Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity [BETA RELEASED, GO TO THE NEW THREAD]

[imweasel]

Hah, that does sound like him. For fuck's sake Drog

Christ, stupid fucking jew.

 

[Kem0sabe]

That's if you play games for the story though. For me gameplay and replayability are higher priorities.

That's true, i play rpg's mostly for the C&C, i love certain gameplay mechanisms like turned based combat, but for me that's never a priority when compared to the writing and characters.

 

[Duraframe300]

Hah, that does sound like him. For fuck's sake Drog

Lay off the bues drog. I don't criticize it, because I love the game. Although I am open to debate and critque.

Jeez, another drog.

 

[imweasel]

Until next time drog.

Hah, that does sound like him. For fuck's sake Drog

Lay off the bues drog. I don't criticize it, because I love the game. Although I am open to debate and critque.

Jeez, another drog.

So many drogs.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[imweasel]

I don't disagree with Infinitron here. BG1 story was so cliche it's laughable. BG 2 has mediocre story. Better than 1 but still...
So what? Fallouts also had terrible stories but were great games. The only RPGs with good stories are P:T and MotB.(Wichers are at the BG2 and Arcanum level or sligtly above)

opinions, opinions.

 

[Sensuki]

Josh is reading that thread now hahah, I wonder whether he'll make a post.

 

[Excidium]

Always great to see people in the Codex valiantly defending shitty RPG design like what has become the norm for sidequests.

You can't really compare Fallout's story to the rest of those games. I mean you can grab a water chip and blow up the base and head back to the Vault all in a few weeks (maybe days?) in game.That would be such a simplistic story as to barely even count. Fallout is more like a series of short stories about each town, and some of them are quite good.

Fallout story is quite good actually, because it is written through your actions, not through walls of text. It's an actual RPG story instead of an interactive novel.

 

[Zeriel]

Even Bioware thought Athkatla had too much content.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131493/baldurs_gate_ii_the_anatomy_of_a_.php?page=2

In retrospect, it would have been very helpful to have this finished set of guidelines at the start of the project, rather than at the end. A number of decisions that were made very early in the development of Baldur's Gate II did not follow the guidelines and could not be undone. Most noteworthy was Chapter 2 of the game - it included a story segment that was similar to those in other chapters, but in Chapter 2 the player could also access all of the class-specific subquests. This led to Chapter 2 potentially dwarfing all other chapters in length because the players could spend 60 hours doing subquests. We needed to put the subquests at a point where all players could access them equally, but end result was that it bloated an early section of the game. In the end there was nothing we could do to fix the chapter disparity so we simply worked around it.
...
In a project as content rich as Baldur's Gate II, we didn't really have to worry about cutting content. While we shipped with nearly all the features we originally planned, we did start cutting quests and characters well before the final testing phase. We still ended up with over 200 hundred hours of gameplay.

In retrospect we should have started this process many months earlier. One of the dangers of development is that game developers have a tendency to always add content if they are given time. They don't naturally spend time limiting and polishing content; instead, more time means more stuff. It's wise to use that prioritized feature list to hone the work (of course ours was informal, which made it a little difficult).

We learned to look at our target date and adjust our content development accordingly. In many ways, quality is more important than quantity. Even though Baldur's Gate II was bigger than Baldur's Gate, the actual content was much better quality - we just didn't realize how much more we had made in BG2 until it was too late!
...
Summary: What could have been better:

• Fragmentation of team communication
• Content bloat (Game too big)
• Lack of early Quality Assurance
• Late asset delivery - audio and sound
• Poor coordination of localization (translation)
• Multi-player - non pausing dialog, non-protagonist characters

"What Could Have Been Better" coming from the company that never made anything as good as Baldur's Gate 2 ever again is way above my month's supply of irony.

 

[Delterius]

Especially when one of the issues isn't 'the frantic pace' of questing, rather that there's too much content.

Personally, I only felt overwhelmed in Athkatla when NPCs came to you and gave you a quest. My first return to the city was always accompanied by a frantic child, a obvious vampire and a courier, all asking me to do something. But running into quest hooks as you do quest hooks isn't a bad thing at all.

 

[Lord Andre]

Witchers are at the BG2 and Arcanum level or slightly above.

I...You...Forget it. Fuck. Whatever.

 

[Rake]

Witchers are at the BG2 and Arcanum level or slightly above.

I...You...Forget it. Fuck. Whatever.

I could have word it better. Witchers are both good as stories go, but i wasn't so keen on the writing. Granted, may be a translation thing but still it brought my enjoyment down.
Anyway, the point i was truing to make to imweasel was that a game can be good even with a simple story.
Fallout didn'tt even have a "story" like more storyfocused games, but like excidioum said Fallout had a good "RPG story" because it is written through your actions.

 

[Blaine]

So what? Fallouts also had terrible stories but were great games. The only RPGs with good stories are P:T and MotB.(Wichers are at the BG2 and Arcanum level or sligtly above)

 

[Rake]

So what? Fallouts also had terrible stories but were great games. The only RPGs with good stories are P:T and MotB.(Wichers are at the BG2 and Arcanum level or sligtly above)

View attachment 1302

o_O

 

[Lord Andre]

Rake OK.

But as long as we're on the subject, I would like to point out that story usually boils down to plot + setting + characters. The volume of words used is irrelevant to the quality of the story. For example, I consider Diablo 1 to have a good story even though it is low on number of lines of text and it takes a background role to gameplay/clickfest.

On the other hand, witcher, and more so witcher2, as story goes, is in your face from start to finish, wordy, flamboyant, constantly breaking up gameplay to take the front seat. But is it good ? Setting is fairy tales with a twist, characters are classic fantasy with a twist and yes, plot is fantasy plot with a twist. Maybe it's good but it hasn't impressed me yet. Not like PST plot, or wonderfully written character of Jon Irenicus, or immersive setting of Fallout.

Right, to end my rant: More words don't necessarily mean better story and just because story is low key it doesn't mean it's non-existant or bad.

 

[Orma]

So what? Fallouts also had terrible stories but were great games. The only RPGs with good stories are P:T and MotB.(Wichers are at the BG2 and Arcanum level or sligtly above)

:youreafag:

 

[Tommy Wiseau]

Fallout's story really isn't all that. I'm playing through it right now. The game is fun, but some things don't even make sense, like your Vault dying of thirst if you fail to bring the water chip in time. I get not wanting to leave the Vault, but still...

There's also a bunch of other muck-ups: some parts of the game are written without any regard to... sentence structure, to put it plainly. The guard at the BoS bunker is notorious for this (not Cabbot, the other one, though Cabbot stands out like a sore thumb for other reasons, too).

Comparing it to "LULZ interactive novul" Torment doesn't do it any favors, either. Avellone knows how to write, and stuff like the sensory stones at the Festhall demonstrate that.

 

[Rake]

Rake OK.

But as long as we're on the subject, I would like to point out that story usually boils down to plot + setting + characters. The volume of words used is irrelevant to the quality of the story. For example, I consider Diablo 1 to have a good story even though it is low on number of lines of text and it takes a background role to gameplay/clickfest.

On the other hand, witcher, and more so witcher2, as story goes, is in your face from start to finish, wordy, flamboyant, constantly breaking up gameplay to take the front seat. But is it good ? Setting is fairy tales with a twist, characters are classic fantasy with a twist and yes, plot is fantasy plot with a twist. Maybe it's good but it hasn't impressed me yet. Not like PST plot, or wonderfully written character of Jon Irenicus, or immersive setting of Fallout.

Right, to end my rant: More words don't necessarily mean better story and just because story is low key it doesn't mean it's non-existant or bad.

I agree. And if you consider setting as part of the story then yes Fallout has good story. Fallout has great setting and atmosphere, that is the reason i played it initially,and one of the main reasons i like it.
As for Diablo, the setting is one of the best, but i doubt anyone played it for the story. Not that the material wasn't there, but it was terribly underused, or in the backround. But if you consider story as a whole(setting,plot,characters) both Diablo and Fallout are good.

 

[Cursed Beaver]

So what? Fallouts also had terrible stories but were great games. The only RPGs with good stories are P:T and MotB.(Wichers are at the BG2 and Arcanum level or sligtly above)

View attachment 1302

o_O

Your story doesn't need to be full of philosophical themes and wall of texts of though provoking interrogations.
You don't judge a story by the number of words, or if it explore pseudo-philosophical questions or not.

I found the different BG2 intrigues to be much more enjoyable to follow than the one in torment/MotB. Torment and MotB were still very appealing, but I wouldn't put them on a pedestral like some here.
There's a lot of RPGs with good stories. But it doesn't just boil down to who is ''deeper'' than the other.

 

[Tommy Wiseau]

So what? Fallouts also had terrible stories but were great games. The only RPGs with good stories are P:T and MotB.(Wichers are at the BG2 and Arcanum level or sligtly above)

View attachment 1302

o_O

Your story doesn't need to be full of philosophical themes and wall of texts of though provoking interrogations.
You don't judge a story by the number of words, or if it explore pseudo-philosophical questions or not.

I found the different BG2 intrigue to be much more enjoyable to follow than the one in torment/MotB. Torment and MotB were still appealing, but I wouldn't put them on a pedestral like some here.
There's a lot of RPGs with good stories. But it doesn't just boil down to who is ''deeper'' than the other.

It doesn't, but Torment doesn't just have 'walls of text'. Not everyone could have written dialog for a game like Torment, but most people can write walls of text, or heck, even an NPC for Fallout 1. The writers' ability of using words is plain in a game like Torment.

 

[Rake]

So what? Fallouts also had terrible stories but were great games. The only RPGs with good stories are P:T and MotB.(Wichers are at the BG2 and Arcanum level or sligtly above)

View attachment 1302

o_O

Your story doesn't need to be full of philosophical themes and wall of texts of though provoking interrogations.
You don't judge a story by the number of words, or if it explore pseudo-philosophical questions or not.

I found the different BG2 intrigues to be much more enjoyable to follow than the one in torment/MotB. Torment and MotB were still appealing, but I wouldn't put them on a pedestral like some here.
There's a lot of RPGs with good stories. But it doesn't just boil down to who is ''deeper'' than the other.

No, i was more confused for the picture he used.
As for BG2, it's my favorite game for the reasons http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...t-eternity-thread.75947/page-639#post-2614907.
But P:T and MotB had better plots. I don't put them on a pedestral, and they weren't so fun to play as BG2. Also word count is unimportand. I never said it was what makes a good story.

 

[Blaine]

No, i was more confused for the picture he used.

Words failed me, and then even just digging up an appropriate image to reply with failed me, so I chose Spurdo Spärde because the sort of stupefaction it conveys seemed to most closely match what I experienced while reading your post.

I'm not trying to slam you with a horrible insult here. In retrospect, I think you just (as you said) didn't word your post perfectly. Fallout's story is told through its dialog (of which there is quite a bit), and yes, the choices made by the protagonist... the fucking Witcher games are shit-garbage in comparison to the Black Isle Fallout games in every single department, including sound and graphics.

 

[Rake]

No, i was more confused for the picture he used.

Words failed me, and then even just digging up an appropriate image to reply with failed me, so I chose Spurdo Spärde because the sort of stupefaction it conveys seemed to most closely match what I experienced while reading your post.

I'm not trying to slam you with a horrible insult here. In retrospect, I think you just (as you said) didn't word your post perfectly. Fallout's story is told through its dialog (of which there is quite a bit), and yes, the choices made by the protagonist... the fucking Witcher games are shit-garbage in comparison to the Black Isle Fallout games in every single department, including sound and graphics.

Updated my Spurdo Spärde.
I didn't knew what the picture was so thanks for that. Yes, in retrospect i didn't worded it good. I didn't even liked Witchers very much. But i don't think anyone played Fallout for the story of all things. Whereas i finished the witcher 1 only for the story, and i heard the Witcher 2 was better than 1( i didn't bother to play it, the only thing that made W1 tolerable was the top down camera)
As i said to Lord Andre above, if you count graphics,sound,setting and characters as part of the "story", then yes, Fallout is way ahead. I was talking strictly about plot.

 

[Duraframe300]

You can thank the drogs for pissing me off, especially C2B.

And thus I have done my patriotic duty

 

[Roguey]

Reminder that the vast majority of quests/content in New Vegas were found in or near the city itself so as usual this is a bunch of flailing over nothing.

Did Josh do the quests in New Vegas or just the gameplay mechanics.

I don't see why this is relevant. Is Josh doing the quests in Eternity or just the gameplay mechanics? There's your answer.

Yeah, the other day I tried to play Call of Duty, but after the awesome cutscenes the game was in first-person mode, and I hate first person mode, so I stopped playing. I hope the next developer fixes this.

Seriously, there are many different genres and levels of games, you don't have to make every game for everyone...

I don't know why you're assuming the people making those claims don't like RPGs. They were posting in a RPG thread after all.