nipsen

Everything death-metal made after Entombed and Bolt Thrower is kind of weak, have to agree with that.. "Yay, let's add some synth and electronic orchestral tunes on top of my ultra-pitched whiny voice. Now excuse me while I go eat some soy beans and salad to my Corona backstage". I think that most of the feedback has probably been from the internal play testers. I would be surprised to learn otherwise. (...) I would guess that the forum feedback is mainly used to gauge what a larger population of users is most concerned about and little else. (...) Well.. from what they've said (some not in public) it seems (my interpretation of it) that they've had a relatively reasonable discussion about it internally. And then decided between stalwartly going full Sawyerbrand as one extreme, and between dulling the edges and going with masking the differences to the IE games on the other end, based on the feedback they've had (while copying the IE games was never an option). And that this was something they had been discussing some time before the beta came out.. So when the only feedback they have comes very obviously from a.. particular audience. And they know that people who are a bit more agnostic about it will very likely not give any feedback at all, at least not before release. Just as they should know how.. noncontroversial some of the changes Josh suggested really were (and frankly, that design isn't some sort of bright idea by a AAA game-designer - I don't know Josh, but I know from how he talks about the designs, and how the game turned out, that he plays or have played role-playing games actively, not just designed computer rpgs. Say what you want, but Sawyer knows his stuff really, really well). So it really ends up with being a false choice where they think all the gameflow complaints disappear if they just make a compromise.. any compromise.. While in the end, what we're ending up with is a slightly more creative and dynamic system than what the IE games had. But which still doesn't either fix the abstract design concerns people have had (copying the IE games never was an option), or truly sort out the perhaps not that critical problems with the gameplay-mechanics. I.e., it seems like another example of Obsidian ending up with a game that shows incredible promise, but isn't polished and as brilliant as.. well.. as we know for a fact it could have been. That's my problem with this at least. And it's going to be difficult enough for me who have no investment in this to read reviews when the game comes out that end up saying things like "not very interesting combat, clearly designed for a hardcore audience, homage to the IE games". And marking the title as an anonymous and marginal title that couldn't have been made into a main-stream popular release, or one that only happened because super-fans shelled out masses of money on kickstarter out of nostalgia. ..when in reality we know that both PoE and Tides of Numenera had a huge overweight with small individual contributions compared to many other kickstarter projects.. I mean, the data is there to suggest they have a broader audience that isn't typically represented. Several other titles as well have been successful by marketing directly on interactive story-telling and immersion, completely outside the usual parameters. So it's not just a fancy to have that idea that there is an audience out there that AAA games doesn't appeal to - but Obsidian somehow chose to profile the title as that marginal super-narrow game anyway. It's a mistake. Both economically and for the game on it's own.

Suppose, for example, a rogue had the innate ability to avoid disengagement attacks (or perhaps a modal ability called "move deceptively" or something). Does that address your concerns about adding spell like abilities or do you mean something else? Well, I'm more worried about how these abilities would not really obey the same rules as the rest of the game. ... Like I said, with the original ruleset you would have a pretty obvious framework where the spells are a bit more dynamic ..... That's the d&d sickness that PoE actually solved with the ruleset initially. But which OE decided wasn't such a good idea to keep, for whatever reason. Ok, I think I understand your point now. You may be right, but I think a lot of the system design necessarily ends up being redesigned/finalized during play testing. On paper, a designer puts together something using logic and probabilities that has enough complexity to be interesting, but when users get ahold of it, only then do you see if your sufficiently complex ruleset turns out to be fun to play. So, I tend to think that OE played with the new ruleset and added new things and jettisoned old things to improve it incrementally. I don't personally design games but I have experience in the UX process for other software and that's usually how it goes (somebody's brilliant vision gets dashed on the rocks of real users' experience with it). YMMV. Well, I've seen a lot of brilliant ideas like that too, it's not that. I've also seen very bad solutions chosen over and over again from the idea that the existing solution's familiarity would be less risky than any alternative. Which is a real and understandable concern when you're selling something like the "successor" to the IE games, like Obsidian is in this case. And "core fans" start clamoring about how the kickstarter goals were betrayed, and things of that sort. And you also have a publisher turning up who have done excellent business for marginal titles by appealing to active small communities directly. The problem is that they barely had anyone see the system before declaring it was unplayable. Worse, it seems they were practically looking for ways to discredit it, by asking what people with an established opinion wanted long before showing what they actually had. Josh were talking about things they couldn't do because of the d&d license long before PoE. This was, in some very significant ways, sold as a wish Obsidian had to make a game that they wanted. Something Josh went through in detail when confronted with whether or not the lack of a Wizards license was a problem - which he said it wasn't at all, in fact the opposite was the case. And the agnostic "interesting, let's wait and see" approach I think a lot of us had wasn't paid much attention to in that situation. Which was a bit disappointing - after all, we know for a fact that very few of the kickstarter supporters played the beta. And even fewer have actually had any vocal opinion about it at all. So you can say on the one hand that it's laudable that Obsidian is listening so attentively to their fans. That paying very close attention to the fans of the IE games and their wishes doesn't just make economic sense, but also is making a commitment to the designs that made the IE games a.. well.. at least a legacy of sorts. That's obviously a valid point of view. On the other hand, you could make the argument that the IE games had some awful weaknesses, derived directly from the pnp rules that had to be included, that make very little sense when playing the game on paper. And frankly even less when you make a video-game. Which arguably is why modern RPGs that actually are successful in spite of simplistic designs, shy away from obeying traditional pnp rulesets. And for example why good GMs avoid d&d rules to a great extent when using the ruleset in their games. I've done that myself, and know a few GMs who also do that consciously. Because otherwise you hamper the actual role-playing too much: you very quickly start to invent new rules to let people play the characters they want well. In games as well - the NWN games being great examples - you end up with design conventions that are not just cumbersome to implement, but also difficult to create an entertaining game from. In fact, even the IE games avoid the d&d conventions whenever they can get away with it, Icewind Dale 2 in particular, because the conventions often make very little sense. The adventure day, resting, the number of spells, the leveling curve, the hit-die for weapons and base damage. All of these have been frequently discussed on this forum as well, and it derives from the fact that the d&d conventions are ill-suited for an "action" game, when the ruleset obviously is designed for an adventuring day that perhaps contains two major battles and a few monsters - rather than what you get in the IE games. And I think that if we were honest here, we would admit that the design conventions that are so dear to some people are not the d&d conventions themselves, but the augmented version from just the IE games. That, as I'm very fond of pointing out, are a bit haphazard and in many ways suffer from being exactly the d&d pnp conventions shoehorned into a game that rather would ignore them altogether if it could. Something for example NWN2 does, utterly and completely. So in the end it's understandable that Obsidian would argue themselves ahead to a point where they would strike a balance of some kind, and drop the obvious parts of the ruleset that weren't identical to the IE games. Even though the lack of a license would necessitate that it's actually different, of course. So it's a difficult problem to solve - and that's making it understandable when it ends up with keeping a slightly different system with different rules - that then emulate the IE games as much as possible. So that the core fans are happy, the Wizards of the Sword Coast are happy, and the rest still get a brilliant story written and conducted by world-class GMs, that they never would have the opportunity to see without Obsidian making the game. And that's a solid proposition in the end, conceptually. But circling back to the beginning here, if they drop the engagement system (just like they dropped the specialization possibilities with the character builds), and fully emulate the "magic rules all" and have IE mechanics exploit Heaven - what happens is that it's a sound proposition as a concept, but it requires a serious rework of the game's implementations to actually work. In other words, the grand idea proposition that is untested and unknown in this case is actually that of going back to emulating the IE games. It requires Obsidian to implement a different system, and it requires them to add a fairly large amount of mechanics that aren't present in the game, and changing abilities that have been designed as more subtle and less significant. It goes way beyond simply adjusting damage of the spells and removing the engagement mechanics - they need new spells, and dangerously similar abilities and spells in the licensed d&d games. Which is something Obsidian will want to avoid in the end. So my argument, which it has been from the start, is that dropping those original designs requires an expensive effort that would have been better spent on fixing the presentation of the game (animation, better feedback to actually show how the mechanics work, so you don't have to be some sort of psychic to figure them out.. although in my opinion the proposed original is fairly intuitive, something I hope to show when I finalize my "Firebrand" spinoff ruleset based on that, but nvm). But also that trying to so consciously copy the IE games per request is not just undesirable from a design perspective and a gameflow perspective - but even from a licensing perspective. I know that when I paid for the kickstarter, I did that knowing we would get something similar to the Obsidian type games, but that it would be different. That it would be something that no publisher would touch, that it would be something new in many ways and original. An in-house developed ruleset. And like we've seen as well, I'm not the only person even on the intertron that have serious doubts about how wise it is to "force" Obsidian to end up dulling the design they had in favor of a more "true to the original" approach. So I'm spelling it out for you now: if they actually take the suggestions seriously, as Obsidian and likely Paradox specially, wants - and completely emulate the IE games, they will run into a licensing problem. They cannot do it. They also cannot simply copy IWD or BG and call the spells something different - this is going to invite lawyers to the discussion as well. So they won't actually fulfill that request/requirement that some extremely vocal people have. You also vastly underestimate the amount of work a "true IE successor mod" would take. An intelligent fan would have hooked in an Obsidian employee and asked nicely if Obsidian could for example make sure that the mechanics of the game was scripted in an external and fairly easy scripting language early on, so that they could technically do a mod if the opportunity arose. But as it is, none of you are going to be able to do it successfully. Meanwhile, purely mechanically there are a lot of concerns with the game that should be addressed that apparently fell down on the priorities list. This is a huge mistake, since some (if not all) of the concerns "people" have had are connected to game-engine mechanical problems. And those problems will still be present even if the mechanics underneath are changed. Pathfinding and correspondance with animation and states, enabling and triggering abilities, even inventory management - these will still be problems on release, even if the core fans are happy and can work around the problems. And if the current system is to be made into something that's actually fun to play and easy to watch - or at least similar to the IE games, without looking horrible - it requires implementation of new spells and new targeting systems for the abilities. We're talking sector abilities and new workarounds for pretty much every single spell in the book. And that takes a lot of work from the existing system. And frankly, I don't think that even that will be worth it in the end. That not only will we end up with a game that would invite nastiness in the courtroom. But also get a profoundly boring game that demonstrates in utter vivid detail why Bioware, Obsidian.. even Black Isle back when.. shunned copying the d&d conventions too faithfully. I mean, Fallout 1&2 had it's own ruleset and character construction - it would not have worked with a d&d system. So yes, I think the argument that everything that isn't identical to Baldur's Gate is proof of how developers are appealing to the casual crowd and secretly wish they could make action games instead - is false. It's not a question of whether you create either an IE game or else you are creating an action-game, and it never was. What we're talking about is creating a simple and comprehensible ruleset that allows deep role-playing and enabling predictable ways to script events that are interactive with those role-playing characters. As well as creating a ruleset that actually makes sense in a video-game, and that takes advantage of having a super-computer constantly doing the maths for you, when that would not be feasible in paper rpg sessions. Sadly, we're apparently not going to see that achievement with this project, even though it was possible and actually implemented in August. And with that, my endless and pointless dissertation on game-design philosophy ends. Buy the book on Amazon.

..we're sort of seeing something like that right now. No Man's Sky, Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous. It's not like Stephen Robertson is coming back, but I'm pretty sure No Man's Sky will be memorable at least. Hopefully it will be a good game and a commercial success because of that..

A new game altogether, yes? Luckily for them, I guess, OE has changed PoE so much that those two changes really will be all that's needed to complete it. Sadly, that means the battles in the game will probably be pretty uninteresting and boring at launch. So clearly, OE made the right call on this one..

Battlezone 2 was another one of those games that somehow fell through the cracks, I guess. Throwaway licensed project, allegedly, not really worth the time. Actually a very good game that finally realized some of the things the earlier games couldn't because of hardware limitations. Psygnosis had a few of those as well. Lander3d, WipeoutHD, that sort of thing. TIE-Fighter. Improved on X-Wing in million ways. Sadly, the collector's cd-rom version (the 640x480 version, not the "3d"/polygon version that's commonly available) is nowhere to be found, more or less, and is difficult to get to run on new computers. I-War 2 - simpler in some ways than the original, and not as immersive story. But altogether a better and more playable space-sim. Still has the same incredibly solid space-flight and 3d presentation. Actually feels like you're flying, unlike most space-sims, where you're rolling around the viewport on a solid globe. Freespace 2 came close, but arcade flight model hampers it a lot and limits how dynamic the engagements are. But imo, the times where a sequel turns out better than the original are few and far between. If you play Dungeon Keeper 1 now, for example, it's .. yeah, the graphics aren't as great as in DK2 - but the game is so well put together. Disagree horribly with the idea that the new xcom game is better than the original as well. The original has elements of strategy and interactivity that went completely above the heads of the people at Firaxis - or maybe they just didn't have the time to figure it out. The game has a neat tactical scape, and so on. But the overworld and the way the aliens behave, how the tech advances, how the missions play out, how significant a loss is, and so on -- that's completely gone from the follow-up.

I'm not really following your point here. Suppose, for example, a rogue had the innate ability to avoid disengagement attacks (or perhaps a modal ability called "move deceptively" or something). Does that address your concerns about adding spell like abilities or do you mean something else? Well, I'm more worried about how these abilities would not really obey the same rules as the rest of the game. And that ability is in the game already, no, except it's not completely 100%, in that it is supposed to decrease visibility or break engagement, not simply make the character invisible? I'm just saying that having these sure-fire abilities will orient the game around them, when they always trigger and don't really relate to the ruleset. Instead of taking seriously that all the actions in the game should take place within the high-level abstractions. Which the game is well on it's way towards dropping completely anyway. But if that's where OE is going, they'd need to add more of those abilities and take the new design seriously instead. Or else you're going to end up with kind of weak spells and abilities that don't really make enough of a difference in the fights to really bother using them. Like I said, with the original ruleset you would have a pretty obvious framework where the spells are a bit more dynamic - that a low-level spell could be useful and almost a certain status infliction if you designed your wizard that way. Or it would be a sure-fire high damage dealer in an interrupt situation if you designed the wizard that way. And this way the spells would be situational and potentially very powerful. As it is now, that falls flat, because all of the characters will be governed pretty much exclusively by class type. Reducing not just the options you have when building characters, but also streamlining the fights and making them more predictable, in the sense that the classes will typically behave the same way every time. That's the d&d sickness that PoE actually solved with the ruleset initially. But which OE decided wasn't such a good idea to keep, for whatever reason.

Well, I would agree with you if the game turned up as it is now. And that in the IE games, having a wizard "balanced" against a fighter would be incredibly boring. Have no problem seeing that. The ruleset we saw before that, though.... it's a bit different. Instead of having a fighter simply being a person not being graced with magical ability, all creatures in PoE have soul magic. They just have different ways of applying it to the world. So a wizard would have a set of specializations, a fighter would have a different one. And in my opinion, the way it was implemented with per-day casts of "unbalanced" spells, and per-engagement casts of abilities, targeting obeying the rest of the (now unknown) rules, etc., actually worked. Unlike now, when the hit/miss calculations seem very arbitrary and pointless for magic, I fully agree with that. But it worked in the original version, because the characters were specialized so heavily, and had very particular weaknesses and strengths. That a creative set of players in a pnp game, or a clever player in the computer game version, would be able to exploit. In the process making both magic and weapons extremely powerful in certain situations, if you played into the specialization. And through that avoiding the problem where you essentially have a wizard that's simply a weak character for a bunch of levels -- before magic rules everything. It's something I dislike with pnp games, and try to work around when being gm. But yes, I can see the point of view that you might want the wizard to be a ridiculously powerful character when it levels up. That magic should be the end-all in a universe where magic exists. And yet - wouldn't it be more satisfying to not end up with simply a specific ability shaping the entire game once it unlocks? You know, that is the beauty of that original ruleset. Where you specialize characters until they become very powerful - but where they develop severe weaknesses (or perhaps in some respect disabilities) along with it. This allows someone to really design their character and role-play it, without having to be hampered by cheesy leveling compensations. In fact, I think it would make the character feel more powerful, when they don't have to face artificial and arbitrary GM-introduced difficulties to have a challenge. And the entire party would still be useful, right.. That's how that really works. But yeah, I understand where that particular idea comes from better now, about wizards making more sense if they can cast insanely powerful magic. That it would make more sense if magic was simply not part of the character ability and class system as it is in the game now. (Btw - a few leech and weakness spells for the wizard really were in the game earlier...)

It's a good set of suggestions. But if you consider that initially, the system wasn't designed for the war of attrition setup it turned into. Or that you were supposed to be able to place characters with fairly obvious and significant weaknesses and strengths in the right positions, and so on, to tilt the battle in your favor. If you consider that, then all of the rescue attempts are a bit misplaced. Or, you need to see those suggestions as attempts to extend the more simplistic setup the game currently has. I.e., the engagement mechanic doesn't really exist, and you can't add things to the game now that will make that mechanic work. Instead, all of it must be attempts to make the current system more dynamic and entertaining. That will compensate for the fact that the strategic element in the battles are no longer dependent on the innate class and character abilities, but instead exclusively on the trigger-abilities and spells. Personally, I think that's futile. And it amounts to essentially creating a new game. Which is why I was not very impressed with the changes - that it would make it necessary to do a massive amount of ..unneeded work. And that if it at all was successful, it would make that entirely new game. That wasn't this more subtle, "lo-magic"-ish universe where realization of soul-power takes all kinds of different shapes depending on the character's imagination. But instead that it suddenly revolves around the timing of the trigger-abilities. Anyway.. barring that OE turns around and offers the original system as an alternative, free dlc version of the game or something like that. Obviously the game needs more imaginative front-line abilities that serve the same purpose as a well-placed and well set up party would have in the original set. That compensate for the lack of actual strategy as it is now. Things like teleporting characters, soul channel to the tanks, stun type of spells that change the entire encounter, buffs that cause actual power-balance changes (with possibly longer casting times, and locking the priest in place, etc.), freeze or fire spells that augment allies (fire increases movement and reflex, ice causes stronger attacks and resilience), cover abilities and magic barriers over areas, seals that seal away enemies, teleports that can work on enemies, void cracks that swallow enemy arrows and spells and channel them at a target, that sort of thing.

So basically: Buff/debuff spells that have no target, and ignore friendly fire good. Potentially devastating spells that have to be aimed or protected against - bad. Even though as it is a mage doesn't start with all available spells, is limited to low-level spells. And you could actually see some existing spells in the dropped spellbooks at the two opposite edges of dyrwood a while back. And even though you can both build a wizard to be quick and light, and still resilient against certain attacks for a short amount of time (such as until a massive spell goes off) - and build front-line fighters with high relfex saves to minimize fireball crash. Or for example build some with high fortitude, to save against necromancy and poison spells, etc. But we don't really care about that, we care about having more buttons to click again, don't we. No, hold on. Actually, I think the high point earlier in the thread was where someone insisted that the mages in the older IE games were more dynamic and fun to play than the mage in PoE. And that this was actually Josh' intention, because he hates mages. Because obviously in the IE games, fireballs didn't cause friendly fire! And you always felt powerful and awesome! And stuff! Seriously, where do you guys come from? How do you end up with viewpoints like this? How in the world do you feel they are so obviously correct that you seem to think they will never be contradicted by anyone? I mean, I'm saying this in some kind of surprise - but I've met Magic The Gathering folks who secretly think of themselves as a real wizard, and essentially think in tapping lands and playing spells whenever they do everyday things - who still weren't as impossible to discuss things with as some of the people who post here. I mean.. how? I'm genuinely curious about where these things come from - and I'd love to hear any of you take a stab at actually explaining it.

Imo, if Obsidian made sure the node-generation for the AI was tighter (or possibly let the AI move slower initially, until the AI finds the right target, etc.), and made sure that the creatures don't warp through a fighter that otherwise would have engaged the creature. And then added visual cues, animation states, etc., to how some creatures might happily ignore the attacks of opportunity and charge a specific target. And generally made sure that mobs move at different speeds - taken this part of the presentation seriously, more or less, and understanding how important that really is for the impression of the game that you shouldn't need to know the rules to make sense of the abstraction you see.. If they had done that, they would have been able to kill about 4 months of bs "balancing" and "Q&A", along with the utterly fruitless ruleset changes. Never mind the UI and interface changes, or the leveling mechanics. Presumably in an attempt to simplify the actual ruleset, rather than make the presentation of it more approachable. Frankly, however thought that was a good idea cost OE a considerable amount of money. Even before the game launched.

As a friend said: "The problem was that you didn't do drugs. So you weren't happy until things actually made sense. Huge mistake".

..hm. Thinking about it, I've never actually heard that line without riders like: "..weed, on the other hand..". Or "my father/priest/trusted adult molested me when I was a kid, and I don't like losing control, which is also why my eyes are stalking you across the table". Or "because that was what I had decided a Christian should be like, and now I'll be going to a monastery!". Or "because it's a sloppy buzz - I like a clear high that keeps you present, like amphetamine, which I still use to compensate for my insecurities and fears". So that was kind of refreshing. To see just that line.

(2) right. But both the xenon makeup in the 360 and the ppc-element in the cell do out of order execution. It's the array of spus that are specialized processors with their internal cache, concurrent access to working memory, etc. These don't run efficiently with general byte-code. But they do run it. So like explained, if you don't have incredible demands going on here, it's not exactly wizardry going on to get a reasonable result. (1) sure. That's.. a thing. But you have to deal with this anyway, whether you develop for Microsoft's lovely Microsoft libraries. Or if you're developing for Sony's sucky sdk, etc. (3) I suppose it was marketed badly, and then sabotaged to obscurity internally, in the way that only Sony knows how to with interesting solutions (it's not the first time - on their phones, for example..). Hardware, however.. the hardware is wonderful. No, seriously, though, it was one hell of an attempt to create a portable cell be platform for the consumer market, without the drawbacks the specialization typically created. And it.. succeeded. It had the special purpose spe-array with asynchronous access to working memory. As well as the decent enough normal processor and a gpu, coupled to the same memory. That engineering feat is what really limited the memory size, by the way - construction of that memory-bus with concurrent access is expensive technically, and... well, you never would do that if you wanted to minimize the production cost, or for example maximize the PC-port performance. If you wanted that, then you would have chosen a different solution. Namely what the ps4 and the xbone turned into. That do have better performance in the area people care about. Shader budget and memory storage. But it of course lacks any of the expensive features. It is a success for marketing, and a defeat for people who like interesting tech and any sort of advancement for for example computer graphics and interactivity in games. The parallel to how games are developed - marketing and cutscenes over substance - is fairly striking, yes?

1 - It is now... It was not this way at launch. Which is why, as one of the videos I linked stated, had developers forgoing the use of the SPE units all together and running everything on the general purpose core. Why? Lack of docs, lack of tools. http://www.redgamingtech.com/sony-playstation-3-post-mortem-part-1-the-cell-processor/ 2 - Thanks for the additional insight. 3 - Compiler? Has nothing to do with the compiler, OOE & BPE are hardware-side optimizations. They are designed to make up for poor compiler optimizations, lack of run time information available at compile time and crap like this highlights. I'm tired of explaining it. Let the world this country do whatever it wants and teach everyone that programming is about... java. Me at coffee shop: Well that depends, are you talking about a superscalar CPU? What is this being compiled for? CS Student (Not 1st Year): What's superscalar? Me: Did you sleep through your hardware class? Him: What hardware class? Me: FFS! Heheh. Yeah, I can see where that's coming from. But even if the documentation was as patchy as it was for the open sdk (which I very much doubt), you would not have any problems whatsoever if you simply allocated the main processor and a helper thread to be automatically allocated elsewhere.. with the simplest wrapper you can possibly imagine - and then dropped everything spu, explicitly parallel assembly and so on, and simply ran it. Then that would work, you see. But yes, I see where you're coming from. Even though those of us who have programmed a lot of assembly, and know when never to use assembly or explicit allocations or imperative function calls that rely on other subroutines, etc., would only ever use that very rarely, and only very late in the process. Specifically because of the kind of issues people did run into when they had to port those functions to even marginally different hardware. Simply because that means, inevitably, that you have to reimplement the entire thing from that point where you chose to use platform-specific implementations. Because make no mistake about it, the complaints about the ps3 hardware being insane and ridiculous does not come from people who program spu-specific instruction sets to add effects or do animation spline correction, or add filters with in-scene dependency, or anything of that sort. The ones who did that - who incidentally Sony fired in mass when their games didn't create "buzz" enough, apparently - they knew what they were going to, and how interesting this really is. The complaints also do not come from competent porters who worked with a well-documented project. It comes from people who either have to port a 360 version, or from people who have put it in their heads that c++ memory hacks to "speed up" games and "steal" clock-cycles under the processor was still a thing in 2005. Or that it's still something you do and expect great results from in 2014. That's just not how programming on current hardware works. You also literally do not write high-level code that in any way exploits the "advantages" of cisc optimisations such as what you have on intel platforms. These belong to the compiler tricks that are fairly esoteric, and also don't actually run on the xbox360 hardware.. You know.. that's something to consider. But yes, at least knowing what simd and superscalar designs is, so you know what the principle behind it actually looks like when you're creating shader code, or something. So you know what sort of structure likely would be possible to optimize like a mf'er if you had such and such instruction sets(read: algorithms programmed on the spu elements, etc) - that would be a good thing, absolutely. But as you point out, that's not how people work now. It's middleware and high-level coding. And my point is that in that context, the xbox360 and the ps3 is identical. Also, when I talked about relying on compiler optimisations to make the game run smoothly, or run at all, then we're talking about something else. Then it's usually about inefficient code that will have no allocation discipline, no resource collection, lots of possible code that might run but won't that's automatically snipped, etc. And you can't rely on that when you have a limited budget on ram - which is the case for any console. Frankly, even mobile developers know how to do this, and when to work with and when to circumvent the compiler in that sense. What resources to mark, what resources to unbind. And none of that is different between xbox360 and ps3 development. That is, if you forgo the use of spus and simply end up with the same or slightly worse results. Meanwhile, keep in mind - "unmodified shader code" can run on an spu. When I first looked at the cell be sdk, and then heard people talk about it -- my jaw dropped. It's like wtf is this? There's a guy who created a huge series of articles where he wrote a byte-code emulator for x86, essentially, to run on the cell, for example. So he essentially took each instruction, filled the spus each cycle with a new instruction, and then ran it. Which then produced abysmal performance (as in merely slightly below the same as when running on an x86 platform). This is a fake example, obviously. It's not even a real-time compiler result. Where he deliberately creates a worst-case scenario that literally never happens. And he did that to "prove" that the cell be was a sham. He's extremely active on the beyond3d forums, for example. And that was something I know people trusted as an authoritative source on deciding whether the cell be had any future. Now, if you made complex instructions instead, you could create something like the in-scene effects and animation in Killzone 2. You know, real-time cutscenes, yeah? But that's again something so far out -- even when it's actually made and it's proven that it works -- that it just doesn't survive. So this gen we have mid-range gaming pcs with an outdated graphics card and inbuilt drm. And it sells more. Because the "industry" has /confidence/ in this cheap crap, and it generates "buzz"..

..actually, the ps3 through commonly available middleware is as perfectly usable as any pc with .. 416Mb ram.. without sacrificing a single thought on cpu-architecture, platform specific implementions through OpenGL inserts, /or/ compiler work for that matter.. The problems that Naughty Dog described earlier at least were similar, but different to the problems the porting crews struggled with. ND made an engine from scratch to create the animation, the magical shirt, etc. And then added parts to this later, such as shader work with commonly known methods that has some requirements that draw resources from more than just the gpu-specific resources. So then you need to plan well, and not start to fight between the parts of the studio that want visual flair and shaders done in one way, and the parts that think you should drop it all and make something new from scratch. So on the games after Uncharted, they - allegedly - had the problem that if they wanted to use their artists as much as possible, they would need to coordinate with a platform specialist who could create new tools, with new limitations, etc. And that's difficult. And if that's the only thing you see as a developer - for example if you're on the graphics and art. Then you're going to observe the architecture as a problem. Because on PC and the xbox, the existing middle-ware and tools are adequate anyway. On PC and with graphics cards, since that's where the methods were developed. And on the xbox, in spite of having the same unified memory architecture as the ps3 in principle, thanks to essentially better limited.. I mean, structured and recognizable.. platform middleware. I.e., there's nothing to compromise about on the xbox360. However, you still need to write an engine and use platform specific implementation - with platform specific limitations. But the graphics and art part is less difficult. Porting people have a different problem. Because the majority of the ports that were made weren't actually ports from PC to ps3, but porting the xbox360 version to ps3. And that leaves you with a fairly specific problem, namely that the ps3 has 60Mb or so less available memory. So something has to go, such as textures, or filters. But when you're sold on the magnificentness of the cell, and so on, there's some pressure involved to create an alternative solution instead. And that's where the complaints turn up - from people who are not really qualified.. and very few people are, and if they are it's a lot of thankless work.. to start restructuring a project that's already completed and repackage it. Including specific implementations and allocation work that may break routines in the project. Which you would need to do - only to get the same results you already have. Meanwhile, the "platform parity" requirement from either Sony and Microsoft (on the pain of reduced visibility and promotion) ensures that if you actually went through the entire thing and wanted to add something interesting, then you wouldn't be able to anyway. Obviously that makes a lot of work on the port untenable. Of course, if you wanted to just port a normally implemented PC game to the ps3, then you have an easier time, since the platform tools ensure such and such execution times (in spite of the core logic not "supporting" out of order execution on the assembly level.. *cough* ..do we even know the significance of this? We're really talking about how automatic compiler optimisations that work on x86 platforms won't work as successfully. Relying on that for getting something to barely run is.. not a good idea on any platform). And that's why you see fairly successful and easy ports being made now at the end of the ps3's lifetime, when developers are simply porting a PC version, rather than outsourcing the port work after developing an xbox360 version. As well as why the ports on projects where they had a competent platform specialist were quite good ports. DICE and BF3, for example. Or the Assassin's Creed games. Both of those had a bigger shader budget than the xbox360 version, for example. They also smuggled in gpu-trickery that the 360 version, or a PC with the same amount of shaders on the graphics card, couldn't run. Since, to paraphrase Christina Coffin, the gpu-code can be run unmodified on the cell's spus. It's not efficient, but it's something that can be used to compensate for the then and now outdated gpu in the ps3. In other words, with a competent platform specialist to do the implementations on the high level, it would be possible to simply add extra graphics card routines, unmodified, without reducing thread response, etc. The thing is that right now, the only advancement in graphics in games is happening is adding more post-filtering and post-processing. Which means the only real requirement is to add more graphics cores from one "generation" to the next. There's no "need" to create a platform with an explicitly parallel assembly language and processing elements that have immediate and concurrent access to main memory. Because who would want.. you know.. real-time ray-tracing, infinitely complex occlusion detection, near infinite light sources, perspective and location varying shadows, physics simulation based on advanced and complex maths that still complete every single processor cycle, etc. I mean, that'd be silly, since we have such awesome cutscenes. Not to mention grass made with green dots and all the square rocks. Awesome. Anyway. And that's not really going to change for quite a while. And that's also why the two current "last gen" consoles really are simply a low-budget PC with an in-built platform drm system. And developers conforming to that very eagerly is what is holding games "back". It's not one platform, or Microsoft or Sony that's holding the industry back at all. You know, you can say all kinds of things about platforms being difficult to develop for and things of that sort keeping games from realizing their potential as a phenomenon (and people actually do, which is hilarious). But what these developers that complain are actually referring to is that they can't add 3% extra shaders. It's not that somehow the game doesn't have enough process cycles to run reasonably well, or enough shaders to run most of the effects. Like people say, really good games that were made a while back are still playable. And they're often made with more skill and thought than newer games. That, as explained, tend to be overly focused on adding those shaders much more than creating gameplay and core logic, rulesets, etc. The Uncharted games being very good examples. Where they essentially threw away a huge amount of animation interference logic, in order to add a bloom filter and more one-shot explosion effects. Along with more cutscenes, of course. And that part - cutscenes and graphics post - is becoming a massive part of what games-development means. Which, as you can probably tell is my opinion, is why games are going downhill.

Then how do you explain my case? I only started playing games like the Baldur's Gate series, Planescape: Torment and TES: Morrowind around 3 to 4 years ago yet I consider them the best games I've played so far. Those games have inherent quality, a quality that supersedes the ever evolving aspects like graphics. "Nostalgia" is nothing but an excuse. I suppose to me it's more that some of the old games (things like Tie-Fighter, Fallout, Xcom in a sense, to take a few different variants) took narrative and story-telling in a game seriously, in a way that most games didn't until then. And later on still haven't. So it's not that they were perfect works of art - but some of these games had at least an approach to interactive narrative. Or made a stab at creating an immersive narrative around the player with some thought. I.e., Tie-fighter with the way the missions hang together in a larger story, but that you only see glimpses of it, and only from the point of view of the tie-fighter pilot. Meanwhile, you're gradually transformed from a completely faceless trooper and into flying wing for the dark lord, if you choose to pursue the hidden objectives and advance in the order, etc. And that's one way to wrap a linear story around the player so they feel they have agency. I-War had a similar one - that half the story is you, the captain of a ship, flying around the universe and interacting with things. I mean, who could possibly see the appeal in that, right..? It's not like that's going to spawn several seasons worth of tv-series Xcom has a different approach again. Basically, there are a million details and variables that keep getting recorded in the background that maps your behaviour. And the alien AI player then responds to that, often in such an organic way that many people start to think they're playing against a pretty intelligent opponent. It's moving in stages and things of that sort of course. But many of the events will take place as responses to things you do, or to counter specific types of tactics. So that's another way to create an interactive narrative over even a fairly simplistic plot. (That of course unfortunately was not present in any way in the reboot). Meanwhile, in Fallout you have all kinds of events written in different locations, with thousands of dialogue lines and options on how to move through the different situations. With conditions that nest very deeply to other scenarios and related choices, as well as just to the specific scenario. So yet again a completely different stab at creating interactive fiction. But in either case, there was this attempt to create interactive fiction in a way that used the unique options you have when you have a player taking part in the fiction. So even when games with very good writing in them turn up now - like the Tomb Raider reboot, for example - it's usually only approaching the Tie-fighter angle, really. With telling a linear story from the first-person perspective - except it doesn't really understand how to entice the player into actually wanting to immerse themselves in the role they're given. And Mass Effect and Dragon Age ends up in that approach as well, because they always have writing that follows a particular pattern, given very solidly by the writer for the particular segment. You're never actually asked to, or tricked into believing, that you're now making any groundbreaking choices that will come back to haunt you. Because it's still moving on a reel from location to location, very specifically and very obviously. And that's something we've seen very few exceptions to lately. I guess ... Rise of the Argonauts, maybe is a weird but interesting example. Because they take it seriously that you're not really role-playing Jason and doing whatever you want. But that you're more exploring what Jason thinks and are trying to figure out what his/your motivations are in the situations he runs into. So then you end up with something different compared to Mass Effect, where you don't really have choices, but where you're given options to pick the colour of the light at the ending, etc. And always only inside a specific segment that, counterintuitively to the design, is isolated from the rest (save the hub-areas). Because that approach is basically turning Shepard into a narcissism-automat - the only real driver in the story is that the player is put in confrontation after confrontation, where the world instantly revolves around what you pick during the next 2 seconds. Before your companions then respond to you in some way before they forget about it forever. There are exceptions, like the companion quests in ME2, and the asteroid mission in ME1. But they are far and few between, frankly. I think that it's unfortunately a bit too common for officially proclaimed gamers to be very fond of that gamey approach as well. Where you're given "choices" that are "meaningful" and "important" as the only real driver in the narration. And frankly, I think that a lot of gamers give that approach a pass exactly because of nostalgia. Because they associate something with that interface and those mechanics that new players, or people who just like interactive fiction, don't see. And they don't see it because the writing really is abysmally bad. And we're essentially back in the good old days again, when bad video-game writing is a genre in itself, because it's just there as an excuse to get the mechanics rolling. About half-way removed from Nintendo's "Story" sheet across the screen in the Mario games. I mean, we can talk a lot about personal preference. But "I like this, end of discussion" doesn't make something equal to "good writing that has depth and relevance to different people in different ways". It just means that you enjoy something, and that you don't care why. That's not a problem as such, but people really shouldn't use that as an argument for why something is written well. At most then you can say "I like that bit, because of such and such". But saying that "I like this, so this is the most we can ever expect to see from games", is a bit offensive. To developers, to writers.. to other gamers as well..

..still, I suppose you could say that the Witcher universe is more grounded in modern medieval middle-European history than most other fantasy settings. In the sense that the pagan folklore from the period - Sapkowsky I think is pretty obvious about this - is retold with a modern spin with the themes and the politics and so on. But in a setting in terms of locations, how armies work, how the kings rule, and and things of that sort that actually is fairly accurate historically. Or, that it's set in a fairly authentic historical setting where the folklore from the area is made real. Which makes the Witcher fairly unique, and different from the more common kind of medieval myth spun from works like Alighieri's Dante and Beowulf, for example, from judeo-christian story-telling tradition. Since the Witcher is inspired by folklore and traditions that existed at the time more than the obviously more known and read historical fiction people tend to associate with "medieval" times. Other than that the Witcher universe is complete fiction, of course. But it's probably useful to have that distinction in the back of the head when enjoying that work. Between pagan folklore that typically wasn't written down (though it still survives in some respects today), and the "medieval" judeo-christian fiction and myth that typically is the foundation for almost all modern fantasy settings.

Yeah, wondered about that. Hang on, let me get my updated 2014 contemporary dictionary for words which we don't really understand anymore: "Forum: noun \ˈfȯr-əm\, place where people fight over which opinion is the most common one, and therefore the only relevant one". Hm. Well, crap.

I like systems that combine "affinity" progression and level progression as well. But if you want that included in a role-playing game, you have to simplify the way the encounters scale, you cannot use custom encounters in the same way, you can never tie abilities and gameplay abilities into the writing, for example. Lots of arpgs tend to have blanked out skills to deal with that problem. That you can actually earn millions of times the amount of xp that you needed to unlock the orb of ultimate sarcasm - but they don't let you have it until you complete a quest or kill a particular boss. Soul Reaver.. good example. You have some sort of progression and collect upgrades - but you're not actually getting anywhere until you get certain powers from the bosses. So in reality the level system is insignificant enough that after the fifth health-upgrade, you don't really care or see much difference. While it's also disconnected from the powers you get that actually matter and change the game. Your critical approach and lack of positive thinking will get you nowhere, Lephys! You have to ask like this: "We shall have Trap XP! And is there any reason, any reason at all, that might justify it?". And now you'll get a list of reasons right away! That's intelligent thinking, you see! Or - possibly just sheer sophistry and creative lying, I don't seem to know the difference nowadays.

And predict the future. Yes, I understand.

^Mm. It means that a party needs to only unlock an assumed average amount of chests (which no one will), in an average amount of optional dungeons (that might not visit), etc. Down the pipeline, it also means that underleveled parties will run into too difficult battles, while overleveled parties breeze through them. How will you "rebalance" that encounter, if you are tasked with that? It's an impossible problem if you want to keep the design. So the solution, like with the attributes it seems, is to drop the design and go with something more simplistic. Such as either dropping level-dependent skills having any reference at any point, or simply making the entire game linear. Or both. ....and that would solve the level pacing problem, in what way?

..A moderator in the beta-part of a forum that at least used to be read fairly often by the dev-team keeps stating that anyone who don't want xp rewards, in this case, is a spiteful jerk who wants to control how people play the game. And hate people not playing the game in the "right" way, since they are mentally off the kilter. That's the assumption, it's not very subtle, and it hasn't got anything to do with motivations. In any case - do you think that encourages open feedback in the forum? Even if he wasn't a moderator, would that really be a welcome way to answer anything? ...on topic: Unless people want to settle for fake xp popups, you would have to choose between getting an insignificant XP reward for sidequest activity, or getting no specific incremental xp-reward. And sadly have to settle for merely loot, exploration rewards, filling out the map, getting to new quests, and gaining knowledge about creatures, along with understanding the game system better, etc. (..actually, scratch the last one, thanks to the attribute system being disconnected from the combat-mechanics, thanks in part to "majority" feedback on this wonderfully moderated forum). Otherwise, leveling up and controlling the level progression has to be mechanically separate from absolute references (like the dialogue skills, or attributes in dialogues), and the combat encounters have to be scaled differently. But this has drawbacks, like I explained. The drawback of something more comprehensive is that it takes a lot of work and planning. So on one side, we have an existing design from a completed game. And on the other we have someone's insistent wish to break the level progression system for everyone who doesn't check the design document before figuring out if they should be ignoring or picking a lock. It's a complete toss-up, obviously.

Yes. And if you could read, I would have already explained to you why having extra variable xp-sources will screw that up. No biggie, though. I mean, don't let me stop you guys in the community team from pushing this to the devs and implementation. By all means.

Maybe they could just design a golden, floating "5xp" cursor that jumps and sparkles when you click anything. But not actually give you xp to screw the level progression every time you click with it, and call it a day? I mean, you can have that cursor if you want it, can't you? Sure you can. This is after all a complicated personal issue some very serious posters have with the game, and it's obvious that the developers should handle this with the utmost urgency and seriousness. As usual.

Weren't the high-level resurrection spells supposed to work that way? That you could get a maimed, but still conscious party-member back on their feet before the fight ended. With a certain amount of stamina left, and the same amount of hit-points as when they were knocked down.. And that people who got killed/no hp either were permanently dead or only possible to raise at a dark temple in the woods or something like that?