RPG divers.

[Maalak]

Et sinon, vous ne voulez pas plutôt parler de RPG ?
Parce que de une, certains s'en tamponnent totalement du déballage d'Avelonne, et de deux, il y a déjà un topic pour parler de ça (même si pas dans la bonne section), donc faites-le là-bas.

[Wulfstan]

Il a l'air sympa ce Feargus (cadeau ).

Merchi.

Eric Fenstermaker

Fenstermaker's Folly (le monsieur en question): Like I said, I'd have liked to just solve it between us but it was well too late for that. I didn't like that it escalated…

I may post a longer critique to this in the Eternity Codex forums, since this is an Eternity thing, including how to approach narrative management in general.

For the rest of this, though, it’s indicative of the overall process and pipelines in place, some of which Eric is not responsible for or even knew about.

Get ready for a lot of carriage returns. Also tldr; this is an example of a flawed process in place.

Based on the fragment quoted in your post, I’ll take that as a, “yes, I agree with the points the fragment is referencing.”

As for the rest of your response, I can sense the frustration. I’m trying to feel bad for your sacrifice and overtime – and under different circumstances, I would.

But if you scripted and implemented something you didn’t even review (especially when it’s 10x easier and faster to make comments and edits before implementing, let alone fixing those same errors, not to mention it’s part of a Creative Lead’s job), well, that’s on you.

It’s not what I would have done – and if I had, I would accept the responsibility for reworking the elements. That's not even a game industry lesson, it's a life lesson.

If it’s easier to blame me for putting the cart before the horse, all right, but I don’t know what else to tell you except that sympathy wasn’t the emotion I felt reading this, only confusion (“well… why did you do it that way then?”).

I’ll be blunt and say sympathy certainly wasn’t the emotion the other people doing overtime and sacrifices for the narrative felt, and I’m not even talking about the Tyranny team - but the sub-leads on Eternity who weren’t in support of it, either.

In those cases, however, I told them they should bring it up with you and give you a chance to address it before escalating it to me (which I consider bad form, as it was sometimes clear they just wanted an excuse to tell you “an owner said you were wrong”).

But even if that didn’t work out, they shouldn’t take it to me – it should go to the Lead Designer next and get his take, and so on and so forth. Some had, but not all.

Other Thoughts!

Although you’ve blamed me for this in the past, it certainly wasn’t my decision not to give you additional support or personnel to get things done in a timely manner – but one issue with being an owner of a multi-owner company is you get to share the blame for all owner decisions, even ones you have no idea have been made.

If it were up to me, I’d have look for ways to downscope (like with the intermittent VO) and if that failed, sacrificed funds to get the team to a proper size to do the game properly, and I’ve said as much about sacrifice in the past – it’s an investment for the future, and it reduces bugs and overtime.

I don’t think any developer should be working more than 40 hours a week, and if they are, the pipeline is likely mismanaged, overly ambitious, has feature-itis or tweak-itis, or is broken in some other respect. It may also be the fault of the actual developer to put more content in than intended, or doing work outside their discipline and/or that's clearly too much for them.

It’s unfortunate the PoE editor can’t handle chunk deletions well if it wasted that much time – the edits I provided were chunked accordingly. I doubt that’s a programmer oversight as the programmer who worked on the dialogue editor while I was at Obsidian I’ve always thought was exceptional and did a great job (I’ll leave him nameless to keep him out of this, but he knows who he is).

As mentioned in this thread ("MF", I believe, I don't know how to mark his user name because I am old), it seems odd for a pipeline to be unable to do that – but I’m not familiar with how exactly you did it or what process you used except that you specifically promised you would handle all the scripting so I could return to Tyranny. I took you at your word.

I do feel in light of PoE1, being able to do chunk deletions easily might have benefited the narrative presentation.

But before you think I’m blaming you for PoE1’s overall word count with that last sentence, I’m not. The over-abundance of text in general is a larger issue. Sure, I can edit my text, but for the rest, something else is going on. So let’s get to word count in general.

For example, according to localizers, PoE2’s word count alone ended up double the word count expected and double the amount Obsidian budgeted for. This has nothing to do with VO, this is word count. This also seemed to be a surprise to some.

So to be clear, it’s not all on you for too much wordage for PoE1 or even PoE2. You did a companion for PoE2. I didn’t work on PoE2. It is a larger problem across both games that was unaddressed. I suspect the lead/project lead for PoE2 was lectured for going over the word count budget, but I could be wrong.

If those figures are accurate – and they may not be - the word count bloat would have become worse when VO entered the picture, which was hinted by the team as not being their decision, but instead dictated by upper management close to the game’s end date. If it was upper management, ideally, they’d be ready to accept the budget costs involved with that decision vs. blaming someone else. I’ve already made my thoughts on VO budgeting known, but it’s expensive and it can be wasteful.

Still, to be fair, even with regards to the word bloat, they may have been able to do cuts to PoE2 word count at the end, I hope (brevity helps as well as being open to large edits). If so, I strongly suspect PoE2’s lead would take responsibility for going over budget vs. blaming someone who edited his work as soon as he was aware of his boss’s requests, especially if that person editing his own work was an owner and technically their superior.

Overall, I’d take all these examples as a lesson of overall pipeline dysfunction and poor communication up and down management through the sub-leads and back again – this is just a symptom of a much larger problem that’s either dictated, done as a de facto routine by senior employees or leads, or never discussed at all, like it was in this case.

The only thing I feel wrong with this is supporting it and saying it’s okay. That it’s good enough. That it’s acceptable. That it’s forgivable. People can be forgiven, but surrendering to the process can’t be. If the process is a problem, it’s something that should be fixed. If not, it becomes disheartening and damaging.

Subscribers to a broken system don’t elicit any sympathy from me – it’s their choice. If you’re supporting a flawed pipeline and flawed process – including one that may include several problems of your own making – and if you can do nothing to change it, then it’s best to remove yourself from that pipeline.

---------------------

I don’t blame Eric for not being able to change any of these things – I do think he provided guidance to a lot of new Eternity writers, and we did work to accommodate him after New Vegas.

But before you think I’m being overly magnanimous, Eric absolutely drove away a lot of talented writers (esp. John Gonzalez – Shadow over Mordor, Horizon Zero Dawn), although John likely wouldn’t ever admit to the fact that Eric hated him; also, we were forced to isolate Eric from John’s Lead Writer responsibilities (which was a failure on our part, but I wasn’t in charge of New Vegas, which had a lot of inner development conflicts across the board).

Even more after John left, we actually changed our hiring procedure to cater to Eric on Eternity, since we knew if he didn’t approve of a writer, you might as well set a torch any writer that worked with him.

Overall, I thought John was a great writer.

When I talked to Eric about the perspectives on John (since no one else had), his solution was, “let’s just divide New Vegas tasks so John and I never have to interact with each other,” which was like, that moment where all the sound evaporates from the room and all you see is the other person’s lips moving, but you can’t bring yourself to acknowledge what they’re saying. I mean, the person you're denouncing - he’s your Lead. He’s a good writer. So are you. Try to meet in the middle. But – no, that was not to be.

Despite the situation, John turned in his notice (which also broke me a little more) and went on to bigger and better things – Mordor, Horizon: Zero Dawn. Kudos to him, but a huge loss for Obsidian in writing talent (much like George Ziets and Travis Stout). All could have been prevented, imo.

Chris Parker

Kyl Von Kull: You did a great job of explaining why FU is so poorly suited for his present role. Would you mind doing the same for Parker? As in, why is Chris Parker such a prick?

This is a very long answer, so I’ll condense it: nepotism (family and friends), works hard but often ineffectively, has poor designer skills but actively gets involved in design (Josh simply started ignoring him after a while, which became a pattern Parker didn’t even have time to notice), and in many ways, Parker is like a little Feargus except he works harder and gets more involved, which causes problems.

Parker’s behavior with Feargus during the PoE KS drive final hours was soul-crushing. While usually these fights were brief, they became longer and longer between the two.

He repeats a lot of the same mistakes and never seems to learn from them – and it’s embarrassing to have to remind him of them when he brings them up in front of others and asks your opinion.

One very specific thing: Both Chris Parker and Feargus have a wonderful habit of giving you room to come to a solution, and then when you when you present the solution, they tell you “it wasn’t the solution they hoped you would choose” (they already had one in mind), and then tell you to go with their decision. Here’s the thing – I don’t even care about that, but in a company where there’s never enough time and never enough money, you can’t waste so much as a day on dithering bullshit – just tell me what you want, if I have a problem with it, I’ll tell you, but chances are, I’ll agree and find a way to make it work and we won’t spend even more time arguing about how we got to this in the first place.

We had this happen on KOTOR2 (I finally had to give up and give Chris the interface, which he wasted months of developer time on – and the programmers we needed - for almost no result). Feargus did something similar when Feargus asked us to decide who should be narrative lead on Eternity – and then when we said, “we should offer the job to George Ziets,” Feargus just said, “no, you should have chosen Eric.” There were tons of things like this where I wish they’d just cut to the chase, because it made you hesitant to make a call because there was always that lurking feeling it had already been decided. And it’s time you don’t get back in a company where again, there’s never enough time.

Part of my extensive post-mortem of Chris Parker (I had pages, since I was trying to learn how to be a better manager by what not to do) was at his best, he would only waste two people's time - yours and his. At worst, he would waste entire department's time or even the whole team's time with feature shifts. Worse, he'd throw tantrums about his own schedules – often trashing them and throwing away promises of personnel and resources in defense of something he was doing. I don’t care about someone wanting to change the schedule, but again, that time was never given back, and the sudden nature of these changes would waste even more time and more planning that had been done with the expectation of promises to be fulfilled.

Another issue was not stopping to think before launching an action. As an example, Parker and other employees spent months trying to help someone get their immigration settled. It cost a lot of time, was distracting, and was a time sensitive matter. But as we were nearing the finish line of a months-long process, Chris Parker suddenly asked, “do we even want to keep her?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – you’re saying this now? Didn't you think this through?

This was typical, but it’s worse when you’re playing with people’s futures here, and carelessly.

On the plus side (but also echoes “repeating mistakes”) is when one of our games has gone to shit, Chris Parker is often sent in to rescue it, and it is in better shape after, even if it's not going to be destined for the quality bin. However, it would be nice if the games hadn’t been bleeding internally in the first place (usually management-wise and staffing-wise). And it would be nice if we had someone consistent to be there who wasn’t Parker, since Parker has owner duties as well.

There was one telling meeting where Chris Parker told the company they were hiring someone to replace him for his position "to do what he did", and someone raised their hand and said, “but Chris, we don’t know what it is you do.”

Chris Jones et Darren Monahan

Kyl Von Kull : [...] I feel like you’re on a roll here with these Obsidian management failures, so how about the last two owners, Chris Jones and Darren? Were they particularly egregious or just too spineless to stand up for competence? Or, as some of have speculated, did FU and Parker have enough shares or board seats between them to dictate policy when they were in agreement? I imagine it would be very helpful to many of your former colleagues to know exactly where the rot is spreading from. [...]

Quick response: Darren and Jones are waiting for their payouts. Darren has said as much to me. Jones has said as much to me with his lack of action on anything.

Longer response: While Darren at least cares about games on some level, Jones doesn’t at all and has mastered the art of saying “no” to just about everything – he’d make a great technical director at a company that doesn’t make games, because he could find a way to say “no” to everything and dismiss it out of hand.

I was very surprised to see him as a lead programmer on Indiana, but not surprised to see that vanish, as Jones doesn’t tend to last long when there’s actual work to be done – he often can’t be bothered. (This was a problem as far back as KOTOR2, which I did confront him on – he also did it on Alpha Protocol before he lost interest in a few months because it was too much work.)

Jones is also one of the ones I point to in Fallout 2’s troubled development = Feargus kept trying to cater to to make sure he was all right, to make sure he was happy, to make sure he was pampered – but Jones was only biding his time so he could ditch Black Isle and switch over to Troika for more money and get a bigger payout. Meanwhile, his officemate (doing actual programming) was suffering like hell with no programming relief despite an experienced programmer sitting 5 feet away who could have helped with the Studio's workload at a time where many people were in danger of getting laid off. Jones first is the Jones' rule. He was also threatened with being de-ownered, but the difficult issue here is that I think Feargus was right to do so - he just consumes resources with no benefit to a project (at least he was for ALL the years I was working there).

Darren’s a frustrating case b/c he’s very smart, he’s more knowledgable about game best practices than most of the owners, and has empathy, but he’s so focused on getting his cash and such an abject coward and afraid of rocking the boat, that his opinions are useless because there’s no strength behind them – he caves at the first sign of resistance. He used to try and tell me what a valiant employee fighter he was. Through email. How tough he was for employee rights. Through email. I told him to his face I thought he was too afraid to raise anything that might get him in trouble.

He was at least as bad at communication and follow-up as both Feargus and Parker (probably moreso on the communication side), the biggest problem is he just seemed distracted all the time.

He was, however, approachable by a lot of employees because he came across as friendly, but he often couldn’t do anything to help things except “hey, buddy, how are you?” “Buddy, tell me more.” vs. actually, really helping someone.

Darren also spent forever on the PoE1 Backer Portal, providing further proof you shouldn’t ask an owner to do content work, it slows everything down – that’s not even a criticism, just the truth. No one seemed to absorb this.

Darren also had an amazing talent of both agreeing to Feargus’s requests (sort of) then not following them once he was out of Feargus’s radius… oftentimes when we had decided something at an owner meeting and agreed on a procedure, I noticed Darren would simply ignore it and not follow the procedure - even when someone needed it to be done.

I asked him about it (as a precursor to a larger question as to why he hadn't done something according to procedure).

And when I asked him why, he would simply say, “well, yeah, I haven’t talked to Feargus about that yet.” But we had talked. All of us. And we had agreed. In my mind, all I could think of was this person was being a blocker for no reason that made sense. And now he wasn't doing what we all agreed to until you talk... to Feargus... again?

As he was being "buddy" with me all I could think of (and then said) was: You won’t follow the procedure until you talk to him? After we talked? When is that? And that also means you won’t actually do what was decided until that vague future date? My dinosaur brain would simply say: Do it now, Darren, for fuck's sake, because you're making a mess where we already decided there wasn't one.

It was frustrating, but it was also one of those situations that because Darren was one of those who nodded and said the right things and even though he completely disregarded what Feargus told him to do, he got a pass because he acted like he was falling in line. Frankly, it was garbage. Parker did the same thing - and even said as much to our publishers as early on as KOTOR2 when diminishing Feargus's thoughts on production issues because Feargus was "out of touch and didn't understand producers or production anymore."

Jones at least had the balls to tell Feargus he was full of shit and we shouldn't do what he was saying (which quickly made him one of the most unpopular owners, because he could often argue with facts). It also made him the target of "well, you don't sound like you want to be an owner anymore" discussions, which weren't really discussions.

I will also say because Darren agrees with Feargus when pressured or frightened, that does make him very valuable when voting needs to be done, and it was good of Feargus to choose him to be one of the production triad of owners and give him a large % of shares to make that vote worthwhile.

Darren rarely, if ever, spoke to me (he was afraid to). However, while we didn’t have a good working relationship on Dark Alliance 1 back at Black Isle, I realized later on it was because Feargus never told Darren that he (Feargus) was coming into my office every other day to give advice and continual dumb changes on the story, so it required a lot of iteration, which (to my error) I didn't realize Darren couldn't be aware of because Feargus would tell him (right?), and I'm sure it surprised Darren to find me in a frustrated mood (Feargus' story iterations ranged from a wide variety of crap ideas, where you had to dig deep and wide to find the good in them - his craptastic story skills also caused a lot of problems on Dungeon Siege 3).

This overall lack of communication continued at Obsidian.

You don’t hear much about Darren, and that’s Darren's desire – he wants to stay "off the grid," he doesn’t want to run projects anymore (it's too much pressure), and he wants to be everyone’s friend while helping (almost) no one until he gets his payout, serves his time for a new master for a few years, then vanishes with his gold. I respect him for his insights, but not his character, which is weak and cowardly.

[Tramb]

Bon je trouve que Maalak est un peu triste de ne pas vouloir papoter du putage ici (paputer ?) mais de là à poster ici le résumé qu'il y a ailleurs, ça sert à rien non ?

[hisvin]

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2018/05/30/d...d-a-decade-ago
Le retour de la vengeance du sujet.

[Tramb]

Sinon Vogel kickstarte son prochain jeu :
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...-the-conqueror

[hisvin]

Je ne croyais pas qu'il arriverait à le financer aussi vite. Si le flux ne faiblit pas, il va pouvoir faire le Starcitizen du JDR, que dis-je du RPG voir même du CRPG.

[hisvin]

C'est le sujet du moment, l'utopie d'un genre ou la dystopie ou hic, l'uchronie.
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-future-of-crpgs/

[anonyme1712]

Je ne croyais pas qu'il arriverait à le financer aussi vite. Si le flux ne faiblit pas, il va pouvoir faire le Starcitizen du JDR, que dis-je du RPG voir même du CRPG.

Attends de voir Pierre Begue et son Knight of the Chalice2 en mode financement participatif à la fin de l'année, et même un Realms Beyond, on tape dans le super lourd là

[hisvin]

Knight of the chalice, c'est super confidentiel quand même. Enfin, c'est l'impression que j'ai.

[anonyme1712]

Knight of the chalice, c'est super confidentiel quand même. Enfin, c'est l'impression que j'ai.

T'as pas tort d'un certain côté dans le sens où la communication de BlueSalamander est sur certains points bloquée si t'as pas montré patte blanche sur son forum.
Mais c'est simple, ce KotC2, y'a pas plus ambitieux dans le monde de l'OGL:
http://www.heroicfantasygames.com/FW.../FWE_Title.htm

Impossible de tout résumer tellement en y a. On est dans une pure adaptation de "DD" sur table là, avec cerise sur le gateau un générateur d'aventures pour qui souhaite s'y coller.
en illustration, l'ensemble des paramètres que le moteur peut gérre pour les sorts:

Jamais vu un truc aussi poussé en cRPG. Faudra juste mettre de côté les exigences graphiques pour se pencher sur l'ensemble des mécaniques DDesque.

Quand à Realms Beyond, bah la renaissance du projet Chaos Chronicles tel qu'il aurait dû être, et même plus encore

[Tramb]

Knight of the chalice, c'est super confidentiel quand même. Enfin, c'est l'impression que j'ai.

Ouais mais c'est vraiment chouettos niveau baston.

[hisvin]

Tout à fait, limite j'ai l'impression que c'est le meilleur mais je suis mauvais juge.

Par contre, je ne savais pas trop ou allait la deuxième version. Merci pour l'info.

[RegisF]

C'est ça Knight of the Chalice ?

[Tramb]

Yep.

[hisvin]

J'en avais déjà parlé mais, comme il y a une démo de sortie.

https://iratus.org/
Un jeu russe typé Rogue qui semble pas mal ambitieux.

[anonyme1712]

Realms Beyond - Combat Alpha 1 Gameplay


Soyez pas inquiets, la barre d'espace servira à accélérer la vitesse, c'est prévu.

en godmod pour les besoins du build test et du showcase en wip: max de sorts (durée max), max de vie, max de tout...

[RegisF]

J'ai relancé une partie d'Icewind Dale EE 1. Le plaisir est toujours là, malgré l'histoire nulle et les limitations du système D&D (la réput' ne sert à rien, peu de quête résolvables autrement que par combat, etc.). Mais le plaisir de former sa troupe de bras cassés et d'essayer de sauver le monde, c'est grisant. On s'invente la propre bio de persos créés de toutes pièces et vogue la galère. L'enhaced edition propose d'ailleurs un nombre conséquent de kits de classes (même s'ils ne se valent pas tous) et il est toujours plaisant de découvrir une classe assez peu exploitée (au hasard le druide totémique).

[pesos]

J'ai envie de me lancer dans un Shadowrun pour tester.

La question est la suivante : les histoires de Returns, Dragonfall et Hong Kong se suivent ou on peut les prendre indépendamment les uns des autres ?

[Dr Funkenstein]

Ils sont indépendants.

[pesos]

Cool merci. Je vais donc tenter Hong Kong, celui qui a l'air de me botter le plus

[Cotopaxi]

C'est aussi le plus verbeux et uniquement en anglais. Mais il est cool oui.

[pesos]

Il me semble qu'ils sont tous anglais only non ?

[R_K]

Le premier a eu une traduction officielle en français. Mais les deux autres n'ont pas eu cette chance, surement jugé trop coûteux par rapport au nombre de joueurs français ayant financer le premier.

[Darkmoon Soleyfir]

Le premier (Returns) est le coup d'essai : sympathique, mais avec une campagne très linéaire et assez plate.

Le deuxième (Dragonfall) est le plus réussi : le gameplay est amélioré par rapport au 1, le scénario est très bon, l'ambiance originale et il a été remasterisé pour devenir encore meilleur.

Le troisième (Hong Kong) est le plus abouti : le gameplay est plus varié, le jeu est construit en capitalisant sur ce qui a été appris dans Dragonfall et son remaster. Mais comme dit cotopaxi c'est aussi le plus verbeux. Ils sont allés un peu trop loin dans les dialogues secondaires et ça devient vite assommant là où Dragonfall est plus juste.

Les trois sont complètement indépendants au niveau du scénar, il y'a juste quelques petites références discrètes de temps en temps aux événements des autres jeux (généralement dans du contenu bonus).

[anonyme1712]

Concernant le lancement de sorts dans le projet Realms Beyond (aka Chaos Chronicles rebirth) : attendez-vous à une prise en compte de composantes materielles, hell yeah !

Material Components are still in the design phase because they have a lot impact to the overall gameplay. But since wizards are already overpowered in D&D3.5e at higher level, requiring those constraints could be a good compensation.

Material components aren't fully developed yet, but yes, we plan to implement them because high level wizards are already powerful as fuck. Limiting their spellcasting with material components is a good way to add an additional cost to casting powerful, battle-deciding spells.
Since we already have other moneysinks (rations, camping equipment, etc) having to spend a couple of gold pieces each time you cast a fireball makes it less of a no-brainer to cast.
Also, running out of a material component while you're deep down in a dungeon with no traders anywhere nearby is also exciting!

Bye bye les spammers de fireballs, yeah !

[Tramb]

Faut voir comment c'est implémenté mais ça marchait bien dans les Ultima, donc pourquoi pas.

[Ckao]

J'aime bien ce genre de restrictions, quand il faut bien se préparer avant de se lancer dans un voyage ou un donjon et ne pas juste stacker des potions de soins.

[Maalak]

Le remaster du premier volume de la vieille trilogie est d'ores et déjà disponible sur Steam et sur GoG.


Le début pique un peu, notamment du fait qu'on ne connait ou ne se rappelle plus trop de la ville et les mécaniques à l'ancienne sont assez impitoyables (et un peu lourdes également, il faut l'avouer ), mais ça fait plaisir de les retrouver.
Au rang des défauts, j'aurais aimé que la minimap soit moins transparente pour gagner en lisibilité et qu'il soit possible de redéfinir les touches pour adapter le clavier FR (pour je ne sais quelle raison, le Alt-Maj ne fonctionne pas chez moi pour changer de configuration FR->UK), bien que les touches fléchées fassent déjà bien le boulot, mais ceci mis à part, je suis content de retrouver ce classique remis aux goûts du jour.

[Edit] J'ai mis quelques commentaires sur le topic Bard's Tale, et j'espère que vu les fans de RPG qui doivent normalement traîner sur ce topic RPG, je ne vais pas trop monologuer sur ce jeu.

[Tramb]

Quoi, tu connais pas Skara Brae par coeur ?

[Maalak]

Ben non, j'ai commencé au 2 à l'époque.


Sinon, il va aussi paraître pour début 2019, selon le même procédé un remaster pour le vieux Wasteland pour ceux qui préfèrent cet univers.