marelooke
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Posts posted by marelooke
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I doubt it will. InXile's smashing success with Torment: Tides of Numenera shows that there is great potential for follow up success, particularly if your first project is well received, which PoE hopefully will be (by the backers, first and foremost, and the press, second).I just hope that the relatively slow/low funding of this doesn't discourage Obsidian from launching their next KS
To be fair though, inXile got a lot of flack for trying to launch a second Kickstarter before the first game was done (as such Wasteland 2's success has little or no bearing on the success of the TToN KS imho since it wasn't released when that KS ended).
On topic, they've shuffled a bit with the stretch goals: enhanced music was added to the companion stretch goal, which was subsequently reached (which imho was a smart move, while companions are neat and stuff "more music" is a bit higher on my "do want"-list), hopefully they'll reach the Dynamic SFX goal too.
Don't care much for the translations (I don't think I've ever played a game in my mother tongue, even if it was available), I can see the appeal of translating a game (not everybody understand English, after all), but I fail to see the appeal of it as a strech goal for the majority of backers.
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After trying to get into the game on and off I've started another D:OS playthrough, damn the game has come a long way since the original release, I especially like how there's now a companion for each major archetype (Mage, Ranger, Warrior and Thief) and the game in general feels "smoother" (but maybe that's because this time I'm playing on my desktop...)
Has anyone tried the new Resident Evil: Revelations? I'm kinda curious as to how it holds up. Or are you all also waiting for it to be released in its entirety before touching it?
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Trying to get through Binary Domain, it's one of those games I love to hate as somewhere under the shoddy gameplay is a decent game. But maybe cover shooters just aren't for me (though I rather enjoyed ME2s combat, so maybe it's not that after all)
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They already have private funding.
Then they (the project promoters) need to start disclosing it, and how much. With a 600k minimum, I'm not sure what to think. KS supporters are starting to hold projects at greater levels scrutiny than ever before.
They don't. Divinity: OS had external funding. Broken Age and Wasteland 2 had funding exceeding their KS earnings, which they filled in mostly through sales of their own backlogs. I can't remember if there's clear details about POE and Shadowrun. Otherside have said that they have external funding, which puts them in the same camp as those other projects. I haven't read the 200k comment marelooke mentions, so I can't be sure, but I suspect that's not all of it.
Took me a bit to find the quote again, turns out it was in the anti-anti-crowdfunding article on http://www.underworldascendant.com/the-game/dev-updates.php (doesn't look like I can link directly to the exact post, it's titled "Time to Trash Talk Kickstarted Games?")
The exact paragraph went like this:
As was true at Looking Glass, we are committed to delivering on our vision. Looking Glass never bailed from a project that we had under production. The few projects that failed to reach completion had the plug pulled by folks outside of our studio, without our having a say in the decision. Let me also note that for each game we put into production, in addition to whatever is crowd funded, we are setting aside from our studio's own funds a minimum of two hundred thousand dollars as a reserve to cover contingencies. It's one measure of our commitment to deliver.
The point is that many projects look for funding from many sources and manage it, and there's no obligation to tell us which cents come from whom. It would be different if they had to sign with a publisher, or any other arrangement where the artistic vision of the project is compromised by the unknown funder. Should there be such an obligation? Perhaps. I think too much information for the public can easily be a bad thing, but it wouldn't hurt if all projects laid out pretty simply that some of the money comes from a bank, etc. (E.g. D:OS used a lot of Belgian government subsidy of some kind, but we didn't know until the postmortem.)
I suspect they didn't really think of it. It hasn't been a very well managed KS. I'm backing because I like Neurath, Looking Glass and UU, but they certainly could have raised more if they did a better job and stopped focusing on stupid "OMG BONUS SLING" / VR stuff.
Yeah, the KS has been rather shoddily managed, I suggest they contact Larian and ask those guys how it's done. Since Swen is a pretty overt Ultima fanboy I'm pretty sure he'd be happy to help
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I think I prefer multi-player for a couple of reasons:
1) Im bored playing by myself. For example, D3 is significantly more fun for me when playing in a group.
2) On the rare occasion that you get a good pug or are part of a good dedicated group, I dig seeing the synergy of skilled players learning and then dominating a tough encounter. To this day I still remember the excitement and my heart pounding in my chest the first time we beat Ragnaros (WoW end boss for Cataclysm expansion). Good times.
Wasn't the end boss of Cataclysm Deathwing? But yeah, multiplayer can have some memorable moments.
One of the funniest was when we did our first split group (2x10man group, because not enough lvl80s for a 25man raid) raid in Wrath of the Lich King and we had a bear of a time with the first boss in Naxxramas (the beetle, don't remember his name), to the point where someone looked up tactics, which didn't match with what we were seeing...at all (damage on tanks was insane, more adds were spawning than tactics said, it was a pretty big *wtf*). Turned out we were 10manning 25man Naxxramas in Black Temple/Sunwell gear, since we forgot about the, then new, 10/25man raid toggle, ouch...)
Unfortunately the LFG system, the raid finder and all the other cross-realm features hollowed out the sense of commitment between guildies as well as the sense of community on a realm.
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I can't take the project seriously because they're not asking for a realistic amount of money for the project they're putting forward.
My minimums:
Existing Engine 2D Game - $300,000
Existing Engine 3D Game - $1,000,000
New Engine 2D Game - $500,000
New Engine 3D Game - $2,000,000
If they're not asking for enough money they're just going to walk away from the project before it is finished. This usually comes, and quite understandably, out of the pure necessity to earn a living.
3D RPGs have been made for far less, it all depends on what expectations you have (Consortium gathered a bit over $70k, for example)
Edit: And I've been seriously considering adding a half million to any 3D game labeled with "RPG", purely based on the idea that RPGs have huge content by their very nature.
Ah, but that's where I think their savings might come from, most RPGs are a lot of work because one has to script a huge amount of possibilities (and then test them all...). If they manage to make their improvisation engine do what they're envisioning most of that scripting work would disappear I'd think.
They already have private funding.
Then they (the project promoters) need to start disclosing it, and how much. With a 600k minimum, I'm not sure what to think. KS supporters are starting to hold projects at greater levels scrutiny than ever before.
They have said they are keeping $200k of the studio's funds aside as a contingency measure in case their estimates are off (or there are unexpected setbacks). Not sure if there is any other funding. (though 1/3 of their estimated budget is a rather nice buffer, imho)
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I used to play MMOs rather intensively, besides the fact that I just don't have the insane amount of time to spend that I used to back then there's also the fact that the communities seem to have changed quite a lot, and for the worse imho. People are a lot more competitive, a lot less helpful and a lot more rude than they used to be.
As for co-op, I just don 't have anybody to play with: playing with strangers doesn't appeal to me and most of my irl friends also have little time for gaming, trying to get our schedules to align on top of having limited time just doesn't appear to work.
So the last years I've basically been playing solo (or with PUGs, in the few MMOs I still "play")
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Looks like the first stretch goal will be achieved, would be really nice if the 700k goal is also met. I ended up upping my pledge by more than I probably should have, but I'm curious as to what they can achieve and the responses in the Codex interview kinda helped alleviate some of my doubts.
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The Book of Unwritten Tales. This has been a very pleasant surprise for me. I haven't really touched an adventure game for a while, so at first there was a bit of a re-learning curve -- mostly just shaking off the conventions of RPG-dom -- but I'm having a blast with this game. Still early yet (just gathering Wilbur's companions in Chapter 2), but... wow. Such fun. I haven't laughed out loud at the humour in a game for a long time, but this game's managed it twice already (wondering, wondering about that breathing puffball at the fortune-teller's wagon, only to have it explained in an LOL moment (haha), and capturing the rabbit. Awesome).
Graphics are great, characters are interesting, setting is fun, the puzzles I've found are mostly intuitive but some of them have given me pause, and with a good dose of slapstick in there to set it all off. Reminds me more than a little of the old Quest for Glory series with its tone and wit, which is still one of my favourites.
Picked up the other two games in the series when I got this one -- on sale at GoG -- and haven't been disappointed in the least.
I tried playing it once, the lack of subtitles in the intro is a pretty big bummer as I, for some reason, had trouble following the dialogue.
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You're asking "why change" but that makes the fundamental assumption that a particular company was using Microsoft in the first place. If you've been running a stable *nix platform that does everything you need for decades, why change?
Okay but realistically who doesn't use Microsoft as the the foundation of there IT infrastructure ? How many companies do you know of that don't have a Microsoft desktop OS and use Active Directory? And I am talking about SME's here and not your 10 -100 user companies ?
Ehm, most companies don't use Microsoft as the foundation of their (business critical) IT infrastructure for various reasons (going into those would, I'm afraid, take us waaaay off topic), those are often *nix machines or mainframes (usually a combination of both).
Among our developers more and more are switching away from Windows (even though Linux is officially an unsupported OS, but running it is tolerated and even encouraged by the operations people...)
Active Directory is just a proprietary LDAP implementation with some bells and whistles and afaik can be presented to UNIX systems as one (and vice versa, it's not all that uncommon for the "Active Directory" in a company to be a Samba server backed by LDAP).
I've also never seen the appeal of Exchange, it's too closely tied to Outlook (which as an email application ought to be taken out back and shot and the remains incinerated) though I have to admit the calendaring component is rather nice and as I've understood rather harder to replace by other solutions, unfortunately. But even if you want to (or "need" to) use Exchange (which has IMAP support, so you can use Exchange and still be free of Outlook) why would that suddenly mean you need to Microsoftize your entire infrastructure?
I never understood why it has to be "or-or", there's no reason why one cannot run Exchange without AD, or have Exchange and AD for desktop use while leaving people free to use whatever they want on their own laptop/workstation, with the advent of smartphones it's become nigh impossible to entirely lock people into a single vendor ecosystem anyway.
Not to mention that the number of Mac users tends to go up and quite often among the higher ups in corporations resulting in a more heterogeneous working environment anyway (company policy or no, you ain't gonna tell your boss to get rid of his Mac...or iPhone...), so slowly I'm seeing the MS-only shops disappear in favour of a more "whatever makes you get your work done"-attitude, which, in my book, is a lot more healthy anyway.
"No really, you have to use the hand-saw using a chainsaw is against company policy..."
Sure there are still companies clinging to total control of their IT infrastructure to the detriment of their employees, but hey, that's their problem. They'll get to catch up with the times eventually, or become obsolete.
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Mac and Linux support is now part of the base goal. Great news!
Aha, now there's a reason for me to up my pledge above the minimum (I have a rule for myself that I never pledge more than the minimum to get the goods for any game that doens't provide a version for an open platform, so basically Linux as I don't expect game companies to start caring about the BSDs anytime soon
)Time to work through the updates to see if they said anything yet to alleviate the technical concerns I had concerning the feasibility of what they want to do with the budget they have.
I have never understood why people really choose Linux over Windows, my basic argument being " why change something that is interoperable and works "
But I respect your decision to base your KS funding on support for multi-platforms
Well that depends on what you use it for, as a software developer I've never seen the appeal of using Windows, the platform is just terrible for any development that isn't tied to the Microsoft ecosystem (I've done some of the latter as well and I'd argue that even then it's not great). So the only real reason I have to keep Windows around is to play games, it would be great if I wouldn't even need it for that anymore.
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Mac and Linux support is now part of the base goal. Great news!
Aha, now there's a reason for me to up my pledge above the minimum (I have a rule for myself that I never pledge more than the minimum to get the goods for any game that doens't provide a version for an open platform, so basically Linux as I don't expect game companies to start caring about the BSDs anytime soon
)Time to work through the updates to see if they said anything yet to alleviate the technical concerns I had concerning the feasibility of what they want to do with the budget they have.
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Mesa encourages you to be 'Murkin'.
Couldn't resist with a cowgirl-themed suit.
Still haven 't gotten Mesa, such a horribly time consuming and RNG frame to get *sigh* I probably also should start to care about the Void some more, really wish you could just grab randoms for there without having to go through the annoying recruiting chat (or make a decent market so I can juts buy the stuff I care about rom the void). Oh well...maybe one day.
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A few months back, I decided I was going to play through Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Throne of Bhaal, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Mask of the Betrayer with the same character.
So having finished Throne of Bhaal, I went directly to Neverwinter Nights, and then I remembered why I can keep coming back to Baldur's Gate again and again...and why I never touched NWN for years after finishing the original campaign:
- The OC is bland and banal. It consists almost entirely of fetching MacGuffins (Waterdhavian creatures, words of power, etc) via quests that are totally straightforward, and without any alternate means of solving them. With the exception of the Charwood quest, nothing in the campaign is particularly memorable and compelling. Worst of all, the game never really establishes any sort of motivating factor to your character. In BG, you had the murder of Gorion and sorting out the iron shortage to compel the PC. In the sequel, you had Irenicus torture you and abduct Imoen. In NWN, on the other hand, your character is just some random academy student with no background and no personal stake in the conflict.
Another thing that bothered me was just how frequently the solution to your quests involves mass slaughter of human beings. For instance, there's one sidquest wherein your character is tasked with stealing pieces of an artwork from noblemen who have offended the local whorehouse madam. Each nobleman's estate is guarded by someone who says that he really doesn't like his job and won't stop you from entering. Since my character is a wizard with no real stealth skills, but with good Charisma and several ranks in Persuade, I thought I might try to bluff my way past the interior guards.
Nope! The only real solution was to violently murder all the guards. And these people weren't evil, they were just doing their jobs. The most ludicrous example had to be the quest where you must free some animals from a zoo because the local druid believed they were being mistreated. The only solution offered to me? Kill all the guards in the zoo and murder the proprietor! There's this odd dissonance in the game where my character is 100% good-aligned, yet I've racked up a body count in the hundreds, with many of those deaths coming under circumstances of extreme moral dubiousness. And no one ever calls you on it!
- What? Do you mean to tell me that the character who was incredibly rude, abrasive, condescending, and unhelpful in every single conversation with me....is EVIL? My god, I got whiplash from this UTTERLY SHOCKING AND COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED PLOT SWERVE!
- Playing as a mage is highly tedious. As in Baldur's Gate, a low-level wizard has a pitiful amount of HP and can only cast a few weak spells per day. They need some sort of melee support if they are to survive. In BG, this wasn't a problem, because the game gave you decent melee fighters near he start (Khalid and Jaheira in the first game, Minsc and Jaheira in the second). Not only that, you had full control of your party members.
Not so in NWN. Instead, you are allowed to have one "henchman" who is completely under the control of the AI. Unfortunately, the AI is utterly brain-dead. For instance, they can only attack targets that they have a direct line of sight to, otherwise the target may as well not even exist. So imagine my character is standing in front of a door to a room filled with monsters who could tear through her puny amount of HP in a heartbeat. In BG, I could order my melee fighters in first to deal with the enemies, while my mage stayed back and cast spells from a safe distance. In NWN, my henchmen will often stand just to the side of the door, meaning he can't see the monsters inside and will thus ignore my attack orders. The only way to get him to attack is to walk into the room first and hope he follows me inside, which is far more dangerous, especially if there are archers in the enemy ranks. You could cast invisibility on yourself, or summon a creature inside the room to aggro the enemies, but I should not have to waste spells just to do something that would be trivial if I had full control of my party!
Now, this isn't a hard game by any stretch, but playing as a wizard who has to rely on her henchmen more so than other classes at low levels is incredibly frustrating. Clerics blowing their Turn Undead spells on weak zombies that they can kill with one swing of their mace...clerics trying to heal themselves in close combat and get murdered by Attacks of Opportunity...a melee fighter who decides to ignore the five guys trying to hack him to pieces and run after that archer in the distance and thus get murdered by Attacks of Opportunity...you get the picture. There's a henchmen AI mod that does a bit to ameliorate the issue, but it's not enough.
- The graphics are as bland as the OC. Being 2D, the pre-rendered graphics of Baldur's Gate hold up fairly well more than ten years later. NWN's 3D graphics have not. The areas are visually uninteresting and very obviously constructed with tilesets as opposed to the more organic locales of Baldur's Gate. And bloody hell, who designed the armour for women in this game? Elder Scrolls modders? You know you've got a problem when this is the most reasonable thing any female fighter wears:
- So I gave up on the OC and started with the first expansion pack, Shadows of Undrentide. The story itself is nothing special, but there are some definite improvements here, such as being able to adjust your henchman's inventory, and the fact that the game offers multiple quest solutions depending on your class and abilities (such as the bit with the kobolds holding a woman hostage in the local tavern). But the henchmen remain an issue for spellcasters, because none of them are good melee fighters. You've got a Cleric/Rogue, a Barbarian/Sorcerer, and a Bard (there's a Paladin, but she doesn't join you). And this expansion likes to throw relatively tough opponents at you, and in larger numbers than what you faced in the OC. Later on, you start facing opponents who are not just spell resistant, but spell immune, at which point a wizard better hope that her summons and henchman can take them down. Otherwise, you're SOL.
Now I realise that the main draw of NWN was never its campaigns, but in the toolset and online play, which is a fair point. But surely BioWare must have realised that there would be a good number people coming into this game from Baldur's Gate who would be completely disappointed that it lacked almost everything that BG so good.
Tonight I'm going to try out Hordes of the Underdark, which I've never actually played before. I've heard it's the best part of NWN...we shall see.
NWN was one of the biggest disappointments I've ever had with a game and it seems I got the worst of it too by trying to play a wizard (as I generally do).
In other news, I picked up my year old XCom: Enemy Within playthrough, the game's still fun though I think I really should have started my second playthrough on Classis or so because after the initial few months the difficulty rather plummets. Now I'm trying to decide whether to drag it out to get the "shoot down 40 UFOs"-achievement or just use the Gollop Champer and get this playthrough over with...
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I think the Molyneux thing is kinda sad, really. He obviously likes what he's doing (I cannot imagine anyone sticking with such a demanding "job" if they hate doing it and are rich to boot) and I don't doubt that he's got some great ideas. I think he should just have people in the company that can slow him down, I think that's the main issue at 22cans, that he is the sole founder, so his will is the law, this wasn't the case at Bullfrog nor at Lionhead (where they were two and four, respectively).
I've seen it before where an "idea-guy" gets to basically run a project without interference and while ignoring the feedback of the other people on the project, it tends to not end well for anyone involved.
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- The game is “pretty difficult”, and you can die frequently even on easy if you’re not careful.
Here's to hoping that the "pretty difficult" isn't anything like The Wichter 2's "pretty difficult" aka "frustrating" (I am, of course, referring to the difficulty at release, not the current state of the game).
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Still playing Guild Wars 2, found out I'll need to do a Dungeon to be able to complete the personal storyline, which kinda sucks as it ruins my idea of playing this as a semi single-layer game. Meh
Also rediscovering a lot of the other annoyances that made me quit the game at launch now that I'm back in areas that pose somewhat of a challenge.So figured I'd go back to Bioshock, which didn't last long. The hacking minigame seriously gets on my nerves, I mean it's bloody everywhere! The level I'm in (the theatre place) also just screams "filler content!", I mean, I really don't see the point of it storywise, so adding those up my motivation to continue was pretty much nihil. Still gonna try to finish it at some point, I mean, everybody's raving about the game so I guess I must be missing something...right?
Oh, and I made it to the final boss in WH40K: Dawn of War: Chaos Rising, which is so horrendously overpowered compared to *everything* that came before that I'm just not going to bother (the way I built my squad doesn't allow for some of the cheap tactics people found to deal with him, unfortunately). Too bad because I really really enjoyed that game too, but they just had to ruin it with the final boss. I just hope Dawn of War II doesn't have the same issue, that would suck.
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I'm afraid I have to agree with the other sceptics here, while I never played any of the Underworlds (or any other Ultima, for that matter) having a much improved TES-style game certainly appeals to me (so sue me for comparing Underworld to TES), but as a developer I can't help but feel that the scope they've set for themselves is pretty much impossible with the funding they are aiming for.
I suspect you're probably right. Has anybody successfully completed and released a Kickstarted FPS game?
Consortium was a first person RPG, but the scope was rather different when compared to UA, the graphics style was also rather stylized.
Judging by the "slow" backing (compared to say, Shadowrun: Hong Kong) I suspect quite a few people have their concerns about how they'll be able to pull off what they're trying to sell, at least I doubt there's that many who doubt there are cool ideas here. I'm hoping they go into the *how* in one of the next updates, if they can convince people that what they're proposing is actually feasible with the budget they have then I'm convinced the speed at which contributions roll in will go up rather a lot.
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I finally decided to revisit The Old Republic and check out the housing. Holy moly, they did a good job with that! I bought a place in Coruscant and unlocked all the rooms with my stash of credits, and then spent awhile decorating it with my stable of characters. I've got a lot of cool stuff, but it still feels pretty empty. Definitely a welcome little diversion from all the story stuff.
I visited a public house in Tatooine just to see what other people are doing. They give you a lot of real estate to work with!
How does it compare to the player housing in EverQuest 2 (still my measuring stick when it comes to player housing in MMOs...how I wish that game wasn't left to wither like it was by SOE, *sobs quietly*)
Anyway, still playing through Guildwars 2, made it to level 65 or so with my Sylvari Thief, currently I'm just exploring and completing areas to make it to level 70 (though I have a bunch of level up scrolls from rewards chests and such) to get access to the next bit of Personal Story content. Looks like my Bioshock playthrough might have stranded in the theatre level once more...
I'd say it is better. While it doesn't have the absolute freedom that Everquest 2 had, it has a ton of hooks for items and you can change the templates to mix up small, medium, and large objects. The houses themselves are brilliant, they are big and scenic with a lot of rooms. It's also very easy to have all your characters access your houses, so I have an Imperial room with all my NPC's from that side, and a Republic room with the others.
Glad to see that at least some MMO developers are still considering player housing as more than a checklist item (though, actually your ship was supposed to be your house iirc from SWTOR launch, and it was rather a failure in that regard).
Guildwars 2's player housing sort of feels like one (a checklist item I mean), while it has some nice features (it evolves based on your personal quest) it ultimately isn't a place where I *want* to be with my character (at least not my Sylvari, maybe other races' are better, though I sort of doubt it) whereas in EQ2 I *always* logged out in my house if I had the chance.
I loved in EQ2 how your house was really *your* house and that you could display your conquests there (including some rare weaponry you acquired through sometimes very long and arduous quests even though the weapon itself was of no use to you, it was still a status symbol), it also made for a rather convenient way to keep players doing "stuff" without it feeling like a real grind (not to mention, that combined with a form of level scaling it managed to keep quite a bit of the "old" content interesting and avoided that certain areas ended up being entirely dead, a problem that WoW suffered from to a major degree before the Cataclysm revamp)
Anyway, looks like I'll have a deeper look into SWTOR's player housing, if that stuff is done right I might even install the game again.
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I finally decided to revisit The Old Republic and check out the housing. Holy moly, they did a good job with that! I bought a place in Coruscant and unlocked all the rooms with my stash of credits, and then spent awhile decorating it with my stable of characters. I've got a lot of cool stuff, but it still feels pretty empty. Definitely a welcome little diversion from all the story stuff.
I visited a public house in Tatooine just to see what other people are doing. They give you a lot of real estate to work with!
How does it compare to the player housing in EverQuest 2 (still my measuring stick when it comes to player housing in MMOs...how I wish that game wasn't left to wither like it was by SOE, *sobs quietly*)
Anyway, still playing through Guildwars 2, made it to level 65 or so with my Sylvari Thief, currently I'm just exploring and completing areas to make it to level 70 (though I have a bunch of level up scrolls from rewards chests and such) to get access to the next bit of Personal Story content. Looks like my Bioshock playthrough might have stranded in the theatre level once more...
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I'm afraid I have to agree with the other sceptics here, while I never played any of the Underworlds (or any other Ultima, for that matter) having a much improved TES-style game certainly appeals to me (so sue me for comparing Underworld to TES), but as a developer I can't help but feel that the scope they've set for themselves is pretty much impossible with the funding they are aiming for.
If they would have the budget of a modern Elder Scrolls game, then maybe I'd be more willing to accept that it can be done, but as it stands: nope.
There are also some other things that I have my reservations about (aside from the ones already voiced by other people): linking a single player/co-op game to what seems to basically be a MMO (which is why I didn't back it back then), how the hell is this going to work? Practically as well as technically (I mean, how are they going to manage the complexities involved with the small budget they have?). And how will this impact modding, or does this just mean no modding (which would be bad imho and is in my mind also one of the huge shortcomings of DA:I when compared to TESV: Skyrim)?
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ME is a game with a fixed character that eventually fell into the trapping of its own system by having to resolve every situation through a binary choice.
Generally speaking I haven't found games that do moral system well, the consequences never reflect the player choice and end up diluting the main storyline. I much prefer games like ME where you're playing a character that has a small variation of choice but with depth rather than a bland character with plenty of choices. Plus I do hate it when games enforce their interpretations on you rather than giving you free choice, Chaotic Stupid can still be roleplayed in a tabletop setting for as long as the DM will put up with it. Games tend to be less forgiving of it, so there really is no point to having a choice that will end in a reload.
The problem with ME isn't necessarily the binary choice, but the fact that, at least in ME2, there isn't really much of a choice. You either play the shining knight or the douche, the game mechanics actively punish you for not sticking to one or the other (there is a mechanism in the "alignment" system in ME2 that decides based on a weighted percentage of paragon/renegade choices you've made whether you will be allowed to use persuasion/bluff so if you don't stick to your chosen "alignment" you at some point will no longer be able to persuade/bluff your way out of any situation). I must say that I was quite disappointed when I found out about this...
Also note that the above only applies to ME2, it wasn't the case in ME1 (because persuasion etc. were actual skills iirc) and I have no idea whether they did something about this for ME3.
And really, this is the general problem with "moral choices" in games. There are usually mechanisms in place that "force" you in one direction.
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Blizzard simplified the classes and got rid of a lot of the redundant skills in this last expansion, so it is actually easier to jump back into the game than it used to be.
Yes, but skills were only redundant due to their ineptitude, different builds used to be possible but Blizzard pretty much killed that option with Wrath of the Lich King (Arcane Power/PoM/Pyro anyone?). And a lot of the "redundant skills" would more accurately be described as "situational skills", cutting those killed the flavour of a lot of classes (but that's another discussion entirely).
Quite a few other games actually manage to do skill "trees" (they don't have to be trees at all) perfectly fine without the need to entirely revamp the skills and their associated tree with every expansion, Everquest 2 for example, were skills (or entire skill trees) are added with expansions and the tuning of abilities was generally fairly minor. Their splitting of "skill XP" ("AA" for Alternate Advancement) and "leveling XP" was also pretty neat imho.
Judging by how my class still plays the same (though I wasn't exactly that high level when I quit GW2) it seems ArenaNet also got things right, at least to a fairly decent degree.
Blizzard just did a bad job imho, and instead of fixing it they scrapped it, because apparently they assume their players are too dumb to handle anything but a cookie-cutter promoting skill system.
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What is this fascination with open worlds lately? I miss the days of tighter and narrower sprawly environments, like say the Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil, or even more recently, the Asylum in Arkham Asylum. It carries the good parts about backtracking, where familiarity with the environment felt nice and intuitive.. the place environment became home. Most open world settings as of late feel very unforgettable and unnecessarily padded.. to keep it on topic in regards to Levine, I'd say BioShock 1 had it right with Rapture. I hope this open world thing is just another phase the industry is going through before the next big thing arrives.Ken Levine’s New Game Is Open Worldish Sci-Fiish RPG
What he’s got planned is an open worldish (“but not necessarily outdoors”) RPG, sci-fi, PC, probably first-person, chapter-like structure, brand new setting, add “ins” rather than add-ons, and a Passion System.
It definitely sounds interesting!
You know, Skyrim happened, and now everyone wants slice of this pie. Same like it was with MMOs few years ago. Every single open world game I played was so boring after a while, and as you say, the setting of them and story is completely forgettable.
http://www.thejimquisition.com/2015/01/the-jimquisition-we-need-more-spencer-mansions/
He might be controversial sometimes, but this episode is exactly taken from my mind... I sometimes wish, that we could again get new Final Fantasy with HD prerendered backgrounds and static cameras. FF IX-2 made this way in collaboration with Sakaguchi-san would satisfy most of my wet dreams... Unfortunately this will never happen
There's a new Resident Evil: Revelations coming up, these games stick to the old formula a lot more (eg. Revelations 1 is set for 90% on a single big ship). I hope Revelations 2 will do the same (and maybe tone down the obnoxious bossfights, or at least give us filthy casuals a way to get past them without too much frustration without making *everything* a walk in the park.
Also rediscovering a lot of the other annoyances that made me quit the game at launch now that I'm back in areas that pose somewhat of a challenge.
What are you playing now?
in Computer and Console
Posted · Edited by marelooke
Finished Binary Domain, it was decent. I got the "normal" ending, I guess (both the good and the bad seem to take some deliberate effort to get).
The controls were at some points truly infuriating (the howitzer fight especially, but judging from a Youtube video of that fight it's mostly due to terrible porting as the guy seems to be able to turn a lot faster with a controller). I'd be tempted to do another play-through to get the "good" ending but some parts of the game I just don't feel like going through again right now.
I also finally finished my F:NV playthrough, only took me 4 years...and I still remembered most of the characters in the ending slides too, so good job on that one Obsidian!