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[Commander Rpg]

And perhaps most importantly, your character isn't saving the world from anything, except maybe the cancer that is his own existence. PS:T takes the idea of your typical RPG protagonist and suggests that maybe, such characters are best off going to hell, in metaphorical (or not so metaphorical) terms. There's a lot more to say here, but I'm not sure I feel like getting into spoiler territory with this already tangential post.

Many personal interpretations can be made on the not-gameplay part, but PS:T gameplay is objectively a mess, and seen from the perspective of 2015 A.D., it's a game on life support. I don't understand why there is people praising it so much today. On the same scale, Fallout 2 is a year older, and has a flawed gameplay too, and you think people could have improved from there, but no, they managed to construct an even worse piece of game, and if it wasn't for the story or character development, it would be still laying down in the earth ashes, instead of the shelves of a videogame market.

 

How the equation: amazing story, excellent character development, terrible gameplay equals to "wonderful game"?

Is a game made to be played or enjoyed through reading only? Wouldn't it be better to do simple cinematics/animations and leave out the gameplay, if this was the case?

[o Ventus]

 

Is a game made to be played or enjoyed through reading only? Wouldn't it be better to do simple cinematics/animations and leave out the gameplay, if this was the case?

1. Text-based games

[Jorji Costava]

Many personal interpretations can be made on the not-gameplay part, but PS:T gameplay is objectively a mess, and seen from the perspective of 2015 A.D., it's a game on life support. I don't understand why there is people praising it so much today. On the same scale, Fallout 2 is a year older, and has a flawed gameplay too, and you think people could have improved from there, but no, they managed to construct an even worse piece of game, and if it wasn't for the story or character development, it would be still laying down in the earth ashes, instead of the shelves of a videogame market.

 

How the equation: amazing story, excellent character development, terrible gameplay equals to "wonderful game"?

Is a game made to be played or enjoyed through reading only? Wouldn't it be better to do simple cinematics/animations and leave out the gameplay, if this was the case?

 

Not sure what it means to say that PS:T's gameplay is "objectively a mess"; does that mean if someone enjoys the game, they're just wrong about some factual matter? But more importantly, the game's dialogue and conversation system is the game's core gameplay loop; for instance, it's possible to fail conversations in PST, and many of your biggest XP rewards come from the conversations. I don't see how this element of the gameplay has dated at all, seeing as most dialogue mechanics that we see today are pretty much the same, if not significantly less sophisticated. To be honest, I think it would be significantly easier to turn modern AAA 'cinematic' games into movies than it would be with PS:T, seeing as most modern games completely divorce story and gameplay altogether in a way that PST never did.

[Commander Rpg]

Premise: I wanted to talk about "playability" and not "gameplay", which are two different things. It was my mistake.

1. Text-based games

I did know ZORK series long before this comment was made. Text-based adventures/games don't have any particular playability outside of plain text.

 

Not sure what it means to say that PS:T's gameplay is "objectively a mess"; does that mean if someone enjoys the game, they're just wrong about some factual matter? But more importantly, the game's dialogue and conversation system is the game's core gameplay loop; for instance, it's possible to fail conversations in PST, and many of your biggest XP rewards come from the conversations. I don't see how this element of the gameplay has dated at all, seeing as most dialogue mechanics that we see today are pretty much the same, if not significantly less sophisticated. To be honest, I think it would be significantly easier to turn modern AAA 'cinematic' games into movies than it would be with PS:T, seeing as most modern games completely divorce story and gameplay altogether in a way that PST never did.

If someone would like to say PS:T playability is at least objectively decent, and thus the game is wonderful because of the other factors, she cannot do it without imitating Dick Dastardly and Muttley. The combat system is chaotic, not enough responsive, bugged, so on and so forth. Other mechanics, which are part of playability, like stealth, are not quite useful as the dialogue. It's that if you're not doing a talkative character, you're losing a good percentage of what the game has to offer.

 

That said, a game which is very good in two aspects and terrible in the third, cannot be considered a masterpiece.

[Simfam]

Many personal interpretations can be made on the not-gameplay part, but PS:T gameplay is objectively a mess, and seen from the perspective of 2015 A.D., it's a game on life support. I don't understand why there is people praising it so much today. On the same scale, Fallout 2 is a year older, and has a flawed gameplay too, and you think people could have improved from there, but no, they managed to construct an even worse piece of game, and if it wasn't for the story or character development, it would be still laying down in the earth ashes, instead of the shelves of a videogame market.

 

How the equation: amazing story, excellent character development, terrible gameplay equals to "wonderful game"?

Is a game made to be played or enjoyed through reading only? Wouldn't it be better to do simple cinematics/animations and leave out the gameplay, if this was the case?

 

Cos the writing's good enough to overlook gameplay.

 

Don't give af about gameplay, or at least, very little.

 

Give me shyt like the Witcher 2, Planescape, and Dreamfall pls.

 

Unless it's frustratingly annoying.

 

F-ck that stupid-ass controlled AI party in P3.

 

Look at you Ms. Imma heal myself and not the MC at 2HP-tan

 

If someone would like to say PS:T playability is at least objectively decent, and thus the game is wonderful because of the other factors, she cannot do it without imitating Dick Dastardly and Muttley. The combat system is chaotic, not enough responsive, bugged, so on and so forth. Other mechanics, which are part of playability, like stealth, are not quite useful as the dialogue. It's that if you're not doing a talkative character, you're losing a good percentage of what the game has to offer.

 

Then play within the game's limits.

 

lol nobody plays a pacifist in Dragon Age, do they?

 

Which wackjob of a fail would play PS:T as a reserved, quiet type of guy?

 

And tbh you sort of can and get the best parts of the main story.

[Simfam]

PS:T is easy to namedrop but I get more triggered by people doing the same with Mass Effect or BioShock honestly.

The "artistic integrity" and "Citizen Kane of gaming" angles pushed by the media was particularly galling because it made the snobbery hipsterism socially acceptable and mainstream. Whereas PS:T is still a niche thing to be snobbish about.

FFS, they don't even know what that phrase means. Citizen Kane was groundbreaking not because it had a "2deep4u story with symbolism" as the gaming press would have you believe, it's legacy was the proliferation of new cinematic techniques (cinematography) and ideas that would later become standard, while having a compelling story to go with it. Marriage of technique and narrative.

Gaming's Citizen Kane came in 1991 and it was Ultima Underworld. Both are examples of incredibly important milestones in their respective mediums but because of that, they have not aged well at all. Simply because many of the groundbreaking ideas they brought to the table have since been iterated and refined.

 

PST is more like the 'lolnope' of the tabletop RPG experience. Twisted shyt around real good.

 

Not Citizen Kane or whatever.

 

So yeah, good post, Crusty.

[A Crusty Knight Of Colour]

Avellone is a very good trope inverter. Between PS:T and KotOR 2, I'm convinced he is a much better writer when he's given a setting and familiar premises/stories to twist and warp than when he has to start from scratch.

[In Exile]

Avellone is a very good trope inverter. Between PS:T and KotOR 2, I'm convinced he is a much better writer when he's given a setting and familiar premises/stories to twist and warp than when he has to start from scratch.

I'm not sure I'd agree he's not at inverting tropes because I'm not sure that captures what he's done in KoTOR2 really well. Even his PST work isn't exactly a trope intenverter if you ask me. And I think in between PST, KoTOR2, MoTB and POE you see Avellone retread a lot of the same ideas and principles. Don't get me wrong - he's great at his style, he's now very consistent in it, and it's by no means close to what others do. I just don't think inversion is the right word.

[Simfam]

Avellone is a very good trope inverter. Between PS:T and KotOR 2, I'm convinced he is a much better writer when he's given a setting and familiar premises/stories to twist and warp than when he has to start from scratch.

 

It's why I hold KOTOR2 in such high regards. Hell, I prefer it over the first by a mile.

 

I'm not sure I'd agree he's not at inverting tropes because I'm not sure that captures what he's done in KoTOR2 really well.

 

Well he did toss away the manichaeism of that universe and turned it on its head. 

 

Though to be fair I'm not that familiar with SW universe, so it's not my place to say that.

 

I can argue for Planescape, though. The man is very good at twisting around certain cliches and such.

 

Take Fall-From-Grace, for example. Succubi are always the 'evil temptress' in these things, yet he took one, turned her around and made her into a fleshed out, fully interactive companion of all things.

 

I don't need to cite any more examples than the one dude before this did. It's pretty much a given that PST is a twist on the typical adventuring experience.

 

ETA:  Hell, right outside the Mortuary there's an old woman who completely takes the p!ss out the Adventurer trope. She says things along the lines of

 

"No! I don't know where the blacksmith is!" or "I'm so fed up of you 'Adventurers' asking me for directions."

[The Love Runner]

One of us. One of us.

Embrace that Mountain Dew.

You can add Playstation to the mix, because it looks like marketing will team up with the brand over Xbox!

[The Love Runner]

Are they doing it in promotion for Black Ops III?

Yeah.

[Commander Rpg]

NwN2 is definitely a buried stillborn child. There is nothing right about that game, except for the expansion that, however, doesn't introduce any fix to the nastiness of the game itself, save for (they say) story, narration and character development.

KotOR 2 is simply an unfinished game, and it is to be judged accordingly, inferior to KotOR but not a mediocre game.

[A Crusty Knight Of Colour]

Neverwinter Nights 2 was a crap shoot. What made the first game was persistent multiplayer and Obsidian wasted it's time trying to implement a new 3D renderer instead of working on base functionality, bugs and content implementation.

It's why Josh Sawyer is held in high regard internally, the project was so mismanaged before Sawyer came in, that 6 months before release they weren't even sure if they could finish anything at all, let alone something good and polished.

They were able to whip things into shape under Sawyer's direction and Neverwinter Nights 2 came out on schedule. It was buggy and mediocre but it was finished with all the features they had promised to implement. Which was something Obsidian wasn't sure they could do.

Incidentally, the former lead who made such a meal of the project left Obsidian to go work for BioWare where he was lead designer in Awakening and a senior designer for Dragon Age II.

He now works for Bethesda and I suspect is one of the major designers on Fallout 4. Just a little background for all that. Ferret's body of work as a whole seems to be fairly solid so I'm thinking that NWN 2 was an anomaly for him. But because of that, I wouldn't trust him to lead a fully fledged game (not expansion or DLC) from the ground up.