Amentep

By making a good game, getting people excited about and having them buy it, enjoy it and tell their friends about who also buy it and enjoy it?

I never played Torchlight (as my game computer has been belly up since before it was released).

Action Mule!

I think as well Obsidian shouldn't be a narrow focus developer (RPG genre is probably as narrow as one would want to go). Plus - as someone who likes a good hack/slash game or dungeon crawler or aRPG, I can say its been some time since we've had a good one (IMO). Titan Quest may have been the last one I played that I really, really liked.

Most of the press remarks seem to imply its alpha or pre-alpha.

My thought on this - and of course everyone comes from a different place in what works for them in a game - is that starting off with "bad aim" and allowing the character go to "super aim" through use of skill points allows the player to get a sense of building their character and also creates a certain value to the gun skill. If a character starts with good aim and moves to great aim than the player may not feel sufficiently rewarded by their choice to spend points in guns. In fact if you start with good aim, it is an encouragement to dump points away from guns making the guns a weak skill tree because you'll probably be able to satisfactorily hit things without putting any points into the gun skills. This way - rightly or wrongly - forces players to live with their choices. Now I say this as someone who is not generally gifted at shooters but never felt that my weak gun skills in the game actually hampered anything. Sure I couldn't shoot anything early on, but I'd put more points into martial arts and quite appropriately had a much easier time rushing opponents and attacking than I did guns, rewarding me with results based on the skill points I used. As I developed my character my gun skills became more versatile in their use. I never put any points into SMGs but could still use them to waste ammo and keep opponents from rushing me.

It was intentional for gameplay. I'm pretty sure of that. Though it would be nice if that stuff could be modded. Just hope with us that Obsidian decides to help its Mod Community. >_ I think its intentional for gameplay to make each of the upgrades do something of import, but I also can't help but wonder if it was also to help further distance the guns from real-world ones (since I seem to recall there was a lot of talk about them not wanting to have to license from the manufacturers the real guns).

I remember writing a story and had everything plotted out and the character did this and then this happened and so on. It was well reviewed by my peers except one thing. I was asked - "Why didn't character A do action B when confronted with challenge C?" The obvious answer is that the author didn't think of it, and if he doesn't the characters can't either. I think with the above example

Depends on the game. You can use a combo of having some slow health/mana regen + making potions fall so frequently one rarely has to buy them, for example. I don't think I ever bought a potion in Titan Quest. heh But yeah, I do get your point. Most games there's something you're going to go back to town for on a too-often basis, where to buy or sell or turn in quests if there's a main town hub etc. I think one thing to remember in the difference between tanks and archers though, is that - assuming a system with health potions and limited arrows - a tank is not going to be required to use a health potion after every fight but that an archer will use part of their arrow inventory in every fight. This will necessitate an archer having to go back to the stores much more often than a tank (and possibly more often than a mana using magic caster who replenishes with mana potions). I remember my archer character in CHAMPIONS OF NORRATH for example. To be useful I often maxed my carry weight with arrows. Because other players were tired of having to go back to the merchants for me to buy arrows (and as an archer based character I wasn't terribly useful switched to combat). But that meant I couldn't pick *anything* up without a lot of dropping and picking up items so I could switch a worn item with a new drop or requesting another player to pick it up for me until I had enough "weight" free to pick up the item from them. I also remember in the IE games feeling forced by ammo limitation for characters whose primary attack was non-magical distance attacks - bows, crossbows, darts or slings - to load them down with ammo so that they didn't rush into melee barehanded before I could replenish their stock (a type of inventory micromanagement I never enjoyed). At least IWD2 gave me plenty of returning Ice Darts as loot.

Congrats Gfted1!

You post enough with a person and you come to expect that persons reactions on the board or blog or what have you. Its a shock to realize they're not there and the loss of their presence is still felt, whether you never met "in real life" or not.

nope.

Did Taylor say anything to Uwe Boll during the making of the movie? Seriously though, I think for action RPGs there has to be a right balance between dialogue and story points and the action portions. Otherwise it feels like you have to wade through mountains of dialogue (or cut scenes) to get to hacking and slashing. So I'm not surprised to see less dialogue than a more traditional RPG.

This is probably just a poor choice of words, but I think from the perspective of Obsidian I imagine that constructive criticism would be more valued than whining or complaining. This has been an interesting thread - possibly because AP's gameplay has so divided those who played it - but well reasoned and thought out criticisms should be the order of the day (and I should point out that we've seen many on both the pros and cons in several threads).

yes, but if Sega is releasing it, they may not be able to announce they're working on a patch (if they were) until Sega announced they had Obsidian working on a patch (or were pending a release of a patch or somesuch).

Yeah but they may not be able to speak about a patch at all, since wouldn't it be Sega who'd have to release the patch?

So you actually don't forgive even Joseph? I moved the star to the just because I *KNEW* someone was going to misinterpret that. 1: I posted while you edited.2: Failed your joke spot check. I knew you weren't being serious! I was even going to add a * to my comment but decided not to. So anyhow a bit on-topic, I never figured we'd have super-mega dev responses (although its always cool when they post). But I've seen a few reading threads, so I'm sure any important feedback we might accidentally post to one of these threads is being seen, if not responded to.

neat!

So you actually don't forgive even Joseph? I moved the star to the just because I *KNEW* someone was going to misinterpret that.

Sorry, I should have read through the whole thread . I'm not sure either comment was directed at you personally though. Not to make excuses, but a lot of the reasons why we can't post too often have already been mentioned. We're pretty busy making games, and also, we don't often have a lot that we can say. I probably delete 3-5 posts a week before I hit the reply button, just because I'm not sure if I'm overstepping the bounds of what I can or should say. Don't worry Joseph, we forgive you. But only you. The rest of the Devs: * *Just in case, I'm being silly. Kitties for everyone!

A Dev Response!

Er...The Dark Spire? One game. And that looks like ****. Come on. It wasn't that good IMO, but that's beside the point. Seems like some old style dungeon crawlers do come out but most of them are made in Japan (SMT: Strange Journeyis the last one I can think of that is close to the old style games in terms of gameworld (3d dungeon crawler) and it probably wouldn't have come out had it not been for it being an SMT game) and most of them never come out here (heck they're still making ! in Japan...) WorstUsernameEver is correct in pointing out that western developers are pretty much ignoring the DS for western styled games.

yeah I thought it was a blast. Also after the Reg Barclay credit, the next one (cut off a bit) appears to be G. F. Starbuck.

Er...The Dark Spire? Sadly we'll never see another Tactics Ogre.

How many Gothic revival (or original gothic) fit their immediate surroundings now anyhow (or even at the time they were built)? Personally it looks like something out of a fantasy painting with that bridge and all.