Ffordesoon

Universe mystery types of things or horrible reality of the world and the eldrich horrors that slumber below types of things? Grown-up things. So, both.

I have vivid memories of playing the IE games at a young age with my cousin, who was older and Knew Things. And when I say I "played with him, I mean that what I did most of the time was watch him play. Cut to now, and I'm playing through the IE games by myself for the first time. So I have fond memories of the IE games, especially Torment, but I am acutely conscious of each game's flaws in a way I wasn't and couldn't have been as a wee lad. I think this is probably the best position to be in as a backer, because I can be objective about my experience with the games now without having to square that with my nostalgia.

A suckerpunch happens when you don't see what the hell you could have done differently, you have no way of figuring it out without consulting a guide, and you can't come back to it later for whatever reason. I'll give an example that happened to me in BG1 (TOTSC, to be exact): the fight with Karoug in Balduran's ship. It is bulls**t, and the reasons why are legion. 1. Unlike regular wolfweres, Karoug can only be hurt by approximately five specific weapons, none of which the player has a reasonable chance of acquiring without metagaming knowledge. 2. You have to have taken specific weapon proficiencies throughout the leveling process to use the weapons effectively enough to kill Karoug. 3. Karoug is very very good at saving throws against debuffs, should you finally come to the realization that he can probably be beaten if you use one of them. This is assuming you have a mage who can use that school of magic in your party (which I didn't), or that you have a wand of paralyzation (which I did, thank God). 4. He has like five or six additional wolfweres with him, one of whom is a powerful wizard who can debuff your party something fierce. You basically have to use the area transition trick to take care of these guys. 5. His health regenerates. And it regenerates quickly, too. A single miss can see him going from injured to barely injured. And if your party isn't specialized in certain weapons types, they're going to miss a lot. 6. You're in a tight space when you fight him, and the Infinity Engine was never good at pathfinding in tight spaces. Also, it means ranged characters have to take a penalty on the other enemies. Ranged characters can't hurt Karoug at all. 7. One of the weapons that can hurt him, the Sword Of Balduran, is in a chest in the room where you fight him. The chest is trapped, and the game doesn't pause when you open chests, meaning you have to use the area transition trick to get all the wolfweres out of the room so you can get the weapon that will kill Karoug. 8. Most of the weapons you need to kill Karoug are in chests off of the island. The island where you are trapped until you kill Karoug. Oh, and there is no way to get some of them without stealing. Because of course there isn't. 9. Only the fact that you are going to fight him on a boat is foreshadowed in any way. 10. All but two of these conditions are entirely unique to Karoug. No other character in the questline works this way. And you have to beat him to complete the questline, even though the writers could easily have provided you with a perfectly acceptable nonviolent solution. And you have to complete the questline to get off the island. That's a suckerpunch.

No. The NPCs in BG1 were cardboard cutouts with whom you could have no meaningful interaction. If you had said Baldur's Gate 2 I'd have let it slip, but saying BG1 has meaningful interaction with NPCs is like saying a soggy piece of cardboard is the best piece of literature since Don Quixote. You, uh, you know I wasn't responding to you, right? I didn't say it had "meaningful interactions with NPCs," and rjshea didn't describe a game like that. He described BG1, which has interactions with lots of companion NPCs, most of which aren't very deep, but which are deeper than IWD's nonexistent NPC companions.

There's probably a satisfying middle ground between the two character-building extremes of BG2 and IWD that would satisfy the need for tailoring your party and allow meaningful interactions. For example, allow the player to build a primary PC from the ground up, then provide a pool of side kicks that you can tailor to a more limited degree. The known character types of your possible side kicks allow the game designers to configure interactions, while you still get a lot of customization choices about your party makeup. You wouldn't even need to start the game with the side kicks--they could just be met on the adventure. That game exists. It's called Baldur's Gate 1.

The combat's pretty lame, no question. The BG and IWD games are absolutely better from a pure mechanical perspective. However, I hardly think the "great story, bad game" argument holds water, because it always seems to be predicated on the combat being a bit crap. There is a lot more to the game mechanically than just the combat, though, and it shines in many of those areas as well. The puzzles you solve wholly through dialogue trees, for example, or the death mechanic, or the way the game organically opens and closes options to you based on your ability scores. And it's not as if even the combat is actively terrible. It's just mediocre, which people seem to confuse with terrible a lot of the time (see also: Dragon Age 2, which is a mediocre game that gets called terrible because it's a disappointment). There is fun to be had with the mechanics, especially if you're a mage, and it is functional. It's just super-unpolished and clearly not a focus for the team, and there's way too much of it in most playthroughs. No, Torment's problem is not that it 's a bad game, or even a mediocre one. It's that it's a good game with a great story, but because it's a cult classic, the people who love it oversell its quality as a game. It's not bad, but it is uneven, sometimes wildly so, and if you're coming in expecting THE BEST GAME OF ALL TIME, it's not going to hold up to that level of scrutiny. Nothing does. Call it the Ocarina Of Time problem.

No, he said Totment was a horrible game. Didn't you ever play Playernscarp: Totment? It wasn't very good.

He'd probably call them gûryg-nuardhs or something. (I kid, Josh!)

The key to making things transparent without makimg them handhold-y is, I think, is to always make the player the one who investigates. The problem with Rey's examples is that the player's companions are doing the work for her. If there's a mystery to be solved, I want to be the one to solve it.

Personally, I want their next Kickstarter to be SF-focused, and hopefully based in space opera traditions. That's a subgenre that gets a weirdly small amount of attention in RPG-land, even allowing for KOTOR (which is Star Wars, and thus more fantasy than SF) and Mass Effect (the RPG-ness of which is debatable). Even the Japanese don't go near space opera enough in their games. The Mandate might scratch a little bit of that itch for me, but good lord, look at the amount of high and low and dark and epic fantasy games that are being funded! One isn't going to redress the balance! Two won't either, but it'd be better than one. Plus, you know, what's what's the highest-grossing crowdfunded game ever? Star Citizen, by a mile. That's a space game. What's the genre that consistently does the best on Kickstarter? Old-school cRPGs. Add to that a developer of Obsidian's stature (which The Mandate did not have), and you have to ask why the chocolate and the peanut butter have not yet collided in an explosion of awesome. All I want is Avellone writing an isometric text-heavy space game with turn-based combat similar to XCOM, planetary exploration, ship-to-ship combat, a story that veers more toward the personal than the epic, a sweet universe, and wonderfully damaged characters that cause me to question my assumptions about life, the universe, and everything. And lasers. Is that so hard? Yes? Well I don't care. Do it anyway. EDIT: Also, as regards this endlessly tedious RPG debate that I'm drawn to like a moth to a flame, I will say this: does it say RPG on the box? Then it's an RPG. Does it not say RPG on the box? Then it's not an RPG. Do you know why? Because genre is only important for marketing purposes. In discussions of merit, the only two questions that matter are "Does it succeed at what it's trying to do?" and "Do I like what it's trying to do?"

So explain it to me.

Where did I compare the IE games to any RPG today, let alone an MMO? I said the trinity existed in the IE games. Why it should be a bad thing that it exists in this game too puzzles me, especially since the game simply cannot be designed around the trinity and live up to its design goals (every party is viable, six fighters, etc.) What is the concern here? Where is it coming from? I do not understand how you get "MMO" from any of what's been said so far.

So how, then, do you know it's true of PoE? Because they used some words that sound kind of like MMO words (even though they didn't originate with MMOs) in an update? You can have a trinity party in the IE games. You can presumably have one in PoE. One of the oft-stated design goals of PoE is to allow you to build your party however you like and have it be, if not optimal, beatable. How could that work if the design was based on the MMO-style trinity?

Dungeon crawlers are RPGs almost by definition.

I'm sorry, but the idea that there was no "trinity" in the IE games is patently false. I can't tell you how many fights in BG1 I won with Khalid and/or Minsc tanking and everyone else in the back shooting arrows or throwing bullets, and I'd have Jaheira heal Khalid if his health got too low. And if you're wondering where the DPS is, it's the arrows, which would always do more damage per second than a fighter. Tank, healer, DPS. And I won like eighty percent of the fights this way. And, for that matter, what is buffing if not another form of healing? Yeah, it may not directly be healing you, but there's a reason why the healer classes in any MMO are called "support classes."

THIS. THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS x1000. Also, traps. Can my traps guy (who, right now, is Yoshimo) not take ages to find every single trap, and sometimes never find them? I totally support having traps in the game, and I totally support having a trapfinding skill, but my God, does it have to be so binary with every trap? Like, maybe not every trap is created equal. Maybe some traps are more obvious to the trained eye than others. This could be another thing to hint at in-game as well: "Don't go into the F***ing Scary Dungeon Of Scariness, friend! There be traps and tricks the loikes er which yer never seen!" Whereas if you're just searching for, like, a really obvious clicky panel or a wire trap, that pops up almost as soon as you turn Find Traps on. At later levels, I mean, when you've invested some points into trapfinding. I'm not saying a guy who takes one level in trapfindind should be able to see super-well-hidden traps, or even obvious traps, without taking a lot of time to find them. That would be stupid.

Nathan Grayson is a big fan of New Vegas. The guy who wrote the New Vegas review is no longer with the site.

Would be awesome. No idea if we'll see it, seeing as this screams "out of scope" to me, but it would be nice. Certainly, an SCS-style mod that makes all enemies act "narrative-friendly" would be appreciated.

If giving the player more options to deal with a spell that's game-breakingly powerful without nerfing its overall power level sounds like it would make the game easier, that's because it just might. It would also give the player more tactical options and make the game more fun without diminishing the impact of the spell. More granularity in dealing with foes only leads to more satisfying encounters, IMHO.

@Stun: Yes, but there are ways to design around the hard counter that make it more of a soft counter. Here's a few off off the top of my head: another character can shove a stunned or held character out of the way, or maybe carry them to safety in exchange for getting rained with blows, or have a fighter guard a certain ally and take hits for them. And maybe stunning would have a set duration in seconds rather than being subject to a saving throw. This is a game with full party control. Teamwork is important. Why not codify that in the mechanics?* * - Yes, I know, the IE games had a guard skill, but it was poorly defined and all but useless.

Sure. But if all you have is rules and tools without genuinely dangerous foes that do lots of damage, then what you get is "fake complexity". "Oh look, you can use fireballs to do massive damage against the ice monsters, this game is so sophisticated!" Except it isn't because the ice monsters do piddling damage against you and you could just as easily take them out with standard attacks. This is a major problem with games today. Well, sure. Biggest problem with the Bioshock series is that you only need to use all your tools on harder difficulties - and even then, it's sometimes not as efficient. Adversity creates awareness of agency. Hey, that's a nice little aphorism!

But those spells don't kill characters outright. What's more likely is that they'll nerf them a bit so they can only be cast on one character at a time, which is fine by me. Also, they'll be probably be counterable with lower-level spells. This is, of course, speculation, but my point is that those spells aren't literally all or nothing, and death spells are. It's hard to get more all or nothing than life and death.

It's worth noting that all this talk of death spells is academic. Why would a game inspired by the IE games that caps at Level 12 have death spells anyway? There are valid arguments in favor of death spells, to be sure, but they've gotta save something for the sequel/expansion/continuation/thingy.

Oh, I wish I could like this a hundred times! I hate dungeons where it's like, "Oh, look, more orcs." Augh, why are the orcs there? Literally all you have to do is say to me, "Well, orcs live in caves in this world," and suddenly I'm back in your story. It's amazing how many games - even RPGs, the genre of worldbuilding and deep lore - don't do this, though. OH HAI IMMA ORC is fine in a first-person shooter, but every time I see it in an RPG, I want to punch. Hell, for me, there doesn't even have to be an explanation! I'm playing Bravely Default right now, and a ton of the dungeons have creatures in them that are just kind of weird and could go in any dungeon. But the game gets away with it, just, for two reasons: 1) There is always at least one enemy that has a very good reason to be in the dungeon. 2) The enemies with no good reason to be in a given dungeon are always unique to that dungeon. Both of these reasons allow for ample rationalization, and together, they project just enough internal consistency that I'm not thrown off when I see a plant-looking monster in an ice dungeon. I've never been to that dungeon; maybe this is some kind of ice plant monster that only grows there? Boom, I'm good. The fact that there are RPGs which don't even bother to do something as simple as this boggles the mind. That was the worst thing about Oblivion's level scaling for me; no enemies or types of weapons were tied to any specific place, even in dungeons. You hear glass weapons are really rare at one point, but if you get to a high enough level, every single standard mook suddenly has a glass weapon. What, did they raid the glass weapon warehouse that apparently exists even though these things are extremely rare and why is this place even here and suddenly you're running around screaming "HAAAAAAATE" and rubbing mashed potatoes into your toenails because why the hell not? And that sucks, because that's how you get ants.

Fair enough, I guess.