![]() Here you can choose to be a charming character-which means you’re hoping the designers and writers worked together nicely to give you many situations where the dialogue is more interesting for the charmer and often tilts the direction of an encounter. Think Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (since we’re going very old school here) or the multiplayer in Splinter Cell: Double Agent. You can totally backstab one of them, but the other one will kill you or chase you forever.” It is precious few games that manage a balance of making you weak (but a badass when you’re in your element so that YOU are what’s scary in the shadows), that expose you to real danger if you mess up, but also allow you to get back into the shadows if things go wrong but you think fast. I love playing stealthy characters, but it’s really hard to make a game where stealth is a viable and fun path: ergo “Nope, there’s two guys facing each other at that fire. So then I’m stuck in the same old familiar What Kind of Fun Do I Want To Have loop that’s sadly so standard in RPGs. You would have shown–in a very few minutes–that the choices matter.īut because they neuter your choice and stick you in front of the long descriptions of how each character type works and what its flavors are-which are totally NOT Fighter, Thief, and Mage. I mean, if a player was just being an idiot and choosing things they really didn’t mean, what’s the worst punishment they would receive if you stuck them with the character they’d chosen to play? Well, they’d have to start a new game, and lose ten minutes of their life-and play the character the way they actually wanted to play the character. But then they neutered that by giving you the ol’ standard Hall o’ Creation: “Didn’t like any of the choices you made ten minutes ago? They didn’t actually matter, you can undo all that and choose your character type here.” The game starts fantastically, making you make tense choices that seem like they’ll have a permanent and an immediate impact-pun intended, if you’ve played. ![]() we tolerated because we didn’t know any better, and programmers didn’t either. “I’m getting stuck on corners? Really?” If you want to evoke an old gaming style, that’s great-but remind us of the good stuff, and quietly fix the b.s. ![]() When my character gets stuck while simply trying to walk around a corner and the movement feels cludgy, in 1997 I just tried again (and again, often) now my tolerance is much lower. Trouble is, gaming has changed since 1997. The IP is different, sure, so it’s not exactly supposed to be the same thing, but it’s totally supposed to be the same thing. So I came in to Torment: Tides of Numenera, the spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment with high hopes. If you squint hard, you could even see strains of the ideas of Torment show up in the Night Angel trilogy. It was, finally, a video game where it seemed your choices mattered. It remains one of very few games I’ve played through more than once.
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