Huh? EU is a turn-based game, just like Civilization.
EDIT: Oh, now I get it. You mean because EU keeps running unless you pause it, while you have to hit a button to move a year ahead in Civ.
EU is a RTWP game (much like DA). No turns at all in there.....
Technology is a deflationary force. Technological advancement should make things cheaper to build, not more expensive.Yeah but compared to a modern game like Inquisition, Torment was a text adventure with a few sprites. The market has changed. 15 years ago, nobody expected professional voice-acting, movie-like cinematics, modern high-end graphics, 3D environments, etc.
You're comparing two very different games in very different contexts and saying that because one did something on a financially and technically much smaller scale, the other should do it too.
I would argue that the voice acting and cinematics actually interfere with emotional engagement. Both serve to deprive the player of control over his character, thus creating emotional and intellectual distance between player and his character.Voiced characters and visual storytelling are hardly negatives when they so strongly enhance emotional engagement with a story-oriented game.
And I disagree with that approach. Swinging too far in the other direction leads us to MUDs, and text-based roleplaying games which, while they serve a purpose, disconnect me as a player much more than a lack of freedom does when it's presented well. When there is little-to-no graphical representation then I'm forced fill in all the blanks. This may work for some, but I can get a better experience in those instances on a tabletop, or by flipping pages of my favorite books, and I've played very few games that can stack up to those two mediums in the areas that they excel at, storytelling and freedom, respectively.
The approach removes a whole layer of why I play games, and why I enjoy them. To dip into someone else's world, play around with some of their characters, hear, play, read, their story, and fight in their combat, using their rules. Total freedom diminishes entire aspects of why I play RPGs, while a tightly-knit-narrative, and solid visuals, music, and presentation enhance it.
EU is a RTWP game (much like DA). No turns at all in there.....
I've only played Europa Universalis IV, and that is absolutely turn-based. Was the first EU different?
Technology is a deflationary force. Technological advancement should make things cheaper to build, not more expensive.
It does. Creating a game like they were made 15 years ago is cheaper today than it was then.
I would argue that the voice acting and cinematics actually interfere with emotional engagement. Both serve to deprive the player of control over his character, thus creating emotional and intellectual distance between player and his character.
Furthermore, a tightly knit authored narrative is an impediment to roleplaying, and it's roleplaying that creates the emotional connection between the player and his characters. Using tools to enhance story-driven gameplay with inhibit that emotional connection, not enhance it.
I think it's been thoroughly established that your experience is an outlier 
Voiced characters and cinematics don't distance me from the game, they immerse me in it. Having my avatar be silent while everyone else can talk is an artificial divide that takes me out of the game. And hearing a line and reading it instead of just reading it doesn't remove control, it gives you additional information. Without the spoken component, you can only guess how a line is meant to be delivered. Meanwhile the other characters are assumed to hear it and will react to it as if it was delivered in a particular way.
A tight story doesn't impede roleplaying if you're clear about the role you're playing. You can't expect the game to work with all possible ideas someone might have about their character. You got to meat it half way. I mean, it's not like I'm going to be upset because I wanted to play the Inquisitor as just waiting for the right moment to betray everyone to Corpyheus but the game never supported me in that.
I've only played Europa Universalis IV, and that is absolutely turn-based. Was the first EU different?
Err....no. EUIV is not turn based. It's completely real time, just with the ability to pause it at will.
And this is where we diverge.Voiced characters and cinematics don't distance me from the game, they immerse me in it. Having my avatar be silent while everyone else can talk is an artificial divide that takes me out of the game. And hearing a line and reading it instead of just reading it doesn't remove control, it gives you additional information. Without the spoken component, you can only guess how a line is meant to be delivered. Meanwhile the other characters are assumed to hear it and will react to it as if it was delivered in a particular way.
That only works, though, if the game is up front about those restrictions (DA2 and the ME games fail horribly on this point - DAI does pretty well). And within those restrictions, there still needs to be space to roleplay. The player still needs to be making decisions on behalf of his character, and not have those decisions made for him.A tight story doesn't impede roleplaying if you're clear about the role you're playing. You can't expect the game to work with all possible ideas someone might have about their character. You got to meat it half way. I mean, it's not like I'm going to be upset because I wanted to play the Inquisitor as just waiting for the right moment to betray everyone to Corpyheus but the game never supported me in that.
Err....no. EUIV is not turn based. It's completely real time, just with the ability to pause it at will.
Nah. 1 day = 1 turn, just like in Crusader Kings II, isn't it? Nothing takes less than a day in those games, that's the smallest unit of time everything works on, and you can't unpause-pause to let "half a day" go by - nothing happens in the game before the day is over. In pauseable real time game (Command & Conquer, say), stuff would be happening the moment you unpause. In CK2 and EUIV, stuff happens turn by turn.
The Dragon Age games are pausable real-time. CK2 and EUIV (if memory serves) aren't.
The only difference between those things is that you can discern the time units.Nah. 1 day = 1 turn, just like in Crusader Kings II, isn't it? Nothing takes less than a day in those games, that's the smallest unit of time everything works on, and you can't unpause-pause to let "half a day" go by - nothing happens in the game before the day is over. In pauseable real time game (Command & Conquer, say), stuff would be happening the moment you unpause. In CK2 and EUIV, stuff happens turn by turn.
The Dragon Age games are pausable real-time. CK2 and EUIV (if memory serves) aren't.
@Stanojez: In roleplaying - you're supposed to determine how a line is meant to be delivered. It's sorta the point of roleplaying.
Though I will disagree with Sylvius that NPC reactions don't matter.
In a cRPG - limited little things that they are - you're only going to get a limited amount of responses - so coding the NPC responses is desirable (for me), but tell me how my PC thinks or feels or how a line is intended is not desirable (for me).
I don't mind tighter knit narratives - I've played some strong tabletop that heavily lead by the nose. It's not a huge offense - because the players in tabletop know they could, if they want to be total a-holes, break the narrative and just do their own thing. Of course, some tabletop is far more freeform so "doing your own thing" is expected.
I don't have any impression of what a cRPG should be - they're all inferior to tabletop and I give them a huge amount of leeway which probably saves me from the nerd superiority exhibited throughout threads like this.
And this is where we diverge.
We don't need to guess how the line is delivered. We decide how the line is delivered. The player is the only person who can know the mind of the protagonist. The writers can't, because there's no way for the game to provide that much information to the player in order to allow the player to make in-character decisions. As such, those details about the character's mind need to come from the player. Every time.
And the NPC reactions don't matter, because people aren't predictable in that way. We can never know why other people do what they do.
If you're already ignoring a big chunk of the personal interactions that happen in the game - NPC reactions - then why not ignore the delivery of the protagonist's dialogue, too?
And no, we don't decide how a line is delivered. There is no mechanism in Origins to tell the game how a line was delivered, yet it certainly was delivery in a particular way in the fictional reality told to us by the game. It's like saying there are no toilets on the starship Enterprise because we don't ever see someone use them in Star Trek. An aspect of the setting that would be congruent with reality but only implied to exists can't be taken to not exist.
That only works, though, if the game is up front about those restrictions (DA2 and the ME games fail horribly on this point - DAI does pretty well). And within those restrictions, there still needs to be space to roleplay. The player still needs to be making decisions on behalf of his character, and not have those decisions made for him.
That's why the paraphrase is so dangerous, as it deprives the player of vital information.
re: restrictions
How do you figure? Hawke and Shepard are much more strongly defined as characters than the far more vague protagonists in Origins and Inquisition, and as such they offer clear guidelines on what would be appropriate ideas about them and what not. And I've made tons of character-driven decisions in all the ME and DA games. I'm not sure I understand your issue here.
Nah. 1 day = 1 turn, just like in Crusader Kings II, isn't it? Nothing takes less than a day in those games, that's the smallest unit of time everything works on, and you can't unpause-pause to let "half a day" go by - nothing happens in the game before the day is over. In pauseable real time game (Command & Conquer, say), stuff would be happening the moment you unpause. In CK2 and EUIV, stuff happens turn by turn.
The Dragon Age games are pausable real-time. CK2 and EUIV (if memory serves) aren't.
I have never come across the fact that PDox games use observably discrete minimum time units used as a justification for calling them turn-based before....
@Stanojez: In roleplaying - you're supposed to determine how a line is meant to be delivered. It's sorta the point of roleplaying.
1) To me, that's not the point of roleplaying, and 2) you don't get to decide how a line is delivered, whether the line is spoken or in text. Either way the NPCs won't react to the line until after it's selected, and they will react to it as if it was delivered a certain way.
The only difference between those things is that you can discern the time units.
In a very abstract way, that's true. Being able to interact with the game while paused - give orders, zoom around the map, look stuff up - is the big difference, I think. If you can't do that at leisure, but must do it while a fight develops, it's real time.
In a very abstract way, that's true. Being able to interact with the game while paused - give orders, zoom around the map, look stuff up - is the big difference, I think. If you can't do that at leisure, but must do it while a fight develops, it's real time.
And a real time game you can pause (e.g. games made by companies like Bioware and PDox) is....a RTWP game. Not a turn based one....
I have never come across the fact that PDox games use observably discrete minimum time units used as a justification for calling them turn-based before....
To tell the truth, my main criterion to tell whether a game is turn-based or real-time is "does playing it stress me the **** out?"
To tell the truth, my main criterion to tell whether a game is turn-based or real-time is "does playing it stress me the **** out?"
Hehe....I do somewhat know what you mean. For me, any game where I can't pause and think about things - unless I'm controlling something small scale like a single character or the pace is very slow - is too stressful 
Technology is a deflationary force. Technological advancement should make things cheaper to build, not more expensive.
By this definition any game is turn-based. It's just that the C&C turns are so short that you can't pause and unpause without a few of them executing.Nah. 1 day = 1 turn, just like in Crusader Kings II, isn't it? Nothing takes less than a day in those games, that's the smallest unit of time everything works on, and you can't unpause-pause to let "half a day" go by - nothing happens in the game before the day is over. In pauseable real time game (Command & Conquer, say), stuff would be happening the moment you unpause. In CK2 and EUIV, stuff happens turn by turn..
And a real time game you can pause (e.g. games made by companies like Bioware and PDox) is....a RTWP game. Not a turn based one....
I can unpause EU and yet nothing can happen until an in-game day ticks over, possibly several real-time seconds later. How can that be real-time and not turn-based? In Command & Conquer, or Dragon Age, events will continue to unfold the moment I unpause, with no observable delay. They're real-time.
I mean, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of it EVERY computer game is ultimately turn-based, what with being run on a computer, but that's a rabbit hole I don't want to go down.
We don't need to guess how the line is delivered. We decide how the line is delivered. The player is the only person who can know the mind of the protagonist. The writers can't, because there's no way for the game to provide that much information to the player in order to allow the player to make in-character decisions. As such, those details about the character's mind need to come from the player. Every time.
Except that how a line is delivered is *not* in a player's mind, it's out there in the world for other characters to see and hear. You can be as cool and collected with the line in your head as you want, but if the writers think you were yelling in someone's face, then that is what you were doing, and everyone around you will think you're an *******. Being able to headcanon a different delivery is a delusion.
I think I can save some time here. Sylvius' position, as I undrstand it, is that what the writers think the NPCs hear when the PC speaks is irrelevant. He's going to make his own mental model for why the NPCs react the way they do anyway, and it doesn't really matter if that model diverges from the writers' understanding of that conversation.
This isn't my preferred approach to interpretation, but it works on its own terms.
I understand his position, but it seems to me that if you are headcanoning your delivery, and then the NPCs react in a way that totally clashes with your delivery, so then you have to headcanon why they all reacted that way in order to make the whole thing make sense, then you may as well go write fan-fiction, because at that point you've just replaced a whole conversation with a totally different one that you made up in your head.
I understand his position, but it seems to me that if you are headcanoning your delivery, and then the NPCs react in a way that totally clashes with your delivery, so then you have to headcanon why they all reacted that way in order to make the whole thing make sense, then you may as well go write fan-fiction, because at that point you've just replaced a whole conversation with a totally different one that you made up in your head.
Yeah, that's why his approach seems so strange to me. If nothing that happens "actually" happens, then it doesn't matter whether a line is textually paraphrased, spoken, or signed in ASL. So why argue the evils of voice and paraphrase when you're ignoring what's being said anyway?
I think I can save some time here. Sylvius' position, as I undrstand it, is that what the writers think the NPCs hear when the PC speaks is irrelevant. He's going to make his own mental model for why the NPCs react the way they do anyway, and it doesn't really matter if that model diverges from the writers' understanding of that conversation.
This isn't my preferred approach to interpretation, but it works on its own terms.
And I respect that it works for them, but I do disagree with it.
Generally speaking, whatever floats someone's boat. That said, this has been some of the most civil and interesting discussion this thread has produced, and while I respect their opinion, and them, as they seem like a rather fine mage, if a bit mad, I disagree with their stance and interpretation.
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