Lephys

Tell everyone attempting that that they must name their single character "The Damned."

It sounds like they aren't repackaging the whole build every time they make any change ever. It's just that, on the days when they're expecting to get a fresh build out for "delivery" for us, and they run into a snag, they can't quickly fix the snag and just toss the fix into the build, because the snag was already packaged in that build. So, the lengthy process isn't for "Every time we need to make a change." I think it's just for "packaging" the whole new build for distribution. *shrug* I realize how noobish I am, btw, at all this knowledge. I could actually be completely mistaken, and an idiot.

I get that. I'm wondering what legitimate reason actually fueled their decision-making process. The answer is pretty much "none." Or rather, they follow a very skewed version of reasoning when they make such decisions. 'Cause, the idea seems to be "if we don't follow this model, we don't make lots of money." Which isn't true. *shrug*. I don't get how someone can be like "Oh, people LOVE my cakes! Better just make like 3. I don't wanna take the time to make 50 cakes, and make 50-times the profit. I'll just try to make those 3 cakes appeal to people who are allergic to eggs, milk, and sugar."

My primitive haven't-used-much-math-in-about-10-years art-kid brain hurts right now... T_____T I understand the concept of what I'm reading, but couldn't really tell you the details, heh.

I have no problem with the sheer existence of "the new sh%#," as it were... but what I don't understand is why companies such as EA feel the need to go all do-or-die with it. "THIS IS THE FUTURE!" Why can't improving on the old stuff AND making simplified, more accessible games for people be the future? Hell, I'm pretty much never going to buy a sports game, ever. They're fun and all, but I am not their demographic. If you try to make them more like a medieval fantasy RPG, you're not improving the sports genre. NOW, if they decided to try and make ONE game that was like, medieval fantasy sports (Something like Quiddich? *shrug*), then that might actually be kind of cool. But, you don't just take Madden and make next year's version Quiddich instead. The future isn't homogeneous, for crying out loud. What are we, the Business Borg? Haha.

It doesn't have to be a huge deal to be improvable. That's the nature of programming, really: efficiency. It may not be the end of the world that you're using 100 lines of code instead of 92 for a given function, but why not explore the possibility of using fewer instead of more, and having time shaved off of loading every time that function is called, etc.? You're not going to die if rain strikes your head, but why not carry an umbrella if it's going to rain?

It has kind of always reminded me of those enemies in Doom, even though they only had one eye, etc. It's the mouth, methinks.

By sheer definition of the word, yes. You're literally taking advantage of the situation. But, what people so negatively refer to as an "exploit" is when you take advantage of an unintended flaw in the mechanics. Taking advantage of a bug, for example, would be a blatant exploit. It starts getting a little fuzzy on the technical legitimacy of the terminology when you're not dealing with outright bugs, though. Loopholes best describe it, I think. The point is that it's unintentional, as per the design goal. If it's a disconnect between the design goal and the design execution, it's something that will most likely be negatively referred to as exploitable. There's really a very fine line between a bug, and an unintended design loophole. A loophole's technically working as it's design (which a bug is not), but is not accomplishing its design goal, which is kind of the point of mechanic design, and, I dare say, the entire game itself.

Piggy-back question: Are characters' voices arbitrarily going to occasionally fall under the SFX setting? That's one of my biggest pet peeves in gaming history. Me: "Oh, the sword clangs and fireball-splosions are really loud... I'll just turn down the SFX volume a bit. There, ^_^" Game: "Oh, I see that you're not technically in a formal, cutscene dialogue with someone, but people are talking. That's totally a sound-effect and not a voice, u_u... Enjoy the whispers!!!" Me: ">________________________<"

That's fine, but "strategy" actually has a set definition. "I'm invincible and you're not" isn't a strategy, for example. That's just being superior. The absence of challenge isn't a strategy, as a strategy is employed to overcome a challenge. Thus, to me, "this game's code doesn't limit you enough to prevent inherent challenge from being siphoned away" is not good strategy, because I didn't even do anything but perform a fundamentally not-bad action and the "challenging" foe was rendered useless against me. In other words, through no amount of effort on your part, beyond the baseline amount of effort required to play the game (obviously if you just sat there and didn't ever move or attack, you'd never win a battle), was the enemy overcome. Or... playing a game of chess against someone in which you can move your pieces wherever you want and they can't... that doesn't mean you're using good strategy. Strategy doesn't even come into play by the time you've won, due to the sheer difference in your capabilities. So, yeah, kiting's fine, just like stunning's fine. But, I don't want perpetu-kiting any more than I want an active ability that stuns your opponent for 100 seconds. It wouldn't be that "OH no, stuns are bad and need to die!" It would be that stunning is arbitrarily ridiculously beneficial.

Then why do you take such issue with people freely discussing what they choose to voluntarily discuss? Your coming in here and lecturing everyone about being codependent doesn't even have anything to do with any of the topics being discussed in here, because no one even claimed that this completely optional discussion must take place. It just seems like you're justifying incessant lectures about things with the condition "someone has said or done something I wouldn't do or say." You adamantly tell people how pointless a thread is, or how wrong they're doing it, then turn around and say "Oh, I'm not worried about your discussion at all. I love personal freedom." What gives, man?

The trick, though, is to make sure that you don't make it inadvertently easy for people who aren't trying to exploit the game system to do so. For example... If some foe keeps trying to attack your "back line," and you just rudimentarily decide "I'd better flee from those dudes," occasionally stopping to attack, and that works just fine -- you outrun the foes, AND keep getting to attack them, due to bad AI or what-have-you -- then you've got a problem. The player shouldn't have to go out of his way just to not-exploit something. There's nothing wrong with exploitable stuff existing, so long as you actually have to go out of your way to exploit it. That's the threshold at which the problem exists... when the intended way to intuitively play the game and the exploit live in the same house.

Depends on which keys your head decides to rest upon, 8P

Ehh... was it really the whole justification for it? I think the engagement update said a lot more than just "because kiting!"

Then we're not worried about Obsidian, either. Po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh.

Maybe you can coat it in Teflon, so all that stuff rinses right off! 8D

You sure are worried about our worries, Skeikh. Does this mean you're addicted to us?

You've completely lost me, Sheikh... We can't "legitimately" care about others' feelings because we only feel our own instances of feelings? A) What would make something legitimate caring? B) You can't want someone else to be happy, just because you can't actually experience their exact happiness in a 1:1 fashion?

So... people should not ever use the word "should"? *paradoxical implosion of space-time*

That's actually pretty interesting. In most of these worlds, everyone can just all inter-breed and make "half(insert race name here)s". Actually... I want to see an Aumorlan. 8P

^ Still, it's funny when you kill an Aumaua, take his armor, and equip it to your female Orlan.

I vote for Sensuki to become the Obsidian Entertainment mascot. Who's with me?!

^ I don't think anyone claimed that BG/BG2 were made up entirely of fetch quests. Someone just went all "Yeah, fetch quests are dumb, not like quests in the old IE games, u_u...", and someone else pointed out that they had their fair share of simplistic quests. That's all.

I'm not knocking 2D graphics in general, and I'm not even knocking the old IE character sprites (because they were quite good for their time, and it's not their fault they had such technical limitations), but, the PoE models can convey a plethora more visual information and detail about your character and their equipment than the old IE sprites. On that one scale of things, that's better. I can't say that makes them aesthetically superior or anything, but, anyone suggesting we need Crysis-level models because these current ones aren't good enough would've been bleeding out their eyes trying to play the IE games, where your chainmail consisted of about 15 pixels. The thing is... 3D or 2D, it's all displayed on an XY plane (your monitor). So, in a lot of ways, it doesn't much matter when it comes to comparing fidelity/detail.

So it's okay to feel positively if Obsidian does well, while it's simultaneously preposterous that we would care about Obsidian running a successful development studio (aka, making profit/having generally good sales)? I'm so confused. O_O