nipsen

A festival for celebrating corporate greed and horrible work conditions for game-developers.

Mhm. And your suggestion makes all kinds of sense, of course.

Yep. Not just misleading, but false. Since damage against dr or critical hit-rate isn't possible to calculate to an absolute number without knowing the monster's stats. But wait. Are you sure you're not just a "confused player", though? Rather than someone who knows basic math?

*groan*

...right. A base stat that says "-10%" to attack speed.... who can tell what that would mean to "confused players"?

Long story short: Dexterity changed the character's attack rate early on in the beta. Basically, a percentage bonus based on the weapon's base attack speed. Making a quick fighter build with somewhat weak weapons a possibly very good build. As opposed to now, when that's not something you would try if you know how the rules work. But yes, would perhaps be interesting to be able to tell how fast you can strike with a weapon. But since it really is set to the class variables, and the weapons are (as far as I know) in three different categories, seeing the actual stat doesn't give you any information you can use. Other than being able to see that some classes get slightly better bonuses for lighter weapons than other classes. *shrug*

Well, what can I say. "We're" "terribly" "sorry", but that was actually taken out of the game because "everyone" in the beta "agreed", that "everyone" would be confused by character abilities that could potentially lead to "trap builds". Or, more specifically, that the rules would prevent you from gaining a flat bonus by boosting might while sacrificing ever other stat. Also, "everyone" thought that this dexterity stat should control movement speed, because having no stat control this - this was simply a fatal flaw in the formation micromanaging that "everyone" and every gamer does in every engagement. Really, how can you even accept the idea of a world where only each of the character classes move with relative speed to each other, rather than to also have individual acceleration worth potentially two pixels on the screen from minimum to maximum!??!!!!11elevenses111! Clearly, Obsidian did all things correctly in addressing this fatal flaw in PoE. So in other words, the "majority" has already "spoken" on this, and we therefore got what we all wanted. And that's final. Because reasons. And 50 page reports full of bs. And if you don't like that, you're an unhinged loony. By definition. So do not complain further, or I will harass you with my multiple accounts at the rpg-codex.

Ahah.. Don't forget to use words like "delusional" and "unhinged" when describing those you disagree with, though. As, obviously, we all see exactly the same parts of the elephant in the room, when we're standing around it, and pointing and explaining, and so on.

Well, that's a series of sound assumptions to make about how things would or should work. But unfortunately none of them are correct. So the conclusion, while very alluring and reasonable, is also wrong. In all the betas I've been playing, the feedback after has been about 99% pointless bickering, about approximately 10% of the features in the game. The rest of the feedback, actual bug-reports, or something halfway useful, makes out a tiny fraction of the lexically recognizable words. On top of that, developers rarely look for analyses of functionality, how well something actually works, how well or how bad the chosen design works. Because.. why would you? Gamers don't know anything about that. So what you get in beta-tests, or what is most visible, is typically fights about what people who are extremely engaged in the game think will appeal to "most gamers", who they think their own opinion represents absolutely. And that makes you end up with things like the FF14 beta, where a bunch of folks think a collection of features might go somewhere and make out a great game. While others think it's crap. Or how the uniquely superb animation in Killzone 2 can be both incredible and game-changing, as well as part of a design-flaw of the like no gamer has ever seen, etc., etc. (And I'm sure we still all see the similarities to how political campaigning works in practice. )

..well. Usually, the best generalisation you can make over, say, forum feedback from eager and extremely interested and engaged people - is that you know you will get an overweight of opinions that are either categorically negative or categorically positive. And that most of the traffic will be short and not very well thought through ditto-opinion. Afterwards, it's easy to focus on that type of opinion, very easy to poll for it, or categorize it, etc. Similar to how political campaigning works, by the way

:D ...on the other hand. This here's a quote from the latest patch notes: "This update contains lots of great fixes and some cool paladin balance changes". And it seems they're patching out a few of the flat ability score bonuses. After having replaced the scaling abilities with flat bonus scores, initially in order to balance the game more easily, to please the fans, etc. That's the kind of people who run the shop here.

By the way - the entire "console releases have less bugs" thing. That's a myth. It's true that it's much easier to rescue badly programmed and junky code when you have one single hardware target. Since you know that when your build doesn't break on one console, you can guarantee that the identical playtest session won't break on the next console. Of course - how much does that really help you? Not all that much. That you have identical and limited amounts of input devices -- useful to know, but it doesn't free you from having to deal with generic interfaces and different combinations and variants of input, disconnected devices, avoiding direct addressing, etc. The truth is that with the sdk-requirements and the ram limitations, you force the developers to deal with, for example, garbage collection consciously. And that alone is probably the biggest element that generally makes a console-release less likely to randomly hang itself. Outside of that, there's how the console-company will have a type of, or a limited amount of playtest responsibility. And that they'll guarantee certain functionality in the sdk that has to work. So you can abstract away a large amount of mechanics and core logic from the beginning, and many developers suddenly find out that when you orient your development process around that, it elevates the process they've adopted in the past and makes it more robust.. I.e., that coder guy that's used to writing direct addressing hacks can have a specific framework to create a specific function in. And that suddenly insures that this function can be tested, and that it can be guaranteed to not interfere with other functions and methods. And that is something you don't have to deal with on a "PC" release. The same tendency is there with the increased use of 3rd party frameworks. The actual framework, that used to be junky horror-code, suddenly starts having to be able to run on limited hardware and limited storage, ram, and so on, with slower processors and slower IO. And that forces the middle-ware to become more fleet if it's supposed to be used at all. So you end up with middle-ware that, at best, ran like treacle on the latest gaming PC, becomes an actual framework. In the same way - that companies become invested in actually making their production targets streamlined, is what pushes for example the Unreal Engine, or Gamebryo, to mention two popular examples, to have automatic resource handling routines with max ram use targets. Another significant part of why games are generally becoming more stable is that physics engines and so on are dealt with in well-tested middle-ware as well. Drivers in general must be designed to massively different hardware, just like mentioned over, and you end up with functions that are pretty much guaranteed to work even without testing - you know on beforehand that you won't run into weirdness if the logic in the code is sound. Meanwhile, console-release games tend to be streamlined and specific. Games in general contain less and less "hacks" of the kind that magicked out 3d-effects no one had seen with Glide and 3dfx, for example. And more and more, you're having general code that executes on pretty much everything. So if you look at this from... a bit higher than the compiler and the keyboard, games are actually getting extremely much better in terms of bugs than before. The type of bugs that are still there shift in type, though. From earlier coming predominantly from hardware interface curiosities and actual hardware differences that.. would be difficult to account for (ram-timing, cache hits, compiler quirks, all kinds of things you don't need to think about now - consoles also had those with the xbox and ps2. Fairly complex systems if you wanted to simply use general code that would run effortlessly on a PC). And into becoming more and more about logical faults in the code, and consistency problems springing from badly structured or maintained programming conventions. So in one sense, you could argue that the fact that console-releases have as many bugs as they still do is.. a step back. That you would actually expect that console-releases should be much better and more stable than they in reality have been the last 10 years. Or, at the same time, that what's really happened is that PC releases have generally become as stable as the wished for console target, that neither MS or Sony ever managed to reach. In spite of how extremely well that (fake) narrative has been sold to the public. Specifically for PoE, though - the bugs they have tend to, from what I've seen of the code and the faults that have turned up at least, come from iterative scripts that have very variable running times. So I think they ran into at some point that they had to specify the scripts a little too much, and add in functions that weren't necessarily going to work with the later addons. Objects duplicating, functions being called on non-existent objects, that sort of thing. Unnecessary and obvious because they might be showstopping. But not.. serious. Haha. No, if you work in politics, you don't twist facts to fit your agenda. You simply present the relevant facts as you would, on reflection, have liked them to have appeared in the given situation you wanted to describe. To let people more easily discover the truth, with as little detour and distraction as possible. (Medal to whoever can figure out whether I'm being serious or not).

No, look. They sent an e-mail to all the backers (even the moderator tantrum exiled backers like me) where they explained they would delay the physical release, and push the digital release. Which they did. For the reason that the physical release is forever. And the digital release can, with very little effort, be updated. There is no issue with this of any kind! It's like complaining that your orange juice is ruined because it doesn't have a parasol.

But then again - considering the amount of crap they sorted out very close to the physical release, they did a good job. Outside of that, they also sent out a notification to the backers where they explained the need to get a final version ready before the physical release could be shipped. And that they were tipping in favor of delaying the physical release for a short time, while rolling out the digital release with some issues. So complaining about 10 days without being able to double-click loot to equip it is... a bit much. If you wanted to compare this release to, say, Battlefield 4 - which you probably wouldn't want to do, but still - then PoE is, in relative terms, somewhere in the realm of "Supreme Heavenly Perfection". In fact, it's the only disc release for a game that would be playable without going online to patch it on "day-1" since the gods know when. Old school. You know - for the fans. Outside of that, I still think they should have fired the Q&A department in October last year, and rolled back the build they had and simply went on with tweaking the writing and the location scripting instead. Talking about "wasted effort" here is like calling emptying the pacific into the atlantic ocean with a spoon "a long term project". So please - some context. Always helps... so to speak.

..how complicated is it, though.. 1. You're not ever going to get a perfect, ideal product with no room for improvement. 2. The question is what sort of improvements it's responsible to let be sorted out after the final release. Or, what you can responsibly shift to the customers. You could for example say that core game-mechanics should be set in stone way before release, and all core functionality should be in place before the product hits beta (you know, "old school" definitions). And then say that within a certain context, you can adjust the user interfaces and functions to customer specification after customers become involved late in the process. Or, you can say that you're pushing a simple prototype to the customer as quickly as is possible, to get valuable customer feedback involved in shaping the final product. A combination, such as starting over again every time someone complains about a particular function -- might not be a good choice. In that it requires rethreading of already completed code, where you really are just doing the first job over again, and hoping that it'll go quicker since the developer is familiar with the code target. A good project will therefore typically make sure that you establish a foundation, and then build extra functions on top of that if that is possible without needing to change the foundation later. While rejecting outright any tweaks to the core functions, since that then means you need to implement specific addons over again every time you change the foundation. But the more common combination in the games-industry is to limit the complexity of the foundation to get it developed and quickly shift it out to the consumer. And then add functionality in a limited way over time, as long as it doesn't require changes in the foundation. And people seem to be happy with that, sadly.

@abaris: Junta is talking about what customers apparently seem to accept when they buy a finished product. The general idea is that as long as the faults are not game-stopping -- that they stop you from continuing -- then the bugs don't really matter. And we end up with a general rule that dictates how the development process should have very few "best practices", and quite a lot of "should probably not have done that" conventions. But it's kept that way by a combination of old habits kept by some, and maintained by time-pressure and lack of experience with building projects on the other. A lot of examples exist where developers deliberately choose an uncomplicated set of mechanics, only because this makes the process of building the game quicker. But when customers don't care about smooth playback, solid animation, etc. And in fact complain to high heaven when they're served something that is dynamic and fantastic but not photorealistic, rather than a pre-rendered cut-scene with fake lighting that looks smoother. Then this is where we end up in the gaming industry: the best selling and most expensive development budgets go to making cut-scenes. While people complain until they roll around about how a single physics object in a massively complex simulation has a coarse shadow-map during occlusion filtering. Etc. We get what we deserve, in other words. And, in the case of PoE, also what we don't deserve, and not what we ordered and were promised. But be that as it may. @PrimeJunta: Well.. a lot of the easily seen bugs that were in the release build didn't exist in the beta.. Meanwhile, 90% of the fixes in each of the patches are pure balance tweaks. So I don't think it's unfair to point out that even if the foundation was solid enough 10 months ago, that woouldn't really matter when Q&A frenzies with the reach of the tweaks towards the end of the development process. Basically: Limited fixing - of course that would have been a great idea. Unlimited game-mechanical tweaks five months before the game is launched --- usually not a good idea.

..because it would have been too embarrassing to have press-releases that read something like.. "[head]HELP US, HELP YOU, HELP US.[/head] [main]Unfortunately, we have a community and Q&A team that can't leave well alone, and who are unable to structure feedback that our programmers can actually implement. Leaving us with a game that is a bit of a patchwork, where serious bugs have been ignored, while less significant ones popped up where none existed. And where "balance" is reliant on manual tweaks from practical testing after the game releases. So since we have no means of any kind to test the game to that extent ourselves, we are as such now, after 2 years of development, declaring this game an early access game. And we ask the community to help us as much as they can to patch up our horrendously bad decisions at the tail end of the development process.[/main] [end]Thank you - and good luck bug-hunting for free, now that we've suddenly discovered the actual value of the resources certain fans threw at us while expecting nothing in return earlier on. No hard feelings, right? Because the success of this game determines if another game like it is ever made again, you know! Not extorting you guys or anything, just saying like it is![/end]".

Good point that. And I always imagine that the adventurers in video-games have these tour-guide guilds they rely on, that keep the quest-givers occupied until the party arrives, gather more mobs each time the party travels on, that carry all their stuff on a cart behind them, just out of view. And who quickly come in and gut Troll-carcasses and Xaurips to get the innards and tongues, so the adventurers can be photographed with their trophies. Had a wizard in a pnp game once have to choose between picking up a sword, and filling his backpack with scrolls (or else not being able to run). And he couldn't do it. Couldn't choose. So he stood there, angry, with red eyes, in this burning tower, and cursed the gods for not letting him carry more loot. It was just too much for him to bear. But I mean, there's nothing inherently problematic about having endless amounts of junk-loot lying around, or letting the enemies be reasonably equipped, for example, and that if you defeat the war-chief, you'll possibly get access to all their loot, not just the unique sword. If you get hold of and capture the cultist, you might get hold of their rings and insignia, and so on. That could open up new quest-paths, and a game could maybe highlight gear sets, or let you continue the quest once you have significant enough parts of the sets for the quests, that sort of thing. But you have to account for the adventure gear economy. That huge cart the adventure guild has. I.e., ideally, you would let weapons have value in the field, but be difficult to pick up and carry around to sell, etc. So that you might want to keep a common sword you find, because it's available. But you might not want to purchase one, because it's not significantly better than what you have. While equipping armies with common gear is reasonable, possible, and explained well, but that there's still a cost involved in outfitting everything standing upright with crossbows and chainmail. ..and stuff like that often makes it easier to justify difficult choices at the top of a burning tower, because then the game assigns value to picking one type of item over another, for example. Before, you just had stupid rules that lost you money, that the game forces you to get elsewhere anyway. Afterwards, you're making a choice between what might be most useful to you right now. And because that element exists, you make better choices as a "designer" as well, because you're not just randomly throwing things around in the encounters.

hehe Brave new World, 1984 as well.. still as current as Fahrenheit 451. Perhaps more than they were. ..Dune, I think, was the first sci-fi book I really enjoyed. Heard a lot of curious interpretations of that book - but after reading through it a few times, I've settled on the same interpretation a few Arab and Persian friends have, about how it is a geological fable about the significance of the land itself. That the real main character is the planet, not the characters there. Frank Herbert has a few spins on romance as well in Dune. Huey's love for his wife, although she's not in the story physically, explains Huey's motivations and actions completely. So while we're not treated to many actual descriptions of their relationship, the character would be empty without his sorrow and determination explained through that love, and how Huey describes her indirectly. What sort of view he has on her, and how he doesn't act out of obligation but of mutual commitment. Chani and Paul, of course, is a relationship that breaks from how Paul ends up being less and less human. But still illustrates that path Paul is on, and how the rise of the heroic superman becomes inhuman, in a way that would be difficult to spot if the relationship wasn't there, and that it is developed fully. So without those well-developed "romances" as a literary devices, the story about the planet might not have been as interesting. While.. we're stating banal things anyway (..I think maybe Josh Wheedon had a good idea with Firefly, to pick up some modern things. About how relationships change, if they do at all, when distances are farther and places and social contexts are different. The entire "reversed gender roles" relationship between the pilot and Mal's right hand woman is really well done in that sense. That the traditional roles either don't fit, and don't matter either. While other more universal concepts persist irrespective of the wrapping. A soft, if stern, commentary on the gender neutrality "ideal" some seem to wish for. To the point where you start to sympathize with the pilot for being the weak female, etc. In a way you likely wouldn't have if the genders were switched again. I mean, that's perhaps what annoys me the most about the "free for all" type relationships people write into games and modern sci-fi now. That it's really just as simple as creating and justifying woman characters that play the roles of "traditional" men, and really just perpetuating the same gender-roles that we supposedly were criticizing. Have a friend who pours over everything Vampire Diaries, for example. And when she started explaining it, she ends up retelling - without realizing herself - the kind of moral values and gender archetypes that supposedly went out of vogue in the 1920s, even in the worst Christian bastions. But this resonated with her, and she simply didn't see the way the books were putting a modern spin on Luther's catechism. Hopefully this is read a bit differently by the 12-year old girls the books are written for - but good grief.. It couldn't have been more obvious if virgins gave birth and angels were flying around the church-spires at night.)

^pretty much. But.. could probably point out that when you write something, it's very difficult to actually don't make any kind of statement, or have any sort of purpose with the text. You could feel that you are simply describing something that is completely and utterly normal to you, for example. Or make the events you describe sound commonplace. Wrapping them in a familiar context, for example. And then end up having difficulty justifying the way you described the events later, or perhaps realizing that the narrative you have used to explain what happened in the past was enticing to you in ways that it no longer is. Lots of people tend towards saying that Ender's Game is a pretty neutral science fiction book, for example, in spite of O. S. Card's somewhat curious political views. And you could say that. That you don't see much preaching in the book, if any at all. But you can't escape the fact that the book glorifies the concept of exceptionalism, narrative purpose and Fate (given by unmentionable God) to a point where people will croak. I'm from Norway, we're bloody best at everything, including bragging - and reading Ender's Game still made me retch. The idea that the best product invariably comes from sacrifice and strife, the more extravagant the better, etc. It's the kind of reason-defying, self-deceptive bull**** that brought us what will be the third set of "meager 7 years" in a row when it comes to international diplomacy, for example. Because people (with actual power and positions) believe in narratives like that, internalize them to the point where it's not sensed they are there at all. And suddenly it's taken as true that if you beat a class of kids half to death every other day, only the most talented artist and greatest intellectual will survive. Because that's how it works, obviously. And it's also how capitalism unchecked by society, as well as rules and people in general, regardless of mere short-term cost in terms of lives and living quality, for example, will save the planet. And make it into an oasis where unicorns and golden hippogriffs greet you, by automatic necessity over time. Incidentally, gay people apparently seem to upend that entire social experiment and destroy the hippogriff oasis somehow.. It's always mentioned as more important than that snag about intelligent design. Seriously, though -- it's the wrong demand to make of almost any writing, that it should not provoke you or suggest anything to you at all. Because if it doesn't, what's the point? Just propaganda? Self-assurance for, you know, people who have critical problems they can't deal with? Personal solace from the world outside with all the strange things happening in it? Balm to avoid thinking uncomfortable thoughts? I mean, if that's all there is to it, then you're at best asking a writer to craft a fictional piece of writing that makes what you believe always seem to make sense. And to make sure every step of the writing avoids describing certain uncomfortable things too accurately, just in case the description makes you uncomfortable, or accidentally makes you think too hard or consider things. And I'm sure people understand how radical it would be to actually sit and make that demand of a writer, openly. If you started boycotting books that say anything whatsoever that doesn't constantly convince you of how everything you think and feel is correct, that never challenge you in any way, or inform you about anything at all. "That book here about a land far away of Milk and Honey! It's upsetting because it suggests what I have here isn't the best! Burn it! And the land too!". No one would ever argue that. But somehow a.. surprising amount of people actively engage in "debates" about how certain things should be narrated and explained. In the proper way. For adults with well-developed preferences and opinions. By other adults with well-developed preferences and opinions. Always fascinated me how much effort people put into this kind of thing. Don't people want to experience something new? Or is "adventure in tv and sofaland" really what we should be writing nowadays?

:D hahahah. No! You don't say! That comes as a /huge/ surprise!

Right.. Morrowind had that. And when I finally managed to get rid of some boss of a quadruple-wielding sword wraith down in the dungeon dimensions -- and they drop a cloudberry. Woohoo. I'm guessing that it's a combination of not wanting to model all the weapons that can be used, and not being able to justify the weapons in the ruleset, etc. Which, as we might recall, PoE solved in the design initially... Having enemies and player characters actually work on the same rules..

...are we absolutely sure the problem wasn't that the acronym loot concept doesn't make much sense? Great that someone thought about tying the mob equipment to the loot tables. Or let the mobs equip things from the loot-table. Bioware didn't think of adding that for NWN and... up to DA:O at least. Bethesda seems to not like the idea either. Most games has one random drop-table for each type of class of monster, etc. But you don't get to loot everything you see. You get some coherency between what you see and what you get. ...so, pretty much the opposite of wysiwyg...?

..What he says is it's rare for a person to ever show any interest in another in the Mass Effect universe, unless sex or violence is involved. Almost as rare as in the real world, in fact.

I suppose at some point it might occur to you that while boring, one-dimensional dolled up girls tend to like movie-stars - many boring, one-dimensional girls also fancy being a substitute mom for home improvement projects no one else could possibly be interested in. But since we're talking about fantasy romances here, you would kind of hope to avoid the mundane annoyances of reality, in a completely even handed way when it comes to gender, yes..?