Dream

What? He is playing the game by reloading; that's the point.

...in batman...a movie. Real life is a different story. Oh, well in that case you're absolutely right since project eternity is real li... oh wait.

You may draw any conclusion you wish, but the intent of this thread was to talk about ways to minimize cases where reloading is advantageous to the player, not about governing someone else's play-style or preference. That's a rather silly assumption. Those are literally the same things. You want to minimize cases where reloading is advantageous to the player because you don't like how said player plays the game.

It's only cheating the system if the game wasn't designed around it. There are plenty of ways to make a game difficult while at the same time allowing one to save as many times as one wants. If anything using check points and/or penalizing saving is a lazy way of artificially bumping the difficulty of an otherwise easy game. One could even argue that to be truly challenging a game should focus on requiring players to think of proper solutions to solitary, yet difficult, situations rather than forcing them into marathon sessions of relatively simple encounters. Of course that type of difficulty could be circumvented by using a strategy guide and/or the internet, and since you, apparently, have no self control I can see why games such as these would not appeal to you.

So **** everyone else and make the game the way you want because you can't self regulate?

Well...yeah. The Devs design the game the way it is supposed to be played. If it is designed to be incredibly easy then I will judge it to be so. I suppose I could play the game not wearing armor or not casting spells or whatever as an attempt to artificially make it more challenging but then I am not playing the game as designed. Nobody flipped out during the IE games that we couldn't save during battle that I noticed. Or was that a really huge outrage? I don't remember. He wants it to be significantly worse than just not saving during combat though.

It shouldn't. On the other hand, what difference would an optional, settable save-timeout for the benefit of those of us totally lacking in willpower make to you? There'd absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, the OP wasn't suggesting a toggle but a hard coded rule that would always be present. Case in point: I don't care about your experience. I care about mine and I don't want to put an arbitrary limitation on myself that the developers either didn't consider or that it wasn't implemented because they were scared that "casual players" would hate it. If they allow me to save at any point, then I'll do so. Then I'll say the game sucked because it was easy. So because you don't have the willpower to play the way you want you instead want the devs to force everyone to play that way?

There's a reason New Vegas only had that on slot machines and not on **** like lockpicking and pickpocketing.

The very first post of that thread started off by saying how certain armor designs (not even examples of other games) are superior (not preferable to the op; straight up superior) to the choices made by the devs of GW2 and Tera. That's exactly what you railed against the op of this thread for doing. Regardless, stop derailing the thread to defend your hypocrisy. On topic: While I see the appeal of a completely independent world that exists and lives outside of the player's influence (with nations waging wars, trading, negotiating, etc. with each other); I think it might be outside the scope of this project (and it would be a QA nightmare, which we all know Obsidian doesn't exactly have the best track record with). I'd personally rather see the limited funds available channeled into development of the primary story, but, if Obsidian had Blizzard's funds, it would be nice to see a massive fleshed out world that was actually alive and not simply a static vehicle for the player to be told the story through.

That sound so fun man! Why don't you just do that yourself and let those that want to save whenever do what they want?

Replying to a thread that asks "what kind of armour would you like to see in PE?" is not the same as creating a thread wanting to teach experienced developers what to do. Besides: I'm baffled by the fact that you still can't let this go. Different people with different preferences exist. Not accepting that is just juvenile Oh I was all about accepting everyone's preferences if you'd remember; it's you who wanted the whole game to be exactly and only as you liked it. Also, I did let it go seeing as I left that little circle jerk to the half dozen or so of you to enjoy; I just can't abide hypocrites so I felt the need to point it out (you'd do well to read the first post of that thread again by the way).

Well all the things that DA2 did to DA:O that people hate DA:O originally did to the IE games (more "actiony"). Personally I didn't mind either game too much (they weren't the best RPGs but certainly not the worst either). Except for those repeating ****ing rooms, christ that made me want to strangle a child.

Or let people play how they want; there's always that.

Who cares if a single player is balanced? Is the idea that someone somewhere is playing the game in a way you don't like such a painful idea to you that you feel the developer should force a certain (yours) play style on everyone? Kensai/mage and Kensai/thief dual classes broke the **** out of BG2/ToB but I never played one and didn't particularly care that someone else chose to.

Because of art, dude.

No. Let people play how they want; it's a single player game.

I think we're talking about the same thing. The audio/visual cues in games aren't explained, but they convey a theme. My point was that Dragon Age 2 has poor conveyance because their symbols don't mean anything. The slaves... the golden eagles? None of that has any meaning because none of it is integrated well into the game. The symbol is there but what it means isn't conveyed. I'm convinced it doesn't have a meaning, it's just set dressing for the game, unlike in VTMB - where you know the clinic has the sounds it does, why it's designed the way it does - it's designed to represent oppression, to represent dark times, to represent a dirty, dingy medical facility in an urban setting, which fits in well with the gothic imagery of vampires and the "coming apocalypse". This theme only grows the longer the game runs on. Dragon Age 2 has these golden symbols, but they have no context, besides Kirkwall being narrated to us that it was "built by slaves" - we never learn any more detail about who these slaves really were, what the descendants of these slaves are really like, or how any of that even matters in the overarching plot of mages vs templars. Are the mages slaves? But slaves back then didn't rise up and brutally kill their oppressors with blood magic? It's hard to give the symbols any context or meaning; the're just THERE. There's poor audio conveyance because it's inconsistent. Kirkwall is supposed to be LOADED with refugees - yet we scarcely see any the entire game; we don't even HEAR the sounds of crowds, or muggings, or suffering, we just see beige dusty houses and an underground section with sewer pipes. The eagles are there because eagles are strong and regal creatures and the dudes who designed that building thought it would look nice. The slave statues are there because the gallows were where the slaves were housed and the statues served to remind the slaves of the power of their masters. As for learning more of the back story of these slaves: place yourself in the role of Hawke. Would you really give a **** about the history of the city and the symbolism of this or that, or would you be more worried about trying to survive and provide for your family? This isn't 8th grade English lit; not everything has to have some deep symbolic meaning. Man, as much as I love constructive criticism and helpfulness, but this is about as arrogant as all the football fans giving the coach advice (even though the coach is pretty much with his team all the time and knows everyone's abilities and skills better than anyone else), or all the people that rant against judges when in their opinion a sentence is not harsh enough (even though judges have studied law excessively and have thousands of pages on a case). Or someone telling a company that they should make a spiritual successor to several rather unrealistic games more realistic.

Being promised 92 virgins as a reward would hardly qualify an action as selfless.

Which is why I said "in the way you describe it"; I was trying to be polite. Symbolism isn't something that you're supposed to describe verbally; that's the whole point. DA2 didn't describe why there were giant golden statues but it didn't need to; they were, as you said, symbolic. If conveyance is explicitly stating what everything means then Torment most certainly did not have it.

While DA2 had a great deal of things wrong with it, and while it may not have been your cup of tea, I'd hardly say it wasn't an RPG (it was) because of Kirkwall. As for Mount and Blade vs BG: people didn't fund a mount and blade style game; they funded an IE style one. Actually RPGs are about playing the role (of a character) in a game with a semblance (or an illusion) of choice. PS:T was hardly plausible and it didn't really have conveyance in the way you describe it but I don't think anyone would say it wasn't RPG. RPGs may be about the world for you, but that's hardly true for everyone. At the end of the day I don't feel any gameplay or entertainment value should be sacrificed on the altar of realism (since this thread really is just another argument for the tired old demand of "make this more realistic!").

D&D may be free form, but the IE games hardly were. There are always the elder scrolls games for people who just want a fantasy sandbox.

I agree, an "evil" person usually doesn't travel with a band of merry companions saving the world. He is in it for himself. A game that really played well with a concept of "evil" was imo ME and ME2. Going renegade didn't mean you went overboard with stupid-evil actions. It meant you were less likely to grant mercy. It meant caring less for the well being of others. It meant having an overall darker perception of the universe reflected in your actions and what you said. There was that great scene with that evil scientist in ME1 where you and Garus finally caught him and then the game presented you with a nice moral dilemma. Adhere to laws and higher moral principles or just execute that bastard. The game made me think, and I love it when a game does that and also challenges my perception of morality. We can only hope we will get something similar in PE I'll go with that, ME(2) did the whole moral thing well, but I don't think anyone would call Shep evil; if anything it was different shades of good guy. Too bad the third game decided to turn renegade Shep from a hardcore "do whatever it takes" type character into a straight up ****ing psycho (who gets PTSD for some retarded reason). Come to think of it Jade Empire did the evil path well since there the moral system was similar in style to ME, but you really had to be a complete sociopath to go all the way with closed fist path. At the same time, however, the evil decisions made sense as opposed to just being "evil." What exactly is an "adventurer"? Its not a profession. A selfish person (evil its not a good description as the above posters said) will do it to loot ruins and tombs and can work as bounty hunter,mercenary, or hitman during his adventures.Nobody forces you to go to the wilderness to "explore". In BG2 you stay in the city for the bigger duration of the game An adventurer implies you have a certain set of skills that make you good at survival and, more than likely, killing. A selfish person with those skills probably wouldn't want go out searching for ruins and tombs to loot and instead want to seek out an easier, and quicker, source of revenue.

Wouldn't an evil guy generally not want to be an adventurer since that's a rather ****ty profession. Hitman, mercenary, enforcer, bounty hunter; those are all more likely ways of life for someone with the kind of skill set an adventurer would possess. Since we're talking about what a "real" bad guy would do and all.

What? Just because a story ends on as depressing a note as possible doesn't make it some paragon of writing (as ME3 shows). And I want to have my cake and eat it because I bought it.

Indeed, and since PE doesn't exist yet, it can be anything. how amazing! Well, in that case, I've always been partial to shooters...