decado

The combat looks so incredibly boring.

I'm late to this party but my God, could that article be anymore fawning and unctuous? What kind of game journalism is this? Why don't they just let BW write some ad copy and send it in?

I'm not underestimating the importance, I'm more questioning the value altogether. DX:HR is, in my view, a great example of how this "context" doesn't make any difference at all. It is not really possible to play as a "bitter aug." It is possible to select dialog choices in this vein, but the game is played the same way whether you like augs, or not. After all, what does it mean to play the game as a "bitter aug"? You will still get augs, you'll still spend your Praxis points on them, and you'll still use the augs to bypass game obstacles. So what exactly is your supposed hatred of augs really worth? At the end of the game, it doesn't make any difference. It doesn't have to be this way. I think giving the player the opportunity to role-play certain styles can work with a canon ending set-up. But DX:HR is not a good example of how to do this.

I think BioWare's historical failure in implementing multiple endings and telling us that YOUR CHOICES MATTER!!! should be recognized for what it is: an inevitable reality of the medium. Past a certain point, juggling multiple story lines becomes unwieldy, almost farcical. The transition from ME1 to ME2 is a great example of this. What meaningful impact did allowing the council to die have on the second game? Except for influencing a few cut scenes here and there? And further, what impact do they have if the story is going to eventually have a canonical ending anyways? It was the same with Dragon Age. I envision two different ways to craft a narrative in an RPG, encapsulated here by a neat graphic I just made: (Sorry for the big ass graphic!) The first is the BioWare approach, where the branches of the narrative are equally accessible no matter how you use the game mechanics. A good example of this is DA:O, where a rogue, a fighter and a mage all have equal access to all the major branches of the story line, no matter how you choose to play the game. All of the decisions that affect the end of the game are narrative in nature, as opposed to ludological (game focused). The upside to this is that all of the content is available to players throughout all of the game, no matter which mechanics you decide to use. The downside is that the decisions you do make are all based on the narrative, and so in some respect they are almost unattached to the rest of the experience as a whole. The other problem is the one I mentioned earlier. BioWare's idea of choice is to give you multiple endings, but those endings don't quite stack up when it comes to the second game. And if you never plan on playing the second game, the choices are even more meaningless because they come at the end. The only thing they do give you is some narrative satisfaction, i.e. "I feel good because the story ended the way I wanted to." This is great, but we should wonder what it is worth. Also, sometimes this doesn't even happen. Look at Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and tell me anyone really gave a crap which one of the three tacked on endings they eventually chose. The second graphic represents the old school Black Isle way of doing things. Fallout 2 only really has one ending, though it does have multiple 'slides' for the various locations/people you visited. But realistically, the game only ends one way -- you storm the oil rig and kill Frank Horrigan. The real decision making process occurs in figuring out HOW you're going to kill Horrigan, which is dependent upon character design choices you've made up to that point (use the turrets to kill him, go to to toe, blast his brains out with the Gauss rifle, etc). It is the approach that makes the difference here, not which narrative path you choose to go down. The disadvantage to this approach is clear -- there is only one ending. But that is really the only disadvantage, and I can't even really agree that it is one because the game will have to have a canon ending anyways. But the advantages over the first approach are obvious: your character, and the mechanics behind the game, decide which way you are going to complete the game's objectives. This is real replayability, and real decision making. Further, all of the consequences to these decisions can be contained in-game. The player can have a vastly different experience while getting from point A to B, but they are always going to get to B. And when it comes time to make Game #2, the developers aren't stuck doing stupid retcons or having your decisions "matter" by giving you access to a different cut scene. I prefer the second approach. The first method has always been a massive failure.

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For example, why do you feel comfortable making sweeping statements like these? Do you have absolutely any evidence upon which to base any of these assumptions? At all? I'm speculating bro, you should try it sometime. It wouldn't surprise me though, it fits in with the general picture being built of PE's design philosophy by the updates. Why else would they remove unviable character builds? 1) How can you remove something before it exists? 2) On that note, how is creating a system that minimizes broken character building a bad thing? 3) How does #2 lend itself to any insights regarding what kind of spells will be in the game, or how hard mages will be to hit? You aren't speculating. You are "speculating."

And if it doesn't, we were fundamentally mislead on the Kickstarters!

For example, why do you feel comfortable making sweeping statements like these? Do you have absolutely any evidence upon which to base any of these assumptions? At all?

You've been tearing up and down the forum for the past few weeks, saying the game is going to suck. If that's you withholding your final judgment I'd hate to see the finished product.

Uh, yeah it kinda does. The attribute system you use determines what kind of content makes it into the game.

Special was great. The use of perks/traits and the attribute set up was probably one of the best iterations of a CRPG system ever devised up to that time. So much so that it is still used to today, 15 years later. Fallout was a good game for a lot of reasons: good story telling, interesting combat, a well-written setting, and, yes, the character mechanics. I don't think this is a revolutionary statement, by the way. FO had many many useless skills and ways to make a bad character. Way more than D&D. I don't have a problem with that personaly, but to say that D&D is deeply flawed and SPECIAL is alright strikes me as...strange. Well I don't think DnD was deeply flawed. I don't like 3/3.5. I never have. My pen and paper exposure to them was limited, because the gaming group I played with at the time didn't really care to switch from 2nd edition. So I didn't get a lot of experience with them, and maybe I would have liked them had I got to play them more. But for my money, 2nd Edition ADnD is still one of the best (in which ever way you care to measure the concept) RPG systems ever made. Regarding the original SPECIAL implementations: I liked that there were ways to make a "bad" character. But even then, FO2 supported a bunch of different ways to play through the game. You did not have to be a killing machine in order to beat the game. I played through once with a high CHA speech/science/knife-wielder. The game was pretty hard, but also a lot of fun. I just had to think outside the box(es), as they say.

Special was great. The use of perks/traits and the attribute set up was probably one of the best iterations of a CRPG system ever devised up to that time. So much so that it is still used to today, 15 years later. Fallout was a good game for a lot of reasons: good story telling, interesting combat, a well-written setting, and, yes, the character mechanics. I don't think this is a revolutionary statement, by the way.

Like getting Daystar at level 9 or whatever, lol. The Crooked Crane Inn FTW!

There is absolutely no reason why they should feel beholden to an old CRPG convention. DnD has always been notoriously hard to translate to a PC, going all the way back to gold box games. Every DnD CRPG has needed a high level of tweaking and manipulation to get pen and paper mechanics in good enough shape to work on a computer. So why bother? Why bother, especially when you've got life-long RPG fans working at the company, people who know how to design a game system, who have designed them before, working on the problem? Where was this grognarding back when OE was making Fallout: NV? Why weren't people demanding an adherence GURPs or RIFTs or Shadowrun rulesets? After all, SPECIAL was created specifically for Fallout, it was designed from the ground up to be a CRPG system. Yet somehow, FO 1 and 2 ended up being some of the best games ever made. Was that just dumb luck?

It's a problem because they will fail to make a ruleset even close to how robust and deep something like 3.5 is. 1) They will? 2) Lmao 3) 3.5 sucks 4) Lmao 5) I guess they don't deserve the opportunity to try? 6) Lmao

That's a pretty definitive statement. Anyone who disagrees with that is wrong then? I guess all those times I felt gameworlds were believable I was horribly wrong! Killable npc don't make world less static if world don't react people dying. So if you don't have resources to make world react to civilian slaughter you probably should not make it be possible in the game, because then there is at least some logic how game world works and reacts. Meaning less slaughter that don't have any impact in the world is in my opinion much worse than npc that don't die, because unkillable characters only take away player's choice in somethings (which isn't ideal in rpgs but reality but sad reality where we live), where world that don't react your actions is just dull and usually also very unbelievable. Exactly. Let's try a substitution.

It seems obvious to me that Obsidian isn't using someone else's ruleset because they wanted to make their own. Why is this a problem?

Unless you're Valve or Blizzard, nobody can afford it.

At the end of the day, though, all of this is academic. The true lesson learned comes after launch, and here the only thing worth mentioning are the dollars and cents. DA:O made more money, and was rated higher by critics. In the video game industry, you have a to make a pretty bad game for sequel sales to be LOWER than original sales -- it almost never happens. They should be asking themselves why that happened, and using those lessons learned for DA:I.

Here's the thing though: she is not a real person, so "because she wants to be" is not a real reason. I get that they gave her motivation and backstory and she's a modern (medieval) independent woman in control of her sexuality, but the reality - like, in the real world, reality - is that she is a video game character. And as a video game character, in a game played mostly by men, many of whom will never finish the game or pay much attention to her backstory, she is a scantily-clad woman who has big boobs and talks about having sex A LOT. I am not saying such a character should not exist or cannot exist, and I am not saying there was not an honest attempt to write her intelligently. But, fundamentally, you can't get around the fact that her function in the game is more sexual object for the player than sexual being. She reads to the player as "the one with the boobs who likes sex." Bioware is trying to have their cake and eat it too with this character by subverting expectations - but those expectations are never actually subverted. She basically still *is* that superficial character the player imagined. You can tell the player "Well, but it's HER wanting sex, not you" but this is meaningless in a game where you essentially control the outcome. All of the potential romantic partners in any Bioware game "want" the player to the same degree as any other - that is, to the degree the player selects the "heart" dialogue choice. This idea could work, maybe, in a game where you didn't have one single PC avatar and you were controlling (or not controlling) all of the characters equally. But in the traditional Bioware cRPG formula, Isabela still reads (to me at least) as a pretty awful presence in the game. YMMV This is a very good post, and one that sums up my objections to the character nicely (full disclosure: I never finished DA2). The other thing that bothers me about this standard defense of her character is even if we grant she is a liberated free spirit or whatever, she simply talks about sex too much. I mean, she talks about it all the time. This isn't a woman who is comfortable with her sexuality -- as written, she comes across as completely crazy and irritating with the constant sex talk. That part of her personality was completely oversold by the writer(s). Isabella is not a believable portrayal of a woman who is comfortable with her sexuality, or simply even a woman who just likes sex. She comes across as a sex-crazed lunatic with an annoying habit of making almost every conversation about sex. It's ridiculous. Also, I think it is disingenuous for BioWare (or any other company) to point to the legitimately disgusting behavior of some people who have a problem with LGBT folks, and use these clowns to dismiss every criticism of DA2 as grounded in bigotry. The average age of a gamer in the US is over 30 years of age. Most people who play these games are adults, not stupid teenagers trolling on the internet. And like most adults of my generation, a good chunk of these people have absolutely no issue with LGBT people, and many of us take very seriously issues like civil rights, bullying, and discrimination against LGBTs. And that's just the US -- what about all other places where BioWare sells their games? Are we supposed to believe that every Frenchie who disliked DA2 did so because he or she is secretly a closeted homophobe? Absurd. So when someone points out that hey, maybe spend less time on making every flavor of romance with your oversexed characters and more time developing decent maps and enemy AI, you might want to listen. I don't give a flying eff who I screw -- or who you allow me or anyone else to screw -- in a video game. Really, I don't. Throw it all in there! But please don't do it and point to yourselves as "pushing the boundaries" and expect that kind of social justice cred to erase the fact that you churned out a crap game in 18 months.

Planescape: Torment and Mask of the Betrayer had the best evil playthroughs ever and they weren't cheesy at all. Hell, MotB's evil path is arguably much better than it's good path. Both games had me going "Holy ****" the whole way through their evil routes. They both had you be a complete and total bastard in ways that I have not seen equaled in other games. They both left me feeling a little hollow and dumbfounded after certain parts. It was marvelous. That goes for my answer to OP's question too: equal or come close to Mask of the Betrayer in terms of an evil campaign and I will be more than satisfied. I think you're talking about something else here, though. These were basically plot points on a narrative that you could choose between. In PST you didn't have the opportunity to run around kicking kittens and punching babies. The "evil" path was essentially the default, especially if you consider TNO's past as a brutal bastard, etc. The devs even said the game was an attempt to upset the traditional RPG conventions of the time, where there were not always "right" answers or "good" decisions. I certainly don't think evil playthroughs aren't possible -- I just don't see them ever working out when they are offered as a choice between different ways to finish the game.

To answer the OP directly, I'm hoping P:E doesn't go far at all in the evil department. In fact, I hope they stay away from it entirely. I'm convinced that most "EVIL!!!" playthroughs are not sustainable in games. They usually end up breaking down under the weight of the larger narrative. Playing as a good guy doesn't mean you are a paladin. You can be self-absorbed or opportunistic and still be on the side of "good" in whichever way you want to define the term. But in an effort to give people the freedom to be vicious jerks, I find that most developers neglect designing the actual impact of such behavior on the game world. It ends up feeling forced and cheesy. Just leave it alone.

I never understood how a demand for realism ends up leading to the ability to kill kids. It's ridiculous. Also, I'd rather have a well-written, comprehensive "Good Guy" experience than a choice between a "Good Guy" and "Bad Guy" that is going to be lousy because designers can only create so much reactive/branching content. There are plenty of ways to give players their own gaming experience without creating an over-the-top murdering lunatic jerk-off. There isn't a single thing the ability to kill kids would add to a game. Christ, I feel gross just writing the phrase "kill kids." How some people can go on a crusade to vouch for the idea, and be upset when it is not included in a game because REALISM!! is effin beyond me.

Played through Shadowrun Returns. It's a good game, but the toolset/editor is what's really cool. I'm looking forward to playing some user generated content once the mod community gets up and running. I'm on the road right now, but when I get home tonight I will be buying the Quake-Con pack they have on Steam right now. I own a few of the games in the pack, but they have awesome old classics (Hexen! Hexen II!) that I can see myself playing for a good long while. Oh, and I recently fired up Dosbox to play a game of Quest for Glory 1. An RPG that was incredibly ahead of its time.

I can see both sides of this. But consider that a guy trying for a shield bash is going to to do exactly that: try for one. I understand what you mean about the cool down being an artificial limitation on how often a guy can do a shield bash, but consider the alternative: you can shield bash at any time, but the odds for success would go way down (as they would realistically) since using a shield bash -- to knock someone over, move their shield aside, push them back, etc -- would only work if it were timed perfectly. And, yes, doing it too much could be exhausting. So cool downs act as approximations of these two limitations: stamina and timing. Instead, the chance for success is driven way up, but the ability's usefulness is now regulated by scarcity (instead of just stamina, or just timing, or both).