Ffordesoon

Every other word? Really? There are many many words in that demo. The F-word is used about five times, and there are scattered other profanities, but I didn't find it excessive at all. I do think I just figured out why some people found the swearing excessive, though. Her posture when you actually meet her doesn't match her demeanor, which makes her whole spiel feel ever-so-slightly off, and the cursing feel excessive. Will post about that on the Wasteland 2 board later. Don't get me wrong; there can be excessive cursing. As with anything in writing, though, it's about context and the voice of the character. At least ninety-five percent of the swearing on Dexter is done by Dexter's sister Debra, and yet it feels appropriate, because the writers have established a consistent voice for that character. By that same token, if June Cleaver screeched the F-word at the top of her lungs and nobody acted as if it was a tremendously strange occurence, that would be excessive, because it would be totally out of character for her.

I have no problem with a "no level scaling" mode. I was just saying.

Balls. Stupid italic tags.

@Grape_You_In_The_Mouth: I dunno if you've played Doom lately, but it is still pretty f***ing great. I dunno if I'd say it's the best shooter ever, but it's still a damn fine game that beats many shooters of more recent vintage quite handily. The same is true of the Quake games. If you like shooters. Based on your comments, my guess is that you don't. Which is fine, but it's not a great idea to tell those of us who do like shooters what we should consider memorable. I don't know what you're talking about with regard to character development or plot in Fallout 1, either. The game's plot is skeletal at best, and its companions are little more than meat shields with a couple of lines of mediocre dialogue. Those aren't criticisms, either; what Fallout focused on was its atmosphere, its setting, its themes, and - most of all - choice and consequence. In those respects, it was an extraordinary success. There were memorable NPCs, obviously, but it's not like you heard about Killian Darkwater's awkward teenage years, or whatever. Quest-givers with a bit of personality are still quest-givers. As an amateur writer myself, I would also disagree that plot is vital to every story, let alone every cRPG. In fact, I'd say a great plot is just about the least[/ i] important important attribute (not a typo) for a cRPG (in the Western tradition, at least) to possess, actually, because the more plot you have, the more fixed the narrative has to be as a result. The best cRPGs almost all start with an intensely dramatic situation that confers upon the player a fixed goal. Doesn't necessarily have to be the final goal, but it's a goal. The player is then given free reign to approach that goal however they wish - which includes deliberately ignoring the goal until they've seen all they can see elsewhere. For best results, the goal should be something clear, but not so immediately pressing that it doesn't make sense for the player to wander. The best starting goals usually have the verb "find" attached to them - find Pharod, find the water chip, find the Amulet of Yendor... You get the picture. Character development is much more important, and it's vital to narrative-focused cRPGs, but it can actually detract from some cRPGs. There is a reason roguelikes and dungeon crawlers don't usually give you lovable companions with detailed backstories. Choice and consequence is the most important to a great cRPG of the three you listed, but there are plenty of cRPGs with solid plots and oodles of character development that possess comparatively little C&C of any real meaning. Certainly, most JRPGs have little in the way of C&C, and even if you exclude those from the discussion, you can't exclude the first ten or so years of Western cRPG development. Wizardry started out as a pure dungeon crawler without so much as a town. Ultima 1 had an overworld, but there weren't many choices that had a demonstrable effect on that overworld, and when you got into a dungeon, it was virtually identical to Wizardry. A lot of early cRPGs didn't have much of a story, nor did they have many characters that didn't serve a distinct gameplay function (innkeeper, merchant, guard, etc.), but they are still fondly remembered and (mostly) eminently playable. Even today, there are plenty of cRPGs that don't have much in the way of plot, character development, or choice and consequence. For example, Legend Of Grimrock's plot is virtually nonexistent. Character development? Pssh, that would require (non- player) characters! And the only "consequences" of any of the "choices" you can make in Grimrock are dying and not dying. But it's a damn fine game that the people who like that sort of game won't forget anytime soon. TL;DR: The reasons you remember your favorite cRPGs fondly are not the reasons everyone remembers their favorite cRPGs fondly, and that's been reflected accurately in the responses to this thread. Games can use literary or filmic techniques, and if that's what you respond to in them, that's fine. But the presumption that those are what other people respond to is merely that - a presumption, and not one the facts support. Now, if you'd asked what makes a story-driven cRPG great, you might have gotten some answers closer to your own. I would agree with you that those are good things for a story-driven cRPG to have, and they can enhance a sandbox cRPG, too. But they are not vital to all cRPGs. Sorry for the long post, but it took me several days to write, so I'll be damned if I'm throwing out any of this stuff!

Huh. The New Vegas I played does not remotely match the New Vegas you're describing. I'm not saying you're wrong, but my experience with it was completely different. I mean, you can kill Mr. House halfway through the game, before you even find Benny, or you can let him take over Vegas, or you can let one of the other factions take over Vegas. And which sidequests you took, how you completed them, and the effects of the quest on the overall faction all permanently affected your reputation with the factions, to the point that there were even separate designations for your character if you made a faction hate you before helping them out a lot. And if you play as a woman and take the Black Widow perk, you can sweet-talk your way into Benny's bed and slit his throat while he's sleeping. You can even make Chief Hanlon kill himself. To be fair to you, I haven't beaten New Vegas yet. But it sounds to me like you're referring more to endgame content. Like, if it doesn't directly affect the endgame, it doesn't count. Is that what you're saying? EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying there weren't issues with the game. There were a few parts where I would have liked more dialogue options, for sure, and I didn't care for the way a few of the quests worked. I'm just saying that all the stuff you're asking for sounds superficially like stuff New Vegas already did.

This thread puzzles me. If New Vegas' reactivity wasn't enough for you, I don't know what would be. I don't think there's a single quest in that game that doesn't acknowledge the player's actions and react to them appropriately. The level of reactivity in it is insane, especially for an open-world game that was only made in eighteen months and has full voice acting. Alpha Protocol is more reactive in a lot of ways, it's true, but they do that by segmenting "talk to this guy" missions and combat missions. There's no real "world" to run around in at all. Funny thing is, I was so into what was going on that I didn't realize there wasn't any exploration until my second playthrough. In any case, I suppose I'm asking you to describe exactly what was such a letdown about New Vegas' dialogue to you, because I honestly don't know how you could come to that conclusion, given what you say you want. To be clear, there are disappointing aspects of NV besides the bugs, most notably a lot of the voice acting (up to Bethesda's standards, but not Obsidian's) and New Vegas itself (which had to be chopped into a bunch of little chunks to work on consoles). The engine also had its awful quirks, like the weird zooming-in-to-everyone's-nostril-hairs camera angle you get whenever you talk to somebody, but those were legacy quirks you can't blame Obsidian for. If nothing else, though, the level of reactivity was a truly remarkable achievement. It's going to be astonishing to see what they can do without being shackled to voiced dialogue and cinematic presentation. Text means they can put many more discrete story paths in. All that being said, I suppose I'm asking you to describe exactly what was such a letdown about New Vegas' dialogue to you, because I honestly don't know how you could come to that conclusion.

@AGX-17: Fair enough. I knew my language was inexact when I called the thread what I did, but I couldn't remember the exact term. "Tiered currency" is the term I was looking for. Still, my mistaken wording seems to have accidentally fostered two interesting discussions about currency. I'm okay with that result. EDIT: Also, I prefer having one main unit of currency, whether or not it's more realistic. EDIT 2: On the other hand, this is not a hill I'm psyched about dying on either, and I'm sure whatever they do will be fine. It's just something that aggravates me.

@Boo's Brother Hoo: You'll get no snarking from me. Snarfling, marmling, a slight tincture of squandrarmkling, perhaps even a good solid karnsling, but no snarking. Bad for the pores, don't you know.

We aims to please. :D

There's actually a much simpler way of "balancing" an overpowered instakill spell like the one Lephys described, and it doesn't require nerfing the spell at all. All you would need to do is make the narrative and/or gameplay consequences of using the spell and others like it really crippling. That could be as simple as sacrificing a point or two in one of your stats, and as complex as a really powerful mage leaving your party because you used forbidden magicks more times than he or she could bear. Maybe your soul could also have a piece broken off of it, or maybe everyone who witnesses the act is traumatized by it and you lose some rep with them. These are just some rough ideas, of course. The point is, you can use the spell, but there's a steep price to be paid for its use.

The irony... What irony? I'm not being snarky; that is actually a genuine question. Where is the irony in saying that level scaling works if I never notice it? "Invisible," in this context, does not mean the thing that is invisible doesn't exist. It means it is not visible to me. A single atom is invisible to the naked eye, but it still exists. Is this Alanis Morrisette irony?

Frankly, as long as it works properly, I don't care if there's level scaling or not. By "works properly," I mean that it must be invisible to anyone who doesn't go digging around in the code. Oblivion was the nadir of level scaling not because the scaling was in it, but because its effects were ridiculously obvious, detrimental to reasonable play, and utterly nonsensical within the established lore. If you tell me glass swords are rare, and then every chump with a leather helmet and a death wish suddenly has one, the whole world is suddenly revealed as an absurd lie. Similarly, if skeletons that used to have a certain amount of bone density have apparently gone to the skeleton gym and toughened up said bones since the last time I saw them, I'm going to call bulls**t on that. I will say that while I have no interest in a dedicated mode that turns off level scaling, I wouldn't be averse to something that locks the levels of scaled monsters to the level they were at when you encountered them on your first playthrough. If I fight Coccyx the Murder Dragon at Level 7 on my first playthrough, and Level 9 on my second, I don't necessarily want him to be just as tough, simply because the first playthrough has already established him as being a certain level. Of course, that could be solved much more easily by simply not showing his level; it's metagaming knowledge, anyway. TL;DR: Level scaling is fine as long as it's completely invisible.

@Tekno: It is what you call the "rough expression" of the opinion that I take issue with. I don't care if you're indifferent to it, which is why I didn't shout at the other people who said they were indifferent to it. My issue was solely with the disdainful tone Karkarov used, and only because by the time you quoted it approvingly, the discussion had turned to one about color blindness. EDIT: In other words, I initially read your quotation of Karkarov as an implied "Yeah! Colorblind people need to get over their coloblindness!" Whether that was actually your intention or not is another matter.

Sure, sure. Those would also be fine.

I would say the most important thing for a cRPG is none of the things listed, although choice and consequence and a dedicated character advancement system could both acquit themselves nicely as answers to that question. But a cRPG is an agglomeration of a bunch of different gameplay styles and systems, some of which any given player must be able to ignore. They are uniquely challenging games to design precisely because the best ones are built around the player not taking advantage of every system available to them, and yet even those systems must be polished to a roughly equal sheen as the ones a player must interact with. Put in more concrete terms, my point is that the success of a cRPG which offers a stealth option and a combat option is necessarily dependent on rewarding players who choose to sneak and players who choose to fight in two separate but roughly equal ways. Each playstyle must also have its own disadvantages, and those disadvantages must be understandable and not so crippling as to be tedious. The most important thing to any cRPG, therefore, is balanced, thoughtful, internally consistent design for multiple types of players.

I think I see the crux of the problem. Y'all do realize there's more than one kind of color blindness, right? What works for someone with red-green color blindness might not work for someone with blue-yellow color blindness, and vice versa. That's the point of being able to change the colors to something that works for each individual player. There is an additional cosmetic benefit to it, of course. The circles might blend in with an environment of a certain color, but being able to switch to another color on the fly would fix the problem without limiting the color palette Obsidian has to work with. That's a secondary benefit, however. Simply being able to switch between modes for different types of color blindness in addition to a legacy mode and a "turn the circles off entirely" mode would be perfectly satisfactory. A palette slider with hundreds of colors on it would be nice, but it's not at all necessary. Come to think of it, depending on how faithfully they're taking after Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, a color customization system should already be in the game at character creation anyway. Why not extend that to the circles?

The multiple currencies thing has been mentioned by Sawyer a bunch of times in various places. It's not my idea, it's his, and I believe he's mentioned that he wants to do it in PE. While I'm sure he'd cut it if it ended up not working, it is as much of a "lock" as anything else so far confirmed about the game.

This started as a reply to Lephys' latest post in the endgame thread, but then I realized it would fit far better in its own thread. Apologies if this has already been brought up. I love the idea of different currencies for different areas, but I hate currency systems that do the copper-silver-gold thing Dragon Age does. I realize it's theoretically more "realistic," and I grasp the function such systems serve in MMOs, but in a single-player game (and, if I'm honest, in MMOs), getting what is essentially fifteen cents for a SWORD, no matter how crappy a sword it is, feels like a cruel joke on the developers' part. It's an annoying system that always makes me feel like I'm not getting anywhere in the game. I realize that my disdain for the system is almost entirely psychological; it doesn't really matter what you call the coins if their function is the same, and I'm sure that if I looked at a chart of average player earnings in Dragon Age versus those in another game that only used gold pieces, I would see that the curve was roughly the same in both titles. If PE ended up using such a system, it wouldn't be a dealbreaker for me. But what I would rather see is a single coin type for each area (e.g. 500gp). Failing that, a system analogous to, say, dollars and cents (e.g. ç150.25 - I just chose the "ç" symbol at random, BTW) would be good. As long as it's not the DA system, I'll be happy.

Thank you for saying that in a way I couldn't, Lephys.

I submit that if you advocate deliberately making a game substantially worse for people who have a disability simply because they should "get over it," then you are a childish jerk. It's one thing if the solution is costly and difficult to implement. A separate mode for the blind, for example, would be wildly out of scope for this project, or perhaps any project, because how would you even do it? That would be a case where it would be unwise to cater to the needs (and, assuming a person with a disability would want to play PE, it is a need, not a want) of disabled gamers. So I can understand that objection. But a feature like the one under discussion, which is (theoretically) utterly trivial to implement and could only benefit the project? Why the hell wouldn't you implement that? What, is Avellone gonna have to cut all his high-larious fourth-wall-breaking dialogue about the blue selection circles? Some cRPG fans - not to mention Tim Cain and Josh Sawyer - are colorblind, and they can't "get over it," because it is physically impossible for them to do so. If that's a problem for you, I humbly submit that you need to "get over" yourself. And that goes for anyone who harbors such an attitude. Yes, I know this post is far more confrontational than my usual ones, and no, I am not going to apologize for that. Some attitudes are too disgusting for politeness. EDIT: It has occurred to me that I may have taken Karkarov's post out of context. In that case, I would be willing to apologize to him.

Dammit! I didn't mean to post that yet! Shoot!

Haven't read the whole thread, or even very much of it, so take that into consideration. I am always looking for a nonlethal option in my games, and love the idea of a pacifist run as well. Any time the player's options consist of more than just killing, I appreciate it. But the annoying thing to me is that a "pacifist run" is often treated as a "You're the cleverest player in Cleverville!" moment of gentle paternal hair-tousling on the developers' part. That isn't to say that pacifism shouldn't be the "best" solution sometimes (brokering a truce between two warring factions, for instance - although that doesn't have to result in an automatic win condition either), but to treat it as the unambiguous "best" solution to every problem is to rob it of its meaning. Pacifism doesn't mean automatic moral superiority. That it is treated as such in many games that include it says more about the industry's crippling fear of challenging players' beliefs than it does about pacifism as an ideal. If you want a ecall the German n Saving Private Ryan

Health, Stamina, whatever. The one that refills quickly.

@The Pain Yak: I thought you were talking about the "endgame" in an MMO sense, and I was like, "NOOOOOOOOOSHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP!" I will offer a plea to Obsidian right now that is almost certainly unnecessary, but I feel it needs saying anyway: guys, I want Project Eternity to be a complete piece of entertainment with a beginning, middle, and end. No sequel teases, no obvious "LOL THIS LOOSE END WILL BE TIED UP IN PAID DLC" moments, no cliffhangers. I want to be able to finish PE and feel like I finished it. I'm fine with wondering how much stuff I missed on a given playthrough, but I don't want to feel like there are parts of the game deliberately cut out of it, you know? When I go to a fancy restaurant and order a big meal, they don't kick me out and tell me to come back in a week for the dessert. Also, what the OP said. Parcel out content in bunches of consistent size, don't pad said content out just to hit an "acceptable" number of hours, and end strong. We have enough games that peter out two thirds of the way through. Try your damndest to leave us wanting more, and not in the Halo 2 "Where's the rest of the game?" way.

@Hormalakh: I didn't say it was related. I said it was relevant to and potentially useful in a discussion of pickpocketing mechanics.