What PoE really is and why it is the future

[Lephys]

When people say complex mechanics they do not necessarily mean pointlessly convoluted mechanics. They mean mechanics that add depth and complexity to decision making.

Exactly. You can make a game complex without making it complicated.

[Sheikh]

And Pillars has the best gaming community I have ever seen so that speaks loads about it too, although indirectly.

Edited October 31, 2014 by Sheikh

[Musaab]

Beamdog mentioned something about having a D&D license to make a new game after meeting with WotC and they did mention something about choosing to base it on 4th Edition.

 

Games I've been playing are: Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, Divinity: Original Sin, Wasteland 2...looking forward whatever "Adventure Y" is from Beamdog (which appears to be set in the Baldur's Gate series), and Pillars of Eternity (of course), and Torment: Tides of Numenera.  Numenera is truly an epic setting.

[Sheikh]

Also on the topic of technology and video games, Kickstarter is the very best technological invention of the last 5-7 years that truly helps video game developers to develop better games in my opinion 

 

Personally if there isnt anything good to play, I prefer to not play anything at all. Pillars is the only game in many many years that I have looked forward to being released and playing. Yes I have played a few other games in the meantime - League of Legends before and a little World of Tanks right now, but I never really looked forward to play either of these, they are fairly literally to kill time.

 

Also with Josh Sawyer being the functional leader of this project, I think his personal distaste of alcohol definitely helps his brain function better and therefore helps this project along.

Edited October 31, 2014 by Sheikh

[Osvir]

I'm kind of on the same level as the OP.

With Kickstarter the developers can again develop things based on feeling, inspiration, motivation and be as creative as they choose or want to be. Making the games they want to make. In Publisher/Business men-relationships I get the feeling that the games are less about what they want to do, but more about what they simply have to do. It becomes more technical and less about "feeling".

I tend to compare this with guitar playing, there's many great guitar players out there, and singers and musicians. But many are just "technical" artists with no "feeling" (que, Justin Beiber). He's a great singer, but where is his feeling? It's just an illusion.

Kickstarter, and the revolution of it, allows developers to get in touch with that "feeling" again, I suppose. But it also invites the crowd, the fans, the audience, to also "feel" and influence with their "feeling"

I also believe that Kickstarter and Early Access affects the big publishers and rubs them in a good way, motivating and inspiring AAA companies to get in touch with their "feeling" again. Publishers giving the developers (the creative people) more room to breath and do their thing... well, at least I hope they do.

[Yonjuro]

 In Publisher/Business men-relationships I get the feeling that the games are less about what they want to do, but more about what they simply have to do. It becomes more technical and less about "feeling".

 

I tend to compare this with guitar playing, there's many great guitar players out there, and singers and musicians. But many are just "technical" artists with no "feeling" (que, Justin Beiber). He's a great singer, but where is his feeling? It's just an illusion.

 

 Sure - another analogy is what happened with beer in the U.S. in the late 80's. Before that, the large breweries got really good at producing millions of bottles of the same bland crap (45% rice or corn 55% malted barley, no hops to speak of - not even legal to call it beer in, say, Germany) and convincing people to buy it by advertising the the hell out of it. The only way to thrive in the brewing industry was to save costs (by making a crappier product) and use the money to buy mass media advertising. 

 

 You couldn't get good beer in the U.S. unless you made it yourself (or lived near a big city where a store was importing beer from places where people cared about it).

 

 Some of those home brewers decided to open breweries and now you can get just about any style of good beer in the U.S. made by people who care about making beer (for profit) instead of companies that care about making a profit (by means of beer). This only really worked because radio advertising was still local at the time. That loophole was closed soon after when a few companies bought up all of the local radio stations after a change in the law that allowed them to do that. 

 

 With the internet, advertising (and information consumption of all kinds) has gotten hyper local and communication is two way, allowing things like kickstarter to happen. I imagine that a lot of people would like to see a return to the "good" old days by means of consolidation of the internet in exactly the same way as it happened with radio in the U.S.

 

 I don't see that happening because it's harder to legislate that without it being obvious and the people who want that to happen will probably die off before they can orchestrate a fraud on that large of a scale.

 

 Anyway, this has drifted off into even more of a tangent than I started with, so, to bring it home, I agree with the OP and expect good things from the game companies populated by people who care about games, but I also expect that large publishers will continue to exist and continue to produce bland crap that they sell to large numbers of people, just like the large breweries; Budweiser (the U.S. version, not the original Czech pilsner) is still the most popular beer in the world but, now there are choices so we don't ever need to drink it.

[constantine]

Beamdog mentioned something about having a D&D license to make a new game after meeting with WotC and they did mention something about choosing to base it on 4th Edition.

Normally I would be excited with such news, but unfortunately every story-quest addition Beamdog added to the BGEE series was not to my liking.

 

I found the new content swallow, uninspired and very badly written.

[prodigydancer]

Heh. People think that old games were all timeless classics. It's because the bad ones are long forgotten (except maybe a few spectacular failures).

 

Get yourself a time machine and go back to 1994. You'll see the same picture: a handful of great games in a huge pile of forgettable trash.

Edited November 1, 2014 by prodigydancer

[Stun]

There is a point out there that video games from the past were better. It is true in the sense that developers from the past were far more motivated to put effort and heart into their creation. On the other hand creators of games from the distant past were not able to express their genius as well because of technical limitations. In the present day the technical limitations have been overcome to a huge degree, but the inspiration has been lost in the meanwhile.

 

PoE is the beginning of the reintroduction of this inspiration. However poe is not as much a messiah of the new age of gaming, bur rather a messiah of the retracing that happens before it. Retracing is basically going back to where we (the developers actually, I am not one, but we are all one) went wrong and lost the inspiration. PoE is at least trying to bring this inspiration back.

Oh I don't know about that. This sounds like excessive wishful thinking with not a whole lot of evidence to back it. First off, I'm wracking my brain trying to find the 'technical advancements' PoE is taking advantage of. I can't think of a single one. Physics? Graphics? Hollywood style cinematics?

 

Second, 'inspiration' is such a vague term. I wouldn't even know where to start. You're operating under the premise that modern RPGs lack inspiration? What do you mean by this, specifically?

[Sarex]

I have played both games. The whole point of League of Legends is to make it simpler and focus on player vs player fighting. In DotA 2 there are many ways to win - 5 man deathball, various ways to get an economic advantage including the method I described before, split pushing, farming. In many instances it is better not to fight in DotA 2.

 

DotA 2 is far and away more complex game and requires more skill, but it can sometimes be less 'exciting'. Some people however require more instant gratification than DotA 2 provides, and thus prefer League of Legends.

 

Hmm I don't know how far you made it in LoL, but pretty much what you describe for DotA2 applies to LoL too. Only in low ELO matches does the behavior you mention happen. You can look at some professional matches, no one fights in them, they all try to economically eclipse their opponent before they go in for the kill, thus most of the matches have low kill scores.

 

Split pushing, farming, rotating and many more tactics are used in LoL and have been used since the beginning. The only thing LoL doesn't have is minion denying and that has been removed because the devs thought that there is no logic in killing your own allies.

 

Tbh everything you described seems to come from experiencing low elo games.

[Sheikh]

 

Oh I don't know about that. This sounds like excessive wishful thinking with not a whole lot of evidence to back it. First off, I'm wracking my brain trying to find the 'technical advancements' PoE is taking advantage of. I can't think of a single one. Physics? Graphics? Hollywood style cinematics?

 

Second, 'inspiration' is such a vague term. I wouldn't even know where to start. You're operating under the premise that modern RPGs lack inspiration? What do you mean by this, specifically?

 

 

Its definitely not wishful thinking, that I do assure you. My days of wishful thinking were of course, filled with disappointments and I exited that thinking gracefully and much wiser. I am glad though that you wish for that which I think is happening and/or will happen.

 

Technical advancements compared to games from 1984 for example? I think there are some.

 

You feel inspiration or you dont. What you are telling me is you dont feel inspiration at all (from games at least?), you have my sympathy for that.

[Sensuki]

Tbh everything you described seems to come from experiencing low elo games.

Read my earlier post about the lack of denying.

[Sarex]

Read my earlier post about the lack of denying.

 

 

The only thing LoL doesn't have is minion denying and that has been removed because the devs thought that there is no logic in killing your own allies.

 

I have and I addressed it. The rest of my post addresses the rest of your comments.

[Sensuki]

It completely removes a strategical/tactical layer from the game. Logic or no. Fact remains that in all areas, DotA 2 remains the more complex game with more mechanical depth. I don't really think that is disputable on any level.

[Sarex]

It completely removes a strategical/tactical layer from the game. Logic or no. Fact remains that in all areas, DotA 2 remains the more complex game with more mechanical depth. I don't really think that is disputable on any level.

 

At the entry point, yeah for sure, but in high elo where strategies are important and everything you do matters, not at all, they are only different. For an example, crowd control is much longer in dota2 thus you have much more time to think and react in team fights, DotA2 has more active on items where as LoL has summoner spells, in LoL spells have much more impact then in DotA2 and are usually on a much lower cooldown so team fights are harder to predict, in LoL controlling a lane is harder and there are many other things that I could go on and compare.

 

It's a slim argument if you are going to hang the complexity of Dota2 on creep denial.

[Sensuki]

Not just on creep denial, that was one example relative to the thread topic where a specific mechanic was removed to simplify the game mechanics. Guinsoo (the LoL guy) used to be the designer of the DotA Allstars WC3 custom maps back in the early 00s, and he didn't like creep deny in WC3, even though the community at large did.

 

Removing it does take away things from the game. The examples I gave were related to competitive play. That's a bull**** statement (sorry) about having more time to think and react in teamfights in DotA 2 just because crowd control spells last longer. Longer cc spells are more punishing and it depends what type of CC you are talking about - channeled disables can de disrupted, for example so casting them at the correct time is critical. Not forgetting that the enemy team also possibly has long disables, so using disables too early can be a waste. The reason that disable lengths are toned down in LoL is because the designers think that it's not fun when players have to 'sit out' of gameplay.

 

I vehemently detest League of Legends, having been a DotA player since 2004.

Edited November 1, 2014 by Sensuki

[Stun]

You feel inspiration or you dont. What you are telling me is you dont feel inspiration at all (from games at least?), you have my sympathy for that.

If that's what you mean by inspiration then your entire OP is a joke. It's really not up to the player to define a developer's inspiration, and even if it was, it's still a remarkably subjective thing.

 

Take Skyrim, for example. Whether you're someone who loved that game or hated it, it oozes inspiration from a developer's standpoint. It's got the deepest lore of any RPG to come out in the last 30 years. (you can spend hours and hours and hours reading the in-game books...and the various different volumes and versions of each one) The world itself contains OCD level detail (there are 5 different types of butterflies for God's sake. Developers hand-placed every plate, cup, piece of fruit, book, item and gold piece on every shelf, table, cabinet and drawer in the massive 300+ hour gameworld.) You can shoot at the birds that fly overhead. you can jump in the water and catch the 8 different types of fish. The game has 9 playable races. Even the game's various DLCs clock in at 50+ hours of content each.

 

Yet, Skyrim is very much a modern game, designed for the stereotypical, modern, casual gamer and I'm positive that neither you nor anyone else on this thread would ever hold it up as an example of "effort and heart!"

 

So I'll ask again: Define Inspiration.

Edited November 1, 2014 by Stun

[Sarex]

Not just on creep denial, that was one example relative to the thread topic where a specific mechanic was removed to simplify the game mechanics. Guinsoo (the LoL guy) used to be the designer of the DotA Allstars WC3 custom maps back in the early 00s, and he didn't like creep deny in WC3, even though the community at large did.

 

Removing it does take away things from the game. The examples I gave were related to competitive play. That's a bull**** statement (sorry) about having more time to think and react in teamfights in DotA 2 just because crowd control spells last longer. Longer cc spells are more punishing and it depends what type of CC you are talking about - channeled disables can de disrupted, for example so casting them at the correct time is critical. Not forgetting that the enemy team also possibly has long disables, so using disables too early can be a waste. The reason that disable lengths are toned down in LoL is because the designers think that it's not fun when players have to 'sit out' of gameplay.

 

I vehemently detest League of Legends, having been a DotA player since 2004.

 

And I have nothing against either of the games and think both are good in their own ways, though I have dabbled a little in the original DotA and played LoL since it's inception.

 

To say that DotA is a harder/complex game to play then LoL is, in my opinion, laughable. Following that logic a Dota2 player should have no trouble being at the top of the ladder in LoL with little to no effort and that has never happened.

 

It doesn't matter though, this doesn't really hurt the argument you were trying to make about PoE, though your facts were colored.

[Sensuki]

Why would I want to play League of Legends? It's a horrible game in comparison to DotA 2 (with less mechanical depth and complexity) and a horrible system that locks you out from all of the heroes when you create a profile, because it promotes "pay to progress".

For the record I played the game in 2009, it was horrible compared to Heroes of Newerth though, so I played that, then heroes of Newerth was ruined by dumb changes, and then DotA 2 finally became good. No turning back.

[Sarex]

I will add one more thing, for the 5 years I have been playing LoL I haven't payed a single cent for it and I have never felt like I was at a disadvantage compared to the people who payed to unlock heroes.

[Sensuki]

I haven't spent a cent on dota either (not even compendiums) although having access to all heroes at once > having to play to unlock them. It's called the zynga model.

[Sarex]

You don't have to pay to unlock them.

[Sensuki]

No, but it uses the zynga model. Game is free, but you can pay to progress. Lots of people won't do that, but heaps of people will because they cbf having to play 50 games just to be able to play a certain hero. 

[Sarex]

And that is bad why? Riot is a business after all, as long as it's not pay to win and there are people with money to spend why should anyone care? It's easy for DotA2 to be like it is, because there is a huge company behind it called Valve.

[Sensuki]

Obligatory: