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Fuligin posted:I'm pretty dang skeptical about this. Seems like a lot to bite off on top of Wasteland 2, and Monte Cook isn't a big draw for me either. Monte Cook isn't a great game designer, but if the Beyond Countless Doorways book he did for Sword & Sorcery is any indication, he's still got it in him to design interesting worlds and spaces to explore and I'm sure that'll be his role in the game. I'm less certain about the developers. "Calling dibs" on both Wasteland 2 and Torment 2 without having finished a single game of that magnitude feels a lot like they just have a business plan of snatching up a shitload of valuable properties via Kickstarter and churning out crap at a pure profit or something rather than being genuinely interested in creating these games. A worthy Torment 2 would be a tall order for Obsidian. It'd be a tall order if they did have the AD&D license, which would mean they wouldn't have to build both a cosmology and a game from the ground up. Baku fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Feb 20, 2013 |
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Feb 20, 2013 19:52
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Drifter posted:Is it just the story setting, or the rights to use specific nomenclature? I've never understood game developers talking about finding D&D restrictive or whatever, because I've never really noticed a big difference in play style. A level-up in XCOM is similar to a level up in Baldur's Gate 2 is similar to Arcanum is similar to Dragon Age is similar to Dishonored and Alpha Protocol and Vampire: The Masquerade. We all just choose poo poo and it does it when we click on it. It seems to me that more important than the setting is the quality of the story and plot and interactivity within it all. There are some fundamental differences in how systems work, for example whether "chance to hit" is based on a complex formula or is a fixed 90% chance for every character all the time and whether or not people have a chance to actively "evade" or it's just a single "miss chance" baked into the attacker's chance to hit. That kind of complex nerd stuff. That said, 4E D&D is the only edition of Dungeons & Dragons whose mechanics are worth copying line-for-line into a computer game in the first place; tabletop RPGs literally have a lower standard for balance in part for the justifiable reason that a tabletop RPG will always have a referee game master overseeing play who can tweak the rules on the fly and overrule the book when anything in it isn't working for their players. It'd be like every time you went into a Diablo 2 game with four friends, there was a fifth friend who had the ability to change anything about the monsters or items or classes the second somebody quit having fun or messed up the game. The bigger thing here is that without the Planescape and AD&D licenses, every single thing in this game (from the setting lore to the things you can play as to the names of magic spells) will have to be written from the ground up by the developers, which is just another way it can go wrong.
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Feb 20, 2013 21:49
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pyrotek posted:They just use a weird rating scale where 5 stars is a classic, 4.5 is a good-great game, 4 is OK-good, and anything less than that is utter trash. If you convert those into a percentage scale where 4 = 80, that's pretty much how every other site reviews games too.
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Feb 21, 2013 07:06
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FRINGE posted:Yeah theyve been very clear about this, the reactionary hate seems a little silly. It isn't hate, it's concern that people are using Kickstarter to snatch up old properties to try and cash in on nostalgia. And until the studios doing it release good games to prove me wrong, I'm going to remain a skeptic. Drifter posted:All this talk of 15 year old history means very little, consider the case with Ron Gilbert's most recent, decent but not stand out game, The Cave. In my opinion, anything past 6-10 years becomes ultimately nice but disregardable when expecting the same type of performance from someone. Whether it's just an outlier or not, this type of thing comes with a huge loving caveat emptor. You don't even need to look that far afield for an example; Alpha Protocol does some things well but it's a loving wreck compared to Torment, and while New Vegas is better in pretty much every meaningful way than FO3 it isn't exactly an epic feat to do that when 75% of the non-writing aspect of development was already done for you by another company. Gamers of a particular age are utterly consumed with nostalgia for things that they obsessed over as teenagers and college students, and will happily exalt anything their idols give them so long as they make a token effort to show camaraderie and speak their language.
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Feb 21, 2013 08:31
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Adraeus posted:You guys are weird. See you're missing the point that I don't give a poo poo who's working on it, and even if Chris Avellone was the game's director and lead writer I'd be skeptical. It's a sequel to a 13 year old game without the original license. I'll believe it's good when I play it and it's good. Like 500+ people gave Monte Cook's Numenera KS 200+ dollars. I'm staying neutral until I see a finished product, they're the ones jumping to a conclusion.
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Feb 25, 2013 12:20
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While I don't think the setting of the game was expressly poor or unoriginal, I'm inclined to agree with Drifter on principle. Good characters - complicated, fun, interesting, moving - can make even the dullest places seem new and vibrant and special. Characters make and break roleplaying games for the player; I overlooked the inherent stupidity of Mass Effect (oh no the squid borg are coming) because I cared about the people in it, and have refused to play a number of JRPGs no matter how much I like the genre or might enjoy the gameplay because I can read a summary or look at the box and figure out that all the characters are cliches from older games and anime that range from boring to repulsive. Also a sentient building that communicates intent is clearly a character 
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Feb 26, 2013 09:19
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Megazver posted:WotC stopped selling PDFs a few years ago, citing piracy. Isn't that sort of a bewildering chicken/egg scenario? Now there's basically no good reason not to pirate them.
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Mar 13, 2013 17:31
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Oh, yeah, I meant PDFs of like AD&D books. They haven't been publishing them for years, and only like two of the Planescape books (not including the boxed set) are even available on Drive-Thru RPG. I was confused and thought you were talking about just their legacy stuff. I've always been a little confused by why game companies, whether computer or tabletop or whatever, have such a hard time making a product available which essentially costs them nothing and would be almost pure profit even if they only got a few $10 downloads per month. I think it's one of the things that drives people to piracy in the first place.
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Mar 13, 2013 17:41
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Twee as gently caress posted:The same guy who is giving $100,000 is also giving $10,000 to veronica mars I mean, if you've got enough money to donate $100,000 to a game production without any personal return other than donor rewards and self-satisfaction, I really doubt another $10k is a big loss.
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Mar 13, 2013 23:30
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Basic Chunnel posted:The best rule of thumb for determining what is and isn't groggy is: Are combat and non-combat skills drawn from separate building pools? Can a fighter know lore and still work as a fighter? If not, you've got yourself a grog system. Numenara is a grog system. This is false. You have a grog system when Lore gives you massive rewards for doing less and/or a ton of extra content, or where Combat is going to be used to resolve 95% of situations no matter what your Lore is. You can make a game that balances combat and non-combat builds just like you can make a game that balances wizards and fighters. That people don't is an indictment of the designers/GMs, not, as you suggest, the concept itself (of letting someone make a character who sucks poo poo at fighting or sucks poo poo at functioning outside of fights).
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Feb 28, 2017 23:36
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