Kjaamor

I agree wholeheartedly that the opening two hours to any game are crucial and whilst, personally, I didn't find the opening to Fallout 2 to be too bad at all, I accept that getting players hooked through the early hours of the game is very important. My recent example of this would be Jade Empire, which I only this year picked up and similarly didn't get through the opening 2 hours because the whole thing felt horribly wooden and contrived. A lot of people have suggested that a good game lies within, but I could not bring myself to search any further for it. Equally as dangerous, however, is the ToEE approach of "first two hours interesting, next thirteen hours grind".

It also buys much more heavily into the co-operative experience than BGII ever did, buying into some very basic mmo ideas, and leaving several elements of the single player feeling extremely odd in the process. Obviously sales are probably the best way to measure success, but the numbers of us who went "Wow! That looks amazing!", bought it, and then went "Oh, it's not", are hardly token. I'm not saying that PoE will be any more a BG successor than D:OS, because both would like the tag but both are going about things in a very different way. I am saying, for the purposes of the discussion, that D:OS would have been a better single player game if it didn't have the focus on co-operative play.

I would suggest that minimum of 8 maximum of 18 is in order to keep the feel of D&D. Certainly later D&D pnp has a minimum of 8 - did any of the D&D crpgs do the same? I recall BG and IWD dropping stats to 1 or 2, but I can't remember NWN or ToEE.

I'll get ritualistically drunk, like every other day.

*shrugs* Personally, I'd be more than happy to get a few good rpgs out of Middle Earth. I'm not campaigning for their inclusion by any means, but some of the above responses with the flavour "Do something new, not derivative" seem to be rather at odds with a game that is a) Deliberately retro, and b) Containing Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Dragons and Ogres. PoE is not only "derivative" but is purposefully so.

Hopefully it will be fixed seed for out of combat rolls (or ideally no rolls at all for things like lockpicking, just fixed skill checks), and saving will be disabled in combat.

True, and it was actually nice to fight such things because skeletons gave your clerics a chance to shine for a change, and the Golems could be a thorn in the side of what was normally a very well-equipped party. The thing with the IE games, compared to FFX, is that weapon-swapping was something that occurred in a few select instances, rather than in 50% of your battles. Also, in the skeleton example as I recall it, Crushing was best, slashing was sub-optimal, and piercing was pretty useless. That meant that your thieves/archers were pretty useless, your Cleric was shining, but your fighters had to decide whether to run with their hit-optimised swords, or damage-optimised flail/mace. In my first runs of some of the IE games, I might not have even brought a spare crushing weapon, much less have put points into proficiency with it. All of which added up to tactical and strategic decision-making. My concern is not the existance of damage types and weaknesses, but that PoE runs the risk of being like FFX, where it is an obvious case of "Fast attacks for this creature, then switch to heavy attacks for this creature" most of the time. I contend that if every fight is going to be "Maces on the fighters, Daggers on the wizard" then it is less tactical and strategic rather than more, and that you're undermining the gameplay purpose of both damage types and of specialisation.

There's nothing said so far that specifically states that things will be this way, but I worry that by focusing so much about the uses of different weapons against different foes PoE sets itself up to be a swap-fest/specific-fest. Out comes another of Kjaamor's JRPG analogies, but FFX was an otherwise entertaining romp blighted by the way that half the fights consisted of "One quick enemy, one armoured enemy and one magic enemy". Superficially it appears like something like that encourages tactics, but because it is both obvious and your options limited, all it serves to do is make all other options worthless, reducing tactical input. Granted, PoE should rightly get far superior combat (just as FFX specialises in melodrama rather than strategy), but I don't want to see "Xvart's! Everyone get their daggers out! Apart from the bear, switch to two-handers for him!" That's the specific fest. The swap-fest is that it becomes necessary to carry multiple different weapons and switch frequently, including mid-fight. The combination of damage types and bottomless stash make this a real concern for me. To my mind, a fantasy character's weapon (not to be confused with their "weapon") is an extension of their personality. I dislike the idea of Legolas occasionally bringing a two-handed maul into the fray because he knows he'll be fighting trolls. I hope that the proficiency table will encourage specialisation at least as much (and preferably rather more) as flexibility.

^Lawful Neutral

I have consistently maintained that Fallout 3 is simultaneously a decent game and a terrible rpg.

Personally, my vote goes to the Fallout 2 system of being able to increase attributes at the cost of a perk (or in this instance, feat). I dislike the min-maxing that D+D encouraged and, like the Rhino example earlier, I think there are more immersive and interesting ways of showing progression.

Sadly, Lephys, and this is why I particularly criticise SoM, the AI does not control your extra person, you can just switch back and forth (unless my copy was broken). So those fights where one player defends while the other hits from range? Forget it. You're all on your own. And those RTwP elements had a split second stall on either side which, while probably inconsequential for multiplayer, is critical when you're the only one who is spam-grazing the boss. And dodging is, at times, less effective than graze-stun spamming bosses. Brilliantly, the bosses sometimes play the same trick back! Gameplay! Again though, SoM is not the definitive evidence that you can't ever tag multiplayer into a single player experience, but it is a terrible example of what happens when you try, and certainly shouldn't be put on a pedestal in a thread of this nature.

...and I immediately rush to the defence of my favourite western crpg. 1) The Navarro rush is part of a speed run that a player make undertake on their second playthrough. Navarro is in the middle of nowhere and its existance - indeed the existence of anything in its direction - is not even implied until much later in the game. 2) Getting to Navarro immediately is no easy feat, because you're moving through high-level random encounters who will largely one-shot you. It is, of course, possible, but even doing so requires a specific high agility build from the off and/or a lot of save/reloading. I agree that putting tons of good items in the inventory of a merchant you can kill immediately and is both obvious and in the characters interests is a bad idea, but this is not what occurred in Fallout 2.

The trouble with MMOs in my experience is that they tend to funnel ideas into the bottleneck of WoW. Many an MMO has had excellent ideas on how to be different and provide something new, but after a while, whether to combat falling revenue or simply to attact more players, someone up high asks "How can we make this game more popular? What are the market leaders doing that we aren't?" and before you know it your distinct and colourful game is another WoW clone. Apart from SW:tOR, a game I was a forum member for years prior to its release, and when I finally got my hands on it the thing proved vastly inferior to the MMO I had played as a training exercise. But I digress, because all MMORPGs are the spawn of the devil.

SoM is actually a pretty poignant example for this discussion because - as someone who played through more than half of the game solo, it stands out as a terrible single-player JRPG, and its success and praise was pretty much purely a result of being one of the only true multiplayer RPGs on consoles at the time. Now that's fine, and plenty of people loved SoM as a result, but it is an illustrative example of how focusing on multiplayer content - even when done well - directly affects the solo experience. Many of the boss fights, an encounter with some lyncathope-esque creature particularly swims at the back of my memory - were likely fun and interesting experiences for a group, but in solo play were absurd graze-spams that were only slightly more fun then seeing how quickly you could reach 500 presses of the A button and no more tactical. Again, that's fine if you play want a multiplayer game, but with a seemingly endless line of MMORPGs out there, you should be able to find your multiplayer kicks in games designed for multiple players. That Obsidian have deliberately avoided multiplayer aspects due to resources suggests that even a surface implementation of multiplayer (possible, but combat is not designed for it) is non-trivial.

*takes sedatives in preparation for yet another "Hey! What if Obsidian got fans to do the voice acting?" series of posts*

Forum posts default as Chaotic Evil.

Enjoy your purchase and nice avatar.

Obviously if someone suffers from Dyslexia it would appear unlikely they're going to get much out of TWD. I would assume, however, that a reading-heavy game like PoE is going to create a similar headache, although it would appear apparent that it isn't as crushing at core moments as TWD. Sometimes it doesn't matter what you pick. Unfortunately, as I reached the end of season 1, it became apparent that the vast majority of the time your decisions don't carry to consequence you might have thought (main reason for lack of enthusiasm for TWAU). However the fact that choices sometimes matter and sometimes don't makes ALL choices much more involving than the toss good/bad/neutral dialogue in games like Shadowrun Returns or even BLASPHEMYBLASPHEMYBLASPHEMYBLASPHEMY Baldur's Gate 2, where you can threaten to stab a victim's child in one line then literally be Paladining one out in the next. I don't expect this feature in PoE, which will lend itself to a different style. I'm merely lamenting the fact that of the gameplay mechanics that this last generation brought in, that is one of the few that I would've like to have seen as part of my generation.

While it may not be as readily apparent that you need to answer within a relatively short time period, compared to it being easily apparent that you swiftly need to put a bullet in a zombie's brain, it was apparent to me that more often than not the option I hammered on in a panic was most likely the option that most suited my response. There were less than three points in the walking dead where my answer did not reflect my general feelings - which is to its credit, the relative ambiguity of the responses almost always reflecting easily the emotion at the core. Practically speaking, of course, those "How's it going?" conversation timeouts were substantially longer than the "OH, ****!" timeouts. Which is exactly as it should be. As an aside, I didn't really bother to pursue The Wolf Among Us, because whilst the above aspect is an excellent trick, neither TWD nor TWAU actually have much beyond a pretty standard point and click game otherwise. That TWD is so playable regardless, is a testament to the quality of the trick and the superb execution throughout. That, and the fact that the Wolf is all too easy to become comedy ****, whilst Lee is a genuinely human and likeable character.

In my opinion, if there was anything that modern games have set a better standard for that should be implemented into retro-style games like PoE, it is The Walking Dead's implementation of time-pressured decision making in dialogue/decision options. The worst option being that you failed to decide on an option in the time you had is an excellent mechanic. If anyone can offer a good example of this occuring in previous generations then do tell, because it's a truly great mechanic and practically makes TWD great of its own accord.

This game is niche and shall sell comparitively poorly, but Obsidian should do quite well out PoE2, which will be an on-rails cover-based shooter.

Generally I like to go back to earlier places. Fallout 2 did this best for me where quests in new towns would take you back to earlier ones, and being higher level would in turn open up new options while you were there. The political changes of the wasteland was a key theme in Fallout 2, though, and its concepts lent themselves well to re-exposure and comparison between places. In many respects, Fallout 2's towns have such personality and three dimensionality as to fill the role normally left for characters. However, I very much doubt that PoE will aim to acheive the same thing. It strikes me as being much more BG/PST in location style. If you're going to encourage backtracking on any level, I think you need to give some (even the slightest piece of) evidence that things have changed and time has passed. The idea that if you killed the army of bugbears who had been slaughtering the local villagers, then people would talk about other, more mundane things or at the very least stop going on about the bugbear threat. In an ideal world, you might seem a new building or two spring up - although this is probably an inefficient use of resources in PoE's case. Maybe if things do not go well, a couple of buildings get torn down. If there is nothing to indicate that any change has occurred as a result of your heroic (or at least, significant) actions, then you end up in mmo land where your activities exist in a vacuum and have seemingly no impact on anything. If the game is linear, then it matters less because you're pushed on to something else without having to seem the crappy harvest.

Use a piece of paper, write your custom backstory on that, and stick it on the wall by your monitor. Alternatively, use notepad and alt-tab to it. I mean, obviously I have nothing against a customisable backstory, but if you're talking about something that exclusively occurs in your head, does it really need a text file in the game?

4 x Red Mage