Humodour

Rather simply. Whilst even legendary story/diplomacy-based games such as Planescape: Torment opt for regulating dialogue options through statistics, or not regulating dialogue at all, Fallout actually has a skill called 'speech', similar to guns or lockpick or science. Dialogue options in game depended primarily on speech, then intelligence, then perception, then charisma and finally the rest of the stats, in order of use. It wasn't perfect but I certainly haven't heard any complaints about it. Still, it was almost assumed that your character tagged the speech skill and put points in it each level up, thus it became kind of redundant. PS:T was sort of similar in that regard to: you either pumped wis/int/cha, or dex/str/con. I dunno, I wish there were a better way; perhaps fewer restrictions on dialogue and no speech skill (i.e. all or almost all dialogue options automatically)? It seems restricting dialogue IS an arbitrary design choice - would it hurt the game if it weren't there?

YAY! I'm an evil baby eating monster... What, did you lose the ability to comprehend my post because I didn't put the second evil quotes?

I'm not a massive fan of any of the JBs listed. But I am a fan of Get Smart, Deus Ex and NOLF. :D

Really? I actually assumed they wouldn't do this. So basically you get 3 different tones of conversation but they all lead to the same place? Yeah, that's really "going to make me change the way I think about RPGs".

The currently mentioned mechanic for critical hits is you line up your reticle and wait a couple seconds while it and another circle meet then fire. You can pre-load assault rifle crits. So no die roll. Thank god. In an FPS setting, innovative cross-hair design is far more welcome than arbitrary die rolls. For that reason I liked Deus Ex's system of cross-hair size determining accuracy, and things like movement, intoxication, limb damage, weapon type and skill level determining cross-hair size.

I agree with Cycloneman: clear cut division of diplomacy is a bad idea; it's always made me feel like I'm missing out on something in the games that do it. By all means, though, use stats, a speech skill, and sometimes other skills together to determine dialogue options. But don't divide speech. I'd be against a speech skill altogether if Fallout hadn't shown how it can work.

I acknowledge that good and evil are human concepts and thus their value and strength depend on our societies. However, the fact that all societies around the world have evolved to generally eschew acts which invalidate an individual's human rights, I think it is fair to dub such acts as 'evil', whilst the reverse, actively upholding another's human rights, is 'good'. Anybody who wants to get by in human society thus needs to live by these standards, or they are evil.

But I remember hearing Sawyer saying that he disliked the accuracy mechanisms in both Bloodlines AND Deus Ex. So it sounds like he's trying to make some lame FPS die roll for accuracy like Bethesda is with FO3, but I guess I'll give the benefit of the doubt for now. Personally there's nothing more annoying than the idea of seeing my shot arbitrarily miss because, while my cross-hair was perfectly lined with their head, I failed a dice roll.

Because a DE with a holster weighs more than any highschool kids backpack? That's what I was thinking. Silly.

I think the solution to people re-loading when they 'fail' a diplomacy or other check is to make the consequences of failure just as interesting as, but very different from, the consequences of success. Failure is always good for a hero - it reduces smugness. Agreed; and to limit the feeling of "you just arbitrarily cut off a whole line of quests because you said the wrong thing".

I hope they have traits like in Fallout (at the start or learned). They were a refreshing aspect to character creation. Edit: I don't mean how Arcanum or Lionheart did them (they were just skill or 100% balanced stat modifiers, with no funny description either). I mean how Fallout did them - how they offered something unique that you couldn't really get otherwise, or that was a genuine boon. Same goes for perks - they shouldn't be plain skill modifiers.

Smooth. You changed your argument. What you actually said was "Mass Effect couldn't have been better" in response to the (valid) claim that pre-determined characters bolster immersion and plot. Which means you're now contradicting yourself and implicitly accepting that pre-determined characters could have improved Mass Effect.

Rather, a pretty close 50/50. I think a real-world RPG will be better than another aleins/sci-fi RPG. Agreed. I'm certainly looking forward to Aliens, but that's because of the company making it, not the setting itself. Whereas for AP, both the style/setting and the company working on it have me excited.

Wow. I figured this poll would be a no-brainer in favour of Alpha Protocol. Not by a long shot.

Yeah that's kind of my point. When somebody starts worrying about whether or not they've missed a secret area, then as a game developer you've made a mistake. I think that holds for things like accuracy in FPSs, too; if you give figures for shots that hit, a fair chunk of people will begin to concentrate on not missing shots rather than the atmosphere and immersion of the game.

I know you find it hard to comprehend even simple ideas, but I'll keep trying anyway: science doesn't know yet (string theory is promising, but so much time has passed it's possible we'll never know). That doesn't mean it was god. I know you find faith hard to understand, and you take comfort in science since you think that there won't be a god in control, that people are. Can you please stop posting in this thread?

[quote name='H

A tonne of thorns?

I know you find it hard to comprehend even simple ideas, but I'll keep trying anyway: science doesn't know yet (string theory is promising, but so much time has passed it's possible we'll never know). That doesn't mean it was god.

Yeah right, this thread is misery. Sounds like somebody who doesn't know how to respond to criticism of his posts, so is aiming to bury the thread instead. Tigranes: Nice post on what science is and isn't. Though I didn't make my post in an attempt to claim science is perfect; rather to demonstrate why beliefs like those of walkerguy ("I don't believe in the big bang... hey isn't it cool how I'm talking to you around the world through light waves?") are illogical. Science tends to be an all or nothing game. Walkerguy: I don't know what came before the big bang; I wasn't there. Does that mean it was 'god'? How rare.

Today I played Twister against myself. It was hard work, but eventually I won.

I asked him a genuine question in response to a quick skim of his post. He doesn't? I must have misread it. I was only skimming sorry. Careful with your words. Not all of science is certain, but that's only true in the same sense that we can't be certain we're not in some virtual reality simulator; it's metaphysics and given that is unprovable by definition, it's something I avoid. But I would certainly say science is solid. Even the so far uncertain areas of science such as string theory are solid. They tell us what is not the case, what cannot be the case, and what any theory of the universe must have on a basic level. I don't follow it much any more, but I know it has already made some correct predictions, too. Science should not be confused with scientific speculation, which while useful to science in the form of new ideas, is in no way proven. Not correct. The typical definition of 'proof' applies to scientific theories; it is a theory once it has been proven via the scientific method. Otherwise it is a hypothesis. The only case where something can be proven 100% true is in maths. Science theories in comparison are called theories if they fit our world view and have survived proof by counter-example so far. If even one unknown, average scientist were to find a counter-example for the Big Bang Theory, the theory would have to be revised. This has happened before, such as classical to quantum mechanics. The thing to note, however, is that the new theory must contain the old theory, and ideally predict other similar outlier cases - meaning this doesn't provide any more support for god. The Big Bang Theory is independently verified and predicted by a wide variety of unrelated evidence and fields of physics. It is because of this that invalidation of the Big Bang Theory means invalidation of our telecommunications industry (wave physics). As such, the only way BBT could be wrong is if it was simply missing something; if a new theory were formulated that encompassed Big Bang theory and made all the same predictions and fit all the same data a Big Bang Theory, and then some. Christian zealots that go around proclaiming BBT and evolution are only theories as if it is a problem are only showing their lack of understanding of the most basic of scientific concepts. One of the reasons people put so much trust in science is its predictive power. Science says "given x, you get y". This predictive power is the very basis for human technology. Can recourse to God do the same? No; which is why faith and science must necessarily be separate. That's nice. I said the exact same thing in the first page of this thread.

I can get behind that.

Krezack, your inability to understand the concepts of faith has made you as blind as someone who allows faith to blind them from science. Hurlshot, you can hurl insults at me all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that it is really illogical and irrational to believe in only half of science. It is one single framework. It's just not possible to pull it apart and say bits of it are wrong, whilst simultaneously preserving the integrity of the other bits. See genetics, biotechnology, medicine, agriculture? The advances we make in those stem from evolution and genetics being true. You can go all metaphysical on my ass if you want, but at the end of the day, it is an idiot who denies the truth of science which has accurately predicted and produced an entire technological industry. The same thing applies to the big-bang; it's not some esoteric area of science, it's based on the exact same foundations of our telecommunications industry and electronics industry in general. Science is not just some unknown theory. It is the basis of advanced human civilisation. It is technology. It is not a metaphysical entity whose truth is uncertain any more than human existence is! People need to figure out science and faith are not related. They are very distinct and attempts to merge the two end in spectacular failure. Edit: I'm not saying people shouldn't have faith. It's an important part of life even for atheists, in some form or another (whether faith in humanity or whatnot). But I am saying science and faith don't play well together. It is a very good idea to keep them separate.