Ffordesoon
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Everything posted by Ffordesoon
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Oh, haha, that makes more sense!
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Wait, so you're for getting rid of the sucker punches? I thought you were against it. EDIT: And, I mean, that's also patently false, but I'll accept that you believe it.
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There isn't. That's his point. The fun is in dealing with adversity, and the most fun is in recovering from adversity as it happens, rather than putting on the Special Robe Of You-Can't-Touch-This after a death and a reload. That's what Sawyer is trying to prevent; he's making the game more difficult while making the systems less obtuse and removing the exploitable loopholes. It boggles my mind that clearly intelligent people don't understand that his intent is to make the game consistently difficult instead of having it spike up and down wildly due to factors beyond the player's control.* Nor do I doubt that there are people who like that level of randomness, but any delusion that it's the majority of players who feel that way is exactly that - a delusion. Having talked with many of those folks, I think they will end up being pleasantly surprised by how much fun they're having with PoE. And if I'm wrong, us beta backers will fix it, believe me. * - And yes, I'm aware that sounds like "He's making it easier," but that's only because people have been lied to about balance and what balance means in recent years. Balance for a mass audience is in no way balance for a hardcore audience. They're wholly separate. We're looking at Dark Souls-style balance, not Dragon Age-style balance.
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PoE doesn't have to do insane numbers to be a success. Paradox makes grand strategy games that sell two million copies, and they're much bigger successes than AAA games which sell three times that. Tomb Raider just recently became profitable despite being the fastest-selling game in the history of the franchise, and Resident Evil 6 was considered a failure despite selling something like six million copies in its first week of release. Success is about net profit from sales, not sales. If less money is sunk into the thing, profit is far easier to achieve. That said, I seriously doubt this game will move less than 500,000 copies, especially in the long run. Same with Wasteland 2 and Torment, for that matter. Games like these are everlasting gobstoppers; BG2 and the rest of the IE games (along with Fallout) have been at the top of GOG's bestseller list since they hit the service. New games in that vein will have stupidly long tails and a perfect marketing story. They may not sell as many copies as Manshoot XII: Exploding Duty (I couldn't resist, I'm sorry), but they don't have to.
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Pah. The Oculus Rift is going to be a nice toy, but VR isn't going to be The Way We All Play Games In The Future. The people who are convinced that Oculus will "save the industry" or whatever are just as mistaken as they were when they thought mobile and social would save the industry. It's not the future, it's a future, one of many. They are doing some staggeringly impressive work, there's no doubt about that, and they're absolutely on the cutting edge. But you disdain developers of traditional television-based games at your peril. VR will be a niche market for the foreseeable future, mark my words. If they could do it without the headset, that would really be something. I also question the assumption that any team could do what CDP's doing (or rather, what CDP says it's doing; I question if they can accomplish their aims). It might be true that any team of sufficient size and manpower could assemble something like The Witcher 3, but it's a rare level of talent indeed that's required to marry a true open-world structure with true choice and consequence. I can, in fact, think of only one game that's accomplished that goal successfully: New Vegas. And even that was not without myriad flaws.
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@Lephys: But you can say that about any Kickstarter. "Help me make this thing that should exist but doesn't" is the pitch, but we're still talking about paying for a thing that doesn't exist. I'm not diminishing the reassuring nature of more specific promises, but I could go to Kickstarter right now, start a campaign, and make up some highly specific promises I have no intention of living up to. Kickstarter is based on trust, as I've said before. If you don't trust inXile with your money, don't back their game. Simple as that.
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In inXile's defense, they did go into more detail in the text that accompanied the stretch goals, and it's not as if anyone was backing a Torment successor for combat or crafting or something "game-y." If you're a Torment fan, you're a fan because of the story and the way it was told.
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@Stun: You misunderstand. I have no problem with the IE games' implementation of death spells. I'm more or less neutral on that issue. What I was talking about was more general problems with the ruleset's translation into a computer game. The spell system as a whole is honestly something I like.
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@ Stun: I'm not going to explain it. It's not worth the agitation I know will come with it.
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You do know the difference between being critical of something and disliking it, right?
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And there's the real problem. For one side, this is about save-or-die spells and whether or not they are in any way useful or fun. (My own answer to that question is "It depends," by the way. In fact, I quite like save-or-die spells, including many of those found in the IE games. My problem is with the AD&D ruleset, which was not designed with computer games in mind and thus didn't always translate effectively, especially if you weren't already a tabletop player. I also have a problem with the excessively obtuse and arcane nature of the ruleset's specifics - which, again, works in a tabletop situation, but doesn't work in a computer game. Neither objection precludes save-or-die as a rule.) But for the other side, this is about the struggle between the Filthy Casuals and the True Acolytes of Gygax. You can't win an argument when one side has prebuffed with a permanent Armor of Faith spell (heh).
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- Josh Sawyer
- Wizards
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Stop goading them. I know it's tempting, but nothing good comes of it.
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Unless the Enhanced Edition made the extremely weird choice to make the walking speeds unbearably slow, you are factually incorrect. It took at least a minute. I timed it.
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No. I am explaining why I am not engaging with you. I don't know how I can be any clearer. May you find what you are looking for in Pillars of Eternity. Good day.
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@Hiro: I don't "contribute" to discussions I don't believe are constructive, but I also won't sit idly by while someone is mischaracterized and baited. I've registered my distaste for your tactics, which are either entirely deliberate or the work of people who don't understand the difference between opinion and fact.
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@Hiro: I stand by my post.
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Yeah, after the walking speeds were modded. I'm talking about the Baldur's Gate games, not the other IE games, which had perfectly fine movement speeds.
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Our dungeon/interior corridors have all been designed with full party navigation in mind. You won't find anything as narrow as Firewine Bridge in Pillars of Eternity. Thank you, thank you, thank you! God, those corridors. Irritating in the extreme, especially at unmodded walking speeds. Have you also designed the exteriors for this? Watching a dude take like two real-world minutes to walk around the entire Friendly Arm Inn almost broke me.
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Ah, well, I misunderstood what you meant by "fair." Which may mean you're misunderstanding what some of us mean by "unfair." What I mean by "fair" in Dark Souls' case is not that every enemy is the same as the player. My point is that the game never sucker punches the player. Once you know The Rules, they're consistently applied in every case. They're very unforgiving rules, it's true, but there is no point at which a player's strategic and tactical choices aren't respected. Even in the most extreme case, there's never a moment where you feel like the game put one over on you.
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Pfftahahahahaha! Either you're the greatest player ever or this is some kind of weird Stockholm Syndrome thing. Ever play Dark Souls? Etrian Odyssey? Tactics Ogre? Thief? Deus Ex on Realistic? A mainline Shin Megami Tensei game? Hell, even Halo on Legendary? Or any one of the other countless games that play fair and are still pretty darn tough? "Games have to be unfair." Wow. Gimme a break, man. IT's A DRAGON!That's like saying 'You should totally warn people that necromancer has undead followers!, 'you should totally warn people a giant will do massive damage' or 'you should totally warn people a banana is yellow!' You misread what he was saying. His point was that, because it is a dragon, players' assumptions about how dragons work should be taken into account and "pay off" in some way, as opposed to, "Ha ha, you thought a dragon would breathe fire, didn't you? But this dragon has basilisk powers! Enjoy getting turned to stone and dying in a way you couldn't have reasonably anticipated, suckers!" Whereas, if there are a bunch of dudes turned to stone near the dragon's lair but before you get to the dragon, that would clue you in that it's not a typical dragon without holding your hand.
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I don't think there's a nostalgia factor so much as a trust factor. The big Kickstarter successes have all either been run by devs with a sizable fanbase that trusts them to put out good games, or devs who showed off enough of their game that people trusted they could deliver on their promises. The more people are already invested in you, the less you have to show to get them to trust you.
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Eternity Expansion style
Ffordesoon replied to Sensuki's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
For PoE, which will presumably have a Baldur's Gate-like structure, I'd prefer ToB-style. This is because it's a narrative cRPG. In a more freeform game, I'd be more interested in a TOTSC-style expansion, but because so much of the appeal hinges on the narrative, I'd rather see a continuation of that. -
@Stun and Hiro: Personally, I think you two are just baiting Lephys. I don't see how you can be so relentlessly critical of the guy and his arguments without ever acknowledging he has even the slightest shade of a point. I don't agree with you on these issues, but I think you have solid points occasionally. You just argue in bad faith, which Lephys - whatever his sins - has never done. Not that I've seen, anyway. I'm sorry to backbench moderate, but as a third (fourth?) party who's been watching this little tete-a-tete play out for a while now, I have to say that I have only seen Lephys respond patiently to a bunch of baiting hogwash that completely ignores his points in favor of nitpicking his examples. If Lephys can be accused of using kettle logic or proof by verbosity sometimes, then I accuse you fellows of moving the goalposts and engaging in the continuum fallacy, among other things. And yes, I'm engaging in the psychologist's fallacy right now, the difference being that I know my own biases are biases. I a am also aware that using Wikipedia as a primary source opens me up to claims of false attribution, except that I'm only using Wikipedia as a source for the purpose of easy definition, not because I necessarily believe in every conclusion every Wikipedia page would seem to support.
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- Josh Sawyer
- Wizards
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Yes, but a suckerpunch by definition fails at execution.
