Lephys

Now who's getting hung up on ultra-technical aspects of words? And arbitrarily quoting them all as if their status as actual words is suspect. Are you Dr. Evil? It's great that you love that, but unfortunately that isn't the mechanic I described. Could you please explain why "allows" is in italics? Also, I have absolutely no clue what you're finding weird, exactly. It's supposed to be weird that I can observe plenty of ways in which games allow players to objectify people? Is sex supposed to be the only way one can interact with an object? I'm quite confused as to your actual point, here.

No you might not as well do that? Or no... something else?

A) I'm okay with the non-arbitrary, reasonable sexualization of female NPCs. 'Normal fashion' is the same way romance is incorporated into real life. It's a part of their lives, and not just an afterthought minigame that they play. You can go through any given situation while in a romantic relationship with someone, or just as separated people. Heck, it could even affect your character's Will/Resolve checks. "Open the gate, or he/she DIES!" Emotional attachment: -2 to Resolve check. B) We're talking about treating people as objects, instead of people. Sex is just one of the ways of doing that. I'm unclear on how that's weird.

I would definitely agree that, if you're going to put co-operative play into a cRPG like this, the co-operative play should not get the focus. Nothing in the game needs to be designed specifically for co-operative play.

At that point, you might as well just abolish the class divisions and mod it into a classless system, with all the class's abilities and traits in a big pool to choose from.

Not that people don't sometimes conduct very informative and quality interviews, but, I gotta say... oftentimes, I'd just rather have seen gameplay footage. You can tell a lot from gameplay footage that you quite often don't learn via interviews.

I'm gonna be a Ranger with an animal companion who's trained to detect traps. His name shall be Admiral Ackbar. 6_u

A) Which is precisely why we'd like romance to be incorporated into a game in a normal fashion, and not in a "this is just a minigame to get sex" fashion. For the record (and it's been stated many times before), you don't actually have to have inter-character intercourse occur at any time in the game, ever, to have a romantic emotional relationship between characters. B) It's totally fine that we get to toy with NPCs in any other way we'd like -- sell people as slaves, make shady deals with mercenaries who will most likely have their way with villagers, psychologically torture people with cruelty, etc., but romance is where the line gets crossed? Pretty much everything else in the game allows you to treat all the virtual people like objects. "If I kill this guy instead of letting him go, I get more faction rep, and then, a nice sword! 8D!" Doesn't mean any of it inherently forces the player to treat anyone like an object. I'm fairly certain the whole point of a "role-playing game" is to play the role of a character in an immersive-enough world that you actually react to things as you would were you that character. Not just act like a child sitting at a computer who hasn't yet figured out that people aren't objects, and using virtual people to reinforce the idea that people are objects.

I think it's more that they don't really care if it sucks. You know all those masses of promancers that everyone keeps complaining about, who absolutely adore Bioware's existing romances? I think it's more "Hey, for this next game, make sure we get those people's dollars, because market research." It's kind of the same reason every Call of Duty rendition has them saying "Hey, for this next game, make sure the campaign's even MORE ridiculous." As I said, it's not that they're specifically intending for it to "suck." They're not even rating it on a quality scale. They're rating it on a marketability scale.

The truth of that whole dynamic is so overstated, though. We can look at THIS specific example -- PoE's actual development and budget -- and determine that maybe they don't have enough spare budget after the core stuff's taken care of to spend on romance, and thus it's better left out. But, you can't really say that, in developing any RPG, with any budget, romance is always going to be some foreign body that must be specifically added to the core game design, and that it's always going to gouge out some of the rest of the game's design. A game isn't infinite in design scope. At some point, you have enough resources for everything you wish to do in a game, as a developer. Everything within reason. Obviously, you could want to make 700 sequels to the game, eventually, and if you had infinite resources, you could just make one game with the equivalent of 700 sequels all in it to begin with. But that's the length of the game's content, and not the breadth. If you want 20 weapon types, and you get enough money to add in 10 more, so you have 30, for example (weapons and their types would be part of the core game), then, if you still have some resources left over, are you just going to keep adding weapon types until you have 973? No. At some point, there's not really any further objective improvement to be made that spending the money on romance instead would somehow be wrongfully preventing. Besides, romance is just character writing. If character writing is part of the core of the game, then romance simply adds to the breadth of the character writing. It's like adding weapon types, only it's adding character facets. If you just slap in a dating sim, it's doing it crappily. So no, simply having romance isn't inherently always better and never worse than not-having it. It depends on the implementation, just like anything else in a game. Combat can suck... dialogue can suck (with or without romance), reactivity can suck, quests can suck, factions can suck, the leveling system can suck. None of it is inherently detrimental.

I didn't think the beginning of Fallout2 was especially dull, but it was definitely, relative to what the beginning of a game should be like, a bit lacking. I think the main reason I was excited about it was because I had already played the first game, and I was all "... SPEARS! 8D!". That's bad, I guess, when the intro segment of your game can only muster true excitement via the revelation of a new weapon type. 8P

Hiro... what's the point of a discussion if you already know for sure? "Guys, we're having a meeting to discuss our next course of action. Oh, I've already chosen what we're going to do, because I know for certain it's the best course of action, no matter what, but we're just going to waste a bunch of time discussing it anyway." I don't know about you, but I recognize the limitations of my human mind and the knowledge there-in, and I enjoy bolstering that knowledge and tempering it with understanding, via discussion. I'm horribly confused as to why you think everything I type on a public discussion forum is some kind of "tactic" in some imagined ongoing battle against you. I'm pretty sure these forums don't revolve around you. They revolve around discussion. I don't see a single other person in this entire forum accusing me left and right of evading things, and employing delaying tactics, etc. I find that mildly strange. I already answered your question. I don't know what else you want from me.

I can't admit something that I don't know for sure. Also, Anita Sarkeesian has videos explaining why anyone who has ever, or will ever, wear the hat of a game developer, sexualizes NPCs? No developer could ever have, or ever in the future, do so for any reason other than what she suggests? I'll have to check that out when I get a chance. See, and that's why I'm not a fan of the idea, personally. As I said, trying to shove a whole 'nother aspect into existing characters is quite tricky to do, when they're written by someone else. Thus, you have to make a new character and shove it into a world written by someone else, which isn't as tricky, I suppose. But, if main purpose of that characters' existence as an addition to the game is to have a good romance, then I'd honestly say the quality of that romance is probably going to suffer from the lack of all that character's other aspects. They might have the best-written romance ever, but that doesn't help us if it's still as separated from the rest of the game as all the bad examples we've tossed about in this and other threads. I mean, I get that some people just enjoy it (romance) more for being there than for being integrated to any degree of quality. And that's fine. They're not wrong to enjoy what they enjoy. But, everything else in the game has to be designed with some objectivity in mind, and I don't think romance is any different. I think having it "fit" is more important than just meeting a bunch of people's preferences. Not that having it fit is going to 100% miss their preferences. I think there's plenty of leeway there. I dunno... I mean, people aren't always super aware of how their desires line up with reality. People will buy the cheapest version of a particular product, only to have it break and need replacement 10 times in one year, when they could've spent twice as much as the initial cost for something that lasts them the whole year. They don't want to spend that initial amount, at that moment in time, but then, they don't want to have to go through the trouble of replacing the thing 10 times, and ultimately spending all that money, either. I think people exaggerate the rigidity of their preferences, oftentimes. Plenty of people who just like "trash" romance would still enjoy a quality one, methinks. They'd just rather have what they already know than what's uncertain.

I think that if Path of the Damned is the most difficult setting, it should just turn all the enemies into Diamond Golems. Then they could say with certainty "these are the hardest enemies you'll face." 6_u

I have no idea exactly how much creative license Obsidian had with Alpha Protocol, hence the for-what-it's-worth observation of something that tends to occur with publishers. To publishers, the game is much more a product than it is an artwork. It's rare to find ones that don't have a pretty particular mold for a given game before they take on a dev team to make it. You're going to have to be more specific. There are many reasons they do it. Depends on the NPC in question, and the developer in question, etc. You're right it's not a hard question to answer. It's a hard question to answer correctly, though. I suppose it's easy if you just stereotype developers, and mish-mash all sexy NPCs ever to exist in any video game.

I'm sure plenty of modders will give it a go. Thing is, character-writing is character-writing. I'd much rather the people who actually invented the characters and the world simply work in those characters' potential relationships than just have it thrown in as an afterthought. That's like appending fan-fiction into a book. Modding is best left to standalone things. You know, "We put weather effects in, because they weren't in the initial game." Or mounts. Or altering shop prices. Or adding in side-quests that don't have much to do with the main story. A good example would be, I'd much rather have the companions in-game, and have someone else mod in the Adventurer's Hall, than have the Adventurer's Hall in and have someone mod in story companions. Also, ideally, romance wouldn't be a completely standalone thing from the story and the rest of the game, so I'd rather not rely on modders to produce something so passively a part of the world.

Keep in mind that pandering to demographics is a much higher priority for many publishers than it is for many developers. You can't really judge a major, published title purely for its creativity, since the publishers kinda go "make this sexy enough, or your funding gets cut." I'm not saying developers can do no wrong. Just, that they can do no right if the publisher demands wrong. "This game didn't have good writing" doesn't really prove the dev team is incapable of writing quality romance, since the factor of "you don't get to just do whatever you feel like, developer" is present.

I'm fairly certain he couldn't care less about my opinion on the matter. What he wants is more kindling for his fire. I could (and I've done this) say "yes, you're right. I hadn't thought of it that way. My bad.", and he'd say "HAH, you're just being sarcastic!", because he thinks I'm out to get him for some reason. I'll not deny that I type a lot, but it's not as if I'm responding to ghosts here.

Negative. You've "explained" that your question "why do they have to sexualize...?" was, in actuality, "why do they sexualize...?", and that I'm somehow being ridiculous by acting as though there's a difference in the first place. Once you actually brought it to my attention that your only interest was in the answer to "why do they" instead of "why do they have to," I then answered your question. You don't like my answer. Too bad. Doesn't mean I didn't properly answer it. You asked me why other people do something. I told you as much as I know. Different developers do it for different reasons, I'm sure. People are complex, and we aren't a hivemindd, so no, I couldn't tell you with certainty why all developers who've ever sexualized NPCs do so. Furthermore, I'll say that it seems rather weird that the second an NPC isn't hideous, that NPC becomes "sexualized," as if they're somehow forcibly molded into an attractive being, unnaturally. I guess people in the world can just happen to be quite physically attractive, but people in a fictional world that we've created aren't allowed to be? Again, I get that stuff like Isabela from DA2 is a bit overboard, perhaps. However, that's more because she just wasn't done very well, and not at all because she was sexy. Real people have a right to "sexualize" themselves, and so do fictional people who are modeled after realistic people. It doesn't really matter that they're not humans. If they have very human-like physiologies, and they are susceptible to things like physical attraction in a way similar to humans, and they're capable of sexual reproduction, etc, then having characters who are sexually expressive and/or quite attractive is not at all out of bounds. It's all about extents. If literally every person in the world is just the epitome of human stripper, and they're all just dancing around performing stripper dances, then the game's blatantly pandering to the real-life human who's playing it. That doesn't mean that having people scattered throughout the world who happen to also be appealing to the real-life human is somehow wrong or unnatural. I didn't tell you what you didn't say. I only told you what I never claimed you said. In what way have I selectively quoted? You said I spent pages on an answer to your question, and I pointed out that I've only really spent a handful of sentences on the answer. Then, in reference to your claim that I was having problems answering, I simply pointed out that providing an answer you aren't happy with is not the same thing as struggling to answer. I answered just fine. You simply aren't satisfied with the answer I provided. Which is your prerogative, so I don't mind. If a child asks his father "Are we going to Disneyworld today?", and the father says "Nope," does that mean he had trouble answering, or that he hasn't properly answered the question? Furthermore, if you already knew the answer to the question you were asking me, then why didn't you simply state why they do it? Anyone would still be perfectly free to contest that explanation, or contribute to it, etc. That's kind of how a discussion works. Or, we could all ask questions that aren't what we actually want to know, then mock people for supposedly being ignorant for not answering the question to our satisfaction. *shrug*. Maybe that's the best and most productive solution.

The "why" doesn't go away if "have to" is there. It's still there. "Why" means "For what reason." "Why do they have to X" and "Why do they X" are still two completely different questions. I've run out of ways to point that out. That's not even mildly technical, much less ultra technical. It's incredibly simple. Why you have to do something is why it's mandatory. Why you do something is simply the reason you do it. It's two completely different questions, complete with whole words and all. It's not just italicizing one word instead of another. The italicizing was purely to illustrate the word that was giving the sentence the meaning you're pretending it doesn't have. Obviously, what you meant was simply "why do they do it," but you didn't ask that. So I didn't respond to that question, initially. I responded to the one you typed. I don't understand why that's complex, or why you feel the need to insist that only an imbecile would respond the way I did, or gather the meaning I did from your initial question. I never said you said it was illegal. And, I could've gone and counted how many times, exactly, I've actually clarified it. But, the blatant exaggeration emphasizes the extent to which I've gone to clarify, along with my understandable frustration with the fact that you keep pretending I have yet to provide any rhyme or reason to my initial response to your question. That's what it adds. You don't think it adds anything, clearly. But forgive me for not trusting the judgment of the person who thinks two whole words don't add anything to the meaning of a question. I'm fairly certain I only spent a couple of sentences on it, tops. Your lack of satisfaction with my answer does not denote a problem in my answering the question.

You asked why developers have to sexualize. I said "They don't." You said "Yes, they do sexualize," as if I was saying they don't perform the act that you described. Thus, I clarified that I was saying they don't have to sexualize. I don't know how else to do that, other than to emphasize the two words whose existence you ignored to come up with your alternate meaning for my answer. Since this is all text and I can't emphasize those two words with my voice, I used italics. I didn't take anything out of context, or suggest that YOU were emphasizing those two words. What you were emphasizing wasn't the point. What you typed, as opposed to not-typing, was the point. I'm 100% serious, here. In the future, how would you have me clarify that my response "They don't" didn't mean what you thought it meant? If you were me, what would you have said in that situation? I wasn't aware it was illegal to use blatant exaggerations. It adds nothing to the discussion? Isn't that an exaggeration, since it adds the fact that I've clarified plenty of times to the discussion. That's something. It's a good thing that isn't illegal, and I perfectly understand the idea you were trying to convey, despite the exaggeration. I don't understand why my answers beget "Oh, you seem to be having difficulty there... can't give me an answer?" from you. Just like I don't comprehend how I'm supposed to be able to possess the knowledge of video game developers' brains. I answered the question as best I can. Unless someone's directly affiliated with those developers, I don't see how they can know why they did what they did. Or, a reason that I didn't list, at least. Why did Peter Molyneux put hand-holding into Fable 3? Only Peter Molyneux knows. And if people know something from other people's minds that I don't know, I'm not about to feel ashamed or inferior about that, despite your petty attempts at causing exactly that. "Other people can answer it." Awesome. I'm happy for those people. This is a discussion. We all share perspectives and information and reasoning, and thus we all gain access to the collective info there-in. This isn't a competition, Hiro. I'm beginning to really worry about you...

Hey! Someone's been smithing in my forge!

I ask this only out of "academic" curiosity, but why the minimum of 8? Is it because lots of things in the world are weaker/less intelligent/etc. than humanoids, and thus still needed to be represented on the scale? Was always a little silly in D&D that you could roll up a character who couldn't functionally do anything, because all but 1 or 2 stats was below 8 or so.

Already answered you. But, I'll do it again: No. That isn't what I'm saying. Nor have I ever said that, or even hinted at it. I've also already pointed out and clarified what I DID say about 3,000 times now, so I don't think doing it again is going to help you any. Because they feel like it. Or because their publisher won't let them make the game if they don't do it, because sex sells, etc. Take your pick. I don't really care much why they do it, to be honest, because they don't have to do it. Not to the degree that they do, at the least.

Roam Ants. Nomadic humanoid ant-people. If you drop something across their caravan line, they all freak out and don't know where to go. That's what I would mod in. 6_u