Kjaamor

Even aside from the limitations of that article, if we accept it to be representative of the truth it still leaves the fact that games are often marketed on their boob count or this is included within, so the point still stands. Well, firstly the armour, like magic and Dragons, can be equally as fantastical and out of this world, and is equally done so on purpose. Furthermore, the argument I would make for armour is exactly that which you give for Dragons: We have a reference point (Say... Plate/Iguanas) which we use to create something fantastical, and as the genre evolves and these stereotypes form we find ourselves further from our reference point and eventually into the realm of the Dragons and Thongs we know. The reality is, and let's be clear the IE games were no stranger to this, that in terms of appearance armour has, within the genre, long, LONG since evolved into sex-specific, revealing clothing. Like so many things in the fantasy genre, the leap from functional immersion to creative design was made. Tldnr; Amour started as Iguanas and now we have Dragons. Again, though, I'm not by any means supporting or even really advocating the use of sex-specific armour. My issue is just with the 'realism' standpoint. I suppose I could bring up the fact that the very reason we have no examples of gender-specific medieval armour in reality is because we had something of a shortage of medieval female knights. Evidently Patriachal society, but certain not helped by the fact that there is an overwhelming trend that men are stronger than women and were thus better suited to such hand-to-hand combat. There again is something we have tons of reference and experience of in real life, but we choose to ignore it for fantasy purposes.

The pattern of sales would appear to suggest that you're in the minority. It does appear from your post though, that you've slightly misunderstood the content of my post by taking it literally at its word. I'm not referring strictly to sex, as much as sexualisation. A more appropriate phrase would have been 'Sexy sells', but that is just phonetically horrible so I went for the standard. It's clear that we're coming at this discussion from the same direction, but from vastly different standpoints within that direction. Which is fine, of course. However, I have to say that if we're honestly using The Witcher or its sequel as an example of positive female modelling and not being a case of 'Selling Sexy' (*shudders*) then, to pinch one from Yahtzee, the Sexism in Rpgs ship hasn't so much set sail, as circumnavigated the globe and returned home laden with exotic spices.

To be fair, if you don't relieve yourself, you're going to get into serious difficulties and the time it would take for this to happen is, for most folks, quite comparible to starvation (although not dehydration). Also, there is a school of thought which I can't begin to comment personally on since it could not be further from my realm of experience, that being involved in fight to the death scenarios tends to have an impact upon your bladder and bowel movements.

With the greatest of respect to Trashman, I'm not sure even he would describe his approach to responding in this topic as patient. While I disagree with most of your post in the context of this thread, I agree that the repeated arguments for 'realism' do display an odd juxtaposition between using historically accurate armour while you use your magic spells to kill a Dragon. I often find myself arguing on the other side to people in favour of 'immersion', but it does seem to hold a rather more sensible base position in the context than 'realism'. But to approach your wider point, it does indeed come down to whether P:E is going to be another game where the best female armour is the Thong +5. I get the impression that it isn't going to be, and while I would applaud the decision it's not exactly a revelation given that the graphics system doesn't encompass a 'Camera behind ass/in front of ****' feature. Still, given that such approaches have become something of a norm within the genre, it is nice. Unfortunately, for all the political sensibilities in the world, the Thong +5 is going nowhere in the genre, since it's inevitably popular within the target audience. The whole rpg setting is littered with 'Adult Content for non-adults', and each new generation of fans - plus many (most?) of the previous generation - will lap it up. Ultimately, sex sells, and in a non-kickstarter program you'd have great difficulty selling PC to a publisher. Indeed, even with P:E, you can guarantee that the portrait art for female warrior-types is not going to display a 16-stone harridan with cauliflower ears and half her teeth missing. This whole thing is an issue I start with a moral standpoint on, and rapidly descend into Nihilism. Thinking about it, I should probably make that my signature.

Outside of tES, then only games I can think of that did the learn-by-doing model were Wizardry 8 and Dungeon Siege 2. Wizardry 8 had a lot of very seperate issues that make it difficult for me to say how well the leveling system worked. Dungeon Siege 2 had a fairly reasonable half-way model where your skill allocations were capped by your learn-by-doing rating. It was enjoyable, but I wouldn't have said it was half the system of BG/Fallout/IWD. What, and I ask with genuine interest, were the LBD models that did things nicely, in your opinion?

Ah, so there has been evidence to suggest that combat will work out on a true pausible realtime rather than the round-based system of BG/ID?

My understanding was that all exp in P:E was going to be quest-based (but I can't reference that, so take it with the standard truckload of salt), and in most IE games killing people who give quests rarely leaves heaps of reward upon their dead bodies. ...but if it does, that does at least finally give a reasonable chance to Chaotic Evil parties!

Well, on my games of Temple, if you dedicated a cleric and a sorceror to bad spells but were crafting focused, the items that could be made were more useful than the characters who made them. Perhaps mandatory is an exaggeration, but they were grossly overpowered. Gauntlets of +2 strength, for example, is fair. Gauntlets of +4 strength is excessive. Temple let you make Gauntlets +6. Just about all the best items in the game were crafted by the party without any great effort, and it only served to make Temple more of a chore after that point. As for 'Did we play a different ToEE?' I contend that it's possible, since my most recent playthrough was from GOG, and may have had some patches that weren't there on the boxed version. Although if it's any consolation, the combat was quite as broken in my version as it was in yours.

If I understand this correctly, this is yet another one of those issues of 'Realism vs Gameplay'. It is, to paraphrase what you say, a ridiculous situation that killing boars should make you a better locksmith. Yet as a gameplay mechanic I infinitely prefer the 'Allocating Exp as you choose' system over the 'Using this makes you better at it' system. I understand that it is rather illogical (save that the chances are you will be improving skills you use the most), but it just tends to make for more interesting and satisfying levelling experiences and rewards than the Morrowind model where I used to spend hours jumping up and down hills to boost my acrobatics, and going away and making a cup of tea while a rat attacked me to improve my armour. There's no question that it's the less realistic model, but it just seems to be the more rewarding and is certainly one of the key elements of the IE games that P:E seeks to imitate.

For once this is a genuine question rather than one of leaping in with a sword of pedantry +4. Do we have conformation on how weapon speed is going to work in P:E? To be honest, I never really gave weapon speed any great consideration in my years of playing crpgs. To take Baldur's Gate as an example, a dagger was far quicker than a Greatsword, but I assumed that the number of attacks you got per round was dependant only upon your number of attacks per round, not your weapon (unless it gave seperate bonuses). So the dagger's damage would register before the Greatsword, meaning if you killed the sword-user with the first strike they wouldn't get their strike off - but if you didn't the Greatsword would inflict far more damage in a round. I recall a certain dart-thrower having peculiar mechanics, but I always took that as being part of the npc rather than the system working as it normally did.

Glad to see that I wasn't the only one who found that slightly bizarre. On topic, I stand by my point that food mechanics are a dangerous thing, but exactly the sort of 'Decide if you want to do this at the start' options that Obsidian have described wanting to implement in P:E. On a related note though, while I applaud the idea of making the experience customisable for the player's enjoyment, I do hope all these potential options are things you decide at the start (e.g. Hardcore/HoF mode), and not a case of being able to adjust difficulty as and when you want. I know Fallout and BG, two games I love, both did this, but after Oblivion I really would like to see that disposed of entirely. ...or maybe they could make THAT optional at the start.

Historically, RPGs were pretty much at the back end of graphics, given that the whole concept effectively stems from pen-and-paper games. There is also the not unreasonable assumption that good graphics means full 3d. While there is definitely an experience to be had of walking through a fantasy world in the first-person perspective, combat in such games doesn't tend to be as decision-based and tactical as those in the isometric form. In essence, the assumption is by focusing on graphics you're already stepping away from a system that provides intelligent, number-based gameplay. The other assumption for this I could offer, is that games that look pretty tend to sell well across all target audiences. RPGs that look great tend to marketed and designed to cross genres and bring in extra fans than just the RP community. To do so, the P&P mechanics get watered down further and further until you have third-person shooters with a few RPG-lite elements like Mass Effect being voted RPG of the year, redesigning the genre, and making it bloody impossible to find a tactical pcRPG ever since. All of which is really why the kickstarter campaigns for things like P:E and Wasteland 2 have been so successful.

Voiceover work offers more limits than text, but that is not to say that text itself does not have practical limits. The writing and the coding around the writing take time, and like so many other features it's a case of assessing whether the end product justifies the time put in. I don't think anyone is arguing that the implementation of further reputation/alignment systems is a bad mechanic, it's just a case of weighing up the effort it would take and whether or not time would be better spent on that than, say, level design, combat mechanics or character development. In terms of expansive, checked dialogue, Fallout 2 is still the king of all the games I've played, and it's the reason why I love it so much. Yet the IE fantasy games (PS:T excepted) got away with next to no checks and it didn't stop them from being some of the best RPGs ever made.

While I think most quest rewards should be appropriate, it can be nice to have a few duff endings just to give some variance. Ultimately, in just about every rpg ever, the quest reward is the experience and any money or gear tends to be quite secondary in terms of what you're chasing. Personally, I did have a particular gripe with the BG 1 system of rewards, mainly because completely long, drawn out quests offered nowhere near the equipment rewards of going around starting fights with people in the wilderness. As a person who plays chaotic/neutral good parties in rpgs, it always irritated me that I was encouraged to kick-off at people who weren't even threatening me in order to get the decent gear. ...but, while it irritated me, props to BG 1 for being one of precious few games that actually gave a viable option for 'evil' parties. In most rpgs, and the early Fallouts are particularly guilty of this, evil questing just means slightly more money for vastly less experience.

Ah. Er...no. RPG gamers, even those from the silver and golden ages of RPGs, tend to be opinionated, extremely blinkered and subsequently rather arrogant regarding their own ideas and design skills whilst trusting no-one else, including the very designers who make the games. Any suggestion that RPers are smarter is shot down in flames and subsequently nuked as soon as you set foot in any mmorpg. For the avoidance of doubt, I am in no way excepted from this myself.

Pretty much that. The only thing I would offer on the food front is that for a mechanic that concerns me, it was handled very well in Mount and Blade. The system there, in a nutshell, was that having varying food types improved the morale of your troops. Most of my inventory was full of different food, and appropriate shopping was actually quite an enjoyable experience. However, if you ran out of food, your troops didn't die, they just didn't get any bonuses. It made it necessary for difficult battles but not an insta-kill trap. Which is another issue with the food system which P:E will undoubtedly wish to avoid - poor management has the potential to kill you several save files back, and if, for whatever reason, you use a single save file, could potentially leave you having to give up half-way through the game. Based on the information so far, I think this is exactly the sort of thing that will be part of the optional rules at the start of the game.

It depends quite a bit upon the gameplay mechanics for me. Of all the types of world map in western RPGs, Fallout 1+2 were my favourites. However, I recall it being mentioned that exp will be granted based upon quests rather than grinding (can this be confirmed or refuted?), which in many respects makes the Fallout map/encounter system feel a bit less rewarding. Also, based upon standard IE fantasy fare and the descriptions so far, I don't think P:E sounds like random encounters will be a necessary part of the economy. So with that in mind I would probably vote for the system of Baldur's Gate 1, where areas need to be transversed to access areas past them. It probably offers the best exploration and scope for interesting encounters. For my sins, however, I've never played SoZ, so I can't rule that one out.

Arcanum does, in my eyes, get away with it far more, because; a) You're actively searching FOR trash b) There are other ways of getting around it (I tend to favour magic-inclined parties). c) The scale of the routing is about a thousandth of what it is in the newer Fallouts or Elder Scrolls. Again, on the greatness of Arcanum, we are agreed. If the combat worked, it would most certainly be up there.

No. They rewarded you for doing it. It wasn't a chore for me, it was fun. I read an excellent post on the Wasteland 2 forums where someone put this point across, and while previously I hadn't been particularly against it, I found their argument to be extremely compelling. The basic idea, is that as a game designer you design a game with a concept of how it should be played. That is the gameplay you design. Not every gamer will follow this, and some gamers will play in alternative ways (sometimes to the extent that the entire game comes around to adopting this - I'm told this happened with Team Fortress 2). Yet you have a basic mechanic in mind. In good game design, players who play the game in this manner will be rewarded - typically with the next level, but in RPGs we might use experience or items. In many games, this gameplay mechanic comes down to skill. Usually, in RPGs, it comes down to tactics and planning, and an ability to shift those tactics as required. Sifting through hundreds of banal crates in the hope of finding some vaguely useful item or money is nothing more than work. There is no skill or tactics to it. There is no challenge or sense of achievement. You are merely being 'rewarded' for OCD. If this was something desirable, then the rpgs that do it would proudly boast on their boxes 'Sift through millions of containers to keep up your ammo supplies!' They don't, because if repeatedly clicking and searching through the mundane was the best gameplay they could offer, they'd be laughed out of most publishing houses (possibly not EA). Now, onto the specific words you placed in my mouth: This is not what I'm saying. Secret things and cool hidden stuff can stay, and I will be looking for it. Yet I want secrets to have a sense of achievement or excitement to them. If I swim though a lake and go under a waterfall and find a crate, good. If I make a difficult climb to the top of a mountain, or even a house and find a crate, good. If a particularly fashionable and rude merchant should clearly look worth stealing from, and I discover a fine set of trousers, good. These are secrets, and cool hidden stuff (although I'll be first to concede those examples are pretty stock ones and I'm sure Obsidian will be rather more creative than I). Having twenty crates full of trash but one has a stimpack in isn't. Having a hundred crates with a grand total of thirty-two caps spread amongst them isn't. I do not object to searching. I object to searching through. We will not be building out cities for the sake of building them out. Content density is important to us and, we believe, to most players. I think this has been expressed before, and I was responding in more general terms to the direction of modern RPGs rather than P:E, although that felt like more of a 'for the avoidance of doubt' post. EDIT to respond to previous post. The gamer who routes through every crate will have substantially more ammo, health, caps, and better quality armour and guns than the gamer who choses to only route through important-looking crates. If I do not play the game as the designers presumably intended, then I will have a more difficult time than people who did. The scope of punishment/reward in this instance is really a question of the perspective you examine it from. Initially, as I hinted above, I felt rewarded for doing it, though in hindsight I would've simply been punished for not having done so. In other news, distinct awkwardness at having been responded to by Josh Sawyer and then spending a long post criticising the mechanics of a game he directed. Hope this isn't going to affect my Christmas cards.

For the record: Fallout 3 was a good game, but a terrible RPG.

Sadly that's going to leave both sides thinking you're pro-opposition. Although... ...such disclaimers/requests aren't going to protect you from calling one set 'roleplayers' (which I think we all consider ourselves as here), and the other 'meta-gamers'.

Indeed, and this is my main concern with all these technically good ideas. They're fantastic in the world of insta-idea-to-code but aren't terribly realistic. Reputation systems are only ever as good as their impact upon gameplay. You can have the most superb system in the world, but if you don't implement it then it really doesn't matter. My understanding (perhaps 'assumption' would be a better term) of P:E is that it will use 'simple' +/-per faction reputation. Even in using this, extreme reputation differences will probably affect a handful of quests and minor reputation differences are unlikely to affect anything. As much as I love complicated systems, I can't see how increasing the axes of reputation will affect the gameplay to a degree worthy of its implementation. I know the good/evil axis is somewhat childish but it is very easy to implement. In terms of practicalities, New Vegas (as an example of heightened methods mentioned here) only used good/evil for gameplay, and the other differences purely affected the arbitrary titles given on your character sheet. Which is fine, but that's really what you have to expect.

The fact that it is a multitude of factors is painfully obvious, so much so that it really takes the meat out of the proverbial poll sandwich. I chose to ignore that option. ...and went for character advancement/levelling. ...unless we're talking jRPGs (:D) in which case it's character development. Play to your strengths, would be my reasoning.

When I think of crafting in single person RPGs, I think Arcanum had it best. Make crafting a viable system that will produce stock goods easily at minimum level, useful but not exceptional items at middling levels, and when crafting mastery is acheived allow an item that is as good as you will find elsewhere. Just don't do the Temple of Elemental Evil thing, where crafting is utterly mandatory, the items unsurpassable and the whole process requiring two dedicated party members as crafters. But the Baldur's Gate 2 system was nice, too. Personally, I just like the idea of the finest crafter in the world being someone who spent the last 200 years in a forge and needs you to collect the items, rather than a twenty year-old wizard who's hit an anvil 12 times in his life. (as an aside, when I played mmorpgs - and long may I hold my addiction at bay - crafting was my LIFE)

I always find threads like this interesting, because they tend to show the full range of reactions npcs provoke, and the different experiences and expectations people have. Personally, a lot of the characters accused of being 'irritating' in this thread were some of my favourite npcs, because they tended to bring the party to life. When I think of my favourite pcRPG characters, I immediately think of people like Aerie, Nalia, Anomen, Xan, Bastila, Mission, even Alistair (who I regard as one of the saving graces of an otherwise profoundly mediocre game). Frankly, and I know I'm opening the floodgates for a torrent of abuse here, the only active npcs I can think of who made games unpleasant for me (which is different than disliking their personality but finding it immersive - ie, Kreia) were Morte and Nordom, who to me spent far too much of the game seemingly mocking me for playing it (passively in Nordom's case). I think that if this thread shows anything, it's that it's worth generally creating npcs who fill similar roles, but offer different personalities. I'm sure, as others have said, that Josh et al can do rather better than airlift characters from other games, but as an example if the cleric resembles Aerie then make the Druid resemble HK. At least that way people can have a viable choice as to the personality of their party dependant upon their personal tastes. ...or, of course, don't, and I will love P:E forever for making a game where I struggled with a sub-optimal party to keep around characters I liked. Alas I think I'd be in the minority enjoying that. Anyway, to get back to the core of the matter, I disliked Morte and Nordom, so flame away.