Yellow Rabbit

People giving highest praises to BG/BG2 stories make me feel weird all the time. I just don't get how anybody could consider those well written. Consistent with lighthearted fantasy setting - by all means. Well written? Please. Speaking of OP's negative MC experience, I'd guess it just overall tone of the review more than its actual content is what got the fans riled up. Then again, Metacritic IS a cesspit, so it's probably not such a big deal. PoE obviously has its flaws (what doesn't?), but it does hit exactly what it was aiming for. Some more balancing and polishing, and PoE will truly shine. I've expected far worse outcome considering that Obs had to make lore and ruleset (which BG had already done in its development time) from scratch and a game itself on that base in 2,5 years for little more than 4 million dollars. It's amazing what Obsidian did accomplish with what they had. This is my personal reason to be hyped about PoE.

Looks like the main problem romance threads keep inheriting from each other is lack of definitions. What's a videogame romance, exactly? It sounds so confusing when people seem to be mutually agreed about romances being a Bioware-style dialogue mini-game and then suddenly start bringing in Planescape: Torment as example of a romances well made. Single Facepalm.jpg is just not enough to comment on that. I'm fairly sure PoE gonna have some romantic content in a broad sense, if not involving PC, in quests, motives and whatnot. It's difficult to avoid entirely and there's actually nothing wrong about it. What devs refused to do is to invent romances as a part of game mechanics which so many Bioware fans consider a given when they talk about romance in an RPG.

I've got nothing against it either, just wanted to point out that MP is not something devs would consider in a scope of an expansion, at least in PoE's particular case.

No way. Expansion is, you know, an expansion. Additional content for the game. Writing network code and hooking it to the engine* doesn't really fit under expansion thing and going to cost a lot of programming and debugging time among other things. Maybe in a sequel. Maybe. Wouldn't hold breath, though. *I'm assuming devs threw all Unity's default networking out as PoE was intended to be strictly SP.

Most of modernly used names in Russia have either Greek or Scandinavian origins and because of that don't look striking so much for European/American people. But names that came originally from Slavic people like Porfiriy you mentioned or, say, Kuz'ma and Eryoma may sound a bit weird, that's for sure. They're rare in RL by now, though. ...Geez, I just saw those names written in latin alphabet for the first time. Now they sound weird even for me. Sorry for offtop

Just a funny side note: in a Russian translations of Salvatore's novels Drizzt was transformed into Dzirt. Officially - because it's "so hard to pronounce that name for people used to Russain language's phonetics" (yeah, as if replacement is any better). Actually - "Drizzt" is very close phonetically to Russian verb which figuratively means "to have diorhea". Imo, it fits. Never liked this drow.

That's pretty much the way it supposed to be done for now (as you already found out from Mod Support thread in Beta section :D). Giving the fact that PoE's Beta being modded even before full game is out, I wouldn't worry about post-release modability at all.

Afaik, legal issues is not the problem here, lack of resources is. Modability never was a selling point of PoE and was brought during Kickstarter campaign by community, not by developers. When the question appeared, devs answered like "Uh, okay, we'll do what we can to support modders as long as it won't require us to go out of our way too far", which is perfectly reasonable for game of this type and budget by me. Now, developing dedicated modding tools definitely looks like going out of the way too far, so... externalizing certain game files is going to be about all in terms of modability.

That not game developer's doing, though. CD Projekt just made the right call taking novels of a decent writer as a base, starting out with solid fleshed out world and several charismatic characters, including Geralt himself. That blasted "sex happens every time you turn around" part that so many people hated outright was just another thing brought up from novels in sake of consistency. It resulted in slight confusion when the game's script poses itself as continuation of the events in the books and uses entire scenes from those at the same time. What, it's all happened again in exactly the same way as before? In context of rpgs, I guess writer have to use different tricks depending on whether protagonist is a predefined person or supposed to be fully customazible by player. The latter tends to be a little nonsense-generating occasionally.

If you're talking about tvtropes, they ended up writing out in "trope" category pretty much every distinctive detail of many stories regardless of their actual tropishness, just because. Wiki project, what else you could expect? I agree that using actual cliches or tropes (which is cliche without negative undertone) might not be an irritating thing, depending on how author fits them into finished story. But imo it's just kinda impossible to distinguish specific reasons why in one particular story cliche fits organically while in the other it sticks out like sore tooth. I mean, that depends on who read/watched/played said stories, right?

I have no issue with romance arcs per se even if they're not optional. Aside from the fact that they take a great deal of time and effort to make that could be better spent on other aspects of the game, they're okay. But obsessed people do freak me out, and subject of their obsession (romances in this case) automatically becomes less than sympathetic to look at.

^ Problem with diversity is that sometimes people differ so much they wouldn't understand points of each other even if they'd try. This usually happens with for-or-oppose topics, you know, like promancers and anti-promancers. My usual tactics in such case is not get involved or shut up ASAP Anyway, PS:T is a great game regardless of romances or lack thereof in it. It would be interesting to compel Angry Joe into playing it and listen to what he'd have to say.

Thank you, cap'n. Don't you by happenstance have an advice of how to preserve sanity talking with those "some people"?

Get used to it, OP, the more you read/watch/play, the more you'll get the feeling "I've already seen this somewhere, or at least something like it". Also, link. Number of possible core story situations in may be limited, but devil's in details. ...Wait. Or is this all about Bi... certain game making company? Nevermind then. @NegativeEdge. For the record, I hated black-and-white Force ideology in Star Wars the first time I learned about it. It's just childishly stupid, whole concept. I hated it through all six episodes, entire Clone Wars serial, and first KotOR. The second one finally gave me somewhat a relief (thanks for that!), although impression I've got from the story was fairly far from what you described.

They call it "duckling's effect". Did you know that newborn duckling takes first living creature he sees for its mother forever? Some people's mind works in similar way. They hear one tune, for instance, and after that for every single tune that has three tacts matching with that first they heard they yell "It was taken from %name_of_tune%! Plagiarism!" Seriously, though, there's no way to know or sure what was taken from where or inspired by what. Unless you're the author, of course. Elements that you've listed could've been borrowed intentionally, borrowed unconsciously or just be a coincedence. After all, seeking godhood is fantasy fiction trope, warrior woman losing her husband is a pretty obvious source of drama, and question of what is soul interests many people.

Never would've thought that it's possible to have romance with "Romances in RPG".

*shrug* All games you've listed based on D&D, right? As far as I'm familiar with this game system (that would be from 1st AD&D up to 3rd D&D) pure casters tend to suck in early levels, be kinda ok in the middle and dominate everything in the late, because IT'S FRIGGIN' MAGIC, MAN! Largely depends on campaign itself, of course, but tendency stands. And in NWN/NWN2 (3rd Ed based games) with all those prestiges you can grow up a really scary pal on whatever base you want, if you're up for it. Breeding horrible monsters of a characters that would make Frankenstein stammer was considerable part of the fun with those games. Point is, PoE doesn't use D&D, casters in it have some humility built in on ruleset level, so the answer to OP is "very unlikely". Many people don't like magic users being so underpowered comparing to IE games, but I, for one, am glad that I won't have to panic looking at the enemies group having three major casters in it (Kangax. Twisted Rune. I'm not good with BG2 at all, flog me).

Imo, if you apply this scheme to PoE it would miss one thing which is important in its particular case: developers' preferences. They knew what kind of games they want to make, Kickstarter helped them to find fanbase of games of this type to fund it. All debatable design decisions Josh made since then aren't going from wish to "broad the audience", but because Mr. Sawyer genuinely thinks it'll make the game better (maybe he's even right, we'll see that yet). There was no "targeting fanbase A/B/C" in this case to begin with, and I sincerely hope there won't be for sequel or expansions. So, again: why would anyone care how mainstream gamers will like PoE?

Positive media for PoE from mainstreamey reviewer is a good thing. Agression towards mainstream gamers is not. I'm not arguing its reasons, just saying that agression's a bad thing per se. All those people going to flow here after PoE's release are in for a nasty surprise *chuckle*

There's wiki which includes some geographic articles, have you seen it yet?. Check out Timeline article after that, gives some more detail.

For once? Seems to me they usually are outside of games with an alignment mechanic. Sorry, bad phrasing on my end. Correction: It's nice that Obsidian didn't pick up this particular part of D&D-based games to make PoE feel more like spiritual successor to the IE stuff. I know they're fond of such labels no more than I am, just saying.

"Jihadists" are not evil, they're idiots. At least those ones who cannot tell lesser jihad from greater and still claim to be muslims. Ugh. Come to think of it, I don't know a single person in a real life considering oneself "evil" or even "neutral" in general. I mean, does those labels even make sense for a real person? As far as roleplaying games go I always thought distinctive alignment system more of a compromise to fit overly complex personalities and motivations of a real people into at least some rules to play by. Would be good to see NPC made without such boundaries for once. That said, I believe Obsidian guys could do it nicely if they'd like to.

Summing up what I learned from this thread: Realism is contextual x5 (c-c-c-combo!) Regarding specifically RPGs things need to get balanced out between gameplay and verisimilitudesness (thanks, Lephys!) in immersion's sake. Features like "yeah, it's tedious to do, but so realistic!" should be no go (unless their absence hurt verisimilitudesness far more than gameplay). What did I miss? Apart from contemplations on what people usually mean arguing about realism.

OP, trust me, you have a good opportunity to learn taking things phylosophically there. I know what I'm talking about since it took me three days to download Wasteland 2, day and night wuthout pauses. Btw, 25 Gb is required disk space for an installed game, and what about distributive? Doesn't Steam compress data somehow to spare bandwith? GoG does. IRC Wasteland 2 GoG distributive was 9 Gb in size and took 21 Gb on disk after unpacking.

Really? Interesting. Larian excuse looks like what it is - an excuse for real reason they don't want to say out loud. I'd guess they just couldn't make mega dungeon up to quality plank. Those filled with break-your-eyes puzzles dungeons of theirs must be really tedious to design. I can see fully legit reason for backers to be pissed off, though. It must be that D:OS turned out to be so lovely soothed them a little. Anyway, I didn't try to find justification for not delivering promised things by my question, I was just curious if my estimation of game design difficulties is correct. Making promises you're not sure you'll be able to fulfill is a risky business, if you accepted the risk - suffer the consequences.