Luridis

"Dude gets away from the horrible thing to live out the rest of his years irrevocably insane" is a pretty significant difference from "dude dies a horrible death by ancient sea god" in my book, but YMMV. And with Lovecraft, that may have been the plan all along.

That's pretty much what I get out of it too... But, I don't know why so many people think the boat was responsible for anything at all. The creature turned into a poison cloud as a way to say... lolz you can't kill me but I can choke you to death. Or, at least that's how it looked to me.

Going out and actually reading some Lovecraft would be a tremendous help in dispelling such misconceptions. Well, you apparently read it... But didn't understand the ship scene at all. The ship didn't kill it and in the end changed nothing. To clarify: Cthulhu dispersed into a toxic cloud and was reforming as the ship made a break for it. The whole point of the entity as a plot device is that it cannot be killed, it is unbeatable. Human ego loves heroes and underdogs and happy endings. Reality doesn't always work out that way, and that idea is scary.

You know what, scratch all that. Bryy, you have the right to make any game you want, and call it whatever you want, assuming you're not squatting a trademark. But, I also have the right to disagree with you about what's thematically consistent with a particular subject. For the record, I hope your game turns out great. I hope it's all you expect. Just because my opinion differs and we don't agree doesn't mean I wish to discourage your creativity. I just see things differently, and that's all the statement is intended to convey. People disagree with me all the time, but it doesn't stop me from working on whatever it is I have planned.

I don't agree with you. The genre is fine. Lovecraft is an author, not a genre. His work is fairly unique in its presentation in a similar way The Empire Strikes Back was. Imagine of Gimli succeeded in destroying the One Ring in Rivendell with his axe, that would neuter the whole damn story. “Now all my tales are based on the fundemental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.... To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.” ― H.P. Lovecraft “And now at last the Earth was dead. The final pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form—and how titanically meaningless it had all been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of humanity—how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools in the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions—or even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever. The stars whirled on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns newborn, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led.” ― H.P. Lovecraft No where in that do I see: Hope, hero, luck or anything resembling an underdog beating the odds. If you survive, its because you happened to fall beneath the notice of the destroyer. You can't cross the streams and walk away like you kicked butt and took names, if you remain sane, that's probably because your struggle with sanity will only please the Old One. If you want to go a different direction and use his work for inspiration, that's completely normal. He has inspired lots off off shoots in horror fiction. But to say a "hero" fits neatly into his themes, is to miss the entire cynosure that is his work. So, good luck with your protagonist.

You know, I'm biased as I'm making a game on Lovecraft, but these are ridiculous standards to hold to. I'm sick of people shredding their creativity in order to stay on the "tradition" route. It's not "tradition"... Lovecraft by the very nature of its theme the villain can only be survived, joined with or it is secretly yourself. That is the root premise of Lovecraft horror. That is what set it apart from the rest of horror: ancient, unimaginably powerful and absolutely unbeatable, period. Now, you can have something Lovecraft inspired that works differently, but that the evil can be bested in whole with a happy ending is not a theme I've ever encountered in his fiction. It's of course okay to call your fiction something different, but to say "this is the Lovecraft way" doesn't work if there is blue skies and happy children petting puppies at the end. Oh, these guys seem to get it too... I don't know why it's so hard to understand.

Yep, xbox decided to follow in Sony's footsteps this time around. And, that that said... I'll leave you with my favorite classic platformer of all time. Though the guy playing is sorta whiney.

1 - This is what I meant when I said the functionality of the middleware is likely tuned to the lowest common denominator for the hardware. I obviously don't write games so that was a guess, but I have used other kinds of middleware in other cross platform scenarios. And, in the cases I am talking about, you can't really depend on anything being there but the foreign interface wrapper to POSIX/libc/STL or whatever level you're working at, even if one of the platforms has mylovelystandardlibs. 2 - No, you can't optimize for OOE / BPE at the level of say, Python. But, you can write code that inadvertently defeats those mechanisms. 3 - I know where you're coming from. I don't think the cell was a sham, I think it was ill-executed, very ill-ly executed. Given what game developers were blogging, as tell as their CEO's at the time, the predictions I made to a friend when the architecture was first announced were spot on. Which went something akin to, "game developers are going to hate it and it's going to take a while for them to build momentum on it because it changes a lot, and from what I understand gives them little assistance in tools and docs. They're setting everyone back, and making the hardware cost a ton more and the benefits that would offset this are probably years away." Or well, you get the drift.

1 - It is now... It was not this way at launch. Which is why, as one of the videos I linked stated, had developers forgoing the use of the SPE units all together and running everything on the general purpose core. Why? Lack of docs, lack of tools. http://www.redgamingtech.com/sony-playstation-3-post-mortem-part-1-the-cell-processor/ 2 - Thanks for the additional insight. 3 - Compiler? Has nothing to do with the compiler, OOE & BPE are hardware-side optimizations. They are designed to make up for poor compiler optimizations, lack of run time information available at compile time and crap like this highlights. I'm tired of explaining it. Let the world this country do whatever it wants and teach everyone that programming is about... java. Me at coffee shop: Well that depends, are you talking about a superscalar CPU? What is this being compiled for? CS Student (Not 1st Year): What's superscalar? Me: Did you sleep through your hardware class? Him: What hardware class? Me: FFS!

Yea, I get that. People took it the wrong way. People made assumptions about what I was referring to. People assumed my statement was tied to black & while lines of thinking. People thought I was only talking about Skyrim. Downhill apparently means different things to me than others, I'm not surprised at that really. It was really all about a douche plowing through an RPG like it was an FPS game. My thinking was: if mechanics are getting weaker, if story lines are becoming more shallow, if puzzles and traps are becoming remedial... It's because people have started playing RPGs like there is a race for the end of the game. I blame WoW, well MMOJSs. (MMO Job Simulators, cause that's what it means to "raid".) My post was never about the games flavor of RPG: tactical, turn based, real time, party based, strong story, first person, class based, etc. "But, think of the children!" - I say to hell with them.

Started Divinity Original Sin and am enjoying it. I like the return of tactical combat and it's nice to see magic that doesn't suck again. (Skyrim's not compelling as a mage, even with extensive mods.) I made a Ranger + Witch for starting characters and went through the first dungeon and then to the beach. I'm glad to see the battle get more serious at the beach because what was in that first dungeon I could have just slept through. The witch I like... But the ranger... doesn't feel like a ranger, feels like an archer (if you've played Might & Magic you know what I mean). I'm not feeling the class at all, is it just not very good or what? I'm starting to think the wayfarer was what I was looking for.

Finished Dreamfall Chapters Act I, I misread the recent update and thought Act II was out but it's not. I flew through it pretty quickly but, not because it was short, it kept me pretty interested the whole way. As a matter of fact, it wasn't as short as I was expecting due to what people have been saying. The whole series has a story line that's suck-you-in like Beyond Two Souls, but it's on the 3rd game and they're not sequels... they're all part of one uniform thing that's not fully explained yet. I dunno, maybe I should write a review and post it up here. Anyway, I'm on to Divinity Original Sin now, which has been good so far.

This guy sums it up better than anyone I have ever heard comment on it before... http://youtu.be/csyL9EC0S0c?t=12m41s

I would love to see Jade Empire 2, with better AI. Or something based on this, though it's pretty unlikely:

Why not start out by making MODs? Divinity: Original Sin has a level editor. The classes in the game aren't fixed so you could probably get something close to what you want in that respect. Learning actual development tools is going to take some time and RPGs are among the most difficult games to start out on. Starting with mods could help you flesh out the process of your stories and creativity without the burden of learning full games development at the front. Finally, everything I've ever read about games development says mechanics and gameplay should be worked out before story because modifying story to suit mechanics is easier than modifying mechanics to suit the story.

I have yet to play a RPG themed card game, but this does interest me. That said, I see some criticism being levied at it, but also being dismissive of some qualities that have actual value. I like space games, complex space games like X3, Master of Orion 2, etc. But, there's another game I like and play called Weird Worlds in Infinite Space. Much of the game is a tongue in cheek representation of those larger more complex games. Gameplay is simple and you fire up the game and finish it in about 10 minutes. But still, I like it and have played it for hours on end. It's perfect when I've had a long and difficult day and I don't want to do a lot of in depth thinking and just want to play something simple. Ever stop to think that, the things you are complaining about are things seen as strengths to other people? Not everyone has time to be deeply invested in game complexity and not everyone wants to spend all of their free time there either. If you don't like simple games then don't play them. I mean...

I didn't blame it all on the PS3 architecture. But, when you're using middleware to facilitate cross platform development, I'm going to assume they want to keep library functions as similar as possible across the platforms. Because, that's what I would do. Just look at standard C library, the functions it provides are largely the same across all platforms. There's a reason it doesn't have lots of platform specific functionality in there. Yes, if you listen to what he says at the end of the video... Naughty Dog succeeded on PS3 because of sheer manpower. And, for the record, I'm not saying the Cell was poorly engineered, it pioneered some good ideas, I'm saying it was poorly engineered for practical use. As a research tool it was absolutely a good thing, but shoehorning the thing to market they way Sony did and expecting game studios to do compiler work was downright insulting. It's their hardware, they're responsible for producing a dev kit for application level development. Let studios do what they do best, make games and not waste their time trying to put together platform tool sets. Edit: By compiler work I mean stuff like platform compiler optimization, things that the hardware developer is in the best position to do because they have access to things like the internal schematics of the CPU and development versions of them. I do realize that studios do some compiler work, but I think that's probably focused on stuff like shaders, or game specific optimizations.

Here ya go redneckdevil, in depth explanations and he even covers Sony's own postmortem analysis of the PS3 and why cell isn't in PS4. In fact I just learned something myself from this, Cell didn't support OOE... That's just... shockingly bad. It appears it was even worse than I thought. Now, if you think I am a 360 fan, you'd be wrong. I've never owned either console. If I had to choose today, I'd choose a PS4. But... I have 512GB of SSD, GTX cards in SLI, 32GB of RAM, 4.1 TB of HDD. So, why would I ever do that?

Everyone has problems with the PS3 because it's not a developer friendly piece of hardware. They're also forced to tune parts of the game engine to the lowest common denominator in hardware, unless they want to maintain vastly different code branches in their CVS. That's how the PS3 can effect games on other platforms. Developers, publishers, even CEO's have commented through the years and they usually amount to: what a piece of crap. I remember reading one comment that said, "More 4 letter words ring out of the PS3 room than the rest of the office combined." The two biggest issues are 256MB was a terrible design decision. The decision to use "cell" was just plain hubris. I mean, if it was so great, if it was they "way forward", if it was everything Sony touted it to be... Then why isn't there one in the PS4? The core issue is that Sony's engineers forgot a something important... Theory and practice sometimes clash. And, when that happens, theory loses. Every single time. - Linus Torvalds.

Do you feel important... now? http://youtu.be/_IVqMXPFYwI

That is actually what I wanted to say. Didn't put it well enough, my bad. Look, there's nothing wrong here. Games designed around concept of "fun" (whether they should be or not - another question), but fun is deeply subjective thing. Not every (wo)man finds reading to be fun. Even fewer find thinking to be so. If you are developer/publisher and seek to sell your game to as many as possible (and you have to, even if only to get back gargantuan development funds of "next-gen graphics") you ought to take a lowest common denominator and divide your game by it. You or me (the gamer) can like it or dislike it, but it is logically right. There were no other ways games could go. AAA titles cannot be intelligent by their own nature, so why keep accusing them of this? You can say that there's Obsidian, who manages to make AAA-games tolerable in this regard at the least and good at the most. But Obs was working only on sequels at first, therefore had strong base in every aspect including technical to begin with, lots of work already done. And even with that every AAA-game they made was severly broken at release in many regards except narrative. For the very first game they want to make without casual gamers in mind they had to go to KS. Moreover, inspiration plays a great role in creative work. I just cannot imagine developer being seriously passionate to make something like Skyrim. More like earning his/her money according to directives from above. Maybe I'm wrong on that one, though. ...The more I see of this guy Volourn, the more looks like his rep is well deserved. Odd. I've said this before but... I think Skyrim came at odds with it's own design due to a lot of different factors. That horrid gamebroke engine, limitations of the PS3, etc. Mods make it so much better, I won't play it without them, but I still get the feeling that a lot of corners had to be cut from the original vision. I like Skyrim but I'm not an FPS guy though, I never liked FPS until the first Half Life came along, and then I saw how a developer could create a compelling story there, along with mechanics and enemies that tell stories of their own. It really is a shame that I rarely see any other FPS noted for its story and atmosphere. I tried that Last Light game and found myself bored pretty quickly. Games shouldn't always be designed around fun, the flash show Extra Credits covered that and did a pretty good job I thought. For some reason that show seems to be haunted by some controversy in its past, but I've never bothered to dig into that. And yes, Volourn is great... We definitely don't agree on everything, but interesting conversation comes from differing perspectives, not ones that are more or less the same. Edit: Come to think of it, part of why I like TES is probably because I started playing at Daggerfall, where as most people discovered the games when Morrowind hit the scene. I also played the Might & Magic series, which is sort of in-between games like the Gold Box RPGs and the first person perspective of TES. It was first person, but party + turn based combat, had really odd puzzles too. The end of book 2 was a surprise, but also made you wonder WTF it had to do with the game.

Skyrim's strength isn't its story telling or mechanics, it's the free and open world. This can be done much better if some people started to think beyond the conventional way to quantify, determine and store player progression. And the world and stories can adjust on the fly, not to an infinite degree, but there is more latitude than what they did in Skyrim, which was to make most of the stories isolated. Even with that, Skyrim had way too many, in fact a deplorable number of global variables to track conditions.

Alright, lets end this right now... Stories Every generation of RPGs has it's good ones and bad ones. When I started the thread I was focusing on the way the guy in the video played Skyrim, not the story that was being told. I've seen good and bad stories in all sorts of genres over the years. That's sort of like saying the only good fiction is what's written by now dead people, when it's just that they've had time to become more renown postmortem. That said, I am tried of save the world. I'd like to see more "save yourself" and "fix the world, or don't. But, there is a price either way."

Actually, I believe "downhill" is an English Compound, one that I simply did not remove the space in. In truth, I don't even remember why because forums are, after all, a largely informal medium for communication. I mean, nobody wants to read l33tsp34k, sentenceswithoutspacedwords or a post that goes on at great length about a myriad of topics from world war 2 to the state of the new york city subway without capitalized titles or any punctuation at all in hundreds of words without end but... Nitpicking on what you did does make you look like a bit like Piccolo Mouso, but that's just IMO. Since you're operating on the premise that date of release on the first CRPG you played is some sort of measure of validity weight of your opinion then I'll tell you my first RPG was a game called Telengard and leave it at that. Assuming of course that Zork doesn't count because it wasn't graphical. Now, snarf it!

Some things are actually better: Graphics are, system stability is... inputs not freezing, controller/joystick compatibility and probably the most needed of all: we don't deal with sound card issues in PC games anymore.