Ffordesoon

It's not a bad interview, I should clarify that. It is, in fact, a very good interview. It's just not any different from a good interview you'd read on any other site. That's all.

Okay. That still leaves the rest of games journalism.

I don't know what you're talking about. It's fine, but it's not all that different from any other interview I've read on the pro sites. I swear, this weird antagonism people have towards something that's ultimately just another branch of entertainment journalism...

Why wouldn't it only be a non-combat skill? That's kind of what stealth is, isn't it? I mean, I guess there's Batman-style "combat stealth," but he still has to come out of the shadows and attack for a second at some point, and it's not like the rest of the Justice League is being equally sneaky, is it? Maybe there's a way for Rogues to disengage and hide for a little bit, but in general, once your party's seen, it should probably stay that way, no?

Wait wait wait... If a feature is a *good* feature, why would one want to only use it sparingly? No feature is inherently "good," just as no feature is inherently "bad." It's all in the execution.

If the level scaling has no discernible effect on gameplay that I can intuit on my own, it's good level scaling. BG2 clearly has good level scaling, since many people are convinced it doesn't have any scaling to this day. Good level scaling means the game is an excellent liar, and that's all we really want out of our games (and our entertainment in general): to be lied to so convincingly that we believe it. It's only when level scaling betrays itself that it's bad. Because then the game is a bad liar. Latter-day Elder Scrolls games are pretty lousy liars, because everything is dependent upon the player's actions to an utterly absurd degree. They're Mary Sue simulators. Personally, I'd like to see a game with Elder Scrollsian Mary-Sue-simulator mechanics that makes those part of the narrative. Have it be about how, simply by adventuring, the player is making the entire world worse. The bandits are armed with better weapons because the player needs better gear. The dragons start murdering people because the player needs dragons to challenge him. More undead start terrorizing the world because the player just got a bow that's good at fighting undead. Etc. Have Avellone write it.

I can't speak for Infinitron, but I'm not sure I understand what "designing an experience" means in this context. That's all video games are: designed experiences. Galaga is designed to be experienced. That's kind of where the whole "interactivity" bit comes into play.

This whole thread is funny to me, as someone who's watched Wasteland 2's UI evolve tremendously over the past couple of months. Every team doesn't have the same exact process, of course, but placeholder assets can stay for a long damn time. I seriously doubt this UI will make it into the final game.

I doubt it. Ragdoll physics practically require expensive middleware and are rarely implemented well. Plus, they lend a feeling of weightlessness to combat that only works if you want the player to feel powerful with every single kill. That works for Diablo 3, but not so much for a successor to the IE games.

Heh. I always wondered about that.

I'm as big a fan as you're likely to find on this forum of "action-based skill combat," and I nearly laughed out loud at this. I'm not going to call you a troll. You may or may not be one, but I'd rather treat those who hold differing opinions from my own with respect. But I can think of so many games in the same subgenre with better mechanics than either of those. Dark Souls trounces both of them handily, for example.

MReed is likely correct. I expect a level of interaction density comparable to BG2, which is pretty much a midpoint between Diablo and Ultima.

Not strictly on topic but they are still very much aiming for a point between two stools with Inquisition, at least from everything I've read about the combat. Yeah, but there's clearly far less of the WoW influence in there, which is all I care about.

Considering that Dragon Age's combat is the answer to a question no one asked (that question being "What if the people who made Baldur's Gate played so much World of Warcraft that their brains turned to mush, and then they tried to make a single-player version?"), it shouldn't be that hard. Frankly, I'm kind of looking forward to Inquisition because they're clearly trying to do a single-character third-person action thing, at least in part. I'd rather have an unambitious but fun system than the previous games' weird halfassed attempt at full party control.

@Stun: I was expressing an opinion about the absurdity of "Fighter" as the name of a single class in D&D, a game in which many other character classes are basically Fighter class kits. I realize it's an artifact of the Gary 'n' Dave days, but so is "Magic-User," and that isn't a class now that there are Sorcerers and Wizards and whatnot. A simple name change with no change to the mechanics would make the class distinction easier to understand without reducing complexity one iota, and you could keep "Fighter" as a party role, in the same way that "Magic-User" is a party role. The game is easier to understand for new players without being dumbed down, and the Gygax-Arneson names are preserved for the old-timers who are attached to them. Everyone wins. And yes, it's semantics, but semantics are important. Otherwise, "Full-Time-Battlefield-Dweller" would be precisely as good a name as any other. All of which is a general comment on the occasionally confusing names of D&D/OGL classes, not a call for anyone to stop using the word "Fighter" when discussing the Fighter class. Clearly, using the class name that is commonly agreed upon is important for a discussion of that class.

To be honest, I would do away with "Fighter" as a class in itself in a heartbeat. I'd keep the mechanical role, but the name itself is too broad to convey anything about a character. Which one is more descriptive, "Fighter" or "Barbarian"? Which one sounds cooler, "Fighter" or "Kensai"? I'd rather see Fighter elevated to a party role, and the specific class replaced by "Warrior." And yes, I think 4E's party roles were a smart idea. I don't think it's a bad idea to have "metaclasses" which multiple classes can fit into. It's the logical progression of 2E's increased focus on class kits and 3E's focus on level-dipping, and it hearkens back to the earliest days of D&D, when the only "classes" were Fighter, Thief, Magic-User, and Cleric. Those are still the four mechanical archetypes every D&D character fits into, if you think about it (though I would change "Thief" to "Rogue" and "Cleric" to "Healer" in order to make those party roles sound as broad as "Fighter" and "Magic-User"). The party role system had the same two big problems all of 4E had: presentation and - to a lesser degree - implementation. They could have saved themselves a lot of agitation if they'd A) given the party roles the names I just suggested instead of the weird MMO-y ones, and B) upgraded all the extant 3E class kits to full classes. Yes, all of them; the thing that made Pathfinder into the juggernaut it is today is the simple process of conversion between 3.5 and PF. What people hated about 4E more than any mechanical changes was the lack of cross-compatibility and openness, and the consequent gutting of build customization. I think the rational argument against 4E would be substantially weaker if you could use all the weird 3-3.5 classes right out of the box.

This seems almost too obvious, but please let us use any additional mouse buttons we may possess as hotkeys. A surprising number of games only detect two or three buttons on a mouse, and it is infuriating. EDIT: Please note that I have had minimal sleep, and may be making this problem up and/or not thinking straight. If this is the case, please be polite when you correct me, thanks.

@Lephys: I'm pretty sure the reason he finds it lame has nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with an emotional attachment to The Way It Has Always Been. I'd strongly advise against any attempts to question his perspective if you value your time.

An internal development studio at a publisher isn't the same as a publisher. Publishers, you know, publish. That said, Gromnir is correct, that was what I meant. I misremembered it, sorry. @JadedWolf: Interesting! I didn't know the Fallouts were rush jobs too. I thought it was just Planescape.

couple quibbles on our part. music w/o gameplay is little different than movie soundtrack w/o movie. sure, you lose some context, but not take too much imagination to fill in the blanks. example: icewind dale theme music for kuldahar or targos. the gameplay would be walking 'round map o' kuldahar an targos. yup, kuldahar music woulda' been less appropriate if we were't dealing with a fey environment, but am thinking even w/o wandering around giant tree, one could be impressed by the soule's efforts. *shrug* and as for planescape... planescape music always annoyed us. is not that music were bad, but the first time we played ps:t, we couldn't help but instantly recognize that the composer for ps:t were obviously also the guy who did music for fallouts... and either he were recycling a great deal, or he had an extreme distinct sound. as a person who played fallout games first, we found planescape music to be... jarring. the music didn't fit perfect for us, 'cause we associated so much o' what we were hearing with the fallouts. no doubt you has seen hollywood movies wherein the music is recycled. annoying. HA! Good Fun! ps if Torment: Tides of Numenera sounds exact like fallout 2, we is gonna be disappointed... not that such is an obsidian issue. just sayin' That's weird. I know it's the same guy, but the two scores are pretty distinct. Planescape is heavy on melodic themes, whereas Fallout is almost all ambeint soundscapes with no distinct melody. I suppose I can see your point, but I can't agree that they sound "the same." It's also worth noting that PST's soundtrack was more or less rushed by the publisher.

How does the video game industry still exist, then? Or [government of your choice]?

As I understand it, the system avoids the Hawke problem by never disallowing or altering player dialogue on the basis of reputation. It instead alters the response to player dialogue based on previous dialogue choices. So if you're honest for half of the game, and then you have to tell a lie, it's more likely to be believed if you have a reputation for honesty. It also tracks major shifts in reputation a la New Vegas. So (to be overly simplistic about it) if you play a third of the game always picking the benevolent option, and then you suddenly turn on a dime and pick the cruel options for the next third, people will think of you as that guy who used to be nice, but is now super mean. There's no undoing what you've done or said up to that point. It's not a sliding scale between benevolence and cruelty where you have to work off your benevolence debt in order to be viewed as cruel (or vice versa). You can't go to a church and pay some dough to be considered a good person again. People remember how you responded to stuff, in word and deed. They treat you like a guy who said and did what you said and did. I'd seriously doubt they could pull it off if it were any other company, but they already did it to an extent in New Vegas and Alpha Protocol, and now that they're free of the game-hurting money pit that is full VO, I have every confidence they'll be able to pull it off. I don't think it'll be perfect, of course. There's only a certain level of granularity they can plausibly reach with any given mechanic, especially at this budget. But I trust them to make it good.

Interesting that you chose baseball to make your point. Baseball is fair because players are considered to be roughly equal in ability. Some players may be worse at certain things, and others may be better at them, but a game between two Major League teams is exciting because the players are considered close enough in ability that either could win if they played the game well enough. Luck is involved, but the reason we call it the "major league" is because it represents the top players in the sport. This is why you don't see MLB players going up against Little League teams, and why steroids are (theoretically) banned from the MLB. Because it is supposed to be fair (read: everyone is on a roughly level playing field). A sucker punch is the equivalent of steroid use by one team in order to beat the other. It's not fair. You can like it, and you can argue for it, just like some people argue for steroid use in the MLB. But it is fundamentally unexciting to know that one team is juicing, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not going to touch your whole "If you want a good story, read a book" thing, though I will say that you're deluding yourself if you think unfairness equates to challenge, because the two are fundamentally antithetical.

Well a roquelike game named ADOM that I play has both. Rust Monsters who can destroy metallic items (besides artifacts), water and water attacks of creatures can make metallic items rust, fire/ice/acid/thunder attacks also can destroy equipment. There are also creatures that can disarm you or steal your equipment. So this are not a bad ideas. Not for a roguelike, no. Because roguelikes have no story to get invested in, so there's no reason to be angry when your character is permadead. The only objective you're emotionally invested in is beating a complex and borderline unfair system, not making it to the end of a good authored story. It's a bad mechanic for a narrative cRPG like PoE, though, because authored story is front and center. You are being told a story, and you want to see what happens next. Which is why sucker punches can work really well in dungeon crawlers, but feel out of place and infuriating in something like PoE or Baldur's Gate. It works differently in tabletop. I believe the reason why old-school AD&D players are attached to that stuff is because character death at the gaming table is often a positive memory for everyone involved. I'll always remember the time my snooty sorceress threw a designer shoe at a dragon before she was obliterated, for example, and I talk of it fondly with others who were there. Given that Gary Gygax was the master of the sucker punch that killed thousands of characters in all sorts of devilishly amusing (at the table) ways, I believe they harbor a certain residual fondness for the openly adversarial relationship between player and GM that Gygax's modules fostered, and that they like sucker punches in their cRPGs because of that fondness. Which is fine, but it doesn't really work in a game that swings Arnesonian in the way PoE does.

<3 Every time Josh talks, it's like he's describing more and more of one of my ideal RPGs. One thing I seized on in this interview in particular is the idea of reducing "slipperiness." Which I totally support. One of my biggest complaints with all of the IE games is that there are no ways of defending squishy party members from martial attack consistently. There are ways around it, especially if you have a caster with you or you're good at exploiting the AI's threat detection, but because attacks of opportunity and combat maneuvers and such aren't built into the system, it too often turns Epic Fantasy Combat into a dull game of keep-away. And yes, I'm aware of the guard button, but I've been playing the BG games almost every day for the past three months or so, and I've never seen a single situation where it mattered even a little bit.