Ffordesoon

Skyrim had loading screens.

The last couple of pages of this thread make me want to put a gun in my mouth.

Also, full voiceover work severely limits a developer's ability to deliver on choices. Text doesn't.

@TrashMan: I'm being dumb even bothering to reply at this point, but: Floating names are needless visual noise that makes it harder to see what's going on, and can easily blur together. They're basically an admission of failure by the art director, and in no way ideal anyway. Look, I don't disagree that there aren't notable differences between plate armor worn by men and plate armor worn by women in real life, but your argument is all over the map. All you've done to explain that argument in the time I've been in this thread is say "Nuh-uh!" to Lephys (and me, a time or two) whenever Lephys says anything. I've been reading this thread for a few pages, and I still have absolutely no idea what you want or what point you're attempting to prove. This weird, aggravating "If you have to ask, you'll never know!" attitude you exude just confuses me. I've seen you explain your position in a coherent way before, but here, the closest thing you've done is say "I like military uniformity!" The rest has been the conversational equivalent of saying "Too slow!" and sniggering at our attempts to figure out what the hell you even mean by that. So I'm just going to ask you directly (and if you've stated the answers to any of these questions, well, restate them): What is your position on this issue? What do you hope to gain from arguing against Lephys' position? Why do you believe your positions are mutually exclusive? What is your ultimate aim here?

@Kjaamor: I suppose I can see your point, and I'm not arguing that rooting through ninety trash cans isn't tedious, but it still strikes me as rather silly. There's a difference between punishment and passing up rewards.

@Randomthom: Good post. I'd say most players, if they're being honest with themselves, are a mix of the two, with one aspect or the other being slightly dominant. Part of that is because cRPGs are single-player experiences and as such have no real penalties for metagaming, whereas you have social pressure put on you to keep to your role in a PnP/tabletop game. I'm never going to feel genuinely bad about subverting an arbitrary rule the designers of a cRPG set up, particularly if I think it's a poor rule, because I don't have to justify my actions to anyone. Conversely, I don't feel any social pressure to roleplay a character who cooperates with the whims of the other players, which affects how I roleplay my character. I can be as good or evil (or lawful, or chaotic, or neutral, or snarky, or what-the-eff-ever) as I want to be, without anyone real (who we will always prioritize over anyone fake) shaming me into compromising for their sake. But people definitely come down on one side or the other in debates like these, partly because of their own preferences, and partly because there are social consequences if they say the "wrong" thing. I would say I'm more of a roleplayer, for example, but I've done my fair share of min/maxing in cRPGs over the years. It's just that my sympathies lie with the roleplayers, and so I tend to argue in favor of their point of view. That said, I do agree that the roleplayers and the metagamers - to the extent that those two groups can be said to exist - won't ever come to complete agreement in a debate such as this one. The groups disagree too fundamentally for the individuals to reach a consensus, if you follow me.

... I really hope you're being sarcastic.

Uh, how did they punish you? By... not giving you caps and/or ammo? There are plenty of things you can criticize both games for, but the idea that they punished you for not rooting through trash cans is a major stretch.

This, basically. It's worth noting that the current speed of game production makes a full city that has the amount of distinct people you would expect in even a medieval "metropolis" more or less impossible to create - not to mention the challenge of making it fun to navigate. Ever been to New York or London or Tokyo? None would make for particularly enjoyable game levels if fully simulated, because they all have their own distinct idiosyncrasies and annoyances. Tokyo's addresses are based on when the building at the address was constructed, for example. Try teaching someone who gets lost in New York to deal with that. Which is not to say that a fully simulated virtual Tokyo wouldn't be an interesting environment, because it would. But, well, did you ever play The Getaway for PS2? The developers worked for ages with GPS data and photographs and stuff to recreate a tiny chunk of London as accurately as possible, and it got boring to drive around in after about five minutes. The same developer tried the same thing on a much grander scale with 1940s LA in LA Noire, and the same thing happened after like ten minutes. They added a button to skip the drive to a location in that game, and everybody used it. Granted, that developer had plenty of other problems, but the fact remains that the accurately recreated cities just weren't any fun to roam around in.

@OP: +1 @Lephys: Plus it (the scenario in your last paragraph) makes the baddie sound capable, which is always nice for the fiction.

I think the deeper issue here is one that's common to the IE games, and which is honestly my biggest issue with RTwP combat in most games that feature it: when your dudes see an enemy, they rush immediately to bash the hell out of it no matter what you do. Even if you direct them away from the enemy, it's usually only momentary; the AI overrides anything you might want to do with its Doom-monster-level kamikaze silliness. I'd like to see a couple of changes to the system in PE that make it less aggravating. They've already announced the melee engagement system and, blessedly, a state in between real-time and pause, so that's good. What would make those systems even better are the following: 1. A defensive AI template that's actually, you know, defensive, as opposed to slightly less suicidal. An archer on the defensive might automatically run to an area with adequate cover when they spot an enemy, for example. This is in stark contrast to even Dragon Age, where the only thing archers did was run to a certain distance and fire until enemies crossed an invisible line, at which point they would run to the acceptable minimum distance again, etc. The difference here would be that they would run to cover and stay there until they're flanked or the rest of the party dies. 2. A readying system. This works well with the engagement system already announced, and gives the player an opportunity to set up genuine choke points, as opposed to telling your dudes to stand somewhere, and then watching them go to that spot, stay there for one picosecond, then run back towards the approaching enemies. If you want to tell a warrior to stand next to a doorway and ready his sword to attack the first goblin he sees, you should be able to do that. The engagement system already permits such behavior; this would simply complement it. 3. A button that makes all of your selected characters immediately stop and hold their positions. Yeah, yeah, the Space Bar pauses the game, I know. What I'm talking about is a button that lets you stop your dudes in their tracks without pausing the action or forcing you to turn off Party AI. They will attack when enemies are in range, but they won't go wandering off like a dog every time they hear a twig snap. 4. An "attack move" command like those found in many RTS games. 5. God help me, I'm going to suggest a feature from Jagged Alliance: Back In Action. Yes, it's generally a rather mediocre title, but one thing I liked was the ability to plan multiple actions in advance during the pause state. Frozen Synapse did it way better, obviously, but that was a turn-based game. The only RTwP example I can think of right now is unfortunately JA:BiA, but I'll happily substitute it with something less lame if anyone can think of a better RTwP game that does the same thing. I feel like I had a couple of other ideas, but I can't seem to remember them right now. Oh well. Five is enough for now.

Sometimes romance happens. Sometimes it doesn't. It depends on what story is being told, and how it's told, and why. That said, the devs should play Kindness Coins if they want to include any romance. It's a little game where you are the object of a dating sim protagonist's affections, and it gives anyone who plays it some great insight into how skin-crawlingly creepy most romances in games are. It's a nice "what not to do" primer.

Why do you think I stopped responding?

This is a great point.

Obligatory: Hee.

I know. I'm just bored with this argument. Also, the last time I played the game was long enough ago that I'm starting to doubt my memories of it, particularly since I played it in third-person mode, which I'm sure most people here rightly ignored. And no, I'm not entirely sure why I chose to do that, though I recall it having something to do with being annoyed by the constant switching between teeny-tiny top-down people and ultra-close-up "cinematic" dialogue scenes filmed like Mass Effect's talky bits. God knows why I stuck with third-person, though. Out of sheer stubbornness? Some weird sympathy for console players? It's absolutely not the best mode to play the game in, so I don't know what I was doing. I can promise you that the light armor issue is far, far more serious in third-person, though. Don't have the same problem with NWN2, for some reason. It's just DA:O and Awakening (which was far better than DA:O, IMHO, and is probably my favorite DA campaign to date).

Why have romance scripts not progressed at all from this point, by the way? Just because I don't want to romance a character doesn't mean I want to tell them to shut the hell up, and yet "romance" and "shut up" always seem to be the only two options. That's why DA2's romance options are so reviled, I think; it's always a choice between "You look nice." ---> SEXYTIME and "You can go die in a ditch." Do they not let people down easy in Canada?

@TrashMan: I stand by my statements.

Word. I totally agree. That said, I also keep arguing just to annoy the other person sometimes.

Aw, come on! Chrono Cross was pretty awesome! As a sequel to Chrono Trigger, it maybe wasn't the best (okay, it was pretty frickin' awful at being a sequel to Chrono Trigger), but it was a damn fine game in its own right. Combat system was wicked cool, there were tons of little story branches and side characters, there were a couple of very solid plot twists... If you go back and play it now, putting aside your expectations, I bet you'll find a lot to love there. I had the good fortune to play it before I played CT, and while CT is obviously the superior game, I think y'all are selling Cross short. Also, the opening theme was one of the five or six best pieces of music ever in an RPG, and I will fight anyone who disagrees. LISTEN: There are a bunch of other really solid tracks on the CC soundtrack, but that's the one that singlehandedly justifies its existence. While I'm at it, I might as well provide more recommended listening that I'm fairly certain nobody's mentioned yet. It's weird, given that they're unrepentant grindfests, but the Monster Hunter games have incredible soundtracks, particularly Monster Hunter Tri: "Village On The Sea, Moga" There are also some damn fine tracks on the Dark Souls soundtrack: "Firelink Shrine" Also Bastion, obviously: It's worth noting also that Dark Souls has long stretches of time where you only hear sounds, which makes the music that much more memorable. "Firelink Shrine" in particular is notable simply because the titular shrine is your home base for much of the early game, and you know it, because the only time the Firelink Shrine theme (which is just about the only somg you hear in the first few hours of the game) plays is when you're nearing Firelink Shrine. The moment you hear the theme begin, you're like, "I'm home again!" That's a really powerful feeling, and one only achieved by not constantly bombarding the player with music. One thing I don't like about the IE games (and endless other RPGs, especially Western ones) is that the (lovely) music plays on an endless loop with no variation, and much of it has a clear endpoint. It becomes kind of oppressive at a certain point, as if someone inside your computer has left their CD player on repeat. Any music will get irritating if it repeats often enough. In PE, I'd like to see more care put into when and where music cues are triggered. There are many things games take from films that I'd rather they didn't, but one area in which films are a good thing for games to model themselves after is in their use of music. Apologies for the crap syntax, but you see what I mean, hopefully.

@TrashMan: There are a number of big problems with all of your arguments against Lephys, but I'll just go over your retort to my point for the moment. There are enough issues with that as it is. First off, the most obvious one: armors affect stats. I can't change my characters' armor without changing their stats. In Dragon Age specifically, the armors had a linear quality progression per class. You could enchant stuff, of course, but that was rarely as effective as simply upgrading to the next best armor. In addition, all the Light Armor sets (the only armor sets a Rogue in DA can ever wear, lest we forget) looked virtually identical to one another at a glance. Medium, Heavy, and Massive armors (the ones my character and Leliana didn't have access to) didn't have that problem. So there was literally no way for my character or Leliana to look any different unless I gimped one of them, and no way at all for them to look different enough to tell apart unless I checked "Hide Helmets" in the options screen. That's a Band-Aid stuck over a glaring flaw in the armor system, not to mention immersion-breaking. Secondly, Leliana and my character looked substantially different. She had red hair, no face tattoo, and human ears. My character had dark brown hair, a face tattoo, elf ears, and a very different facial structure from Leliana's. The light armor simply removed all those differences, and each race-gender combo had exactly one body type. Oh, and I kind of needed to be able to tell them apart, because my character was a melee rogue and she was a ranged rogue. Sending the one who's crap at melee into a melee? Not the best idea. Now, you might say there are solutions to those problems, and on that, we would agree. But you were responding to something I said about one game in particular, and that game did not have those features. My "plight," as you called it, was entirely due to poor design. If it had been as simple as customizing the characters to my aesthetic preferences, I wouldn't have complained about the issue in the first place, because that's not a real issue. This was something actively detrimental to skilled play.

@rjshae: Word. The IE games had better icons, but "better" isn't "best." The real problem with both examples is that most D&D spells are well-suited to tabletop play only. Not conceptually, necessarily, but there are far too many spells suited for insanely specific purposes, and far too few general-purpose ones. For every Magic Missile, there are ten Animate Ropes and Petulengro's Validations, if you catch my drift.

@Frenetic Pony: Oh, it was a really enjoyable game, no doubt. But you can't deny that it's kind of a mess in a lot of ways - most particularly the non-sandbox-y bits, although those did have a few neat ideas that weren't implemented all that well. Basically, the issue with Fable II is that it's unfocused. Really tremendously enjoyable, but unfocused. You know?

@Frenetic Pony: I think they did that in Fable II, but accidentally, which is why it didn't quite work. If you got enough people in Bowerstone to like you, you'd get mobbed by random strangers who were in love with you because you were the best at flatulence. Which was a lot less enjoyable than it sounds. Still, I actually agree with you. Fame - in cRPGs as in real life - is one of those things that's treated as an automatic positive, but it can be really bad for you in a whole host of ways. Getting recognized should be awful for a thief, but fantastic for a bard. EDIT: Also worth noting? The Fable series isn't all that good, but they've done a hell of a lot of really interesting stuff with it. I'd like to see more RPGs swipe and flesh out some of the systems those games left half-finished, because some of the ideas there really were terrific. They just whiffed the core mechanics.

@milczyciel: Oh, no, you didn't insult me at all. I was just making an idle observation. No offense intended.