I'm in the WoW Beta Test!

[A Black Falcon]

How you ended that retarded explanation with "it's called an imagination" is beyond me. So basically what you're saying is that you need an imagination to like shitty controls that barely even let you the player directly control your character.

I'd say that makes about as much sense as any of your posts, Brian. You rarely, if ever, make a lick of sense. I don't know what it is, perhaps in that strange world you live in everything you see is distorted to fit your odd perspective.

The simple fact of the matter is that point and click controls in games where you control a single person (and yes having people in your party while you only control one person's direct movement counts) is lazy and poor control design. It works in strategy games because the character you are playing is actually yourself, and the direct control is your own self. When you use the same philosophy in a game like KOTOR what you're doing is reducing the player/character interaction to Sims-like levels, and you are no longer the character.

If you like it that's fine. If you like to eat fecal matter that is also fine. But don't try telling me that it tastes good.

I was trying to explain how I disagree with your (flawed) depiction of interaction, "good" controls, etc. It's not my fault if thought is too much for you... :P

I said "it's called imagination" because a big part of games is of course imagination... if you spend the whole time you're playing BGII thinking 'i hate this' of course you will hate it, but when I play it it's just natural. Part is certainly how many hours I have put into that engine, so for me it is natural, but my point is that I do not view that interface as a significant block to immersion. Sure, it's less immersive in some respects than Grim Fandango. But as I said it really can't be. Not if it wants to be a good game. So instead it uses the system that works best, as all good games should. And if you have the imagination to look at the game and play it as a game depicting a world, you'll have fun. It shouldn't take much to get past the point where you aren't bothered by the control scheme and Baldur's Gate II is immersing you just as much as KotOR. Play each one for ten minuites and KotOR probably is more immersive because of the graphics (I don't count controls for a whole lot as far as immersion goes, it's more about graphics and interface on screen... like, Grim Fandango. Its use of the gamepad actually means a more complex and harder to use control scheme than a standard adventure game one of the period. And thinking about it, how different would GF be with a normal scheme? Somewhat, but not hugely. I VERY highly doubt that it'd affect the immersion or quality of the game. Certainly not for me at least. But I guess I just have a better imagination (for lack of a better word) for these things than you...

Anyway, back to the point. BG uses what works. It's not immediately the most immersive system, but if you play it a lot you'll get drawn in and will forget all the little things like having to move people by mouse commands. At least I, and certainly many, many others, feel this way. Fine, I have to use the mouse to click and move them. So? For one thing BG has six people to control, not one, so it's got to have some kind of compromise... this is just the best one. It's not lazy. It's not bad design. It is the exact opposite of those two things. It is great design and it would be much lazier to implement some stupid direct control scheme into a BG-type topdown game. It would have a very low chance of working well and certainly would never be half as good as BG's... but then as I've said I'd take the BG control system over the KotOR control system any day. You disagree, which is okay, but you really shouldn't be acting like it's morally indefensible and actually is destroying gaming to suggest that there could be an advantage to a less direct form of control and/or more control complexity. It's stupid and wrong. As I said, the control scheme, to me, has not been a significant block in any way, shape, or form to be being immersed in Baldur's Gate. If you want things that do that look at things like how sometimes you can see things on the other sides of walls. THAT is breaking the immersion. But merely using the mouse to control my characters from a top-down perspective? No, once you get used to it it can be quite immersive, and it is to me. It's sad that it isn't to you because those are some of the best games of all time.

I just fundamentally cannot understand how you could consider something as simple as clicking to move to point B or holding down the button to go to point B such a big difference in gameplay and design. I do not see it that way. They are very similar in most all ways. They are different, have somewhat different applications... but you have gone on a huge rant against this and I still don't quite understand what you are ranting against... or rather why you are ranting against it. Clicking to move is an issue THIS big? It just makes no sense at all to me. It is not a big issue!

Grim Fandango is unique because of its interface, but more so because of great game design. Escape from Monkey Island uses the same interface but is a much worse game... I was definitely more immersed in Curse of Monkey Island, a traditional mouse-click adventure, than I was in Escape. That is just one example of how good game design counts far more than some little thing like the controls.

KotOR vs. Baldur's Gate is the same, though much less extreme since the quality differnce between KotOR and BGII is a lot closer than CoMI and EFMI.