesser beings into doing interesting things, or just plainly going around theatres and trying to find the best musicians around, for a quick fix. Doesn't care much about how much the world goes out of whack because of what he does. I used to have a DnD campaign where Olidamara had made a parade through the woodlands of musicians like a marching band. Everyone with some musical talent would have to pass a will save or be swept up and become part of the marching band, where they would play till they dropped dead from exhaustion. This clogged up the main road through the forest, ruined the nights rest for most of nature nearby (loud noise) but produced an amazing spectacle. Non-musicians would need to pass a will save or be enthralled by the music. That's the type of boredom solutions I expect from gods.

It's not about free choice. People don't self regulate. If self regulation worked we'd not have an economic crisis. The psychology of man is to try and pick the most efficient way through. The trick is making sure that it makes more sense to play the game normally than to save whenever it gets tough.

Well, I guess I am a cynic, but I think that a slow death of the Palestinians avoids the pesky accusations of genocide, though the end result is the same.

You have repeated yourself like 6 times now, we get it, you don't want it. So far I've only heard one argument from you.

Answer the question "why do people save games" and you can start answering "How do I discourage someone from save scumming"

seriously impressive.

I disagree. there should be options outside playing the game sure, but I think it's fine to have content that is only accessible if you choose to play the minigame.You got to be ok with not everyone seeing everything. I'm probably not going to clear out all 15 levels of the mega dungeon, that's fine. If you don't enjoy the minigames, don't play em. But that shouldn't mean that the minigames carry nothing of consequence. Just that there are options besides them. IE say you want to gather information, you can do that by beating a guy at this game, or you can do something else for other information elsewhere.

chance, not random chance.

I think you may misunderstand the premise. It would be apparent beforehand that some options are riskier than others. It wouldn't be the heart attack example, but rather he can go on to redeem himself, or he can decide "ah **** it, I can go on being the bad guy muhahaha" (to put it bluntly) Random consequences based on chance, and some insight to what the possible outcomes might be beforehand, and I think this would make the game a lot more organic. with no playthrough exactly the same, even if you do everything exactly the same. Now that's replayability!

Ah the fundamental "who owns the land" question. Somewhat irrelevant. Israelis live in Israel now, and Palestinians live in the Palestinian territories. Do we accept right of conquest? We'll, I think we kind of have to. You can't kick out the Israeli's now, they're there, they've roots there now. (even if they didn't before 1948) Should they have come there in 1948? No, not on the shaky claim they had. but that's all moot now. Both sides can each have their territory AND live in peace, this I believe. I would like to say that the Palestinians were already living there when Israel was founded, but they were part of a territory under the control of the British (ever great administrators of the land, look what they did with India, Afghanistan, Persia, the American colonies, etc. lovely cases of ignoring local populace, culture, traditions and sensibilities.) The Argument that Israel is the land that Jews originated from and should be theirs, well, I guess if that's true then we should give back the United States to the native Americans, we should give back Turkmenistan to the Turkish, Turkey to the Greeks, the Netherlands to the Spaniards, Hispaniola to the now extinct native people. Why doesn't that happen? Well because of the history. It's not that it got conquered fair and square, as no conquest is ever fair nor square, it's because people are living there, people who have a shared cultural identity, who call the place they live their homeland, who have roots there. By the time Israel was created, the Palestinians (in a world where great Britain was rapidly losing control of it's colonies after fighting two ruinously expensive wars) had the right to Palestine. The British figured it still belonged to them, so considered this killing two birds with one stone. But that's all moot now. Israel got created, several generations have lived and died there, you can't deny the Israelis their land now. What you can do, is partition the land in such a way that there is space for both peoples. Israel should stop annexing more land, they don't need it. (though there is a fear that if Israel can't keep growing it will die a demographic death. I'm not sure if I care. Israel as a Jewish state rubs me the wrong way. I'm fine with it being a secular state, in which all religions are welcome. Right now it isn't.)

Extracted was surprisingly good. it's off to a slow start. but if you enjoy sci-fi, I recommend it.

@OP. Popcorn brain, it's called. We humans get a small dopamine boost every time we click a link. it's a bit of a "ooh, what does this button do" or "what's behind this door" Clicking random article on wikipedia, getting stuck on tv-tropes, googling yet another thing, it all gives us that little spike. a small fix. and that reward is hard to turn off, because of the way our brains are wired. Getting rid of all that is a huge boon. I'll let you know when I've succeeded

The Length of your posts make them daunting to read, but it does demonstrate that you are passionate and argue well. However, good communicating skills sometimes also mean being brief. I try not to zone out when I see a wall of text (especially because I'm often guilty of them myself) but it does happen.brevity is the soul of wit and all.

That's seriously impressive. I just wanted to say that. that's 13.7 times per second. Insane. The more I read this thread, the more I think the hatred is not against minigames, but rather the repetitive nature of some minigames. the monotony that makes it a chore rather than something exciting. The trick is (I think) to make the minigames such that they are never exactly identical, but unique experiences in every instance. That's doable by changing the extranalities while keeping the mechanics the same. I've seen games that do minigames well, despite it's many flaws, many of the minigames or staple quests in the assassins' creed games are quite entertaining. In the first game, pickpocketing challenges where in different environments, different crowds, targets that behaved differently, such that while it was still "get close enough but not too close and press button x" each pickpocket was different. It didn't do it perfectly, but as an example it should work for what I mean. Many people here seem under the impression that a minigame has to be completely separate from the rest of the game. But that's when you get the "why bother?" disconnect. It's not about making these games optional, it's about making them fun, about preventing them from being overly repetetive, and about good pacing (a 1 minute game EVERY SINGLE ****ING TIME you pick a lock is bad pacing) When you don't make it dynamic enough, it does. As much as I love Jacksmith, the smelting/pouring mechanic is exactly the same every single time. Unless you spasm and toss the mouse across the room, you're not going to spill the molten ore, or have any detriment to your forging process. So, the only factor there is whether or not you spasm. You don't really have to try to not spasm. You just don't do it. It's not any sort of fun challenge. Also, the blade hammering pretty much always gives you plenty of hammerings to go completely around the blade. This makes you be pretty careful, but it's exactly the same every time. So, while I admire the "crafting can be active and fun" notion behind the game, I definitely wouldn't port it straight into an RPG. However, if you were to, for example, have to hammer differently each time (maybe the cooling molten block has a different temperature grid every time, so your hammer blows cause varying effects depending on the temperature of the area you're striking, which could be color-coded much like an infra-red thermal image for simplicity's sake), now you have a dynamic system. I've said it 12 times and I'll say it again. If, after figuring out that mechanic, it becomes too tedious to repeat it a bunch of times, then the exact same logic can be applied to combat. "Oh look, bandits. Man, I've already figured out how to fight these guys and be victorious, so now fighting bandits is purely a chore and is no fun at all." And yet, I don't see anyone suggesting that combat getting duller with repetition is a good reason to not have a combat system. Oh man, this is why I hate random encounters so much. they become a chore when I'm really busy wanting to get to point B from point A. Now I have to get through this combat thing... again.Combat isn't the thing I get most of my enjoyment out anyway. (Which is why I dislike dungeon crawlers masquerading as RPG's, like Torchlight and Diablo and Dungeon siege. All of which to my mind aren't RPG's) But this too, as I mentioned earlier in this post, is about pacing and presenting the player with a fun and distinct challenge. Not just more of the same.

Something is replayable when a second playthrough is a significantly different experience from the first playthrough. That means different challenges, not just different solutions.

I agree, if every lock was different however...

I think Visas is probably my favourite NPC companion character of any game so far. Although Mira was pretty interesting too. I think that Morrigan in Dragon Age was trying to be a combination between Visas and Kreia. I would enjoy it if you get offered the chance of redemption when you may not have realised you did something wrong in the first place. have all your deeds up to that point seen from a different perspective. I dunno. As for redemption from an obvious evil... pass. cliché doesn't begin to describe it.

that's a false argument. it's not like you can't expect anything from the player. it's not a simulation where the only thing determining outcome is character stats. A false argument? Are we scoring a high school debate class here? Yes the player can be expected to have some input altho in a ROLEPLAYING game that input is typically in the form of determining strategies and deciding how HIS CHARACTER would proceed. Success and failure should for the most part depend on strengths and weaknesses in his CHARACTERS skills and attributtes vs those of the enemies and the games mechanics and not on the players dexterity and button mashing prowess or on knowledge the player has gathered from experiences outside the game. Introducing minigames like chess and poker at the very least unfairly skew game results towards those with specialized outside knowledge of their workings while offering nothing that relates to the players CHARACTERS in the game and thus IMO serve no useful purpose in the game save from those who happen to play and enjoy those games outside the confines of the roleplaying game. Would you have the devs add these game forms to the "game requirements" - CAUTION: Player must have a thorough knowledge of chess, poker, backgammon, hearts, spades, & old maid, and be ready to learn other card and strategy & board games specific to this game on the fly in order to participate fully in these adventures. If you want to play chess or poker or other minigames - exit PE and do so to your hearts content - don't clutter up my CRPG with them... Well, that's assuming there's A. use of a real-world game. B. No teaching the game ingame.I suppose you could limit participation to those characters who can reasonably be expected to play.

The problem for this sort of thing (and minigames in general) in a CRPG is the game is supposed to be about the characters skill set not the players - so who's poker playing or chess playing skills is this going to rely on and how are they going to be determined? that's a false argument. it's not like you can't expect anything from the player. it's not a simulation where the only thing determining outcome is character stats. That depends on how generic the reward is, or how completist you are. Not everyone cares to get every reward.

I'm in two minds over this. On the one hand, I would like everything that this game offers to be polished. And animations are part of that. I want to hear a little clank sound when I move a piece of weaponry in my inventory. On the other hand, I don't see why you would need everything to have an animation. Like you said, grapple without an extensive animation but with an obvious effect should be equally feasible, if it adds to the game mechanic wise, I shouldn't disqualify it for lack of an animation.

If there was a "don't know" option I'd have picked that. If you allow movement like that, you'll have to balance your game around that. doable...

Nice try, Japanese Prime Minister