Logos

Dignity is a tool of the ruling classes used to bully the opposition into oppression! Down with the regime! Up with beta!

To echo an earlier post, Cthulhu will not tolerate such an insult!

If we've descended to the point where we're just posting excitable youtube videos, I have a cool cellphone commercial to share

It's gotten to the point where I can't even play other games while I wait. I was playing Dark Souls 2 before, but now I'm just watching twitch streams.

Not in my timezone, which is the only one that matters. PST. Planescape Torment? Please Send Tell

You can also buy it for $25 as an extra option with anything else.

Oh my god I can't even deal. If you were to put me in a delayed gratification test I would fcking eat all the marshmallows right now

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kith_and_kin

I wish timezones went in the opposite direction. There's nothing west of california but water, no one's benefitting from being downstream! But if western europe was 9 hours behind instead of 9 hours ahead, I could've woken up to a beta key ready to be redeemed. Now, now I have to wait.

Isn't mass production one of the main benefits of digital distribution? I don't think the offices at Obsidian are filled with developers hand-carving ones and zeroes into storage media by candle light.

I love puzzles in RPGs. They're an essential component of the experience for me. When I instruct my character to cast a fireball, I feel like I'm controlling a game most of the time. But when I'm solving a puzzle, I feel like I'm actually doing something of importance in the game world. Figuring out something secret, something hidden. That's a great experience.

Exactly.

You don't find repetitively killing the same enemies over and over boring? Then we're just going to have to disagree about it. What you describe is called "grinding", and it (and my opinion of it) has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, because we were discussing xp upon enemy death. You can grind in Dark Souls; you can't grind in Baldur's Gate 2. You can grind in Diablo; you can't grind in Mass Effect. Not all games with xp upon enemy death have grinding, and not all games that have grinding are boring. The fact that having the xp upon enemy death mechanic in your game can sometimes lead to a situation in which a player ends up (either willingly or unwillingly) grinding is a different discussion altogether. Distributing xp upon killing an enemy incentivizes a certain player behavior: to kill more enemies. Overdoing it can result in grinding. Not distributing xp upon killing an enemy also incentivizes a certain player behavior: to not always kill all enemies. Overdoing that can result in boring gameplay just as well. The issue is not xp upon killing an enemy, the issue is overdoing it, misapplying it, or otherwise designing your game badly. PoE will not have xp upon killing an enemy because its designers think that they can more effectively give their players the experience they want to have that way. That's really all there is to it.

I don't like variety in my rpgs, because I like learning them. I like knowing where things are, I like knowing what enemies are where, and I like knowing what happens when, because I like puzzling my way to alternate solutions. That sort of experience exists to a much lesser extent in Diablo III for me, because the items and locations are always different. You can't depend on anything going to happen, so all you can really control is your character build considered in a vacuum. In games where things stay the same you can build your character in conjunction with the environment you're playing him in, giving you much more control over the game and your experience than you would have otherwise.

I simply disagree with the premise that rewarding xp upon enemy kills encourages behavior that is 'boring'. In fact, receiving xp upon killing an enemy is exciting, because it's the game telling you you've just overcome a significant challenge. That you don't experience things this way does not mean that it is not an experience that exists for others. There is no single absolute truth of what is boring and what is not. That said, no xp for fights could encourage behavior that is just as boring: simply stealth past everything and then persuade yourself to your xp at the end. Xp for enemies could lead to boring gameplay, no xp for enemies could lead to boring gameplay. What we both want is exciting gameplay, experience or no experience for enemies is an issue entirely orthogonal to that.

I've finally become a backer, I couldn't deal with potentially not having access to the backer beta. Baldur's Gate 2 has such a powerful grip on my being I couldn't not.

Whenever I want. "Leveling up" is an abstraction that only makes sense from a meta perspective. In any world you don't become better at anything in discrete chunks; all improvement is gradual. Therefore, because it is an abstraction, I should be able to do it whenever I want, just like pausing the game, saving the game, loading the game, starting the game, or anything else that is not explicitly an action within the game world.

What is wrong with playing the game to get xp? You can't exactly play an rpg "incorrectly". (unless you're that fps streamer who couldn't work out what to do in Skyrim because the game didn't tell him...)

Wizard, obviously, because wizards are the best always. As for the race, I think the Aumaua look really cool. Maybe I'll go godlike, but I didn't like the looks of the fire ones they showed during the gamescom demo. Perhaps the other ones are better? I guess I'll find out tomorrow!

I don't see why I should be denied the pleasures of splattering spiders over cave walls just because of your psychological peculiarities. Instead of trying to control the experience of others, start by controlling yourself. Hey, I remember you (that is, if you're the same Tsuga C)! This is reflir, from the bioware offtopic forum. Anyone else here from the old days? Thinking about it, it kind of makes sense that a game like this would bring us together again

"Tough ****, this party is not a democracy. If you want fairness and equality you should've become a moral philosopher instead of a sellsword."