SophosTheWise

Lephys, I think there are many people who think having separate quests is better. Probably because fulfilling it gives instant gratification. But I always feel like this (from the latest Kickstarter update from Lords of Xulima)

Ahoi mateys I really miss the grand adventure in many RPGs nowadays where everything was somehow interconnected, where a quest felt like and adventure and not an errand. The last RPGs which gave me that sense of adventure probably were Dragon Age: Origins with the quest to search for the holy ashes and Dragon's Dogma because it didn't have traditional fast travel. I was just watching Spoony's Ultima Retrospective again and there's a questline in Ultima VII which is almost ridiculously complex. What do you think about complex questlines? What do you think we can expect from PE?

I think turn-based is a great system for combat-centric games. Honestly, I coulnd't care less about combat in games like Torment and I wan it to be resolved quickly. I'm in it for the story, not for intricate, tactical combat.

Today I was just going through the old updates and I totally forgot, that before the stronhold there was a player house stretch goal. So, does the stronghold eliminate the earlier stretchgoal, or do we get them both? I mean sure, the stronghold is more epic, bigger and has more uses, but one argument for a player house would be that I maybe simply want to lay back in a house with an herb garden instead of throning on my stronghold...

I sincerely hope leg armour is separate, as leg armour (and clothing) always seems to get neglected, as if there was only one type of leather pants and and some silly skirts.

Now now, don't get all defensive - I read the codex discussion about your disposition. You have to agree that #1: Coverage of Josh Sawyer's presentation was poor and #2 (actually you might not have been around for this) the coverage of the Wasteland 2 Gamescom thing was also pretty shallow. Have you read this ? This isn't the same discussion as in the Codex. I'm not being defensive. I'm simply stating the reasons for it. Of course the coverage was poor and of course the Wasteland 2 thing was shallow, I'm not debating that. But then again I'm a fan of RPGs, so I demand more detailed information. Fact is, most of gamers don't really care about those games. For general gaming journalists, those games are but a side note. Your free newspaper at the train station is probably also shallow about politics, whereas a specialized magazine on politics is probably a lot more detailed. What I'm trying to say: hardcore RPG fans are not the target group of any general gaming site. A normal reader simply doesn't care about the TB vs. RTwP debate and they don't care if there's XP for kills or not. That's why I said it's a vicious cycle. Those games are, from a gatekeeping-standpoint, almost irrelevant and their coverage is only a nice-to-have and not a must. While journalism certainly has the responsibility of informing people, journalism also has to be economic, especially now, where journalism is slowly dying. Also, I found Grunker's article a bit shallow in its analysis. While I agree that practices of gaming journalists are, most of the time, horrible and most of those guys can't even call themselves journalists. I fight of at the forefront against those kinds of guys and it's inconceivable for me to ever write a preview based on a trailer and I'm a harsh enemy of gaming PR. But to reduce the problem to the omniprescence of PR is an oversimplification that neglects all structural problems that are prevalent in any journalistic genre or in journalism in general for that matter. I find it important to understand that a lack of quality in journalism is not only associated with "bad journalists" and "evil PR", even though that's a schema which has a very strong narrative and is therefore a charming explanation, even if it's not the right one. I don't want to get to technical but people in journalistics are really, really not sure what all the exact problems are and how they really interact, as that strongly depends on the applied theory of research. But one thing everyone agrees with: PR is evil is an oversimplification (and a myth, even), which was proven by Barbara Baerns with her determination-thesis or rather by the criticism about her research. tl;dr: there are things such as target audiences and gate-keeping and "PR is evil" and "most journalists are ignorant" are not the only explanation for lack of quality. This is a very common occurence and is the result of the so-called "recontextualization" , which is a linguistic process of writing which is being explored with progressionanalysis. Of course there are bad journalists who design their stories before even talking to people, but mostly that happens when someone misinterprets what you say, or rather he simply understands it his way. I know, people on the codex hate me for not being objectivist, but really, everything you understand and hear, you understand with your brain and your ears and not some sort of objective brain-ear. Even if you say "The minister hastily gathered his material", that was already a totally subjective impression.

By the way, has anyone of you seen the gameplay footage from Deep Down for PS4? That's armour porn! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIRUImPWaOo

To be fair, not all gaming journalists get paid *raises hand*, even in France. The small sites are not covering Eternity because they have scarce resources and they are better spent at AAA titles because those are the games which get you the clicks, which get you the advertising revenue you need to keep the site up and running. But then again, they can't grow because their target audience is better served via bigger sites which also have the resources to write more than just a few small daily news. The big sites don't cover Eternity, because they probably don't have an audience for it, as the AAA crowd usually doesn't care about Kickstarter games. I still meet gamers who have never heard of Kickstarter. It's a vicious cycle, really.

Actually I would be mad if that wasn't the case for PE. In my opinion, that's what dialogue is for apart from giving away quest information. It's an "immersive gateway" to the game's universe. (Also, I love having different dialogue options, even if the result is the same. I still remember he Dwarven Charter where you could insult the Dwarven boss, just for the sake of having different insults) I know what you mean. Show, don't tell. But in a text based, isometric roleplaying game that's kind of hard, because you can't plaster propaganda posters and small details everywhere. Of course, you don't have to know how the government works. But what if I want that? You can simply ignore the codex entries and I can read it. Well, there I agree. What's a Paladin?

Apparently the world map is only temp according to Sawyer on the SA forums.

The only thing I don't like as much is that many characters don't wear hats or helmets. Also, too many hoods. But other than that, it's fantastic.

I'm actually intrigued by the journal. Not only by how it looks, but because it gives away first quest information Maybe we have a lot of political intrigue as part of the main story, which would make sense considering there are four crests on the map...

I know it has already been posted in the Codex and also in the GDC thread. But I guess not everyone follows that thread and will therefore miss out on a lot of awesome stuff. Thus, here's the link to the slides! http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1019755/Gathering-Your-Party-with-Project Enjoy everyone! (I've never been that excited about new screenshots before. Actually I've never been excited about any "new screenshots", but alas, so it goes)

What Obsidian? It's Bethesda and it's gonna be sheit. MAAAYBE they'll let Obsidian make an addon if they feel like it. Obsidian didn't even manage to get 85 on metacritic last time. Well, Obsidian made F:NV and I guess everyone around here would prefer that Bethesda would outsource Fallout 4 rather than doing it by themselves. Why? The domain is even registered to Zenimax.

And how does it work with skill tags? I remember being confused by Baldur's Gate I where you want to get into the bandit camp and you can say something like "Let me join you!" So I basically thought that my character was sincere and not lying. Thus, how about: "Let me join you!" [Lie] "Let me join you!" [Truth] i dont think it matters if it is a lie or not. the result will be determined by what you do after you "join". Let me join you! you act like a proper bandit and go along with them, you get result A you backstab them at the most opportune time, you get result B you fail to be convincing as a bandit, you get result C no matter what the reason behind joining, you asked to join them and you did, in order to get to the result you seek I'd say it matter skillwise. If you have to use a bluff skill, your bluff could fail. Other than that, I think your proposition is a bit too complicated. What if just joining me gives me certain reputational points that I didn't want to have in the first place? Just because the game doesn't differentiate between sincere joining and the lie?

And how does it work with skill tags? I remember being confused by Baldur's Gate I where you want to get into the bandit camp and you can say something like "Let me join you!" So I basically thought that my character was sincere and not lying. Thus, how about: "Let me join you!" [Lie] "Let me join you!" [Truth]

So, what are you guys thinking about the incoming Fallout 4 announcement? Maybe it's the sooper-seekret next gen project Obsidian is working on?

By the way, I like Avellone talks. He's just so relaxed and fun. Really cool to watch and listen. @Kaz: What are you even doing on the forums? GET BACK TO WORK! No, seriously, really awesome portraits. I'm really looking forward to see more of your art. What's up with the wizard estate on your website? Is that a PE design? To get back to the portraits: Someone on the Codex has found a statement by Josh (probably from the SA forums) that the blonde guy is Edair whose name is no spelled Edér.

I wonder who Emilio Valtas is. Sounds really Vailian.

I agree, I love that one. She's possibly an air-element Godlike, judging by the feathers. The companion portraits are Kaz's work, I believe. Though the high collar, plate armour and her being black would also speak for Vailian. Maybe sort of both?

At 26 minutes there is a bunch of new screenshots as well as two fantastic (!) companion/character portraits.

I'm not sure what part you're referring to. I don't have any problem with goofy dialogues when they fit. "Entertainment" is a good reason to include a dialogue option as long as it's mixed in with choices that have a larger impact. I totally agree with you. I enjoy the grand perspective of games, I enjoy deeper and more mature themes (whatever that may be) but occasionally having funny dialogues and funny characters (Noober comes to mind) really brightens up a game, in my opinion The part I was talking about: For those who don't understand: "Not everything was better in the past."BioWare's tools for the Infinity Engine were very powerful but terribly complicated", says Josh Sawyer. "Also there was a lot of nonsense-dialogue. They might have been entertaining but we believe that you'd prefer to see really good conversations." Edit: Well, someone was faster.

Roughly: Another problem: the player charaters shouldn't stick out from the environment (so basically they shouldn't float on the 2D map). The developers solve this problem with area-dependent environment maps. They also toned down ambient lighting and used "light probes", which is a special function in Unity. This function checks the lighting on certain developer-chosen points so that the right lighting for the character models can be determined. Using shadow map sampling they can determine where exactly a character model is located. Then they apply shadows which are generated by dot-like light-sources. "Thus the shadows might not be as detailed, but they combine the models and environment much better, explains Josh Sawyer.

Generally very happy with the preview, but I'm a bit worried about Josh's comments about nonsense dialogues. I'm all for having a deep story with lots of reactivity, but sometimes having a little fun is awesome. I hope it doesn't get 2edgyndeep4u

I'm an avid reader and kind of an enthusiast when it comes to literature. Also, I'm not easily impressed by writing. It seems I would incline to agree. But the problem with your statement is, that it hinders development of good gaming narratives. If people in the beginning of games with stories would've said "Ah, shucks, I don't want stories in my game!" we would've never had, say, Dear Esther or Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs which were absolutely stellar in writing. They have to be the most literary games I've ever played and I loved them dearly. "Reading" sounds unspecific and that irks me. It reminds me of verbose, everyone's-a-walking-encyclopedia-of-banalities Planescape. That, on the other hand, is true. I wouldn't say Torment was full of banalities, at least not in the context of other computer and videogames. I think Torment introduced players to some interesting albeit not very deep philosophical questions, and I think those players were never in a "philosophy" target group. So there's that. But I really hope we will not see "quality" writing in the vein of R.A. Salvatore. Someone in the market square whining about trees for several pages worth of monologue is pretty banal IMO. Avoiding things like that is what seperates an accomplished writer/ team of writers from your average blogger. I don't really remember that particular scenario, but I think it's important that not ever character is a wise wizard. I like characters who spout nonsense or banal ****. Still, I think, especially for its time and in the context of video games, Torment was spectacularly good and surpassed basically every fantasy RPG which existed back then. PS:T has nothing on Dear Esther or Amnesia: AMFP, but it's still a very good game writing-wise. That's fairly much all multicellular lifeforms. Oh God, yes. Salvatore is the ****ing worst. Seriously, how can anyone enjoy that? His stuff is boring to read, generic as hell and his language is weak to the point that I can see a high schooler being better than him.