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Ohioastro

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Posts posted by Ohioastro

  1. I've been playing computer games since Wizardry 1, so don't put me in the (sneering) "casual modern gamer" box.  A lot of people seem to confuse rigid adherence to every detail of older games with some sort of gaming purity.  I value a good storyline, interesting character development, interesting encounters that I find challenging and that make me think.  I don't need to waste my time juggling things on inventory screens, and I do like to try out multiple ways to play characters without relying on internet "how-to" guides from others.  And I also don't have hundreds of hours to game.  Something like a respec option is radically different from doing something like making Dragon Age 2 encounters trivial at normal difficulty: it doesn't impact my game at all if I don't use it, and it gives me some options to experiment with my characters that I might not otherwise have.

     

    Some of the mechanics of the old games were poor.  Some ideas were excellent.  There is no reason to adopt both.

    • Like 1
  2. There's another problem with respec being available that I haven't seen anyone address yet. How easily it could be exploited.

     

    Player: The enemies in this dungeon all attack my WILL defense. Better respec my two tanks to focus more on their INT and RES. *Easily massacre's dungeon due to using the respec to hard counter the dungeon*

     

    Player: Why is this dungeon so EASY!? This game is boring!

    That's a problem with infinite free respec, not one with having it at all.

  3. Some people just like to try on different choices for fun. If I do multiple playthroughs I would try different classes, not the same class with a different approach. This is not a short game.

     

    I'm also sure that they'd have an opt out for people who want it. Resources are a legit reservation, but this can be a high impact option, and it would probably be quite popular.

  4. I don't like the vibe that I'm getting from some players on this thread: that they want to punish other players for mistakes that they make and that they want to impose their game play preference on others.

     

    Letting people keep class, race, gender and change focus within their class does no harm to my game and some people really like doing it.

    • Like 2
  5. I'm happy to have backed it, and as someone who started computer games with Wizardry 1 I really like the sound of these changes. I don't need to cast Cure Light Wounds a zillion tomes after battles, or do a battery of prebuffs.

     

    Tedious and repetitive tasks were the worst part of the old IE games. Here's hoping that they keep the actual core elements without a fixation on nostalgia forms.

    • Like 5
  6. In games like BG you had infinite storage. It was just tedious and clunky. Similarly, your character is always better off if they loot everything; so mechanics like individual corpse looting are really just a demand to make optimal game play dull and repetitive.

     

    The unlimited stash is the equivalent of dumping your junk in containers, and area loot simply speeds up a mechanical task.

     

    These are the sort of thing that make it not fun to replay old games, and mindless clicking is not skill.

     

    More to the point, coding resources are finite, and I'd rather see bug fixes than nostalgia toggles.

    • Like 1
  7. I refused to buy DA:I because the early reviews made it clear that it was a pure console port. And the idea of MMO like quests also didn't appeal. I really liked DA;O. The fights were tactically interesting, the story was reasonable by Bioware standards, and character development was solid. DA2: my God, but I hated that game. Recycled environments, insultingly easy (or easy but tedious on 'hard') combat, and repulsive factions (Nazis vs demons. Can't they both lose?). Add in that your choices didn't matter, and even interesting concepts like the Quinari couldn't save.). For the record, also enjoyed Divinity; OS and Wasteland 2.

  8. There is a development cost associated with toggles, and this looks to be a poor use of them. I understand objections to autoloot. But I really am paying attention to the people complaining about this, because it tells me that they're all about aping mechanics of older games unthinkingly. And this was a terrible, tedioustedious affair in BG that really put me off the game. Good riddance to a bad idea in my book.

    • Like 4
  9. I think that there is a basic angle that has been missed in this discussion: if you want a game with a boygirl humanelfdwarforcother protagonist you are forced to a very limited set of plot devices.  If you want your protagonist to have context - actual relationships that predate the game period - you don't get to mix and match gender / species / background in arbitrary ways.

     

    What made Torment special was that you were able to figure out, as the story progressed, that you actually *had* connections to the other characters and history.  Similarly, they at least made an attempt in Dragon Age: Origins to give your characters distinctive origin stories.  Unfortunately, they then folded into a generic storyline.  I also think that the strongest aspect of the Witcher series is precisely that this isn't yet another condemned prisoner / amnesiac / adopted foster child - it's a lead character who is embedded in a culture and roles with others.

     

    Therefore, I don't see this as "laziness" ; it's a response to a specific problem, namely that people want to paint their pixels with a range of superficial choices that drive a very narrow and superficial set of possible plots.

  10. To be honest, I think that people here are putting Baldurs Gate up on a very unrealistic pedastal.  Quest overload is a huge problem.  Once you accumulate a long list of quests, for example, they just all blur together and lose all urgency.  People end up just running around and doing the most efficient things (e.g. if you're here, do A B C; if there, D E F; it's a lot faster if you do Z first...)  If you put the game down for a week and come back you can't reconstruct what the heck you were doing.  I find it much more important to have quests that make internal sense - so that you do urgent ones NOW, for instance, and can work on longer-term ones at a more leisurely pace.  There is a happy place between "twenty quests at once" and "one at a time."  BG2 wouldn't have lost anything if the companion quests ended up having tiers, for instance, and if it had been designed that way I suspect that this would have been the thing people wanted back.

     

    Now, having distinct choices is great - I'd just take three that had some sensible reason for happening and that advanced the plot over a dozen disconnected bits that didn't.

    • Like 1
  11. I've been following this game for awhile - first post.  I really don't understand the relentless criticism of games like Wasteland 2.  I have a pretty long background in these sorts of games - back to Wizardry 1, actually.  I never finished Wasteland 1 because I got to the final battle and found out that I'd run out of bullets.   Not on my team - in the game world. 

     

    Wasteland 2 does a lot of things right.  It has a definite feel to it, the skills almost all turn out to be useful, and there are a lot of ways to approach problems.  (e.g. you can pick a lock on a door, bash it down, or blow it up...or you can enter an area from multiple places with multiple methods.  You can slaughter everyone or talk your way around.  There are some haunting moments and choices in the game.  There is a strong element of strategy to the fights with semi-destructible terrain, and you can create effective characters in a lot of different ways. 

     

    From a technical point of view it certainly has flaws.  It has a real element of randomness to it.  (I'm amused by statistically illiterate people who think that the percentages are lying.  If you shoot guns 14 times in a fight a 5% chance of a gun jamming means that one is more likely than not to occur.)  This is most annoying with things like lockpicking, and it promotes save/reload play.  It doesn't clue you into what a good build looks like.  The NPCs - 3 out of 7 - tend to have skill sets that are neither known to the player in advance nor terribly useful.  There are some clunky UI choices.

     

    On the flipside, it rewards repeat play - both from a choices point of view (there are two large choices that you make in the first section that will strongly impact your game play) and from their persistence (decisons that you make at one stage can manifest consequences much later.)  You will also design a far, far better party on the second round than the first.  I like games that aren't one and done.  Some of the battles have a nice IWD tactical feel to them.

     

    If I had any advice, it's that a good clean UI is a huge asset to a game.  A system that closely links cause and effect is also very helpful to start out with (e.g. avoiding trap builds), and having systems that come across as being "fair" (e.g. I messed up, but can see what I could have done better.)  For positive lessons, a decent story, meaningful consequences for your actions, and multiple ways of attacking a problem go a very long way. 

    • Like 1
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