1067 réponses à ce sujet

[nikki191]

the original poster asked what happened to this being an rpg.. the answer is simple with mass effect 2 there is a larger customer base for gears of war, and FPS games than their is for rpg games, so thats obviously the market they are aiming for now.

the weapon dlc's is more evidence of that, the twitch shooter hammerhead missions again are evidence of that.

i expect no rpg elements in ME3

Modifié par nikki191, 03 avril 2010 - 04:33 .

[Aven]

I am really glad they went the way they did.

Although I miss the loot parts and equipment screens a lot (I never got why people complained about it taking to much time converting stuff to omnigel, I love having a use for loot I don't need, even if it's minor)



The combat is just amazing now. It's a fast paced immersive cover shooter that really hit the sweet spot for me.

You really feel the weapons you fire (Widow, Carnifex, Claymore)

The skills are really fun to use (Adrenaline rush, Biotic Charge)

And the fact that not all new weapons you get are better then the previous one at all occations is neat.



If this game got anywhere close to Dragon Age, I wouldn't touch it with a spoon.

DA:O's story is probably amazing, but the animations and gameplay is really non-immersive imo. I usually love this kind of game, but DA:O just didn't stick. I have tried several times to get into it, I just can't.



What I don't get, is that they didn't do both. Keep some loot and a bit more advanced money system, maybe crafting etc.. and still keep the awesome action. Would also be great if they avoided missable items. I am a min-maxer, and a game quickly loses it's appeal if you are able to bork your character

[Dudeman315]

I am a min-maxer, and a game quickly gains it's appeal if you are able to bork your character. If you can just pick random crap and it might as well be a poorly done shooter. You can bork your character in CoD:MW2 for crying out load. Good customization requires thought not twitch shooter, spin and fire.

[Aven]

Dudeman315 wrote...

I am a min-maxer, and a game quickly gains it's appeal if you are able to bork your character. If you can just pick random crap and it might as well be a poorly done shooter. You can bork your character in CoD:MW2 for crying out load. Good customization requires thought not twitch shooter, spin and fire.

Agree to some extent, but it also requires you to know what lies ahead in the game.
If you need a certain amount of stats to wear an armor, and you don't know that you can get stats from quests, so you waste your lvl-up stat gains for it. You broke it.
If you are suddently able to choose between 3 different weapons for a character, and you have no idea which weapon does what for your class and you pick the wrong one. You broke it.
If you max a squad mates ammo power so he can share it with you before you find out that you can get bonus talents into an even better ammo (and there are no squad-respecs). You broke it.
And since I mentioned missables... there are the weapon upgrades. Most people miss a few during their first playthrough... and since there is no way to get back to where they were. Arf...

I am not saying you shouldn't think before you place your stats, but it's not possible without knowing all of the game mechanics and exceptions to these mechanics.

[Terror_K]

Actually, many RPG's show you most of your attainable skills before you can even get them, so you should exactly where you can go and be able to see and plan ahead. In cRPG's the exception tends to be the hidden prestige classes or skills you don't know about until you've unlocked them. This is actually fairly key in P&P RPG's for you to plan your character ahead (for example, in the current Star Wars Saga Edition game I play I've planned my character up to Level 20 with their feats and talents, as well as choosing which prestige class to take and when). Many cRPG's allow this and Mass Effect has been no exception thus far (you can highlight each skill and its level and see what it gives you). In Mass Effect 2's case though, it's pretty much impossible to bork your character and break them (and even if you could it allows you to reset all your skills anyway). You could in the original game on the harder difficulty levels, but you'd have to be pretty careless.

[Pocketgb]

Dudeman315 wrote...

I am a min-maxer, and a game quickly gains it's appeal if you are able to bork your character. If you can just pick random crap and it might as well be a poorly done shooter.

Eh, that's kind of what I did for ME1. Success in that game didn't rely on much. The hardest parts were on Insanity when you were like level 9 and you'd go to a UNSC mission.

Dudeman315 wrote...

Good customization requires thought not twitch shooter, spin and fire.

Probably why they refer to the ME series as an Action-RPG, not just an RPG.

As a sidenote, "borking" your character in MW2 isn't entirely intended...

Modifié par Pocketgb, 06 avril 2010 - 07:29 .

[Dudeman315]

If you are suddently able to choose between 3 different weapons for a character, and you have no idea which weapon does what for your class and you pick the wrong one. You broke it.





Like 3 pistols without stats and you actually have to go into combat a test which is better--like in ME2

[Dudeman315]

As a sidenote, "borking" your character in MW2 isn't entirely intended...



It's hardly ever intended just that you have enough customization that it's possible!

[Xpheyel]

Pocketgb wrote...

Dudeman315 wrote...

I am a min-maxer, and a game quickly gains it's appeal if you are able to bork your character. If you can just pick random crap and it might as well be a poorly done shooter.

Eh, that's kind of what I did for ME1. Success in that game didn't rely on much. The hardest parts were on Insanity when you were like level 9 and you'd go to a UNSC mission.

Thats what I don't understand. I felt like Mass Effect builds had a range from 'game is still winnable' when I just throw points around to 'demigod' when you actually pay attention and stack cooldown bonuses... Not being able to do stuff like chain Master Marksman perpetually and turn your sidearms into recoilless, heatless, monsters with infinite ammo is a good thing in my book.

I'm all for stat manipulation with proper balance... That is not ME1's stat system by any stretch of the imagination. 

[Dudeman315]

Xpheyel wrote...

Pocketgb wrote...

Dudeman315 wrote...

I am a min-maxer, and a game quickly gains it's appeal if you are able to bork your character. If you can just pick random crap and it might as well be a poorly done shooter.

Eh, that's kind of what I did for ME1. Success in that game didn't rely on much. The hardest parts were on Insanity when you were like level 9 and you'd go to a UNSC mission.

Thats what I don't understand. I felt like Mass Effect builds had a range from 'game is still winnable' when I just throw points around to 'demigod' when you actually pay attention and stack cooldown bonuses... Not being able to do stuff like chain Master Marksman perpetually and turn your sidearms into recoilless, heatless, monsters with infinite ammo is a good thing in my book.

I'm all for stat manipulation with proper balance... That is not ME1's stat system by any stretch of the imagination. 

No such thing as proper balance if choice is meaningful . . .

And see here is where we differ, I want to go from noob to god!  It's what I call progression.  If everything levels with you you can kill a god ala Oblivion at level one--heck it's easier than doing it at level one than level 10--why even have levels? 

Infinite ammo exsisted without you doing anything so please don't use it in your argument. You had it in both builds so it's not a relevant point. 

I like it when there are challenges that you need to be a certain level or higher to beat because the enemy is that hardcore not this fluffy even challenge is lvl 1. If I had this on pc I'd do a level 1 run(moded for +1 xp per mission).

[Xpheyel]

Dudeman315 wrote...
No such thing as proper balance if choice is meaningful . . .

And see here is where we differ, I want to go from noob to god!  It's what I call progression.  If everything levels with you you can kill a god ala Oblivion at level one--heck it's easier than doing it at level one than level 10--why even have levels? 

Infinite ammo exsisted without you doing anything so please don't use it in your argument. You had it in both builds so it's not a relevant point.

I like it when there are challenges that you need to be a certain level or higher to beat because the enemy is that hardcore not this fluffy even challenge is lvl 1. If I had this on pc I'd do a level 1 run(moded for +1 xp per mission).

About ammo, I just meant that a heatless, recoilless gun is not necessarily over powered if you can only shoot it once or it takes 5 seconds to charge up or something. The conjunction losing many limitations that makes breaks it in my opinion. 

/Shrug.

Guess we'll never see eye to eye then. I have no problem getting more powerful but I want the mooks to keep pace with me (though usually with different/more complex behavior than just having them scale HP). If the enemies aren't a legitimate threat, I get bored. 

And I have to disagree about balancing. Perfect balance is impossible, but to me your selections and specializations should determine how you play (which is what gives it the impact in my opinion), one set of options shouldn't be a clear winner on effectiveness. The weapon choice covers some of that for me in ME2. Pro and cons, trade offs. That to me is what the essence what I wish the stat and upgrade systems were in both games. 

Modifié par Xpheyel, 06 avril 2010 - 06:05 .

[Dudeman315]

Xpheyel wrote...

Guess we'll never see eye to eye then. I have no problem getting more powerful but I want the mooks to keep pace with me. If the enemies are not a legitimate threat, I get bored. 

Then you are not really getting more powerful--if it take 10 shot to kill mook A at lvl 1 and 10 shots to kill mook A at lvl100 then did you really get more powerful just because 100 is greater than 1?

Or I guess define more powerful vs same power level in a auto lvling sense,(and please no lvl 10 enemies are more powerful cause it says lvl 10) if you could please(Hoping this doesn't come off snarky because I'd really like to know the other perspective on this)?

There should be a reward to grinding xp and playing playing to maximum effectiveness.  Oblivion is my perfect example of the worst autoleveling enemies--it actually was worst to lvl than to play athe whole game at lvl 1.

I don't think that ME2 had bad autoleveling for a shooter but leveling was never really an issue since with level 4 incerate + weapons I never needed another power on low lvls and on higher difficulties all I need to add was stealth for about 4 battles because of infinte xp-less enemies or flying death lotuses(can't remember what they are called) or hitting the last valve(speeds things up by not fighting).

And yes there should always be enemies that can give you a challenge just not the same goblin for 100 lvls.

Modifié par Dudeman315, 06 avril 2010 - 05:47 .

[Aven]

Dudeman315 wrote...


Like 3 pistols without stats and you actually have to go into combat a test which is better--like in ME2

No like: Do you want Assault rifle, sniper rifle or a shotgun. You have no idea how they work compared to the weapons you have and you can never go back and redo your choice, and because you had no idea this choice was coming, you couldn't make a save right before either.
Like I said in an earlier post; missables. Ruining your skill build in ME2 is a non-issue because of respecs, however, it's a problem for squad mates.. etc..

English is not my first language, but I am hoping I am getting the point across anyway.

[Xpheyel]

Dudeman315 wrote...

Xpheyel wrote...

Guess we'll never see eye to eye then. I have no problem getting more powerful but I want the mooks to keep pace with me. If the enemies are not a legitimate threat, I get bored. 

Then you are not really getting more powerful--if it take 10 shot to kill mook A at lvl 1 and 10 shots to kill mook A at lvl100 then did you really get more powerful just because 100 is greater than 1?

Or I guess define more powerful vs same power level in a auto lvling sense,(and please no lvl 10 enemies are more powerful cause it says lvl 10) if you could please(Hoping this doesn't come off snarky because I'd really like to know the other perspective on this)?

Edited late, but ideally there would be more kinds of mooks, more mooks, or other external game mechanics that force me to change how I deal with them. If I'm facing off against the same guys over and over they're probably not going to be very tricky/engaging because I (should have anyway) learned their strengths and weaknesses earlier. And to elaborate, I guess there is nothing wrong with keeping Mook A around as canon fodder as long as he's just there to catch bullets for some other baddy.

Let me put it this way, in Mass Effect 1, I can have like a 10m radius lift on Ilos right if I bring a leveled biotic along? If we're still fighting the same Geth types they ought to be coming at me in dispersed clusters and larger numbers than before, so I can't neutralize most of the group with one power and pistol them to death... Which is what actually ends up happening. 

Like the platforms in the Collector base in ME2 are kind of a joke in comparison with the platforms on the Collector ship. There aren't even Scions a lot of the time and now I'm level 30. Though the valves/bubble can be a decent switch up, depending on your class to some extent.

What if they add a guy who recharges the other Collector's barriers or a barrier recharging device you had to knock them away from with physics skills? Things like that. 

Modifié par Xpheyel, 06 avril 2010 - 06:29 .

[Dudeman315]

Totally agree with more diversified enemies--as long a geth A is still geth A adding geth B for difficulty is totally cool because geth A dies like I've gained more power but geth B makes them harder to kill. Which allows strategy--kill geth B first then clean up geth A.

Modifié par Dudeman315, 06 avril 2010 - 06:43 .

[Pocketgb]

Dudeman315 wrote...

No such thing as proper balance if choice is meaningful . . .

You sure as hell don't need crap like Immunity in the game, that's for sure.

Dudeman315 wrote...

And see here is where we differ, I want to go from noob to god!  It's what I call progression...

We like to progress, we just don't like it when doing so the game becomes more and more breeze-eazy. We want to get our new tools and perks but we also want to test it on foes worthy of such. ME1 did this, with the game starting out somewhat difficult and getting brainless near the end. It's something that a few of us hope to avoid with Action-RPGs.

Dudeman315 wrote...

I like it when there are challenges that you need to be a certain level or higher to beat because the enemy is that hardcore not this fluffy even challenge is lvl 1. If I had this on pc I'd do a level 1 run(moded for +1 xp per mission).

Because then it doesn't feel enough like the challenge is in the encounter itself, just that the bad guy is a high level. In order to kill a certain elite in WoW, I would grind and do quests to beat that thing's level - and that I'd kill it. It did not feel very cool knowing that the only reason I could a powerful foe was that I killed rats for a few hours.

[TJSolo]

Pocketgb wrote...
You sure as hell don't need crap like Immunity in the game, that's for sure.

An exploitable power that people exploited, not a problem of the overall mechanics. The mechanics of the game worked fine, there were out-liers that needed rebalancing with end game in mind. Then again that is a developer problem. A player that has a problem with Immunity or some powers being too strong, should very simply limit their own use.
A kin to how players know about cheats but do not use them.
Self control and restraint.

We like to progress, we just don't like it when doing so the game becomes more and more breeze-eazy. We want to get our new tools and perks but we also want to test it on foes worthy of such. ME1 did this, with the game starting out somewhat difficult and getting brainless near the end. It's something that a few of us hope to avoid with Action-RPGs.

Who is this 'We'? The 'We' you are talking about sound confused and contradictory. As that 'We' seem to want a CoD type reward system, which is not character progression it is just increased armory and perks. That 'We' would be best suited to keeping their ideas of progression kept in pure shooters or platformers where the characters never progress but just get a little better offering of weapons. Now for Action-RPGs, lets not be ignorant of the RPG elements. One such element would be character development like stats and powers.
The character progression of ME1 added to the replayability in that a character started pretty weak and devoid of powers/stats and then progressed to the end game full of powers/stats. ME1s concept and implementation was fine but being the first iteration improvement is possible. Bioware improved their concept of progression in DAO but ME2 the progression is shallow by comparision to both RPGs and the Shooters of this era.

Because then it doesn't feel enough like the challenge is in the encounter itself, just that the bad guy is a high level. In order to kill a certain elite in WoW, I would grind and do quests to beat that thing's level - and that I'd kill it. It did not feel very cool knowing that the only reason I could a powerful foe was that I killed rats for a few hours.

WoW rats?  Are you just mentioning random things about MMOs and grinding just to try and make it look negative because you don't like the idea of power/skill progression in RPGs? Let's leave the fake examples out and try to only work with examples or ideas that meet your experiences.
There is the confusion again about character progression. Some people don't like RPGs and don't like progression to be tied to powers/skills yet prefer the idea of progression being tied into the type of guns or perks one has. If you unlocked the noob tube and then killed the elite it might have felt better to you.
The type of progression being discussed is along the lines of RPG progression with powers/skills and to some extent gear.

[Sylvius the Mad]

[quote]Xpheyel wrote...

I have no problem getting more powerful but I want the mooks to keep pace with me (though usually with different/more complex behavior than just having them scale HP). If the enemies aren't a legitimate threat, I get bored.[/quote]
I don't understand this position at all.  If I build a character well or make good decisions, the game should get easier to reward me.

Imagine if your boss said to you, "Great job today.  As a reward, I'm going to cut your salary to make your life that much more of a struggle."

That's crazy!  And it would suck.  Growing powerful is only meaningful if you grow powerful relative to your foes within the game and defeating them becomes easier.
[quote]Wizard Weatherwax wrote...

A videogame should have in mind that a gamer plays it in order to have some fun.[/quote]
A roleplaying game should have in mind that a gamer plays it in order to roleplay.
[quote]Lusitanum wrote...
But you still get consequences that you couldn't foresse without the need of metagaming.[/quote]
Just like the real world, yes.  Sometimes the future unfolds in ways you don't expect.

But never do you behave in ways that are beyond your control.  That's the disconnect between roleplaying (which works like the real world does) and Mass Effect (which does not).


[quote]Like Lothering getting arbitrarly destroyed at the beggining of the game while the rest of Thedas doesn't get attacked until the end of the game[/quote]
This has nothing to do with your ability to make choices on behalf of your PC.


[quote]Wynn leaving your party when you return to camp because you defiled the ashes[/quote]
This has nothing to do with your ability to make choices on behalf of your PC.


[quote]the vendor at Wade's shop trying to recoup his expenses on the Drake/Dragon Armor by pouting and not letting you (a.k.a. the person with hundreds of Sovereigns in his pockets) buy anything from him[/quote]
This has nothing to do with your ability to make choices on behalf of your PC.


[quote]or the party members who just decide to leave with all your hard-earned (both in gameplay time and actual money) equipment on them.[/quote]
This has nothing to do with the ability to make choices on behalf of your PC.

None of these examples affect how you make the decisions on behalf of your character.  His thought process and choices are made by you, in the moment, and the consequences are beyond your control.  Just like the real world.  That makes for a good roleplaying environment.


[quote]No, that's playing with computer dolls, and for that we already have The Sims.[/quote]
But there you have to design the setting and supporting characters yourself, which is unlike roleplaying.

Remember, the player's experience in a CRPG should closely resemble the player's experience in a tabletop RPG.  And the player doesn't have any control over the setting or supporting characters there, either.


[quote]I never said that the gameplay was fun enough to make me ignore the inconsistency, all I said was that giving you a Game Over screen because your party members died through no fault of your own is incredibly frustrating. And furstration is the opposite of fun.[/quote]
I would agree that would be frustrating, but no one was suggesting that.

I suggested that the mechanism that produce a Game Over screen should treat the PC and his squadmates similarly.  Yes, one way to do that would be to have the screen appear when any one of them fell, but I would suggest a better way would be to have it appear only when the entire party fell.

BioWare games that lack any real death mechanic often encourage suicide tactics.  Send in one or more characters to draw fire and get killed, only to have the rest of the party deal with the now distracted and weakened foe.  Mass Effect is no different, except for some reason it only works when the squadmates act as bait, but not when the PC does it.  That doesn't make any sense within the game's setting.  The squadmates can and do fight on their own without any direction from the player, so why can't they keep doing that after the PC gets knocked out of the fight?

You said that you didn't think it would be fun to lie on the ground while your squad kept fighting, and I disagreed with you.  We can disagree, but at least disagree with me honestly without constructing this absurtd strawman about wanting the game to end when any squadmate falls.  No one here has asked for that.  I certainly haven't.

Are you just trying to annoy me?


[quote]Now, tell me how hard can it be to come up with a justification as to why an Alliance Marine would try to fight a threat to Humanity and the Galaxy as a whole, after your came up with the previously mentioned example. What, is your "imagination" not capable of handling something when it doesn't involve mercilessly beating the crap of established lore?[/quote]
And as I've explained, I absolutely can do that, but the game might then have Shepard's behaviour contradict the details of that explanation.  That can't happen in DAO because I have all of the information necessary to come up with an explanation that is consistent with the rest of the game, but Mass Effect never gives me that.

I can generate a backstory about why Shepard wants to fight and how, but what happens if that backstory is then later denied by Shepard himself?  In a game with full dialogue options, I can avoid that happening by not choosing the option that contradicts the backstory, but Mass Effect doesn't show me the options so there's no way for me to know that my backstory will work.  And if the game might just break it later, why would I bother investing any effort in constructing it?


[quote]Then that would be another baseless assumption[/quote]
That wasn't an assumption.  It was explicitly a supposition.

Do you even know what these words mean? 


[quote]I claimed nothing, I made a vague guess.[/quote]
With a specific amount.  "a full hour" you said.  If there's uncertainty in that value, it's at the upper end.

Your intent doesn't change what the words mean.


[quote]1) The future. There's bound to be a faster way to get from point A to point B, even if it just means faster elevators;[/quote]
Presumably, but not necessarily.  There's no inconsistency here.


[quote]2) It breaks the immersion because I know that's just a cover to the loading of the next area I'm going.[/quote]
You know.  Your character doesn't.  Nothing presented to your character was at all out of the ordinary.

You broke your own immersion.  You can't blame the game for your bad decisions (well, clearly you can, because you just did, but it was stupid).


[quote]Not to mention that the moment the game asks you to just lean back and wait for something, it's taking you away because you're not playing anymore[/quote]
You were never playing.  You were roleplaying, which is a different thing entirely.

But, oh, right, you weren't roleplaying, which is why you want to game to cater to you, even though you don't exist within the game's setting.  You're basically demanding inconsistency.


[quote]Unless you consider jumping or just driving out of the way of said slow moving projectiles while you blast the enemy away with superior firepower.[/quote]
XP penalty.  The game actively discouraged you from fighting from within the Mako.


[quote]And with the added bonus that getting hit by accident while in the Mako just means that your shields are going down a bit, and not that you have to restart from your last save point.[/quote]
Weren't you lauding ME2 for punishing unskilled play just a few pages ago?  Why isn't that a good thing in ME?


[quote]unlike the Sniper rifle, which only two classes know how to use effectively.[/quote]
This is also untrue.  I used the sniper rifle almost exclusively, and I never played a Soldier or hybrid class.
[quote]That's comparing not measuring. If something is measured, then it has to be "determined by measurement".

Using your example, I can possibly tell you if one of them is clearly heavier than the other if there's a significant difference in their weight but I can neither tell you exactly how heavy it is, nor could I give you a clear answer if one of them was only slightly heavier than the other, in which case I would have to measure them first.[/quote]
Who built the first scale?  How did he know if it worked?

Create your own units.  Find another rock that's about the same mass as the smaller of the first two and then compare sums of rocks against each other.

Are you really this incapable of working without units and values being spoonfed to you?


[quote]Exactly: my time. Just like I can sell any other of my posessions, it's just something I'm offering in exchange. That's selling something I own, not something that makes my who I am.[/quote]
I was only asking you to sell something that you own.  Your enjoyment of a particular book is yours.  Look at the sentence - note how we can only describe the enjoyment as being yours; that's the only way we can differentiate between it and other people's enjoyment.

You presuppose far too much.


[quote]With lots of saving and loading. Because there was no way to predict how likely it was for you to get a given number, it was perfectly possible for you to be at 12, draw a 9 or a 10 and then lose.[/quote]
You just demonstrated that you don't know how probabilities work.  Just because we know something is 80% likely not to happen, that doesn't mean it can't happen.  Sometimes it will.

Pazaak plays a lot like poker (another game of skill).  Playing it well will cause you to win over time.  You'll lose some of the time, sure, but over time you will win as long as you play it better than your opponent.

And this was true even in KotOR, where your opponent always started first (and thus had the initial advantage, though that advantage did not always persist).


[quote]Oh, and since in KotOR1, you always drew first, the odds were against you from the start[/quote]
Again, the odds were against you at the start.  There was no guarantee they would continue to be against you.

Playing Pazaak for profit took a lot of time, and I suspect a lot of people really didn't enjoy it.  A lot of people don't enjoy playing Blackjack successfully either, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible.  I really liked that the feature was in the game, because it rewarded a different style of gameplay.  That's something RPGs have traditionally done very well.  No matter how you liked to roleplay your character, the game would let you do it (and thus the game would be fun for you).


[quote]I'm talking about games of chance and Pazaak was a prime example of the genre.[/quote]
And I've explained both how feeling the odds are against you in games of chance is crazy (though given your lack of understanding of probability this makes perfect sense), and also that Pazaak is more a game of skill than a game of chance.


[quote]A "victory"? Seriously, is that how you see this? A battleground to be won or lost? You're really taking this seriously, aren't you?[/quote]
I take everything seriously.  If I didn't feel strongly about this issue I wouldn't invest so much time in moving the margins of public opinion.
[quote]And if my retort was so flawed, why not point it right there.[/quote]
Because if such a claim would be understood by you, you would have already reached that conclusion yourself. 


[quote]You only "win" something when your "victory" is clear, not when you back down claiming "I win!" to yourself.[/quote]
My victory was clear to anyone who could understand the debate.


[quote]Aaaand... completely missed the point again. Great...[/quote]
False.  It's my point, after all.  You were disputing my claim.


[quote]If you take a modern hospital that far into the past, it might still be a hospital to you, but it stops being one in the world that it's in. That's how definitions work: the concept of a given thing changes depending on when and where you are. [/quote]
No, that's not how definitions work.  That's how definitions are created, but not how they work.

Definitions are immutable.  That's how we can measure things over time.


[quote]Now a hospital, that's a different story. Someone coming from the past would have to wrap his mind around the fact that a hospital does not share the same signified that he's used to[/quote]
But he doesn't have to do that at all.  To him, it is a Krankenhaus.  But that does change what the hospital is objectively.  What something is depends upon its characteristics (or are you going to dispute that?), and the hospital's characteristics don't change over time.  What people call it does, but that's not relevant to the discussion.

I'm looking, from you, for a definition of an RPG that you're willing to apply across all time periods.  I don't care if that definition means that some games people thought were RPGs in 1986 don't qualify under your definition; I just want to know what the definition is.  And then I'm going to find a bunch of games and see if you think they're RPGs.  Since it's your definition, you will have to agree with my findings (unless I apply to criteria incorrectly, though you'll be free to point out where I do).

You seem to have some standard for what counts as an RPG, but you won't tell me what it is.  Why is that?  Is it because you don't actually have a standard but are just going along with whatever the crowd thinks?  If I present you with a game with which your peers are entirely unfamiliar, how will you determine into what genre it falls?


[quote]But a language is shaped by its speakers. That's how they change, adapt and evolve no matter how much a given sole person might complain about it.[/quote]
But we're not talking about language.  We're talking about things that exist in the world.

Bertrand Russell would have your hide.


[quote]You're not getting it again. They really, REALLY don't care about what people like you think. You noticed that "I wish they made RPGs like they used to" bit? Guess which group of elitists they're refering to?[/quote]
And you baselessly concluded that that represented BioWare's opinion, did you?  As opposed to just being a joke that would appeal to the sorts of people who would enjoy that game.  That was a joke aimed at you, and it worked.

It tells us nothing about BioWare's opinion on the issue, assuming that BioWare (as an entity) even has such an opinion.


[quote]Oh great, so that doesn't exist either.[/quote]I didn't say it didn't exist.  I said you were wrong to blindly assert that it did.

Why do you always think that I'm denying something if I say you're wrong to assert it?  You keep assuming an excluded middle.



[quote]Do I even want to know why you think the most basic pillar of human existente is just an illusion?[/quote]Belief in the existence of groups is unscientific.  Groups don't satisfy Ockham's Razor.

[quote]When you're a loner that avoids "pretty much everyone"... it kinda is.[/quote]
I could demonstrate how wrong you are by telling you something about my life, but I don't really want to tell you anything about my life.
[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

And since it couldn't have missed its mark more stupendously if you had shot in the air after being blindfolded and turned around about 15 times, that's another hit to your ability for "reasoned conclusions".[/quote]
Would you care, then, to reconcile the apparent contradiction?  You've established that you think what things are are determined by popular opinion.  Why not marriage?  Is marriage not a thing?

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 06 avril 2010 - 10:21 .

[smudgedhorizon]

This is really off topic, but Pazaak was one of the most awesome games ever, I sank so many hours into playing it!



On topic, I really didn't enjoy ME2 even half as much as I enjoyed ME1. Was this because of the new empasis on combat and the removal of many of the RPG aspects? Mostly, but I felt the story wasn't up to scratch either.



ME3 isn't really a must-buy for me anymore, though it will be a shame to have only 2 collecter's editions out of the trilogy, but if it's anything like ME2, I regretted the purchase and didn't enjoy it enough to justify the cost. There are so many great games, and ME2 didn't stand out, to me it felt like a very pretty but ultimately generic shooter. The delicate balance of shooter combat and rpg goodness was what helped make ME1 magic. ME2 lost it.

[Pocketgb]

TJSolo wrote...

As that 'We' seem to want a CoD type reward system, which is not character progression it is just increased armory and perks...

This drove your entire post into the crapper. Try again, except this time without any of the arrogance, ignorance, false assumptions, and labeling.

[ajstorm1]

Dudeman315 wrote...

Gilead26 wrote...

But in the end Mass Effect is about the story. Is the story in ME2 weaker than in ME1? No, it is different, it's focused on individual characters rather then on a galactic chase. But think about it, in ME1 we had no idea what the threat was or how this crazy new sci-fi world worked, we had to be told. But in ME2 we know what the threat is it's been named, the challenge is gearing up and creating a team that's capable of dealing with the threat. So it makes perfect sense that the story shifts to focus on your individual team mates.

Just my $0.02

Except it really doesn't, 2 mission a piece for 12 characters doesn't feel like it focused on anything really(except shooter combat).  There was never really an oh s**t that's where the story was going moment. There was a very megaman feel where you could do these in any order but eventually you have to do them.  Garrus my old buddy barely even talked to
me. They could have made 6 characters with 4 missions a piece and the rest optional dl characters with 4 missions per and given them dialog on the ship.  Instead 12 barely knowable characters that I must depend on for my life.  Think if you had to follow 3 missions with Thane before you finally caught him and he talked to you because he was curious about you and then joined your team if you made a good argument because he respected you.  You'd feel like you accomplished something vs "Hi mr. assassin wanna join my team?" "hmm ok."

I think I both agree and disagree with you to some extent, Dudeman. I agree with most that the RPG elements and deeper storylines of ME1 were a little lacking in ME2. But at the same time, I think you experienced more with each of your individual squad members in ME2 by recruiting them and gaining their loyalty. Everyone seems to forget that in ME1, you spoke to Garrus in the Med Bay and BINGO, he's a member of your squad. You walk up and have one or 2 comments to Wrex at C-sec and BINGO, he's a member, too. You save Tali in 1 gunfight and listen to her give 1 piece of information and BINGO, now she's a member too. It was much easier to fill out your team than it was in ME2. Heck, the only real "recruitment" mission was getting Liara and that was almost by accident. So, while I do feel that more story and more conversation options would have really helped ME2, I'm not convinced that the mission structure was necessarily bad. Think of the loyalty missions as the UNC missions of ME1; you could do them or not do them. It's just that in ME2, the storyline of each "side/loyalty" mission involves a team member. And it's nice that the earning of loyalty can affect the outcome, whereas no matter what you did in ME1, either Ashley or Kaiden were going to die, period. 

I guess the point of my rambling is that I don't think ME3 needs to be an "either/or" proposition. I like the improvements that ME2 made to the combat. It's fun, so now. leave it alone. Bring back more story elements for ME3 while leaving the combat as-is, I think will make MOST of us ME fans happy. But that's just my opinion.

[Lusitanum]

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

I don't understand this position at all.  If I build a character well or make good decisions, the game should get easier to reward me.

Imagine if your boss said to you, "Great job today.  As a reward, I'm going to cut your salary to make your life that much more of a struggle."

That's crazy!  And it would suck.  Growing powerful is only meaningful if you grow powerful relative to your foes within the game and defeating them becomes easier.[/quote]

And there's another moronic comparisson. A game is not like real life and we expect different things from both of them. I'd love my studies/responsabilities at work to get increasingly easy with time (and not the reverse) but that's not what I want from a game, which we expect to require to apply the skill you've learned so far to surpass increasingly harder challenges

Since when is a game supposed to become easier as you beat it?

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

A roleplaying game should have in mind that a gamer plays it in order to roleplay.[/quote]

Except that people don't play roleplaying games to roleplay, especially since the vast majority of them don't give a crap about the word. Most of all, they play it to have fun. So Wizard Weatherwax's point still stands.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Just like the real world, yes.  Sometimes the future unfolds in ways you don't expect.

But never do you behave in ways that are beyond your control.  That's the disconnect between roleplaying (which works like the real world does) and Mass Effect (which does not).[/quote]

Except that in the real world, you can interrupt, explain and do anything else you might need in order to correct that situation, not stand there waiting for a new line that will most likely never come.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

This has nothing to do with the ability to make choices on behalf of your PC.

None of these examples affect how you make the decisions on behalf of your character.  His thought process and choices are made by you, in the moment, and the consequences are beyond your control.  Just like the real world.  That makes for a good roleplaying environment.[/quote]

And a terribly metagamey experience.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

But there you have to design the setting and supporting characters yourself, which is unlike roleplaying.

Remember, the player's experience in a CRPG should closely resemble the player's experience in a tabletop RPG.  And the player doesn't have any control over the setting or supporting characters there, either.[/quote]

You still walking around that stupid tabletop RPG idea? After all the changes and progress that this genre has accomplished, you're still stuck to that idea?

This is why you'll always be playing with dolls: you still have to grow up.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

You said that you didn't think it would be fun to lie on the ground while your squad kept fighting, and I disagreed with you.  We can disagree, but at least disagree with me honestly without constructing this absurtd strawman about wanting the game to end when any squadmate falls.  No one here has asked for that.  I certainly haven't.

Are you just trying to annoy me?[/quote]

I do find some degree of enjoyment in seeing you get annoyed, yes. It's one of the main reasons why I still spend what little free time I have available coming here instead of doing something more constructive like... playing a videogame.

But I'm not disagreeing with you just because of that, I'm disagreeing because you're wrong. That's just how the game works: you die, you restart because you messed up because the game isn't going to make you sit there watching your characters stand on the same damned place you left them while they wait for the A.I. (who also loves to just sit there and wait for you and run away to safety as soon as it's even slightly injured) to come and fight you.

Hell, even Left 4 Dead uses the same concept: if you go down and your three companions are all bots, you're done for, Game Over, back to the last safe room. And we're talking about bots that 1) are able to forward on their own; 2) have exactly the same abilities that you do; 3) are much smarter than your squadmates in ME. And even then they're stupid as rocks, which is just why you go back to the beggining when you character dies: they're not smart enough to survive on their own and the game shouldn't keep you waiting while your characters fumble about and you look for ways to entertain yourself. I already had to do that in Dragon Age and I'd be hard pressed to think of a moment where I felt such a need for a "fast forward" option.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

And as I've explained, I absolutely can do that, but the game might then have Shepard's behaviour contradict the details of that explanation.  That can't happen in DAO because I have all of the information necessary to come up with an explanation that is consistent with the rest of the game, but Mass Effect never gives me that.

I can generate a backstory about why Shepard wants to fight and how, but what happens if that backstory is then later denied by Shepard himself?  In a game with full dialogue options, I can avoid that happening by not choosing the option that contradicts the backstory, but Mass Effect doesn't show me the options so there's no way for me to know that my backstory will work.  And if the game might just break it later, why would I bother investing any effort in constructing it?[/quote]

Because you broke the lore and the setting with the Arcane Warrior, bending it (poorly) to what you knew of the lore in that game and not the other way around. And in that example, you said justifying that sort of inconsistency made the game "fun". What happened to that?

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

That wasn't an assumption.  It was explicitly a supposition.

Do you even know what these words mean? [/quote]

It was pretty damn judgemental for a "supposition".

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

With a specific amount.  "a full hour" you said.  If there's uncertainty in that value, it's at the upper end.

Your intent doesn't change what the words mean.[/quote]

I said the following:

[quote]Lusitanum wrote...

And walked you did, for about... what? a full hour through the same identical scenery on the climax of the game.

[/quote]

Noticed the elypsies and the "what?" there? That indicates uncertainty, because I had no exact knowledge on how long it took, so I just made a guess.

Now, what was it that you were saying about not knowing what a supposition was?

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

You know.  Your character doesn't.  Nothing presented to your character was at all out of the ordinary.

You broke your own immersion.  You can't blame the game for your bad decisions (well, clearly you can, because you just did, but it was stupid).[/quote]

Of course that my knowledge of the game breaks my immersion it's exactly because of that fact that immersion exists. Every time that given work presents you with something that reminds you that what you see it's not real, then it's breaking your immersion, like a crappy special effect, a ridiculous plot hole or some gimmicky way of hiding what I know to be a loading screen. I'm sorry, I guess I'm just too mentally stable to let what I my own knowledge affect how I percieve a game, instead of the knowledge of my fictional character that I'm playing as.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

You were never playing.  You were roleplaying, which is a different thing entirely.

But, oh, right, you weren't roleplaying, which is why you want to game to cater to you, even though you don't exist within the game's setting.  You're basically demanding inconsistency.[/quote]

"I want the game to cater to me, even though I don't exist in its setting and hence that's bad."

OK, getting seriously creepy now.

I'm just going to stand over there.

Way over there.

Don't want to catch any of that...

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

XP penalty.  The game actively discouraged you from fighting from within the Mako.[/quote]

Soften them up with the Mako

Get out.

Kill them.

I don't have to deal with the XP penalty either, but that's because I used the most basic functions of my brain to deal with it. Not that it was especially hard, but apparently it seems to have elluded you.


[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Weren't you lauding ME2 for punishing unskilled play just a few pages ago?  Why isn't that a good thing in ME?[/quote]

Because there's a difference between being unskille and just plain stupid.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Create your own units.  Find another rock that's about the same mass as the smaller of the first two and then compare sums of rocks against each other.

Are you really this incapable of working without units and values being spoonfed to you?[/quote]

Are you really this incapable of working out why that doesn't help in the slightest?

Here, I have a rock right next to me. It's pretty big, covers most of my palm, but is about as thick as my fingers and has an oval shape. Can I give you an accurate value on how big or heavy this rock is? No! I can't give you an exact number unless I measure it. Sure, I could create my own scale but then I would just be where I left off: this is the biggest rock that I have, which is a comparison and not a measurement.

And you're the one telling me about spoonfeeding information?

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

I was only asking you to sell something that you own.  Your enjoyment of a particular book is yours.  Look at the sentence - note how we can only describe the enjoyment as being yours; that's the only way we can differentiate between it and other people's enjoyment.[/quote]

And again, how much is it worth? How do you measure it?

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

You presuppose far too much.[/quote]

Again, am I really getting this from the likes of you?

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Again, the odds were against you at the start.  There was no guarantee they would continue to be against you.[/quote]

You mean, besides the fact that a hand was usually decided in 5 draws or less, meaning that if you didn't start off low while your opponent started strong, then you were most likely boned? Then what about the fact that your opponent knew what he was going to draw and hence wouldn't go bust while you had no such luxury in order to plan your game?

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

I'm talking about games of chance and Pazaak was a prime example of the genre.
And I've explained both how feeling the odds are against you in games of chance is crazy (though given your lack of understanding of probability this makes perfect sense), and also that Pazaak is more a game of skill than a game of chance.[/quote]

And again, all your "explanations", all your rantings and all your usual inane retorts ammounted to the same thing: you failed to see the most basic aspect of the problem and completely missed the point. Because you can go on and on as much as you want on how games like Blackjack and Poker are all about skill, but the moment your opponent has the advantage of being able to get  vital information on the deck while you can't, then the game is already against you by its very rules, regardless of how much "skill" you think the game involves.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

I take everything seriously.  If I didn't feel strongly about this issue I wouldn't invest so much time in moving the margins of public opinion.[/quote]

You're a riot.   Seriously, and here I thought I had already checked all the humorous things on the Internet for the day. Now I've really seen everything.

I mean, I could undestand an Internet discussion being taken seriously if it was about religion, politics, sexual orientations, how violence may or may not be an acceptable means to do good or anything else that was the least bit important in any way, but now I've found a guy that is all business about his personal opinion on how he wants freaking RPGs to be.

Dude, you just made my day.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Because if such a claim would be understood by you, you would have already reached that conclusion yourself. [/quote]

And hence that's why I posted it in the first place... ?

Wait, what?

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

My victory was clear to anyone who could understand the debate.[/quote]

OK, I'm honestly trying to supress my laughter here. I mean it, not only do we have the whole "victory" thing again, but on top of that, there's also the little "only those who happen to agree with me are enlightened enough to understand the full scope of my glory and success" that is just so unbelievably arrogant and presumptuous, it just can't be expressed in words. But it's incredibly hilarious. :happy:

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

No, that's not how definitions work.  That's how definitions are created, but not how they work.

Definitions are immutable.  That's how we can measure things over time.[/quote]

No, actually that's just how they work. That's why words like hospital have changed over time. Just like so many other words like, for instance "kamikaze", "football" or "teenager".

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

But he doesn't have to do that at all.  To him, it is a Krankenhaus.  But that does change what the hospital is objectively.  What something is depends upon its characteristics (or are you going to dispute that?), and the hospital's characteristics don't change over time.  What people call it does, but that's not relevant to the discussion.

I'm looking, from you, for a definition of an RPG that you're willing to apply across all time periods.  I don't care if that definition means that some games people thought were RPGs in 1986 don't qualify under your definition; I just want to know what the definition is.  And then I'm going to find a bunch of games and see if you think they're RPGs.  Since it's your definition, you will have to agree with my findings (unless I apply to criteria incorrectly, though you'll be free to point out where I do).

You seem to have some standard for what counts as an RPG, but you won't tell me what it is.  Why is that?  Is it because you don't actually have a standard but are just going along with whatever the crowd thinks?  If I present you with a game with which your peers are entirely unfamiliar, how will you determine into what genre it falls?[/quote]

Basically, it depends on which RPG Elements it has and how it implements them. Again, I'm not like you, I won't just say "it fails to have this aspect that I happen to like, so it's not an RPG", I'll look at it, I'll try to actually play it and then I'll give you my personal and subjective opinion on wheter or not it's an RPG or not. And if someone else disagrees with me giving valid reasons as to why they don't think the same thing I do, I can respect that. But I won't accept the views of elitists how just see their way as the perfect way. Because those guys are a dime a dozen, and you'll always find them defending their kind of game against all the others, regardless of their merits.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

But we're not talking about language.  We're talking about things that exist in the world.

Bertrand Russell would have your hide.[/quote]

And Sassure would have yours.

See, I can also throw names around with no real explanation just to show how smart I am. Again, it's not hard, but I try to avoid because it makes me look like a self-conceited idiot.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

And you baselessly concluded that that represented BioWare's opinion, did you?  As opposed to just being a joke that would appeal to the sorts of people who would enjoy that game.  That was a joke aimed at you, and it worked.

It tells us nothing about BioWare's opinion on the issue, assuming that BioWare (as an entity) even has such an opinion.[/quote]

No, there's no record of Bioware's opinion on the matter, not even the article that I posted in that exact same retort about how games need to change and evolve if they don't want to stagnate like the JRPG sub-genre and that you just happened to casually ignore.

The joke's on you, dude. Literally.

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Belief in the existence of groups is unscientific.  Groups don't satisfy Ockham's Razor.[/quote]

That's great, but again, that's just how the world works

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

I could demonstrate how wrong you are by telling you something about my life, but I don't really want to tell you anything about my life.[/quote]

And what makes you think I would ever care to know anything about your life story? If you were someone who was able to show the least bit of empathy to people who don't say "amen" with you, I'd be more than willing to hear and help you, just like with everyone else. But you like to be arrogant, conceited, agressive and disrespectful to those who don't share your views, so why would you ever expect me or anyone else to care about what you've been through?

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Would you care, then, to reconcile the apparent contradiction?  You've established that you think what things are are determined by popular opinion.  Why not marriage?  Is marriage not a thing?[/quote]

Idiot, what things are isn't defined by popular opinion, but what a word is used for is ruled by the speakers of a given language. If marriage was the word used for "going out on a date", then it would be so, despite its roots on... whatever the roots for the word "marriage" are. If the vast majority of people think that marriage is a wonderful thing, I can disagree with that, but if they use the word for something completely out of the scope that I have for it, then I'll have to abide by that, so people can understand just what in the hell I'm talking about.

[EternalWolfe]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Xpheyel wrote...

I have no problem getting more powerful but I want the mooks to keep pace with me (though usually with different/more complex behavior than just having them scale HP). If the enemies aren't a legitimate threat, I get bored.

I don't understand this position at all.  If I build a character well or make good decisions, the game should get easier to reward me.

Imagine if your boss said to you, "Great job today.  As a reward, I'm going to cut your salary to make your life that much more of a struggle."

That's crazy!  And it would suck.  Growing powerful is only meaningful if you grow powerful relative to your foes within the game and defeating them becomes easier.

The proper comparison would be "Great job, as a reward, I'm going to promote you(level up).  You'll get paid more(more tools/better rewards from the gameplay), but the work will be harder(increase in difficulty, which you proved you can handle)."  But you seemed to completly missed what he was actually saying, and just put in your own assumption of his desires.

[Sylvius the Mad]

[quote]Lusitanum wrote...

And there's another moronic comparisson. A game is not like real life and we expect different things from both of them.[/quote]
But the game is real life from your character's point of view.  Are his desires about his life that different from your desires about yours?

[quote]Since when is a game supposed to become easier as you beat it?[/quote]
A game isn't.  That's the whole point.  An RPG is not relevantly similar to other types of games.

[quote]Except that people don't play roleplaying games to roleplay, especially since the vast majority of them don't give a crap about the word. Most of all, they play it to have fun. So Wizard Weatherwax's point still stands.[/quote]
You can't defeat a normative claim with a descriptive claim.  "No is implies an ought."

[quote]Except that in the real world, you can interrupt, explain and do anything else you might need in order to correct that situation, not stand there waiting for a new line that will most likely never come.[/quote]
But why would you want to?  And why would you necessarily have the opportunity?

[quote]And a terribly metagamey experience.[/quote]
Where's the metagame?  It's only metagaming if you take into account the consequences of your characters action even when your character wouldn't know those things.  Don't do that.

[quote]You still walking around that stupid tabletop RPG idea? After all the changes and progress that this genre has accomplished, you're still stuck to that idea?[/quote]
Absolutely.  That's what roleplaying is.  Games that don't permit roleplaying are not roleplaying games.

[quote]they're not smart enough to survive on their own and the game shouldn't keep you waiting while your characters fumble about and you look for ways to entertain yourself. I already had to do that in Dragon Age and I'd be hard pressed to think of a moment where I felt such a need for a "fast forward" option.[/quote]
You never had to do that in Dragon Age unless you forgot that you were playing a party-based game.

DAO and ME aren't relevantly similar in this regard.  In ME you're playing one character.  In DAO you're playing several at a time (just like other party-based CRPGs).

[quote]Because you broke the lore and the setting with the Arcane Warrior, bending it (poorly) to what you knew of the lore in that game and not the other way around. And in that example, you said justifying that sort of inconsistency made the game "fun". What happened to that? [/quote]
My Arcane Warrior explanation wasn't complete.  I haven't ever bothered to come up with a decent explanation for that because I don't really like the class, and I don't need to come up with one for the game to be fun.

A big hole in the explanation is not an inconsistency.  A contradiction within the explanation is.

In ME, Shepard can directly contradict your roleplaying constructions.  You can come up with a reason why he did something or other, and then he'll go and directly deny that through word or deed, and there's nothing you can do about it except reload and hope a different dialogue option doesn't do that.  Or just retcon in a different explanation, but to do that you'd need to remember what every other decision Shepard eer made was so you didn't contradict those retroactively.

I admit I don't know how the Arcane Warrior works.  But I don't need to know how it works.  As long as there's a possible explanation available the setting isn't broken.

Mass Effect, on the other hand, will neatly eliminate the possibility of there being a sensible explanation by presenting mutually exclusive statements as if they're both true.

That's how logic works.  Contradictions are bad.  Everything short of contradiction is acceptable.  It's binary.

[quote]It was pretty damn judgemental for a "supposition".[/quote]
And thus you demonstrate you don't, in fact, know what the words mean.

How judgmental it might have been has no bearing on whether it was a supposition.

[quote]Noticed the elypsies and the "what?" there? That indicates uncertainty, because I had no exact knowledge on how long it took, so I just made a guess.[/quote]
And your "vague guess" was off by almost an order of magnitude.

It needed to be corrected.

[quote]Of course that my knowledge of the game breaks my immersion it's exactly because of that fact that immersion exists. Every time that given work presents you with something that reminds you that what you see it's not real, then it's breaking your immersion, like a crappy special effect, a ridiculous plot hole or some gimmicky way of hiding what I know to be a loading screen. I'm sorry, I guess I'm just too mentally stable to let what I my own knowledge affect how I percieve a game, instead of the knowledge of my fictional character that I'm playing as.[/quote]
Compartmentalization.  It's an important skill.  I suggest you learn it.
[quote]Soften them up with the Mako

Get out.

Kill them.

I don't have to deal with the XP penalty either, but that's because I used the most basic functions of my brain to deal with it. Not that it was especially hard, but apparently it seems to have elluded you.
[/quote]
Are you even paying attention?

I was responding to your specific assertion that one advantage of the Mako was the ability to one-shot kill mutliple enemies at a time.  Given the XP penalty, that's clearly not actually an advantage.

Everything else I already refuted with the discussions of stealth and manoeuvrability.

[quote]Because there's a difference between being unskille and just plain stupid. [/quote]
A difference in degree, not in kind.
[quote]Are you really this incapable of working out why that doesn't help in the slightest?

Here, I have a rock right next to me. It's pretty big, covers most of my palm, but is about as thick as my fingers and has an oval shape. Can I give you an accurate value on how big or heavy this rock is? No! I can't give you an exact number unless I measure it. Sure, I could create my own scale but then I would just be where I left off: this is the biggest rock that I have, which is a comparison and not a measurement. [/quote]
You've just pauinted yourself into a corner.

At what point is it a measurement, then?  You're so adamant that there's some sort of dividing line between a measurement and a comparison.  What is it?

Not all measurements are precise.  That's the source of the old joke about how 2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2.  But that they're imprecise doesn't prevent them from being measurements.

But if you think they do, exactly how precise does a measurement have to be before you think it's a measurement?

I await your acquiescence.

[quote]And again, how much is it worth? How do you measure it?[/quote]
For what will you trade it?

That's how you measure it.  Every day, you make dozens (probably hundreds) of decisions, and you do so by weighing options against each other.  And here you are denying that such a thing is possible.
[quote]Again, am I really getting this from the likes of you?[/quote]
Yes.  I presuppose almost nothing.  It's one of my gretest strengths.

[quote]You mean, besides the fact that a hand was usually decided in 5 draws or less, meaning that if you didn't start off low while your opponent started strong, then you were most likely boned?[/quote]
Yes, but you could see that early enough to make good resource management decisions and thus win the gme more often than not.

[quote]Then what about the fact that your opponent knew what he was going to draw and hence wouldn't go bust while you had no such luxury in order to plan your game?[/quote]
That the opponent was cheating doesn't mean the cards weren't produced at random.  We got here discussiing your irrational fear of randomness.
[quote]You're a riot.   Seriously, and here I thought I had already checked all the humorous things on the Internet for the day. Now I've really seen everything.

I mean, I could undestand an Internet discussion being taken seriously if it was about religion, politics, sexual orientations, how violence may or may not be an acceptable means to do good or anything else that was the least bit important in any way, but now I've found a guy that is all business about his personal opinion on how he wants freaking RPGs to be.

Dude, you just made my day.[/quote]
If you don't really care, why not just let the games be developed as I see fit?

[quote]OK, I'm honestly trying to supress my laughter here. I mean it, not only do we have the whole "victory" thing again, but on top of that, there's also the little "only those who happen to agree with me are enlightened enough to understand the full scope of my glory and success" that is just so unbelievably arrogant and presumptuous, it just can't be expressed in words. But it's incredibly hilarious. :happy:[/quote]
Logical claims are demonstrably true of demonstrably false.  This, incidentally, is the right time for the excluded middle.  If I make my case well, then anyone who sits back and works through the logic will see that I've done so.  But those incapable of understanding the logic will never get there.

I can't control whether you understand me, so all I can do is make a good case and then I'm done.

This is why communication isn't a thing.  Each of us acts independently, and neither has any control over hw his remarks are interpreted by the other.
[quote]No, actually that's just how they work. That's why words like hospital have changed over time. Just like so many other words like, for instance "kamikaze", "football" or "teenager".[/quote]
You've just shown that's how they're formed.  That is demonstrably not how they work.

If they did work as you described then they wouldn't actually serve their function as formal definitions.  And defintions that are not formal defintions are not definitions.
[quote]Basically, it depends on which RPG Elements it has and how it implements them. Again, I'm not like you, I won't just say "it fails to have this aspect that I happen to like, so it's not an RPG", I'll look at it, I'll try to actually play it and then I'll give you my personal and subjective opinion on wheter or not it's an RPG or not. And if someone else disagrees with me giving valid reasons as to why they don't think the same thing I do, I can respect that. But I won't accept the views of elitists how just see their way as the perfect way. Because those guys are a dime a dozen, and you'll always find them defending their kind of game against all the others, regardless of their merits.[/quote]
But I'm not doing that.  I'm defending the merits themselves.

Your personal and suibjective opinion should never matter to anyone but you.  What I'm trying to do here is give people the tools to form less subjective opinions so we can actually have meaningful conversations.

If we all work from our own definitions, then we'll never get anywhere.

And again, you failed to offer the definition I requested.

Oh, and I'vesaid nothing at all resembling "it fails to have this aspect that I happen to like, so it's not an RPG".  I'm defining the genre independently of whether I like certain features.  For example, I like levels, but I explicity said earlier in the thread that I don't think they're required for a game to be an RPG.

I don't care what the definitions are; I just want formal definitions we can use to discuss game features.
[quote]And Sassure would have yours.[/quote]
It's laughable that you think Saussure would be on your side in this debate.  His concept of linguistic dualism is exactly the point you're not getting in the hospital example.
[quote]That's great, but again, that's just how the world works[/quote]
That doesn't even make any sense in this context.  What is how the world works?

The world can easily be described without positing the unnecessary concept of society and instead describing our behaviour individually.
[quote]And what makes you think I would ever care to know anything about your life story?[/quote]
Because it would disprove your assertions.

Not that you seem to care about whether your assertions are correct.
[quote]If you were someone who was able to show the least bit of empathy[/quote]
Then I would be irrational.
[quote]Idiot, what things are isn't defined by popular opinion, but what a word is used for is ruled by the speakers of a given language.[/quote]
Now, suddenly, you recognise that these two things are different.

So, back to the crux of our disagreement, what is an RPG?  I don't care what people call an RPG, either now or in the past.  What is an RPG?

[Sylvius the Mad]

EternalWolfe wrote...

The proper comparison would be "Great job, as a reward, I'm going to promote you(level up).  You'll get paid more(more tools/better rewards from the gameplay), but the work will be harder(increase in difficulty, which you proved you can handle)." 

But who would want that?

I'd much rather have the job get easier instead.  It's not much of a reward if I have to work harder now.