The suspension of your suspension of disbelief

[Coriolanus]

D:OS endgame with the 'come back later!' talking door seriously made me want to quit.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

D:OS endgame with the 'come back later!' talking door seriously made me want to quit.

Haha. Well, at least you were at the most optimal point to leave the game.

Scientists build the worlds most powerful, most omniscient computer. It costs a trillion dollars. They ask it its first question. Gibberish comes out. The scientists think they discover then fix the problem. Ask another question. More gibberish. Disgusted, the scientists kick the computer & start to leave the room. The computer says, "Y'all come back now, y'hear?"

 

[Jack Of Owls]

- The lack of outhouses in Oblivion

Well, like I've been saying, mods can fix that. I believe Morrowind even had a mod that if you went too long without dropping a deuce and didn't use the outhouses that were available, you soiled your armor and your charisma stats dramatically lowered. Or something like that. If you port that over to Oblivion, you solve at least one of the other problems listed above in your post, assuming The Adoring Fan isn't into your pound cake and starts trying to get even closer.

 

[Tigranes]

Look, I actually understand to a degree. Oblivion, especially coming after Morrowind, especially with no other game like it out at the time, meant, you really wanted to like it, you were really looking for an experience that that game could not provide on multiple levels but no other game was really doing it either.

But the reality is you were in a level scaled world, doing Progress Questy makework in a dungeon that is actually the same dungeon you were in 3 hours ago.

 

[crawlkill]

Right, but this begs the question: what games aren't like that ? All games are designed by humans, the number of choices that are offered in a quest are necessarily limited, there will always be some options that you might want but that will not be available.

All games exclude some options, by their nature. Some games aren't about making choices at all. But when a game has dialogue trees, I expect to have some kind of agency. In Bethesda games, I have something between a tiny bit and absolutely none, even when the choices that I should be able to make would be simple, obvious additions.

If I'm playing an RPG and can't even pick between two sides one of which actually worships murder in a single encounter that won't have any branching consequences , that RPG doesn't deserve the title. That's what an RPG is to me--not numbers and combat style, but some element of decisionmaking in the way things play out.

Maybe if the writing generally and the dialogue in particular weren't so fucking appalling it wouldn't be so disruptive for me. But they uniformally are. Don't tell me I have to be on board with your shitty cardboard supervillain and then flood journalism with nonsense about how in your game "you can do anything." The dialogue surrounding the Elder Scrolls games is part of what makes them so loathsome--the fact that people discuss them as if they actually had variety, when in fact they're just giant empty spaces (someone in this thread said "hiking simulators," which I liked) full of largely linear quests (I don't think the word "quest," with all of its nerdy pointlessness, has ever been more appropriate) and procedural dungeons (see comments on stupid words like "quest" being exactly right for TES).

Interestingly, Baldur's Gate fails as an RPG under this scrutiny. It's not common that your decisions actually matter, and when they do, it's generally in a pretty boring/hokey/infantile "good or ebil" way. Which goes to show that vivid, vibrant dialogue can go a long way to get people like me on board with a more "along for the ride" style of game. I'm not sure quite which games DO succeed on the agency-o-graph--Torment, obviously. Alpha Protocol, weirdly. New Vegas did a pretty good goddamn job with it. Wasteland 2 is promising to be far and away the most impressive example ever, and I hope they deliver. PoE and Torment 2 generally seem to be on the same bandwagon. It's a pretty good bandwagon to be on, in comparison with the size-obsessed EPIC!!! market that makes games like Skyrim hits.

Thinking about it, this is one of the things Mass Effect 3 actually did startlingly well. So many of your calls in the previous games, if you import a save, come back around. It really did make me feel like I'd made good (and, JUST ONCE, incredibly bad) calls in the past. The knowledge that that little fictional space was going to be a much better (AND IN THAT ONE CASE MUCH WORSE IT EATS ME UP TO THIS DAY WHY DID I DESTROY THE GENOPHAGE RESEARCH) place because of my choices, and the knowledge from other people's games that it could've been very different, really engaged me.

And Bioware accomplished that with a shittacular voiced everyman protagonist and a horrible dialogue wheel that allowed more or less only binary dialogue choices. And with EA breathing down their necks. That's kind of a feat.

 

[Carrion]

- The lack of outhouses in Oblivion

Well, like I've been saying, mods can fix that.

I just downloaded the Oblivion Outhouses mod and it makes such a difference, I'm really enjoying the game now. I mean, it didn't really fix any of the real issues I mentioned in my post, but hey, you've got to look at the positives rather than the negatives. Thank you, JackOfOwls!

 

[Abelian]

I disliked the BG series' reputation system, where you could slaughter scores of innocent civilians, but could still achieve a good reputation by donating gold to temples (unless it was a tongue-in-cheek reference to they buying of indulgences, but I seriously doubt it).

This is more of a general annoyance, but it did make me painfully aware of the limitations of the game engine:

 

[RK47]

 

[deuxhero]

I disliked the BG series' reputation system, where you could slaughter scores of innocent civilians, but could still achieve a good reputation by donating gold to temples

Don't forget how it drops if you, on your own, kill someone in the middle of nowhere.

 

[Kalasanty11]

I disliked the BG series' reputation system, where you could slaughter scores of innocent civilians, but could still achieve a good reputation by donating gold to temples

Reminds me of Fallout 3. Nuke the town, donate 2000 caps to priest, kill the priest, get your caps back - you are still considered messiah. One of the "good" companions was telling me over and over again that I'm making my daddy proud. Didn't know that he had been such a sadistic fucker

 

[RK47]

I disliked the BG series' reputation system, where you could slaughter scores of innocent civilians, but could still achieve a good reputation by donating gold to temples

Reminds me of Fallout 3. Nuke the town, donate 2000 caps to priest, kill the priest, get your caps back - you are still considered messiah. One of the "good" companions was telling me over and over again that I'm making my daddy proud. Didn't know that he had been such a sadistic fucker

Some game jewnalist said the same of New Vegas karma.
He killed every single NPC he came across and still had positive karma.

 

[Night Goat]

In New Vegas it seems nearly impossible to not have good karma, because you gain karma for killing fiends and you kill a lot of fiends.

 

[Kalasanty11]

Some game jewnalist said the same of New Vegas karma.
He killed every single NPC he came across and still had positive karma.

Yeah, all those guys ignoring that karma was basically replaced by reputation. The only mistake Obsidian made, is that they hadn't completely removed karma. It was worthless anyway.

 

[Rostere]

Oblivion is banal, shit, and boring. That's pretty much settles the discussion about it. Whomever is prepared to continue the discussion beyond that point has really failed to appreciate this basic fact.

 

[Helton]

Balance is good in moderation.

 

[crawlkill]

Balance is good in moderation.

are you suggesting...balanced balance?

no, balance is always good. statistics are statistics, ie, things people are not remotely good at figuring out on their own. seriously, it's hilarious how confident nerds are of their ability to effectively parse statistics without spreadsheets. I am completely confident that there are "must-have" perks in Fallouts 1 and 2 that actually don't work. certainly the case in Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

the statistical RPG is the ultimate example of the placebo effect. the people who design the game have the opportunity to actually hire statisticians and decide what kind of tolerances they want players to experience. players, though, will always be clueless, unless they're actually running the numbers. which is definitely a fun way to play a game. statistical modeling is my favorite.

 

[crufty]

this might be too throwback, but...not reading the megatraveller manual and then finding out some skills i selected had no in game effect


was there an in game warning? I don't think so iirc

 

[octavius]

this might be too throwback, but...not reading the megatraveller manual and then finding out some kills i selected had no in game effect


was there an in game warning? I don't think so iirc

The only good part of MegaTraveller was the character generation anyway.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Balance is good in moderation.

Too true. I remember playing MM6 and by the time I reached the end boss I was so overpowered that I killed her in approximately 4 seconds (real world time). Most. Anti-climatic. cRPG. End. Game. EVER. It was not particularly well-balanced, but the follow-up MM7 had good balance (but in moderation) and it was more challenging.

 

[Helton]

are you suggesting...balanced balance?

Yes, but only so much.

 

[Applypoison]

Being primarily a fan of challenging hybrid-RPGs, I think any game can be better through additional balance... there are some nuances to it, though.

Balance is good in moderation.

Too true. I remember playing MM6 and by the time I reached the end boss I was so overpowered that I killed her in approximately 4 seconds (real world time). Most. Anti-climatic. cRPG. End. Game. EVER.

That would point to proper 'power fantasy' balance, but poor meta-balance, which is very common and where I would like to see things evolve a bit further. Video on the issues brought on by 'power fantasy' consumer trends, for good form (touches briefly on designer perspective):

At 3;50 an interesting solution is proposed in the form of offering players gameplay mechanics comparable to 'apples and oranges', meaning they are situational in their uses and effectiveness. This goes against the typical convention of giving the player a bunch of recolored apples that grow in power linearly as the game progresses. Balance is important here, because you can't accurately compare apples with oranges on a spreadsheet. It can only be achieved through extensive playtesting and QA within the game environment.

(I realize neo-WoW and LoL might come off as weird examples in the video, but apply these concepts to S/T-RPGs like XCOM or Fire Emblem and it should make a little more sense)

They also published a video on 'perfect imbalance', which is another interesting concept. Due to power fantasy being what the fans want, perfect imbalance becomes a helpful concept when looking to design a cRPG where the game world is supposed to be dangerous and threatening, yet where you still want the players to gain power and have some actual fun at most points in the game. It's a little like offering the same experience a good DM/GM can offer, by making players adapt regularly and use their own thought processes/skills to 'beat' the game, finding surprises and twists along the way. Challenging elements of the game 'rotate', so that by the time you comfortably overcome a section of the game filled with traps and poison debuffs, the focus of the gameplay shifts to exploiting elemental vulnerabilities, for example (the possibilities vary a lot based on any given game's systems e.g. Food, spells, combat, enchantments, exploration, stealth, puzzles...)

This does essentially mean balancing the balance... it's ambiguous, can be tough to weave together and adds to development time but IMO makes for a much more complete and consistent RPG experience. All the fun of those challenging first few hours, putting your bootstraps on, can be preserved over a much larger part of the game.