The "yet another thread ruined by ABF" Thread

[A Black Falcon]

Still a GREAT game though. Tell me, are you experiencing glitches right and left?

Glitches? Um, other than this annoying memory leak that makes the game run slowly to the point of being unplayable after playing for a few hours (and that was before I patched it (I patched the game today, but that was after I played... it did the 'slowdown to unplayability' thing again and I thought 'hey there might be a patch'...) so it might have been fixed), no... at least I don't think so. What do you mean?

As far as your complaints.... Honestly, I can't understand a couple things about PC style inventory. First off, what's with that silly grid where you have to "fit" everything into place? I've SEEN those character sheets, you don't EVER do that in D&D, you just write it down! I get weight and limited inventory. I've dealt with both before in many console RPGs. However, as a general rule, people started hating that VERY quickly. Square soon realized limited inventory just wasn't fun so they let people carry 99 of everything in the game, if they could find it. Honestly, I want a PERFECT file , that means gimme gimme! At the very least, they should have some sort of bank system so you can still have everything, just not with you, thus presenting the same limited inventory challenge when taking on dungeons and such.


And another thing, before you say anything about how organizing things on a grid is somehow more realistic, it's not. C'mon, even with these limitations, these guys are carrying around several hundred tons of metal at any one time COMPLETELY out of sight. I know "magical bag of holding", but that's just a silly excuse . The only game that EVER actually explained how someone could really HOLD so much stuff, in an acceptable way, EVER, was, well, Pokémon (inventory is transformed into and stored as energy in a "backpack"). Not that it's a problem mind you, I don't mind little things like that being unrealistic. I just don't like when they try making a small PART of something annoying for the sake of realism when the very basis of that component isn't realistic to begin with.

'explained how you could hold that much stuff'? Play Baldur's Gate I or II, DJ. Really. Or play NWN and create a character with very low strength. See how much you can hold (weight-wise)... yeah, not too much. Yes, it is a bit unrealistic to have a strong warrior be able to carry several hundred pounds of armor (if you have a mostly full inventory of suits of armor for instance) around all the time. I would just assume that they put it down between fights and stuff. :) But it's a million times more realistic than having now inventory limit at all. And a much, much better design.

You are kind of right about inventory spots and real D&D. Real D&D doesn't have limited inventory spots. What it has is a weight limit. It's called 'sensibility'. People shouldn't be able to go around carrying fifty suits of plate mail! So there's a weight limit. The inventory spots thing was for PC games to make inventories easier to design, I assume. So having unlimited inventory spots isn't the big problem. Having what appears to be no weight limit is.

As for 'perfect', DJ, this is not Final Fantasy. This is D&D/d20. That is utterly impossible. There are so many more types of things in D&D that that's an utterly impossible idea to even begin thinking about, and you know it, inventory limits or no. What you do is try to get the people you have to have equipped the best possible stuff... :)

D&D. The way real D&D works is you have a backpack. That is what holds your stuff in your inventory. You have a weight limit. It is based mostly on your Strength, naturally. Being a pen and paper game you need no 'interface' or 'quick item' slots or any of that stuff so all of that is invented by the game designers... the system just has to set rules for weight and for what can be equipped where. Which is why different D&D games can do this somewhat differently.

Now, I will admit that some of the D&D games have done some things to avoid inventory limits. Baldur's Gate I has nothing, but in BGII there are various bags of holding. By the expansion pack, you have an arrow case, a scroll case, a gem bag, a potion case, and a general bag of holding. Each has a low, static, weight no matter how many items are in them (though they have a limited number of items they can hold). This gives you a virtually unlimited inventory... but this is very high level characters and you have a lot more items to hold than low level guys where most of the stuff you could be carrying is just loot from baddies to sell in town, so it's more needed. And that's more bags of holding than is normal for one of these games I think.

Anyway, in that game those are rewards for getting really far into the series and playing a lot, not just something you get at the start... you have to deal a lot with inventory limits. It's a big part of D&D and it is definitely not one that this game should have dropped. Quite dissapointing.

As for the interface, what you describe is totally different from the console controls. I can't even relate. XBox used L and R to select a target and A interacted directly.

I didn't describe the interface, DJ. Well, I kind of did, but in the form of comparing it (negatively) to PC RPGs. You know the list, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, etc, etc... haven't you played ANY of those?

In the PC version, when combat starts it auto-pauses (well you can turn that off but you'd have to be pretty stupid, or impatient, to want it that way). Your characters auto select an opponent. Three little buttons appear over the target. The first one lets you choose either normal attack or one of your special abilities (power shot, etc). The second... no use yet for me. Force? Mines? The third is for grenades. You click the icon to choose that option or click the little arrows right above and below the icon to change between the choices. Items work the same, except in four boxes in the bottom corner (four categories obviously).

To change character, you either click on their portrait in the bottom left corner or hit tab. To unpause you either hit the unpause button or hit spacebar (at least THAT'S the same!)

As I said, this kind of direct control of course works better with a gamepad. But with mouse, it's just clumsy and obviously inferior to a normal button (like Baldur's Gate) or rightclick menu (Torment, Temple of Elemental Evil, etc) system.

As for the headings that actually say "persuade" and such, what's the complaint exactly? You want to know what you are doing and what stat it's based on, right? Why not just TELL the person that information up front? What's so wrong with that? Neverwinter does that too. I really don't see what's so stupid about it.

Absolutely not! I want it to just give me a list of dialogue options! Let ME figure out which one is right, or which one seems more like it is there because of my Persuasion, or Intelligence, or whatever! I think that it is insulting your user's intelligence to do something as blatant as listing 'Persuasion' on the dialogue option. It is a clear indication that the game designers think the players are stupid and can't think for themselves and I don't want it in a good RPG. That isn't in Baldur's Gate or Torment!

As far as combat, your complaints are PC version exclusive I'm afraid... I guess the controls really aren't better in the PC version as I had assumed...

Depends on what you want from them, really. What I wish it would be is a interface that is a improved-but-similar version of the interface in Baldur's Gate II. Or Icewind Dale II, if you want that one, because of its improved customizability... :)

What it IS is a console-styled one that has been adapted to PC. The adaption is as good as could be expected without making any actual gameplay changes, but the mere fact that it still has the same basic game interface designs as the console game is a big negative in my book.

Camera view... Honestly, the behind thing worked, most of the time anyway, very well. I will freely admit that there were a decent number of times where I wanted the camera more of a raised angle. Often it was just the monotony of being that SAME elevation back there staring at my character's backs the whole run (not exactly an awe inspiring view of heroism from back there...). There was a whole axis on that right control stick that could have been assigned to elevation, wasted. Understandably, there were likely a lot of things they would have to draw tops to if they had let you do that (think of rolling the camera up only to notice the top of that hill you ran by is nonexistant and you can SEE THROUGH TIME), but it's certainly something I would have appreciated.

I'm not complaining about the camera while you are adventuring. It's as good as I can expect from a third person title. I'm talking about combat only. I thought I was clear about that... that 'behind the character' view just is not as good as a top-down one for directing strategic combat! It just is not. You don't have as good a view... it makes it harder. And it makes switching between characters confusing as your viewpoint suddenly changes. It also makes it much less obvious what other characters' sightlines are without selecting them -- in a topdown view I'd be able to SEE that my other character was behind me and couldn't fire at those guys yet, while in this one I can't do that until I switch to him... this is an annoying flaw and between these various issues combat does not work as well as it would from a standard topdown viewpoint.

Though you do make a point about elevation -- this IS a 3d game, for good or ill, so it'd be nice to be able to move the camera up and down. Even if it auto-centered afterwards (like Warcraft III), it'd be nice... but as you say this way was a whole lot easier to design so I can understand why they didn't.

The whole light/dark system was supposed to be unique, actually applying allignments to the quest itself in a major way. Tell me, are there PC RPGs that make use of the 9 way alignment system of normal D&D in such a way as the story is totally different depending on it? Probably so... But hey, Bioware is trying to sell it, and if that involves lying to a naive console gaming public about a "first ever" feature that isn't really first ever, they'll go ahead and do that.

Well, with PC RPGs honestly in a lot of them the 'good' campaign is a whole lot more developed. One of KOTOR's biggest strengths is how it really lets you be either good or evil, and actually shapes the plot to a big extent depending on that... that isn't that common in PC RPGs really. What I meant was that you have more variations on alignment. It's not just a simple 'good to evil' continuum, it's more a four pointed one (Lawful to Chaotic and Good to Evil on different axes of the plane). A more complex player alignment system. As for the game design with playing as different parties, as I said it really depends on the game. In a more open-ended game like Fallout you can be what you want to a large degree. In Baldur's Gate I though you really have to be good... BGII improved on that a lot, though. You can be evil if you wish. But it's a lot easier to be good. It's not that simple of course, though, as the alignment system suggests... frequently in the game you come across moral dilemmas that don't directly affect anything except maybe your Reputation score (seperate from alignment, this one actually changes as the game progresses -- remember, in most D&D games once you choose a character's alignment it's permanant! There are only a few exceptions to this in D&D games (like a plot point in BGII where one character can go from Lawful to Chaotic if you do things wrong, and The Nameless One whose alignment changes depending on your actions). So you have a Reputation that increases or decreases at certain points where you do (or do not do) good things. I don't know how it compares to KotOR... in BGII anyway your 'goodness' won't affect how the game ends really. But it definitely has an impact on the game as you play it. In who is in your party, how you act to NPCs, etc...

Oh, on that note, another aspect of most of these games is party alignment. As in, if your party is (namely your main character) Good with a high reputation, Evil (or even Neutral, with a high enough reputation) PCs (Player Characters) will complain (If I hear Jaheira complain one more time about 'all things needing to be in balance'...)... Evil characters will even leave if your rep is too high.

In that way the Light/Dark meter is similar to that -- just a scale that goes up or down -- but the difference is that in the D&D games that meter is backed with a complex nine-point alignment system while in KotOR, like with much of its ruleset, that meter is the whole alignment system (as in simplified). (If you want another example of a simplified ruleset, look at the saving throws...)