ShadowPaladin V1.0

Possibly Or wait for technology to evolve... I dont see how it can be done though at least not from the examples of games that are already out there. You can plainly see where each one has made sacrifices in one area in order to strengthen another aspect of the game. As Grommy said its really no use making comments about how this and that should be unless you can actually come up with some sort of implemtation. But really how could you write something like PST without knowing who the main character is in advance ?

Your very wrong here. You can create very deep characters in IWD but they are your creations , which requires your effort.The same effort that designers put in when they create characters for games.If you dont think thats work, then I suggest you take it up with them. The game (IWD) will never acknowledge your effort in the way a game that is written for a specific character will. Because it simply cant. There is an almost infinite number of possible characters and no game can allow for those possibilities. Even in a game where you have a strong element tying any character to the story there will still be discrepencies for some character types. A 16 year old elf growing up in candlekeep for example. In IWD you can be anything you want for a background. It really dosnt matter because the game will never and can never acknowledge it. Which makes creating backgrounds for your characters a labour of love. Or in my case something I do out of habbit. On the other hand if you take PST. No character freedom whatsoever. You are the Nameless One. Regardless of what choices you make, how the story changes what class you choose to play. That character can never not be the Nameless one.Change the character and the whole game falls appart. The advantage of that is that the game is fully aware of who you are. It can make relationships and past events based on that knowledge. The player dosnt have to do anything except read whats there and pick an option. Any option will do they are all written for that specific character anyway. So if you say that not having to do anything for your character removes the roleplaying (although in the case of pre gens its not your character anyway) why do so many people hold up PST as the best RPG ever ? Perhaps KOTOR is a better example. When you arrive on Taris you "own" your character. Then over the course of the game your character is overwritten by this new character. A lot of people think that Taris is pretty vanila but the reason is there is nothing there to tie you to the plot at that point beyond rescuing Bastila who you dont even know. First you become a Jedi. Now I really didnt want to be a Jedi but I had no choice. Because the designers now have some control over you. IE they know you are a Jedi they can tailor events to that. Like meeting Juhari at the grove. This is possible because the game knows you will be a Jedi at that point. A non Jedi would have no interest in guiding her back to the light, or pushing her further along the path to darkness. Her hero worship of you because unknown to you she remembers who you are. It's a bit more subtle than PST but less complete. The best way to think of it is like this. Imagine trying to write a book when you have no control over what the characters might do. The more control you have the the better story you can write. But the more control you take the more the story is yours and not whatever characters the player has created for themselves.

To me a series of opening scenes which gets all the characters to the same point (the start of the game) by different routes is the best compromise. It's the one I use in PnP all the time. It's not exactly a new idea Wild Arms 3 did it ,rather better than TOEE I might add. Four very different characters with four very different motivations but they all managed to arrive at the same place at the same time. It's not total freedom. But then thats not realistic even in PnP. But it does give you some say in how your character gets to a certain place. Ignoring for the moment that in KOTOR your a specific individual. How hard would it be to come up with some different ways of getting people to Taris and having some links to their particular prologue once they got there? Did you have to start BG in Candle Keep ? In a lot of cases you have to do a little suspension of disbelief if your playing a non human with that particular game. Just one thing. How did a hacker and a necklace of missiles get into the same universe ?

Along with that freedom comes work that the player has to do. Work is a burden. In a story driven game you get a fully fleshed out character and a story written around them and you dont have to do anything in the least bit creative.

I dont hate them. I just see no point at all making choices for them. As pre generated characters they should be perfectly capable of doing it themselves. I dont mind helping out with combat and the other technical stuff. But as Yuna put it in FFX-2, this is her story.The player was simply along for the ride as they would be if they read a book (damm fine book but not an RPG in the classical sense).

Actually the best way I find is to run mini adventures for the characters and then base the main campaign around things found out during the mini episode. It's like the prologue they do in the storyteller games. It allows you to use things that are important to the character to motivate them. It brings the background of the character to life (no one is allowed to play in a campaign I run without a background). The problem with the approach you outlined is your basically taking their motivation for granted. Smart people dont go following bleeding people through the forest they call the cops. In a bank robbery they keep their heads down and hope for the best. But as a CRPG approach where you have the luxury of mandatory participation those sorts of events would work. Most of the skill in being a good DM is how much you can convince the players that what they are doing is their idea when you have really had them on a tight leash all along (saves a lot of work). TOEE actually had a nice idea with the opening vignettes but they ended up being totally crap and pointless.Rather than relating them to a specific alignment (works for D&D I suppose) It would be pretty good if you could choose from say 8 prologues. Each prologue being related to a different sort of character background. So you simply choose the one that most closely fits your character concept and hope fate treats you well. Depending on what you chose during the prologue the events in the main game change. A little like the Shining Force series (which used episodes)only not as grand.

This assumes that everyone who plays CRPG's are PnP or former PnP players. They are not. Without those character creation skills and experience something like IWD would be pretty empty and flat. It also dosnt explain why people are willing to fall on their swords to defend something like PST which is little more than a glorified "choose your own adventure" book. Characer creation is not player driven thing. Its a collaberation between player and GM. In the case of a CRPG you are simply playing by the rules the GM sets out for characters. That dosnt excuse pre generated characters though. I dont know anyone who actually plays PnP with pre gens. But they do make for good story casts if you use them the way Squenix does.

Thats what I meant by players having the a vorpal weapon on their side I'm not to up on the SW stuff outside of the movies. But dont the weapons of the age KOTOR is set have some sort of weave incorporated into them purely for the purpose of fighting against lightsabers? I would imagine that after the purge there were so few Jedi around that it wasnt much of an issue anymore.

Hehe funny how realism gets unfun when you think it through isnt it Everyone has their own degree of what level is fun vs what is realistic. I dont like instant death combat never have. The whole idea of if you roll 1-10% you die and if you roll 11-100% you dont strikes me as incredibly pointless.There isnt anything you can do except hover your finger over the quickload button. Failure in combat should be the result of either a string of bad luck, or incompetance. Not the result of a single dice roll. The difference in something like JK is I can recognise the move coming and either avoid or counter it so if I screw up I screwed up which is far more palatable than having a dice which is nothing but a random factor. I dont mind it however if there is a way to protect yourself from it. So having a death spell is fine as long as there is a counter spell you can cast if you suspect you might need it. However with lightsaber if your talking about a 10% chance of "death" then when you factor in the number of rolls over an average game its going to happen a heck of lot. The problem with Vorapal weapons is there is no such counter except for their rarity. (For anyone who dosnt know a Vorpal weapon is a D&D weapon that takes off somethings head if you roll high enough. The other version , the sword of sharpness takes off a random limb). All in all unless the players have them which usually makes them laugh hysterically, then they are a giant unpredictable pain in the arse to DM. I had a Githanki roll 4 20's once and kill an entire party which ended the game on the spot.

With full player control yes its possible but not through an RPG type interface. Lightsaber combat in JK is all about timing and timing is something that isnt particularly relevent when you are rolling a virtual dice. Lets not forget that losing in a limb in JK was also instant death (hence reload). Very few games have an instant death with no chance of protection. D&D has instant death spells, sure. But it also has numerous ways of protecting from them. Vorpal weapons are an instant kill. Which is annoying but because they are comparatively rare in D&D it's not a constant maybe one encounter in a game will have vorpal weapons. How many foes have lightsabers in KOTOR.. Lots of them. Towards the end of the game almost everyone in fact. Now if each of those hits was a 10% chance to instantly end your game I would throw the thing in the bin. There is nothing clever or tactical about having a 10% chance to die every time you get hit. What do you do once you have lost a limb ? Robotic replacement , pretty standard SW stuff. But how do you get from where you are currently lying with a stump to the place you need to be if the whole party is lying on the floor in various states of dismemberment ? Your forgetting one VERY important thing about SW the whole lopping off of limbs is there for dramatic effect. It dosnt stop the story while the characters slope off to "Limbs R Us" for the 15th time that week.

It's very much a trade off. The more control the designers have the better they can fit the story around the character and the more "alive" they can make the character without any work on the players part. All games even PnP games have DM restrictions. It's not uncommon to start a SW RPG with everyone either looking to join the republic or already a member. The advantage a human DM has is they can adapt. Where as in a game all the possibilites have to be there before you even start. If you allow the player absolute character freedom you are also placing the "burden" of roleplaying and character creation on the players shoulders. Take IWD for example. You can treat it as a statististical hack and slash game. Or you can create 6 very unique characters of your own design and run them through the game. The tradeoff being that because the game cant possibly predict what your characters will be in advance it has to be very open (in order to accomodate all those possible characters). It would be impossible to write something like IWD with absolute freedom of character and give it the personalisation of BG. Then you have BG where your character has a destiny that ties them into the story. It dosnt really matter what character class or race you pick because that destiny can apply to any of the possible D&D combo's You still have a degree of freedom to create your own character. But with the proviso (some call it baggage) that you are a and always will be a Child of Bhaal and that will shape how the adventure progresses. Because the designers know this they can tailor the adventure for a Child of Bhaal so it takes on a personal overtone than something like IWD. Then at the opposite end of the scale you have the likes of PST where everything is written for one specific character. Stronger story again. But you are stuck with that one specific character. If you dont like them , then its too bad. The choices are illusionary because they all apply to the character. You might change the story in some way. But your not actually roleplaying as all the work is done for you. There in no challenge to stay in character. In my experience most people seem to go for the middle ground of BG where you have something that ties you to the story, but without having to have a specific identity. Although the FF series which are basically stories with you doing the hard bits (like combat) are also very popular and the stories overall tend to be better and deeper.

"Real" saber combat would be very boring in a game. Really it only takes one hit to take someone out of a fight even if the wound isnt fatal. Other than that its all about avoiding being hit. See almost any of the SW battles and when you are talking about flesh (rather than robotic bits) people tend to lose interest in fighting when a bit of them comes off or even if they take a wound. "Realistically" no one is going to be able to be hit 12 times with a lightsaber , but then again the same is very much true of D&D and weapons in general. would combat be any fun if it was roll the dice and the one who hits first wins ? Vorpal swords are fine in theory but when they are used against you they lead to an awful lot of reloads if your unlucky.

Good ol' Mission to the rescue I really enjoyed the end of KOTOR. I was running through the Star Forge with Juhari and Jolee tossing aside Sith like they were rag dolls. I had to check myself because I was getting way to arrogant in my abilities. But it really did bring home both how much the character had evolved from Taris and how powerful Jedi are. I didnt enjoy the cheesey Malek duel though. Didnt really make sense that you couldnt cut through the tanks, and yet your lightsaber would happily sail through them if you threw it.. (maybe my fault for not taking saber throw , but it was a very disatisfying end battle).

<edit > What the heck I'm bored... 1. Grandia II 2. Shining Force/Dungeon Siege 3. Summoner I/II 3a. Baldurs Gate I 4. Final Fantasy V 5. Fallout I/II/Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicle 6. Final Fantasy X-2 (already did that one). 7. PST/KOTOR Remembered two others as well. 8. Escape - You are a prisoner, the rest should be obvious. Example Dark Sun (now thats going back a few years) Sword of Mana/Baldurs Gate II. 9. Just doing our job/looking for adventure - You/your party has signed up to do a job or is travelling to a region which you know should lead to adventure. Usually there is some deeper plot at work like that in the "escort". Example IWD I/II I'm in agreement with Voloun btw (watch as hell freezes over) I've played so many of these things how the character gets introduced into the story dosnt make or break the game. However an introduction with some enigmas is much more likely to get me thinking. Losing an NPC character in the intro dosnt work on me. Losing a character that has been a useful and productive party member does. I almost shed a tear when I had to leave Marcie (MRC) behind in Sword of Mana because I couldnt have gotten through the area without it (Its a robot) and it tells you its got rocket jets so the girl character (you can name them) lets it toss her across as the tower collapses. On the other hand the main characters parents being killed in the intro, nothing.Gorian in BG , nada.

Auron is very much active at the start. Basically long enough to walk you through what is the "tutorial" part of the game. Then you get seperated. If someone is on hand to ask advice then you have to wonder why he isnt doing anything else. It makes no sense that your party get beaten silly and you reload a game when there is a level whatever Master on hand who stands there and does nothing beyond give advice. It makes absolutely no sense. Even Yoda is more than willing to get his saber out when the situation calls for it. He didnt sit there giving lightsaber fighting tips to Obi Wan and Anakin.. Thats why you either need to seperate the character from the mentor. Or not have one in the first place except as a background detail the player comes up with. Other than another force user or overwhelming odds there isnt much that can actually challenge a Jedi. Qui Gon was simply keeping a low profile but anyone who knew what a Jedi was would have spotted him a mile off.

There are a more than a few ways to get the character involved in the story of the game (which is pretty important) which ones do you prefer ? In no particular order (since I like examples) we have: 1. The escort - You are sent to meet and escort someone to some place or event. Invariably something goes wrong or the event isnt what it appeared to be. The advantage of this one is that its very open and suitable for many different characters who will be doing it for different motives. 2. We are under attack ! - You start off having a normal day doing whatever people in that particular setting do. When out of the blue your town/villiage/castle is attacked by some outside force. Generally the rest of the advanture revolves around finding out who and why and getting strong enough for some payback. 3. The destiny - You have a destiny. You know what it is, everyone around you knows what it is and you cant escape it. 3a. The hidden destiny - As above only your in the dark about it and some of those around you know what it is. 4. I was walking in the woods one day - Just that, your in the wrong place at the wrong time and you end up involved in something that is way beyond your comprehension. Any time you attempt to get out something drags you back in. People you dont know are trying to kill you and you have no choice but to find out what the hell is going on and try to come to an "understanding" 5. Just something that needs to be done - The place where you live has a problem (or an ongoing problem). People are sent out to solve it (with or without your knowledge) but none have returned , now its your turn. 6. In at the deepend - You are thrown into a battle or series of battles (usually making up the tutorial) beyond fighting for your life and a few hints your not really sure whats going on. FFX-2 is a classic example of this.. Why am I fighting Yuna ? 7. Who am I - You wake up with a headache and no idea who you are.You find out about whats going on in the story at the same time as the character (unless your a clever sod). There has to be more than 7 but you can probably place the majority of RPG intros into one or more of those.

It's corny but its quite in character for Star Wars dialogue. The +1000 points is niether here or there. Its nothing to do with the dialogue. Anyone who is force sensitive can spot them unless they are actively hiding. They all tend to dress alike before the purge as well. It's almost like a uniform. If the master isnt active then there isnt much point having one. Those who know about Jedi will know there is one out there somewhere and those who dont know well it wont bother them. You could possibly do it like in FFX where you met Auron (who was rather powerful) at the begining of the game and you got seperated when Sin attacked and you met him again later in the game when you were a comparable power level. Having some sort of disaster that seperates you from your "baby sitter" and leaves you alone and clueless is a pretty good way to start a game. Then later on he can show up to either help or oppose you depending on where you happen to be on the Karmic ladder.

It's going to be interesting to see if they can pull off the same character/NPC interaction and story without sticking an amnesiac pre gen in there. It worked in KOTOR but if its done in KOTOR II its going to be incredibly lame because everyone is going to be clued in from the start. The problem with SW is the Jedi are so far beyond your average character that any major conflict is either going to have to include them, or exclude them completely. It's not like D&D where you can be a child of Bhaal and still be any of of the permited character classes and or races without it making a difference. Its going to be quite a challenge to even pull off a BG level of freedom within the SW universe.

They couldnt really ask for a better first bite of the cherry for a new company. Hollywood stars get paid obscene amounts of money so funding an "art" film is more like a hobby. Companies rarely have that sort of funding on an individual basis (the money belongs to the company not an individual). Even if it is the case then it also has to be something that the person with the money wants to do. Possibly. However just because you have a hit with a big name it dosnt mean that you will get a hit with something original just because its made by the same people. This is why Jade Empire is going to be interesting. Up till now Bioware have been existing on license properties for their big sellers. Jade Empire is their first original concept (since the MDK days). The ideal would probably be Squenix. They have a franchise thats as recognised, or possibly more recognised than D&D and its all theirs. Thats probably the ultimate dream for any developer I would imagine.

I really liked 3. Being chased around and not knowing quite when he would pop up added a lot of tension. When I first played it I didnt know you could kill him. Pumping that many bullets into something and it not falling over dosnt usually bode well. So I did a lot of running and dodging as he followed me around. The last one I played was Code Veronica (unless you count RE0 which I gave up on pretty early).

I'm kinda bored of the whole survival horror thing, so unless RE 4 is at Blockbuster then not that interested. I will be playing Forbiden Siren over the weekend (time permiting). Whether a game is cutesy or not , dosnt really matter. FF:CC is kinda cutesy but its still a damm fine game. Beyond Good and evil was ok , rather short and lacking replayability. More of a combination of concepts rather than an original game.

Thats the way of the Sith. In order to be recognised you would have to take power from the current Dark Lord. Much like Malek did when he destroyed your ship. Whether or not you are Revan dosnt even come into for the Sith. I suppose the significance in the temple event is that you at that point are deciding what course you will follow to conclude events. Either removing Malek and causing a power struggle amoung the Sith (if your a Jedi) or removing Malek and re assuming your position as Dark Lord. As the Sith follow only power they will follow the winner of the strugle. Where being Revan really struck a chord in KOTOR is as you were moving around the Sith academy. You were able to use your identity to tell the other Sith that its never too late to change, even if you think it is. The talk with the original Sith Lord is also thought provoking. But as far as the Sith following you because of who you were. That was never going to happen. Its simply not in the Sith ethos.

I think it added impact because the last memory you have of Bastila is probably the one being trapped in the cells together. I think the ammount of time that she has been away dosnt come across all the well in the game but it's a pretty significant chunk of time. I think if you are shocked by the Bastila that confronts you at the temple, then the writer did his job well. I suppose if you were really into her you could have gone along with her. But the Sith ethos dosnt really support long relationships Oh I tried everything. Threw thermal detonators at them, grenades , mines, tried hitting them... I think you get a hint about the tanks in the dialogue at some point. Well in order to tell a story you need structure. Unlike a PnP rpg every possibility has to be accounted for before the player has even started the game. Biowares method is simply there way of keeping the story on track. Sqenix simply take the cutscene approach. Both methods are storytelling devices. The issue I have with the Bioware method is that it can sometimes lead to situations like that on Leviathon which really kill the credibility of the game. Generally you need some method of enforcement because once the player is aware of the forthcoming situation, they will probably be able to beat it even if its difficult. Which would kill the story on the spot.

Changes resulting in advancing the main plot isnt really anything new. But the areas in FF:CC develop independent of the main plot. Which is what makes it noteworthy. The area reacts to the actions of the character. If you leave an area alone then it will be at level 1 even if the game clock is on year 12. Likewise if you revisit an area at every opportunity then it will be at level 3 as early as year 6. This is far more dynamic than simply reaching chapter III and everything "upgrading".