Ohioastro
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Posts posted by Ohioastro
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Rheingold: Yeah, we are spoiled rotten atm. Last year was great, and this year has had a fantastic start with PoE, and soon we'll have Serpent of the Staglands and Witcher 3 (although I've never liked that game series. Don't ask me why. I have the games and I really tried to get into them. I guess it's the fixed protagonist that somehow rubs me in the wrong way, for starters.)
What I like about the Witcher series is that it really catches the idea of being in a living world. The villages are places that you could imagine being actual villages, not a half dozen houses with questgivers in them. They're boorish and crude, of course, but that's just a style choice, and it doesn't bother me. I just had a devil of a time beating the starting sequence in Witcher 2 - although once I got the hang of the controls it got easier. But the "I can't complete the tutorial!" feeling was sure a new thing for me...
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Ideally this will be a sign for the developers to completely ignore a community of toxic people in the next round. They're certainly making a very clear impression here, and it's not a positive one. The people involved don't seem to understand the most basic elements of persuasion - how to convince people that your ideas are good ones, which doesn't involve childish claims 'of "butthurt", doesn't involve picking apart what others say to prove that you're right and they're wrong, but does involve some minimal human interaction skills.
If I really wanted to slam PoE I wouldn't write attack pieces - because only the true believers would make it past the first paragraph, and my tone would antagonize the people I was trying to reach. If I really wanted to turn opinions around, I start by trying to understand what someone else is saying, indicate that I understand where they're coming from, then engage; they might change their mind in a way that calling them an idiot won't.
As far as I'm concerned. it's an interesting new system, I got more than my money's worth, and I'm looking forward to the next installments. With more resources I think that they can do a good job on things like encounter design, AI, and a deeper conversation / consequences system, and a bit of balance tweaking. And the people who have played the same games over and over and over and over can go back and play them again, instead of trying to turn a new game into a pale shadow of an old one.
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Calling other people retarded and the like should really provoke moderator action. Personal name calling like that is BS.
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I'd add that these numbers are running around the highest of any current game - so, no, this isn't some quirk. And it includes both the pro reviews and user reviews - the latter are typically far lower if there is a substantial unhappy user base. (Compare Dragon Age Origins with Dragon Age 2, for example,.)
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Charisma in the classic games is a true dump stat. As long as one member of the party has it - and a couple of classes use it - everyone else can set it to three with absolutely zero consequences. Calling any stat in PoE a dump stat is an abuse of language and an indication of someone who doesn't understand what it means. It doesn't mean "I can carefully arrange my party members so that the fact that I made a character weak and vulnerable can be mitigated". It doesn't mean "gee, I didn't notice all of the saving throws that I missed, or the opponents that I made harder". It means that it had NO IMPACT ON YOUR CHARACTER, which is &*() objectively untrue for PoE stats. While, say, charisma had zero impact in the games that the same people scrape and bow to.
Anyone arguing to the contrary is playing word games.
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Kiting is nothing more than abusing limited AI. In my view you might as well use console commands, and more to the point the designer hates it. So any engagement solution that might actually happen has to not feature kiting.
Games where everyone has to stand up to melee attacks are games where all of the classes end up being almost the same.
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The original review was a multi-page hatefest, declaring this the worst game that Obsidian ever made.
Actually, it says "the worst Obsidian game I’ve played to date" - who knows which ones he's played
"Worse than Dungeon Siege 3" is a clue.
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I don't understand what is a problem here. This is not bitching and whining but poiting out valid issues with POE.
If somebody already likes the game, I don't think that reading any review will change his/her mind.
When I read such a review I can see that I am not the only one who can see its flaws.
The original review was a multi-page hatefest, declaring this the worst game that Obsidian ever made. The intent of &%*($)$ like that is to tear the game down, period. None of this "constructive criticism". If you hate absolutely everything about a game, you're not pointing out "valid issues", because if there is a point to saving a game, there should be something of value in it. And the original review recognizes no redeeming features at all.
And, no, putting things in the worst possible light is *poison*. Instead of enjoying something on its own terms, the cool kids are telling you that it's really lame. It;s the gaming equivalent of "don't those pants look goofy?"
In terms of issues - every single one of these games has a system. When you figure the system out, you can beat every single one of them. At every difficulty level. This isn't true for action games, where you also need fast enough reflexes, but for games like PoE and the IE games it is absolutely correct. So all of these "flaws" are going to emerge no matter what, which is why writing hit jobs and hate pieces on the game is absurd.
So if someone complains that "once I cracked the system it was easy", I say "so what"? I got a 100+ hours out of this game, which is terrific value. I got a lot more out of Morrowind, about the same out of Skyrim. And when I played BG / IWD / etc. the first go around I finished them, then did other things - replaying them years later. I can easily see myself doing that with PoE too.
If there were hard counters people would be bitching that the game was too easy once you knew rock-paper-scissors. If there were more "fun" builds people would be bitching that the classes were imbalanced, or ability X is OVERPOWERED NERF IT. (Yea, it already happens. Stupidly over-powered Baldurs Gate style builds would not improve this.)
Improving the game is taking the game on its own terms and trying to suggest ways of making it better. It's not trying to convince people who like the game that they're really losers with bad taste if they don't hate it.
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And, of course, the one sentence opinions of internet posters are sufficient to decide matters.
Don't the put-down crowd have other hobbies?
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You can do something fun and creative within a lot of different structures. I'm not a big fan of action gaming, for instance, but I really liked the Bioshock series - and even though I'm no longer young, with quicker reflexes, the Witcher series worked for me.
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It's a (polished) mediocre game that I don't like. The above average bits are non-gameplay related.
The best thing about it is clearly the art. However I do enjoy playing games more than looking at them.
*sigh*
I don't like --> mediocre. You of all people...
Let's say it has RTwP combat designed below average level on all accounts and call it a day without jumping to conclusions about overall quality of the game? I don't want to sound ungrateful for all your really hard work and passion you poured into the beta, but you decided you don't like the game long before it was done.
Why do we need to convince people that they actually like POE when they have said (and explained) that they don't? It's just one game and people are going to dislike it, life goes on.
Enough about POE, let's get back to Star Trek and Song of Ice and Fire discussion!
Conversely, why do people feel that coming to a message board dedicated to fans of a game and telling them that a game they enjoyed is complete &(($ and the worst game ever made will accomplish anything positive?
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I'm not having issues either. There are always some people who have problems. Games where bugs are a huge issue have forums a lot angrier than this one.
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And I still find myself shaking my head - here is a game that is doing better in public reception (and, I'd bet sales) than they had any right to expect - and we're talking about this game as if it is some complete failure. It's Alice in Wonderland. As a direct counterexample, Might & Magic X, Wasteland 2, and Shadowrun Returns got genuinely mixed feedback on release - which is the sort of case where developers really do usually step back and reconsider things. Berlin, for instance, is considerably more substantial than the first SR game was - answering the strongest critique.
I think that they'd be well served adjusting encounter design, working on more clever AI, and not on drastically messing around with game systems if they're working on changes in the combat side. You can keep engagement and change how sticky it is; you can throw enemies at a party from different directions, or have more ranged opponents who are more clever about targeting damage dealers, etc. To me, it is a lot more important to integrate story line ingredients more deeply. Having reputation matter more, or having people respond more strongly via background;
By contrast, ripping up game systems and starting over means that the things above just don't happen - you have fixed resources And I've seen enough game systems in action that I know that you can make a fun game in a lot of different ways. The criticism here is largely not helpful because it largely consists of people advocating wholesale redesign of a successful game launch, basically nursing grudges from beta. "Engagement is too sticky" is a valid critique; "throw it out" is not a useful suggestion. Those advocating hard counters could be advocating for more severe penalties/ bonuses in the current system (which might happen) as opposed to demanding complete reworks (which won't)....
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His behavior since launch has not given a favorable impression.
And, yes, I was watching the boards during beta, and he really went out of his way to do true beta testing. Unfortunately, like a lot of other people who get wrapped up in something, he then apparently thought that he had earned the right to design the game itself. It doesn't work that way, and after putting heart and soul into something for so long it stings.
Nonetheless, other people have not only a right but a duty to tell someone that what they're doing is counterproductive, especially if it's causing you to lose well-earned respect for what they do.
You seem to be as butthurt as TheisEjsing. And no, Sensuki didn't think he earned the right to design the game. Sensuki came up with suggestions to improve the game, a lot of backers agreed with his suggestions. Some didn't. Obsidian ignored a lot of those suggestions and we have a game that could have been better than what it is. eg. Suggestions like cyan for neutral NPCs which is now part of the IE mod. Fact.
Can we get back to the actual topic.
I feel sad that someone who contributed a lot here is acting out in such a remarkably self-destructive way.
I read his ideas, and basically he was arguing against the specific stated design goals of the developers. That never works. Some were OK - but a lot of his ideas were, to me, horrible. For example, complaining about area looting vs. clicking on every bloody corpse. He wanted pre-buffing, didn't like healing, engagement, stat design, class design, the writing style...Jesus. Beta testers test whether something is working - they don't redesign games. And there is a reason for that.
The old games had a series of features - some deliberate, some from old habit, some from technical limitations. A lot of players get fixated on all of them as being necessary, Good designers separate out the core ingredients for fun. For instance, I've gotten really tired of spending all of my game time shuffling junk from A to B. Thank God for the stash in this game, the lack of arrows, the crafting things that accumulate passively in the background. I spend my gaming time enjoying myself, not organizing and weeding through junk. And this sort of thing is the sort of thing that traditionalists absolutely despise as "dumbing down" - even though, of course, I could keep unlimited piles of junk around in games like BG if I was willing to waste enough of my time to do it, with no in-game consequences at all.
And the basic proof that the developers were right is that this game is, by any rational measure, an enormous success. It got incredibly positive professional reviews, for a genre that doesn't usually appeal to people who have favored relatively easy and shallow action games. It got incredibly positive user reviews. (Games where the users rebel have huge gaps in pro and user reviews, e.g. Dragon Age 2.)
And then you have a subset here who lost design arguments with the designer - completely unsurprising - and who now hate the game and trash it all they can. I've seen this movie before, and I'm not somehow being hurt. I honestly think that the angry crowd would simply be better served by stepping back - for their sake, not mine.
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If your goal is to persuade, you don't do that by pissing people off. And the Codex does that in spades. Why would a developer bother to listen to a group that heaps personal abuse on him? One that ignores anything good and exaggerates anything bad? And if they also provide clear evidence that they don't know what they're talking about (e.g. demonstrating that they don't understand the systems, because they were only playing the game to find attack points, not to enjoy it) then it's even easier to ignore them.
Real-life lessons apply here. If you want someone to listen, praise what's good and then they may be able to hear you when you critique what's bad. Show perspective. Be professional - rants convince only the people who already agreed with you. And be willing to take what you give - the way that Codex folks can't see any problems at all with their approach, but are so eager to talk about why everyone else is worthless, is a major tell of a real community problem.
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RPGCodex just released their first review (there will be another one)
http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9867
This is my favourite review so far. I agree with most, if not all points/conclusions although often for (sometimes very) different reasons than the reviewer stated.
Sorry, Sensuki... I've gotta disagree with you 100% here. This review is the Codex at its worst. And I say that not in a "the Codex is terrible" sense, but in a "this is the kind of thing that gives the Codex a bad name" sense.
So he makes a thread, so he can watch people be insulted by an insulting hatchet job. Such respect that man deserves. He didn't get the "I saved PoE from itself" reclaim, but he is making damn sure, to get the "I benevolently tried everything, but it was impossible to help OE" reclaim on the codex now.
His behavior since launch has not given a favorable impression.
And, yes, I was watching the boards during beta, and he really went out of his way to do true beta testing. Unfortunately, like a lot of other people who get wrapped up in something, he then apparently thought that he had earned the right to design the game itself. It doesn't work that way, and after putting heart and soul into something for so long it stings.
Nonetheless, other people have not only a right but a duty to tell someone that what they're doing is counterproductive, especially if it's causing you to lose well-earned respect for what they do.
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There are some interesting points there. In particular, I think that they hit upon something in terms of design - the early and midgame is usually the most compelling section of the lot, and to be honest that was true for me in PoE too. (And in others - as far as I'm concerned, the high point of BG2 was definitely the lovely city that you hit immediately after escaping from Irenicus.) It's a bit of a shame that Twin Oaks wasn't more developed - there are some truly clever ideas there. (I'm referring mostly to the side quests, that basically fell off drastically after Act II - the main quest was fine by my book.)
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"Gorion(you didn't use his name I noticed...) was memorable? He had almost no dialogue- he tells you to leave Candlekeep soon, then runs into Sarevok and dies."
Yet people still remember him. That won't happen to the characters you meet at the beginning of PE.
I certainly will. The only BG characters that made any real impression on me were Minsc, Yoshimo, and to some extent Jaheira (in BG2). That was because Minsc was a cute running joke. The others: I'd mostly have to look up their names.
Just because something doesn't appeal to you, it doesn't follow that it doesn't appeal to me. I genuinely liked Eoder by the end of the story, for example; Durance and Grieving Mother were really interesting; Aloth was funny (and the dialogs between him and the other party members after his split personality was revealed were priceless). Kana and Sagani were really alive to me. The ones who had less of a presence for me were the druid (he's comic relief, but his link to the watcher was weak for me) and the paladin (in fairness, she wasn't that useful to me as a party member). And the culture and world engaged me far, far more than whatever was supposed to be happening in generic Faerun-like BG. If you want story development gone right, PS:T is a far better argument.
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Or maybe some of us have 100% fire resistance to your silly straw man?The point, it whooshes right over some heads....
Again, you made factual errors in your review. Show me one of those from the Codex review. Otherwise, you're not making a point, you're just lurching out in a butt hurt rage.
So not liking Imoens voice is a factual error? Saying that you can get big game advantages by rerolling random numbers over and over and over is a factual error? The opinion that the class system is complex and opaque is a factual error? The opinion about the story line? Not liking the inventory management? Not liking the early story? The (fact) that casters at low levels in D&D are underpowered with little to do, other than being third-rate fighters (unless you did the roll-until-all-your stats are great trick, in which case they can be a floor wax and a dessert topping)? (I even threw in a couple of garbled things, like the feats from other games, as a tribute to the mistakes about PoE in the original review...)
And, more to the point, I *loved* Baldurs Gate 1. But I can put on my hater hat and make it look bad. I could do the same thing for every game in the genre. I really like the tactical feel of IWD2, for instance - it's actually a game that I replay because it makes me think (the bridge encounter is my favorite CRPG puzzle, period). But if I was writing a hater screed I'd focus on the oft-criticized plot and the silly min-maxing of stats etc.
So, instead, why not focus on enjoying games instead of tearing them down?
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The point, it whooshes right over some heads....
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It's pretty funny that the same people who come in and sneer at us for daring to like a new game...get all defensive when you point out any problem at all with the decades-old games that they like. If I was them, I might ponder the Golden Rule.
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Since we're discussing RPGCodex attack pieces, here's a "review"(excuse me, attack piece) on Baldurs Gate 1 in the style of the original review.
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Baldurs Gate 1 is an epic disaster of a game. The problems start with the wretched character creation system. You roll random dice over and over and over to get the best start. This is pathetic game design - and it is absolutely crucial for your game. The class system is byzantine and cumbersome, with all sort of hidden rules about which class can do what. There are linked sets of important abilities, called feats, with virtually no information on what they do. There are traps in character design all over the place - you can gimp yourself with the wrong choices. Once the game starts, you're put into a hideous tutorial area where you do stupid things like fighting illusionary warriors in a basement and doing fetch quests like a golden retriever. Your first companion has the most annoying voice that I've ever had the displeasure to hear.
You start out weak as a kitten, able to be taken out by house pets. If you choose a spell caster you can do one or two things before you need to take a nap. You'll be taking lots of naps. You can be in the middle of an epic fight and then just plop down for eight hours without consequence - or spend a couple of game days riding back to an inn, knock back a couple of pints, and then jump back like nothing happened. You'll spend half your time playing inventory tetris. You'll spend the other half of your time searching for a point - why would I care about some stupid iron shortage?
(to match the original, I'd need about 10,000 more words attacking it as garbage; you get the idea...)
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Would you say that this "has valid points"? Because the things in it, a lot of them anyhow, are basically true - and irrelevant to the fact that it's actually a very fun game. But, codex style, you're supposed to be defensive and talk about how it's really only mediocre - instead of telling the troll to go back under their bridge...
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Why should I bother to argue with a misinformed hatchet job of an article? One where the reviewer either doesn't understand some systems (e.g. how the stats work), misstates facts (the absence of unique items is wrong), doesn't understand the class system, dismisses the writing with a couple of unexplained sentence. I could go on, but basically it's a worthless article for a different reason.
I get really, really tired of having people dress up hit jobs as reviews. This guy hated the game during development. The only reason he played the game was to extract things that he could pick apart to attack in a writeup. Every single aspect was taken in the most negative way possible; every flaw exaggerated; every virtue minimized if it was mentioned at all. You could pull this crap on every single game, every single book, every single movie. It achieves nothing.
For example, I really liked that the dialog options weren't telegraphed to you, Bioware style, with exactly what would happen if you pressed the button. Some special options were counterproductive; you could even close off options in dialog without even knowing it. The reputation system is clever and could develop into something very cool. You didn't have glowing arrows over the heads of people giving quests; on replay I keep finding ones that I missed the first go around. I found the lore really interesting - the science vs. magic / religion aspect was well done; the world was a hell of a lot more interesting to me than any generic D&D world (I'm looking at you, Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale..) If you actually read the lore, read the responses in conversations, and so on. It didn't have the "everyone is horrible" Game of Thrones or Dragon Age 2 vibe to it. Now, maybe all of the people who wrote reviews about how they liked this were all wrong, and maybe the flocks of users who went to the rating sites and talked about how much they liked it were all misguided. But it's more likely to me that the people who claim that they don't like the story are a small minority. That's fine, but it's completely the inverse of reality to take a recognized strength of a game and call it a weakness because it's not "my style."
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Yes, the basic complaints are that they didn't just xerox the IE games. You know - the parts that each particular person especially liked; not the ones that they didn't.
Oh, and clearly having a Kickstarter means that the developers are obligated to satisfy every backers vision of what game design should be. Because, of course, the people involved in making this game, being rookies, need wise guidance from internet message board warriors. Have I got it all?
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The truth behind the words in constantine's "The 'Truth' behind words in RPG Codex's #1 Review for PoE "
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
I wouldn't waste my time in a game forum where I didn't think the game was any good. What purpose is achieved? Am I going to convince people who are enjoying themselves that they're wrong? Am I going to make people agree with me by calling them names? Because when I read things like the Codex review, my takeaway impression is "what a collosal jerk", not whether, like a blind squirrel, he sometimes found a nut.