Bay 12 Games Forum

If they'll be playing Inquisitors, you'll really want to make things pretty black & white.  The heretics and mutants are the enemy.  There's no shades of grey.  Make them out to be evil incarnate.  Your players should be ready and willing to burn out the corruption wherever it may be.  Even if it turns out to be their best friend.

Just because it's an insanely dark setting, doesn't mean that your players cannot make a difference.  Sure, their actions will be inconsequential in the grand scheme of things...  You've got superpowers clashing over whole regions of the universe...  A few Inquisitors aren't going to change the course of the war...  But they can affect a city, or even a planet.

If you keep the scope relatively narrow - effectively giving your players tunnel-vision - you can actually make them feel pretty good about what they're doing.

And that can be a very effective way to emphasize the darkness of the setting as well...  Keep them focused on the task, keep them feeling good...  And then, at the end, once the campaign is over, pull off the blindfold and let them see just how little all their hard work has accomplished.

This happens several times a day...

Wife:  What'cha doing?
Me:  Building a dwarf fortress.
Wife:  <snicker>

...I'm not sure what she find so amusing about the exchange.

I understand, but still. DF takes it to a whole new level. How many games are there in which you can make a fountain of blood built from the bones of random traders and elven skulls? I don't care about how violent it is, I am just the philosophical type of person.

Well, first of all, most games don't have the mechanics available to build fountains of any sort.

But it's a sandbox game.  There's absolutely no reason, beyond your own amusement, to build a fountain of blood out of bones and skulls.

Dwarf Fortress, in and of itself, doesn't have much of a philosophy.

Although if you revised it slightly to "Attack and kill anyone not in your immediate family/ tribe" it could create some weirdness.

Weirdness?

I thought that was how the world actually worked?

Generally speaking, "moral" choices in video games are a joke.  It's usually painfully obvious what is the "good" choice and what is the "evil" choice...  And they're generally both caricatures.

One of the things I enjoyed about Dragon Age is that it really muddied the waters.  It wasn't really clear which was the good choice and which was the evil choice...  Nor was it entirely clear whether it mattered if you were good or evil.  All that was really important was that you stop the Archdemon.

At night it's FUCKING DARK, dark like I have not seen dark in a video game for a long time. It really adds to the atmosphere, and makes stuff that helps you see in the dark actually useful.

This is something I really miss these days...

Seems like there aren't a whole lot of games that are willing to make nighttime/darkness truly inconvenient.

I remember playing EverQuest...  And when the sun went down, you couldn't see anything.  Carrying a torch took up a slot.  Made elves (with infra/ultra-vision) downright advantageous.  Light spells, or items that had a light effect, were incredibly handy.  At night there was a genuine concern that you'd stumble into something you didn't want to be fighting.  And if you had set up camp, it was the elf or the guy with the best lighting equipment who wound up pulling...  While the rest of you huddled together and hoped you didn't lose sight of each-other.  Fun stuff.

STALKER did night very well...  But made it almost too easy to get your hands on night vision gear.  Which was, itself, somewhat limited...  But it was too easy to mitigate the darkness.  Either with night vision, or a flashlight, or simply finding a well-lighted area to hang out in until morning.

And every RPG I've played recently lights up the night so well that it might as well be daytime.

This reveals the problem to be poor gameplay design, rather than a pathing problem. If the best tactic to counter a rush is to build supply depots or other buildings as a wall, then we need actual WALLS. Defenses should be able to stop these attacks at the gate. A single protoss warrior between two pylons should not be your rush-defense strategy, its absurd.

That's kind of what I was trying to say.

It's absurd to think that a marine (or protoss, or whatever) is going to act as some kind of immovable wall.  You should be able to push past individual troops.  It makes sense.  Yes, I understand the cop with a riot shield analogy above...  But you know what?  If you had a half-dozen zerglings trying to get through that narrow gap, they'd simply trample him.  He shouldn't be an immovable object.

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A wall wouldn't lower your unit capacity when destroyed and would be tougher.

Cool. I'd still rather use supply depots/pylons, because they're actually useful. Walls are only useful for about the first 10 minutes anyways. After that you might as well put your supply depots on perma-lower and send your 2 guard zealots off to die scouting, because the enemy's gonna just fly in anyways. Walls would be permanent, block your ground units, and be completely useless outside of the rush time. Seriously, there is no need for 'dedicated' wall units with no benefits except +100 hp.

Ultimately it comes down to gameplay mechanics.  Due to the way the game is built, rushes happen.  An early swarm of quick, cheap units can completely ruin your day.  So there needs to be a defense.  And, due to the way the game is built, that defense takes the form of half-assed walls to keep those rushes from doing too much damage.

The game could very easily have been made differently - either to eliminate the threat of rushes, or to provide a better defense.

Look at the old C&C games - you could build walls and gates.  The gates automatically lowered to let friendlies through.  They were crazy cheap, built very fast, went a long way towards mitigating the threat of a rush, and didn't hamper your own troops.  Sure, they were useless against flying units...  But they did their job and didn't hamper you, so it wasn't a bad thing to build them initially.

Blizzard could have added some kind of defensive walls to the game and made it work.  To suggest that is impossible is just silly.

Decisions were made along the way that resulted in the current design.  The design where you wind up using a couple individual units to form a wall.

In the context of the game - that works.  The mechanics work.  It is effective.

But it doesn't make sense.  Logically, a couple marines should not have the same effect as a cement wall.