nipsen

Novac was.. well.. it seemed to have gotten more attention than any other location in the game. But I don't think it was the actual time mechanics that made it successful. Instead it was that it made sense for the people to be there at the time. The time-advance mechanics still weren't all that great - even if they were saved in this specific case by the fact that you could sleep in a bed and advance to the right time-slots. Since you don't know when the switch is thrown, right? But it made sense this time because the guy waits until dark, and he is bound to be in the dinosaur when the sun rises. .. even if the engine didn't actually allow that, you imagine it did. But I think you're right that it doesn't necessarily need extra paths. More than careful scripting... and a link between the scripting and the writing. The difficulty is having someone as gamemaster, or writer, and so on, who can quickly come up with alternative rationalizations for what happens. Like I said, narrative time doesn't mind about technical things, it only cares if it sounds plausible. And since you're not really demonstrating every single event, people will extrapolate what happened from just a few extra cues. So the trick is to allow for events in the timeline that seemingly alter the paths, and then account for those indirectly. Then again.. I know a guy who did this purely mechanically, listed events in the quest and just chose one randomly. Had a traditional arch, opening, crisis, resolution - put in one, noted the conditions, and that led to a specific resolution he had prepared. And still pulled it off pretty often. But what you want to "see" is that the world around you is actually moving when you're not looking, no? That's the goal, not to create incredibly difficult and complicated guided paths. And that doesn't necessarily mean you have to make everything the player does reactive. ..lots of people who write stories like: "you pick up an apple, cut it, and it causes the apocalypse!". That doesn't make the world more dynamic, it just makes your choices more important, as well as always being that annoying trigger everyone stands around waiting for.

..I think it has something to do with the way they've balanced the encounters. If you don't have human players, things start to get a bit out of hand just with three players, even on normal. Get stuck with two team-mates in the equipment screen during a boss-fight, and you're sort of not going to do so well. Can recommend playing it online, though. Much more fun than I thought. Screen zooms out a bit, encounters become pretty impressive.. that sort of thing.

"Until evening". You will be able to complete two errands, three if you choose the quickest way, but not four. You have to choose between going south through the ghoul-infested ruins, or going through the snow-covered mountain path to the west. One will be risky, but might save you time. The other will be slow, but you are certain to arrive later than you would wish for. I always put in things in short quests as well when people run around doing too many silly things. "Yeah, you just missed him, he had too much altar-wine and said he was on his way to the [inquisition's main chapter CRITICAL LOCATION], and you can just about /exactly/ manage to reach him in time if you go to this CRITICAL LOCATION FOR THE QUEST right now. Same with always coming too late, no matter what. Also helps making non-time dependent exploration more fun, or at least I think so. Um.. Narrative time?

What's that sound? Why, it's Eurogamer's "tech"-guys, all Microsoft employees, IGN chatterboxes and Gaf-people guffawing in disbelief. Because /everyone/ knows that porting a game across platforms is /expensive work/. And that developing multiple trails will make the cost of everything double for each platform! Rabblerabble! It's been said by /professional developers/ that a toolchain that can compile for different platforms is simply /not possible/. So therefore Obsidian are lying about their commitment, and promising things they cannot keep! Expect a huge mass of guesswork and arrogant opinion masquerading as a news-item about prominent kickstarter campaigns going down the drain on N4G tomorrow!

.... playing games for years never saw any of this really just as well.

Just out of curiosity - would you consider the game misogynistic, if you could shoot enemy soldiers through their ****? In any case. I can also guarantee you that no "serious" gaming site would ever dare to call Sniper V3 what it is: a childishly vicious game - a bit like happily pulling legs off spiders. And that this particular game seems to be designed for people who pulled the legs off spiders, and kept doing it as a hobby.

..I think he said he's favoring an angry conviviality of groups ruled by an absolute authority (i.e., a dictatorship), as long as opportunism is encouraged. But not actually allowed without strict limitations, so that things will happen properly for the right people (as they justly deserve). *spit* *hhaaarrrrkkkk* Anyway. No Man's Sky. Good preview. Sort of. Game about exploring space. Just the seamless flight between the planet's atmosphere and interstellar travel is impressive enough (allowed by the way the engine draws planets and detail based on visibility, not existence in the 3d space). But looking forward to hearing more about ways to tie clusters of planets together, and making your way towards populated space-systems, mapping the new ones you've found into the galaxy maps, that sort of thing. ..Apparently the goal of the game is to travel to the center of the galaxy. Which seems weird. I want to get as far out on the fringes as humanly possible.

Oh, well.

I will maybe go for one fighter and a multiclassed cipher. I don't know, I really like the category type equipment sets and so on. Easy to use as a stepping stone. Makes you able to choose something defining for your class early on.

Mm, that was my impression as well. That Josh didn't mean "there are no nearly unplayable and idiotic builds that are obviously inferior in most situations". But more that the builds would make narrative sense, and that a combination of stats would meaningfully describe your character from the beginning. So look forward to the terminally obese monk that has exceptionally low stamina, no upper arm strength, and can't trigger the upper tier focus effects - unless he somehow survives to level 50.

..not sure, but if I'm guessing right from ..eventually getting around to reading Josh's posts in the last update thread, you can probably create some pretty diverse fighters. Maybe a fighter with high might stats won't necessarily be a huge hulk, with two-handed weapons and steady long-range damage. But a brutally fast striker who can convert accurate and frequent critical hits from just serious wounds into outright fatal attacks, but sacrificing defense and speed to do it. While a low might build could focus on causing wounding hits when they hit, stamina abilities and defense (in a way that other classes can't). Or a dueling build for a one-handed longsword that's based on avoiding critical hits but causing them more often, and hitting on the abilities first and on the first attempt. Maybe there's a way to build a fighter with incredibly high stamina but low might that will outshine everyone else after the first volley of trigger-effects. Seems to me the entire threat roll calculation could allow stuff like that. ..or I mean, that you actually could build those characters from stats focus, ability picks and weapon category choices - instead of having them end up there after 20 levels, as a side-effect of an incredibly specific build. So.. seems promising.

Hm. I thought it was a really good portrait of a soldier's face. ..and will accuracy affect how likely the attack is to cause full damage attacks and criticals as well, instead of just adding to the hit-percent?

Seriously, though. It's nice to see some people who don't outright hate Obsidian's games talk about them and all. But I sort of feel like I want to know a little bit about how the game is set up now.

:D Any real scientist is like that, no? And it really seems very natural to be curious about a phenomena like that. But I'm really drawn to the idea that there's an actual mystical element to it. That if you treat animancy as just a science, as something to control and shape to your liking, you're literally tempting the wrath of the gods.

I don't know. My impression was that what is called animancy is an attempt at objectively defining what some people do instinctively, or think of as religious activity, and so on. So a person in this world could, just guessing, go to a graveyard and touch the soul of a relative, gaining particular knowledge in a very specific context. And then leave it behind, thinking no more of it. It's a rite you do in respect of the dead, who actually exist, and therefore everything works great. And people have aversions to killing people for bad reasons their culture doesn't respect, and your connection to your ancestors and their values is a real physical size, so to speak, rather than something you do just for your own selfish sense of decency, etc. Shamans channel souls, help them coexist with the living. Ciphers might be beings partially living in the soul world, or having their physical self phasing through different realms. So when animancy turns up as a discipline, what they could be talking about - wildly guessing - is that this is specifically the approach to soul magic that isn't cultural, instinctive or religious. But instead purely utilitarian. Perhaps doomed to cross a few barriers those limited by faith or respect for the dead won't, for all kinds of good reasons. After all, I think they've established that the soul is objectively a force that exists in Pillars. So evidently afterlife and birth/rebirth, or dissolution of souls, materialisation of them, must be very important. Whether it's shunned, feared and persecuted (i.e., witchcraft is real!). Or completely incorporated into the culture.

Maybe you could make some "Pillars of Eternity" hoodies? Small white "Obsidian ent." on the front. Coloured large "Pillars", light grey small "of Eternity" on the back. Class skill or class of your choice offset to the right. "Animancy", "Cipher", "Enchanter", "Paladin", "Priest", that sort of thing. Oh, and add a zipper. ..oh, hoho, man, that's so nerdy. And I'd wear it every day if I had one. (..actually, might just make a print with "Pillars" and "Cipher". Won't be a problem if I don't sell it, right?)

..? I did just that - upgraded my pledge when I first registered the kickstarter pledge on this site, using the amount from the kickstarter and putting something on top. I can still add another pledge and retail pack if I want to it seems. But probably isn't possible to alter the pledge from kickstarter if it was finalized into an order earlier, at least from the web-system we have access to.

I think I know less now than before e3.

From the article: :/ ....Because he's unpredictable. Funny thing to say, really. EA, Paradox, Blizzard, other publishers, are all well known for drawing up sponsorship deals with youtubers. At the most respectful, these are open agreements that require a number of videos every week, containing at least such and such many percent gameplay, within a certain timeframe of the launch-window, etc. With suggestions for what might be problematic with the content filter, if anything, and where the music should be scrambled, what sort of logos might not be shown, what content is unlocked, etc. At the other end is EA's deals with people like LevelCap, where they essentially pay him to post content, given that he avoids anything that can be interpreted as being "pre-launch difficulties". Which of course is everything negative about the game. EA has a great tradition on doing blackouts on specific types of negative content - for example making it a demand in their beta-tests that no one signing the nda are to talk about network issues. That actually happened. An online game - but you're not allowed to talk about problems with the network solution. EA themselves won't talk to the press if they mention network problems, or perhaps servers on the opposite end of the world used for load-balancing during the peak hours. So youtube isn't a complete unknown. It's just that some of the most popular channels are critical voices who will rid themselves of their entire viewership if they stop being critical. Seen several channels with people who had a good run, but lost all their viewers when entering a sponsorship agreement with a distribution portal, for example. This is a well-known thing. Meanwhile, people like Joe and Totalbiscuit will still have a good pay from their youtube channel even if all the major publishers hate their guts. Funny how that works out, isn't it. When being beholden to your readers - or at least to advertisers that aren't directly attached to what you're covering - makes you useless for publishing purposes in the games-industry. Seriously, if someone had told me thirteen years ago that this is how things would work out in the future, I'd be laughing at them. But then this it actually happens anyway..

Funny you should mention that entire "decline" idea. Because the feeling I got when I was engaged with Sony (and could use that to fish for comments from some of their partners in a way that I couldn't when just asking as a blogger) - was that a lot of people seriously thought that if we didn't somehow manage to make zombie-shooting fps-games popular /right now/ , then gaming would forever become an obscure industry and die out, etc. Or in more concrete terms: That the industry would never be able to support the kind of production scale they were planning for and putting into place at the moment. That practically everyone involved would lose their jobs in the short term. In other words, that the ones who sat on the investment money themselves had serious doubts about what they were financing. Just as the people who were engaging studios had very little faith in that any of this actually could result in products that could be sold to profits like they expected. Part of this is about unbelievable expectations, of course. And a mismatch between the expectations for profit a creative studio will have, and the expectation an investor will have when it comes to the return from buying stocks in games as opposed to.. potatoes and milk-carton designs. Some of the successful pitches that have been made when it comes to retention, recurring visits and purchases, motivation for buying things during gameplay, etc., have been literally insane. But I think the biggest responsibility for how this stuff has gotten out of hand lies with the fact that the entire games-media as it is now essentially exists to print folksy retellings of the advertisement packages they get from their largest sponsors. And how that has led not just users but also creative studios to focus on a very small amount of people, to the exclusion of everyone else. Like you point out above, there are a lot of niches out there that sustain themselves just fine. Where the synergy between the niche activity and the specialized media-coverage following it enlarges it to a point. It's possible to imagine games-media and the games-industry as a niche like that, in the way industry insiders tend to do. But what has happened is that the large sites, and large magazines before that, have taken to specialize coverage too much. Kieron Gillen in PCGamerUK, for example, and his "new games-journalism manifesto" that really has survived until now. It's all about creating coverage that sounds more appealing to a wider audience. But in reality the result has pin-point specialized appeal only for the insiders who know what the heck "great gameplay" means. Had a huge spat with a site-owner about this a while back, because he believed that the nomenclature that made sense to him had general appeal as long as it could semantically have been describing... something other than games, like crabs fighting on a beach, or whatever. But lucky is he who can somehow sustain a review-site on just that. Just how interesting is it to read a text where the only thing you take from it is that the writer is excited about something? You know it's excitement about what you're assuming is your interest, right? You've clicked this because you're already interested in crabs on the beach, so you know it's stuff you want to read about. But how interesting is it, really? Like Kieron Gillen was allowed to escape with when PCGamerUK ran into the ground as well - the truth is that the entire setup is created to please advertisers and investment partners, not the readers. The readers, it's assumed, will come anyway. And when they don't. Why, it's the end of the video-game industry. See the problem here?

You know, a humorless cynic would read that as "Few thought it was possible, but Obsidian has made yet another clunky, impenetrable old role-playing game again!". ..I really wish some of the retro focused sites would at least smuggle in some "rediscovering forgotten realms" line, or something. But probably shouldn't complain. Re. metacritic user list. That was a bit weird. And could be a reason to justify the idea that games like PoE are actually extremely popular, and that new games that retain some elements from these games will be the ones that are the most successful. But the argument that will win out is that the folks who like these rpg-games are a very small amount of people, and a less motivated and predictable audience compared to people who like fps-games. That's been under there from the beginning. RPG fans require a dev to write huge stories and want 50 hours of gameplay, at the very least, and will be critical and merciless if something isn't fantastic. While the other audience will settle for a 4hour campaign and some popup bonuses while playing online. Basically, the idea of selling PoE as something that the market actually wants, more than streamlined versions in first person formats is something that will backfire. It's been proven that it's not what people want. Or even if it is, there are other options for devs. I mean, I'd love to write that Obsidian is now spoiling us with manna from heaven, after Bethesda, EA/Bioware and Blizzard/Activision have starved us through the desert for the last bunch of years. But I'm sure there are other angles here that are easier to sell, at least to people who don't enjoy sarcasm as much as I do. Such as that the game focuses on exploring fictional interactive worlds, letting you have a trip through scenarios written and conducted by world-class gamemasters, for your convenience and easy enjoyment, etc. I mean, the problem here is that RPG-games are completely unimpressive from just a screenshot, don't have kill-cams (thank god), and might reward you if you stop and think for a bit.

Mm. But what is that appeal really about? Is it misplaced nostalgia and get off my lawn, and so on? A very large amount of people see it that way, with the exclusive entitlement issues that come along with it. It's "our game", that no one understands any more, etc. Or is it maybe about presenting how narrative, design, and the interference between the two is still as important now as it was a bunch of years ago? Maybe the old games that required you to suspend disbelief by a thread can be enjoyed effortlessly now thanks to better graphics and smoother programming solutions? If so, what are the challenges for the game-designers now compared to earlier? How would they approach dialogue construction - do they actually write a script rather than a set of environment boards for the level-designers first. How does that process happen, and how does Obsidian want to be described as an elite team of craftsmen in a unique discipline, please. Etc., etc. I mean, it's not undoable to make something like that interesting. But fat chance getting hold of someone with the opportunity to print it, never mind a person to write the piece.

Well, then prove me wrong, and send me the details for just one editor like what I'm asking for. Shut me up. Prove to me that media-outlets can be used to successfully promote something other than blockbuster AAA pitches. Prove to me that I'm having a comical persecution complex about evil industry media editors coming after me with the imagination and tenacity of very small hamsters. It shouldn't be hard, Bryy. Just one example. I'm creating a fully falsifiable hypothesis about how the games-media works. And I'm not unreasonable - I'll admit the theory is faulty if you can show me that example. But until that example turns up - you can't possibly disagree that trying to sell PoE to mainstream games-media is completely and totally futile. Like I described, it's probably going to work against you as well. -- Seriously, though. I know it's not black and white. But the thing is that as things are, we really do have a serious difficulty in proving that logical construction up there wrong. That's kind of a real problem Obsidian should probably adjust to, yes?

..I guess the difficulty with handling "adult themes" in a mature way, is that you're likely only ever successful if you can challenge immature people to change their minds along the way. Or, you could of course add "tasteful" sex-scenes that are explicit off-scene, and pretend it's interesting for all kinds of deep, mature, emotionally developed reasons. Or something.

Mhm. Have you tried to sell an editor on the idea that your personal "conviction" about, I don't know.. quality craftmanship will dictate whether or not the writing would generate interest with the readership? Or, if that failed, tried to argue that at least that is how it should be, and that the magazine would nevertheless gain a reputation for fronting solidly built titles. Which would be valuable. Since doing that would demonstrate how the magazine has some sort of grounding other than the next sponsorship deal, or the next heavily marketed titles in an attempt to create the biggest ditto-headlines. If you have, and succeeded, or haven't and are convinced you can find an editor who will buy this -- go ahead and send me the details, and I'll send them my resume. If not -- then I'm not really that interested in hearing about thoroughly benign salesmen who are simply interested in "making the best of what we have", to "sell the product as easily as possible", while "being absolutely clear on who has creative vision", and so on, Bryy. Because if your business is to generate public interest. And you have no avenues in the mainstream press where your product can actually achieve that. Then -- if you still attempt to go that way, you're either incompetent, or you are deliberately trying to fail. I mean, that's why Paradox uses youtube a lot. That's why they're practically invisible to the mainstream press, but still get sales. But no. Let's pretend that writers engaged with the big sites are going to actually describe the game without prefacing it with: "An outdated concept that none of you will like - but hey, let me give you this pity pitch for your amusement anyway!". "Here's how your grandfather's games looked like!". I'll tell you what's fascinating: that the idea that e3 is where you go to show off your creative vision, to enthrall and fascinate people looking for such things, is still alive. After 15 Call of Duty games. That's amazing to me.