DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

I feel like if you don't get any enjoyment out of playing a game without the combat challenge, you're probably going to want something other than a New Game+. Some people appreciate the cathartic effect of being able to stomp on the bosses for a change instead of being an underdog.

One situation where I feel like New Game+es are most worthwhile is when you get some particularly useful skills or equipment right near the end of the game. In the original playthrough, there's almost no opportunity to experience it to its full potential, but the New Game+ lets you go back and get some real use out of it.

The originals Baldur's Gate games didn't have a conventional New Game+ system, but they had character importation which allowed you to send an endgame main character back to the beginning of the game, and, with a bit of tweaking, keep your equipment. I thought this was great, because the game is designed to limit your party's strength relative to your enemies, and a lot of your combat effectiveness comes from your equipment, but a lot of the best equipment only becomes available near the end of the game, so I think it can be fun to experience what the game would have been like if you'd had access to it from the beginning. Some people argue that if you're going to do this, you might as well just hack the game to beef up your stats and give yourself all the best equipment, but I never felt that way. I enjoyed using the powers and items I had gone out of my way to earn in a context where they weren't just allowing me to keep pace with the opposition. I feel like sometimes it's nice to be challenged, and sometimes it's nice to cruise while watching just how much your strength has escalated since you first started.

I was really put out when the Enhanced Edition version of the Baldur's Gate games took away the mechanism for keeping your equipment with an imported character, since I am resolute that it wasn't a bug. It wasn't something anyone would have stumbled on without taking advantage of it deliberately. Even if unintentional, it was definitely a feature.

It sounds like an interesting premise that could be done well, but be careful to consider players' loss aversion. More options don't always make people happier; people don't like missing out on things, and if they're given too many viable choices (such as too many tempting options on a menu,) they actually tend to be less satisfied with their choices. Intuitively, you might expect that a person would be happier with the best choice out of 40 than the best choice out of 4, but it seems we can't help thinking in terms of getting the rewards of one selection while missing the rewards from the others, and missing 39 options feels worse than missing 3. You want to strike a balance where your players don't feel too badly torn by the options available to them, or the degree of choice will start to become a burden.

author=Liberty
Compared to II, the best in the series (rank is basically II, I/V, III and so forth as agreed by most fans), where the story starts with a bang and only gets better as it goes... well, I have to say that while I love both games, II really hits all the best notes - it starts strong and just builds stronger and stronger.

Literally, the first scene is your whole youth brigade company getting slaughtered on a routine trip and the reveal that the big bad is the Prince of your country and your Captain was in on it. That's the very first 10 minutes of the game. And it gets better. It has it's slow points but it does the hit hard and fast very well.

II, I/IV, III? Really? I thought IV was almost universally considered the butt monkey of the series, far below the others.

Personally, I favor III over II, although I'm probably somewhat biased having played II many years after III after having heard so many discussions of what was so good about it that it would have been hard for the execution to live up to what I imagined. In some bits, like , I felt that the game was trying to sell me as tactical masterstrokes things that were sufficiently unrealistic as to assault my suspension of disbelief. But really, I think my main issue with the game was that Suikoden III had introduced a lot of elements of story and gameplay which were different from what I'd seen in any other game, and being the more highly regarded game, I expected Suikoden II to be like Suikoden III, but better, and it's not- they're substantially different games in many ways.

I have mixed feelings about leaving in the combat exploits. On the one hand, in games that offer game breaking exploits, I generally use them. On the other hand, in games that offer game breaking exploits, I generally use them. It can be fun and cathartic to smash through opposition which was intended to be challenging, but sometimes it gets tedious, and I still end up doing it anyway, because once I've noticed it, passing up the exploit feels like deliberate self-handicapping. At least in the case of the infinite attack power exploit I discussed on the game page, that one doesn't become practical (within means I discovered) until near the end of the game, so I didn't end up locking myself out of most of the challenging combat in the game, which probably made for a good compromise.

author=unity
Also, realistically, many bisexual people are on a scale of how likable they find either gender (for example I find females more attractive than males, overall), so it only makes sense that people who like both genders would have different ways of speaking to a mate of one gender over the other. This means twice the work for the developer, but I think it would work fine.

Again, I admit that my "make everyone bi, dammit" mindset is extreme, but having some bisexual characters in games would certainly be welcome :D

Given a cast of any significant size and level of development, I'm almost certainly going to make some characters bi whether you have any option to select your PC's gender or not, because elements like this can still significantly affect how characters relate to each other. I'm not going to be planning out every nuance of character interaction in advance from the beginning of the game, so it's not like I always know from the outset whether, say, the fact that a character is bisexual, or that they like to read fairy tales, is just going to be a random tidbit that informs how I think about them as a writer, or if it's going to manifest as a notable trait in the game.

In one game which I'll hopefully get around to actually making once I finish my commitments to working on other people's games, one character's bisexuality happens to be an important component of her arc of character development, despite the fact that the main character of that game does not have selectable gender. I'd like to give players choice in terms of the kind of romance they can experience over the course of the game, but I don't want to provide that level of choice at the cost of depth and nuance.