Diogo Ribeiro

Feels good to know that your dream date is there for you because you made some weird or fairly nonsensical choices over the course of the game.

Hmm, Fallout's Traits and Arcanum's Backgrounds taken to the next step. Sounds good.

Yeah, and you would know . Let me check - hm, not finding any code here. Sorry, we have brains, not computer circuits. I'm sure you'll learn some day. Your wannabe feminist activism and assumptions about what i know of women is, quite frankly, wasted on me. If you can't be bothered to accept lighthearted comments such as these, i suggest you don't even try.

How could you NOT enjoy Chocobo Racing ? Didn't see much of a point to it. The gimmick wore off after some races.

I don't know much how minigames are used today, but in the days of FF7 they were very stupid, nonsensical and game breaking. I got the feeling my intelligence was being constantly questioned by the developers.

Ditto. <_< Well, in both cases, success with them all depends on how you push their buttons... >_>

I know that concept art is important (in a way), and it was my mistake of not really explaining what i meant with the question. In his list concept art was put side by side with other things which are far more important to a game, which led me to make the question.

If you're taking it at face value, i agree. You're bound to be struck more by an event thats displayed realistically than a gob of pixels collapsing. I just found that, on par with the characterization, i never got to feel anything for the character. A slum-girl getting stabbed by a goth boy somehow didn't felt as striking as having Leo sacrifice himself to the death, or even seeing Cyan's three reasons for living (wife, child, king) gone in minutes. Precisely.

I must be a very strange person. People often tell me the points in which they like and/or liked a game, and i just blink and stare at them. I usually found the moments they liked the be "meh" at best. I'm either a robot or an alien experiment. The reason i'm saying this is that i saw Aeris' death a mile away. After having played games like Phantasy Star 1, FF IV, V and VI, i was already used to seeing characters die. Then when i noticed everyone was taken by surprise at this character's death, crying, claiming its one of the greates moments in history, making fanfics... I was *stunned*.

OMG U TEH FANBUOY!!! j/k FF7 was so overhyped its not even funny. As i played i often laughed at the game, not with the game. I severely disliked almost everything about it. The translation wasn't helping either.

Now i really need to replay it.

1. I think so. Stupid thing, really, FF8 is my favourite game of the series, yet i don't remember much of it now, as i only played it twice, and lent it to a friend of mine, who hasn't still returned it <_< 2. True, but it does constitute the premise for a combination of interactive and cinematic. 3. "Drawing cards" in combat? Perhaps you meant drawing magic and the ocasional GF?

Thats true, i remember that. The Garden invasion led by Seifer is both interactive (although the scene i'm thinking is sort of like a minigame, go Square!) and cinematic. The particular scene i'm thinking was that of Squall and a Galbadian (?) soldier duking it out while hanging from a jetpack. The mission was to disable the opponent before he disabled you. The jetpack would fly around with both characters hanging on to it, and on ocasions, events happened in the background (specially the big scene between the two armies fighting).

Is there a problem with people comparing FO2 with D2? I'd find it weirder if people were comparing FO2 or D2 with some of those you mentioned, however. At least FO2 and D2 have similar aspects which can be compared.

Lets hope not, or deaf people will be screwed. Concept art is important?

You could always make it so the story was not dependant of him. If you use the old "two kingdoms at war" storyline, they can keep being at war without your input. Dynamic changes across the gameworld, oblivious to player input, can make it so the evolvement of the game doesn't need to be player-driven. You could even set up large events which would happen, and be carried out, without the player being nowhere near them. I suggest try playing a bit of Avernum 3, which in a way, does what i'm talking of. Cities can be destroyed if you don't help them, but you're not required to help them as well. This poses the problem that you can be a successful adventurer, even doing courier jobs between towns. But if you don't help them, eventually said towns will be destroyed and if you were a courier/tradesmen the destroyed cities pose a problem to your income and means of survival now. You can either decide to prevent this, or ignore it and find other means of living. Not only that, even if you do help some cities, that doesn't mean they won't suffer from other raider/monster attacks, and it doesn't mean they won't have aditional problems further on, regardless of what you did before.

True, true. I think comparing it to a movie is not exactly a correct form of comparison, because a movie is meant to be cinematic and doesn't rely on player input to move forward, so its expected of it; but a videogame relies on interactivity to be appreciated and to move forward as well. Granted. One of the things I also tend to dislike about cutscenes is that i'm a fan of the concept of conveying something's meaning displayed without flair, even if in a scripted fashion. I like the "emergent gameplay" concept and how something like interaction between me and others (or NPCs among themselves) doesn't need a cutscene at all. Quickest example being Deus Ex, which, no doubt had its long share of cutscenes but also had many occasions where NPCs were simulating conversations between themselves, and all you needed was to get close to them to hear it. This kind of approach was, in my opinion, engaging and not as irritating as a cutscene. To be honest, i don't remember many cutscenes in HL, aside the initial event. Most of what i remember from the game is just scripted events which you could be active in (although the majority of times you couldn't do anything useful), but cutscenes, nope.

Why not have the best of both worlds? A game can still be a pure RPG and be a cinematic experience. KotOR maybe overdid the cut-scenes a little, taking away control from the player too many times, but the story couldn't work without them. Technology is changing the face of RPGs, and games in general. You can do so much more now with graphics and sound that they cry out for a movie feel, and designers are only too happy to oblige. Even PS:T had a number of cut-scenes; they weren't too intrusive but they were there to further the story, like KotOR. So it certainly shows that a game need not be crippled by cinematics. Cutscenes' basic function is to further a story element when player involvement is not really at stake in the event's unfolding. Player involvement could've been the cause of it, but representation of the actual outcome is what a cutscene usually handles, or should. A cutscene becomes intrusive the minute it takes away command from the player to just show something the player could've noticed himself without a Hollywoodesque extravaganza showing it to him. Nothing wrong with cutscenes, but taking away player control when the player could either solve the situation himself, or see it for himself, is what people tend to dislike about them. If we wanted to have a cinematic experience we'd go to the movies. By the by, which cutscenes do you feel would make the story collapse if they weren't there? Which do you feel were absolutely necessary to show in cutscene form instead of giving control to players?

Most of the options are fairly easy to grasp as their names tend to make it clear what they're about. The major difference is that ToEE has more options to learn (most of which one can gradually learn, they aren't required to be learned in full from the get go). And mastering the controls isn't rocket sciencetist material either. If the tutorial didn't explained it for players (like the tutorial in KoTOR did as well), the point and click gameplay is hardly daunting.

Even without a manual, ToEE was fairly intuitive. The hyperlink system for the in-game help was very helpful.

1) Yes. 2) Which is why i pointed this out. If rules adherence is not important, then choose a system and come up with the rules as you see fit; don't buy each new ruleset and associated material. But the thing is that most people do it anyway. 3) Bioware didn't had to follow the rules because of the setting per se; they should just have took the rules closer because thats what they were working with, the rules. They could've just used, say, source material which didn't include the rules, and still make up their own. The standard company rule of giving someone a ruleset to work with and not caring what they do with it is what got us in this mess. One example of this being a problem, mostly for gamers, was of how some people were stunned at some of ToEE's rules after playing Bioware's AD&D/D&D games, which they thought to be mistakes or bugs, but were actually better implementations.

^That's good to know.... I think

The point was that this was done even before using excessive voice talent.

The "universal opinion" that the game is rubbish is not founded on its rules adherence, as well as KoTOR's success isn't based on its lack of better rules adherence. ToEE failed because of other factors and KoTOR succeeded because of other things as well. I daresay that both would have had pretty much the same results if they were not based on any rules. In the meantime... As far as rules not being "holy writ". Why is that, in the case of D&D, you've had 3 separate versions, each with their rules corrections, and whatnot? Why not just go with the initial rule system and have people change it as they wish? Shouldn't, after all, rule 0 apply on this one as well? When someone says that the rules from PnP don't translate well to a PC game, there isn't factual basis for this claim. If the presentation isn't changed in the process, nothing prevents it from working. You're basically taking an example of someone - in this case Bioware - who claims they don't successfully translate, but you're forgetting that they're not working with a correct base system. Its easy to say the system doesn't work in a PC game, but perhaps it'd be easier if people realized why: RT is the problem as it doesn't allow for a good transition of it, period. In realtime most of the D&D system falls apart, a basic example being AsoO, which someone at Bioware forgot there wasn't a reason for their existence in RT, yet they decided to include anyway. That's why they claim they have to adapt them. Sure, its their decision for their games, I have nothing I could possibly attack them with on that matter. Its their decision for their games, let them do as they wish. However there's a fine line between saying they can't successfully translate, and that they can't fir their own already made design. Which is pretty much the thing. They decide they want to go with a given system they created, then try to shove the rules of the license into it. Obviously this isn't going to work. This kind of translation never works. But don't doubt for a minute that if they developed a game with the rules as a top priority, instead of having them be the last to consider, that it'd be more rules-focused.

@ShadowPaladin V1.0: Agreed. @Gromnir: