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If you gently caress withRymrgand too much in a few conversations he just murders you too.
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Feb 23, 2021 21:37
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Ravenfood posted:If you gently caress withRymrgand too much in a few conversations he just murders you too. Which owns, all this dialogue is hilarious
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Feb 23, 2021 21:40
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I love me some non-standard Game Overs. Also the not-so-subtle implication that Ondra is trying very hard to kill you all for knowing about the Eyeless so that, once you solve her problem for her, they go back to being completely unknown. My favorite ways to get around it - -Put on the Diver's Helmet -Have a con score of 20+ -Free the spirits of the forge at the end of WM1, they will come rescue you as Not-Sahaugin
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Feb 23, 2021 21:46
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Planescape: Torment has a couple of those.
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Feb 23, 2021 22:02
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If you play solo and don't meet any of the requirements, Ondra says "ok don't tell anyone I did this" and saves you herself
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Feb 23, 2021 22:37
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DourCricket posted:I love me some non-standard Game Overs.
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Feb 24, 2021 01:46
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v1ld posted:How do you model this spread as a designer of new systems? The way I've seen suggested is to establish a baseline, and then adjust values up/down around that baseline. You might, for example, start out with the basic Fighter and model out its raw autoattack DPS at a neutral stat point, and then introduce additional factors - such as miss-graze conversions, increased critical hit modifiers, different stat spreads, etc. - and see how that affects overall DPS while making adjustments to keep things in a reasonable range. Once you have the basic damage ranges established, you can then begin to determine defenses and status effects by assigning them comparative "values" to that baseline (e.g.: how much damage is it reasonable to give up to apply Blind or Paralyze to a single target or a group of targets). Obviously, this can only get you so far, since it's challenging to try and model edge cases (like how valuable Streetfighter's passive is, since its strength is entirely dependent on how skilled players are at setting it up), but it's a good way of creating a foundation you can work off of. Even still, RPGs require a lot of data and effort to properly balance, which is probably why so many of them come out with easily exploitable combinations or weird power curves. Modern games like PoE2 have the benefit of being able to gather telemetry data and apply patches to fix parts that a smaller volume of playtesting data may've missed, but the creators have to be willing and able to both implement and use those tools effectively. Vermain fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Feb 24, 2021 |
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Feb 24, 2021 02:16
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netcat posted:Lmao what the gently caress. I didn't know you could actually die at the end of WM2. That's pretty dumb Uh, no? It makes sense lore-wise. You might be powerful and you might be a Watcher but you're still a puny human. It's a good ego check for players.
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Feb 24, 2021 09:04
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Skwirl posted:Planescape: Torment has a couple of those. I love that The Lady of Pain will let you gently caress about ONCE and basically get away with it, but do it again and she basically obliterates you and the fact you're not supposed to be able to die be damned.
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Feb 24, 2021 09:10
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Jerusalem posted:I love that The Lady of Pain will let you gently caress about ONCE and basically get away with it, but do it again and she basically obliterates you and the fact you're not supposed to be able to die be damned. Yeah, you can also become king of the dead, but it ends the game because it involves you being stuck in a chair for eternity.
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Feb 24, 2021 09:36
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Lady of Pain also ignores crimes of your past personalities. At least one of them has already been in her prison and escaped. That's her answer for a theoretical philosophical question if you can condemn an amnesiac for crimes they don't remember.
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Feb 24, 2021 09:49
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Furism posted:Uh, no? It makes sense lore-wise. You might be powerful and you might be a Watcher but you're still a puny human. It's a good ego check for players. "Ego check". It might be slightly funny but it's also just bad game design. It's a cut scene, directly after a boss fight no less, where you can get a game over because you didn't fullfill some arbritrary condition that you have no way of knowing in advance
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Feb 24, 2021 10:58
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netcat posted:"Ego check". It might be slightly funny but it's also just bad game design. It's a cut scene, directly after a boss fight no less, where you can get a game over because you didn't fullfill some arbritrary condition that you have no way of knowing in advance Maybe you shouldn't have dared a God to give you their best shot
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Feb 24, 2021 12:34
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'What're going to do, erase me from existence?' - Quote from PC who was erased from existence
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Feb 24, 2021 12:35
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Meatgrinder posted:Ah! English is my fourth language and I am rarely exposed to its spoken variants. How would you pronounce "blackguard"?
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Feb 24, 2021 12:42
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For some reason I just had the urge to pronounce it "blackgouarde".
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Feb 24, 2021 13:18
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multijoe posted:Maybe you shouldn't have dared a God to give you their best shot Yeah, and it's not like it's been established before in the base game that if you ever so slightly provoke Rymrgand he kills you. He doesn't give a gently caress.
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Feb 24, 2021 13:24
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I'm still sad we didn't get a PC priest of Rymrgand. Yeah I know you can mod it in but that's not the same
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Feb 24, 2021 14:06
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netcat posted:"Ego check". It might be slightly funny but it's also just bad game design. It's a cut scene, directly after a boss fight no less, where you can get a game over because you didn't fullfill some arbritrary condition that you have no way of knowing in advance It would be different if it was any kind of *LOLrandom* type thing but saying to a god 'I'm special I dare you' and him going 'actually you're not special to me' makes perfect gameplay sense to me.
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Feb 24, 2021 14:48
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The god in question also makes it abundantly clear where you stand with them in every conversation before that point so tbh anybody who gets mad about getting offed in such a manner is actually pretty funny
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Feb 24, 2021 14:53
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Darkhold posted:Couldn't disagree more. Getting into a stupid combat fight should kill you. Staying stupid stuff in dialogue options should be able to kill you as well it's just as much gameplay as the other. I think everyone is mixing the ending of WM2 with the dialogue with Rymrgand in Deadfire for some reason? You don't have any dialogue at the end of WM2, you pound at a crystal and then you (or whoever you sent to do it) drown unless you have 19 con, a diving helmet or choose to release the souls of Durgan's Battery.
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Feb 24, 2021 14:56
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Antigravitas posted:How would you pronounce "blackguard"? I played EQ (it's a title for rogues of a certain level in the game) and pronounced it as if it was two words, black guard, until I looked it up because I did not know its meaning and found the actual pronunciation.
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Feb 24, 2021 14:57
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netcat posted:"Ego check". It might be slightly funny but it's also just bad game design. It's a cut scene, directly after a boss fight no less, where you can get a game over because you didn't fullfill some arbritrary condition that you have no way of knowing in advance I saw someone say in the Cyberpunk thread that people like choices and consequences in games because it's a sign that the game is taking them seriously, eg Zelda just says "go into people's houses and smash all their pots, whatever" but in Deus Ex if you go into the women's bathroom then the game will notice and someone will say "uh you're a man, what were you doing in the women's bathroom". It's cool because the game says "I'm noticing what you do, and what you do might affect what I do". Some of my favourite RPG moments come from the game taking me seriously: trying to juggle factions in New Vegas, or a guy noticing that you're wearing combat armour in public in Alpha Protocol, or there's a bit in Witcher 3 I found really memorable because you have multiple dialogue options with an NPC after a big cutscene, and if you ask "so what just happened" before "how are you feeling" the NPC gets mad at you. So yeah, at the climax of White March you get a situation which has the potential to kill you. There are lots of ways to get out unscathed- but if you didn't find either of the diving helmets, and didn't bring the robot party member, and don't have anyone with a high Constitution, and didn't get the horn that summons ogres, and didn't release the souls of the Durgan's Battery crew back at the White Forge, and you can't convince any of your other party members to do it, then you're toast. There's an actual fail state, which means what you choose matters. I liked getting killed there because the game told me I'd die and it meant it: it took me seriously. The chat with the Eyeless afterwards is cool for the same reason. You can say things like "there are some things man was not meant to know" and they'll say "really, because at the animancy hearings you didn't seem to think that"
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Feb 24, 2021 14:58
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netcat posted:I think everyone is mixing the ending of WM2 with the dialogue with Rymrgand in Deadfire for some reason? You don't have any dialogue at the end of WM2, you pound at a crystal and then you (or whoever you sent to do it) drown unless you have 19 con, a diving helmet or choose to release the souls of Durgan's Battery.
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Feb 24, 2021 15:02
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Meatgrinder posted:I played EQ (it's a title for rogues of a certain level in the game) and pronounced it as if it was two words, black guard, until I looked it up because I did not know its meaning and found the actual pronunciation. What. What the hell. Englishmen, Americans, Canadians, whoever else is in charge of that language, just fix it already, would you?
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Feb 24, 2021 15:12
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2house2fly posted:So yeah, at the climax of White March you get a situation which has the potential to kill you. There are lots of ways to get out unscathed- but if you didn't find either of the diving helmets, and didn't bring the robot party member, and don't have anyone with a high Constitution, and didn't get the horn that summons ogres, and didn't release the souls of the Durgan's Battery crew back at the White Forge, and you can't convince any of your other party members to do it, then you're toast. There's an actual fail state, which means what you choose matters. I liked getting killed there because the game told me I'd die and it meant it: it took me seriously. Fallout New Vegas Dead Money has a good example of that and why it's bad. At some point you can persuade an NPC to do something, but he'll secretly get mad at you and later he'll betray you. People call it a mind-blowing moment but really it doesn't work well in FNV. Cause every other dialog in this game has taught you that skillcheck option is safe and good. You know that dialog is not really a part of the gameplay, it's the way to get exposition and accept quests and make big prominent decisions. Well, maybe there's a single quest that is an exception - the one where you interrogate a legionaire - but when you do it you're explicitly told it's an exception and you have to think what you're saying. Some games did it better. Arcanum shows you the power of dialog early on. Even if you have persuasion skill you still have to say very specific things to get out of some situation. But the rest of the game doesn't have a lot of those challenges and in general, dialog isn't that great. Also Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition look very primitive with thier dialog wheel - but it's actually used in a way that makes you careful about what you say. Sometimes asking wrong exposition question can provoke people, sometimes peaceful way out of dialog is very suboptimal.
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Feb 24, 2021 15:21
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the Eyeless confrontation suffers though for having strict and perhaps even inaccurate interpretations of what happened and why in a given playthrough (though the logic of the Eyeless and that choice is dodgy in general, if I remember right) which does kinda tie back into what netcat said and also what everyone thought netcat was saying - unclear stakes and choices because the medium itself obscures what is happening. it's like breaking Dijsktra's leg in Witcher 3
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Feb 24, 2021 15:46
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Lt. Danger posted:the Eyeless confrontation suffers though for having strict and perhaps even inaccurate interpretations of what happened and why in a given playthrough (though the logic of the Eyeless and that choice is dodgy in general, if I remember right) The Eyeless conversation is kinda frustrating because tempering Abydon gives you the good ending and yet to achieve that you have to make some bad choices like letting Devil murder Harmke (ok, maybe this one isn't bad, but at least debatable), or having Maneha forget her past. And you need to be anti animancy iirc which like ok fine but the game pushes you in the opposite direction if you're playing a good character. Thaos wanting animancy to fail makes the natural choice for most PCs to probably be to counter his plot and make sure that the Dyrwood doesn't ban it. But I believe if you're pro animancy it really hurts your chances of tempering Abydon.
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Feb 24, 2021 16:00
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netcat posted:"Ego check". It might be slightly funny but it's also just bad game design. It's a cut scene, directly after a boss fight no less, where you can get a game over because you didn't fullfill some arbritrary condition that you have no way of knowing in advance Combat is bad game design because you can get a game over by the arbitrary condition of "didn't maintain hit points above 0". There are so many ways to survive it and there are so many signs that there will be some consequences for your actions that it doesn't feel like a gotcha so much as a normal consequence of your actions.
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Feb 24, 2021 16:13
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perhaps uncharitable but in hindsight the Eyeless kinda feels like a proto-Outer Wilds where situations are contrived to force ambiguity
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Feb 24, 2021 16:28
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To be honest, I'd have been perfectly fine with cutting the third option from the Eyeless entirely. I don't think it's really comparable to The Outer Worlds, where usually finding a bridge between the two polar opposite in a hub is relatively easy (it was made a little more challenging in the DLC, and I think the narrative gained a lot from that).
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Feb 24, 2021 16:43
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I was thinking more in terms of the game as a whole - in the main quest players overwhelmingly supported progress and knowledge, so the Eyeless confrontation is written so that the opposite will be true, "balancing" the theme. this requires some contrivance: only being allowed to make certain arguments that fit a certain perspective, omitting details like why exactly the player is opposing Thaos, the basic concept behind the third option of adding context by forgetting knowledge (?? it's been a while so using the wiki for details, but this seems backwards?)
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Feb 24, 2021 16:55
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The correct answer is that the good ending for the Eyeless is not tempering them at all, gently caress Ondra  (although textually I admit it is the golden ending, in that it leads to less conflict in Stalwart and is the most difficult to obtain).
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Feb 24, 2021 17:08
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netcat posted:I think everyone is mixing the ending of WM2 with the dialogue with Rymrgand in Deadfire for some reason? You don't have any dialogue at the end of WM2, you pound at a crystal and then you (or whoever you sent to do it) drown unless you have 19 con, a diving helmet or choose to release the souls of Durgan's Battery. You can loot that helmet in the very dungeon this happens, and you don't even have to equip it for it to work. C'mon.
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Feb 25, 2021 00:55
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I don't think you can loot it there, it's a quest reward for the task about a missing little girl or you can get it from a stronghold event
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Feb 25, 2021 01:04
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Yeah I don't think it's available in the dungeon itself. That said, the conversations with Ondra in the dungeon VERY EXPLICITLY TELLS YOU that whoever stays behind with the hammer is going to die. Unless you are blitzing through the quest text, you cannot possibly miss it. Edit: or is the issue that someone is going to have to die, unless you meet one of the multiple criteria to save the character? (By the way, Eder plus a constitution item plus some constitution food very easily meets the 20 CON requirement) Also blackguard can be pronounced "blaggard" or "black guard." Language prescriptivists, especially English language prescriptivists, are the worst. Dick Burglar fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Feb 25, 2021 |
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Feb 25, 2021 01:22
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It's fair to be annoyed by it, there's not much precedent for it because the game very rarely throws actual You Can Die For Real scenarios at you outside of like boss fights, I think failing in scripted interactions normally gets you an injury debuff. It's easy to hear Ondra say "you gotta die to solve this problem" and think "yeah right idiot. I'm the Watcher of Caed Nua!" and expect to get some ingenious rabbit-out-of-a-hat magic trick option to save the day. And you do! You get several of those options, it's just that not all of them involve surviving...
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Feb 25, 2021 02:25
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Dick Burglar posted:Yeah I don't think it's available in the dungeon itself. That said, the conversations with Ondra in the dungeon VERY EXPLICITLY TELLS YOU that whoever stays behind with the hammer is going to die. Unless you are blitzing through the quest text, you cannot possibly miss it. Edit: or is the issue that someone is going to have to die, unless you meet one of the multiple criteria to save the character? (By the way, Eder plus a constitution item plus some constitution food very easily meets the 20 CON requirement) The issue as described was that you can get a "game over" for staying behind with the hammer. Which implies that yeah, they opted not to send a companion instead, and opted not to use or find any of the many ways to survive it, and instead just wanted to go ahead and roll forward on "I'm the protagonist, suckers" and not engage with the very serious god telling you that this will be Perilous. That is, they rightly realized sending a companion might kill them, and so went themselves, counting on extra-narrative factors that don't exist and where then upset when they didn't.
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Feb 25, 2021 02:43
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ilitarist posted:Fallout New Vegas Dead Money has a good example of that and why it's bad. At some point you can persuade an NPC to do something, but he'll secretly get mad at you and later he'll betray you. People call it a mind-blowing moment but really it doesn't work well in FNV. Cause every other dialog in this game has taught you that skillcheck option is safe and good. You know that dialog is not really a part of the gameplay, it's the way to get exposition and accept quests and make big prominent decisions. Well, maybe there's a single quest that is an exception - the one where you interrogate a legionaire - but when you do it you're explicitly told it's an exception and you have to think what you're saying. Some games did it better. Arcanum shows you the power of dialog early on. Even if you have persuasion skill you still have to say very specific things to get out of some situation. But the rest of the game doesn't have a lot of those challenges and in general, dialog isn't that great. It's why I hate dialogue-specific skills in RPG. Games train you to understand when that [Persuade] tag shows up in front of a dialogue choice, it's an "I win" button for that branch. You don't have even have to look at the other dialogue options, just pick that one. In the FNV cases you pointed out, when it breaks against that expectation it comes as a source of frustration instead of inspiration. That's why I like that POE just doesn't have a dialogue-specific skill to put points into. All the contextual dialogue tags are coming from stats with other purposes (character attributes, skills, disposition), there's a wide variety of them and they show up so often that I'm not trained to read into them as "I win" choices. Like there's little expectation that if I pick any dialogue choice with [Aggressive] that would be the best outcome from a conversation. People point to Perception and Resolve as the most checked stats in terms of quantity, but sometimes choosing them (Resolve especially) will really piss people off instead and you're better off choosing the untagged options.
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Feb 25, 2021 07:15
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I like PoE2 more than FNV but you still rarely have to think about what you say. Well, maybe you have to if you turn off helpers and wand to get a specific reputation and faction disposition. Tagged dialog options are still your go-to clicks. Another example of interesting persuasion system I remember is in Witcher 3. Usually options are very limited, Mass Effect-style. But sometimes you can use Jedi persuasion. It only works on weak-willed and even if it works on someone their firends will know what's happening. So it's always a dangerous option. Fallout 3 and other systems with dice rolls for dialogue probably try to do something similar - make engaging in persuasion/bluff/threats dangerous - but it never feels right.
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Feb 25, 2021 07:46
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