Ffordesoon

I propose autosave BEFORE starting dialogue. That way you won't be forced to reload older file or make a specific quick save in case you want to fool around with dialogue possibilities / wish to explore them all out of curiosity / whatever other reason. I think it's funny that even though most of that post was kind of a really long and politely worded version of "COME AT ME BRO," it was the word "after" - a word I did not think about at all - that someone seized on. For the record, I don't care if it's before or after.

It's a very minor part of some games, but it's a major part of a game like this. Good catch.

@Lephys: Ah. Fair enough, then.

@Lephys: The fact of gender isn't really at issue in any discussion like this one, for the record. Men and women are not identical physically; that's obvious to anyone who can see. If there is a problem differentiating between characters of different sexes during the development of PE, and such differentiation is important to the game in some understandable way, I don't think anyone would argue that making that difference clearer wouldn't be the right thing to do. The issue at hand, for those who care about such things (and I am one of those people, albeit one who's learned to pick his battles), is the idea that a human woman in the game shouldn't be made to prance around in "armor" that is clearly designed to be ogled unless it makes sense for the character to be in that armor. And I don't mean in some flimsy "All the priestesses of Biblevania dress like this!" obvious-lore-excuse-for-skimpy-clothes kind of way. That doesn't mean that there can't be characters who dress the way they do explicitly to titillate people, either. It's very much a case-by-case/contextual thing. The only inviolable stipulation - and I'm only speaking for myself here - is that it must feel as though the character made the decision to dress the way she did, rather than being a finger puppet of the author's who occasionally drops her sword just so the men in the audience can watch her ass wiggle as she looks for it. Not saying you're in trouble with the social justice police or anything. I'm just attempting to explain what the actual concern of someone who cares about "the gender thing" tends to be. It's not about equal representation in the sense that every character should look and act exactly the same, but rather that nobody should be represented in a deliberately titillating or exploitive way without cause. Does that make sense? EDIT: And I do agree that a generic avatar ain't exactly spiffy, either. DA:O had that problem; when my female City Elf rogue looked identical to Leliana because they both had the same awful-looking leather armor equipped, I was tremendously aggravated.

I haven't read this whole thread, to be clear, nor am I going to, because I want to read whinging about the differences between the TV and book versions of Game Of Thrones about as much as I want to fall down a mine shaft. Possibly less. But if I'm misrepresenting what's going on here, do let me know. @AGX-17: Which was, um, kind of my point? @Elerond: No, Sensuki had the right of it. I was answering the question posed in the thread title, and also subtly pointing out how ridiculous that question was. A woman's breastplate is, in ninety-nine percent of cases if not one hundred, a man's breastplate. The suggestion that women need some sort of special breastplate is simply not correct. Boobplate - as it's usually portrayed on the cover of fantasy novels, anyway - is and will always be impractical for combat, simply because the whole point of plate armor (all armor, really) is to provide a buffer zone of protection against physical harm. If the armor is shaped to your contours, there's no buffer. It would be like a man having armor sculpted to fit his junk. It might protect against actual penetration by a blade, but the force of the impact is still going to be transferred almost one-to-one. It's pointless. Does that mean I have a problem with boobplate being in PE? Not necessarily. Some armor I would technically class as "boobplate" looks rather cool from a purely aesthetic perspective. But the question "What would a female breastplate look like?" - the question asked in the title of the thread - is based on a ridiculously false premise. You might as well ask what a "female" top hat looks like. It looks like a top hat. Because it is a top hat. Oh, and if I may preempt a dumb retort to this point I'm making: yes, men are taller on average than women, and no, that doesn't change the fact that a woman's breastplate would be functionally identical to a man's breastplate, because the design is identical. So any "But women are shorter than men so their armor would technically be slightly different than men's so NYEHH!" wiseacres can go ahead and keep that idiotic little argument to themselves. See also: this. EDIT: All of which has very little to do with PE as a game, to be clear. This is simply an elaboration on my response to the thread title.

...A breastplate?

Ouch. Sorry.

Oh, I can tell you why they weren't able to do it right. A few reasons, actually: • The publisher forced them to insert a real-time combat option into the game a few months before release, which basically meant that neither mode was polished in time. • It was a tremendously ambitious and innovative game on a schedule and budget which weren't at all conducive to ambition and innovation. • It was a tremendously ambitious and innovative game. As much as we all like to hate on Big Evil Publishers, from a pure financial point of view, they're right to be wary of investing in projects that are innovative or ambitious, and doubly right to be wary of investing in both. Because innovative things tend to be a bit busted the first time around, and ambition only multiplies the amount of things that might end up busted. See also: Peter Molyneux's whole career, pretty much. EDIT: And you should totally play Alpha Protocol, because it's a great game wrapped in a mediocre one. If you can squint hard enough to see past the numerous flaws (and if you've played Arcanum three times, I think you probably can), it's a gem.

Oh, well, if we're doing Engrish-y names: Magic Souls DX: Peace Sister Quest ~æ Twinkle Song: The Lovely Witch Arflowna Eternity Force: Soul Of The Passionate Hero! Soul Dancer: High School Is Weird, Upperclassman~ Oppan! Eternal Recurrence Of Legendary Heroes And, of course: Soul Of The Heart: ~Days Among The Eternal Cherry Blossoms~

It's worth noting that I'd love a Kickstarted Arcanum spiritual sequel for the same reason I would like one for Alpha Protocol: because it would be a chance to get it right. Both of them are games which are beloved for a few things they get really, astonishingly right, and both of them are games most people would bounce right off of for, let's face it, the larger amount of things they do poorly. And I say that as someone who likes AP much more than Mass Effect 1, its obvious antecedent that is absolutely the more polished and consistent game. I actually wish Arcanum had a sequel slightly more than I wish AP had one, to be honest, because I can at least play and enjoy AP, for all its faults. Whereas Arcanum... Well, I love everything about it except actually playing the thing, which I've never been able to do for more than an hour. And I'm a tremendously patient and forgiving gamer who is more than willing to spot any game the benefit of a thousand doubts. If Arcanum doesn't work for me...

Numerous autosave options, from an option that saves like every two minutes to one that saves every time you open your inventory to one that saves after every dialogue to no autosaving whatsoever. Also allow us to decide how many autosaves we want to keep at any given time, from (say) 30 to a single one. Let us change both of these options whenever we want. This would be restricted to the normal game, and wouldn't affect Trial Of Iron or that other mode that I can't remember the name of at the moment. I am aware that there are people who will find this idea lame and "casual" and blah. To those people, I say this: you are entitled to that opinion, and I have made it a point to mention options and restrictions that I believe will placate you adequately. If you still have a problem with the idea because someone else whom you have never met and in all likelihood will never meet might make use of different options than your own, it is with the greatest possible respect I can muster that I advise you to get over yourself and/or grow up. Those of us who have ever experienced a crash to desktop or a random power outage that erased like six hours of game time because we were too busy, you know, enjoying ourselves to remember to save will thank you.

@Grape: I am either not grasping some important component of what you're saying, or I do grasp it and simply don't agree. In either case, your argument puzzles me. I mean, I'm a writer. I have a natural bias toward authored narratives. I am also a confirmed evangelist of authored narratives in video games. To that end, I would agree wholeheartedly that an authored narrative of sterling quality can make for a special game. But... Well, before I try to deconstruct your argument, I want to know what it is you mean by "plot" and "character development." I know what they mean to me, but I want to make sure we're on the same page - or within the same chapter, at the least. There would be no sense in arguing about plot and character development with someone whose interpretation of those terms is radically different from my own. At that point, I might as well deliver an exhaustive lecture explaining why an object you think is yellow is actually blue.

@C2B: It's worth remembering that nobody (or very few people, at least) here is a professional game developer. Not every good idea is going to be pitched well. That's what constructive feedback is for. And I do think it's a pretty good idea, if underdeveloped in terms of the particulars.

What about localized pockets of unnatural darkness? That is to say, spells that blind enemies and/or the player?

Eh, fair enough. It's all semantics anyway; as long as we each know what the other is saying, everything's cool.

I'm not sure you quite understood what I was saying, but I will agree that F3's blinkered black-and-white moral choices were a big disappointment.

I meant verisimilitude in the narrative sense, which is normally used to refer to a fiction's internal consistency - in my experience, anyway. Sorry, I should have clarified. "Plausibility" doesn't work for me, as it's overly unclear what it means in the context of a fantasy or SF story without further explanation, and it cleaves too closely to the notion that a good story is of necessity a realistic story. I prefer "internal consistency," as I said. It's not perfect, but it's a far more flexible term, and is ultimately more truthful about the artificial nature of storytelling. I'm not the biggest fan of realism as the dominant mode of fictional expression anyway, of course, so I'll grant you that I'm using the term that suits my needs. But if a fiction is striving for realism, it will need to be internally consistent anyway, so I feel it's a fairly objective term to use. You are, of course, free to disagree.

I like to burn chicken at the steak. Gives it a smoky flavor. BA-ZING! I JUST LEPHYS'D LEPHYS! On topic: it's also worth noting that exact enemy levels will probably not be displayed. The IE games didn't do that, after all. Perhaps Challenge Rating-type things (though I'd prefer it if those were subject to a player-controlled perception check), but no actual levels. Therefore, if the scaling works as intended, you'd have to go outside the game to prove conclusively that level scaling was going on. Nothing within the fiction would tell you so. Ergo, verisimilitude (which is consistency within a fiction, not truth) is maintained. Ergo, the only concievable problem anyone could have with it is a sort of Schrödinger's Cat problem, which the designers necessarily can't deal with because it's on you. BOOM! I'm on a ro-o-o-o-oll!

Low-light vision. Darkvision. YES.

Well, I actually think the Fallout franchise in particular works better in first-person, for a number of reasons I don't feel like getting into right now. That said, I've been continually surprised that neither Bioware nor Bethesda have tried assigning a small team to an isometric, text-based RPG spinoff of one of their franchises. The Kickstalgia craze has proved there's enough of a market for it to be worth the investment, they'd get nothing but good press from the hardcore community, and the budget would be relatively small by comparison to the bloated ones they have to work with now. I mean, PE's got like twelve people working on it. You're telling me Bioware doesn't have twelve extra people to spare? If nothing else, they could contract Obsidian or inXile to do it, then collect the profits. The hardcore fans get their "real Fallout 3," Bethesda makes some bank and gets a foothold in an emerging market, the fans of the new games still get the new games, the people who like both (such as yours truly) get more games to play... As far as I can see, everybody would win in that scenario. That is, as long as they didn't try to use Kickstarter to fund it. Which I have a horrible suspicion they would, "to gauge interest." And somehow, inevitably, microtransactions will happen. I made myself sad.

AHGEEDMC KOKHSLNFNNCCNJNCMOKSKA,,HFIKN IWANNITNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWW

So the game has no level scaling, then. Glad that's settled. Yo, Valorian! There's no level scaling! You happy now? (Nobody tell him.)

@Osvir: Couple of mild corrections for your list there. Original Sin is basically attempting to be a modern Ultima VII. Granted, that was true of Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity to various degrees as well, but the game the whole series is a tribute to, to the extent that it's a tribute to anything, is Ultima VII. Weirdly, Shroud Of The Avatar isn't so much a tribute to Ultima as it is to Ultima Online specifically. Also, Bethesda would never, ever do a top-down mode in Fallout 4. They've only just now made their third-person mode halfway passable, and that's relatively easy compared to designing an entirely new mode of gameplay exclusively for PC players. Not to mention that their whole gameplay model and engine is built around first-person open-world gameplay. How would they handle transitions to interiors? What about picking up small objects? Or dialogue with NPCs? And their games are designed around the principle of the player always seeing something worth investigating on the horizon; how would you do that with no horizon? And wouldn't it get really boring looking at their ground textures? It's a lovely dream, and I laud you for it, but the fact is that such a mode would be ridiculously cost-prohibitive in every way that counts, and for relatively minimal returns. It'll never happen. Sorry.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! *sobs, bangs head repeatedly against wall* I had a long response to Valorian all typed out, one that was logically sound and rigorous and as unassailable as I could make it... AND MY IPAD BATTERY DIED JUST AS I FINISHED IT! SON OF A— *flips table* Oh well, at least I was only doing it for myself and not to feed the troll (which I would've been doing, no doubt, but that wasn't the reason I wrote it). Maaaaaaaan, now I'm bummed...

Just curious, here. Do you go out of your way to notice which shots were filmed with a Steadicam when you watch movies? I'll save you some time: unless you're deliberately watching the film with an analytical eye, no, you don't. Because, if the movie's any good at all, you will have bought into the illusion that you are witnessing events that are, on some level, true. Great cinematography puts you inside the reality of the film immediately and never takes you out of it. It is meant to be - yes - invisible. That is no indictment of its quality; it is simply the nature of the art. If a boom mic swings into frame, then the illusion is shattered and you are suddenly painfully aware that you are watching a film. The invisible has become visible, and has failed as a result. So it is with level scaling. It is a system, and, like all systems, is neither good nor evil in itself (though I have no doubt you disagree). The quality of the system is simply a question of implementation. Level scaling is not a gameplay mechanic, by the way; that implies that it is a variable the user can control from within the game (i.e. not in a pause menu or main menu). Level scaling is a system that runs entirely "under the hood," and as with all "under the hood" systems, its presumed existence is only confirmed when it fails to work properly. When it works, it quietly supports the illusion presented in the game, just like all the other systems. The test of a given level scaling system's quality is simple: if you hadn't been told it was there before you played the game, would you have noticed it? If the answer is no, it's a quality system.