Luridis

Then they (the project promoters) need to start disclosing it, and how much. With a 600k minimum, I'm not sure what to think. KS supporters are starting to hold projects at greater levels scrutiny than ever before.

I can't take the project seriously because they're not asking for a realistic amount of money for the project they're putting forward. My minimums: Existing Engine 2D Game - $300,000 Existing Engine 3D Game - $1,000,000 New Engine 2D Game - $500,000 New Engine 3D Game - $2,000,000 If they're not asking for enough money they're just going to walk away from the project before it is finished. This usually comes, and quite understandably, out of the pure necessity to earn a living. Edit: And I've been seriously considering adding a half million to any 3D game labeled with "RPG", purely based on the idea that RPGs have huge content by their very nature.

Don't get your hopes up. It's highly probable. I don't care for VIP resets, but 'other' developers have been protecting gamers from themselves far too much these days. It's highly patronising and also symbolic of the shallow RPGs we have been attuned to lately. For example, ditching deep, strategic combat in place of the ability to have sex with a transexual because 'feminism' isn't how to create a good RPG. Deep strategic combat is not mutually exclusive with sexually diverse romance options. Stop attaching a social agenda to a point that is otherwise well-made without one. So, I agree that games have become shallow in the area of mechanics, but that isn't necessarily do to them addressing issues in sexual diversity. Correlation not being causation and all that jazz.

I backed a physical tier for the physical rewards, not the software media. So, I voted option #1. Computer Software is no longer developed for a static target. By nature of constant updates to the operating system, runtime libraries and even video drivers; you simply can't expect any disk that you own to run in even the next Service Pack on Windows or Glibc + Kernel update on Linux without patches anyway. I'll happily use Steam, and put the disk in the box when it comes later. BTW: Just to put that in context... I've downloaded something like 1.8GB of patches to Windows 7 & Office 2013 this month. What do you want to bet that those updates broke something, somewhere? Odds are good it affected someone.

I understand where you're coming from, and people should do that. But, as I'm sure most of the people who've been a victim of identity theft can tell you: it's very difficult to correct once it has happened. An ounce of prevention on the corporations part is worth a pound of cure in the consumer space.

So, there's this big announcement about Sony Online Entertainment... Are they just about games and the online service or do they house the PlayStation hardware division as well? At any rate, I feel for the developers there. Investment acquisitions are almost never good, they're about squeezing every dollar out and then dumping the company on a longer term investor. Usually, lots of people get canned and benefits are reduced, not to mention quality going down the tubes.

Ha! You think it's bad now, wait another decade. Things are today exactly where I predicted they'd be 10 years ago. We have these entities in our society that are becoming increasingly sociopathic, they're called corporations. With every new generation the focus of these entities becomes less about making a good product that makes money, than just making the most money at the expense of everything else. So, what does this have to do with security? Writing high quality, debugged and safe code is less productive than just getting your code to market as fast as possible. Now go read about how developers are treated in big firms. We're headed for a big fire sale down the road, and all because corporations have the attitude that saying you're sorry is less costly that trying to prevent mistakes. Software is one of the few types of engineering that can be delivered in a genuinely hazardous state and the company get away with this. Try doing that with a car and you'll get sued and will need to do recalls. Software gets away with it because of this b.s. idea called a clickwrap, 99% of which now require you to sign away your right to due process of law, thanks to a supreme court that sold out its people.

Yea, I see one really, really big problem with this video folks... I didn't see coffee anywhere on that table! Personally, cold day in hell before my work could get me into a meeting room without coffee.

Errm not sure what the question means but I think I can guess. If you're asking about how much do the developers have to code compared to how much they inherit from the game engine that depends upon the game. Sometimes they have to develop entire tools to do the things they want to or to insert features that are lacking on the engine. But the engine developers don't work on games, they might receive feedback from game developers but won't develop tools exclusively for a game unless they are the ones making it. I'll give you a for-instance... CryEngine is currently being reworked by the Star Citizen developers to incorporate double precisions for world space coordinates. That is, of course, no small feature to add. I personally would think that required a lot of library modification to support, since anything that interacts with world space might need a calculation adjustment. My question is, wouldn't that normally be handled by the engine developer and not the game studio?

Um.... That was the point of the Telltale Games system. So.... just don't play it? Yea, I didn't realize that when I bought the first one. Likewise the point of all these FTP games is to gouge the player at their weakest point for cash. I don't play those either. I won't deny it's a functional business model. I won't deny that it makes money. But, I will argue that it is a negative business model, kind of like fracking oil. (Though games are obviously not an environmental concern.) When we go to the pump, we of course prefer lower prices, but lower prices are largely due to these new destructive methods. (F2P works because of gouge-player-under-duress.) If the consumer were given a more positive option all the way around, they might take one. But, they're not and, just like fracked oil, once the least risky model for multiplayer game becomes established as F2P, the consumer will not have another option to choose.

Well then maybe you can get your wish and pillars of eternity can be loaded with completely linear dialogue options that constantly remind you that your choices mean something and you can click PPPP over and over when picking locks. Because, that's what the stuff I am talking about is, if it were replicated in an RPG setting. People tend to look at a mechanic and say that its bad just because it was poorly used. They will rail against said mechanic without any thought to how it could be applied better and worse they might ignore games that successfully use it just because it is present. I very much liked Shenmue but if I tell someone that it is the game that defined QTE they might become biased against it. Its art therefore rules can be broken as long as the final result is pleasant or aesthetic, rambling against mechanics seems pointless since I can't possibly think of bad mechanics just mechanics that are badly used. Okay, I bite on the first point... The pressing buttons bit could be alright in the right context. Like back, back, high punch launching the spear from Scorpion in Mortal Kombat. The second point, "remember that", isn't so much a mechanic as a deliberate display of metadata behind player input. The only place I've seen that done well is in Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, where every once in a while the balance shifted message came up. I didn't mind that because it was a reminder that your collective actions to that moment resulted in a major shift of the game. However, I cannot see a reason to ever display to the player each and every moment they do something that changes something later. No room for discovery there. Denying the player discovery is, at it's heart, an assumption that they're too stupid to "get it". Mechanics I do like occasionally bother me, because sometimes I wonder if there was a better way, or if it's making something too easy.

Well then maybe you can get your wish and pillars of eternity can be loaded with completely linear dialogue options that constantly remind you that your choices mean something and you can click PPPP over and over when picking locks. Because, that's what the stuff I am talking about is, if it were replicated in an RPG setting.

I'm not just going to blanket bash all new ideas. I've seen a plenty of new stuff I like. But, there are some that are so incredibly misguided that I think whoever invented them, should be ashamed of themselves. So, let's talk about them here, mechanics you love to hate. Back in the day, there was exactly one "Press Something" message that we saw in just about every game, that being "Press Any Key to Continue". Well, some backwards thinking fool decided to take that to a whole new level of WTF?! and set the whole world ablaze with an idea seemingly tailor-made to create repetitive motion injury. "Press L Repeatedly, Now (0.8 sec) Press E!" - And, just when we've started to fight tunnel-carpal with keyboard and controller designs, someone introduces a whole new future filled with completely unnecessary (as narrative) button presses. Can you imagine Half-Life 2 with this mechanic? If every valve, crank and lever in the game game with "press x,x,x,x,x press e!"? What if every use of the gravity gun had a key pressing pump-up mechanic complete with power meter to send something flying within the game? A horror to be sure. (Breaks out into a terrible rendition of Sarah McLachlan's "I will remember you.") Oh yes... I'm going to call this one: Mission: Remind players that they are too stupid to understand choices, consequences and branching narratives. Thank you Telltale for popularizing this particular brand of "dumbing down". No really, it is catering to simpletons. I don't care what justification anyone has. This is a feature born and bred on play testers that just didn't get the idea that video game plots are not static like those of a novel. I personally find nothing more thought-interrupting than seeing the words "x will remember that" appear on my screen. Each and every iteration of this terrible, terrible idea throws itself as a monkey-wrench into the business of contemplation. Can you imagine the horror of these words: Deekins will remember what you say! Imagine many of your favorites with this, from Knights of the Old Republic to PS: Torment. What a terrible idea. Telltale, to their credit, put in a feature that allows the player to turn these messages off. But, even with that I can distinctly recall a video interview with the designers that explained that they had to go back and put "placebo" messages in the game so that it isn't so obvious to the player where major lines of consequences were rooted. I am also glad to see that some studios are fighting the good fight and have decided against to such nonsense. Sadly, some studios need to be reminded that the thoughtless adaptation of popular trends isn't always a good idea. So, what newfangled mechanics may you display bad-smell-kitty-face??

I created the thread, I thought that made me allowed. :D But seriously, if we didn't have any topic deviation, we'd have a lot more threads on this forum. There are places where I think it's a great idea to stay on topic, like the beta forums and whatnot. But, I don't think I've ever complained about someone going off topic in a thread I made, well unless you're talking about someone who's made 20 pages of just trolling or whatever. Are there any modern action games I like? Or an I just being curmudgeonly? I know that the styling, genre and narrative of this particular title don't appeal to everyone, but I thought Alan Wake was well done. So no, I'm not just a guy who's a downer in general on modern games.

I have been using some of these and Cynical Brit off and on for years. AngryJoe, however, is simply intolerable. I tried to watch his review of something about 3 weeks ago and all he did was throw a tantrum because he couldn't figure out how the mechanics worked. The fact that he's in love with the new Tomb Raider just reinforced my opinion of him as a d-canoe.

I'm putting this here to illustrate my previous point. The original game focused on puzzles, atmosphere and some action. In the new version, the action portion of the game has 100x the priority of the other two elements. To be frank, TR2013 feels like more of a "The Last of Us" clone than a member of the Tomb Raider franchise.

I'm currently grumbling... grumbling because the Tomb Raider reboot started out so nice and then devolved before my very eyes into Lara Croft meets Call of Duty. I really wish I could have seen a decent review of it somewhere. Attention: Gen Y game designers... E,E,E,F & Square, X, Circle from on screen prompts, oh and lets not forget one-pass-impossible-iterative-level-design = Not innovative, in fact... it's pretty effing stupid. Is this really the best you can do? Is this the best you can innovate? It's really terrible, guys & gals made better mechanics with only 8 bit CPUs. But, I guess without the graphics, they had to. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for trying new things and it was looking good at the start, with the pistol and bow. At the outside it might have included a shotgun. But AK-47, RPG and all that jazz... yuck. We already had a scientist protagonist turn super soldier, his name is Gordon Freeman, and he does this kind of thing better. I am so tired at the moment of mechanics fatigue in modern games, when they become so monotonous you wish the hell they would just get out of the way so you can progress the story. I feel like they went all copypasta on the mechanics code from The Last of Us to TR. I could say something about this sort of thing happening when mechanics don't contribute to the story, they become a burden in the eyes of the player and all that. Anywho... TR: Reboot - The game feels like it needs zombies, cause that's how it plays. I mean, can you imagine Indiana Jones carrying a pistol, bow, whip, climbing axe, rpg, ak47, pump action shotgun, etc. I think someone missed the whole point of the original game. Like I said, the addition of the bow was nice, even better the use of rope-on-arrow as grappling hook was a nice touch. But the whole thing just devolved rapidly into an FPS after that.

Heh! Funny, that! :D Regardless, this is exactly what we are doing here, on their own backer beta forums. I'm pretty sure they don't want it any other way, and since they have considered plenty of posts over the years on PoE and implemented suggestions and such, I guess that would make the Obsids nutty too. All this talk about "nutty" reminds me that I've had far too many nuts over X-mas, btw. I used nutty to avoid the more obvious "rude". Not nice when someone comes to your work and tells you how to run your own schedule. There's a difference between input, which they do see, I've seen them sit in a thread for hours, and armchair quarterbacking their job.

Just like this...

I'd rather have them make the game they want to make and hopefully accept our input on what we find not so great. But, you can't sit here and tell them how to prioritize their work, that's nutty. They're probably 2 builds ahead of beta and they're working on more than stuff you can see. There's a good chance they're still working on content to some degree, or at least getting it into the game and/or debugging it. So, in other words... http://youtu.be/GqAUwGEJgLM

I'm out... I'm really just fed up with that place. I'm looking for a much smaller site, with far less groupthink morons talking trash, and reviews that don't look like they were written by the publisher. Does anyone know of an outlet like that? And yes, I tried google, it's not helpful in dozens of pages, maybe even a hundred. The real internet is word of mouth these days, can't trust anything in a search anymore. (I miss webcrawler.)

I'm a little inclined to partially agree with Josh S. about cleanse, dispels, etc. Did you play NWN1 & 2... Blind Fighting was a not optional talent for melee characters. In fact, I remember being in this warehouse once with the ranger, who was DW and had a cuisinart-like number of attacks per round. When I started running into wizards that cast either blind or darkness on a regular basis... I'd go whole fights swinging at air if I didn't have anything up to counter it. So, I took blind fighting and never much cared after that. Every melee build I made after that, it was one of the first talents I took, every time. Yea I know that is a black/white example. Really, the difference in those mechanics between visually impaired or not were too great, making the talent just about mandatory. What I am glad to see is that the magic isn't going to gimmick route of Divinity:OS. I like that game, but I'm really getting tried of it all coming down to the deft usage of the billions of oil and water barrels that exist in the world. Sometimes I just want to nuke stuff to death with brute force.

LOL I wrote out that whole thing on taking you at your word that weapons really did 1-40 on the roll! I noticed the numbers but never went to look how they got applied. Silly.

I do hate the collecting of junk from millions of containers and selling it. I also hate level requirements too. If you don't want the player to use it until level X, then keep it off the roll table until then.

LOL I stared on normal and went to easy because I realized all the classes no longer worked like they did several months ago and I was getting hosed. For instance: I wasn't using my cleric to pick up line breakers, because 3-4 months ago they couldn't seem to handle melee at all. At the time, I kept them way in the back to avoid losing my healer. I'll dial it back up after I get use to everything.