Egosphere said:
This is the calculus that gnostic objectivetards use to establish the metadaemonic rankings of vidya:
quality rankings, no. But it's not hard to take any game and establish the scope of its c&c relative to another. New Vegas has more of it than Icewind Dale, Fallout 2 more than NWN, Arcanum more than Kotor. This isn't a point of contention.
No, it is pretty hard, unless you are just going by gut feeling (in which case why pretend like you are describing reality as opposed to your preferences?) "Scope of C&C" is such a general thing that to even being to "objectively" - ie, quantifiably - assess it, we would need to narrow it way the fuck down. For example, we could compare the average amount of dialogue options in a given type of encounter between NV and IWD. Or we could consider the number of ending permutations, of which there are more in FNV thanks to its many ending slides. Or maybe we could consider the amount of consequential mechanical options offered to the player on a per-encounter basis, of which Icewind Dale would probably have more of on average given its character development system, turn-based combat resolution, and so on. Even this is probably too broad, but you get the idea.
But at the end of the day, this quantitative assessment will not tell you which game is
better than the other (which IMO is an impossible thing to determine because I don't think this magical property of "good" exists in the universe) or, more sensibly, which one you will
like more - you need your subjective, personal heuristic for that, or to appeal to someone else's subjective heuristic. Even by considering C&C you are already exercising your subjective preferences in arbitrary valuing it over other factors. Just look at our anti-Semitic friend's post above - it demonstrates perfectly what I mean.
Basically, any time you write a statement like "New Vegas has better C&C than Icewind Dale," what you are really stating is "I liked the C&C in New Vegas more than the C&C in Icewind Dale." "New Vegas has more C&C than Icewind Dale" basically tells us nothing unless we really break it down. This isn't a pedantic point - if you want to use the "X is better than Y" statement as a linguistic shortcut to communicate the "I like x more than y" sentiment, more power to you - I just object to people who unironically buy into this unsubstantiated belief that there is this metaphysical hierarchy of games and we all ought to spend much time and effort divining it. Its just funny to see brave internet agnostic-atheists (to whom I belong) argue with each other about these esoteric forces of goodness and badness and their battle over the souls of games.
,haven't read anything similar on the codex.
