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Ffordesoon
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Posts posted by Ffordesoon
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YEAH, ASS-SYMMETRICAL ARMOR
WOOOOOOOO
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If it's "consolized" to want my characters to go where I tell them to go without getting stuck on a bit of scenery every single time, then f**k it, I'm marching in the console army.
The one thing that I've never understood about the cRPG community is this weird attachment to features that make the games objectively worse. This is a perfect example. What's the one aspect of the IE games that is universally derided? The pathing. So someone suggests a way to make it better, and immediately someone else pops in and says, "Well, I didn't need any of that in the IE games, and you're catering to stupid people if you allow players to do things like plan their moves and not waste their time and enjoy themselves!"
I realize I'm being a curmudgeon, and I apologize for that, but there is no logical reason why some of this old, janky crap should not be improved.
I admit, I'm a layman. I do not know what "improved" would actually mean. But I do know that the approach the IE games took would not fly today. In fact, I distinctly remember reading all the reviews of the games as they came out, and the bad pathfinding was mentioned every single time. It didn't fly back then either!
Is the solution proposed in this thread perfect? I dunno. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't have the authority to make that call. All I know is that it strikes me as idiotic to say that the pathfinding system in the IE games was more or less fine, so let's just do that again in this game made in 2013. There was plenty in those old games that was terrific and worth iterating on, but not everything in them was gold-plated astronaut ice cream sex.
Again, apologies for the crabby tone, but Sensuki's post brought that out in me (inadvertently, I'm sure).
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What is this "Political Correctness bandwagon" you speak of?
People being nice to each other.
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Sexism? I think that is undeveloped in media. Somewhat taboo on the level as pedophilia. keep that in real life. Lol imagine a quest involving a woman suing for sexual harassment and the player taking sides.
I... I genuinely do not understand what you just said. I mean, I understand the words, but the point escapes me entirely. Please clarify?
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It's always bizarre to me that very few developers seem to realize just how important fun, quick, easy, and precise movement is to a game. There are genres where it's more important, of course; a console platformer is going to live or die on the quality of its movement, whereas a cRPG controlled with a mouse will only seem somewhat less fun. But even in a cRPG, it's important. The whole Diablo series succeeded on the merit of its movement, whereas some cRPGs are basically unplayable for the neophyte these days because of how poorly their movement was designed. Oddly, this seems to have afflicted 90's cRPGs in particular. Tile-based games like Wasteland have swung back around to playable status, whereas Fallout's more granular movement now feels overly herky-jerky and tedious.
If the Kickstarter-funded cRPG developers should apply one thing from their time working on what a Codexer would derisively call "console shooters," it's the understanding of what makes for enjoyable movement those games inculcated within them.
(I can already picture the response to this post. It is a credit either to my confidence or my stupidity that I have chosen to post this anyway.
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The main Redcliffe quest was a very good one, but the siege bit was tedious crap. It's the ultimate example of the "neener neener" encounter design Prime mentioned.
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I enjoyed Origins combat from an aesthetic standpoint, but the Benny Hill style chases after the undead at the Siege of Redcliffe village didn't exactly endear the broken control system to me. Nor did my allies happily jumping into the flames outside the windmill. I'll take Icewind Dales combat control scheme anytime over that. Also why did I have to buy tactics slots, surely these should have been free AI behaviours like in the Infinity Engine games.
Holy moley, I completely forgot about having to buy the tactics slots! That was the whole reason I never got the hang of the party AI system. What a bad idea.
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XII.
Yes. That game did the AI thing right.
Dragon Age's combat is the worst thing about it, but I do agree that it had some smart ideas, and that the AI programming thing was on the right track.
The biggest problem with DA's combat from my perspective was that it tried to be Baldur's Gate 2 translated into the language of World Of Warcraft. That was great for people who find WOW's combat enjoyable, and was probably a smart business decision overall (WOW was still at its height then). It alienated me utterly, however, because it made me feel old. At the time, I didn't understand the language of MMOs, and yet the game talked in that language constantly. Imagine reading the sequel to your favorite book and finding that all the verbs are in a language you have never heard before and sometimes they're adjectives for no reason. Dragon Age was like that for me.
Add to that the fact that its balance was shonky at the best of times, and combat in DA managed some kind of unholy perfect balance between tedium, frustration, and impenetrability. For me, anyway.
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@motorizer:
Oh yeah, it's the happeningest party in town.
We've got people talking past each other, walls of text, poor word choice, random detours into Game Of Thrones and 300... It is a veritable potpourri of confusion, outrage, and confused outrage.
JOIN US!
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I was mainly talking about Dragon Age, actually. I know I said I was talking about the IE games, but to be perfectly honest, I was using that as an excuse to bash Dragon Age's combat, which I found uniquely awful. No idea why I felt the need to be slightly dishonest about where I was coming from, but there you go.
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Fair enough; my bad if I came off as a bit of a **** at the end there.
No problem, man.
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@Dream:
OH THANK GOD. :D
No, my whole point was that every story has themes, as it seemed to me you were saying that only certain "artsy" stories have themes. That was all I meant by "more layers." It was simply a poorly chosen phrase, and I accept full responsibility for any confusion or consternation it might have caused. This whole tiff seems to have been a case of us talking past each other, which relieves me to no end.
I can see now why you called me a pretentious snob. Reading my words now, with a little distance, I get a distinct whiff of tweed and college girls.
The fact is, I was struggling to figure out how to respond to you, because I literally could not comprehend what I believed to be your argument, and I wrote the "more layers" bit in a moment of feverish desperation.
I'm not trying to say 300 is some intricate, inscrutable Joycean masterpiece of symbolic structure or anything. I'm just saying that there are themes there. That is all, I swear to you.
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@Dream:
I don't have a degree in anything. :|
Why is this so hard to understand? I'm not saying "The red Spartan capes represent maternity" or some other insane thing. I'm not even arguing that it's anti-gay or pro-fascism or whatever. I haven't even seen the thing, if you'll recall! I'm only arguing the principle.
My only point - my only point! - is that the movie has themes. Whether they were put in there because they sounded good or because they meant something to the filmmakers is irrelevant. The point is, they are in the movie, if only because Gerard Butler has to scream something.
Why this seems to anger you is inexplicable to me.
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Not to be a jerk, but there have already been lots of threads like this one.
Just, you know, FYI.
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Leaving aside the obvious question of what "meaningful discussions" can be had about a popcorn film if we're arbitrarily disallowed from discussing anything beyond the surface level of the film because it apparently makes us "pretentious snobs" who think we're "better than everyone else," who was claiming that the film had a "deeper meaning" that only they understood?
I mean, there's a world of difference between your "blue curtains" example and saying that the movie where a diplomat gets kicked down a well just might have an anti-diplomat agenda.
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No, that's actually an interesting take on the issue, and I thank you for offering it.
For what it's worth, I do think English teachers - the bad ones, anyway - have much to answer for. By teaching students what the book is supposed to mean according to their curriculum rather than putting the onus on them to bring their own perspective to the work, many English teachers foster a hatred of textual analysis in their pupils that sticks with them forever. Literary devices are judged instruments of authoritarian artifice designed to justify an English teacher's paycheck, or derided as things thrown into a novel simply to trick frustrated readers into believing they are in the presence of greatness.
While there is truth to the second objection in certain cases, literary devices are by and large merely tools in a writer's toolbox, no more or less artificial than nouns, verbs, and adjectives. And textual analysis is not a game to be won, though there are undoubtedly academics who treat it as such. It is, rather, an attempt to fully understand and evaluate one's own opinion of a text through the application of rigorous critical standards. The objective is (or should be) a deeper understanding of the text and the way we engage with the text, not to stifle divergent voices.
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@Dream:
Hey, look! I found some quotes from all three movies you mentioned that indicate those movies have themes beyond what they literally portray on screen!
Transformers 3
How doomed you are, Autobots. You simply fail to understand that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...
Bad Boys 2
We ride together, we die together. Bad boys for life.
Shoot 'Em Up
Let me give you a piece of advice. Never trust the people who stand to profit, plain and simple. They're the bad guys.
Are those dumb themes? Absolutely. Are they at odds with what's actually on the screen? Perhaps; I haven't seen any of those movies. Do these films strive mainly to entertain rather than inform? Well, duh. But my point is that even the dumbest piece of Hollywood garbage can be taken apart and analyzed through a variety of critical lenses.
Your argument seems to be that we shouldn't even attempt to do that, because... Well, I'm unclear on that point. You say we sound like "English teachers," as if thinking critically about a popular film is somehow a bad thing.
Why is it a bad thing? No, seriously, I'm asking. Why?
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*sigh*
I knew someone was going to question that bit.
I'm not going to defend my statement, for that way lies madness. It's based on memories, after all, and my memory is as imperfect as anyone's. I don't want to fire up Dragon Age: Origins and do research, because that would involve getting into combat in Dragon Age: Origins, which I enjoy about as much as punching myself in the throat repeatedly. Enjoyed the game, despised the combat.
Also, I played in third-person. On the PC. Because I'm an idiot.
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@jamoecw:
To be clear, I'm not saying the film or the comic is a justification for war with Iran. I'm not saying it isn't, either. I'm saying that there are more layers to the story, and Miller/Snyder's telling of it, than "Some wicked awesome dudes fought in a battle and all died but they were so super awesome that the Persians retreated."
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Love is not merely romance/sex. That's one type of love among many. I love my father, but I'm not asking him to [CENSORED].
Likewise, I can want to have sex with someone without being in love with them. For example, I find the actress Elizabeth Banks tremendously attractive and would hop in the sack with her at a moment's notice. I have never met her, so I necessarily can't be in love with her. Maybe she's really mean, or smells awful, or, hell, eats toddlers for breakfast; I don't know, do I? That doesn't change the fact that I lust after her, or my fantasy of her.
I feel the same about any number of actresses. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say most people have felt something similar for an actor of either gender at one time or another, and probably more than one. What, you think all those dudes who bought pinups of Pamela Anderson in the 90's did so because they really like photography? No. It's a normal thing to do. Well, as long as you don't go all John Hinckley, anyway.
Then there are the people you see at, like, the coffee shop. You don't talk to them, and you're probably never going to talk to them, but, you know, sexy is sexy is sexy. They're going in the mental Rolodex.
I say all of this not to come off as a creep (though I have no doubt I have been quite successful at that
), but merely to point out that lust is not love and love is not lust. They can commingle, but they are not one and the same. And romance, though it is love in the sense most often cited, is merely one form of love.Yesterday was Mother's Day here in America, and perhaps elsewhere. I doubt most of the people buying flowers for their mothers were doing so as a means of seduction. But they did buy flowers for their mothers, because they love their mothers. Which is to say, you can love someone without wanting to get them in the sack.
While I am absolutely a proponent of romance and sex and love in games, what I hate is the idea of "winning" a relationship, and that's the dominant approach by far in games.
This article, despite being one with verbiage in it many of you will no doubt find contentious, is one that lays out the problem with current "romances" quite well. I'd recommend giving it a read, even if the politics in it are alien or repulsive to you.
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You guys sound like English teachers talking about a novel.
It was just a movie about a bad ass battle.
Yes, and Animal Farm was just a book about animals, and The Great Gatsby was just about some jerks doing jerky stuff to each other in the Twenties, etc.
Just because some people overanalyze small details doesn't mean there's nothing there to analyze. Anti-intellectualism of the sort you're engaging in is why we can't have nice things.
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@Fearabbit:
Don't bother responding to him. Guy's a zealot.
You know, FYI. Just in case him likening level scaling to drinking poison wasn't enough of a clue.
That said, I'm going to ignore my own advice now, because I'm dumb. Which is the part that he's going to quote in response, I assure you.
@Valorian:
Why do you continue to hammer away at this point? I mean, seriously, why? We all know how you feel about it by now, and you're absolutely not going to get what you want, so why keep at it? What is your objective here? What do you hope to gain?
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@Greensleeve:
Complexity for the sake of complexity is just as bad as simplicity for the sake of simplicity. Neither simplicity nor complexity are inherently good or bad. It all depends on the game.
Crusader Kings II, for instance, would be severely diminished if Paradox removed the option to imprison people from the game. You wouldn't be able to ransom characters, you wouldn't be able to throw a dude in jail for a couple of days because he dared to attempt to convert you to the heathen ways of the Lollard, etc. The removal of imprisonment takes interesting decisions and scenarios entirely off the table, and adds none in return.
By contrast, a mainline Mario game would be complicated needlessly by the addition of moral choices and fully customizable guns. Those are very popular elements of other games, and they could be said to add complexity, but they would be ridiculously out of place in a Mario game. I don't need to know the Goomba I'm about to stomp on is just working for Bowser because there aren't any real job opportunities in the Mushroom Kingdom for honest Goombas. I mean, look at that sentence! It's ridiculous!
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@Dream:
But it is based in fact, however loosely. There really were three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae who all bit it, right? I mean, there's basically wholesale invention on top of that, but it's not a story that Frank Miller made up. It's not even the first time the story was turned into a film; Miller himself has said on numerous occasions that the inspiration for the book was a film called The 300 Spartans he watched as a kid. Whereas Captain America is a story we are all aware some creators absolutely did make up. That's the difference. I agree that anyone who went into a movie with that poster believing the film would be a faithful retelling of historical fact is a dumb person, but as you may have noticed, there are quite a lot of dumb people.
That said, I should mention that the "factual" story of the three hundred Spartans is as "factual" as ancient history ever is, which is to say we don't know with any degree of certainty what actually took place, but we do know what was said to have taken place by those who kept records of such things. But for the purpose of this discussion, that distinction is academic.
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Action/Adventure or RPG? What's the difference?
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted · Edited by Ffordesoon
I dunno, man. I think roleplaying depends as much on the player as the system.
I've talked to players who roleplay their Shepard down to the smallest detail, and I've talked to players who play Fallout as a pure min/max game, with no investment in any sort of character concept whatsoever. I've played JRPGs where I felt many character concepts were valid, and I've played choice-laden cRPGs where I felt as though I was forced into someone else's character concept.
Certainly, there are some games which foster roleplaying better than others. But roleplaying is ultimately just pretending to be someone else, and I don't think it's possible to unfailingly induce that through mechanics alone. Some people just aren't good at that. Is the person who plays Mask Of The Betrayer by picking a pregen that looks cool and then choosing whatever options strike their fancy not playing a cRPG? Is the person who relentlessly pursues a character concept in Mass Effect not roleplaying? And there are plenty of people who will "roll play" in a game of D&D - are they "playing it wrong?" Hell, is relentlessly pursuing a certain combat build not also pursuing a character concept, in a sense?
It seems arrogant to me to define what is and isn't a "valid" cRPG solely based on how well it fosters a certain playstyle that not everyone will engage with. I'm all for reactivity and choice 'n' consequence and all the rest of it, but I think there's a myopia in believing that to be the sole measure of how RPG-y something is.
And before you say something along the lines of, "Well, someone could choose not to jump in a platformer, so—" No, not really. You can't beat a platformer by not jumping, but you can beat a cRPG without once truly roleplaying, because roleplaying is a possible effect of cRPG mechanics on the player, not something inherent to the genre. Admittedly, the name of the genre is misleading, but that's a separate issue.
I have problems with the "True RPGs have stats and turns!" crowd as well, but one thing I will say for them is that all the games they consider part of the genre do have common elements it's impossible to complete the game without engaging with. I don't agree with them, either, but their definition is closer to an objective one than one based on a subjective, personal concept like roleplaying.
To be clear, none of this is meant to suggest that I desire less choice and consequence or role-defining mechanics in my games. My point is simply that it's unfair and illogical to exclude games from a genre because they do not foster roleplaying in you.
I hope that makes sense.