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Everything posted by nipsen
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Yeah, I know. It's more that I didn't expect it. Or couldn't have expected it. BG is more in the range of "hey, we're an inexperienced bunch of wannabe adventurers, so let's go to sleep in a forest that swarms over with goblins, since we're really tired from all that trekking to the very specific destination we're being told to work our ways carefully towards, while being wary of dangers! It'll be fine, because I have a 1d4 dagger with +1 damage! Imoen positiveness! Yay!". And then if you do that and die, you sort of understand what went wrong. It's not "yeah, you know - I /could/ tell you where to go, but I'm not gonna! But hey, I'll open the city gate for you now that you've reached [level 3] and pretend it's probably going to be fine! Have fun!". Well, yes. Because I found the guard captain - who makes no attempt to ridicule the weakling Source Seekers for seeking out THE MONASTERY before taking on the real Orcs (that happen to be five times as strong as the guys who landed on the other beach, 500m away.. like I said, why don't they level the city right now?). Or maybe suggesting that you should perhaps seek out some angry wizzard on the mountain to the east before heading to the old battlefields in the north, that sort of thing, to test your determination across the dry plains. Maybe any of the people you meet who have been outside the city could mention something about these areas, suggesting what might be there (gossip about Evelyn casually digging for corpses around somewhere specific)? Apprentices might send you to find specific ingredients in areas they themselves would have a hard time surviving alone, but which they would probably have braved anyway if they had to, since the undead are comparatively less dangerous than the Orcs? On top of that, you can argue with the captain and end up finding that the Undead are actually more dangerous than the orcs.. So when I go to the nearest gate and I'm told I'm probably not strong enough, I'm not going to try it anyway, just to show'em! So all I'm seeing are three, for options for where to go. Where all the guards say the same thing. And the most difficult one (which is probably impossible to get past on even an even level/5-ish? footing without taking along the annoying hag (and I don't know if the adventure guild would send along anyone either - they were just too annoying) - that quest happens to be the direction the first quest is pointing you towards. So yes, I understand there's a progression here, and that there's probably easier farming elsewhere. But the game doesn't actually tell you that... short of I guess hinting that the gate with the bars that can be lowered and the huge ballistae, rather than the closed wooden doors (that you only have to ask one guard to open) is the one you're intended to go randomly wander out first. I mean, I don't mind difficult. But what it seems to me has happened here is that they've probably originally set up guidelines or intended guidelines - I don't know, maybe there were map coordinates in the beta? Specific areas opened up one after the other? Does it say something in the lore somewhere that hints to these areas being good for missions? And then all of those helpers have disappeared when the more readable dialogue was written, and the more "final" map mechanics were designed. Instead all you hear about are people who have tried to go out and kill the undead who have never returned in a recognisable form - while you could dispatch an orc with the wave of your finger in the intro. Right.. can't do that. Way too much work. Pity the ones doing stuff like that . 2 means making it narratively consistent, and that there's some sort of progression involved. You open areas you have a chance to survive (BG has you escape the city walls, for example, after you've gone through some training.. same thing. You have nodes you can get to, but you won't reach them until you've progressed through the ones ahead. You get equipment here and maybe complete a quest. After which you're supposed to be able to handle more difficult ones. Do you meet a helpful rogue who can teach you the basics of picking locks on the way? Perhaps. And perhaps now there's a door you can open with basic training, and there's another nearby that only experts can open. Etc. Fallout literally just kills you with a random encounter if you go too far. But the game also impresses on you, over and over again (even when it's not technically the case), that you will die from dehydration, Mutants will kill you, raiders will murder you, vault hunters will flay you for trophies, slavers will catch you, etc., etc. if you don't go to the nearby settlements first. In the first game you're also told specifically to go to either vault 15. And on the way you can ask directions to another settlement, so you're given the choice to get there instead. Either works, and you're able to become relatively comfortable with how the world works on those first couple of segments without the game guiding you by the ears. What happened in my D:OS play was that I ended up combing the entire town for a key to a chest. Which I found in an unrelated area quest-wise. That the game knew was there, but that I wouldn't know about. In the same way, if I decided at the time that the location of the key was perhaps important - then the game had no way to use that later. Basically, I can't even hazard a guess as to where I'm supposed to be looking. All the while I also have been told I can run on quests, but I'm specifically discouraged to do so until I've ran around the city some more. So even if all the elements I need to progress are, of course in the game somehwhere, I find them by sheer luck when I'm just playing the game normally. ... 1. apparently the trip to the statue of fools, or something - the first and closest location after meeting with the guard-captain is not the easiest place to start, yes? ..you know.. 3. all of them. Even within the city. Where's the morgue? It doesn't say until you get there. "I should check on Jakes body". You know, fine, I'll find the morgue... by combing the city's houses that all look exactly the same. For signs outside that don't read anything until you are near them. ..Leads to the next quest-flag are just.. not well written. Yes, agree with that. The actual combat mechanics are interesting and well done. Really like the area spells and the clouds and smoke and so on. That's really neat. Wind on fire - sweet. It's got huge potential. Hopefully we'll see more of that (played through an entire jrpg just because I could freeze the water with a spell, and then melt it again. Could combine fire and wind as well). I also hate the "press X to roleplay" thing that developers seem to be so much in love with at the moment. All of that doesn't help, is all, when the metagame is so convoluted. My character levels up, he's intending to be a fast rogue(with lots of action points) who use cheaper invisibility spells and magical smoke spells (over and over again, thanks to the speed he has. But the spells I want cost approximately 50.000 times the amount of gold I can get from stealing the foundation off one of the merchant's houses. So.. what do I do? Read a faq? Go spy the toolkit for hints? And then it doesn't help by saying: yeah, but you were /supposed/ to go the opposite way and farm there. ...but yes. Was not disappointed with the combat mechanics or the visual UI design (though they have some.. weaknesses with the AI being too predictable and perfect, buttons not responding because of overlays, and masses of popup boxes that don't tile.. and things of that sort, but still..). I was disappointed with the amount of "you should have known, don't give us a hard time. Keep clicking!". ..pet talker and the underpants, yes? I like animals but I can't speak to them, and it didn't make sense to me that I should be able to learn it. What sort of animal talk are we thinking of anyway? Empathy, words, dog-language, universal "animal"?.... Again.. the game has at least one character who can shapeshift, and presumably speaking to animals is possible. So why can't I just ask someone to be an interpreter? Wizzards seem to be everywhere, just not the ones I want. Is there a guy hidden in another library who will join me and assist me with that..? You know, this kind of thing is frustrating when you're trying to actually play the game on it's terms. sort of.. What they've done here is the Bethesda approach, just with more custom details put in, though. I'm probably not guessing too far off if I'm saying it wouldn't have taken much more time to cull down the dialogue trees and write some custom lines for the few people that are walking around the town. Three screens of text before finding out that the guard definitely doesn't have anything new or useful to say, for example.. not really comfortable for me as a player. I can see where you're coming from of course. But it's not black and white here either. That either we get Dragon Age: Origins and .. no meaningful dialogue (which eventually becomes a blessing, since it doesn't matter if you skip past it in terms of choosing the answers quickly so you can get on with things). Or ME3, where you choose which colour you want on the ending. Where all abilities are cooldown skills similar to an mmo. Or you lose all tactical and planning aspects altogether for a whittle-down-the-healthbar minigame.. Or else that you end up on the other end of the spectrum with practically code-words stand between you and a game-over screen where you can't load up the previous save-game until you restart the game and load it from the casette over again, etc. For example Josh has talked a lot about exactly that. On how people often complain about new mechanics that make sense, simply because they don't look like what used to be there. I mean, people are really put on the spot when they have to explain specifically what was so amazing about the formations in BG1&2, for example. Useful in certain situations, yes. But it's something that survives from a system intended for pens and notebooks with grids - that doesn't really translate into a system where the movement isn't restricted by grids any longer. So why does a game that doesn't rely on this need them? Why not something more dynamic where the wizzard can hang back nearby the shield-maidens with the huge knockers? Can you successfully avoid making that an in-game conversation (hung up in bad jokes about underpants, that lasts for a bioware hour), while still making that choice meaningful, outside a pure game-mechanical one? Of course! It's possible. But you have to design it consciously so you can make meaningful choices with the tools you have as a player. And I think that with D:OS we're getting the reverse effect somehow. That since it sort of looks like the old games (hey, see the characters have circles around them), and they can be grouped around a bit, and so on. That suddenly is a brilliant thing, in spite of the mechanics not really making any sense. Take the intro into combat, for example - I have a group of two hanging back. And instead of retreating the other group when they were spotted, so I can pull the enemy into a trap -- I need to escape, or else walk up to the front with the other two... which was possible without spending action points.. And when I escape, I get to attack the encounter again from the same spot, since the AI instantly retreats. So basically what you have is not formations, you have one group that moves into the combat spot, which stays where it is. ..the combat was fun otherwise, though. Like really, really fun, damnit.
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Difficulty level
nipsen replied to Macrae's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
I'm guessing that's probably because it is so common that mechanics in games usually are not all that great. Seems to me that "easy" more and more simply means that the enemies are dumb enough or have so little health that they allow the mechanics to not be a huge hindrance. Or, that increasing the difficulty just means you have to use more potions or spam super-abilities. The original Demon('s) Souls was a very good example of how it's possible to get around that. Lots of people are talking about how it's fair but difficult - but that was because the fighting mechanics always allowed you to move as if you were in control, in spite of not simplifying everything to a counter/attack minigame. And since all creatures and even the bosses obeyed the same rules as you (no homing attacks or unblockable crazyness, no missed hit-boxes or unfair slashes through walls. etc. unlike in Dark Souls), the feeling you had pretty much always was that there was a way to win, but that you didn't play towards that when you lost (and they managed to maintain that for all the classes, which was a real achievement). So you would happily go back and try again if you were defeated.. Know a guy who normally dislike games because they don't seem very fun, and he doesn't have the "training" those of us who have played practically every game released have. But he liked playing Demon Souls, even though he didn't get past the second stone for a very long time. But he still played that game, and that was because the difficulty didn't come from contrivances and bad controls, or from (to non-gamers) unintuitive mechanics that had to be learned outside of the game. But instead from challenging you in a way that made sense internally in the game while not being completely boring. ..And I think that is true for pretty much all games - if an rpg forces you to rest every ten meters (nwn), or just use more health-potions when the critters are more difficult to defeat, and so on. Or you figure out that it's really about clicking more, and spamming more functons, or micromanaging on a very low level with less room for mistakes when the difficulty ramps up. Then it's not fun to a very large amount of people. Saw the same thing with Broken Age. There are a few people who insist that the game is only less difficult because it removed the contrived verb-based interface. That the difficulty alone came from figuring out which verb to use, or which pixel to click, and so on. But here as well: if you don't make a game challenging without relying on contrivance, and also don't add any challenges outside that, the game just isn't fun. And obviously the game becomes very easy to get through when you remove those contrivances. But it's of course not impossible to design challenges that don't rely on contrivance. ..Maybe that's really the biggest difference between a good and a bad video-game?- 77 replies
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..if the game also told you approximately in which direction you /were/ supposed to be going, that would probably be a start. Wouldn't make it much of a better design, but at least you wouldn't be wasting your time trying to figure out the metagame. Since someone mentioned Fallout 2. In Fallout and Fallout 2, they did a few specific things to avoid scenarios like what you get in D:OS. 1. Make encounters progressively difficult outwards in a circle from your starting point. Generally, the longer the distance away from the safety of the vault or the village, the more difficult battles. 2. Explain in some way on beforehand that difficult encounters are either extremely difficult, and that you probably need to come back later. Or use a different trick. Khan camp, for example. (Note that "trick" doesn't mean: you need to sell loot and buy a specific spell and disposable one-shot lockpicks that cost a fortune). 3. Directions. In D:OS, I ran into several examples of people pointing me at a landmark I have heard mentioned before -- but which isn't marked on my map, which the quest-giver doesn't mark on my map, and where I literally have no idea where can be reached from. I've accepted several quests that simply are not possible to find without trial and error. 4. Gear with stat-requirements, not randomly generated awesomeloot with level penalties.. from chests in areas you were /supposed/ to reach at a later level.. It's just very convoluted, and extremely poor design. If you had a game-master making a game like this for you, he or she would be the kind that would flip the table and shove you out of the room if you suggested that perhaps... not killing off half the party in a random self-loading bear-trap on the way to the dungeon would be a more ideal approach. Actually, the first 30 minutes of the game makes sense (which probably accounts for the relatively good reviews) because of the linear tutorial level. That is.. if you abandon your pursuit of what seems to be your entire reason for being in Cyseal in favor (he's right there! If he can't teleport, he's toast!) of potential loot. Then you're teleported out a distance away into the fog, wondering what exactly happened in between the two locations in the time you were away. The game tends to give you these tremendously obtuse popups insisting that you can click the mouse-button on both the left and the right sides, for example. Explanations for what is going on with the narrative, if anything, are.. not exactly as careful as that. 10 hours later, and you're still running into the same problem. I suppose it's less of a problem if you've played the game 20 times before and know what's going on (then you would probably know of a way to disable the popups as well). If you know where the quests are anyway, and don't really need to mark the map with custom flags -- which you can't really use for anything but confirming that "yes, I am now back at a point I have been before". But if you don't have the metaknowledge, it's pretty confusing. Much more confusing than BG1/2. Specially since you kind of suspect over and over again that if you didn't trigger a quest-state at some very specific point on your path, the game-world will stand still forever. (...or as the D:OS writers would have said it: "The vast expanse of Wooooo and abstract terms will be obscurified from mortal eyes as gods die and lay claim to heavenly bodies and angels and demons burn trails freely on the Earth's crispy but soft crust, I would really like a cracker, what was I talking about again, just ship it, ship itttttt?!!?!!!"). Imagine something like New Reno in Fallout 2 - if none of the npcs in any areas know how to explain where anything else is (i.e., the ones who wrote the quests didn't know what the map would look like or where the NPCs were standing, nor made any attempt to circumvent that problem by writing relative references such as: north of the citadel. To the east of the convent. The western beach. Ask this person, find it past this building-- follow the bloody pixie-dust trail, etc). And if all the quests in New Reno were made to look "free" and non-linear by forcing you to zig-zag the map approximately three hundred times until you've collected all the critical items needed in order to "progress" the quest - at one specific point - that you don't know where actually is triggered. You discover that you've triggered the quest-flag by pursuing something else somewhere else. It would be something like this: "you can't become a made man with the Wrights before you've concluded all of Renesco's sidequests, since he is potentially dead after the ending of said quest, but the game won't tell you that or even attempt to explain this in a non-metagame way". It'd be completely uninteresting. I think my favorite bad design hook-off with D:OS is the way the conversations actually pretty often force you into a critical confrontation that leads to a battle (like the guards at the beginning - "You deserve to be punched in the face") - and you really have no way of knowing that suddenly the game takes you literally, and adds spears and axes, so you murder the bastards and that's that. But then later - you can accuse people of murder, admit to stealing their house off the foundations, try to have them arrested, threaten the captain of the guard -- and the game actually requires you to do it to progress the quest. Which this time /doesn't/ lead to a confrontation. In fact, these guys couldn't care less as long as you don't pilfer the cheeze three inches from the guard's nose. Apparently pickpocketing in Cyseal is an arcane art, while stealing people's houses off the foundation is easy and can be done by anyone. The game has no way of explaining any of that. And even the hilariously 1980's pre-Sierra design with the dialogue trees recurring for every single character in the game-world: "1. tell me about yourself. 2. about the subject you seem to be having more information about. 3. tell me gossip, if implemented. 4. whosaprettybird" --- doesn't actually prevent the designers and writers from telling you critical information when you need it. Just try to wrap your head around that. The dialogue sequences in the game are one step removed from being narrated debugging info -- and the game is nevertheless convoluted and impossible to understand. Not because the quests are complex, but because they are contrived and obscure.
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..Had to play it.. for some ten hours or so, until I got around to some quests progressing a bit.. spent a long while micromanaging things, moving around random objects one by one to find switches. Played rock-paper-scissors with myself 10 times each argument. At some point the guards decided I was strong enough to be let out of the city gates. Which I wasn't. By some... fifteen levels or so. Unless I moved around the orcs (that were strong enough to level the city at any point), and then I could progress a bit further. Until I found a door I couldn't get through (your quest-flag is in a different castle), that I couldn't lockpick (you should have chosen skullduggery instead of airyanism three levels earlier!), turned back, and got slaughtered again. I'm sure you're actually supposed to be grinding undead at some direction of the compass somewhere, and then run around investigating your first quest - which seemingly is a tutorial quest, but really is the main quest - once in a while in between the looting and leveling. But I don't think I care enough to try again. This was a waste of time.
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No circles below characters?
nipsen replied to Archaven's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
..if it was me, I'd program in circles that follow the elevation of the terrain, and have a shader-budget for lighting and shadow-treatment that breaks an SLI Titan setup. -
What will game cost on release?
nipsen replied to kranecu's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Nice post, anameforobsidian. It always surprises me, even though it shouldn't, when journalists, gamers, hardcore fans, analysts, etc. Insist that even if the game isn't very good, even if the studio that made it didn't really get paid and never could finish the game, even if the salaries people get are peanuts (and cut off halfway into the project), even if the employees are treated as crap (I mean, it's not exactly uncommon that some of the best developers retire from games-development and start using their education on something more profitable - by necessity, regrettably, etc.) -- then that doesn't matter as long as the company made a profit on the project. Because then we will be given another bug-ridden, half-finished, soulless serial-produced game once more in the future. Which will be great. And the industry will go on. The same people also bemoan a perpetual incoming industry-apocalypse because the cheap customers refuse to pay a premium for dlc, etc. I mean, one day, we will have games-development houses that are supported in a way that they can operate independently. So they can develop quality titles while hiring out their excess personnel to publisher projects. And it will be common, and acceptable, for these developers to talk openly about "tent-pitchers" - that they do hired/requested work to earn money so they can develop what they want more freely. That won't be the death of the industry by any means. Instead it will very obviously increase the talent and the output. And like I said, it really is disappointing when that goal, of independently financed developers, somehow isn't favored by actual people who just play the games. That's like literally saying: "I want Joss Whedon to make /only/ Avengers and Buffy - forever". ..Nothing of that creative stuff that slightly provokes people on the internet, please! And it's made all the worse when the argument you hear - and I've had this said while I was listening, with my mouth open, right after the PoE Kickstarter took off - that Obsidian is a developer that has little discipline and knowledge of how to make good, polished games, so they should be grateful for the assistance a larger publisher will provide. Hence the kickstarter success is a curse in disguise, and we are only waiting for the kickstarter fails to come in (and you've seen some of the eager press about that subject, from that exact angle, in more than one major site). Stuff like that.. not a huge fan, have to admit. -
^somehow became interested. Might have had something to do with the option to take a piss on someone's expensive carpets. (Btw, the No Man's Sky feature on gamespot is up. Last episode was very good: http://www.gamespot.com/the-next-big-game-no-mans-sky/ )
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What will game cost on release?
nipsen replied to kranecu's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Mm. I have to admit I do love capitalism. So very much. Seriously, though - if people don't respect it if others could never, in a million years, think it's anything but absolute insanity to give a developer money for a product they don't have any idea what will look like when, or if, it's finished. Then please keep it to yourself. If people don't think they should sponsor Obsidian to make games no publisher will touch -- so be it. Their choice. Capitalism. If only this sober consumer attitude extended to the products offered by major publishers as well, that would be great. Moving on - we know the budget is locked now. Additional funding will not go towards developing the game further. So it's really about which alternative will leave Obsidian with the most money per purchase. And odds are that even if Steam ends up selling the game for a higher price than the "digital" tier you still can purchase on this site - which they probably will - Obsidian will be left with more money per purchase in the end if you buy it through their pre-order portal. And that buying it after release, in their release-channel, will be marginally less expensive for them as well. So it's probably a completely moot point. Steam rarely differentiates between digital and physical releases, selling them all for an as high price as it will go for. (And likely Obsidian will resist lowering the price initially unless they want to gamble on getting a billion-selling hit by dominating the hit-lists initially, etc.). In other words, if you want the cheapest digital release, you buy it from Obsidian now or after release (which likely still makes Obsidian earn the most money off anyway). If you want the discs after release, you buy the paradox-made thing in the shop.. -
Shipping Physical Goods and Customs
nipsen replied to Gyges's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Bah! No, you have to petition the right authorities back in the 70s when the law was made and the interpretation of it established, you lazy bum! We just have to find a time-machine. That is not signed copy usually means, and it would be quite worthless, as mass copied signatures don't have any relevant collecting value in them. ...I suppose they could sign a couple of hundred cardboard prints, before they become boxes, and ship them along to the factory afterwards. But that's cheating, and no one wants to know about it if they do that. How many signed collector's edition boxes did people order, by the way? -
Shipping Physical Goods and Customs
nipsen replied to Gyges's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
That's how it works legally, and how it's supposed to work. But in practice, what we do here in the last Soviet state is this: When the goods arrive at the airport, they get shipped to the mail service's custom department (unless you pay for a private actor to deal with the customs papers for you - in which case you declare the type of goods and add 25% tax for certain goods. As you say, the ). And the clause for freely importing personal goods in Schengen only applies if you have been out of the country yourself. Internet shopping always incurs a 25% tax in addition to the customs fees, as long as the goods are worth more than 200 NOK ~ 24 euro or so. So even if Paradox filled out all the customs papers, specified the value of the goods, that we've paid such and such, that the tax was included or not included -- it wouldn't matter. Because Internet shopping has it's own rules.. it's stuck to a mail service licensing agreement -- and there's no way to get around it. In other words, I wouldn't honestly be incredibly unhappy if Obsidian marked the original Kickstarter value on the package, and thought of the disc-set as a "free gift" in return for a "donation for a good cause". Which, incidentally would actually make the customs papers completely legal - just saying. -
Haha. I think "Shallow Space" is what the nearby space sectors become when they're overpopulated or something. Still - better than Nexus: The Jupiter Incident.
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.... Well. Somebody is going to write an unpaid review on an obscure blog in a few years, where they write about how Pillars lets you make your characters unique and interesting from the start of the game. Rather than making you a weak farmer who needs to level up from grinding turnips for hours. While the game then is reactive to those initial choices, allowing you to develop your character further. ...or something.
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Update #79: Graphics and Rendering
nipsen replied to BAdler's topic in Pillars of Eternity: Announcements & News
..mmh. Could also be a good idea to have the UI follow the same aesthetic as the 2d surfaces elsewhere, like the parchment pages, that sort of thing. So the things that move in the game happens in the virtual world, instead of randomly at the screen, etc. Huge fan of transparent UI that turns at a slower rate than the objects further in, though. (Like the holographic loading screens in killzone 2). Seems to me that you can get away with movement on the top UI level without it being a distraction as well then.- 192 replies
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we dated an actress... once. HA! Good Fun! Pretty sure all of us are actors, in one way or another. To misquote some guy. But even if it is reasonable... and very obvious.. to assume that Obsidian folks would feel slighted, and dumped, by how the press falls in love with Bioware and EA's money. How they carry a not very good title on review blitzes and.. embedded journalists.. I mean, that actually happened. Not just the one who got a role in the game, but others who were paid to write positive features ahead of launch, etc. Becomes very difficult to get a critical Mass Effect 3 review printed when a senior writer gushes about the game's motion features the week before launch. Without disclosing that they had a sponsorship agreement with EA at the time. And EA obviously knows that, and are very skilled with exploiting the PR opportunities the current games-media gives them. That Obsidian would be annoyed by how every game they launch gets instantly described as a buggy unfinished mess in every review. Because they mention they have bugs they unfortunately couldn't address themselves. While no other developer on earth gets their games reviewed in the same way. Because they keep their mouths shut about the huge occlusion problem in 90% of the game's scenes. That they lose bonuses for metacritic scores, that were reduced thanks to a set of very curious reviews. When eventually the same publication wrote a "New Vegas makes the original Fallout 3 obsolete" feature about a year later. Etc. That Obsidian folks would think that they are being punished by press and fans for being honest, rather than serving people a constant stream of bs. And that simplistic design from abstracts that can be summarized on an a4 page makes good sales-pitches. But often bad games. Or that three minute romances makes for striking press, but uncomfortably bad dialogue in the game. And that this is something it's natural people would eventually catch on to. Just like how having a compartmentalized writing team writing bulk in parallel might increase the amount of quests, but make everything disjointed and uninteresting, etc. That larger budgets and shorter development cycles isn't going to "solve" the problem with producing AAA games, but that this razor-slicing concept is not going to cut it for actually making deeper games after all, etc. And that thoughts like this could possibly be something some Obsidian folks, like some of us, feel is somewhat redeemed with the kickstarter success of PoE, for example. And could, perhaps for good reason, think that Bioware got some well-deserved problems with TOR and the ME3 "choose your colour overlay on the picturebook ending" debacle. I think all of those are reasonable things to assume are views that can exist. But that there is a battle going on between Bioware and Obsidian, that's an intertron invention, no? ..I mean, if I remember correctly, the entire serialmance thing was an issue on a few hundred pages and fifty thousand threads on Bioware's forums all the way back to Neverwinter Nights. The idea apparently being that every character in every house in the game, as well as the dog, and the druid's animal companions, should have a romance option. Because if dwarves would not throw themselves at elves and humans, it would be racist. In the same way, that romance by default is something every NPC in the world has, and you have to program it to set one to have specific affinity for just the other sex, so programmers are homophobic, etc. And other amazingly entertaining philosophical discussions. It's not a secret that Bioware's community manager folks were more involved in that discussion compared to anything else, including the drm horror. Thanks to - hopefully in large part - because of the amount of traffic this crap generated. So when that interest in serialmancing results in adding token relationships with npcs in the games - that it actually ends up in the design, and is the most talked about feature in the entire game - then that says something about the approach to making the games that the company has. And the approach to taking on board "input" from the fans. And at least that's where I feel slighted. I really don't have a habit of going on a book-forum and writing down 5000 words about why I thought something was intelligent and thought-provoking. I was genuinely shocked when I found out the dune on usenet had huge discussions about how vain Frank Herbert was, for example. That never occurred to me, and it still doesn't whenever I read the books. But it still generated a discussion that lasted for years. So if there is a split here, it is between people who think that vapid crazy **** on the internet should be instantly catered to as quickly as possible. And between those who suspect that doing so is quietly killing off the fanbase. And that's not really bioware or obsidian, but a very outspoken and obvious design philosophy at many major publishing companies and developers at the moment. If anything, that's what makes Obsidian as a company inedible to a lot of people in the gaming press. This could have been a random stupid comment (very likely), but I've actually had people say outright that they dislike Obsidian for not giving them easy **** to sell that fans want. Meaning that they didn't respond to what was buzzing on the forums at the time, etc. That was a real opinion by a relatively well-placed writer. And perhaps that's what makes Obsidian inedible to some publisher folks as well? That they still exist as a studio, in spite of not actively making vapid crap. I mean, things that supposedly sell, that people want to buy. .. just my opinion, obviously.
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I'm guessing they're looking to engage parts of their team full-time for a period, or something like that, to get some of the heavy grinding done. Or they're doing something else to pay the bills at the same time, I guess.. ..man, their crazy weird updates are creepy. Don't say anything about what they want to use their budget on, though. Meanwhile, Shallow Space seems to be shaping up. Shallow Space is the ..spiritual successor to Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. Unfortunately, it's not based on the "Black Sun" tech engine that Nexus was. HD Interactive doesn't really exist any more. And that tech-demo we've been drooling over for the last 8 years basically is lost forever. So it's taken them some time to get the game up to a level where it actually looks good enough to show any promise at all. And I think it was wise to relaunch it as "Shallow Space". It still isn't as brilliant as what that nexus 2 trailer demonstrated. They're lacking the light distortion effects from beams and background objects through displacement shields. And light washing over the scene as the sun comes up behind a planet. The rotating objects in far view-distance that don't pop in as they change from static to dynamic objects, that sort of thing. Same with capital ships having their detail generated depending on how close to the viewpoint it was - another very obvious obstacle to making space sim games work.. It is an unreal engine game, and there are certain limitations to it because of that. But it's starting to look impressive by the normal "AAA" standard now. So it will be interesting to see where they'll end up.
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Neat. I thought they were sort of stuck on trying to get it greenlighted on steam or something. Picked the disc version.
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Physical Media Release
nipsen replied to rjshae's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Kind of admire the fact that certain developers and the larger publishers have managed to instruct people so well that: "release the game when it's done" isn't even an option. So balancing patches /have/ to be done after release. And a "gameoftheyear" edition is inevitable and understandable. Along with the need to sign up to a content portal full of ads to get "free" updates on the hat colours. And three months after the game launches, the disc version isn't compatible with the current version of directx and .net. Also, disc quality must be worse than the discs you buy for 1$ for 50. The cover art must be made by the secretary in Paint. The paper quality is the kind you use in the toilet. The plastic bits holding the disc down should break off the first time you play the game. Or else the publisher will go bankrupt from the cost of including an always online drm encryption scheme. It's all completely reasonable. -
This stuff is always predictable, though. Josh says they don't put in romances, because they have to be done really well to be satisfying, and they'd rather spend time on other things. And there's always some jackass who literally says: "NO, WE WANT SIMPLISTIC CARTOON SEX AND BADLY WRITTEN COME-ONS FROM FICTIONAL GIRLS IN THE GAME TO PLEASE MY BADLY SUPPRESSED SEXUALITY!". Suddenly, it's the most popular thread on the forum. And that's both poetic and appropriate to bring up the next time someone even /seems/ to be expressing an opinion about anything, isn't it.
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A little bit more on "about games", talking about design and No Man's Sky. Trailer for feature next week: http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-point-is-marketing-killing-the-wonder-of-games/2300-6420070/
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I suppose a thought might be that it's a dangerous thing to describe any system with a label, and think that ends the discussion about what it represents. [insert week long lecture about communism, Marx and lesser known speeches on parliamentary systems and free speech, why "Marxism" doesn't exist, British empiricism, German commercialism. And Stalin, Manchuria, Imperialism, China and up to the never-ending Korea "conflict" here].
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..notes on Nationalism is one of Eric Blair's many very good essays. But I'm not sure people who took that quote to heart could even bear to read the entire thing.. Massive wealth inequality, poverty, huge incarceration rates (especially for minorities), sexism, racism, slavery, child-labour, exploitation of the third world, imperialist wars... Its all still there. Right. We just don't have a powerful megalomaniac insisting that everything we do has a greater meaning and a larger context, where any effort we can put into it is part of the inevitability of history, march of democracy, freedom and liberty, etc. So we have to motivate people to do actual things by themselves. And that - really is the most difficult thing you can do, because people who think about this stuff are often megalomaniacs themselves. Obviously, any revolutionary will be a bit crazy. But nowadays, we don't really see the point in doing anything, unless it is on that larger scale. Like I said, very brave people have given up on humanity because individuals are morons who don't believe in anything other than pettiness and egotism. And I could probably add that the ones who do believe in anything, tend to believe in ways to justify egotism, and swear to methods that protect their scared little minds from events that might make them change their opinions: There's no such thing as bad news for "our" side. Just look at people with Rand in a picture-frame on their desk. They sit on the actual writing and justification presented to them, which is by it's own description a philosophically justified system of egotism. Where trusting in that egotism and taking it beyond mere human boundaries, is supposed to create a glorious and successful world in every respect. When that doesn't happen, there's no reason to adjust. Because the entire work is dedicated to having people motivate their individual egotistical acts, and building them all together into a bridge of terror across the abyss of stagnation. And therefore it is good, no matter how many idiotic things that follow each individually egotistical act. No matter how destructive, or what personal context it is performed, an egotistical act is a good, because it motivates people to act and to create change. You know what the worst part is? It is that if people actually were informed about how what they do affects others, Ayn Rand would not actually be completely idiotic. Apart from the fact that she specifically encourages people to act without the restrictions of implications, of course. Meanwhile, "our group" and "our movement" continues to mill around doing nothing. Because actually motivating individual people to do anything about small things where they actually have influence - is hard. So hard. Whether it is believing in that it makes a difference, or if it is thinking it has any influence. So things move on. Individual egotists are protected and encouraged to be egotists by laws and state. And the ones rebelling against it keep sanctifying imaginary goals that hopefully can't be reached. Such as? I'm not denying movements existed but these were primarily aiming for tiny concessions and reforms with hardly the level of mass support previous movements had. This is hardly a contentious claim; leftists complaining about the modern state of the left is basically a cliché. EDIT: And props to anyone who can tie this back into the thread topic. :D haha. You know what has been the most annoying thing for me in the last 15 years? It's that intelligent people are mostly tremendously humorless idiots. If you try to do something nice and convenient: why, there is an intelligent person there insisting that you have a widespread agenda with it and a huge philosophical justification for it. The one insisting on that may or may not be on "your team". And both sides are equally disappointed when you're just motivated by something that doesn't fit into the normal preconceptions. In my opinon, feminism is a bit like piracy and the hacker scene. We won, basically. Spotify, Apple store, at least some services are selling loss-less, and they're selling digital tracks. But in the end, the tech we promoted isn't used by the artists. Very few artists actually take the time to either learn about loss-less and high definition audio. And very few see the point in creating a target for their recording that has higher definition. In fact, because so few people listen to music on anything but a mono radio in the kitchen - having high definition targets is going to make the music sound worse. So while the tech exists commercially, and that the thought behind it is good. There is little to no demand for it. The licensing schemes that would have sprouted from that tech isn't happening. And we're left with a few select artists that know their tech, who offer their music in higher definition and loss-less decoding. And we can buy delicious manna from those. But no one else but a few people really can enjoy it, or indeed do appreciate it. Feminism is the same way. Feminism has won. Women can now legitimately be as much of a bastard as men can. Women can raise boys to be wimpy little overprotected ****s and there's nothing anyone can say about it. Incompetent women can run around and abuse their position as much as incompetent men. Equal rights for bastards exists. Meanwhile, mutual respect exists in pockets, on the back of previous victories. Where some live together as partners, where women actually are allowed to enjoy sex as much as men, and where perspectives change and are worth something. But the world elsewhere doesn't have any use for that. It may exist, and it may be convenient and lovely for those who appreciate it on the personal level. But it's too tame, too boring for the ones that fight for the right to be a bigger bastard than the rest. I mean, that's really what you get now. People get upset because women are involved, and they don't know how to deal with either themselves or other people. Either from bad upbringing or bad personal choices. Counterparts get upset because of the stupidity of it all, and try to match that with their own stupidity. And they all still call it feminism, apparently. I mean, seriously - "feminism in videogames". Just have a taste on that. It used to be about wages, voting and family planning, right to decide your own life and fate. And now? The importance of having young adults being exposed to whiny gays in video-games, so they won't be stuck in their safe and assumed preconceptions about gender roles. Humans are hilarious.
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Some of the problem being that we don't really have anything to fight for, I guess. Seriously, though - a lot of the things we read about in history books were small events that are taken into a larger context. And only remembered and presented as important because they were considered to be part of a larger movement. Enemies of such and such as frequently as heroic actions by the ones we like and care about (like white privileged boys). Meanwhile, people who really did important humanitarian work.. wives and nuns running an open clinic teaching women about prevention, family planning and sex, sexually transmitted diseases, etc., in the 20s in certain countries, for example. Against church, against the establishment and against pietism. They had enough enemies that they were never part of the "feminist movement" or the suffragettes around the time. Hell, that kind of thing is still not good enough for common attention now. You know Semmelweiss? Guy who suggested doctors should wash their hands before going into operating, overseeing births, that kind of thing. Specially when they had been performing autopsies of post mortems right before. He saved a bunch of lives by having the doctors indulge his insanity for a while. But eventually he had to leave Vienna. And eventually, he gave up on the entire thing. He died after cutting himself with a scalpel he had cut a corpse with right before. And died, as he knew he would, of blood poisoning later. Neither of these people were part of a huge movement, unless you start to improvise with the history-lesson for "simplicity". Point is that at the moment, we don't have anything we /think/ is important to fight for. While the ones that think they have something to fight for tend to be... completely insane. Megalomaniacs. Believing in great stories and the inevitability of history. Judging by a friend I had, that has happened a lot of times before.. He was a nazi during the war, he's dead now. Basically, he never admitted the entire thing was a bad idea. So when I met him some 40 years later, he really hadn't changed his opinions at all. Frankly, I should have recorded everything he said and published it somehow. You would be surprised how well that material has survived into the next millennium. Different words, different contexts. But it was familiar. Too familiar.
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Or fear petty things, while inflating their self-importance.
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..when you have influence, that's just a fancy name for "self-fulfilling prophecy", Monte. "The inevitability of history". Good one. Always sells papers, in spite of how "Accept your fate and embrace the End which is near!" does't. "Currents in the demographies". That's my favourite. "Really, we don't know how it happened, but somehow everyone's a complete arse to everyone else now, and curiosity is a sign of weakness and lack of respect for God". What the entire "White privileged boys" problem in games - let's just be clear we're only talking about games here - boils down to is this: White privileged boys are privileged, and think they should be, because they have money and are great reliable customers. And there's a real misconception involved here that I feel white privileged boys suffer from. You see, most white privileged boys are equal opportunity people. They don't care where you're from, or how much you earn - as long as you're white and privileged. Some white and privileged even want to embrace brown and sort of less pink people who are privileged as well, which shows great forbearance, in my opinion. Because it is a completely known fact to everyone else, that all other groups of people would like to be white and privileged. Why would they possibly not want to be that? So these aforementioned progressive white and privileged takes that seriously, and wants to include the other groups - out of a sense of survival. Because think of it like this - one day there will be (an inevitable) rebellion, and then the situations will be reversed. Where white privileged people will have their station taken from them, and be lorded over by the blacks and specks. 'tis the law of the universe, clearly. And the trick is to allow the weak groups to aspire to be one of us, and never actually have the opportunity. Hahahahahahahahaha! Oooahahahahhahaah! Eat cake! Seriously, though. The one thing I dislike the most about the way games are sold nowadays, is that an obviously very small group is allowed to dictate what the game should cater to. At the board-meetings there's a whole bunch of talk about how the game can add features and script reactivity, avoid showing the face of the hero, etc., to better allow the player to identify with the character. And then it turns out that when you actually sell the game, there is one uniform audience that jumps at the same time if poked in the right way. And it is: White privileged boys with small penises who want to buy power-fantasies. They're exactly the same person, they're identical in their preferences, they take their inspiration from the same TV shows, they listen to the same music, they wear the same clothes, they read the same books... at least the same comics. They have the same hair, they have the same eating habits, they have a 99% synergy with the currently promoted goods on major tv shows, etc. These people are easy to sell to. They don't care about anything, and they'll fall for any lie if it's told with enough authority. And I don't see why the PR departments have to be so conceited about it. They sell exclusively to the easiest targets, and wish everyone would be like that. But it's bad form to lie about it. And to insist that you are actually catering to "all gamers". That's the annoying part. See, it's really not just about self-censorship at the studios. It's a marketing necessity. We all know that this band of orcs actually have skirts underneath their masks when they're farming xp. But they still act like they're the target audience for the sales-pitch. Gruff and aggressive, who like bashing people's skulls in. That's the pitch, and they're following that up. Developers do the same thing, looking at that and responding to the easiest sales-pitch. And it's actually a phenomena that isn't actually that old. It used to be that certain products were obviously sold to specific genders, and marketed that way. It's not very clever to sell razor blades "for both him and her", for example. You know, there are probably some progressive marketers out there who would go for that, but it probably won't work. But now, we get the "group identifier", that more people than just the target group identify with. You sell dreams and wishes, see? You don't sell products. You sell what people want to be, what people see in their mind when they think of your product. And it's just weird to see that when you're talking about video-games. That were engineered from the start to have dynamic content, where practically everything can be projected in some way or other based on feedback from the user. Artists and musicians are typically hot on expression, and personal expression. There was typically an aspect of that in video-games as well. Making virtual fantasies to entertain people. And that's.. just not interesting any more. Instead it's all about sitting down and playing the same groundbreaking and personal power-fantasy - together with other people who feel the exact same way, and who think of the game exactly like you do. And then write about it in bad English in the commentary fields on IGN. It's just weird. I really don't know where that came from. You don't see the same effect in any other serious marketing venue. Be it milk-cartons, tv series, movies or tourism, or whatever. You just don't encourage boring people to be boring. It just not good business. And yet. With white privileged boys and gaming, there's an opportunity for exactly that.
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This is a tricksiest question, isn't it. But yeah.. any editor worth a damn would demand, instantly, that you either get a die-hard role-playing game player to do the preview and in-depth articles. From the perspective that they dislike the game for not being hard core enough. Really, what's up with the graphics - they're not as awesome as my imagination anyway, so get lost! Who cares about animation (which I'll smuggle in a small tidbit about, just to be nice to the devs who seemed so proud of it) when there's stats to be analyzed! Or, you would have a vapid, superficial moron - any person would do, I guess. Have them do a preview. And then school them on what they /should/ have included, even if someone actually chose their point of view as a starting point for the coverage. And neither of those approaches would have avoided a set of questions that would either relate to character generation specifically. Or to the personality and abilities of a striking character that someone noticed, and how their abilities are used in battle (and ed says: incidentally, "hag fury" used in this scenario is an ability that increases number of attacks at the cost of damage potential). I mean, that's the problem, right? It's so cozy and nice that we're not getting anything out of it any more. Some developers and publishers realize that and see it as an opportunity: they can control what people are saying, guiding them by the ears. And people do follow directions. But it really does annoy me a lot when you have.. even someone like Joe Vargas ends up talking to the guys, and it's so careful and nice and only the right subjects that have already been allowed, and they can't talk about anything in detail, and they all respect that. Just pathetic. Not that I would have been any less nervous about talking to Josh than if I was invited to casually chat about cyberpunk with William Gibson. But you're not really doing anyone any favors by being so careful, no? Saw that same thing with No Man's Sky as well after E3. The view I've heard the most has been that it's probably overhyped. Of course, people who were at e3 are having a hard time even explaining what it is. Just like with any amount of other games, that no one knows anything about - other than that they are awesome! - before they come out. I comes from bad "new" journalism, bad journalists with too high self-importance, and too much "I thought that it was true at the time I wrote it (in a hotel hired by the publisher, while drinking champagne together with three overseers from the PR office, who also instructed me to use certain words and build up the preview in certain ways - which I happened to neglect to mention at the time) - but because I thought it was true at the time, therefore I am only being honest, and my credibility does not suffer"*. Seriously, though -- think there's any kind of future for some kind of journalism again? Some sort of journalism that is based on skills, curiosity, and a sense for encouraging your sources to see the value of answering what you're asking them? You know, actual information. That is interesting to the readers rather than the advertisers, since readers care about credible information they know the context of. Rather than that the headline makes them want to click it, which they'll do and then not read the actual text. ..or am I just dropping into science fiction futures again right now. *actual quote (minus the paranthesis) from slacknews after a particularly bad e3 preview.