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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Pillars of Eternity
 
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Tyrsell
Nov 5, 2008
 Personally, I want a RPG based on ancient China (or one of their many stories and myths) that isn't the mediocre Bioware created Jade Empire.

There's so many rich stories that are untouched by Western developers from that area of the world.

* # ¿ Dec 13, 2013 02:25
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 08:50
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Tyrsell
Nov 5, 2008

EightDeer posted:

Jade Empire is the best game Bioware has ever made :colbert:

I fail to see how those two sentences contradict.

* # ¿ Dec 13, 2013 22:37
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Tyrsell
Nov 5, 2008

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Arg, I typed up a big message then x'd out of the window and lost it. What I was going to say is that almost all the classics we're talking about have a huge problem: few players actually finish them. Partly it's the nature of sandbox games, partly it's that people are playing to build characters and once their character is "done" so are they, partly it's that generally building a "complete" character trivializes the game's challenges.

The Elder Scroll games all have all of these problems together -- the writing is at best "good for a video game," they're huge sprawling open worlds with relatively weak main plotlines, you can get a "finished" character while only completing a fraction of the total content, and once you do "finish" your character, the rest of the game's content becomes trivial and hence boring (a problem that level scaling does not solve). It's not just those though; the same issue comes up to a lesser extent in Avernum, in Divinity: Original Sin, even in classics like, I have to admit it, Darklands -- most people don't bother to finish.

A few games (Planescape:Torment, Deus Ex) get past that hurdle by just having objectively amazing writing, coupled with good game balance throughout so you never feel like the game has become trivial (of course, neither of those is really "sandbox.") A few (the Gold Box / Infinity Engine games) generally just don't let you actually "finish" your character -- i.e., in Pool of Radiance, you might max out your party at like level 8 or so, out of AD&D's twenty levels (the idea being you'd carry your party over to the sequel). PS:Torment also put a lot of character-building decisions in the end sequence, so if you wanted to get the "best" character you had to finish that thing out.

The more I think about this issue the stranger it is to me. Why are so many classic games usually left unfinished? How many people never bother to finish their favorite book?

It's easier to finish books than games.

1. They generally take less time. Even some of the ridiculously long fantasy epics that certain fantasy writers are fond of writing take about the same amount of time as a regular game to finish. For example, take a typical long fantasy epic like The Eye of the World (Wheel of Time Book 1). It's ~700 pages long. A typical reader takes about 1-1.5 hours to read 100 pages, so in this case it would take them 7-10.5 hours to read the book. Taking a quick look at howlongtobeat.com Baldur's Gate takes 42 hours to finish the main story, Baldur's Gate 2 takes 18, Icewind Dale 34 hours, Icewind Dale 2 47 hours, and Plancescape: Torment 37 hours.

2. Video Games have difficulty. The only way someone is unable to finish a book is if they get so bored/disgusted by it's contents they don't want to. With games, sometimes a player is just unable to get past a certain point because of it's difficulty. A certain fight/level might be too hard, a puzzle might be too difficult to solve, or there is a certain path they have to take that they just miss because they weren't on the same page as the developer.

* # ¿ Sep 18, 2014 00:57
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Tyrsell
Nov 5, 2008
 I don't really care about it being easily moddable as long as we aren't locked out of the console and console commands. If I want to give myself 9999 gold coins and 20 in every attribute, it should be something that can be done. :colbert:

* # ¿ Nov 15, 2014 17:16
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Pillars of Eternity