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princecoo posted:Make the Thieves Guild refuse you jobs because you're not adept enough. Add certain objectives in the questlines that will give you an immediate and permanent buff to the relevent skill, so that by the time you reach the conclusion and become their leader, you actually are worthy of the title. Speaking of Skyrim, this is a thing dragging the game down: Radiant quest grinding. The Thieves Guild doesn't bar you from any of the storyline based on stats, but if you want to be the capital-G Guildmaster, you have to grind out at least 20 'Small Jobs' (ie. randomly generated 'steal x random item from y random person' quests), 5 for each of four cities, to unlock 5 special side quests to 'take control' of those cities and unlock shopkeepers in the hideout. As well as making friends with the Khajit. Once you do all that, you finally get to be Guildmaster. It's just horrible and not very interesting milling through randomly generated content to get past an arbitrary fetch quest barrier and while I'm all for gating content to character, the part they did gate behind slow progression was awful and tedious in the extreme and dragged down one of the more enjoyable factions of the game.
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Oct 18, 2015 15:20
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It's a completely failed attempt to replicate what they did in Oblivion where they gated the quests based on skill (as has been pined for in Skyrim) by making you steal a certain value worth of poo poo before the next quest was available. Problem is, as they did it in Skyrim, there's way too loving much of it, it's all the same, and all it gates off is the final reward. Oops. 
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Oct 18, 2015 15:26
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Lizard Wizard posted:Those sure sound like things that have no place in an open-world game. Skyrim itself has a dungeon you can't complete without the zoom-forward shout. I don't see how something like 'an area that deals constant, massive ice damage' is out of place. As for the last one, gently caress, dude, stick a dungeon in the world that can't be accessed without both knowing its location and the secret code to access it, stick the code in a story quest, boom, you have to get that far before you can access it.
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Oct 18, 2015 19:26
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The horse in Assassin's Creed. It becomes redundant once you get to use fast travelling but even if you decided to ride all the way to your location you are forced to move at a snail's pace to not arouse suspicion.
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Oct 18, 2015 19:38
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princecoo posted:I think Skyrim (and games like it) should not necisarily lock out content for certain quests, but rather make them more involved. It makes no sense if my axe and shield carrying barbarian can just walk up and become Archmage of a Guild of wizards simply by doing a few fetch quests. It would be better if my strong he-man could only get so far in that quests storyline until he actually, you know, became proficient at some magic. Make some puzzles dependant on performing magic of some kind on them, at a certain level of skill. Like someone else said, Morrowind did this pretty directly, you straight-up weren't allowed to advance in the Mage's Guild questline unless you had sufficient skill level in magic. It was pretty direct and arbitrary, and there was no way to pitch it that didn't involve busting down the barrier between game mechanics and in-story dialog like a Kojima tutorial. Like always, I feel like Oblivion gets less credit than it's due on this front. A lot of the guild content, especially early on, is designed in such a way that it rewards a certain play style, if not necessarily being very demanding of that style. The Mages' Guild thrusts you into a few challenges that demand the use of magic, or at least knowledge enough to recognize the challenge. The Fighters' Guild involves enough hands-on, direct physical combat that you do at least need to be prepared for it, and the Thieves' Guild and Dark Brotherhood do require you to be capable of routinely getting away with stealing and murdering. They don't try as hard as they should at a lot of these, I'll grant, but it's at least present enough that you have to be willing to play that style to play the questline. In Skyrim, the only one that's actually remotely demanding is that the Companions bitch you out for using magic in your entrance duel. That's not only not nearly enough, but the fact that's the only one that's there is just more and greater evidence that Bethesda wanted everybody to play a burly man-hero.
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Oct 18, 2015 20:01
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princecoo posted:I feel like Oblivions skill increases (increase skill by using said skill) probably lends itself better to this method. But to get it all ironed out and implemented would be a bitch in development I guess. I'm confused - how does this not apply to Skyrim?
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Oct 18, 2015 20:23
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Tales of Maj'Eyal is pretty much the best Roguelike I've ever played, but even then it kind of outstays its welcome as soon as you complete the first continent. On the one hand it loads up all the worst parts of the game until the very end, but on the other that means that the final act of the campaign is a slooooog and I regularly stop playing a character after Dreadfell unless I specifically want to unlock something later in the game.
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Oct 18, 2015 20:36
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IIRC Morrowinds stat and skill requirements for guild progression weren't nearly stringent enough. I think the same goes for the thieves guild in Oblivion. You only need to fence 1000 gold worth of goods in total to become grandmaster. Obscuros Oblivion Overhaul drastically increased these amounts. I think one of the thresholds was 20000 gold.
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Oct 18, 2015 21:58
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Alhazred posted:The horse in Assassin's Creed. It becomes redundant once you get to use fast travelling but even if you decided to ride all the way to your location you are forced to move at a snail's pace to not arouse suspicion. Or you could just gallop past at breakneck speed, middle finger extended. 99% of the time you're in no danger of anyone catching up.
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Oct 18, 2015 22:35
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Death Zebra posted:IIRC Morrowinds stat and skill requirements for guild progression weren't nearly stringent enough. I think the same goes for the thieves guild in Oblivion. You only need to fence 1000 gold worth of goods in total to become grandmaster. Obscuros Oblivion Overhaul drastically increased these amounts. I think one of the thresholds was 20000 gold. No that's stupid as gently caress, at that point you're basically just mindlessly grinding. Stealing stuff to an arbitrary amount is just boring. Instead the player should be sent off on cool heists. Thieves Guild quests should totally be about all sorts of thief related crime, from simple robbery to breaking into banks, con artistry, skooma smuggling, all sorts of cool poo poo they could send you off to do instead of just stealing some random crap.
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Oct 18, 2015 23:29
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Slime posted:No that's stupid as gently caress, at that point you're basically just mindlessly grinding. Stealing stuff to an arbitrary amount is just boring. Instead the player should be sent off on cool heists. Thieves Guild quests should totally be about all sorts of thief related crime, from simple robbery to breaking into banks, con artistry, skooma smuggling, all sorts of cool poo poo they could send you off to do instead of just stealing some random crap. The Thieves guild quests would work so well as a mix of general jobs to raise to money (contract thievery and the like) while also using said funds to finance better, more interesting jobs or the like. Like you steal some poo poo for some guy to make money, and then you use your proceeds to finance a major heist or to fund a campaign to obtain some blackmail on a magistrate to get some leeway with the law or the like. Or maybe do some history quests and make it about (partially) dealings with a Thief-Taker General type, getting to play both sides of the game, that kinda thing.
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Oct 19, 2015 00:28
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Nuebot posted:What trailers have you been watching? Pretty much all I've seen of FO4 is "look at our kickass shooting now, look at this god damned death claw it's gonna get you! Now you're ironman! Yeeaaahhh!" it's been pretty heavy on the guns and power armor. Alaois posted:as proven time and time again, any time people complain about fake sounding accents in video games, it was actually done by native speakers
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Oct 19, 2015 06:13
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U.T. Raptor posted:Doing something the opposite of your alignment made Three Dogs' broadcast about it hilarious too. I liked that he called me a racist for killing ghouls that were killing people.  FO3 really didn't think things through sometimes.
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Oct 19, 2015 06:17
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Nuebot posted:FO3 really didn't think things through sometimes. Yeah, like the entire last third of the main storyline.
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Oct 19, 2015 06:46
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Inco posted:Yeah, like the entire last third of the main storyline. Listen man, they're going to poison the poison water with a water purifier that's full of radiation. What doesn't make sense about that? Also it's just one lake. Also they have a billion Mr. Handy's everywhere that can purify water and nothing is stopping anyone from just disabling one and turning it into a water purifier. But I mean, Destiny!
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Oct 19, 2015 06:51
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The computer-President wanted to poison the water because it was a dumb computer. The colonel wanted the purifier so he could use it to conquer the wasteland.
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Oct 19, 2015 07:00
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Nuebot posted:I liked that he called me a racist for killing ghouls that were killing people. If you're talking about Tenpenny Tower, It's hard to tell what of that quest resolution is bugged and what's actually intended. That mission is REALLY weird like that.
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Oct 19, 2015 07:02
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Cleretic posted:If you're talking about Tenpenny Tower, It's hard to tell what of that quest resolution is bugged and what's actually intended. That mission is REALLY weird like that. I think it's just poo poo design and bethesda's weird rear end morality scale. Like the vampire quest line where the good ending is to convince a whole village to be willing human cattle.
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Oct 19, 2015 08:05
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Tenpenny Tower was memorable because you think it’s a pretty standard quest about convincing rich people to be accepting of the poor shabby 99%er ghouls, but it turns out to actually be a surprise A Wyatt Mann cartoon about how if you let minorities into your neighbourhood they’ll slaughter everyone indiscriminately
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Oct 19, 2015 09:27
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I thought it was a good twist because that's what 'kill the rich hurr hurr' actually involves.
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Oct 19, 2015 11:04
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bourgeoise spotted
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Oct 19, 2015 11:09
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Strategic Tea posted:I thought it was a good twist because that's what 'kill the rich hurr hurr' actually involves. The issue that people take with it is that killing the oops-I-guess-they're-homicidal ghouls in return still counts as bad karma.
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Oct 19, 2015 11:12
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It'd make more sense if you could do something about it after letting them in and punish those responsible without being called "evil". I mean the guy literally lied to you about his intentions, you should totally get to kick his rear end for that.
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Oct 19, 2015 11:55
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Jastiger posted:It'd make more sense if you could do something about it after letting them in and punish those responsible without being called "evil". Bourgeoise spotted 
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Oct 19, 2015 12:12
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Yeah, much as I love FO3 the good/evil karma scheme was patchy at best. its fine for some things (stealing from friendly NPCs, killing friendly NPCs = evil, giving water to people dying of thirst = good) but anything more nuanced than that then it was all down to the opinion of the quest writer what was "good" or "evil" and how good or bad it was. Not to mention that in a RPG the players motivation isn't always what it is assumed to be. If you are following the "good" quest line because you prefer the reward to the reward of the evil quest line (eg doing as much legwork as possible in the Wasteland Survival Guide questline instead of lying because she sends you interesting places full of people you can kill and plunder and because you want the full rewards from the guide) isnt really "good" is it? Because you are only doing it for a selfish reason. Crushing Moiras dreams and persuading her to give up on writing the guide (IIRC) gave you a pile of bad Karma, but no reward. A player might decide to do that to protect her from herself because she was plainly not well suited to wasteland survival, but still bad karma. Murdering random vendors is evil, but its also dumb because thats one less person to sell your poo poo to. Basically real life and peoples motivations are usually much more complicated than a binary "good/evil" system. Asking quest givers for bigger rewards in some games is considered bad, but if you then spend those rewards on the weapons you need to save the world from bigbadguy thats not necessarily bad (in my eyes at least). I played through FO3 enough to get all 3 of the "reach lvl 20 at maximum (karma alignment)" achievements, and good was easy, evil was easy and I had no compunction about gaming the poo poo out of the system to get the neutral one. So I get that going around and murdering all the ghouls in tenpenny towers could be evil, but killing the leader (who was responsible for the murders) should have been a karmic wash. But because the game system tags him as a friendly NPC who isnt hostile to you, it gets tagged as ann evil action. One of the things dragging the game down for me; I find it really difficult to be an arsehole to NPCs in games most of the time. I dont know why. For the bad karma run of FO3 I found it much easier to pick the good/neutral lines in dialogue and then murder them after the conversation than I did getting bad karma by being a dick to them.
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Oct 19, 2015 12:18
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Strategic Tea posted:Bourgeoise spotted Nah I remember I really wanted to let the ghouls in because gently caress the 1%. But that wasn't' carte blanche to just murder everyone. I mean I would have expected Tenpenny to get flung off the balcony, but the people that didn't know any better didn't deserve to get murdered. Plus they just let a bunch of feral ghouls run around, what is the point of that? You may be a ghoul, but you're not THAT, why would you want that in your society? In every other part of the game those ferals need to be put down the same as deathclaws, but here they are your buds? Nah. Was bad design imo and left a bad taste in your mouth after trying to do the right thing. Edit^^^^^^ Post above this: I think FO 3was written when Good was obviously good, and Evil was Murderous Psychopath. I think Mass Effect did it much better. "Evil" wasnt' RAH RAH KILL EVERYONE, but more "This is the shortest and most direct path to my goals" which makes a lot more sense. In FO 3 the options are "Sure let me endanger my life for the 50th time" is good and "No thanks" is evil somehow. Jastiger has a new favorite as of 12:28 on Oct 19, 2015 |
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Oct 19, 2015 12:25
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Stealing in 3 and NewVegas doesn't really work that well because you still lose karma even if you're stealing from a bad guy. Or if you're stealing from no one. Or if you're not being seen. All that matters is that the item is marked as "owned" and you get called a bad person for taking it. It kind of puts a dampener on stealth runs.
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Oct 19, 2015 12:39
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I liked getting good karma for cleaning out a prison taken over by an evil murderous gang that made blowing poo poo up their thing, but getting bad karma for touching their stuff.
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Oct 19, 2015 12:40
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Taeke posted:I liked getting good karma for cleaning out a prison taken over by an evil murderous gang that made blowing poo poo up their thing, but getting bad karma for touching their stuff. It might have only occured before the patches came out, but in some spots where you got player homes it was also possible to lose karma for stealing your own stuff because it didn't properly flag the items. 
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Oct 19, 2015 12:43
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SiKboy posted:Yeah, much as I love FO3 the good/evil karma scheme was patchy at best. its fine for some things (stealing from friendly NPCs, killing friendly NPCs = evil, giving water to people dying of thirst = good) but anything more nuanced than that then it was all down to the opinion of the quest writer what was "good" or "evil" and how good or bad it was. Not to mention that in a RPG the players motivation isn't always what it is assumed to be. If you are following the "good" quest line because you prefer the reward to the reward of the evil quest line (eg doing as much legwork as possible in the Wasteland Survival Guide questline instead of lying because she sends you interesting places full of people you can kill and plunder and because you want the full rewards from the guide) isnt really "good" is it? Because you are only doing it for a selfish reason. Crushing Moiras dreams and persuading her to give up on writing the guide (IIRC) gave you a pile of bad Karma, but no reward. A player might decide to do that to protect her from herself because she was plainly not well suited to wasteland survival, but still bad karma. Murdering random vendors is evil, but its also dumb because thats one less person to sell your poo poo to. The only way you could ever do a "proper" karma system in a game like fallout is by doing it with a word of mouth system, if no one sees you kill that random water beggar in the middle of bumfuck nowhere you shouldn't be penalised at all, same goes for slaughtering an entire camp of people silently, if there aren't witnesses why would anyone assume it's you? If you go around machinegunning people and leave witnesses then people will talk about you for better or for worse, I don't know how stealing would work, if people see you wearing the armour you stole from them I guess they'd attack or something? basically get rid of "you did a good thing" "You did a bad thing" just let peoples reactions and disposition to you be the karma system depending on what they know of you. Brazilianpeanutwar has a new favorite as of 13:19 on Oct 19, 2015 |
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Oct 19, 2015 13:16
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Brazilianpeanutwar posted:The only way you could ever do a "proper" karma system in a game like fallout is by doing it with a word of mouth system, if no one sees you kill that random water beggar in the middle of bumfuck nowhere you shouldn't be penalised at all, same goes for slaughtering an entire camp of people silently, if there aren't witnesses why would anyone assume it's you? If you go around machinegunning people and leave witnesses then people will talk about you for better or for worse, I don't know how stealing would work, if people see you wearing the armour you stole from them I guess they'd attack or something? Skyrim almost does it right. Kill all the witnesses and your crime goes away! Unless you do murder, sometimes?. Murder never goes away and guards are psychic. There are also certain NPCs who, upon being killed, everyone will just know and you get a bounty, even if you teleport them to a dark, sealed void where no one could see.
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Oct 19, 2015 14:00
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Nuebot posted:Skyrim almost does it right. Kill all the witnesses and your crime goes away! Unless you do murder, sometimes?. Murder never goes away and guards are psychic. There are also certain NPCs who, upon being killed, everyone will just know and you get a bounty, even if you teleport them to a dark, sealed void where no one could see. There was a bug at launch where a chicken in a town would watch you kill someone and the guards would know as a result.
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Oct 19, 2015 15:26
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Nuebot posted:Stealing in 3 and NewVegas doesn't really work that well because you still lose karma even if you're stealing from a bad guy. Or if you're stealing from no one. Or if you're not being seen. All that matters is that the item is marked as "owned" and you get called a bad person for taking it. It kind of puts a dampener on stealth runs. IIRC you could steal from the slavers without any penalty in FO3.
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Oct 19, 2015 15:27
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RBA Starblade posted:There was a bug at launch where a chicken in a town would watch you kill someone and the guards would know as a result. It wasn't just at launch, apparently it still exists. I remember watching a video not all that long ago by some dude who did tests on it in an empty field with a mix of people and animals through multiple runs and it turns out goats are loving narcs.
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Oct 19, 2015 16:48
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Nuebot posted:Skyrim almost does it right. Kill all the witnesses and your crime goes away! Unless you do murder, sometimes?. Murder never goes away and guards are psychic. There are also certain NPCs who, upon being killed, everyone will just know and you get a bounty, even if you teleport them to a dark, sealed void where no one could see. That's because skyrim is poo poo, i'm sure if any other game put effort into it you might get some great emergent gameplay but not skyrim, never skyrim.
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Oct 19, 2015 17:07
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Was it Skyrim where they said they had to tone down the AI because npcs would go out and complete the main quests? That sounds like hooey
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Oct 19, 2015 17:40
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I just got DA:I after not really playing the DA games (I've sunk a few hours into a copy of 2 I got for like six bucks, and it's fun at that price). Now I haven't gotten very far yet, I'm just at the Hinterlands talking to Giselle now, but this game has some serious issues: -The facial expressions are robotic as hell and don't convey emotion so much as convey an unsettling sense that the animators were unaware that emotions exist -The frame rate chugs during canned cutscenes sometimes, like whenever the front of Cassandra's armor shows up (this is on PS4 too, so it's not like I'm playing it on a Celeron laptop or anything) -For an "open world" game it's really not that open - jump on the rocks next to a path and you might just find out that the enormous mountain or field next to you is just a fancy skybox -It's still buggy, months from launch. On my first play session I was unable to level up any characters until I quit the game and restarted. What was that 4.6 gigabyte patch for?! EA is bad. Bioware is bad.
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Oct 19, 2015 17:58
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Calaveron posted:Was it Skyrim where they said they had to tone down the AI because npcs would go out and complete the main quests? That sounds like hooey I'm almost positive you're thinking of Oblivion.
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Oct 19, 2015 18:32
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Calaveron posted:Was it Skyrim where they said they had to tone down the AI because npcs would go out and complete the main quests? That sounds like hooey Oblivion was the one where they would have npcs that broke out in huge faction wars that left entire towns devestated and questlines destroyed before you even found them until the disabled radiant AI.
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Oct 19, 2015 18:41
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Calaveron posted:Was it Skyrim where they said they had to tone down the AI because npcs would go out and complete the main quests? That sounds like hooey Lizard Wizard posted:I'm almost positive you're thinking of Oblivion. He's thinking of Stalker games. http://aigamedev.com/open/interviews/stalker-alife/
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Oct 19, 2015 18:50
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