Gromnir

wouldn't worry overmuch. not all posters is as welcoming and good-natured as us, but am assuring you that those who responded to you with sarcasm or seeming derision (at least in this thread) is good folks and comments were more jocular than anything else. HA! Good Fun!

josh's particular use o' the "write what you know" aphorism virtual compelled us to respond. likewise, josh's defenders seemed to be under a compulsion o' sorts (*snicker*) and we obliged. 'pon reflection, we is quite thankful o' the participation. hardly amounts to us trolling. although these boards has gone kinda... soft. seems that criticism o' developers results in an antibody kinda response. Destroy the irritant at all costs! silly. HA! Good Fun!

*chuckle* this thread has become most amusing. HA! Good Fun!

is possible that the real life person(s) who was initial model for the bespeckled character has spots. dunno. maybe some biowarian has channeled dennis hooper from Apocalypse Now, and is like, trying to keep it real... man. HA! Good Fun!

@tmzuk the word "immersion" has a long and ill-fated history 'pon these boards. use at your own peril. josh has been quite forceful in chastising boardies for overuse o' immersion. immersion (much like realism) is not a goal in and of itself. is there a gestalt or ideal stew o' elements that leads to mythical "immersion"? perhaps, but is different for you than it is for anybody else. need to be very careful in fully explaining what you mean and how you use. am not particularly bothered by your use o' immersion in your earlier post (got kinda sucky in this most recent one,) as you did at least passing explain those qualities o' the activated abilities that interrupted your immersion, but am just gonna note that immersion is always gonna set teeth on edge of some posters and possibly some developers. we feels same way 'bout "proactive." folks who use proactive like it got some special meaning deserves to be run over by an asphalt roller... very, very slowly. HA! Good Fun!

Well, I never said anything either way about whether current trends in video games are moving closer to or farther away from the medium's full potential. I only stated that I believe cRPG's have a deeper capacity for realism and complexity than PnP RPG's. Most straightforward, this is simply by virtue of computing power, but there are some aspects- emergent narrative, for example- in regards to which we will hopefully learn how to utilize that power more effectively and efficiently. Also, when you try thinking of reality as the most complicated simulation we will ever experience (nothing is merely abstracted and everything factors in a la Butterfly Effect), I think you'll realize that realism and complexity are definitely related. Complexity doesn't always lend itself to realism, but a realistic simulation without some baseline level of complexity is practically unfathomable. There might not be a causal relationship (or perhaps even a correlational relationship) between the two, but "complexity" as a variable moderates the potential for realism. shoulda posted full quote. am seeing where we misread you "The thought that- for the sake of being "fun"- cRPG's should be less realistic than PnP RPG's just makes me cringe. In fact, early cRPG's (including the Infinity Engine games at that, in my humble opinion) suffer from playing too much like graphical tabletop RPG's, rather than taking full advantage of the video game medium (which by the way tends toward more realism and complexity, at least in my view)." so, no, we complete disagree with you. 1) we dont think ie games played much like actual pnp session at all, and 2) that last thing we want is genuine realism in our crpgs, whether pcs is capable of it or not. pnp sessions is far more 'bout interactions tween the participants than they is about rules, which is why d&d has always had Rule 0. take out the peoples, and you necessarily gotta streamline some stuff to makes games palatable--the lastest thing we want a crpg developer to be shooting for is realism. shooters? sure, but not crpg. *shrug* and no, reality and complexity got no sympathy. a game based on purely constructed and fantastical can be just as complex as any realism engine. in fact, from a crpg gaming pov, a true realistic simulator would most likely be less complex. the behind the scenes physics is not the kinda complexity anybody is looking for, and whatever capacity for such physics can be put into a fantastic world with complete made up physics anyways. why one would wish to do, we dont know. am knowing how this ain't clear, but consider combat. realistic combat is like hobbes state of nature in that it is "poor, nasty, brutish and short." realistic combats would also not require multiple menus of fancy powers and abilities. actual, while there is Agrippa kinda stuff describing uses o' sword and some other very small handful o' weapons, there really weren't no "schools" o' training for stuff like axes and maces and hammers. ... am betting we still has a meeting of minds. HA! Good Fun!

will respond to one point only "which by the way tends toward more realism and complexity, at least in my view" am thinking you is going down a highly suspect path. is many who will argue that video game media has significant reduced likelihood of complexity, at least in recent years. for hardcore crpg fans, "console" is ineherent including a quality o' "dumbed down." one word: fallout. compare 1997 fallout to fallout 3 and then try to convince folks at nma that you is right. although resources is not shared such that increase graphics results in less resources for mechanics realization, it frequent seems that current emphasis is 'pon making visually appealing 'stead o' making deep or complex. a text-based game, on the other hand, would have no such limitations as graphics is a non-factor. etc. regardless, while it is true that better computers increases POTENTIAL complexity, the reality has not supported the actualization thus far. furthermore, we would caution against coupling realism and complexity. without even discussing we thinks it should be clear that there is no direct correlation or even a sympathy 'tween these two concepts. HA! Good Fun!

this reasoning is problematic. am not a psychiatrist, but the link 'tween girls becoming strippers here in the US and their having daddy "issues" is well documented. am suspecting that the elimination o' deadbeat dads would significant impact sargy's potential pool o' stripper candidates. poses something o' a moral conundrum for sargy? what to do? HA! Good Fun!

The Church o' Cain were filled with righteous indignation over Interplay's unforgivable sacrilege : development of a fallout action game for consoles. *scratches head* am, to this day, baffled by the reaction. sure, we thinks that most regular codexian/nma posters gots a screw loose, but the vitriol over bos were, to our mind, pointless. nobody were gonna force minions o' cain to buy and play bos. resources going into making bos were not making a pc fo3 less likely. as far as we know, cain had not spoken outta a discarded burning sofa left on streets o' irvine to exhort the faithful to rise up and cast off the shackles o' interplay tyranny. mere existence o' bos inflamed the church to a ridiculous degree. *shrug* regardless, to stay on-topic, we will note that every game development board has got those posters who is self-appointing themselves as the stalwart defenders o' developer honor. they sacrifice their own dignity to protect developers who has been insulted or attacked. if proper amount of deference is not shown to a developer, the stalwart defenders will step forth and lash the offender with a fiery rebuke. is kinda cute. HA! Good Fun!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyZddrngaAE song kinda makes us wish we were lesbian. kidding HA! Good Fun!

last swtor post from us for awhile. as such we will admit that we did bounty enough that we has enough reputation saved so that in 4 more weeks we will be able to hit legend rep w/o actually doing another bounty mission. dont recall the number o' the blue (630 rep) and green (270 rep) modules we got spread over a number o' toons, but we did math, and we has 'bout 1000 rep points more than needed for legend. sad, no? we simply not wanted to have to do bounty next month. HA! Good Fun!

regarding genesis query-- there is an argument that role-play shouldn't have no activated abilities. is not you fighting, is your character. you create character-- give abilities, skills, whatever, but once things like combat starts, behind the scenes mechanics resolve encounters leaving player free to actual role-play rather than being bogged down in minutiae. is a very good argument for doing things this way when you got a dm/gm and folks is actually role-playing. if you is in character, it is tough to justify min/max and +/- considerations that go into even simple game encounters. the thing is, most folks don't get into character with a single-player crpg enough to justify complete hiding of mechanics. oh sure, no doubt some of us has howl'd in anguish at our monitor as a wyvern stabs us mercilessly with its poisoned tail, but is not the kinda immersive role-play you get with 5 geeks sitting around a gaming table. most of us just don't buy enough... probably 'cause it seems a bit creepy to genuine identify too serious with a crpg avatar. whatever, gonna leave that between you and your psychiatrist. without geeky group gestalt, we gots a role-play Game more than a Role-Play game. game aspect becomes more important. games got rules and players wanna win, even if winning seems a little wacky in a crpg. there is also the non-negligible % of players of crpgs who simply hate crpg combat. is more than a few folks we has met over the years who would skip every combat encounter if they could. they likes the settings and stories and characters and romances (*groan*) and dressing up their paper doll, but they hate combat. sneer if you want, but those folks is out there and they buy these games. well, Gromnir likes crpg combat. yeah, we ain't talking 'bout chess v. Deep Blue or any such challenge, but am enjoying overcoming well-crafted combat encounters. for us, increasing micromanagement is a good thing. we likes loads of abilities and choices... just so long as is turn-based or RTwP. loads o' choices that we gots to time perfectly and hit 9 different buttons in right sequence within a 5 second window is not fun. give us pause or turn-based and then bury us with abilities and stats and rules. nevertheless, there is people who legit not wanna deal with activated abilities. we could make some snarky remark about japanese dating sims as an alternative for those folks, but it would be wrong. very wrong. HA! Good Fun!

causes (direct or proximate) o' our possible admonishment/censorship/banishment cannot reasonably be blamed 'pon you. but to stay on-topic, am gonna suggest that da:i needs a malleus maleficarum analog. HA! Good Fun!

there is a board prohibition 'gainst saying bad things about the employees of other gaming companies. seems silly that if they come here they should still get same protection. nevertheless, we leave vague so that we cannot be accused o' being critical o' a specific employee. folks who was around at the time know, and so does biowarian. will probable get post expunged regardless. *shrug* nevertheless, da2, a game which we actual enjoyed despite Major flaws, were a clear step backwards for bio. how they respond is making us a smidgen curious. HA! Good Fun!

if we ever get desperate for credits we will sell our czerka crate o' matic. have been offered upwards o' 25 mil for it. weird. also, am supposing that buying hypercrates to get credits makes no less sense than mindlessly running czerka/bh/section x dailies. nevertheless, the notion o' paying ea real money so we can get swtor creds just seems... dirty. HA! Good Fun!

since this is a da:i thread, we will observe that we is,for the first time in awhile, curious 'bout a bio development. sure,we has played most bio releases (not all) since release of BG, but recently we were far less interested in development side of things. the thing is, da2 were something new, and am curious to see how bio responds. all full bio games has either improved or expanded 'pon previous games, with the exception o' da2. bg2 improved on bg1 in a grand way. nwn, although not as enjoyable to us as bg2, were clearly more ambitious in scope. me, though not necessarily our cup-o'-tea, were bio's step into consoles, and they stepped in big. etc. the thing is da2 were the first full game bio made that we could clear say, "this falls short of your previous works-- it was not a worthy effort." is possible that me3 falls into that category as well, but we never played... it were also released after da2. regardless, da2 is, in our estimation, the first time bio has taken a clear step backwards, and we wanna see how they respond. btw, am not gonna belabor the point, but we noted that the announcement of some da2 "features" previous to its release were indicating that bio were actual cutting corners on da2. we suggested that da2 would clear be a scaled done affair from da:o, and not 'cause bio thought doing so would make better. am thinking that post mortem of da2 makes obvious that Gromnir's predictions 'bout da2 were correct-- nonsense like recycled maps n' such. one cheerfully ubiquitous bio minion said we were wrong here on these boards. am thinking we still deserve an apology. not expecting, but think we deserve. HA! Good Fun!

*snort* is no way in hell Gromnir is spending real money on game beyond subscription just for vanity enhancements. we get 500 or 600 free coins per month, and that is more than enough for us. saw some guy complain that he spent $$$$ to get 2 hypercrates and still no lizard mount... were blaming bio and ea. HA! little too much spirit o' p.t. barnum in the cartel stuff for Gromnir to get involved. HA! Good Fun!

our server is jedi covenant. was in ld 50 guild, but like we said, too much drama... and they were too focused on pvp anyway. when server transfer became available, guild died as virtual everybody went to a pvp server. we has done far less pvp since 2.0. am recalling getting jumped by a naked jugg smash monkey who killed us in 2 hits with us at about 90% health. yeah, it were a bug that got fixed, but that and the 40k health assassins in green mod gear and other nonsense made us think that maybe we would take a break from serious pvp for awhile. our biggest swtor gripe is actual customer service. no doubt customer service for other mmos is just as bad, but the canned and useless responses sets our teeth on edge. Gromnir runs into bug doing czerka dailies that prevents us from getting weekly despite completing all missions. please give us credit for weekly and fix bug.-- submit ticket under bugs category (mistake) 2 days pass blahblahblahblahblablah. bio response is complete unresponsive. is almost as if we got a bot response that scanned ticket for keywords and gave a pre-rendered response. soooo, Gromnir creates another ticket, this time under missions heading 2 days pass blahblahblahblahblahblah. translation: you are screwed. this is a known bug that will be addressed in a future patch. please search the boards for more info. please submit a bug report. ty. sincerely, #$%@&%$# ... bah. 'bout 1/2 of the very limited number o' tickets we submitted has resulted in a satisfactory resolution, and am estimating that average time to get resolution is 4 days. almost always need to submit a second ticket, so probable more like 1/3 of actual total tickets is ending in satisfied Gromnir. *grumble* HA! Good Fun!

sidenote: am not thinking the gameplay of either ps:t or kotor were great. bio developers did manage to get the feel of star wars combat and universe, but gameplay was quite shallow. ps:t is our favorite crpg, but is not 'cause o' gameplay. combat were almost an afterthought in ps:t-- bad afterthought. also, a walk-through of ps:t can be distilled thus: put every attribute point into wisdom and talk to every named npc for win. as much as we like ps:t, it were horribly balanced and Gameplay were no deeper than kotor. HA! Good Fun!

as strange as it may sound, Gromnir actual has a handful o' swtor "toons." am not an mmo guy, but we joined with a friend... a friend who quit 6 months later 'cause his wife wanted to play guild wars. d'oh. we does some pvp and has end-game characters, but doing regular raids for us is tougher because we is a solo player. we were in a guild for a short time and the drama were too... just too whatever. our heals sage is a known quantity on our server, so we is always getting invites, but just can't bring our self to do another guild.am thinking the only way we joins a guild is if it is a small group o' folks we knows quite well. is a busted game in many ways, but we still plays. go figure. HA! Good Fun!

soooo... am not quite sure we see a point. anybody here think it is a good idea to threaten developers o' a game with violence? email harassing o' artist or programmers is a good idea? anyone? am doubting any nutter who is gonna stalk a developer is gonna be dissuaded by a message-board appeal, but you get no argument from us that such behavior is bad. just kinda pointless to say so as all but crazies already agree and the real wackos is not gonna care if poster X observes that death threats is very rude. ... want us all to be nice to developers, is that it? 8 pages o'... whatever? doesn't seem to have an actual purpose. if we tells developers that they is so kewl they fart bose-einstein condensate, they will maybe make a better game? makes an over-the-top happy birthday poem to _________ the programmer maybe sees us get additional info drops? hmmm. seems kinda sketchy. well okie dokie, am guessing we can do our part. *Gromnir spreads arms wide and offers tim cain, and feargus urquhart a manly group hug* all good? HA! Good Fun!

Yes, waaaaay better. BG2? How many people voted? did a quicky search... were a few such polls: which ie game do you want pe to most feel like which crpg do you want pe to most resemble etc. 250 votes were most we saw for any single poll. kotor were never mentioned save as fitting in "other" category along with mass effect and a half-dozen other games. bg1/bg2 were typical lumped together... lord only knows why. big winners were typical bg1/bg2 as clear #1, and ps:t #2 just ahead of the field.. but were not Gameplay polls per se. am not sure if such polls is actual meaningful in any way, but there you have what we were able to see. HA! Good Fun!

what a new fallout game needs is "Great Atomic Power" by the Louvin Brothers. is shocking it ain't been in a previously released fo game... shocking. as for death mechanics... *shrug* got no problem with ordinary death mechanics, but we could see adding owb flavor: every time you dies, the mad scientists does some minor alterations. probable best to keep pure cosmetic, but you could add gameplay aspects too. some special unlock if you die a ridiculous number o' times. little cut-scene where you becomes fankenstein-deathclaw and go rampaging and gets burned to death in a windnmill by a mob of angry ghouls. then reset. HA! Good Fun!

You sound like all RPGs have to have specific features or they have no chance. Which is simply not true. Look at Grimrock or Skyrim/FO3. No companion interaction, no preset history for your PC necessary and still a lot of people had fun with these games many years after the "revolution". Wasteland2 will also have blank party members for you to (role) play. And Arcanum (if we ignore the combat) was loved by many people exactly as it was, even after BG. There is more than one way to do an RPG. @Gromnir: Rulebooks were the rule before context-sensitive help was invented/possible. Whether that information is in the game as tooltips and in-game manual screens or externally as a book there are games that simply need it. Even with the best user interface you can't avoid having to read auxiliary information in games like Civilization or a war game for example. So when codex praises arcanum for needing a book they are probably not refering to the UI descriptions but to the underlying mechanics that are described in the manual. PS: I can't remember to have had any problems with Arcanums UI when I played it. It might be different if a camera is behind my head and I was forced to do it inbetween designing new games. you says you is responding @Gromnir, but that doesn't seem to be the case. we responded to this: "while i enjoy watching the playthroughs of arcanum by sawyer, he would have taken away much more by reading the rulebook (which he didn't do given his issues with the interface). it had great fluff and told how it was envisioned, which is really good, and has pretty much what was lacking from the game itself." we replied thus: "that being said, we agree that one probably gets more outta arcanum by reading rulebook or even game manual than an actual play-through of the pc game. such a reality should be taken as a damning criticism o' arcanum, but folks at codex seem to thinks that gets tim cain bonus points. weird." your response that codexians like complexity such that secondary sources become necessary for game comprehension is not... responsive. *shrug* arcanum plays better from the manual or from rule book than it does on monitor using mouse or keyboard. were a conceptually very ambitious and intriguing project that fell short o' goals and claims of developers. were not polished. were not balanced. were not well-written. were not... *shrug* too many folks laud arcanum for what it aspired to be as 'posed to what it actually was. HA! Good Fun!

josh is the one with the religious motif tattoos. that being said, we agree that one probably gets more outta arcanum by reading rulebook or even game manual than an actual play-through of the pc game. such a reality should be taken as a damning criticism o' arcanum, but folks at codex seem to thinks that gets tim cain bonus points. weird. HA! Good Fun! ps in response to some poster above. arcanum were getting something like an extra +6 months o' qa time that most games do not. am assuming it were sierra that decided at the 11th hour that game would get a simultaneous europe and North America release. game were actual gold, but then release gets halted so game can be translated into polish and german and whatnot. all that extra time did not result in a more polished release