Ffordesoon

Called it. PrimeJunta owes me... Ew. A testicle? Never mind. Seriously, this is good news. I do confess to being a bit confused when people were shocked and horrified that a beta of an Obsidian game had showstopping bugs, though. Made me wonder how many people here have bought and played Obsidian games on release. I was pleasantly surprised at how stable and together the game already feels, to be honest with you. But then, I was never expecting it to release in 2014, so.

I got a quest and wandered around town for a second, and then I decided to go off into the wilderness, where I was promptly murdered by a pack of lions. I love it.

It's funny to me that people are mentioning Wasteland 2 as an example of "doing it right." I was on the WL2 forums when the size of the beta was first announced, and there were a fair few people who had the exact same complaint that's being expressed here: "I want a beta, not a glorified demo!" And then a lot of them ended up playing the beta for ages. I actually like what Obsidian's doing here, mainly because it caters to my preferred beta playstyle. I don't have the stamina for long-haul testing, so what I do is test out everything I can for a few hours and then stop playing until release. Knowing that this will be a short beta is nice for me, because I'll be able to complete it without spoilng anything for myself.

Most classic Western RPGs have pretty lame or outright nonexistent openings, and even most modern console-focused WRPGs have **** openings. It's part of what makes the genre so difficult to demo. The best classic WRPG opening I can think of is probably Ultima IV's, where the fortune teller introduces the concept of the virtues. You're eased into the themes of the game without any time being wasted, and the text does a good job of sucking you in even before you're given the choices. PST's is definitely pretty good as well, though I would have to echo the complaint that the opening (and the rest of the game, really) is so thick with blocks of novelistic text that it can grow wearying quickly. The first important plot hook ("Find Pharod") is also delivered too early, it's too easy to miss Deionnara, Pharod himself should be introduced a fair bit earlier, and the weird stuff is thrown at you so early and so frequently that it becomes polarizing. The best modern WRPG opening I can think of is probably Fallout 3, actually. Say what you will about the rest of the game, but everything up to the first glimpse of the outside world flows like butter. The writing and VO aren't brilliant, but they get the point across. Players are introduced to all the concepts they'll need to understand the game without it feeling too overtly tutorial-y, and you leave Vault 101 with absolutely no doubt as to your high-level quest in the game. Not only that, but they do a good job of conveying how bittersweet it is for the player to leave the vault, there are some nice (if heavy-handed) C&C moments that reinforce the Fallout ethos, and the first moment you step out into daylight is, as someone else mentioned, a superb wow moment to cap the whole thing off. DA:O probably deserves a mention as well, but I haven't played all of the origins, and I understand they vary in quality. Also, it doesn't do that good a job of actually teaching the mechanics, which Fallout 3 did very well. Also, you kind of get the origin part of the opening and then the "You're a Grey Warden now!" part of the opening, which ends up almost feeling like two openings in a row, the second of which is a lot longer and more weirdly paced than the first. A good RPG opening, to my mind, is brief, enticing, and ends with a killer plot hook. Based on the videos, PoE's opening seems to fulfill all those criteria, which makes me excited.

Yes, I hope to see most of the pulsing icons from the original games. That's like the only bit of the demo that made me do a little frowny face. As clunky and weird as those UIs are in a lot of ways, the cursor icons are more or less unimpeachable.

Mass Effect is the odd one out there, surely? There are certainly plenty of dark things that happen in those games, but the world itself was hardly grimdark in atmosphere. I would think Mass Effect's world would be one of the better RPG settings to live in - hyperspace travel, new worlds full of boundless possibility, racism and sexism pretty well conquered, great health care, a more permissive attitude toward sexuality, Elcor Shakespeare... I mean, yeah, the Reapers are a thing, but they don't show up till the third game. If you were to live in the world of the first two games, though, you'd have a pretty sweet deal. Am I missing something? EDIT: Oh, and I should point out that if you're looking for a more lighthearted cRPG, Divinity: Original Sin fits the bill. It's the kind of game in which you can wear a bucket as a helmet and talk to a shell who wants to be thrown pack into the sea called Ishmashell.

It looks how I remember BG looking when I was twelve and every game looked amazing. But with PST's writing and IWD's atmosphere. And a much better UI than any of them. And there are scripted interaction things and pretty in-world animations and it moves way faster and the combat looks awesome and I am in romantic love with everyone who had any part in this and I wish I could spend another thousand dollars on it and oh my god oh my god OH MY GOD HAD I BUT WORLDS ENOUGH AND TIME TO PROPERLY CONVEY MY EXCITEMENT This is a knockout punch right in them warm and fuzzy nostalgi-feels, Obsidian. You know those "Grape Job!" stickers that you scratch and then it smells like grapes? You get two of those. Three! Christ, and I haven't even played the thing yet...!

Personally, I find this sort of backer entitlement a bit silly. I'd like to see gameplay, yes, but I kind of don't care if someone else sees it before me, especially when it means orders of magnitude more exposure for PoE than it would otherwise.

@OP: You made my brain sad.

The circle is essential for judging the range of the effect.

^This, especially now. I dunno if anyone's fired it up lately, but Wasteland 2's gotten really damn good, largely thanks to beta and Early Access feedback. And outside of the Codex forums, the beta wasn't recieved badly to begin with. Coverage on the pro blogs has been remarkably positive, and posts on the official forums have gone from an overall "meh" reaction to broadly positive over time. Posts I've seen elsewhere have been more or less positive. There have been outliers, of course, but I think the picture Sensuki paints is far bleaker than the reality. It's also worth noting that inXile is a far smaller company than Obsidian, with a looser structure and less resources. So there's that. FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm a mod on the WL2 forums, for those who don't know. Make of that what you will.

I just hate elves. Dwarves are awesome. Elves are lame There's not much more to it than that, for me.

I think it's important that the area the spell affects is crystal-clear, which wasn't true at all in the BG games, so in that sense, I prefer the circles, especially for AoE spells. At the same time, I obviously think the BG spells had more personality, and I'd like to see that here. The important thing is not to get so caught up in personality that it's hard to tell what's happening. I think the BG2EE pic is indicative of that problem. It's clear that many things are happening, but it isn't so clear where the effects are coming from and how they relate to one another. In addition, the "*quaffed a potion*" bit points out an obvious problem with BG's potion buffs, which is that they almost all had more or less the same animation (swirly lights around a single character, and maybe a colored glow afterward) despite doing vastly different things. When compared to, say, Chant or Armor Of Faith, the feedback is annoyingly indistinct.

No no, no no, no, no, nononono, no, NO, no, no, NO, no, nobody can do the SHIMMY like I do, nobody can do the SHAKE like I do, nobody can BOOGALOO like I do...

No.

They are right about one thing, Lephys: you should play BG, especially BG2. It's always better to argue over concrete information than abstract scenarios based on guesses, and it's not like they're bad games you should dread playing. They are, in fact, pretty damn spiffy, despite any quibbles I may or may not have aired about them on this forum. There's a reason why many people on this forum get snippy about potential changes to the formula.

Well, I vehemently disagree with that. Even within work-for-hire cape comics, there are plenty of terrific books and runs and single issues, and that's hardly the totality of the medium.

@Gromnir: What? No! I love Sandman! I thought you didn't like it that much, is what meant.

This discussion of comics kind of makes me want the other discussion back. Not because I liked that discussion, but because I'm way more familiar with comics, and the taste of both KaineParker and Gromnir is driving me crazy. Preacher is cheesy? Sandman is only okay? JMS' Spider-Man run was good after the first year? What mad world have I wandered into? You are, of course, entitled to your opinions. He said, stuffing a sock in the mouth of his inner fanboy and whimpering.

I don't think we are missing the point. By saying that you are significantly underestimating the audience, or else you're being condescending. It's just not that important to everybody to rehash the same old social issues without significant new context, and I'm merely supplementing that with some mechanical details as to why the point is trivial to me in this instance. If I was being condscending or underestimating your intelligence, I apologize. Not my intent. And, as I said, you made a good point in response to me.

@rjshae: Well, I did say I wanted to have a nice discussion, not that I was trying to start one myself. Being serious for a moment, what I said wasn't intended as an attack, and certainly not an ad hominem one. If it came off that way, I apologize. I was attempting to gently chide you and others for missing the point, not attacking you. But that's the problem with these discussions I was just talking about. They have a polarizing effect, because one side (to the extent that there are sides) refuses to grant the other's central premise, even as a simple thought experiment. As such, every attempt to broach the subject becomes an accusation of complicity, and even the smallest challenge to one side's accepted narrative is taken as an acidic barb lobbed with malice at the opposition. As such, my acknowledgment that your subsequent point clarifying your "twelve pixels high" comment is not without merit may be seen as capitulation on my part, or you might regard it with suspicion. My assurance that I mean it is then also suspect, and the implicit pedestal upon which civil discourse stands is further corroded. Hell, perhaps my playful aside at the top of this post will be taken as a calculated attempt to double down on my position, or maybe even a full-on passive-aggressive snipe. In a discussion this charged, all things are possible - though, in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that this list of things I don't want to happen is a rhetorical attempt to prevent them from happening. And even that last admission, which seems to me so innocuous, could be taken as evidence of my guile, and concomitant untrustworthiness. The simple practice of persuasive argumentation might render everything I say invalid. Why does this happen, and what can be done to stop it? These are the questions I am most interested in answering.

Ugh. This sort of debate always brings out the worst in people. Which is a shame, because I'd actually like to have a nice discussion about the history of boob armor and the reasons some people (both male and female) dig it, and some people (again, both male and female) find it degrading and sexist. There are good points on both sides, though I would generally side with the latter group. What it boils down to, though, is this: most players will probably want to be able to tell male and female characters apart. Is that sexist? It depends on the player's reason for wanting it. Personally, unisex armor would be fine with me. At the same time, I like seeing my choices in character customization reflected on the character model. But boob armor is something a lot of backers want, and something a lot of backers don't want. I don't think creating armor sets that are recognizably feminine from a bird's-eye view is a bad compromise on Obsidian's part. Whether they should compromise on that is another issue entirely, but I don't think it's a bad decision given their audience. Oh, and shame on anybody who tries to say this is "grownups fighting over boobs" or "twelve pixels on a screen" or whatever. At issue is the possible influence of the male gaze on fictional armor design. Things not at issue: anyone's manhood, how great breasts are, how terrible breasts are, how large the tiny women's breasts are on the screen, how small the tiny women's breasts are on the screen, the relative merits of sexiness, political correctness, SJWs, Tumblr, Twitter outrage. Do take note.

@Gorgon: My feelings are similar. I think tutorials are a necessary evil, but should always - always - be optional. It's also nice when they're clearly signposted as tutorials. Mandatory tutorials (mandatorials?), on the other hand, pretty much always make me want to punch the person(s) responsible. The amount of times I want to punch them can vary, however. For example, whoever designed the tutorials in Assassin's Creed III deserves to be punched in the stomach constantly forever, whereas the fellow(s) who designed the tutorial in the first Halo deserves one soft brotherly punch to the upper arm. @anameforobsidian: I liked the idea of New Vegas' tutorial more than the reality of it, but I see what you mean and agree. @Lord Gorchnik: Don't worry about me. I only spend ten percent of my day wondering if the scary people on the internet will like me. Well, maybe twenty percent. (Other eighty to ninety percent: procrastination.) I agree about the flashy "NEW" thing, incidentally. I should have mentioned it in the original post, but I didn't want to spend too much of the post delineating BD's system instead of explaining what I thought PoE should take from it. Shot in the dark here: your handle wouldn't happen to be a Best Show reference, would it?

1) I think Josh and the others have done a pretty darn okay job of that, given what is presumably an extremely busy schedule. 2) These are easy things to promise. They are not easy things to deliver on. When a dev writes anything, people will take it as a commitment, no matter how hedged the wording. They will also always have more questions that aren't answered. I've seen it happen time and again on the Wasteland 2 boards. If the devs are being overly cagey, it's because underpromising and overdelivering is always better than overpromising and underdelivering. 3) Josh confirmed that potions and healing are in the game in another thread, and that characters can permanently die in all modes. 4) Stamina and Health are also presumably represented numerically in some fashion, given that the game is made of math. I don't see why they couldn't show those numerical representations in the game. I don't see what confirming that there are indeed hit points will accomplish, exactly. But then, I don't see how anyone could possibly get the idea that there aren't hit points in the game just because there are two measurements of health instead of one. That is, unless there is some sort of extremely rigorous definition of "hit points" Monte Carlo is adhering to, in which case I confess I am truly baffled. 5) I like Monte Carlo. He writes well and seems affable. Just saying.

@Lephys: I get all the jumping to conclusions. I don't do it anymore, but I get it. Ninety percent of anticipation is hoping they (whoever "they" might be) don't f**k the thing you're anticipating up, and when you hear them say something that sounds bad to your ears, it's natural to assume the worst. And, for what it's worth, I'll be very disappointed if the grognards are right and the classes do feel the same. To my mind, they should feel - if you'll forgive the horrid historical connotation of this particular phrase - separate, but equal. If I may flog your car analogy to death, just because I want every car I buy to be roadworthy doesn't mean I want all cars to be the same car, nor does it mean that I expect every car I buy to be great on every type of terrain. I'm not going to expect a Lamborghini to do the job of a Hummer, but - and this is crucial - I'm also not into the idea of a Lamborghini performing like a Dodge Viper. If I buy a Lamborghini, it's because I want something that only a Lamborghini can give me. Discarding this increasingly irritating analogy entirely, when I play a Rogue, I want to feel the lack not only of Wizard-ness, but of Fighter-ness and Monk-ness. If I play a Wizard next, I want to feel the lack of Rogue-ness, but also the lack of Chanter-ness and Priest-ness. I just don't want to regret picking a certain class/build, either - or rather, I don't want to regret taking a certain class/build because of the way the game is designed. I may find I don't like playing a certain class/build, and that's okay. What I don't want is to feel that I disliked the class/build because of a lack of effort on the designers' part, as I did in Dragon Age: Origins when I played a ranged Rogue.