Malekith

That not how it works in games though. In games, when grey mortality is decided upon, everyone/thing becomes grey. The players is beat over the head with this fact and most choices are rendered irrelevant or just not given. Few games haven't gone down this path, when going 'grey'. Go play any game that is 'grey' and find a companion like One of Many or Bishop. Then see if you can be the villain or evil. You'll find it's a no on all accounts. Some people just want to see the world burn. There is nothing flawed or shallow about this archetype, just how it's written. Extreemly rare. I would be hard pressed to think any real world examples.Most people of this archetype are mentaly unstable or even outright crazy. They tent to end in asylums and not in leadership positions to threaten the world

Really I find it less realistic because of this, it removes bad and good people/choices and replaces them with one choice/personality, grey. Realistically some factions/characters should be grey, but not every single one. We should have characters like Kreia, but we should also have characters like One of Many, Bishop, etc. Not just paint every character in one colour. And lets not forget the worse thing grey mortality does, the removal of being the villain. It forces the player to be the hero. its seems to me that people have different ideas on what grey morality means.Grey morality doesn't mean that there are no good or bad people, but that there are realistic motives behind them and not evil for the sake of evil or good just because they have a messiah complex.For me a good excamble of grey morality are the Song of ice and Fire books.I would like PE to follow a similar approach

There are all sorts of very rational reasons to wipe out entire cities. History suggests once you wipe out a couple the amount of fighting you have to do going forward is pretty dramatically reduced. Except you are not an army on invasion but a lone wanderer or a party of six people.

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. The same way as a good guy wont go to loot tombs but stay to protect the people and join the city guard?

I agree with what you say.But the distinction should not be only in roleplaying it. An example of what i consider good quest design and what i meant when i made the thread is the quest in DA:O when you try to save the earl's son from the desire demon.You can make a deal with the demon and learn blood magic.No one learns of this,which makes sense as there is no way for somebody to know, so no reputation loses and you get the alliance with the earl the same way as if you banish the demon.An "evil" person, when evil means someone without conscience who is willing to condemn a child to possesion from a demon in exchange of power or even simple sex, will do it, a "good" person, someone who is no willing to deal with demons and sacrifice children to achieve his goals wont do it. In my opinion this offers more opportunity for roleplaying than to do the optimal thing when you save the day,get the girl and gain the most XP on top of that.

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

More XP and you can't be realy evil. You can be a selfish as****** and still your karma is high (defender of the wastes) The only way for the game to recognize you as evil was the childkiller or slaver perks in F2, but then you just miss half the content of the game. Or to go on a rampage and wipe out entire cities. Thats not evil its lunatic

In most games( IE games and original Fallouts included) the "good" options awarded better than the evil ones.That doesn't make sense.Unless they are mentaly unstable psychopaths, in real life most people don't do ''evil'' deeds just for the kicks of it but for selfish reasons. They do it because being evil rewards better then do the good thing. This isn't an absolute case of course. But when it makes sense the evil option to gain you more than the good one(most of the time,after all what exactly is the "evil option" if not to put your personal gain above the good of others) it must reflected in the game. I think it will lead to more interesting choices in the gameplay if the player has to sacrifise something (gold,information,...)to uphold his principles, as well as cases that there is no clear good or bad solution.

BG2 strikes the perfect balance

Exactly. I would like the devs to look for inspiration in Warhammer Fantasy to the champions of Chaos

This is false. The old woman in Ragpicker's Square can teach you. She's in a hut in the bottom-middle of the screen. After that you can switch betwen fighter/mage anytime you want by talking to Dakkon. It seems to me you didn't even play the game carefully.

The games had not a good story.The world had an excellent history and it was very well develloped, but as games the main storyline was... poor. I would argue that Skyrim has not even an ending! The game's story and the game world's story are two different things Besides, Bethesda's writing is atrocious.The only thing they do well is exploration. I don't say they are bad games, just that they are bad in things i consider important and their strong points are things i don't care about. I don't care much for exploration,and the games are lacking the motivation for me to explore..Even on the IE games, i didn't like the empty wilderness areas in BG1.Also in TES the world may be huge, but it feels shallow in comparison with BG2 for example.NPC's should not all look the same and should not all repeat the same lines.

Okay well any Elder Scrolls game from Morrowind up would be a good example. Morrowind itself is so open you can actually break the story and still beat the game, it is just really hard. Deus Ex Human Revolution released last year is another good example, you could shoot your way through that game but you could also kill no one outside of forced moments, get through entire levels without even being seen, and there were many moments where making the right choices in a conversation could make big changes for how you approach a level. Also the recent Fallout games like New Vegas were very open ended and had a very diverse set of playstyles you could use to get past most things. Drakensang The River of Time which I recently played through even had multiple moments where you had different options on how to proceed. For example at one point you had to get a group of pirates to stop harassing an elf village. You could have done it by disrupting the crew and conning them into mutiny, you could have just walked up and started killing, you could even try to negotiate on the pirates behalf. I never tried it but theoretically you might have even been able to steal what the pirates were after directly. I am sure there are plenty of other games out there to draw from. Maybe not, but using Adventure game mechanics would have served the story far better than using D&D 2nd edition did. Different strokes for different folks. I thought all the Elder Scrolls games were horrible.Fallout 3 the same. New Vegas i give it to you, but exactly because it was open-ended the story suffered. In the end it comes down to preference.I thing the story and the themes are much more important in a game.This is the reason i hate sandboxes. I was bored in all of the Elder Scrolls games.Fallout 1-2 were excellent games but i prefer P:T and BG2 because of the story. All of the IE games were linear or semi-linear. I want PE to have more choices&concequences than most IE games but not at the expense of the story.Also different choices in the gameplay should have concequences in the story

You said what was wrong with the entire game without even knowing it. It has nothing to do with being combat oriented or not. I don't care if every single objective in PE can be cleared without drawing a weapon one single time. But to quote you "...in a game where the optimal way to finish..." is wrong, wrong, wrong. There is no "optimal" way to play a well made balanced RPG, that's the whole point of why I don't like PS:T. Creating your own character, making your own choices, and progressing through the game on your terms, not the games or the Developers terms. That is a "good" Role-Playing Game. There is nothing wrong with a forced stealth situation, or a forced diplomacy/investigation section, or even forced combat. But when 50% + of your game is forced diplomacy/investigation you had best be making an adventure game or you are doing it wrong. I don't disagree with what you are saying. I just say that the game is not overrated.Me(and i imagine the others who think this is the best IE game-for the record its my secont favorite, i slightly prefere BG2) acknowledge the game faults. I say that despite the flaws this game is a masterpiece. The only sin of the game is that as you say there isn't balance among the playstyles. But how many games truly are balanced? Fallouts? The evil choices were a joke. Evil players have 1/3 of the content a good character has.Many games offer a non combat approach, but without exceptions the combat approach was better in terms of XP and loot.Torment just has them the other way around

Yeah.... maybe. If it weren't for the fact that I don't really like the Forgotten Realms as a universe and Planescape was by far my favorite campaign world I would agree. Let's just say one of my top complaints is how unfaithful Torment is to the source material. Using Berk in a sentence doesn't mean you are in Sigil, you could be in a crap dive bar in london too. No not really. Also I can't help that you have no sense when it comes to game design. Removal of options in an RPG is never a good design move. Forcing the player to play a specific way in an RPG is never a good design move. PS:T does both without even leaving the character creation screen. Unless of course you don't mind being a subpar character who sees less than half the lore/story (only reason to even play it), being forced to get the bad ending since you missed half the story, or being forced to be a mage since it is literally the only viable class choice, too bad you have to be hours into the game before you can actually be a mage. Why was it a game that took place in a city located at the center of the universe with doors leading literally everywhere had fewer options and more restrictions on where you could go and how you could play than one that started in a backwater keep in the middle of no where? PS:T is the ultimate expression of "substance" over "quality". It doesn't wash for anything other than effete snobs and fanboys. Torment was more linear and has fewer choices i give you that, but not in the degree you seem to think. I have completed the game with all classes.Sure, even with fighter if you want to have interesting dialoge options you have to raise your inteligence and wisdom at least to 16. And its true that the combat was the worst of all IE games except BG1.But in a game where the optimal way to finish it was to not combat anyone and finish the guests through dialoge and the end goal is not to kill an army but to rediscover who you are it make sense that the most important stats to be inteligence and wisdom. Like it or not the game was all about the story and the writing and not for combat. I understand if you want a combat focus character the game is not for you, but in what the game wants to achieve it does. And for most people who have played it its one of the best cRPG games of all time on par with BG2. Its not "overrated", it may not be the kind of game you prefer

PS:T is a great story I am sure. You not liking what I am saying also doesn't make what I say any more or less true. It is, by far, the most over rated "GAME" Obsidian has ever made. Note the word "GAME" as in, more than just "STORY". The fact that it sold badly and was outsold by both Baldur's Gates as far as I know also says the majority agrees with me, not you or the other fanboys who will hop out of the woodwork to reply. Good story + bad gameplay + bad design decisions = bad game. Care to explain the "bad design decisions" ? If you mean the "no armor-no swords-18 inteligence for dialoge" i disagree. The game is the better for these