kanisatha

Hehe. I guess I must be the only person who liked that theme song. I was very sad when ST:E got canceled. Still consider it to have been one of the better shows out there.

Actually you and I are in agreement. I also am very happy that Obsidian has tried to create a new combat system that is complex and intricate while at the same time being different from the D&D D20 system (and especially a system that doesn't rely as much on random chance). This is my personal preference, and apparently yours as well. But I believe my conclusion does apply when it comes to the vast majority of gamers out there, almost all of whom are never visitors to this forum. Your point that the only way to get people to appreciate a complex combat system is to keep at it with the games you make is very much valid, except for that developers need to show good profit margins today and not twenty years from now.

Yes! I saw this story too. The aliens are real y'all!!

Yes this is what I've pointed out as well. P:K has complex rules but because it's based on a longstanding TT game system it has a core group of fans for whom the rules are transparent. By contrast the complex rules of PoE don't have that same advantage, whereas this issue was moot for the D:OS games because even though they also were using a "new" rules system that system was very easy to figure out and not complex at all. So the lesson for me is if you're going to use a new rules system that players are not going to be familiar with, make it simple, intuitive, and easy to understand. If you want to use a complex system, use one that is already well-established (ex. the D20 system).

"Create"? Riggggggght. Bet they were hiking in the desert at Roswell when the idea just came to them.

Ohhhh, so that explains why you're not liking her too much. Yeah she's definitely not melee/frontline material. She is best for shooting from the back. There's even a specific build for her you can find in this forum that makes it possible for her to one-shot powerful enemies later in the game.

If you set her up right, including her equipment and tanking up her fox, she becomes quite deadly as an archer later on.

BBC America is doing a complete run of ST:DS9, something like 18 episodes each Monday and Tuesday beginning 6 am tomorrow. I've got my DVR set to record, though I'm concerned I won't have the time to watch them before I run out of recording space.

LOL. Me too. I just love P:K and am looking forward to backing this one with a good amount of cash. P:K is easily the funnest cRPG I've played since playing BG1 for the first time when it came out.

No you are blatantly wrong about this. Reviews are essentially anecdotal, and having a whole lot of them makes no difference whatsoever. The sample was not randomly selected, and as such provides zero validity. No respectable journal would publish a study based on online reviews. And yes, a biased sample *is* worse than no sample at all. Nope, you guys are the ones directing blatant and unfounded arrogance at me. You three are part of a very small clique of posters here who think the forum belongs to you, that you are superior to everyone else in the forum and get to play at being gatekeepers of the forum, and everyone else must bow down to your "knowledge" and "wisdom." And its not just this thread but every thread in the forum in which you post. You constantly denigrate and put down any poster who dares to disagree with you or refuses to go along with your line on things, and in the process drive away any and all other posters from the thread so that you can monopolize the thread with your inane posts. The best threads in this forum are those where you are not involved, where thoughtful, civil and inclusive discussions take place. The moment any of you decide to jump into a thread it goes downhill very quickly thereafter, which is exactly what happened to this thread from where it first began. So I'm done with trying to discuss anything with you. Feel free to continue on with your silly little echo chamber "discussion."

I did point out a flaw in your argument, a very fundamental flaw at that. Your entire argument, including your rationale for playing down my theory, is based on considering user reviews (as you put it). But user reviews completely miss two very major segments of the overall population: (1) those people who did not buy the game and never had any intention of buying the game, and (2) those people who bought the game, did not like it, but were not sufficiently motivated to write a review. I would estimate these two groups make up the overwhelming majority of the population. As such, user reviews are not only a non-representative sample of the population, they are a biased sample. So, for me, user reviews are not "known data." They are not data at all. Thus, when you use user reviews as your rationale for any argument that you make, for me that argument is completely unreasonable. I would not accept any inference drawn from user reviews (or even critics' reviews for that matter) as being reasonable/logical/factual.

There was a news article late last year interviewing the devs and they said the game had made enough money for it to have been sufficiently profitable for them (relative to their budget I would guess). I tried Googling the article but cannot seem to find it now.

This resonates with me. I think you have something here that makes sense (to me).

Ok. This is a fair-minded take and one I can accept, so long as we agree this works both ways, which is to say I also am not convinced by the personal opinions of certain others.

But where's the science? I don't see any science anywhere in this thread. You are being dismissive of my posts because they are my personal opinions even while yourself only offering personal opinions too but somehow spinning your personal opinions as "science" and "reason." This entire thread is nothing but personal opinions and unsubstantiated theories, and your personal opinions and theories are no better than mine.

"Exhaustive critical scrutiny"? Yeah right. Basically your entire post boils down to: We who know what's what were having a wonderful discussion involving patting each other on the back about how incredible our insights are, and you who don't belong here barged into our discussion with an alternative view that we disagree with and reject. So we don't like you and you need to go away. Whatever. I'm not interested in this any further. The best thing Obsidian can do to make their next game popular is to completely disregard any and all "discussions" in this forum. It's no wonder Sawyer prefers to interact with every other forum except this one.

This is exactly it for me as well. Doesn't make me sick, but it is very uncomfortable, constricted, and extremely frustrating and exasperating.

Huh? Where did I do anything of the sort?

Ok, and my theory is the same. It is very reasonable, and it does not conflict with any known data. That's my point. Everything in this discussion is theory and conjecture. So why the piling on?

On the basis of my personal intuition which is based on my more general observations of society as a social/behavioral scientist.

And yet quite a number of other people out there somewhere apparently loved the game, right? That's exactly my point. You and I and others on this forum are not even in the tiniest bit a representative sample of gamers generally. So if we're not representative of the general gamer population, the things we liked/disliked about the game are also not going to be representative of that general population. That is why, instead of thinking about the things I personally liked/disliked about PoE, I am trying to think about factors that are more generic and thus likely to be factors affecting that general population. Yes I like everyone else here don't have any data of my own. But that's not preventing anyone else here from offering their opinions and speculations, which is the entirety of this discussion on all the multiple threads on this question in this forum. So why are my observations and speculations different and subject to a different standard? I am a scientist and I understand how inference works quite well.

What percentage of gamers write reviews? My guess would be an extremely small percentage. I've been playing video games since the late eighties and have never once written a review even though there many games I've played that I ended up disliking or even hating (D:OS1 for example). Furthermore, going by Steam reviews, a lot of reviews tend to be generic and superficial and nonspecific. I don't think player reviews can provide a good picture. Achievements also are not particularly useful because they won't capture the person who played the game a little bit, got exasperated, and walked away.

I flat out refused to play TOW because of the first-person thing. I just can't.

I do have several friends for whom things were this way, but I wasn't going to use that as my argument because that is clearly anecdotal. Btw, I also was/am fine with the PoE1/2 combat system, as are many on this forum obviously. But out there in the gaming real world, I am convinced views are quite different. And also again note, the D:OS combat system is so very simplistic and easy to figure out. This is indisputable in my view, and as such how can one ignore this when making comparisons of sales between the two games? For me it is glaringly obvious. My personal model of this issue is as follows: D20 combat system => Easy; PoE1/2 combat system => Hard TB combat => Easy; RTwP combat => Hard Classless system with limited character creation choices => Easy; Class-based system with many classes, subclasses, and multiclassing => Hard Etc. The more the game combines 'Easy' over 'Hard,' the more popular it will be.

Sorry, disagree. First, not at all the point but ... at least in the US the numbers are very clear that an ever smaller percentage of people are extremely math/science literate while an ever larger percentage on the other side are totally incompetent. An extreme bimodal distribution. Two, P:K did well because it uses the D20 system, which a good number of even casual RPG gamers are quite familiar with. Three, RTwP has nothing to do with this issue. There are plenty of RT/RTwP games out there that are very successful. But in the tiny niche genre of old-school classic RPGs yes we're currently going through a phase where TB is the fad for many within that niche. But again even that only reinforces my point, because TB by its very nature is a simplification of the combat system. Developers are going TB precisely because more casual gamers find it *easier* to handle than RTwP.