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Kajeesus posted:My biggest letdown in PoE was that they replaced the RPG standard set of English/French/Spanish/Arabic/Japanese cultures and had poo poo like Inuit dwarves and Hawaiian shark people, but still set the game entirely in Celtic America. I know an Aleut dwarf, she doesn't have a fox but she does have dogs. She definitely prefers a rifle to a bow though.
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Jun 27, 2016 05:49
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i liked pillars of eternity and will probably enjoy this. that is my hot take for this thread.
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Jun 27, 2016 05:58
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Mr.Pibbleton posted:I know an Aleut dwarf, she doesn't have a fox but she does have dogs. She definitely prefers a rifle to a bow though.
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Jun 27, 2016 09:53
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Orv posted:No, the writing in PoE was bad, flat out, nostalgia is not involved. Even for a video game it was the most predictable poo poo. A character started talking and I knew where the entire quest line was going, and the world building itself was safe and boring. Almost every single quest was some flavor of Obvious Bad Guy, Obvious Good Guy, skip ahead, Oh No Good Guy Is Bad! I can't emphasize this enough. Usually I love obsidian games but I got bored to tears 20 mins in game and had to drag myself halfway through the game before exhausting all willpower and just deleting it. It feels like the entire game was written by a pedantic fellow taking a philosophy 101 class.
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Jun 27, 2016 10:46
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Kajeesus posted:The actual twist was that the guy he killed was a shitbag, and his killer wasn't just a murdering dickhole. You're not supposed to be surprised that he was the killer. yeah and who tells you the guy was a shitbag? you got played son.
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Jun 27, 2016 12:15
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Not even being snarky, but what rpgs are usualy considered to have good writing? I don't think I have played one that is better then Harlequin Romance/Mac Bolan Murder Adventures for Man level writing. Quality of plot is so low on my list of desirable game traits that maybe I just don't notice much though.
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Jun 27, 2016 17:28
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bongwizzard posted:Not even being snarky, but what rpgs are usualy considered to have good writing? I don't think I have played one that is better then Harlequin Romance/Mac Bolan Murder Adventures for Man level writing. Quality of plot is so low on my list of desirable game traits that maybe I just don't notice much though. Well, there's Planescape: Torment. Then there's KOTOR 2, and chunks of NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer. Witcher 3 is a very good effort. The list falls off a cliff pretty quickly after that. Yes, generally speaking any mediocre novel is better than the vast majority of RPG writing.
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Jun 27, 2016 17:38
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bongwizzard posted:Not even being snarky, but what rpgs are usualy considered to have good writing? I don't think I have played one that is better then Harlequin Romance/Mac Bolan Murder Adventures for Man level writing. Quality of plot is so low on my list of desirable game traits that maybe I just don't notice much though. Planescape: Torment is generally considered to be the best written video game of all time and my personal favorite, but it is super aged and I played it in my very impressionable teens. It's got a pretty heavy philosophical bent, and the more surreal parts of PoE are definitely inspired by it, but I think the Planescape setting is more conducive to it as a whole. Alpha Protocol is also pretty solid in that regard, and it actually uses the video game format to its advantage by having a malleable plot that is shaped by your actions. Outside of Obsidian RPGs I'm quite fond of Final Fantasy IX (my first Final Fantasy, naturally) and Mass Effects 1 and 2, but even those are only really well written by videogame standards.
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Jun 27, 2016 17:47
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There's character writing and plot writing and prose writing and those are all distinct things save for small bits where they intersect (characters doing plot lifting, etc). Most games have horrible plot writing, sometimes because plot's not the real point of the game but just as often because production cuts lead to hasty patch jobs. Bad character writing is the rule and prose writing's rare mainly due to the shift into visuals over written description. PoE's plot writing was decidedly bad and it's a toss up to say whether that was due to time constraints on revision (like many games, first drafts were final drafts) or due to narrative and character design decisions (most notably, a refusal to impose character motivation / fixed identity on the player and the emphasis on sidequesting and exploration). It was probably a bit of both. Its character writing, however, was fairly strong on the whole, with most characters having discernible motivations and internal conflicts, which are vital to good character work. But as with the game as a whole, it seemed like the writing was held back by an insistence on keeping as little of the game "required" as possible - if CNPCs "popped" too much then their absence would be heavily felt, and it was a priority to prevent players who didn't want to take them from feeling deprived. As a result they all feel as though they exist in traveling bubbles, and compared to other games their arcs feel short and modest. These days I hesitate to ascribe too many plaudits on Chris Avellone as a writer, honestly. He's a unique talent when it comes to integrating character and theme into game design but his actual writing is both maximalist and oblique,, and that's not just a way of saying he's long-winded. His style of character writing specifically has always worked in settings with heavy mystical / arcane elements, because his characters are all teachers first and foremost, so when his voice is given to a jedi master or a prideful planeswalker he knocks it out of the park, but when it's given to a semiotics-obsessed courier with an obsessive vendetta, he whiffs just as hard. I knew I'd reached a turning point on MCA when I realized I was 35 minutes into my first conversation with God/Dog and was getting bored enough to click through without fully reading. Dead Money has grown on me tremendously but that hasn't changed.
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Jun 27, 2016 18:29
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I mean it's been several years now and I still can't say with any certainty what Ulysses was trying to prove or what he wanted from the Courier.
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Jun 27, 2016 18:46
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People concentrate a lot on the writing of PoE, which is fine I think (the big problem lies with how the story is presented to the player, in my opinion, not in the story itself) but seem to overlook the game mechanics a lot. I think Obsidian did a fantastic job at balancing the classes and spells as well as making it nearly impossible to have non-viable builds. They solved a lot of the issues D&D 2.0/3.x had, while keeping the same "feel", and for me that deserves a big applause.
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Jun 28, 2016 12:14
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I like a good fantasy RPG that goes into themes and all that, but sometimes I just want some fantasy high-adventure trite to top off the call to adventure dungeon crawling. I was hoping that for Pillars. While I liked the game, I didn't very much are for the writing on a whole. Durance was kind of interesting but I found his interactions confusing (he and Grieving Mother's dialogue trees were a pain in the rear end to go through) and what they had to say too longwinded - it felt like all the writing went into them at the expense of other characters. They were enjoyable but interactions with them felt sparse compared to those two. Companions aside, which were mostly great, I just felt like they were stuck in this weird spot between Baldur's Gate and Planescape. It felt like they didn't want to tell the usual fantasy stuff but didn't want to have 100 paragraph metaphysical debates and philosophizing of Torment. It wasn't light enough to be fun or in-depth enough to be engaging. The only part I really got invested in was the St. Waidwen history because it was vague enough to go either way and was an interesting tale of blindly following a messiah figure and committing horrible acts in his name. Furism posted:People concentrate a lot on the writing of PoE, which is fine I think (the big problem lies with how the story is presented to the player, in my opinion, not in the story itself) but seem to overlook the game mechanics a lot. I think Obsidian did a fantastic job at balancing the classes and spells as well as making it nearly impossible to have non-viable builds. They solved a lot of the issues D&D 2.0/3.x had, while keeping the same "feel", and for me that deserves a big applause. Gameplay-wise Pillars of Eternity was really fun and I hope Tyranny follows suit. But I did have some gripes with it: I never like PoE's handling of attributes. They tried to make them all useful in some way in combat but then also had skill checks in conversation and I always felt those were at adds with each other. In D&D ( Infinity Engine games specifically), at least you had classes benefit from one or two attributes and they could be the used in different situations. Like your Sorcerer/Paladin used to chat with people due to a high Charisma, fighters for the constitution/strength checks, things like that. So I hope they handle stats differently in Tyranny (and from the OP it looks like they will). I also didn't care for the loot all that much. I think I'm in the minority in this regard but I appreciated the, frankly, broken weapons and items in the Infinity Engine games simply because it made the world feel more storied and old. It wasn't symmetrically designed and there are going to be artifacts of power out there that are simply extremely powerful and better than anything you'd be able to make or find. You murdered a red dragon dead and you get Carsomyr or decide to be evil and get Blackrazor. They were storied items that didn't scale to you or weren't necessarily usable for you either. They just existed in this world. But yeah, Tyranny. I hope it's good! I can always use more CRPGs in my life.
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Jun 28, 2016 22:39
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Jimbot posted:I also didn't care for the loot all that much. I think I'm in the minority in this regard but I appreciated the, frankly, broken weapons and items in the Infinity Engine games simply because it made the world feel more storied and old. It wasn't symmetrically designed and there are going to be artifacts of power out there that are simply extremely powerful and better than anything you'd be able to make or find. You murdered a red dragon dead and you get Carsomyr or decide to be evil and get Blackrazor. They were storied items that didn't scale to you or weren't necessarily usable for you either. They just existed in this world. PoE totally has game breaking weapons, even before the Soulbound ones - they are just not as obvious as in the IE games. Maybe that's a problem of its own (very good weapons not being very obvious until you start playing on Path of the Damned) but the lack of good items with a back story isn't a problem PoE has.
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Jun 28, 2016 23:01
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I've found that the worst part of PoE weapons is picking which one to use your very limited dragon bits to enchant with.
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Jun 29, 2016 03:29
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When the 3.0 patch introduced an item which can clone any other item I was briefly in hell trying to figure out what would be the best thing to clone.
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Jun 29, 2016 03:33
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2house2fly posted:When the 3.0 patch introduced an item which can clone any other item I was briefly in hell trying to figure out what would be the best thing to clone. goddammit i just realized i never used that when i did my potd run.
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Jun 29, 2016 03:34
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Roobanguy posted:goddammit i just realized i never used that when i did my potd run. It's you. You're the guy with 99 Megaelixirs who beats the final boss without using a single one.
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Jun 29, 2016 03:38
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2house2fly posted:When the 3.0 patch introduced an item which can clone any other item I was briefly in hell trying to figure out what would be the best thing to clone. Yeah, it's a tough one! I think I'm gonna do bittercut on my current run because I like that sabre so drat much and I keep passing it between my paladin and cipher.
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Jun 29, 2016 03:46
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Captain Oblivious posted:It's you. You're the guy with 99 Megaelixirs who beats the final boss without using a single one. I actually never did get into using potions, because they took a precious few seconds which I felt I could better spent wildly swinging my sword. One thing I don't like about PoE is that all upgrades are pretty granular; I like to pick things which make a drastic difference in a fight. Fingers crossed for Tyranny on that front.
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Jun 29, 2016 04:23
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Avellone wrote and designed New Reno in Fallout 2. It's full of pop culture jokes, gangsters, and hookers. It's also very reactive to player actions and choices, features multi-faction gameplay that the player can side with, and multiple solutions to quests. People saying guys really these well regarded RPGs with lauded stories are just harlequin romances is kind of tired. Video games aren't books or movies. I think when they try to be, they end up being tawdry knock-offs: actual harlequin romances and pulp fiction. The point is, I disagree with people who dismiss Obsidian(or other good RPG writing) as philosophy 101 is silly. First of all, anyone who thinks that even works like Planescape:Torment or Mask of the Betrayer are even philosophy 101(or literature 101) have had minimal interaction with either philosophy or literature. I think this is why its invariably compared to Dostoevsky or Tolstoy: the critics have limited exposure to literature, so pick an impressive sounding name from high school out of a hat. With that, when I think of the excellence in writing exhibited by Obsidian/Black Isle, et al: here's what I think of: thinking through the implications of a setting, including cliches(Fallout: New Vegas did the best, but its even present in the mixed Neverwinter Nights 2), reactivity to player choices, creating a gameworld that has more thought into than a series of dungeons to hack or shoot through. These are all things that are unique to the video game medium. I'm disinterested in comparing video game writing to novel writing because, well, I can read an actual novel. But the videogame medium does lend itself to unique storytelling aspects, and I'm hard pressed to think of a group of developers that do it better than Obsidian.
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Jun 29, 2016 07:53
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It's not an insult to say the writing in Video Games is bad compared to great literature. As you point out yourself it's a new medium so it's still finding its feet. It's closer to comic books right now where 90% of it is pulp and 10% rises above it. Only it's even younger and more complicated than comic books. Maybe in 50 years we'll see something that is truly going down as a classic in writing but for now even the few exceptions to total drek are limited in what they can do.
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Jun 29, 2016 08:46
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There's no need to compensate for the poor state of game writing by putting it in a ghetto the way pulp used to be. Pulp didn't become high art because it aged into it, there was always good pulp and bad pulp and people just had to come around to accepting it as something capable of being good. Chandler didn't just make good noir, he wrote good books. Hitchcock didn't just make good thrillers, he made good films. Things like reactivity and player choice are matters of design that make writing harder, sure, but we can still differentiate pretty easily between games in which it has been approached instrumentally as a pretense (most shooters, platformers, action RPGs) and games in which it is considered a feature in itself (SCUMM adventure games, western RPGs with scenes consisting solely of dialogue). Which games in the latter category do it well is a matter of opinion. The simple fact is that most game writers are designers by trade and it's just one of the many things they have to cover, and so it can get lost or characterized as infrastructure to support gameplay and stay out of the spotlight. And honestly, writing is more a craft than a talent - the more energy you devote to it the better it gets, and the old adage is writing is rewriting (which is absolutely true). But most games are written as they're made, and it's telling that in something like film development, concurrent writing is a pretty strong indicator that the finished product is going to be a mess. On the page, revisions can be made at low cost, but once the writing has been actualized in production, mistakes become hard to correct. Games can be written well in all respects, and they have - VtM: Bloodlines and The Last of Us both do plot and character writing exceptionally well. But publishers tend to underestimate their audiences, and there's as yet no prestige system that can make good craft something worth investing AAA money in. We've yet to see a game really succeed on the industry level by the hook of telling a good story. Bioshock would count but the gaming community has tried as hard as it can to paint it as a case of mistaken identity. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Jun 29, 2016 |
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Jun 29, 2016 18:03
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Those are all good points and I honestly believe that Chandler would be considered one of the best writers in the english language if he didn't write genre fiction.
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Jun 29, 2016 21:04
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New developer diary all about combat
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Jun 30, 2016 01:19
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Octo1 posted:New developer diary all about combat Thank god that they removed friendly fire from the game. It was such a nuisance constantly killing my own people with spells in PoE.
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Jun 30, 2016 02:18
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Eh, I liked the FF, with the visual indicator of effect range, hitting your own dudes became a tactical decision, rather then an accident.
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Jun 30, 2016 02:43
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Octo1 posted:New developer diary all about combat quote:Friendly Fire: We’ve removed friendly fire from abilities in Tyranny. I wanted players to be able to focus on maximizing their damage to enemies, without worrying about harming their own party members in the process. Nice.
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Jun 30, 2016 04:20
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Well, it's nice that they are willing to explore a wider design space anyway. It'll be interesting to see how much, if at all, Tyranny effects the design/gameplay of PoE 2.
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Jun 30, 2016 04:37
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I don't like the "skills increase as you use them, which contributes to your level" thing. Oblivion did that and the system was terrible. Then again Oblivion's progression system was terrible because of that combined with 100% scaled leveling so who knows how this will be.
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Jun 30, 2016 04:47
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GreatGreen posted:I don't like the "skills increase as you use them, which contributes to your level" thing. Oblivion did that and the system was terrible. I also love both of these features, which makes me suspect that I am some weird outlier in terms of what I like in RPG design.
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Jun 30, 2016 04:57
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I'm kind of bummed by the absence of friendly fire. It adds a layer of tactical depth that I liked in PoE or XCOM.
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Jun 30, 2016 08:28
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If skills increase by use then they're going to have to have respawning enemies or random encounters. In Pillars if you started the White March after 100 percenting the base game you didn't that much opportunity to level your soulbound weapons.
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Jun 30, 2016 08:51
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GreatGreen posted:I don't like the "skills increase as you use them, which contributes to your level" thing. Oblivion did that and the system was terrible. Not a big fan of that system either, but Oblivion had lovely implementation of pretty much every gameplay mechanic, so I wouldn't judge anything based on that
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Jun 30, 2016 09:30
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Furism posted:I'm kind of bummed by the absence of friendly fire. It adds a layer of tactical depth that I liked in PoE or XCOM. Not a fan of its removal either. Disappointed in the direction they seem to be going with the gameplay overall, hoping the hyped choices & consequences stuff can make up for it a bit.
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Jun 30, 2016 14:38
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I've just always thought that use-based skill gains take a level of control away from the player. It seems like Diablo 2 did it better. Let players bank all XP and apply points to either gaining new skills or strengthening ones they already have at their discretion. Imagine how many build possibilities in Diablo 2 would be taken away if once you chose your skills, a large chunk of your additional XP was simply auto-distributed to the skills you use the most. For this game though, it seems like this mechanic would be best translated into a system of two skill pools, a "spend these points to get new skills" pool and a "spend these points to upgrade skills you already have" pool so you don't have to play those elements against each other. I get that the concept of leveling up the skills you use feels natural because that's kind of what happens in real life, but in a great big spergy RPG like this one where players are going to want to meticulously build characters exactly how they want them, it seems like this will at best incentivise players to play characters in very specific ways to get the best out of them instead of how they might naturally want, and at worst force players to hamstring characters into not being effective in lots of situations because it will screw up the player's intended build for that character. For example, if I want a Paladin that specializes in auras or buff casting, under this system I'll now be forced to make that Paladin hang out in the back being useless and not hitting anything while he's not casting so I won't risk "burning" xp on melee proficiency that could have gone towards his aura/buffing proficiency instead. In a system more under my control I could instead send the Pally into the fray to whittle down and distract enemies in between buffing the party, then when I get my usage points banked, I could spend them on specifically buffing and auras, etc. GreatGreen fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Jun 30, 2016 |
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Jun 30, 2016 14:47
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I like it because it adds challenge and feels more "organic". I don't think every game needs it but I think it can be done well. For me at least, gameplay/UI is overwhelmingly what I am looking for and everything else is very secondary. I would love to get into say The Witcher games, but I cannot get used to how the controls work, playing it makes me feel like I am suddenly nine drinks in.
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Jun 30, 2016 14:58
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i'm weary of use/skill based stuff where it intersects with MMOs, where it becomes a horrible loving grind like UO, or other hideously broken mechanics in an ugly game like Oblivion. It's a method of advancement that compounds bad systems. It's entirely serviceable in this sort of environment. There are companies where hearing that it's a part of the game would make me seriously hesitate, maybe stop caring about it, but it's okay in this instance.
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Jun 30, 2016 15:18
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GreatGreen posted:I've just always thought that use-based skill gains take a level of control away from the player. It seems like Diablo 2 did it better. Let players bank all XP and apply points to either gaining new skills or strengthening ones they already have at their discretion. Imagine how many build possibilities in Diablo 2 would be taken away if once you chose your skills, a large chunk of your additional XP was simply auto-distributed to the skills you use the most. The real problem is always some skills start out totally terrible so even if you want to raise them its tedious or impossible not to raise poo poo you don't want. In the classic example of Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim you start off being able to kill gently caress all with destruction or conjuration because you run out of magicka after very few spells, it takes forever to regen and usually does less damage than a sword which you can swing infinitely. Try going through the early parts of those games as a pure mage and its a nightmare even if it becomes good and fun way later on. When you can assign points you dont have to worry about that.
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Jun 30, 2016 15:19
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Zore posted:The real problem is always some skills start out totally terrible so even if you want to raise them its tedious or impossible not to raise poo poo you don't want. Exactly. This type of system really forces the player to always be conscious of not doing anything to screw up their intended builds, which the player can only accomplish by self-gimping, which sucks. GreatGreen fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Jun 30, 2016 |
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Jun 30, 2016 15:24
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It's part of my nervousness about this sort of system, too. In the worst case, you end up with a bunch of guides saying things like "cast fireball against these enemies six times BUT NOT SEVEN and then dodge four times" that people follow so they can get exactly the character they want for the last 10% of the game (by doing insane combat rituals for the first 90%). It's possible that this game will avoid this trap somehow, but it's a tough problem from a game design perspective, since the whole point is to take the explicit control mechanism out of the player's hands (picking where skills go as you gain XP/gain a level/whatever) and replace it with an implicit one (use what you want to increase). The latter feels simpler, and in some respects it is, but the consequence is that if what a player actually WANTS is the former system, they're still going to try for something like that using the implicit tools, which makes things much more complicated for that player instead. What an ideal player in a system like this looks like is someone who doesn't really care about the details, since the levelling system is automatically worrying about those details for you, and I'm not sure how much overlap there is between that kind of player and typical RPG players. (And, let's face it, Tyranny is not going to be the game that gets non-RPG players interested.)
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Jun 30, 2016 15:32
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