Skip to main content

A brief note on the latest backer update from Torment: Tides of Numenara

By

The latest backer update went into some detail about the way character generation is handled in-game. I like this approach, and it sounds like they're doing it right.

But the tone of the post really annoyed me. The writer acted as if they were inventing all of this stuff new, when in fact what they describe is exactly what pretty much all the Elder Scrolls games have done starting with Morrowind, and is also evolutionarily related to the "fortune teller" character generation used in several Ultimas (though that actually devolved over time; by Ultima 7 it was very perfunctory).

I find it hard to believe that the senior folks at Obsidian are ignorant of two major families of CRPG. I find it more likely that the marketer who wrote the piece was less than fully engaged in gaming. Either way, it's a huge mar on the face of a team and product that I'm eagerly awaiting.

Doing something right, yay.
Acting as if nobody had done it before, boo.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New Stellaris patch - the power of a name, the sadness of the lame

By
Paradox just shipped a free update to Stellaris featuring a story written by Alexis Kennedy. That's enough to get me to think about trying it again. I checked out the patch notes, and I see a lot of clean up of things that bugged me about the game. But wait a minute. These are the notes for the fourth major patch, and they clean up things that were wrong (sometimes obviously) from the start? I'll chalk it up to development priorities; certainly there was a lot missing that needed to be added, and since the main point of the game is to look like a 4X while actually being a 1X bolted on to a standard Paradox set-piece political game I guess problems with the other three Xes were not as high a priority. I'm certain I'll try Stellaris again at some point, especially if they get more good writers in on making snippets for it. But I doubt it will ever really be my kind of game.
Post a Comment
Read more

This article didn't quite change my life, but it was the most worthwhile thing I've read in a while

By
I like the games I like, and I'm no longer in the business of making games, so in many ways this article is not to my address. But it was still really worth my time to read carefully. It never gets anywhere near the stupid misogynistic pseudo-editorial "defense of games" crap that I'm not naming to avoid the still-raging humans pretending to be flamebots, and it comes from the opposite, and very constructive direction. And it quotes Tim Gunn more than once, in a very on-topic way. Tim Gunn is an awesome individual, even though I doubt he's ever been in the same room as a videogame for long. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-07-video-games-are-boring
Post a Comment
Read more

The highest bang-for-buck thing in Fallout 4

By
So, I had a hankering for some first-person murder hoboing the other day just when Steam put Fallout 4 on sale, so I gave up my plan to wait for the GOTY edition. It's mostly living up to my expectations, good and bad, based on reviews and on previous Bethesda games. The ostensible plot hook (lost baby) is completely underwhelming (sorry, clicking a blob of pixels a couple times can't compare to bonding with a real baby) but irrelevant to the game anyway. The main plot sounds potentially less stupid than the one for FO3. The settlement stuff is not quite as bolted onto the side of the game as I expected - taking time and perks to improve your settlement network can pay off in upgrade mats. But the thing that surprised me most pleasantly was remarkably simple. If you choose a somewhat common name for your character, the voiced robot butler will actually call you by name (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Codsworth/recognized_names). I didn't know this going in, and my first ...
Post a Comment
Read more