Section8
Cipher
I'm mostly with Naked Ninja on Fallout's "pacifist" playthrough. I still think it's incredible that it's possible, but you're dreaming if you believe it's just as viable as a real character archetype. What I don't agree with is his low opinion of the game itself, but hey.
Getting back the topic at hand, I'm not going to go overboard here, since we're just disagreeing on nearly everything and pissing into the wind, but I'll jump on a few points.
See, this is where I get very subjective. [wank] When I create a character, I create an image - a snapshot of a synergy between function and personality [/wank]. So when I let my paladin loose on the world heavily armoured and ready to run a longsword through whatever comes my way - the last thing on my mind is grabbing a bow that I'm unskilled with, and kiting bears like a pansy. I'm breaking character for the sake of the game, and to me it feels like the dog tactic of exploiting shortcomings in the AI. Like getting a FPS boss stuck on a bit of geometry and sitting back an sniping it to your hearts content.
Admittedly, the bear example isn't quite in the same ballpark of exploitation, but it essentially amounts to the same - you're choosing a tactic that deprives you of any challenge. It doesn't take much skill to move a couple of units in circle (provided they don't trip over each other) and I can't see a way you'd ever be threatened. It may be tactically sound, but it ain't much fun.
As for avoiding situations you can't win, there are a couple of considerations here. First, that there's no way to tell how difficult something will be until you fight it, (as a quick aside, did anyone take the "oh don't go into that part of the woods, there are big bad ogres there!" stuff as anything but reverse psychology?) and the crucial role of luck makes most fights seem winnable just as long as "the dice start going my way". I'd usually be at least half a dozen reloads in before I conceded something was unwinnable.
That's probably pretty fair. I bought the hype, had fond memories of my limited experience with Gold Box games and expected something a lot better. And we're not talking about any particular prejudice against the style of game. I played and enjoyed Diablo for what it was. I loved Fallout, though even then I had no idea how much depth the game I had. I was really into Total Annihilation and was playing quite a bit of multiplayer Starcraft. Hell, I liked Ultima 8. Nothing about Baldur's Gate ever grabbed me, at all.
I don't agree with that. The GTA 3 "trilogy" are excellent examples of jack of all trades games. You have various modes of driving, from stunt circuits to races to simply getting from place to place, you have third person/first person shooting and stealth, you have aircraft flight, in San Andreas you have various minigames - pool, hoops, arcade games, rhythm games... and all are done to a standard that is average at worst, and excellent at best. And within the more common modes of play, there's a constant effort to provide unique situations and adapt to new gameplay dynamics.
I'm just not seeing that Baldur's Gate does a decent job of anything. The real-time combat lacks the strategic building/resource layer and urgency of an RTS, has quite alimited set of tactical options, and virtually no use of terrain in comparison to any squad-based tactics game, from X-Com to Rainbow Six, it has none of the wit, intelligence or humour of an adventure game. It's not fair to hold it up to the pinnacles of the respective genres it blends, but I don't think it even surpasses the ordinary.
I'll make the Oblivion comparison again. You could argue that it too is a jack of all trades, blending elements of a first person shooter, a stealth game, an epic adventure, an RPG and even throws in various minigames for lockpicking, persuasion and the like. Again, it wouldn't be fair to hold Oblivion's FPS standard up to say, Half-Life, but it can't even match the early forays into the genre, or the across the board mediocrity of Raven Software's back catalogue.
That's probably fair. I haven't experienced the high points described by many, but if someone didn't like the core gameplay of GTA 3, I wouldn't be recommending Vice City or San Andreas to them, even though they're clearly both refined and improved from the "original".
And maybe, just maybe, that's another source of ire for me. I know a lot of people lamented the waste of JE Sawyer's talents on Gauntlet: Whateverthefuck, and I do the same for pretty much the whole of Black Isle post Fallout 2. There was clearly a lot of talent there, and I lament the fact that it was all forced through the grinder to become fodder for a bunch of games with the same core gameplay as something I thought was a piece of shit.
Actually, my memory has failed me here. I had no problems with BG2 where you could actually up the pathfinding nodes. Baldur's Gate had no such option and was a shitfight because of it.
That old chestnut. First of all, it's a pretty sensible tactical action. A gunfight isn't about two people standing in the open and blasting away. Not using cover is far less plausible. Also, I don't remember any enemies that would root themselves to the spot if their only target was hiding around a corner. Well, there's Gizmo for obvious reasons. And how is this "abuse", while using a bunch of unskilled archers to kite a bear is "tactical"?
Yes, Fallout's AI wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, and it would have been nice to see enemies use cover against you, but it beats the hell out of Baldur's Gate, where it seemed you were either fighting out in the open, or in tiny little passages where you'd constantly have to stop your party from taking the long way around every time their script wanted to attack something past your own chokepoint.
We're not talking about the inevitable - if you persevere at the game you'll eventually win, we're talking about combats for which there is a single outcome - unscathed victory. Boring as bat shit, and a long way removed from an inevitable victory that comes at a cost.
Nah, I'd liken it to playing most of Fallout, not enjoying it overly much, giving the second a go and stalling at Klamath.
Never got that far. And don't be the guy who says "Just ride it out! It gets good thirty hours in!"
I've sat through a lot of shitty narrative, from the absolute horrors of Japanese arcade games to conspiracy theories that read like a 12 year old's X-Files fanfic. The big difference in most of these cases is that the story isn't the focal point, and the rest of the game serves as ample compensation for the shortcoming. I've even made a solid effort with a few games that tend the other way, compensating for shitty gameplay with great narrative. But I think I've made it pretty clear that I can't see any redeeming features in Baldur's Gate.
Funny thing is, getting exposure and making money have no inherent benefits for the consumer, and it's exactly those sort of goals that lead developers to strive for Mass Effect or Oblivion instead of something far less forgettable. I haven't touched Jade Empire, nor Mass Effect, but yeah, it would be safe to say I have no faith in Bioware as game designers. But, I don't see how a shit adaptation of someone else's design is much better.
Just because the skills themselves are passive, doesn't invalidate them. Both skills shifted the strategic aspects of the game in ways beyond "fights better". Having a secondary hero with a lot of movement points made army resupply and so forth much more achievable, and left your primary hero free to maintain a forward presence. They do exactly what a passive skill should, and don't try to be "deep or engaging".
Sirtech, in their final years, managed to accomplish some pretty solid results with NPC personalities - Jagged Alliance 2 in particular. The highly under-rated Hostile Waters had NPC banter much like Baldur's Gate, if slightly less nonsensical.
Obviously I can't comment on Shadows of Amn, especially since my first acts in that game were to slaughter Jaheira and Minsc, and watch Imoen insta-teleport herself out of the shithole it is our sole purpose to escape in the name of some death-cheating narrative bullshit, I have a pretty limited but negative view. As for the first game, I got a little weary of characters like Khalid and Jaheira bitching about their own fucking actions, and don't remember any notable party clashes, except for maybe Minsc demanding I kick him out of the group so some other fag could help me kill his fuck ugly girlfriend.
Hah! Point taken. There is a lot of luck involved, but it walks the line so very well. I think a lot of it has to do with it being phase-based, so you're sweating on every hit/miss/no penetration, tossing up your options and re-evaluating every round - should my valkyrie go for the kill, or heal the guy who is one shot away from death - should my ninja spend a round hiding to get sneak bonuses, or tank it out so the bishop who is all but dead has less chance of being targetted... that sort of thing. You just don't get that from Baldur's Gate because everything is happening simultaneously and it all looks like a clusterfuck with animations of everyone swinging weapons about four times more often than they're actually making attack rolls.
It just doesn't walk that same line. By the time you realised your fortunes, the moment has passed. There's no real oppornuity to sweat on it. Makes a huge difference.
Yeah it was dumb. But that Black Isle logo was pretty convincing to a dumb teenager.
It's already been said, but for RPGs, particularly PC RPGs, D&D was big news. The Gamespy network had been plugging BG for years prior to release - on sites like Planetquake and PlanetHalflife no less. It was cynically marketed using brand recognition of both computer games and products outside of them, and that makes it more akin to a Star Wars game than say Fallout or Stonekeep. If you had to pin down one reason why Baldur's Gate was a runaway success while Fallout remains a "cult classic", look no further than AD&D.
As for design by committee - are you sure? It took a bunch of established materials, selectively ported them to a new medium with very little forethought, added multiplayer, because multiplayer was the big buzzword at the time, aped the real-time of games like Warcraft II and Command & Conquer, just like every other motherfucker was doing, added a bunch of "wouldn't it be cool if?" features that offer no gameplay advances whatsoever, added 5 CDs worth of pointless graphical wankery, a bombastic orchestral score and a bunch of VO.
It shows the same kind of design ineptitude that Bethesda have a reputation for, and for me, it's a poster child for design by committee.
Let's see. Torment, Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale 2, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dungeon Siege, Dungeon Siege 2, Space Siege, Drakensang... just off the top of my head, that's a fair legacy, even if it is mostly Bioware.
Okay, so maybe that was too fucking long again, but I just can't restrain myself from venting against this over-rated turd.
Getting back the topic at hand, I'm not going to go overboard here, since we're just disagreeing on nearly everything and pissing into the wind, but I'll jump on a few points.
See, this is where I get very subjective. [wank] When I create a character, I create an image - a snapshot of a synergy between function and personality [/wank]. So when I let my paladin loose on the world heavily armoured and ready to run a longsword through whatever comes my way - the last thing on my mind is grabbing a bow that I'm unskilled with, and kiting bears like a pansy. I'm breaking character for the sake of the game, and to me it feels like the dog tactic of exploiting shortcomings in the AI. Like getting a FPS boss stuck on a bit of geometry and sitting back an sniping it to your hearts content.
Admittedly, the bear example isn't quite in the same ballpark of exploitation, but it essentially amounts to the same - you're choosing a tactic that deprives you of any challenge. It doesn't take much skill to move a couple of units in circle (provided they don't trip over each other) and I can't see a way you'd ever be threatened. It may be tactically sound, but it ain't much fun.
As for avoiding situations you can't win, there are a couple of considerations here. First, that there's no way to tell how difficult something will be until you fight it, (as a quick aside, did anyone take the "oh don't go into that part of the woods, there are big bad ogres there!" stuff as anything but reverse psychology?) and the crucial role of luck makes most fights seem winnable just as long as "the dice start going my way". I'd usually be at least half a dozen reloads in before I conceded something was unwinnable.
That's probably pretty fair. I bought the hype, had fond memories of my limited experience with Gold Box games and expected something a lot better. And we're not talking about any particular prejudice against the style of game. I played and enjoyed Diablo for what it was. I loved Fallout, though even then I had no idea how much depth the game I had. I was really into Total Annihilation and was playing quite a bit of multiplayer Starcraft. Hell, I liked Ultima 8. Nothing about Baldur's Gate ever grabbed me, at all.
I don't agree with that. The GTA 3 "trilogy" are excellent examples of jack of all trades games. You have various modes of driving, from stunt circuits to races to simply getting from place to place, you have third person/first person shooting and stealth, you have aircraft flight, in San Andreas you have various minigames - pool, hoops, arcade games, rhythm games... and all are done to a standard that is average at worst, and excellent at best. And within the more common modes of play, there's a constant effort to provide unique situations and adapt to new gameplay dynamics.
I'm just not seeing that Baldur's Gate does a decent job of anything. The real-time combat lacks the strategic building/resource layer and urgency of an RTS, has quite alimited set of tactical options, and virtually no use of terrain in comparison to any squad-based tactics game, from X-Com to Rainbow Six, it has none of the wit, intelligence or humour of an adventure game. It's not fair to hold it up to the pinnacles of the respective genres it blends, but I don't think it even surpasses the ordinary.
I'll make the Oblivion comparison again. You could argue that it too is a jack of all trades, blending elements of a first person shooter, a stealth game, an epic adventure, an RPG and even throws in various minigames for lockpicking, persuasion and the like. Again, it wouldn't be fair to hold Oblivion's FPS standard up to say, Half-Life, but it can't even match the early forays into the genre, or the across the board mediocrity of Raven Software's back catalogue.
That's probably fair. I haven't experienced the high points described by many, but if someone didn't like the core gameplay of GTA 3, I wouldn't be recommending Vice City or San Andreas to them, even though they're clearly both refined and improved from the "original".
And maybe, just maybe, that's another source of ire for me. I know a lot of people lamented the waste of JE Sawyer's talents on Gauntlet: Whateverthefuck, and I do the same for pretty much the whole of Black Isle post Fallout 2. There was clearly a lot of talent there, and I lament the fact that it was all forced through the grinder to become fodder for a bunch of games with the same core gameplay as something I thought was a piece of shit.
Actually, my memory has failed me here. I had no problems with BG2 where you could actually up the pathfinding nodes. Baldur's Gate had no such option and was a shitfight because of it.
That old chestnut. First of all, it's a pretty sensible tactical action. A gunfight isn't about two people standing in the open and blasting away. Not using cover is far less plausible. Also, I don't remember any enemies that would root themselves to the spot if their only target was hiding around a corner. Well, there's Gizmo for obvious reasons. And how is this "abuse", while using a bunch of unskilled archers to kite a bear is "tactical"?
Yes, Fallout's AI wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, and it would have been nice to see enemies use cover against you, but it beats the hell out of Baldur's Gate, where it seemed you were either fighting out in the open, or in tiny little passages where you'd constantly have to stop your party from taking the long way around every time their script wanted to attack something past your own chokepoint.
We're not talking about the inevitable - if you persevere at the game you'll eventually win, we're talking about combats for which there is a single outcome - unscathed victory. Boring as bat shit, and a long way removed from an inevitable victory that comes at a cost.
Nah, I'd liken it to playing most of Fallout, not enjoying it overly much, giving the second a go and stalling at Klamath.
Never got that far. And don't be the guy who says "Just ride it out! It gets good thirty hours in!"
I've sat through a lot of shitty narrative, from the absolute horrors of Japanese arcade games to conspiracy theories that read like a 12 year old's X-Files fanfic. The big difference in most of these cases is that the story isn't the focal point, and the rest of the game serves as ample compensation for the shortcoming. I've even made a solid effort with a few games that tend the other way, compensating for shitty gameplay with great narrative. But I think I've made it pretty clear that I can't see any redeeming features in Baldur's Gate.
Funny thing is, getting exposure and making money have no inherent benefits for the consumer, and it's exactly those sort of goals that lead developers to strive for Mass Effect or Oblivion instead of something far less forgettable. I haven't touched Jade Empire, nor Mass Effect, but yeah, it would be safe to say I have no faith in Bioware as game designers. But, I don't see how a shit adaptation of someone else's design is much better.
Just because the skills themselves are passive, doesn't invalidate them. Both skills shifted the strategic aspects of the game in ways beyond "fights better". Having a secondary hero with a lot of movement points made army resupply and so forth much more achievable, and left your primary hero free to maintain a forward presence. They do exactly what a passive skill should, and don't try to be "deep or engaging".
Sirtech, in their final years, managed to accomplish some pretty solid results with NPC personalities - Jagged Alliance 2 in particular. The highly under-rated Hostile Waters had NPC banter much like Baldur's Gate, if slightly less nonsensical.
Obviously I can't comment on Shadows of Amn, especially since my first acts in that game were to slaughter Jaheira and Minsc, and watch Imoen insta-teleport herself out of the shithole it is our sole purpose to escape in the name of some death-cheating narrative bullshit, I have a pretty limited but negative view. As for the first game, I got a little weary of characters like Khalid and Jaheira bitching about their own fucking actions, and don't remember any notable party clashes, except for maybe Minsc demanding I kick him out of the group so some other fag could help me kill his fuck ugly girlfriend.
Hah! Point taken. There is a lot of luck involved, but it walks the line so very well. I think a lot of it has to do with it being phase-based, so you're sweating on every hit/miss/no penetration, tossing up your options and re-evaluating every round - should my valkyrie go for the kill, or heal the guy who is one shot away from death - should my ninja spend a round hiding to get sneak bonuses, or tank it out so the bishop who is all but dead has less chance of being targetted... that sort of thing. You just don't get that from Baldur's Gate because everything is happening simultaneously and it all looks like a clusterfuck with animations of everyone swinging weapons about four times more often than they're actually making attack rolls.
It just doesn't walk that same line. By the time you realised your fortunes, the moment has passed. There's no real oppornuity to sweat on it. Makes a huge difference.
Yeah it was dumb. But that Black Isle logo was pretty convincing to a dumb teenager.
It's already been said, but for RPGs, particularly PC RPGs, D&D was big news. The Gamespy network had been plugging BG for years prior to release - on sites like Planetquake and PlanetHalflife no less. It was cynically marketed using brand recognition of both computer games and products outside of them, and that makes it more akin to a Star Wars game than say Fallout or Stonekeep. If you had to pin down one reason why Baldur's Gate was a runaway success while Fallout remains a "cult classic", look no further than AD&D.
As for design by committee - are you sure? It took a bunch of established materials, selectively ported them to a new medium with very little forethought, added multiplayer, because multiplayer was the big buzzword at the time, aped the real-time of games like Warcraft II and Command & Conquer, just like every other motherfucker was doing, added a bunch of "wouldn't it be cool if?" features that offer no gameplay advances whatsoever, added 5 CDs worth of pointless graphical wankery, a bombastic orchestral score and a bunch of VO.
It shows the same kind of design ineptitude that Bethesda have a reputation for, and for me, it's a poster child for design by committee.
Let's see. Torment, Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale 2, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dungeon Siege, Dungeon Siege 2, Space Siege, Drakensang... just off the top of my head, that's a fair legacy, even if it is mostly Bioware.
Okay, so maybe that was too fucking long again, but I just can't restrain myself from venting against this over-rated turd.
