Yonjuro

Some combinations seem like a stretch from a RP perspective. Being a Paladin/Assassin/Druid/Monk/Ranger is OK if your character has ADHD, I suppose, so maybe there are role play ideas I haven't thought of. Overall, I think it depends a lot on how fast you gain levels, class abilities etc. for game balance. In BG1, dual classing kind of made sense (in that a character might get interested in something new and change professions - I did that for real), and there was a real trade off. E.g. if you dualed Imoen to mage too early, she needed the knock spell to open any locks and if you did it too late, you were going to have trouble with some nasty traps in certain places (unless you swapped her out for a different thief for only those places with bad traps (in which case you were a munchkin power/meta gamer and none of this 'making sense' stuff applies to you )). In BG2, dual classing could still make sense for the same reason, a career change, but the downside was almost non-existent since XP came fast enough to gain your first profession back very quickly, so it was an easy way to build an overpowered character. I never played a multi class character because it never seemed to fit a character concept I wanted to play (but I did find Jan Jansen especially useful in several play throughs)

I disagree. I don't see the "leveling obsession" as something inherently possitive or necessary for a RPG.Wihle removing levels ersay isn't necessary, a differnet leveling paradigm is necessary. If the player can at any point reach "epic" levels, then the desing is inherently borken already, since it's going to be a b*** to balance or to provide meaningfull narrative or world. Personally, I' do away with HP increase orany automatic stat incfreases per level. Minimum increases. Skills. Feats. Something to make a character more knowledgable and versatile without making him OP. I personally WANT to be human (and thuis very killable) at lvl 20 just as much as I was at lvl 1. I don't want to see a dozen bandits and go "meh, they are no danger" as I walk right in their midsts and yawn as they stab me for 1HP of damage(or no damage). If I want to feel like part of that world/setting, then I have to feel like I am there. I should react to danger as a normal person living there would. Which is to feel fear every time I fight, because I know I CAN be killed. I see your point, but put yourself in Candlekeep as a squishy mage but with the spellbook and items from ToB and you'll walk through BG1 in no danger at all without ever hitting the 'Level Up' button, right?

For the record, I hope we see a bunch of sequels (the good things about not licensing somebody's rule set) and that it will be possible to play through them with a single character. It was one thing I especially liked about the BG series. Well, Bhaal always was kind of OCD like that. Anyway, I think the linear plot was a disaster. The previous games were good, in part, because of the exploration. Still, your point is spot on in that having a repeat of BG1 except with Elder Orbs in place of Xvarts wouldn't have made it good. One thing I would have liked was to have the earlier settings be a part of the story (I'm sure this was an IP/Licensing issue) but returning to Candlekeep to use the library, or something like that, could have been fun. Returning to your BG2 stronghold and doing things related to that could have worked too. You can get to the Watcher's Keep from either SoA or ToB but for some reason you can't get back to Athkatla once you've hit the expansion.

.... Not limiting cipher to enemies could have lots of interesting consequences -- and I bet the allies might have a thing or two to say about being used as spare batteries! Yes, attacking the monk pre-battle would buff up both of them. Hmmmm.

Yup. In particular, the oasis map was very silly. You have a main character that had gained immunity to +1 or lower weapons and 50 grunts with +1 weapons or lower. Not really a fight so much as a scheduling issue. (On the other hand, I suppose this does highlight how far your character has come from the days of running away from wolves outside of candlekeep.) I think the main thing I didn't like about ToB was the linear play. The exploration of the previous two installments wasn't there at all. All quests were mandatory (and not even a lot of choice in the order you do them in). Worse yet, the person giving orders to you was pretty obviously going to end up being the villain. You could see that coming but your PC could not.

...in settings where there's no reason for it not to work the same- it does.... I just wanted to underline this point. It's an opportunity to make something excellent. A favorite bad example of this is Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. There are statues galore that are supposed to make it look like you're in Rome. Some of them have the Roman names of gods others have the Greek names. The cost associated with building that place would have dwarfed the hour in the library (now, it would be the 15 minutes on Google) it would have taken to name them consistently. A tiny bit more work than that could have told an interesting story about the mythology. As it is, shiny crap. Why not spend the (minuscule, in comparison to the total) extra effort?

Related to this, the in-game elements need to strike a balance between orienting the player (with familiar things) and describing the novel parts of the world. Planescape:Torment did a great job of this with the sounds; e.g., in the Flaming Corpse Bar, it sounded like a ****tail party that had demons invited (oh wait, '****tail' is going to be censored by the forum software, isn't it?; I mean the kind of party where people stand around drinking mixed drinks and having discussions about subjects not pertaining to ****). It's worse than that. The developers might build such an uber weapon to make testing go faster and then when they remove it .... it will... you know .. proclaim that it's "too legit to quit" and remain in game forever.

That's a good distinction to make. These are almost two dimensions (since we're getting all mathematical in this thread) though not orthogonal dimensions (see, mathematics ). In an RPG, I think there are periods of being in the zone, during combat mostly, and then popping back out into the story. Using the IE games as examples, I think BG1 and IWD1 are similar enough in mechanics, but BG1 probably ends up being more immersive (for most people; as Lephys pointed out, it probably makes more sense to think of elements which support immersion rather than being intrinsically immersive) for two reasons: the story line is more personal in BG1 whereas in IWD1 your character is some anonymous adventurer with no clear motive to follow the main quest line. Secondly, in BG1 the non-linear exploration involves decisions that you can imagine your character making (Do I go with the hamster carrying guy to invade the gnoll stronghold? Sure, why not, he'll just get himself killed otherwise). Regarding zoning, mechanics that are two easy keep you out of the zone and mechanics that are too complex, in a certain sense, also keep you out. What I mean is that if you have something that requires a very specific solution that isn't readily apparent when it needs to be ('ugh, here he goes again with the math' - an exponential tree with a too few viable goal states). E.g. IWD1, early in the game, you get to a dungeon where, if you had known what you were in for, you would have purchased a weapon with a higher enchantment level for one of your party members at the expense of better equipment for others. Since you didn't know that, you now don't have the money to do it and have to shoot a magic missile at each of the monsters, go rest, and repeat ad nauseum until you've cleared the place out (or just reload to an earlier save and equip differently). Ack, you're out of the zone (and not a lot of motivation to get back into it). If that situation came up in BG1 you could elect to do other things first and come back later (e.g. if you went to the 'Farm' map with all of the ankhegs too early (without a scroll of acid protection and a ton of healing potions), you might decide to come back later). The immersive benefit of exploration is also a zoning benefit in this case.

Anyway, the meta-discussion here is interesting and all (where by 'interesting', I mean 'not interesting'), but to the main point of the thread: Some additional concrete examples from BG2 a game I find immersive except for: Dialog bugs, e.g.: 1. In a few places, Banter assumes PC is male. This is an immersion breaker for my GF who generally plays a female PC. 2. Slums district, "Couldn't you see he was armed", well, no - solo monk here, not armed, going to kill you thugs anyway. 3. Umar hills, Old man makes fun of party for wearing armor, see number 2. (also the case for Kensai, Mage, etc. playing solo or in a party where nobody has armor). These are concrete issues with straightforward fixes and they speak to game design (items need enough attributes (e.g. robe vs. armor) to support dialogs; dialogs need to check them etc.) Presumably people who write games know that already by now, but it is a concrete example of game software design influencing immersion. Voice acting: In the Spellhold asylum, one of the inmates, Aphril, is voiced by the same person who does Aerie and it is painfully obvious. Sometimes an actor can voice a part and sometimes not (the same person voices Ellesime and that works for me). Easy suggestion, get a different voice actor for each part. (but, if actors get paid like session musicians, that would make it more expensive) Dialog choices: Dialogs put words in your PC's mouth and it can be immersion breaking if they are out of character. E.g., in the first visit to the slums with Jaheira in your party, you get three options for what do we do next (these are not direct quotes): "How the hell should I know", "Let's just go to a tavern, what difference does it make anyway" etc. This doesn't sound like the character I thought I was playing. It is a ham handed attempt at character development that doesn't work - apparently related to the romance story line. Romances: While we're on that subject, in game options to prevent the (awkwardly written) romances would have been good for immersion, maybe something during character creation. As it is, one can drop Aerie from the party and pick her back up to end the romance storyline but shadow keeper is required to shut down Jaheira (or just dropping here entirely or choosing sufficiently rude dialog options, but both seem out of character esp. if you played through BG1 with Jaheira and Khalid in your party). Some people have fond memories of the romance plots (probably those who played the game during their younger years) others do not. The above are more like bug fixes and it would be useful to hear more examples from people of such immersion killers. Also, getting a handle on what makes a game immersive to begin with would also be interesting. In a previous thread, I posited that BG1 and BG2 might benefit from the Infinity Engine look and feel since they leave more to the imagination than later, more realistically rendered, 3D games (which aren't always realistic enough on their own and may not match one's own imagination). Not everyone agreed, but (the constructive part of) the discussion brought out some good points about consistency, book-like vs. film-like experiences etc.

Sure, I agree that 'power' for both magic power and muscle power doesn't make a lot of sense. I was trying to come up with a stat that makes sense and that would be beneficial to fighters and wizards (and presumably other classes who would derive different things from it). Anther example could be something like 'out of the box thinking' that gives, say, fighters more surprise attacks and wizards a wider variety of spells. You (or, more to the point, JESawyer) can probably think of 5-6 stats that make sense and that every class would want a.k.a. no dump stats.

I don't think we know what the actual stat is going to be yet though, do we? What if it was 'training persistence?' If a wizard trains a lot (by reading and practicing spells etc.) the training effect will be different than for a warrior who is using training time to hit things with weapons, guard with a shield etc.. Having the property that you spend more effort getting good at what you do is the stat that you could put your points into and the result would be different for different classes. The D&D stats of STR and INT, if they exist in P:E, would be derived stats from training persistence (with different numbers for our two different characters who have the same training persistence number). Would that address your concern?

Sure, and I'm not trying to pick a fight with you here either Right, "we're spending XXmillion dollars to make this game - what? 10k for writers, that's crazy, get someone cheaper!!!' I see what you mean now. We have talking past each other a little bit. When I said symbolic representation, I was including the visual parts as well. The spell casting animation may be functioning as a an element of a visual language of sorts. If this is true, then making the visuals 3D and more realistic could detract from the experience, or at best, not do anything. That is what I was getting at when I mentioned BG Reloaded vs. original Baldur's Gate - I don't know if that is true or not since I haven't played BG Reloaded (BTW, in any case, I am impressed by the level of effort that went into that mod). TLDR; Another way to say this hypothesis is: Making a game 3D and more realistic might make it function less well as a visual language while falling short as a fully realistic representation.

Fair enough. Here's where I'm coming from: Let's look at BG1 as a specific example that (according to me) works well as a game. It is kind of minimalist, but it works the way that a good novel works (using our terminology from earlier in the thread). What I mean is that, by the end of the game, I cared what happened to the characters in my party. I lost two of my party members in the final fight, and it was a bit like when a sympathetic character dies in a novel or movie (the two were Khalid and Dynaheir so, in hindsight, it wasn't really a big problem ). My installation of BG1 is using Tutu, the banter pack etc.( a 'modern' install of the game). I'm still surprised at how well it worked for me as a game. I don't say this out of nostalgia for my youth because I didn't play it in my youth, I played it a year or two ago as an 'old'. I also say it as someone who hasn't played many games (and who has finished almost none of them). When something starts to feel like sitting at a computer poking keys and doing mouse clicks (i.e., not immersive), I declare it unfun and stop playing it (these include NWN, Oblivion, KOTOR etc.; games that have the benefit of better tech. but didn't work for me as games). So, instead of my original general question: Why does BG1 work as well as it does (for the subset of us that think that it works)? Is it the story? (hmm, maybe, but the story is pretty standard stuff.) The character development ? (errr, even with the banter pack, you have a few tens of character interactions ...) The pretty backgrounds and music? (well, they are kind of nice, but....). The comic relief? (ok, Albert and Rufie were funny and all, but you need to have comic relief from something for it to be comic relief). I think people have had some good insights in this thread already, but there is a fine line between a game that works (for me) and the other 99.99% percent of them (that I won't bother with for long). (Obviously, I'm hoping that P:E will be on the good list.) Of course, the symbolic vs. realistic angle is certainly not the whole story: e.g. IWD didn't work for me; I think because the story is too sequential and rolling a full party isn't as much fun as recruiting, say, Minsc; so story and characters matter. So, I started this thread because it occurred to me that a game like BG1 works because by representing the story the way that it does, it causes the player to think about it in a different way (and maybe it hands you enough detail to construct the world in your head instead of constructing it for you out of not quite good enough 3D graphics??).

Ok, I see what you mean. Sure, I agree there is nothing inherent in a more realistic game that should make it less immersive - quite the reverse; one would expect technology to improve the gaming experience. In fact, it's very surprising that BG2 is still one of the highest rated games of all time on Metacritic (so is BG1 esp. based on user scores) considering how many games have been produced with the benefit of better technology (not to mention the much larger development budgets and the ability to learn from earlier games; imagine how much the industry has spent making things that are, deservedly, much further down that list). Yet here we all are salivating over P:E. So, I guess I could rephrase my original post as something like, do the IE games work as well as they do because it is easier to make an immersive experience when you use a more symbolic less realistic representation?

So we have two ideas floating around here (and nobody really buying my original hypothesis ) : First we have artistic coherence: BTW, I agree on both Oblivion and P:T (though I've ranted elsewhere about some of the gameplay aspects of P:T) I see what you mean. Although, faces seem really hard to do well. Mass Effect may have worked better with less emphasis on the animated faces (I don't have a strong opinion about that since I didn't play it for very long (or maybe that means I DO have a strong opinion about the facial animations)). And we have the book-like vs. movie-like experience: So, what we could be seeing with the IE games is a combination of good writing and a simple audio/visual representation (more symbolic than realistic, according to my way of thinking) that causes the brain of the user to process more of the story. I called this 'immersive' in my original post(, though not everyone agrees with that word choice).

So, if I'm getting your point, you seem to be saying that the IE games might work because they are cohesive rather than my 'symbol' hypothesis. (BTW, I don't know what you're referring to by the "uncanny valley" spiel). One reason why it may not suggest that is that if you were to compare the IE games with the same stories played with pencil and paper where you were doing dice rolls and calculations yourself, the mechanics of playing could intrude on the story. Also, the voice and graphics of the IE games are adding something. My hypothesis is that they are adding something like a symbolic language. Fair enough. Let's not use the word immersive. Suppose that for the sake of discussion, we say there is a 'book - movie contiuum'. I'll just throw this out there: The IE games might be closer to the book side where they succeed whereas many newer games have tried to put themselves on the movie side and failed.

The recent topic on facial expressions made me think of something. Rather than hijack that thread, I'm starting this one. It seems to me that one of the reasons why the IE games are as immersive as they are is because the graphics, voice snippets etc. work more like a symbolic language than a realistic portrayal. Other games with newer tech. have tried to be more realistic depictions with facial expression, full voice acting, 3D scenes etc. but they tend to be less immersive than the more tech. primitive IE games (at least, to me they are). In other words, maybe the IE games take place in your brain and the newer 3D games take place on the screen? Has anyone played Baldur's Gate Reloaded (the original BG content redone for the NWN2 engine)? The experiment we will never be able to do would be to get people who have never played BG and have half of them play the original and the other half to play BG Reloaded and see who is drawn into the story more. If there is something to this symbolic vs. realistic dichotomy, what would a 3D game need to be more immersive: --facial expressions derived in high res. from human actors and rendered better? --crisper feeling navigation? --other? or: --more symbolic less realistic images? (are cartoonish 3D games more immersive than realistic 3d games?) I would be interested to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

Yup, and completely unlike real life, finding piles of money is not awesome.

But that actually has a surprising downside. Once you equip with the stuff, you know you're not going to find anything better because there is nothing better. This immediately takes out all the fun in shopping and looting. "Nope, nothing good found this time either, and there never will be again." Agreed. I see the appeal but I really don't like this idea. For me, a big part of the fun is finding the items that help your party. When you literally never find anything useful (because it's always inferior to what you can buy at the corner blacksmith shop), that detracts from the game. Items you find are then no different from finding gold (except that you have an extra step to turn them into gold with which you buy the item you really want). Even when there is no randomized loot and you're on your Nth replay of a game, you have strategic considerations e.g. in BG2, after you've done it once, you know that going to the guarded compound in the temple district will yield Celestial Fury after a hard fight. If you were playing as a solo Swashbuckler, you might like to get it as soon as you can figure out a way to win that fight whereas a solo monk might not bother because by the time you can win that fight you don't need the sword anymore (<--not really true if running away a lot is part of the game plan, but I digress). Anyway, it adds replay value to the game. I think if you went down the street to Katanas 'r' Us to buy CF (or to Quarterstaves 'r' Us for the Staff of the Magi for a more extreme example) whenever you have the money (that you, presumably, got as a side effect of XP farming diseased gibberlings ), then something is lost from the experience.

A major advantage to this idea is that it could add (a lot of) replay value to the game. If you picked up 5 of the recruitable NPCs you might be better off solving the main quest in one way whereas if you picked up a different subset or rolled some of your own characters it might work better to do an entirely different set of things and/or to do them in a different order due to the character classes having different strengths. If that were the case, someone wishing to write the comprehensive munchkin walkthrough with the 'solution' would need to write 56 of them (for the (8 choose 5) combinations of joinable NPCs) and that still doesn't account for smaller parties, player rolled characters and parties that change over the course of the game. This seems promising though it could be hard to do this on a a given budget and make it a compelling story that is also fun to play (if it becomes a guessing game of what to do next based on who you have in your party, then that isn't the same thing as 'replay value' ; if any subset/order is just fine, then you have the 'open world wander around doing whatever and wondering if you're making any progress because there is no obvious thing to do next' problem ).

This seems important. In Tolkien's books, the hobbits, in addition to being small people who end up doing big things as part of the plot, were also a good literary device since they were from a far off backwater and needed to have the lore explained to them and hence to the reader. The sprinkling of lore gave a sense of depth to the books (of course, he spent several decades developing the lore, so your mileage may vary as to how well that works in the game world (it could be *very* effective for the Nth sequel referring to lore from P:E to P:E_n-1)). Anyway, the point I'm trying to bring out is that, if done well, it will give a sense of depth, if not, it will just be a bunch to stuff to read (or to ignore).

'Degenerate' seems like a strong word for most of these (except maybe the "alertness level reset" thing ). As an aside, you might have fun soloing BG1 as an Archer (using Tutu) or a fighter putting all pips in bows (using the vanilla game). With this build, I can't think of a way to beat the game without creative use of potions and arrows. I think I (at least partially) cured my hoarding tendencies by doing something like this. Anyway, for these two examples, 'alertness level reset' and 'hoarding' : I think I would prefer that P:E fixes the former (by not resetting the alertness level), but for hoarding tendencies, I think it would be annoying if, say, potions had an expiration date (or worse, if arrows had an expiration date). I think I'd rather try to fix that one in my own game play. What do you think?

I thought of adding a house rule that would tie different spell schools to different attributes. Enchantment and Conjuration to CHA, Illusion to DEX, Alteration and Evocation to INT, Necromancy to CON, Abjuration to WIS, that sort of thing. It would make a kind of sense and yield a much wider variety of relatively balanced mages. Didn't bet as far as working out the details, and eventually gave up on the idea because I didn't want to add even more complexity to the system. Yeah, it would probably require figuring out how the chosen attribute works with each spell and then working the bugs out ...

True. But that's one of the reasons we use "balancing" to describe what we're going for. When a scale is balanced, both sides of it are equal in weight. They aren't simply equal. Yes. To expand on this with an example: If, in the D&D world, CHR was useful for a mage, maybe it would allow, say, elemental summoning without a chance of your summon turning hostile whereas a high INT mage with CHR of 3 would almost always have summons turn hostile. Maybe CHR would cause domination or charm types of spells to work better. That would mean that you can roll a higher CHR lower INT mage and play in a different style than a very high INT mage with CHR of 3 (e.g. maybe the lower INT mage isn't as good with chain contingency spells or whatever). You would have to play differently to use each build. I think this makes the game more compelling and gives you more replay value. The game certainly doesn't ever 'win itself' in this scenario - quite the reverse.

Yes. in a nutshell. Although to be fair, if we were to map out D&D-like stats to Hagler and Leonard, neither one of them had low intelligence. I'd place Hagler's pretty high --above average-- (15 or 16) But lower than Leonard's, who was a pure ring genius (18 INT for him). Agreed. That's what I was trying to say with my no dump stats comment. Heh. I know a few Hagler fans who would say exactly that.