Joe Krow said:
Your response is wholely unsatisfactory.
1) Is irrelevant (but I am proud of you). Saying Morrowind is a first person roleplaying game is not a stretch and you are the exception not the rule.
2) Look up the word "discovery." Cross referance that with the word "create." Everything that is discovered was already there... thus they are discovered. Are you saying the attitude of your enemy is static? If so that is nothing to hold against the game. Few games are programed to have the enemies mmake value judgments and it certainly didn't affect my enjoyment of the game. A close correlation can be found with...
3) The rival factions create limitations for the player... joining one precludes aniother. Alternate endings are not such a concern for me if I "enjoyed the ride." If you meant something else please elaborate. Your metaphor about painting did not imply anything more but I am curious what you would rather see. Did you read too many Choose Your Own Adventure books in your childhood? They were fun. If yes turn to page... My favorite game was Ultima IV and it had none of that.
4) Pure opinion. (One I disagree with).
all responses are always unsatisfactory. they're also meaningless and completely inane. welcome to the internet, enjoy your stay.
1) all distinctions are irrelevant. what they put on the box is irrelevant. all i know is it if puts pixels on the screen i interact with and pisses off the wife, it's a game... or porn too, i guess. some i enjoy more than others.
2) static creep is an xp advancement tool, dressed up in a myriad of shapes, sizes and skill challenge. one does not discover a... whatever the fuck those annoying birds were called, skyracer? no matter really, one enjoys the encounter or they don't of that particular brand, grinds the fuck out them until they reach the next arbitrary level of advancement or wishes whatever dev thought them up is taken outside and shot, in the nuts. they remain as they are. sometimes all three in various degrees.
discovery, actual discovery, of 'enemies' is rare in games. sometimes there's no need for it, due to historical reference or is heavily lore dependent... nazis, tolkein's orcs, imperial stormtroopers, yada yada yada... most of the time however, devs tend to rely on preconditioning in order to create an emotional disposition towards said creep/mob. good, bad... i dunno... most shitty authors use the tool as well.
let's take orcs as the example though. in the gothic series they're unidimensional and pretty bland. pb relies on the gamers previous experience with orcs as a concept in other games and in fiction. the orcs in warcraft, crying little pussies once they gave up their demon blood rage, regardless as the series progressed they're slowly discovered by the player with a fleshed out story and background. even if one had no experience with them at all, over the course of a well made game could actually come to discover them. now warhammer orcs or orks... all around fucking win for so many reasons... really, i don't need to go on. fucking pinnacle of an evolved 'enemy' just waiting to be discovered by a new player or through the eyes of a new pc for a player who's familiar with them already.
granted, gw has had some twenty years to flesh them out, but even in the earliest iterations were unique and not simply thrown up as 'the grind of the day'. they also have a hook that draws you in makes you want to 'discover' them.
stumbling across a mob you haven't seen before isn't 'discovery' if they're nothing more than a tool to get you to the next level. not to say that beth hasn't done this at times, in fact they've even done it well now and then, but you use the term too liberally for just another encounter.
before you go and run your mouth again, that ain't semantics. if it does nothing to further the game world, other than add xp to your bar the colour it comes in is meaningless. everything, every piece, every mob, every character can and should add life to the world, but is often not in order to pander to the power junkies. the two can coexist but the lesser path is so often taken.
3) in soviet russia, role plays you. even with the finite limitations of dvd space and dev time, hacking away choices rather than changing them later on is a poor mechanic. if you remove the ability to interact with one house, guild, club, circle jerk, et al simply because the player choses another, then it becomes a system of pathing, the factions themselves remain meaningless. could be the fighters guild, could the ice cream man's union, other than the colour you wind up with on your clothes it makes no difference, since no one other than the pc and maybe the odd pc is affected.
think about the word canvas, think about the start of a game, one where the pc is supposed to have an effect on the world. save it, change it, destroy it... the after should be notably different from the start. you take it too far and you have a smear like oblivion, i've already explained how morrowind turns out.
4) the 'sandbox' is pretty much a bethesda invention. it's a concept they've pioneered over the years and had both bright and low points with. it does have rpg conventions and holdovers, which i feel are sorta useless and they don't do very well, or haven't since daggerfall. they forge a decent path when it comes to game world design but seem to lose the vision. we're not talking about the mechanics that guide character action through that world, be they simple like a health bar and ammo, or more detailed with various 'stats' and 'skills' determining just how likely those actions are to succeed.
i think those conventions are stale and do more to harm the genre now that help it really. it locks the game into shallow design paths, killing innovation. other than numbers on a page and the old 'check and roll' they serve no purpose when the technology is there to totally do away with them. gonna take a company with real vision to do that and real savvy to actually pull it off. looking forward to that and i hope it catches me completely by surprise.
when you said '90% of games revolve around these' you were right, like how a broken clock is right twice a day, or why kids with downs occassionally say funny shit. thinking you're supah familiar with the second one... now go play in traffic.
