Sacred_Path

Mmmh... maybe do give examples then? Granted, I've already brought up PS:T, but... if you're fond of planar travel, you should be able to think of some other examples. Let's try to sort this out. I don't think I broadly acknowledged that your example "accomplishes its task", I said that what you describe could be agreeable on the one hand because it's obviously not very different from your usual cavern/ natural adventure location, but on the other hand it begs the question why such a relatively mundane place has to be an alternate "plane". This is an inherent problem of using planes, not specific criticism towards you. You can bombard the player with weird ****, thereby provoking the question of "WTF is this ****?", or you can design your plane to be more natural-looking/ feeling, thereby provoking the question of "how is this a different plane?". elaborate plz

Infinite amounts of man-hours that could be infinitely better spent on other things. Sry

You state that your point is that planar travel could be good, and you don't care about any examples either of planar travel done well nor of it done badly. Therefore it IS theoretical, not misunderstood. Believe me. Or look up the definition of theoretical Eh, exactly because I was mostly talking about how planar travel, and I included "teleportation to a far-away region" there, sucked in a lot of games I've played, not how a theoretical example of a plane could sound cozy and homely. Yours does, btw. And I would compliment it for that on the one hand while faulting it because OTOH it's so mundane. We might just ask "what is a plane"? Does the plane of Earth really need to be made up of mud and rocks, things that are Earth-y in our 'plane'? Couldn't it just as well just be a void through which many-colored gaseous formations drift, and smugly in the middle of it sits the great deity of Earth? I think so. The point is I'm not especially intrigued by either idea, nor especially repulsed by either idea, until I get some reasoning why the story had to take place in this other plane at all (instead of a more common type of area).

Mhhh... so your point is entirely theoretical. That seems to be the case pretty often with you. Has that ever annoyed anyone? No wonder we can't agree in that case, as my argument is "a lot of instances in which I've seen planar travel/ radical changes of location in games, it sucked", while your argument is "it could be good in theory". Let me help you come up with an example; PS:T. Planar travel obviously worked for that game because it's set in the "City of Doors". I'm fine with that. Just like, OTOH, in Icewind Dale I expect an intimate portrayal of a geographically constrained area. As to the plane of Earth being a simple cave; I think you can figure out yourself why that's not exactly a great idea. The idea of "planes" inherently has one quality: it must strike the player as alien. If your idea of a seperate dimension is that of a cave, there's probably no reason why your story element "travel to the Plane of Earth and talk to the Great Serpent" shouldn't rather be "travel to the Great Cave and talk to the Grand Druid". Unless your story involving planes is so strong, and your artistic possibilities so limited, that you want to go through with it nonetheless.

You can either flesh out one (type of) setting, or you can cram all kinds of settings into a game and call them "planes". An area that blends in seamlessly with the rest of the setting (such as a cavern in a mountain range in the Spine of the World) is therefore different than an area you reach by means of a "portal", for the very reason that in the latter case, players will expect something markedly different from where they left. Is that hard to grasp? I think you're confusing several things here. If you're talking about an open world game with the scope of having several different climates/ radically different cultures, then yes. This wasn't the case in, say, IWD2 though. By all means, it would have made sense for you to never travel very far outside the geographical region you started in, as the name implies. Stepping into a portal and ending up on the other side of the world in a greenhouse = spell broken, at least for me. yes, I don't enjoy them for the reasons already cited, not all of which are subjective.

Nop, it doesn't make a difference (to me) wether it was planned from the start. In either case, the portrayal of one area might suffer if you make a hasty transition to another. Would they have had to spend more time highlighting the cultural oddities of Chult in SoZ if half the game hadn't taken place on the Sword Coast? I think so. In the case of IWD2, the little holiday trip ruined the claustrophobic feeling of being stuck in a boreal corner of the world.

You're right, because I don't remember a thing about this.

eh, personally, I'd rather everyone wears armor and no one has magic tats. When there's no consistency in the setting, I just feel like getting stabbed in the brain repeatedly. But yes this might be totally subjective as well.

I think the point is, and I agree to some extent, that a lot of mystery should be preserved until the player gets to a certain location/ faces a certain enemy. I think the easiest way to do this is to make short flavour texts. Like Herodotus describing Scythia as a place where gryphons live; it may be true, or it may be a euphemism for well-bred horses (better yet if the player doesn't even know what a gryphon is).

Personally I'd rather play one game set in the desert and one in a forested area than two games that mashed both together. But that's possibly just me. Now that I'm thinking about it, it was in IWD2 that we also got to visit Chult I think. It's called ICEWIND DALE people. A true "WTF is this ****?" moment.

welp, not if you're playing on Hard, possibly without reloads, because for a good amount of the time you'll just stun and impale yourself so often, it ain't fun.

actually it's more like... "this game takes place in the desert, so there are no forests. But I really like forests! So let's teleport the player to a plane where they can see the cool swaying tree animations one of our artist has been working on in his spare time." it's like putting everything and the kitchen sink into the game, no matter if it goes against the concept/ premise of the game.

Get Margaret Weis on board too, and drop the Ultima plans. Dead horse is dead anyway. Instead, make Death Gate 2: The RPG. I've always wanted to own a house in the Labyrinth.

In reality, a fully armored and armed swordfighting legend would look like any other armored and armed person, until they actually spring into action. So a group of bandits might still rely on the strength of numbers and jump on said person. It's only in fantasy RPGs that your high-level character sparkles like a Christmas tree and can be identified as a threat from miles away. Therefore, I don't really care either way. Bandits can run up to me and die or run away and fellate my e-ego. It seems to be a huge deal to a lot of people that the game recognizes their awsumness in this fashion though.

I hope [expect] that in P:E our character will be so retarded that they neither have an idea of ethics nor grasp the concept of legality. That's the only way to ensure madshure players' freedom of choice.

Everything that really is an achievement, you're usually aware of. Winning a tough combat encounter/ sneaking through an entire area undetected/ playing with no reloads for the last 3 hours/ Finding all the pieces to an awsum item are, or can be, real achievements.

Ke$ha has self awareness? Ok, the people behind Ke$ha know they're selling crap. can I call you a hipster instead? Two things: 1) I don't necessarily downgrade i.e. an FPS if it has no character development. That's simply not a staple of the genre. However, if it's present, I will rate that game higher than I would have otherwise (if the character development is well done). Also, if it's there but done badly (i.e. badly balanced), then I will give that game a lower score. PS:T has plenty of combat. It just isn't well done. If your game isn't about combat, ok. Maybe don't put in more than two monster races then. I have an open enough mind to try such a game, even if I might not enjoy it enough to buy it. But saying "ok, we put in some crap combat for all you RPGers who wouldn't otherwise buy the game. But the game isn't actually about the combat so don't be mad k lolz", I can't quite follow there. 2) As to my "bullet point" list; as I said, it consists of things that just come up naturally during play. Within the first minutes of any game you'll get a good idea if, for example, there are convincing physics or if the world allows for much interactivity. You simply can't help but notice. Torment didn't have this any more than other IE games. Fine. On to the next point. And so on. After all, a game must have something, no let me rephrase that, several things going for it to make me like it. PS:T is pretty much a one-trick pony. You can of course interject here and scream wildly "but that's not what the game was built for!", that's fine for maybe one point. But if you remark that for every single point I bring up, it doesn't hold up as an excuse anymore. Hmm... I can't actually think of a CRPG that I'd call a masterpiece right now, so... that might be telling. it seems we shouldn't be disagreeing by much then.

I think I can see the problem now, people with fringe tastes tend to like everything no one else likes I'd like to make this post more useful but I can't.

If elegance of design is able to offset problems with functionality, I don't mind (when it comes to games)

While it made use of more interesting AD&D races than other AD&D games (like gith), none of those races' mechanics were different from your average AD&D game. If you have a race with wings which can't or doesn't fly, it might as well be interchangeable with any other wingless race. Welp, all I can say is I don't tick off little boxes when I play. These things just come up naturally when you're playing. Do I have any races to pick from when I start the game, and how are they implemented? Is there some meat to the combat system (you can judge that when you get your first hostile)? Are NPCs moving about or are they just standing in place forever? There are fine lines there. What I find silly is if people think they're not subjective in their judgement at all. I also find it silly to judge solely according to "standards". Like saying "game A had a great feature, game B doesn't, so that's a step back". You can genuinely miss a feature, but you can also say "I miss feature X, game A had it, but game B has some other features" or "this game doesn't have feature X but this game also works without it".

Uhm.... I was talking about Planescape: Torment, not Torment: Tides of Numenera.

Nah. The dissonance between us was "I understand that you didn't like Torment, but it's because you aren't steeped in culture" (PJ) and "I understand that you like Torment, but your very subjective reasons don't make it a good game" (me) But, among the other reasons for this disagreement, something else just occurred to me. I've been following Brian Fargo's tweets since backing ToN, and their kickstarter record for 1mil gained in the shortest time has just been broken, by a movie project no less. So I read up on the movie project and its director, and my verdict was that the series that the movie is based on just sounded really bad/ crappy and contrived. However, Wikipedia says this guy's series have received quite some praise from critics. I don't watch TV all the time, and I don't watch any one thing so much that I'd tire of it. I'm also pretty discerning in what I watch, and not many programs qualify there. Maybe the reasons why critics responded well to these series is because they were bringing something new to the table, or sidestepped some issues that plague a lot of TV programs. It's a critic's opinion, not a casual viewer's. I have played pretty much every PC RPG that came out since the early 90's that wasn't horribad (though some certainly were worse than others), and I haven't played many games from other genres in the last 15 years. I do know people who play an RPG every now and then, maybe once a year or every two years, possibly less. And when they play them they seem to really enjoy, for example, all those fantasy trappings. Things that I have long become bored of, or at least I'm not excited about (like Tolkienish races and monsters). I mostly approach these games with a mindset of 1) how well are fundamental aspects (the 'traditional' ones) executed compared to other games and 2) how much innovation/ improvement on failures of other games is there so I'm looking at Torment and I'm checking things like - living world (NPC schedules etc.): nop - interactive world: nop - a new take on combat or thieving or diplomacy options: nop - an interesting new take on races: nop - working economy: nop but dialogue and text out the ass. So I'm mostly not thrilled, no matter if the quality of the dialogue is better than 90% of what we've seen in CRPGs in this area. I don't know about PrimeJunta's gaming habits vs. mine, but I think these are the reasons for the angle at which I'm looking at this game. I hear you say, "you must judge the game more on its own merits! Play fewer RPGs/ go out more/ get that broom out of your ass", but these are the reasons for my verdict. Anyway I think PJ has already checked out of this conversation but that just crossed my mind.

I thought the very point of having monsters in fantasy is so you can display your awsum killing skillz without having to consider any grey moral areas

In that case I'd expect him to be up front about i.e. the game needing more polish, or them needing more people because satisfying both offline and online players is demanding. Even one of the most ridiculed kickstarter campaigns, that of Grimoire, was upfront about the game being finished, but if you gave them moar moneez it would go towards very specific enhancements. 1mil actually seemed pretty low to me for a Garriott project, I was wondering about that all along.

Well, that's a bummer. While it was clear that something like this would happen at some point, I don't know why it had to be Garriott to corrupt the KS model. Forsaken virtues alright