🚀 go-pugleaf

Gerry Quinn <ger...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the entrails of
the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>In article <so58e9d4dfd2h11j6...@4ax.com>, Xoc...@gmx.com 
>says...
>> Gerry Quinn <ger...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the entrails of
>> the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:
>
>> >I wouldn't expect much of freeware games.  Spiderweb still sells their 
>> >old-school games - lots of people buy them.
>> 
>> Oh I know they do, but as I noted previously, isometric RPGs aren't
>> particularly immersive and certainly would never be an "Even better"
>> system then the Elder Scrolls has.
>> 
>> Their games look like they're from the 80s, and while some people like
>> that old school look, I don't and I never found that kind of game
>> immersive.
>> 
>> How can you, you aren't IN the world, you're looking down on a party
>> that's in the world.
>
>It could be worse - what if you had to decode a set of symbols to work 
>out what characters are doing?  I don't understand how people can find 
>those so-called "books" immersive!

Total non-sequitur there Gerry;
In a book or a movie or a TV show, you're a passive outside observer,
not involved in any way, in the game you're a participant.
(This is something Cryptic Studios has never understood, since they
insist on putting cutscenes in their games that show you things you
could not possibly know.  It's ok to do that in a movie, since you can't
warn the hero about the villain's trap, but when you are the hero in the
game, and they show you the villain's trap, what possible motivation
could you have to walk into it?
I'm assuming their story guy came from TV/Movies and isn't a game
player, so he just churns out scripts the way he always has and no one
corrects it for the genre change.)

That's kind of the point I'm making about the dumbing down of RPGs -
fewer and fewer choices and more defined roles being assigned.
Take away my choices and I'm not role playing anymore, since I have no
real input.

It's the kind of thing that made Freelancer not immersive, while
Privateer was.  In Privateer, I was Xocyll the pilot and I chose what I
wanted to do, in Freelancer, I just drove Edison Trent and watched him
talk to people and do actions in cutscenes and if I deviated from the
script in the slightest other NPCs instantly nagged me.

>Seriously, different strokes for different folks, but for me the 
>perspective doesn't make too much difference. I guess I must be more 
>about getting immersed in the story than 'being there'.

It's not just the perspective, it's the party vs single character - I
can role play a character, not a group of 4+, since I'm not 4+ people.

>> >MMX Legacy is out now, granted they seem to have put plenty of art into 
>> >it, but the gameplay is old-school.
>> 
>> Well screenies make it look fairly advanced graphically, but it's party
>> based.
>> 
>> I played some of the early Might and Magic games, and Dungeon Master2
>> and the Eye of the Beholder series, they were fun, but they were never
>> immersive the way Ultima Underworld or Arena was.
>> 
>> I'm one person, I can role play one character, where I do all the moves
>> not a party where I click on a key and the character makes an attack of
>> some kind or picks a lock or defuses a trap or whatever.
>
>I agree that having a party tends to push a game towards the strategy 
>side of things.

Strategy can be engrossing (I loved the first 2 X-COM games,) but it's
not really immersive, and immersion is what I want in my RPGS both SP
and MMO varieties.
I want a world to play in where I can, to some extent, write my own
story and behave as I determine that character should behave.
That's why I subscribed to City of Heroes for so long - I could make a
character with powerset choices identical to another character of mine,
but with a completely different backstory/motivations and it played
differently, despite being functionally identical.


I want to make my own backstory and motivations in RPGs, not have one
forced on me as seems to be standard on consoles* as well as a lot of
the older party based PC RPGs like Baldur's Gate, or Dark Messiah of
Might and Magic.
* (one of the main reason I don't play consoles - I have no interest in 
fighting games, or shooters using a hopelessly inferior control system
or sports games or "RPGs" which give me a premade character to control,
with it's own prewritten story and motivations and dialog, and that
really doesn't leave much.) 


>> Maybe if I had MPD I could get immersed in that, but I doubt it, since
>> it would still be that one step removed from me doing anything in game.
>> 
>> Party games should be isometric, since placement of the characters
>> matters when making attacks (or at least it does in the good ones.)
>> 3d is good for single character games with high immersion, where you ARE
>> the character.
>
>Wizardry 8 had a decent system combining 3D with positioning, but it 
>hasn't caught om as far as I know.  Not sure why - the combats tended to 
>be overlong, but that was game design not an intrinsic feature of the 
>system.

Fairly sure I never played that one. 
I tried one of the Wizardry games but I really didn't care much for the
world and the fantasy with sci-fi elements it did, so I never did finish
it.

Xocyll