Fearabbit

I think the only problem with that list is that Skyrim and Fallout 3 didn't make it. You can say what you want about them, but they're not bad RPGs and I'd recommend them to any newbie of the genre. And what else is a list such as this one good for, except to show people which games to look out for? So... yeah, some of the very old RPGs could've been replaced with modern ones. Other than that: I couldn't care less about the ranking. And it's funny how people get so angry about it. I know that the Codex likes Arcanum, PST and Obsidian games, and the list perfectly reflects that. What's important is that there are pretty good reviews of the various games (which must have been a lot of effort) and that almost all important RPGs are represented. These two combined make it possible for anyone to find games he/she might like, and that's great.

haha

Tropico 5. Always liked the premise of that series, I think I'll finally give it a try. Other than that... I'm still on the fence about Divinity: Original Sin. It looks great, but I'm not sure if I like the gameplay. There are games where I love turnbased combat (Arcanum, Fallout) and there are games where I absolutely despise it, and I'm not sure which one this will turn out to be. Just to name one example.

I must say that I really miss this feature in other games - the option to turn the game into a comedy of sorts. Other RPGs sometimes offer you funny dialogue, yes, but usually there are repercussions to it, or it doesn't work because the overall tone of the game is still too serious. Playing as a Malkavian completely changes the experience while still making perfect sense in a way. I really, really liked that. Apart from that... I liked VtM: Bloodlines, but soon after arriving in Chinatown it became too suspenseful for me, I'm ashamed to admit. I mean, I like the atmosphere very much, but the haunted hotel was already almost too much for me, and then the whole business with the snuff videos and those strange abominations started... that was just too much "nope" for me. What can I say, I'm a wuss. :D So I watched the rest of the game as a Let's Play. (It had only cost me 5 euros anyway and the beginning more than made up for that expense, so I didn't mind not being able to finish it. I still loved the rest of the story, and especially the ending!)

Yeah, just because the melting ice caps made Chtulhu rise and create a police state with unspeakable horrors stalking the streets, it doesn't mean we have to implement chips into our brains or can't have some fun. :D

Well I care about balance in a singleplayer game for two reasons: 1) I don't want one character I created to be less enjoyable than another, and 2) I want to be rewarded for progression, not penalized. Arcanum's character creation was great, but while advancing through the technology and magic trees was fun, it was futile. Molotov cucktail, balanced sword and the first Necromancy spell were easily the best and most useful things you got out of that combat-wise, and you could get them at first level. I pretty much killed the final boss with molotovs or that necromantic damage spell. I had a MUCH harder time with the Elephant Gun or whatever the final badass-looking gun in that tech tree was called. And realizing that was NOT enjoyable. The other thing is that even choosing a tech guy was a wrong decision. They were worse in pretty much everything than a normal fighter or mage was, and they had more micro-managing with bullets, batteries, crafting materials etc. That's the only thing I want "balanced". If one character is totally overpowered combat-wise but the other one is just so much fun to play that I can't decide between these two concepts, then that's all I want. I don't need perfect balancing in the combat area as long as I'm having fun. No, pre-apocalyptic. Where you don't know if there's gonna be a post-apocalypse. To be specific, I was thinking of Mass Effect, that type of thing. Mass Effect had a cool universe but it was screwed from the very beginning, and after the last game they either have to go back in time or create a whole new setting for the next one. One that's way less cool than the one they started with because the mass effect relays are ancient history now, so no more space adventures, I guess.

I voted for "original IP" and "don't care which combat system" as well as Space Opera, Science Fiction, Steampunk, Other. We haven't had a good Space Opera or Science Fiction game in a long time, and I think Obsidian would be the perfect developer for it. No cyberpunk and no "all is lost" setting please, though. Steampunk... I'd just like ONE really good steampunk game. A game that takes everything good about Arcanum and leaves all the bad stuff out and doesn't go overboard with the technology and gadgets. (Steampunk is actually a bad label for what I want; I want a slightly science-fictional 19th century setting with magic and monsters.) Other... I don't know, I'm thinking of a pirate RPG. Or rather, an RPG set in a slightly fantastical version of the Caribbean with more islands and voodoo. (I'd love a game that took the basic premise of Risen 2, improved it and put it in a PoE type of game.) By the way. Has the label "Eternity Engine games" been coined yet? If not, then I'd like to propose it for this new line of RPGs that are based on one engine yet are different from one another.

Do we know how many wilderness areas there are, and can we make a reasonable assumption as to whether more would be beneficial? Currently it doesn't seem to me that way. For all I know, the game currently has exactly the amount of wilderness areas it needs. As for companions, I think I'm fine with the number that we have right now. Which I don't know exactly but I think it's around 10, maybe less? Since there's the Adventurer's Hall, I don't think I need more for replayability.

Okay. My point of view is: Those are limitations because they limit you in some way; but that can also be a good thing in some cases. I don't think that a DM is a negative limiting factor, he's an important limiting factor, just to name one example. I saw anameforobsidian's post just as a very neutral listing of things that limit possibilities in PnP (with a focus on spellcasting). As I understood him, the only negative bits were that a PnP game can be unfair to players who aren't as imaginative as others (although that could, of course, be considered a positive thing because it's supposed to be part of the learning curve) and that cRPGs necessarily have to impose limitations that will feel unsatisfying in certain situations. If you roleplay an all-knowing deity, and you don't know everything about the world because the game withholds that information from you, then that's a limiting factor that sort of ruins your "all-knowing deity" experience. On the other hand, roleplaying an all-knowing deity might not be much fun to begin with, so this limitation isn't exactly negative.

Yes. However, that was exactly his point. If somebody has personal limitations to his imagination, then these directly affect his ability to use magic imaginatively, meaning his spellcasting is limited by his own mental capabilities. That was literally all he wanted to say and all he said. So I don't understand why you try and disagree with him. Now something he didn't explicitely say but that I think is implied - it's a problem that PnP games have this limitation, because if you're trying to roleplay a character much more imaginative than yourself, you're screwed. You just can't do it. And even if you disagree with it being a problem, it's certainly noteworthy that this limitation exists. Yeah but he was talking about cRPGs. You can't do that in a cRPG. Every breaking of the system needs some form of implementation, and when you just can't summon grease underwater (at least without it bugging out somehow) because the designer didn't think of this possibility, then the spell is artificially limited. Like he said - either the designer allows ALL THE WAYS a spell can be used, or he artificially limits it. There's literally no other option, so again, don't understand what you're disagreeing with or arguing against. Sorry but that whole thing just doesn't make any sense at all. "He's not a limiting factor, but he does limit what you can do (in some cases)." What?! If he limits you 1 time in a months long campaign, he was still a limiting factor! Not an important one, but it is there. anameforobsidian never argued for anything more than that.

...it's a limitation of the magic of the wielder of said magic, yes. You're not disagreeing with his point here at all. All he does is count the ways in which a spellcaster is limited by the PnP system, and one that's important is "he can only find uses for his spells that his player can think of". ...unless the designer makes the spell waterproof, i.e. gives it additional limitations. Again, you're not disagreeing with anameforobsidian. In general, we're not talking about Medieval Europe. We're talking about PnP and while his points are still valid in a sci-fi or steampunk setting, yours is very, very specific. (It's also weak, as knowledge of the body as in "stab it here or there to make it dead" was pretty common even in the Middle Ages.) You can try to explain a design element away with "the people in that setting do not know about that possibility", but that doesn't make it less hackish. And of course, it's also a limitation. You're practically forbidding your spellcasters to ever accidentally find out about certain ways they could wield their magic. Brilliant. So... my point is, anameforobsidian made a good list of limiting factors in a PnP game, and you try to disagree with him for some reason, and I really don't understand why you would want to do that. I guess it's because you want to make the point that cRPGs are inherently more limited than PnPs, but that's obviously true, and nobody's denying it.

Lephys and JFSOCC, excellent points! I've heard that Two Worlds 2 has a pretty powerful magic system, but I haven't played that yet and it's not really a classical RPG. Anyway. I have never understood the fascination with fire magic. (I do know where it comes from, but it is a bit old-fashioned nowadays.) It would be interesting to see what they come up with if ALL elemental magic was forbidden. Maybe we'd find that without it, offensive magic is suddenly a much darker affair. I mean, Harry Potter is a good example. The only guys who even had offensive spells were the bad guys. The fireball as a non-necromantic and non-evil alternative didn't exist, because it doesn't actually make sense. In that universe, the only guys using fire magic would be Voldemort et al. Just something to consider.

The ONE thing I really want is non-degenerate, balanced gameplay for all classes and skills. Which is why I have very high hopes for P:E. I get it very rarely that I'm struck by the extreme fairness of a game, but when it happens it's much more satisfying than having lots of choices or branching storylines.

...which is, however, the sort of [Lie] tag that I absolutely cannot stand. This happens in some RPGs too - there's an option to lie about something, and you're basically guaranteed that the truth will come out and you'll find yourself in a difficult spot. So you (or, at least, I) never lie in those situations. Which is my own personal reason why I find the "I want to join you! [Lie]" thing problematic, because I would suspect that this choice directly leads to a situation where I get caught and have to kill everybody while the odds are against me. The discussion still hasn't brought up a good concept how the player can be told what his options are, neither has it provided a good argument as to why something like that wouldn't be necessary. Yadda yadda Expert Mode and "have to use your brain", yeah I get it, you're all very used to the concepts. New players aren't, and Obsidian has said time and again that they will try to make the game accessible. "Use your brain" is a flawed argument, by the way, because no two brains think alike. The Nameless One has 5 dialogue choices, one of which is secretely the high-INT answer. How can you tell? By analyzing which of these sentences is most likely to have been written by a developer as the smartest choice available. Which means you have to consider the (unknown to you) intentions the developer had when writing the scene and the fact that he knew the outcome beforehand, whereas you don't. This thing can go wrong. It often doesn't, but sometimes "use your brain" is simply unfair because your failing had less to do with your inability to analyze the situation correctly, and more with your inability to know what the developer was thinking. Example: A demon asks you "What is connected to the energy of a person?". The answers are "Magic", "Strength", "Responsibility" and "Mass". Now suppose you don't know Albert Einstein's theories because you never had a Physics course, but you do study Philosophy and you think that "Responsibility" is most fitting. But of course, the developer thought "Mass" was the most intelligent answer you could give. So now you have to fight the demon, or whatever. Different people have different solutions. And all of the above would actually be correct answers - you cannot know which is deemed the most intelligent one by some guy you never met. This is a general problem with the limited amount of choices in dialogue systems, but at least tagging answers tells the player "okay, this might not look like the most intelligent answer to you, but some developer decided that it is, so pick that one if you want the intelligent outcome".

This is the game I'd recommend as well. It got rather mixed reviews, but from what I've seen so far, it looks like a really fun game. Cool fantasy story and nice co-op gameplay. (Didn't get a chance to play it yet, though. I have one friend with whom I play co-op games, and he wasn't interested.) But then I don't have very high standards when it comes to co-op games, I just wish there were more of them outside the shooter genre. I really liked Castle Crushers as well, for example.

Yeah, the thing about the [Lie] tag is more about quest design and communicating different possible objectives, it's not connected to the disposition and reputation system.

If an argument doesn't apply to the situation you have in mind, it's always good to consider if the other person maybe had a different scenario in mind, instead of directly jumping to the conclusion that the argument is bad. Basically, what teknoman said - I was talking about a scene where you're in a forest, in front of a bandit camp, and you need to get access to the camp so you pretend that you want to join them. Or you can actually join them. If you're running around town saying "I'm a bandit", yeah your rep would suffer for that. That seems kind of obvious. PrimeJunta - I was saying that there has to be a good reason for getting bad rep. That's all. If the bandits are in town and you ask them to take you as a recruit in front of a crowd of people, you should get a reputation for that. If you do it in a secluded area, you shouldn't. But when you do quests that involve robbing people, you should. It's really simple and intuitive, and I was only pointing it out because people kept saying that of course joining the bandits should give you bad rep. Different kind of tags. The ones I was talking about aren't cheats, they're a form of communication between the game and the player. There's no way of telling whether "I want to join" is meant as a lie or not, whereas you can guess that "I'm going to kill you slow and painfully" or something like will be a "Violent" response. jethro and Tamerlane - Regarding the "Obsidian is good and this won't be a problem" thing. I've seen this happen in the best RPGs. And yes, I believe a few Obsidian RPGs suffered from it as well, I seem to remember something like that in NWN 2 for example. But I'm actually not worried. I was responding to the discussion going on, which wasn't about P:E directly and more about RPGs in general.

Well, I presented the argument that a [Lie] tag suggests to the player that the game is considering this possibility at all. Thus the player is assured that they will see a satisfactory quest development that coincides with their motivations. I did say that there are other options, but that the ones I can think of don't convince me... so there are two possible responses to my post: Either argue that communicating to the player that there are multiple ways to play out this quest is unnecessary, or provide a better option than the [Lie] tag. You didn't do either right now, so excuse me if your post doesn't convince me.

And how does it work with skill tags? I remember being confused by Baldur's Gate I where you want to get into the bandit camp and you can say something like "Let me join you!" So I basically thought that my character was sincere and not lying. Thus, how about: "Let me join you!" [Lie] "Let me join you!" [Truth] i dont think it matters if it is a lie or not. the result will be determined by what you do after you "join". Let me join you! you act like a proper bandit and go along with them, you get result A you backstab them at the most opportune time, you get result B you fail to be convincing as a bandit, you get result C no matter what the reason behind joining, you asked to join them and you did, in order to get to the result you seek I'd say it matter skillwise. If you have to use a bluff skill, your bluff could fail. Other than that, I think your proposition is a bit too complicated. What if just joining me gives me certain reputational points that I didn't want to have in the first place? Just because the game doesn't differentiate between sincere joining and the lie? As has been said, there are no conversation-specific skills (though skills and attributes can still play in to combat). Besides that, if you lie to someone about joining a bloodthirsty bandit group, why wouldn't you get "is a cruel, bloodthirsty bandit" reputation? Wasn't that the whole damn point? If you don't want people to think of you as a bandit, you probably shouldn't be pretending to be a bandit. I hate these overly long quotes at the begining of a post, but I just want to add to this whole discussion: First, I don't think you should get a bad reputation for pretending to be a bandit unless you actually get to rob people. This part is often screwed up when it comes to quests where you pretend to be someone you're not or where you have a secret identity - how would people come to think that you're a bandit when they've never seen you hang out with bandits or rob people? Think of Oblivion or Skyrim, where people might never see you stealing things and yet throw insults at you for being a thief of the Thieves Guild. A bad game will tell you: "Yes you can pretend to join the bandits, but the downside is that as soon as you join, you will get a bad reputation for being a bandit. THIS GAME HAS CONSEQUENCES YOU KNOW." A good game will not change your reputation unless you actually go so far that you get involved with the criminal activities of the bandits you're infiltrating. Second, I think it's important that the player gets an indication that the game "gets" what he's trying to do. If there's only the dialogue line "Let me join you!", the player doesn't know if choosing this option means that you actually become a bandit or if it also means that you can just pretend to be one to get into their camp. I'm sympathetic to the idea that deciding whether the things you say are lies or not is up to the player. But you have to tell the player somehow that there is such a choice to make. And you better don't design a quest and then forget that people might have these hidden motivations. Say the player chooses "Let me join you!" and expects to be able to betray the bandits, because it makes sense for his character to do something like that. The game, however, thinks that you actually want to become a bandit, so it gives you a "Bandit" reputation. And even if you wipe out the whole bandit camp, this reputation doesn't go away. Or if you don't wipe them out, but steal some important item and then run away, but the bandits still treat you as one of their own. And even though you have crucial inside information about heists the bandits are planning, you can't tell the guards about them. These situations can be very frustrating. So "Let me join you! [Lie]" as a second option that also alters your quest objectives accordingly is a good compromise. Another way to do it would be a quest entry "I've joined the bandits. They trust me now. I can either play along or betray them.", but I think that kind of ruins the immersion, because it suggest that even your character who actually really wants to be a bandit still strongly considers betraying them for no reason at all, and vice versa. Maybe the best thing to do would be something like "Let me join you! [Lie or Truth]". I don't know.

I pretty much like everything I'm hearing so far. But if I had to list some highlights off the top of my head: - I'm very excited about the Cipher and Chanter classes. - The reputation system sounds excellent with just the right blend of flavour stuff and real consequences. - Crafting! It sounds great and I'm very much looking forward to it. - All the art is great. I especially love the character portraits so far, I think those might be the best ones I've ever seen in an RPG (best ones meaning "most to my liking"). - I LOVE the world and the fact that it's more modern than your typical fantasy RPG but also classical enough to not be steampunk or anything like that (which I adore, but that's what Arcanum 2 will be for, hopefully, one day ^^). The races and various ethnicities, the soul theme... sounds like some really great lore that can rival any established franchise. - Combat sounds extremely exciting, fair and balanced. Everytime I read one of Sawyer's posts that go into this, I get excited. He clearly loves to create these systems and I feel the game is in very good hands there. - I think objective XP is a huge, important change to other classical RPGs that will make the game more satisfying for me personally. I hate having to run after an enemy that's fleeing just because I need the XP.

Actually Death is only a toggle in standard play. You can't toggle it off in hardcore mode, which was the original question.

Cleric Nemir: I don't get your problem... maybe I agree! But here's what it looks like to me right now: there's one option in the game that's exactly how you want it (dead is dead), and there's another option where PCs are only badly injured. Why is this a design flaw? It seems to me like they covered all their bases. Also I think that you'll still have to reload if your whole party is "maimed", so isn't it a bit extreme to say the PCs are unkillable?

Please read my posts concerning the "inferior tactics". Even if it was not an insta-kill spell, a spell that does anything from 1 to 30 damage has about a 10% chance of instantly killing you if you have 27 HP. The mage presumably stood there buffing the other enemies, because he wound up with a party that had almost full health. Then, in the end, one spell hits the one person that may not be killed with maximum damage. That has nothing to do with tactics, it's just bad luck. (In my opinion it would have something to do with tactics if the spell always did 30 damage and you knew about it beforehand.) ...erm, what does this have to do with isometric view again? :D

This is the one thing that people always get wrong about simple probability, so please just trust me on this. I agree with you that it's a good strategy to take out the mage soon because the more he casts, the more likely it is that you suffer heavily. But if you have already survived without any losses, then the next time you're not running any higher risks. The tenth spell isn't more likely to kill you because it's the tenth spell. But ten spells are more likely to kill you than one. No, the chance of surviving would have been 90% if he had gone faster. Just like it was 90% when he took his time, maybe because he had been lucky a dozen times or because the mage did other things like buffing his allies, we don't know that. In this very specific situation, it didn't matter at all how fast he took out the mage. The only way to guarantee a 100% success is to kill the mage before he can cast a single spell, because it could be just the one that insta-kills you. That's the part where the game stops being tactical and just gives you a checklist of things you have to do in a certain order to survive - I'd say that's not a good tactical gameplay design. High constitution would have helped, but how do you know that you need high constitution when in earlier battles you never even lost a lot of health? In hindsight it's easy to see how he could've survived, but hindsight is not the same as tactics. Tactics are based on the empirical evaluation of your situation, and choosing a different attribute instead of constitution when you never had problems with HP before was actually good tactics, if you ask me.

Let's use math here. A mage has a few kill spells, you got 10% chance to instantly die. Yes, follow me? Okay, you get hit by one, 10% chance to die, right? The second? 10% chance to die. Total; 20%. Third, add another 10%. By now your deathchance over those casts is 30%. Your odds definitely are getting against you. The chance for you to survive all that is significantly smaller if you get just one of those 1d10 rolls, rather than 3 of them, or more. Alright. Now let's use correct math here. 10% chance of being killed by a spell. First time has 10% of killing you, second time also has 10% chance of killing you. However, if you know the mage will spam this spell this means that your odds of not having died after the second time are (0.9*0.9)=0.81, 81%. That's your first mistake. They don't stack, they multiply, but only if you look at the whole combat and say "if he hits 10 times, I have a chance of surviving that's (0.9)^10=0.35, 35%." When looking at a single instance, however, the chance is always 10% (that you get killed). Karkarov killed 8 enemies while the mage kept spamming an insta-kill spell at him, and he didn't die? Well, then all of that doesn't matter for the next time the mage casts the spell. The probability of dying is 10%. It wasn't the reduced chance of having let the mage live so long that killed Karkarov, it was the completely normal "90% of surviving" chance that killed him, and that is what he's criticising. That there is something as a 10% insta-kill chance. Killing the mage first or last doesn't change that, he would've died in both cases and strategy doesn't come into play. EDIT: And the X-Com example doesn't apply because that game isn't over when one of your party members dies. Baldur's Gate, as far as I know, cannot be continued if your main character dies. And this very specific combination of effects - "this has a chance of 10% to kill someone, and if it's the main character it is game over" - this is what's causing a problem here.