Jarmo
4241
DC Universe Online.
Does that mean a really long string of costumed heroes? Like on a “everybody-and-I-mean-everybody-and-their-cousin-Jimmy-teams-up” comic book miniseries embossed foil-enhanced gatefold cover?
Jarmo
4242
MindJack. A slaying.
It seems Zero Punctuation is past its prime here in Qt3.
Huh, I’m kinda surprised, as these have been great reviews.
The various episodes have felt rather interchangeable for some time now. They’re still entertaining to watch, but the novelty factor has worn off so usually I don’t feel compelled to comment.
That was excellent. I’d never heard of Mindjack before I clicked on that link.
Now I’m curious to know if it ends the way Yahtzee predicted, since he never finished the game. Does anyone know?
Wade42
4247
No idea, but that would be a neat twist.
PS - Tom reviewed it, and was a bit more charitable.
You should see the Giant Bomb Quicklook. It’s doesn’t look good.
Insanely so, one might say.
Good lord, he savaged it. I kind of wish he’d drop the whole game reviewing thing and just make funny cartoons with the monster guys.
Two Worlds II this week:
The first 47 seconds address one of my main irritations with current fantasy games. The rest was pretty good too.
Someone other than me notices RPG interface design stinks! I can’t think of a single game that had a quick-switch equipment system that actually worked worth a damn, unless you count the Cataclysm release of WOW finally ripping off all those mods.
In Oblivion, your shield returns to your hand if you don’t have anything else in it.
Quitch
4255
Dark Messiah allowed you to assign the shield to a quickslot and the it would add your strongest sword too once equipped. Not perfect though.
Neverwinter Nights allowed you to equipment two items to one slot.
As I recall Diablo II allowed you to switch between two complete weapon sets (specifying what was in both hands). That’s a bit earlier than Cataclysm.
Eh? I don’t recall that at all.
Diablo 2 is a good counterpoint; it was minimal, but at least they tried. Note however it only covered weapons slots, which brings me to…
Neverwinter Nights allowed you to equipment two items to one slot.
The larger point is that RPGs love to give you tactically-useful sets of equipment, but make switching back and forth such a hassle people don’t bother. For example, every RPG that comes to mind has stuff like lightning-resist armor; the only support in general they give you for switching to a “max lightning resist set” is doing it by hand. Some even forbid you from doing it in combat. What on earth are they thinking? It’s like designers get the “make interesting tradeoffs” part, but then just throw up their hands and give up at the “implementation” part. Make up your mind if you’re supposed to swap sets or not, people.
I haven’t played the first NWN, but I think the part that you’re ignoring here is that most of these RPGs seemed to be designed with saving and loading as an integral part of the design. What I mean by that is that the player is actually expected to go into an encounter, fail, look at a rotating hand dissolving into sand, go through multiple loading screens, then get back to the situation before the encounter where you died. Then you evaluate how to do the encounter better.
Let’s see: I got killed by lightning last time, so this time I should equip my lightning resistance items and drink the lightning resistance potion if I want to survive the encounter. Or: last time I got turned into stone, so I should first equip this petrification resistance item before I get to this part.
The games are just designed in multiple ways to be played in a way where you have the disadvantage the first time through, but after you die you’re expected to learn from it, and then go into your inventory and make the necessary changes.
I don’t like that design either, but it’s just how it is in a lot of older games. In newer RPGs, their solution to this dilemma seems to be to make things easier. If you’re less likely to die, then you don’t need the specialized equipment/potions as much.
In Neverwinter Nights 2, I handled the uncertainty by having multiple casters in the party that cast all their protection spells before every potential encounter. Unfortunately the designers must have thought of this in advance, because often I got forced into cutscenes at the beginning of the encounter where my protection spells were still counting down and usually stopped working by the time I stopped talking to the bad guys and actually started fighting. So that taught me to not cast the protection spells until after the fight actually starts.
That’s a depressingly good observation.
This is why, IMHO, roguelikes are generally much better designed than RPGs. Instead of relying on the save/load cycle to warn players of how they’re going to be unfairly killed, the designers have to think of ways to make the game genuinely risky while at the same time offering players options of how to deal with that risk so that when you do die, it can feel fair.
