Handsome CostanzaAsk me about 8bitdoRIP Iwata-sanRegistered Userregular
edited July 2015
We have yet to see enough about romancing companions to determine if they will be worthwhile components to the story or not. Also the fact that each character is capable of being "bi" does not mean that they are all bisexual. It simply means that if you choose, that specific character will be bisexual in that instance of the gameworld. The characters you do not have bisexual relations with will be straight in the context of that playthrough unless otherwise specified by the game. It's not like Zombie U where you change characters but remain in the same story when you die. We're talking about alternate realities here in video game form. The "universe" (read, game instance) that you decide to bang Boone in is not the same as the one where you choose to bang Veronica instead. Only if all the companions ran around screwing members of the same sex regardless of player actions could their characters be considered bisexual.
TLDR; just because they are capable of being bisexual doesnt make them all bisexual. I'm capable of killing someone but that doesn't make me a murderer. (Not associating bisexuality with murder, just an analogy). Theres a difference between being capable and being willing and actually going through with it.
It's a common argument had regarding Dragon Age 2, but the short version is that sexual orientation is part of a character and the act of removing it causes an inherent limitation.
You can write around that, of course, but it stuck out as odd in DA2.
I'm willing to wait to see how they manage perks and skills. I don't like the idea that I could pick up any weapon on the fly and just use it with ease, but I'm sure they'll balance it out somehow.
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Handsome CostanzaAsk me about 8bitdoRIP Iwata-sanRegistered Userregular
It's a common argument had regarding Dragon Age 2, but the short version is that sexual orientation is part of a character and the act of removing it causes an inherent limitation.
You can write around that, of course, but it stuck out as odd in DA2.
That's the beauty of good RPG's, they let you be the character you want to be and shape the world according to your wishes. We should be pushing for more variety in these types of games not less. The Fallout franchise has always had a "choose your own adventure" kind of vibe to it, and if I recall correctly there was a perk in Fallout 3 which, if selected, suggested that your character was gay or bi, Confirmed Bachelor. So this kind of thing does have precedent in Fallout games.
Characters are constructs that don't necessarily have fixed sexualities. It's possible to for example make one explicitly heterosexual in response to the player's sex-choice at an earlier stage, by swapping out a few characters' dialogue-accounts of history.
It's a common argument had regarding Dragon Age 2, but the short version is that sexual orientation is part of a character and the act of removing it causes an inherent limitation.
You can write around that, of course, but it stuck out as odd in DA2.
That's the beauty of good RPG's, they let you be the character you want to be and shape the world according to your wishes.
I don't know that I agree with that statement. Perhaps good RPGs are fully fleshed out worlds in which our actions can have an impact, but not one wherein every path is always available to us.
Characters are constructs that don't necessarily have fixed sexualities. It's possible to for example make one explicitly heterosexual in response to the player's sex-choice at an earlier stage, by swapping out a few characters' dialogue-accounts of history.
Perhaps; perhaps not. One might posit that a person's romantic history impacts the way they approach relationships, and that this might inform how to create more lifelike characters.
It's a common argument had regarding Dragon Age 2, but the short version is that sexual orientation is part of a character and the act of removing it causes an inherent limitation.
You can write around that, of course, but it stuck out as odd in DA2.
That's the beauty of good RPG's, they let you be the character you want to be and shape the world according to your wishes.
I don't know that I agree with that statement. Perhaps good RPGs are fully fleshed out worlds in which our actions can have an impact, but not one wherein every path is always available to us.
Characters are constructs that don't necessarily have fixed sexualities. It's possible to for example make one explicitly heterosexual in response to the player's sex-choice at an earlier stage, by swapping out a few characters' dialogue-accounts of history.
Perhaps; perhaps not. One might posit that a person's romantic history impacts the way they approach relationships, and that this might inform how to create more lifelike characters.
I think one of the things that made DA2 feel weird was that some players felt like every romancable NPC was hitting on them before they were even thinking of pursuing a romance. So that's part of why it left a sour taste in some mouths.
DA:I had some of the better implementations of romantic options with their own preferences. Dorian is playful enough to flirt in a friendly manner with a female inquisitor regardless of his orientation. It was interesting reading reactions to that since I'm pretty sure it was a first for a game.
But really, I think we mostly just want a well written romance no matter if the NPCs have preferences built in. I swear that Persona 3/4 are the only games where I can recall taking my waifus out on dates instead of just saying nice things to them after each story mission.
This reminds me of one of the controversies over the Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty campaign.
In that game, there are two major choices the player has to make, each of which lead to different missions and different rewards. In the first, you decide whether you choose to trust an agent who works for one of your enemies, or a client who has been hiring you to acquire suspicious chemicals. In the second, you must choose to either side with a human doctor trying to save refugees, or an alien who wants to contain a mutagenic plague.
In both cases, whatever choice you make is retroactively made the "correct" one. Whoever you sided against is revealed as a deceiver, attempting to trick you. The reasoning, I can only assume, was that players should be allowed to choose the reward they want without having to feel guilty about being tricked.
However, many players felt patronized by this design decision. Making judgement calls, and sometimes being wrong, is a part of life, and these players didn't want to be sheltered from that fundamental truth.
I can see a lot of parallels in the current discussion.
I would really enjoy a Bethesda Fallout game that had more options to solve the main quest without violence or killing a single person, but I'm okay with power armor being a small mech.
I really hope they've improved on stealth this go 'round.
Stealth in Bethesda games tends to get weird due to the environment not being designed for it. Lack of cover or alternate pathways means making it quasi-invisibility is the easy way to make it usable.
This reminds me of one of the controversies over the Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty campaign.
In that game, there are two major choices the player has to make, each of which lead to different missions and different rewards. In the first, you decide whether you choose to trust an agent who works for one of your enemies, or a client who has been hiring you to acquire suspicious chemicals. In the second, you must choose to either side with a human doctor trying to save refugees, or an alien who wants to contain a mutagenic plague.
In both cases, whatever choice you make is retroactively made the "correct" one. Whoever you sided against is revealed as a deceiver, attempting to trick you. The reasoning, I can only assume, was that players should be allowed to choose the reward they want without having to feel guilty about being tricked.
However, many players felt patronized by this design decision. Making judgement calls, and sometimes being wrong, is a part of life, and these players didn't want to sheltered from that fundamental truth.
I can see a lot of parallels in the current discussion.
Honestly, I thought the choices and consequences in Wings of Liberties worked out fairly well and mostly made sense? Like, the doctor gets desperate and the alien goes apeshit. The branching paths later on had reasonable choices and consequences. I thought it was an interesting, non-linear form of progression compared to the following iteration of the campaign, which just... didn't bother.
re: RPGs, Dragon Age 2's were distinctly player-sexual and dialogue was written to be that way. I think it's perfectly possible to execute that approach well, but my guess is that to many once people understand how that works their illusion of choice doesn't hold up as well.
So, a webcomic had a character who could sense people getting turned on as a racial ability, and naturally my thoughts drifted towards skyrim and some mods I researched.
This in turn got me thinking about how there is a lack of enemies in .....really any bethesda game capable of stalking and ambushing the player, using stealth and guile to their utmost ability outside set pieces. Yeah, some skyrim mods added enemies who would naturally have invisibility cast on themselves, there were chameleon armored enemies in Oblivion, and the nightkin in Fallout 3/NV, but nothing that would rise to a real panic inducing level that you have on NPC's.
I'm talking about locking doors behind you, randomly dropping traps in areas deemed safe, tagging you with darts and running away at top speed while you bleed out/circulate more of the poison, funneling you into killzones.
Hopefully with the generational leap and balances, the threat of night being caught unaware is real. VATS only letting you know how screwed you are.
This reminds me of one of the controversies over the Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty campaign.
In that game, there are two major choices the player has to make, each of which lead to different missions and different rewards. In the first, you decide whether you choose to trust an agent who works for one of your enemies, or a client who has been hiring you to acquire suspicious chemicals. In the second, you must choose to either side with a human doctor trying to save refugees, or an alien who wants to contain a mutagenic plague.
In both cases, whatever choice you make is retroactively made the "correct" one. Whoever you sided against is revealed as a deceiver, attempting to trick you. The reasoning, I can only assume, was that players should be allowed to choose the reward they want without having to feel guilty about being tricked.
However, many players felt patronized by this design decision. Making judgement calls, and sometimes being wrong, is a part of life, and these players didn't want to sheltered from that fundamental truth.
I can see a lot of parallels in the current discussion.
Hell, the reason the witcher series is lauded is because of the 2nd half of C&C, the first half is actually pretty lackluster with most of the choices being binary, and a lot of the story being linear as hell
This in turn got me thinking about how there is a lack of enemies in .....really any bethesda game capable of stalking and ambushing the player, using stealth and guile to their utmost ability outside set pieces. Yeah, some skyrim mods added enemies who would naturally have invisibility cast on themselves, there were chameleon armored enemies in Oblivion, and the nightkin in Fallout 3/NV, but nothing that would rise to a real panic inducing level that you have on NPC's.
I'm talking about locking doors behind you, randomly dropping traps in areas deemed safe, tagging you with darts and running away at top speed while you bleed out/circulate more of the poison, funneling you into killzones.
Hopefully with the generational leap and balances, the threat of night being caught unaware is real. VATS only letting you know how screwed you are.
Most players don't want this kind of thing, which is why you don't see it very often. It's the equivalent of 'rocks fall, you die. restart y/n?'
Like, remember the magical traps you could trigger in Morrowind that were instantly fatal, more or less? They would apply an obscene level of poison and/or life drain to you and boom, time to load your last save, hope it wasn't too far away. Some of them were on doors or chests where you would have no reasonable guess that fiddling around with the objects would have fatal consequences, so deaths involving them felt really, really cheap.
Games that properly calibrate your expectations (Dark Souls) and/or are properly set-up to deal with brutally lethal encounters (most Roguelike games) can get away with things like that; a sprawling Bethesda game, where you have to deal with all manner of conventional annoyances while just trying to travel to the next quest checkpoint really doesn't need invisible enemies that snipe you & force you to retrace the same long walk over and over again. Hell, half of the time I'm frustrated in Fallout 3 or NV after dealing with just a couple of random mob spawns that get in the way - an insta-death stealth assassin that just shanks you from behind with no warning & kills maybe half an hour worth of progress would make me ragequit.
So, a webcomic had a character who could sense people getting turned on as a racial ability, and naturally my thoughts drifted towards skyrim and some mods I researched.
This in turn got me thinking about how there is a lack of enemies in .....really any bethesda game capable of stalking and ambushing the player, using stealth and guile to their utmost ability outside set pieces. Yeah, some skyrim mods added enemies who would naturally have invisibility cast on themselves, there were chameleon armored enemies in Oblivion, and the nightkin in Fallout 3/NV, but nothing that would rise to a real panic inducing level that you have on NPC's.
I'm talking about locking doors behind you, randomly dropping traps in areas deemed safe, tagging you with darts and running away at top speed while you bleed out/circulate more of the poison, funneling you into killzones.
Hopefully with the generational leap and balances, the threat of night being caught unaware is real. VATS only letting you know how screwed you are.
I think there first has to be better stealth for the player through environmental design that supports cover and alternate paths for ambushes before we get anything more complicated than some enemies having stealth boys or stealth boy effects.
I'd say that outside of Legion/NCR hit squads though that no NPC really induces panic in NV. Nothing close to the panic of a pack of night stalkers or deathclaws. Last night I was in Lonesome Road because I felt compelled to do yet another playthrough (this time with automatic weapons. Grunt + Assault Carbines are obscenely deadly) and came across a place I swear I normally get ambushed by Marked Men but only found two live Marked Men and a named one standing. There were 5 Marked Men corpses around one Deathclaw corpse. Nothing about the body count was surprising.
Cannibalism, really hope they make it more speedy and efficient this time around.
It was just a giant hassle to eat people in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Low health gains and animation takes way too long.
Always fun to take for the dialog options but after awhile I stopped actually eating people and just became a poser people eater.
Had some thoughts on this just now: I hope Bethesda looks at a lot of the more impactful New Vegas perks. Cannibalism was fun in theory but Them's Good Eatin' had a much more hassle free and useful consuming-the-flesh-of-your-enemies effect.
Likewise the ammo crafting was great even if some calibers didn't see any love until GRA.
Actually, I think all my favorite perks, skills, rewards, etc. from New Vegas were ones that changed what you could use as and do with resources. Them's Good Eatin' turned living enemies into potential healing. Survival crafting in general did the same with animals, plants, and some chems. Hand Loader made scrap metal a lot more useful. The biological station in OWB made certain crafting recipes a lot more accessible when you could make plants on demand. Implant GRX straight up added a new resource fueled by time passing.
Bethesda style games are all about interacting with the world so upgrades that increase the ways you can do so can go a long way.
Trapped chests were so much better in Skyrim now that there was a visual cue to the trap. I think I avoided most traps in Morrowind or was so prepared with tools that they were never an issue.
That's what I enjoyed most about Project Nevada, tweaking my build and implants to use VATS as a series of criticals like in F4, or a meter of bullet time like in Max Payne.
I'm failing a perception check (I really hope those are still in the dialog) and am having trouble comprehending how these perk business is going to play out.
At Quakecon, they mentioned a high tier Charisma perk that causes enemies to sometimes switch sides in combat, turning against their own former colleagues.
At Quakecon, they mentioned a high tier Charisma perk that causes enemies to sometimes switch sides in combat, turning against their own former colleagues.
I look forward to the comics that would explore this.
edit: I'm particularly thinking of a swole Hispanic vault dweller walking around shirtless and buff, and a bandit screaming out "He's too sexy, I must protect him!"
I'm failing a perception check (I really hope those are still in the dialog) and am having trouble comprehending how these perk business is going to play out.
My understanding is that having SPECIAL stats at a given level unlocks each of those perks as an option whenever you get a perk point, so Strength 7 lets you pick any of the first 7 strength perks. I wouldn't be surprised if they made you pick the lower ones first, or somehow gated the higher ones a little (ie, must be level 5+ to pick a perk that requiers 5 of a stat), but that's speculation.
edit- and each perk will have four ranks, so hopefully they're more than just 10/20/30/40% to X.
I'm failing a perception check (I really hope those are still in the dialog) and am having trouble comprehending how these perk business is going to play out.
My understanding is that having SPECIAL stats at a given level unlocks each of those perks as an option whenever you get a perk point, so Strength 7 lets you pick any of the first 7 strength perks. I wouldn't be surprised if they made you pick the lower ones first, or somehow gated the higher ones a little (ie, must be level 5+ to pick a perk that requiers 5 of a stat), but that's speculation.
edit- and each perk will have four ranks, so hopefully they're more than just 10/20/30/40% to X.
From what I've read there's no gate on the perks beyond the SPECIAL requirement. So if you start with 9 strength, you can take the first level of the 9 strength perk on your first level.
Also, the perk system replaces skills so I imagine they are more than just percentage bonuses.
Posts
It was just a giant hassle to eat people in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Low health gains and animation takes way too long.
Always fun to take for the dialog options but after awhile I stopped actually eating people and just became a poser people eater.
TLDR; just because they are capable of being bisexual doesnt make them all bisexual. I'm capable of killing someone but that doesn't make me a murderer. (Not associating bisexuality with murder, just an analogy). Theres a difference between being capable and being willing and actually going through with it.
Resident 8bitdo expert.
Resident hybrid/flap cover expert.
You can write around that, of course, but it stuck out as odd in DA2.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
XBL: GamingFreak5514
PSN: GamingFreak1234
That's the beauty of good RPG's, they let you be the character you want to be and shape the world according to your wishes. We should be pushing for more variety in these types of games not less. The Fallout franchise has always had a "choose your own adventure" kind of vibe to it, and if I recall correctly there was a perk in Fallout 3 which, if selected, suggested that your character was gay or bi, Confirmed Bachelor. So this kind of thing does have precedent in Fallout games.
Resident 8bitdo expert.
Resident hybrid/flap cover expert.
Perhaps; perhaps not. One might posit that a person's romantic history impacts the way they approach relationships, and that this might inform how to create more lifelike characters.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
I think one of the things that made DA2 feel weird was that some players felt like every romancable NPC was hitting on them before they were even thinking of pursuing a romance. So that's part of why it left a sour taste in some mouths.
DA:I had some of the better implementations of romantic options with their own preferences. Dorian is playful enough to flirt in a friendly manner with a female inquisitor regardless of his orientation. It was interesting reading reactions to that since I'm pretty sure it was a first for a game.
But really, I think we mostly just want a well written romance no matter if the NPCs have preferences built in. I swear that Persona 3/4 are the only games where I can recall taking my waifus out on dates instead of just saying nice things to them after each story mission.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
In that game, there are two major choices the player has to make, each of which lead to different missions and different rewards. In the first, you decide whether you choose to trust an agent who works for one of your enemies, or a client who has been hiring you to acquire suspicious chemicals. In the second, you must choose to either side with a human doctor trying to save refugees, or an alien who wants to contain a mutagenic plague.
In both cases, whatever choice you make is retroactively made the "correct" one. Whoever you sided against is revealed as a deceiver, attempting to trick you. The reasoning, I can only assume, was that players should be allowed to choose the reward they want without having to feel guilty about being tricked.
However, many players felt patronized by this design decision. Making judgement calls, and sometimes being wrong, is a part of life, and these players didn't want to be sheltered from that fundamental truth.
I can see a lot of parallels in the current discussion.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Stealth in Bethesda games tends to get weird due to the environment not being designed for it. Lack of cover or alternate pathways means making it quasi-invisibility is the easy way to make it usable.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Honestly, I thought the choices and consequences in Wings of Liberties worked out fairly well and mostly made sense? Like, the doctor gets desperate and the alien goes apeshit. The branching paths later on had reasonable choices and consequences. I thought it was an interesting, non-linear form of progression compared to the following iteration of the campaign, which just... didn't bother.
re: RPGs, Dragon Age 2's were distinctly player-sexual and dialogue was written to be that way. I think it's perfectly possible to execute that approach well, but my guess is that to many once people understand how that works their illusion of choice doesn't hold up as well.
This in turn got me thinking about how there is a lack of enemies in .....really any bethesda game capable of stalking and ambushing the player, using stealth and guile to their utmost ability outside set pieces. Yeah, some skyrim mods added enemies who would naturally have invisibility cast on themselves, there were chameleon armored enemies in Oblivion, and the nightkin in Fallout 3/NV, but nothing that would rise to a real panic inducing level that you have on NPC's.
I'm talking about locking doors behind you, randomly dropping traps in areas deemed safe, tagging you with darts and running away at top speed while you bleed out/circulate more of the poison, funneling you into killzones.
Hopefully with the generational leap and balances, the threat of night being caught unaware is real. VATS only letting you know how screwed you are.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Royce_ebooks
Shit like this causes me to think I have ADD or am at least hyperactive.
Now lets talk about how swole we can make our womenz in Fallout 4.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Most players don't want this kind of thing, which is why you don't see it very often. It's the equivalent of 'rocks fall, you die. restart y/n?'
Like, remember the magical traps you could trigger in Morrowind that were instantly fatal, more or less? They would apply an obscene level of poison and/or life drain to you and boom, time to load your last save, hope it wasn't too far away. Some of them were on doors or chests where you would have no reasonable guess that fiddling around with the objects would have fatal consequences, so deaths involving them felt really, really cheap.
Games that properly calibrate your expectations (Dark Souls) and/or are properly set-up to deal with brutally lethal encounters (most Roguelike games) can get away with things like that; a sprawling Bethesda game, where you have to deal with all manner of conventional annoyances while just trying to travel to the next quest checkpoint really doesn't need invisible enemies that snipe you & force you to retrace the same long walk over and over again. Hell, half of the time I'm frustrated in Fallout 3 or NV after dealing with just a couple of random mob spawns that get in the way - an insta-death stealth assassin that just shanks you from behind with no warning & kills maybe half an hour worth of progress would make me ragequit.
I think there first has to be better stealth for the player through environmental design that supports cover and alternate paths for ambushes before we get anything more complicated than some enemies having stealth boys or stealth boy effects.
I'd say that outside of Legion/NCR hit squads though that no NPC really induces panic in NV. Nothing close to the panic of a pack of night stalkers or deathclaws. Last night I was in Lonesome Road because I felt compelled to do yet another playthrough (this time with automatic weapons. Grunt + Assault Carbines are obscenely deadly) and came across a place I swear I normally get ambushed by Marked Men but only found two live Marked Men and a named one standing. There were 5 Marked Men corpses around one Deathclaw corpse. Nothing about the body count was surprising.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Had some thoughts on this just now: I hope Bethesda looks at a lot of the more impactful New Vegas perks. Cannibalism was fun in theory but Them's Good Eatin' had a much more hassle free and useful consuming-the-flesh-of-your-enemies effect.
Likewise the ammo crafting was great even if some calibers didn't see any love until GRA.
Actually, I think all my favorite perks, skills, rewards, etc. from New Vegas were ones that changed what you could use as and do with resources. Them's Good Eatin' turned living enemies into potential healing. Survival crafting in general did the same with animals, plants, and some chems. Hand Loader made scrap metal a lot more useful. The biological station in OWB made certain crafting recipes a lot more accessible when you could make plants on demand. Implant GRX straight up added a new resource fueled by time passing.
Bethesda style games are all about interacting with the world so upgrades that increase the ways you can do so can go a long way.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Fallout isn't a talking person's game for most people? :P
I mean, there are still seven perks we don't know about. And the highest we know of is only at 4, which is hardly a Charisma-based playthru.
So I assume I just failed a perception check and you were kidding.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
At Quakecon, they mentioned a high tier Charisma perk that causes enemies to sometimes switch sides in combat, turning against their own former colleagues.
I look forward to the comics that would explore this.
edit: I'm particularly thinking of a swole Hispanic vault dweller walking around shirtless and buff, and a bandit screaming out "He's too sexy, I must protect him!"
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
My understanding is that having SPECIAL stats at a given level unlocks each of those perks as an option whenever you get a perk point, so Strength 7 lets you pick any of the first 7 strength perks. I wouldn't be surprised if they made you pick the lower ones first, or somehow gated the higher ones a little (ie, must be level 5+ to pick a perk that requiers 5 of a stat), but that's speculation.
edit- and each perk will have four ranks, so hopefully they're more than just 10/20/30/40% to X.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Still waiting on Dan "Man of his Word" Ryckert to eat a hat
From what I've read there's no gate on the perks beyond the SPECIAL requirement. So if you start with 9 strength, you can take the first level of the 9 strength perk on your first level.
Also, the perk system replaces skills so I imagine they are more than just percentage bonuses.
Charisma has always been the dump stat.
But it loses its thread
That said, it looks like I'll be going a high luck run for all the criticals.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
That would make characters really powerful, assuming SPECIAL works like the other games.