ShadowPaladin V1.0

And where you get a bloat for physics and the like in an FPS you get the same bloat in story and design in an RPG. It's not simply a case of lets write something and it magically appears on screen you know.

not half as tedious as I find people with no grasp on reality. " DS or not you cant kill any of the NPCs. Dont know why you brought it up again you cant do it until the story allows you to do it. That is not freedom and thats nothing like Morrowind. Well for one thing you would realise what they have done. For another educating youself is never a bad thing. Well those names crop up constantly so they must be doing something right. Actually it has nothing to do with my imagination and everything to do with trying to write for a bunch of variables rather than a known narrative. Your Drow companion turning on you is bad AI from Deaken nothing to do with the story. The idea that a companion would turn on you because a kobold miss cast a spell is pretty ridiculous. It's really not that old. Well lets examine that. RPGS are not big sellers outside of Japan. The market will reach saturation at around 2 million and thats being very optimistic. The more geeky you make your RPG the lower that figure goes. Common sense that if your market is saturated before you make a profit then your stuffed :D Thats not taking into account pesky things like limited diskspace, memory etc which isnt something that is an issue writing a book or making a film. Which have been questionable since there is no proof , only hope on your part along with a healthy dose of dellusion about how games are made. Who says I am pleased? I'm accepting the reality of the situation because I dont want to throw my own money at a risk like that. If i'm not willing to risk my own cash on something like that. Then why should I be critical that no one else will? When I see you stump up a couple of million for your game then I might start to take what you say seriously.Until then its just too easy for you to say well things should be this way and hang the cost. Because FPS games tend to last around 8 hours. I enjoy JRPG's most , but I appreciate KOTOR and the like for the change of pace.

I dont see how an RPG could sell in those numbers. Unless your name is Squenix it just dosnt happen. For an offline RPG I've never heard of figures of more than a million five. (the aforementioned aside). I've never played the game so I couldnt really compare what KOTORII did in a sixth of the time.

I'd have to disagree when it comes to NPCs less is definately more. Although the trinity system was nice. I never did like FFX's sphere grid that much. But the guys got taste :D

Perhaps if you were you would see how ridiculous that is. If anything it should be me saying it to you since your the one refusing to accept reality here.

Well lets see no one has done it yet. Thats a fact. If you throw a enough time and money at something it's usually possible. Is it really worth throwing that sort of time and money at a 40 hour game. You might think so, but your not the one shelling out the money are you. Rather would you be willing to pay 10 times normal price for such a game ? Even if you are most people are not. You couldnt be more wrong. If the story in KOTOR was incidental then you could kill off the NPCs. Oh jee I wonder perhaps because they are some of the most in demand VOT outside of Japan. Why dont you go read their filmographies and educate yourself. Unless you make it impossible then someone will do it. I kill Malak on the Leviathon. But the game just refused to accept it and carried on anyway. How easy it is to circumvent the apparent "difficult choices" for one. The narritives end in the battle there is no story implications attached to them. So your not bothered that it was incorporated badly then. So much for your discrimination.. Anyway this is getting boring so to sum up. 1.Your ideas are unfeasable. 2.There is no evidence that they would work even if you did spend the extra time and money. 3.And most important most players wouldnt care, they would rather have another 20 hours added to the game.

Yeah, that was so lame... As if the midi-chlorians bit and young Anakin in Episode I wasn't bad enough - "Let's try spinning - that's a neat trick!" :angry: <{POST_SNAPBACK}> All he had to do was implant the suggestion that he wasnt there. You do have to wonder why they didnt just take his mother along anyway dont you. It's not like they were going to be coming back to tatooine. There didnt seem to be any logical explanation for leaving her behind.

Way to post something totally pointless. By this can I conclude that you now realise that your ideas are not realistic.

The difference is that I actually have proof of them existing in working games and your just saying it "should" be possible without being aware of the costs. In Morrowind the story is almost incidental. Following the story is not what the games focus is which is why the story isnt important and why you can kill various people without breaking it. If you want crap VOT yes. Jennifer Hale, Tara Strong etc. dont come cheap.Read the KOTOR II credits. Most people will agree that few things ruin a game as much as bad VOT. I thought it was pretty clear that eventually you were going to run out of things to kill. Aside from that anyway you still have the expense/time/effort involved in turning each character into the boss. Way to contradict your own point there <shrug> Actually I just found it funny.

Am I ? I wonder how many people are playing HL II for it's story? KOTOR I and II's sales figures are similiar which would mean your reasoning is flawed and no one stopped buying KOTORII because of quality. Simply that the market share reached saturation. Only the likes of Final Fantasy could go toe to toe with an FPS. While blithely ignoring the realities that would involve. If you want an answer you need something that isnt KOTORII related. more work, more money, more difficult etc. There is a very good reason why JRPGs follow one principle and games like KOTOR follow the other.

I'm not familiar with it. Would you care to elaborate?

I've told you all along it can be done as long as you take the choices away. Apples and oranges, Morrowind is not a story based game as such its very hard to break the story. You do realise that you would have to record VO for all those possibilities ? And what happens if you kill Atris and Kreia ? You do know you can complete all 5 right ? Not really much of a choice if you know how the reaper ward works. But that aside, are these choices meaningful ? They do alter the difficulty of the battle, but little else subsequent events play out exactly the same way. I think the mirror thing crops up in the summation, but I wouldnt call it meaningful. It's more foreshadowing which is pretty pointless unless you actually foreshadowing something. Hearing Morrowind and HoTU and superlative gaming in the same sentence. Not something I ever thought likely.

Because it's the truth. How do you find out about the quality of a story? You can ask people(which spoils the story and may or may not be accurate), you can hope that because you know the authors work the story will be good(not foolproof by anymeans). But you cant know for certain until you experience it. It's like eating a cookie. The only way to know the quality of a cookie is to taste it. As a result if you dismiss things out of hand you may miss something good. And you still run the risk of a total lemon of story unless you already know what it is, which would be kind of pointless I would have thought. Who cares ? Once you pay for the game mission accomplised by the publisher. One of the worst things you can do is to make a game so good that no one wants to play anything else. Your just copying the JRPG design. Depth at the price of choice. Some like it some dont. Trying to compete directly with Squenix, not my idea of sane :D I simply dont care to argue about something that isnt "complete". There are too many unknowns. Again JRPGs have done this, the games are totally crafted around the NPCs in every aspect from story to gameplay. They have a much more organic feel but it's not under your control in the way KOTOR NPCs are.

Not really all I'm saying is that it's been done and it's not as revolutionary as you seem to think it is. Because in KOTOR the characters play an important part in the main plot. Without the characters you dont really have a plot. Now while it's possible to remove the characters from the plot, you then have to come up with another device that drives the plot. Very simple example on KOTOR design. Kreia dies on Talos no more Kreia whoops there goes most of your story. This is why KOTOR NPCs cant die , thats why they will get up after every combat. Same is true of Jade Empire , except in that case they pop up fully healed. Even your very simple outline dramatically increases the workload. And dosnt allow for any possibilities beyond A and B. It also puts a huge emphasis on the characters "likeability". You might go through hell to save Bastlia (personally I wouldnt) but would you to save GOTO ?

Nicely said. I dont think any of that is realistic until a computer can adjust the story on the fly in the same way a human DM can. Until that point it's either a very tightly controlled story with minimum real choice, or a more open generic story but allowing for more meaningful choices on the players part.

Neither KOTOR would be what I would call challenging enough to break a stride. But regardless. I'm not against instant travel, quite the opposite. I was merely illustrating how it makes any sort of tension impossible. You pretty much confirmed what I was saying about how trapping the player in an area (although technically you are not trapped) leads to a fine line between tension and frustration.

Well no one has done it so it can't be that easy can it. If someone could write a PST style story without having to give you a pre gen character of a known race or gender I would be very impressed. The ammount of work that would involve makes it a very unlikely thing to happen. Your not propounding anything of the sort. All your doing is borrowing from what the Japanese have been doing for over 10 years. While you see this as a step forward I see it more of a step sideways. It's pretty obvious that the more control you take the stronger you story can be. Just look at KOTOR and how much relied on you being Revan , or KOTOR II with you being the Exile. No it's not a little bit more complex. It's only a little bit more complex if you rob the player of every meaningful choice in the story. To do otherwise would require writing a whole different story arc for every outcome. Regardless of what choices you make in an RPG you will almost certainly be running over the same scenery and fighting the same enemies. Even with classics like FO this was still the case.

Nothing actually on the release schedule then?

Swoop racing was better this time around but still too basic. If you want to have that sort of thing as more than just an aside then you need proper league structure and the ability to upgrade your swoop with various parts. Be a good money sink too which is something the game could really do with. Chocobo hot and cold is probably the only mini game that I've really enjoyed just for the sake of it. The card games in FFVIII were fun too.

I see no point in doing anything half-heartedly. I work hard; I play hard. I high excruciatingly high standards for myslef, and I have very high standards for those that I interact with; I do not suffer fools. If I purchase a product from someone, I expect it to be commensurate with the hard-earned cash I have laid out. I am not unrealistic, just discriminating. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> You left out spam hard Still your hardly what a publisher would call a benchmark consumer. In order to discriminate something of that nature must be available. Obviously it could be that you are just wrong and the nature of writing that you demand just cant be done as long as you include an element of choice. This seems likely as every example is a narritive that requires a linear series of events to occur. Without those events occuring then you would have no story. The same is true of tension. Not much of that when you can return to your homebase whenever you like. The alternative of course which is trapping the character into the location would have to be so finely balanced to be tense and not just an exercise in frustration as to be something best avoided.

Mine worked fine. The only thing that went wrong was a scene not triggering because of the airspeeder. Walking through the door sorted that out. I know a bunch of people with chipped Xboxs who are having all sorts of problems. But thems the risks as they say.

I suppose that would depend on how seriously they wanted to be taken. I dont tend to take most religions seriously anyway. But if people wanted to live their lives by the "Jedi" code I'd see nothing more unusual than if they said they were christians or muslims or something else. You can probably learn more important personal lessons from Jedism anyway. Whether or not it is "real" dosnt matter. If someone did happen to perfect force powers or lightsabers, it would have the others beat hands down for practicality wouldnt it ? :D Ok ok lightsabers are not practical, but they would be fun.

Well someone who didnt like that sort of combat would probably hate it on principle. It would be like recomending any sort of plaform or driving game to me.