Amentep

I'd think (and could be wrong) that most people who are heavily conservative secessionists see the federal government as something granted its powers by consent of the state; their patriotism therefore should be stronger for their state than for the nation as a whole, which they see as an outgrowth of their state agreeing to cede part of its state power to a national government to encourage inter-state cooperation and management. Ergo, the state is more important than the nation.

If I thought romances would hinder game quality, I'd not argue for them. But I'm pro-romance in that I think there's value in developing relationships of all types with the NPC and PC. But I certainly can't dismiss those who think that such effort will negatively impact the game because to my mind the implementation of it isn't trivial - not saying you are saying they are, but that that has been an argument on these threads.

To be honest, I've never seen much difference between Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim. Except Oblivion introduced the character creation feature of "exploded faces" that never looked quite right. The only difference really is cutting down the "busywork" in building skills (I jumped from tall building and didn't die - skill level up!). I never felt any real interest from any of the NPCs in any of the games or any of the quests. The guilds are a joke with one being able to join most (if not all) of them without issue (whether it makes sense or not). The fun in the games was roving around the landscape doing whatever you felt like doing, not in engaging characters or plots. Although Morrowind is unbearably ugly without mods, IMO. Any how, which is better - "I saw a mudcrab today...horrible creature" or "I used to be an adventurer like you...then I took an arrow to the knee"?

I remember the only time I ever renamed all the NPCs in a game, I then spent the game having a dickens of a time trying to remember who was who because I couldn't remember what I'd named them. So no real interest from me.

Of a single minor quest. Describing the romance as minor is precisely the reason why some people argue that people who want romance in games just want a sex minigame. Because it doesn't seem like there's any import to them if they're "minor". So minigame. I'd also argue that the proper way to do a romance is that it can't be a singular "extra" quest, because then the Player is going to feel the character is pointless unless they want to romance them. To make sure that the character holds up in responsiveness for all players, the Romance should be an alternate path and there should be dialog content for the player who chooses not to romance the NPC that still gives the NPC character depth. Which would mean, realistically, that adding a romance is at least creating double the amount of work. YMMV, of course. To be honest, downplaying the implementation of romances (as some people have claimed a fully formed, completely responsive, non-trivial romance could be created in hours) isn't helpful either. What we know is that the developers have said that it takes 2-3 months to write a companion. For a romance to work (IMO) it cannot be tacked onto the character as an afterthought, it has to be part of the 2-3 months. It should - as I mentioned above - not lock out the player who doesn't choose the romance from having and interesting companion. Which means developing parallel relationships (romance-friendship or romance-rivalry or romance-unrequited love or whatever) Now you also need to make the romance recognizable by the game world (since the player is going to want feedback on their choices). So now the other companions need to have comments, maybe non-joinable NPCs; maybe the villain. And now their are other choices - should a group going to an Inn with a couple in a relationship be charged more for a specific room for themselves? Should there be shops that sell items that you can give to your SO (for RP purposes not for a +1 on the relationship meter)? Are their quests where knowing that the characters are in a relationship is important (storyline bits where the heroes may end up captured and being interrogated I think you'd want the game to acknowledge trying to get to the PC through the NPC SO). Etc. So to my mind this stuff isn't minor and isn't trivial.

I watched Skyfall over the weekend (enjoyed it, has more similarity to Casino Royale than Quantum of Solace) and the Star Trek reboot (which I liked again).

Mebbe it should be treated like romance then. A pop up message that says "You happen to have some bread in your backpack. It looks delicious. Your stomach growls when you look at it, though you do not know why. You feel strangely compelled to sink your teeth into it. Give in to this seduction y/n" Completely optional. Now we're back on the winning track with pop-a-bread gameplay and romance pies!

*Knock, knock* "Who's there?" "Forton" "Forton Who?" "Forton is a lot of weight!" ... Maybe you had to be there.

I never argued romance was required, though, only one "tool in the toolbox" for developers to use if/when it made sense (to them, not to us) On the flip side, really don't want to see a non-toggle-able food mechanic because I find them a bore in games and a lot harder to ignore than optional dialogue. Can't argue that it isn't, but ultimately that's what most of these things boil down to from our (the game players) perspective

1. Few things would be more important than food. 2. There can be choices about food - do you actively kill monsters/ animals and eat them, do you use a character's skill (like setting snares) to simulate hunting, or do you fight humanoid enemies to buy food with their gold? 1. In real life, yeah. In a game? Not to me because that's not what interest me - the story & characters are. If I wanted to play a sim game, I'd play the Sims and be forced to feed my Sim and guide them to the bathroom to poop and all that. 2. Again making complex systems to handle what is essentially a money/time sink button press element ("Press 'Y' to not starve to death") isn't interesting to me. I won't hate it if a food mechanic is in, but its not something I have an interest in.

I can't understand this arbitrarity. If you allow for the fact that your character has enough experience in his world to take care of his physical needs, why don't you just guess that he also knows how to satisfy his emotional needs? Because the choices should be mine - not choices on what to eat and when, but what to do in the "important" stuff that develops who the character is or how the story unfolds. Who I pick as my ally is defining, not eating a sandwich. Without the choices that count being mine, I'd just be watching a movie. Which is fine activity but not really what I want for a game. I'll admit that I'm a bit idiosyncratic in this regard, but to me food requirements are pointless busywork; you have a meter that goes down and is replenished by pressing a button. The button only works if you have a resource in your inventory. So essentially all that has been added is a button I'm required to push and a money sink that I have to spend money on. I'd actually rather pay an upkeep fee for things like this and not worry about pressing the button. I also confess that back in the C64 era I played a RPG that had a food mechanic and got stuck in a situation where I needed money to buy food but didn't have any but starved to death every time I tried to go to the outerlands to find a monster to kill for gold. Arguably realistic but for me not a fun experience at age 13 or 14. Absolutely. If I could romance a pie [and eat it], we'd all be happy and I'd buy 10 copies of this game. I think we have Obsidian's next Kickstarter here. EDIT: rereading this, I was struck by my previous idea that to me RPGs are more story with a character I control working through the definition of the character and story established/allowed by the game. Its entirely possible that I'm more in favor with game elements that concentrate on the aspects I like (which is story & character) vs those that I don't like that don't add value to story and character (heavy sim aspects, like eating). This may explain why I don't see a logical disconnect between being pro-romance and anti-button-press-eating while others do.

I'd like to assume that my character knows when they're hungry and how to plan to have food available to them when traveling. I don't like to assume my character knows how I want them to interact with other people. A character doesn't have to be in a romance to live; they do have to eat* to live. I'd like to assume dialog with other characters can lead to unexpected outcomes. If I eat bread, I should eat bread. Not roll for initiative and try to hit with my teeth. The only way these two situations - in my opinion - could be remotely relatable is if I have to have dialog options with my food to successfully eat or something. Which is just weird enough concept to be worth it. *or some eating equivalent if we're talking plant people or something

Yes--and then you can go after people who make a similar-enough product using a similar-enough symbol. The breadth or narrowness of a given trademark depends a lot on how many lawyers you can afford. You're have to be fairly close though for the lawsuit to be anything other than a nuisance suit; I'd think (and I'm not a lawyer) that unless you had three snakes eating one another Bethesda wouldn't be able to prevail in a suit. Just having an ouroboros wouldn't be enough - even in the same competing field. Not that it matters since Project Eternity's logo isn't using the ouroboros anymore...

Except Monte Carlo is anti-romance and was forced to remove a cartoon of a lady in a chainmail bikini from his sig! As I mentioned before, I think its far to easy to classify the "sides" in a derogatory manner. For example pro-romancers have been accused of being people who think sex is icky in real life and therefore look to games as their sexual fetish outlet. And now you've essentially asserted the same of the other camp. The problem is assuming that someone's pro / con romance feeling has any connection to how they feel about sex and relationships in real life, which ultimately doesn't logically follow. Er...I'm on your side and that's the argument I've been making for like a month now. Color me befuddled.

See I'd disagree (possibly because of semantics, but reading a novel is an experience, its just not the same experience as playing a role-playing game). To me a role-playing game is a participatory story; I take a character in the story and develop that character through the story based on what the story gives me. This is why they can be so flexible as to carry very heavy plot and character driven epics and simple "jump in a tunnel and fight monsters" type tales. The experience is in the playing, sure, but that's not what they are. Actually given a limited budget, I'd argue to expense (money, developer resources) is a good reason to be very frugal in character development to ensure that the player gets the most "bang for their buck" (dodgy innuendo not intended, oo-er). But for my purposes I could see a story in which a group of people share a friendship and journey for that reason or a group forced together in a fellowship developing a camaraderie along the way without having there be a need for a romantic relationship to develop. Could it? Sure. Must it? No. I'm a big believer in the idea that romances need to work within the context of both the PC and the NPC and if the group gathered doesn't make sense to have a romance there's no reason to include such a thing. A character can be well drawn and realized in the game without being romanceable (and I think the reverse is true, although I know many who debate this).

* sigh * Yes, having no bananas is exactly like having no moral choices, because it takes away from the experience. Re-read your post, forensically, and try to tease out a few micrograms of sense. No? Me neither. ... If you like dating sims then come out and say it, don't dress it up in terms of moral choices and immersion. Feh. Yes, writing stupid thing, while saying that you opponent makes no sense, is exactly like having an argument. Because I suppose this kind of behaviour comes with a gratifying feeling of false superiority. As for the dating sims, I have already explained the difference. If you paid attention to what I was saying instead of trying to look witty and well-worded, you would have known it too. To be fair, reductive arguments in storytelling doesn't work; the idea that "Story A" is diminished by not having "element B" assumes "element B" was considered for the story in the first place. Which it may not have. While I agree that romance is one "tool in the toolshed" for developers building stories and characters, its by no means the only tool in the toolshed, and they can build a perfectly fine game without it (alternatively for the haters, they could build a perfectly fine game *with* it too). The idea that characters become robots when romanceability is removed automatically assumes that the only character traits the character had was to be romanceable.

Eh, I'd rather the humour come from the story/character/setting not referencing funny (or supposedly funny) things from the internet.

For the comic beek geekasm (as far as I kinda recall) - Dinah Lance aka Black Canary was the daughter of a non-powered costumed heroine from the JLA days. She started out as a brunette who wore a blonde wig, a leather jacket and some fishnet hose as a way of hiding her identity whilst kicking butt with martial arts ability and general "scrappy attitude", then picked up some sonic based scream powers along the way... JSA not JLA; Black Canary actually took over her 1940s strip from Johnny Thunder's strip where she was introduced as a sort of bad girl who eventually reformed. The whole thing with the daughter was really an attempt to justify why the GA Black Canary was still around in the early 1980s adventuring (in her 60s and with no powers), since originally it was the Golden Age Black Canary who moved to Earth 1 from Earth 2. The "Canary Cry" was originally given to BC when she immigrated after the death of her husband due to radiation from fighting the monster that killed him. When it was decided they needed to explain the age of BC, the writers introduced the idea that a curse given by JSA foe The Wizard had given the daughter of BC and Larry Lance the "Canary Cry" which she couldn't control and when no one could cure her, Johnny Thunder used his Thunderbolt to put the daughter in suspended animation (in which she still grew into an adult). Then to explain how this was supposed to work, they revealed that the Thunderbolt and Superman of Earth 1 arranged with GA Black Canary (who was revealed to be dying from the radiation from the above mentioned story) to have her memories of implanted into her daughter(!) so her daughter wouldn't realize anything had happened to her(!!) before sending her to Earth 1 where she initially thought she was her own mother(!!!) in those early adventures with the JLA. Then Crisis on Inifinite Earths happened and they created a much more straight forward continuity (unless you count the bickering caused by Wonder Woman being replaced by Black Canary as a founding member of the JLA). I actually didn't mind the continuity changes, but did think the writing was horrible on that show (the episode with the fast growing assassin baby was pretty much the last straw for me). The good just outweighed the bad, heavily, IMO.

It gets worse if you begin the game as a clueless wimp whose boots are clearly too big for him. - Lands of Lore1: you are the king's champion for no apparent reason - Wizardry 8: you're hired as bodyguards but you can't fight a rat without dying - Icewind Dale 1: you're hired as caravan guards when there are yetis and **** in the mountains who can kill you with a mean stare - practically every single Ultima This will probably not happen in PE but I just want to make sure that idea doesn't get lost along the way. To be fair, in IWD1 you're part of what's supposed to be a fairly large contingent of people, so I don't think its that crazy. You were joining a large group organized by a former adventurer, not supposed to be the sole defenders of the caravan.

Conversely, having romance feels artificial. Unless you're playing a squee-laden emo sap. Playing a video game feels artificial. Unless you're a computer. See: http://www.something...cial-forums.php for details. Edit: For the record, I think this SA article should be inextricably bound with Chris Avellone's opinion on romances in all extensions of this discussion going forward. I pretty much left BSN after the flood of people demanding that Bethany, the PC's sister in DA2, be romanceable. And I say this as someone who is generally "pro-romance" in games if it fits the story, character, etc, I just couldn't come to terms with people who felt like that wasn't just a good idea but an absolute necessity for the game. Of course it didn't hurt that I find the BSN to be terribly hard to use as a forum, either. I'll say this as someone who feels they are pro-romance I'd never stoop to say that any romance is absolutely necessary. I'll also always argue that any romance shouldn't ever be done at the expense of the NPC (ie violating their core concepts). I'd rather have no romance than poor romances that exist only to make the NPC the PCs virtual love slave, devoid of their personality that made them an interesting NPC in the first place.

M is an ancient symbol and that doesn't prevent the golden arches from being trademarked. I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the M is trademarked as a design - two arches that form an M - not as a letter (which wouldn't be trademarkable). Note that as an ancient symbol, the ouroboros isn't trademarkable (its considered a concept in the public domain), however you could make a distinct version of the ouroboros that is trademarkable - like ES:O's three snakes to one eating its tail. Also I thought Obsidian had dropped the traditional ouroboros from their logo, instead using a more abstract circle / sun motiff with a multitude of snakes (which would be trademarkable as far as I know).

Yeah I mentioned that in the post prior to this one. The other origins though fall under less reasonable rationales, IMO. You're pretty much railroaded to being a Warden without any ability to pursue other options (particularly egregious IMO is the human noble origin where you don't have the option of walking through the secret exit that you're standing next to instead of being blackmailed by Duncan into being a Warden).

I must have a mustache so I may exercise my little grey cells.

This is true to an extent. But a couple centimeters of snow doesn't really need plowing and I've seen some southern places still hole up and wait for it to pass. Now admittedly, I use "all season" tires, so maybe there's something about the tires in those southern places, but I do chuckle when light snow chokes out some towns. If you don't drive in ice very often, you're more likely to be a danger to yourself and others. Even when its a case of a couple of centimeters its usually easier to wait it out. That said I enjoyed the snow two Januarys ago - shut down the entire city for two weeks!

Sorry, I did a terrible job of wording it. My point as that games, where you are locked into a specific backgrounds (Alpha Protocol, Planescape Torment, Dragon Age 2, Witcher, Mass Effect) actually have the most roleplay. You actually feel that what you do matters. Because devs can concentrate on the story and on player's experience instead of mashing in apparent variety like they did with countless classes and races in NWN2, something which was utterly pointless in single player. Actually I don't disagree with you that you can do more in-game with a character whose background is created by the game makers. You can be very specific with references and history and reactive to that. Note, however, that DAO doesn't have you start out as a Warden, it forces you to become one through the course of the game (well the prologue), so I don't see it as exactly the same thing (your mileage may vary, of course).