GameBanshee - GotY 2011

RampantCoyote said:
@Guenthar - Don't forget that a lot of D&D modules (and tournaments) back in the early days used pre-generated characters, too. And ditto for "pick-up" games. I wouldn't say it was equally popular as rolling your own (how could it be?), but it was a pretty common practice with the grandfather of all RPGs. I consider it a pretty valid practice in any RPG. (Although that being said, Frayed Knights notwithstanding, I do prefer the games that let you roll your own).
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For a tournament or convention game you pretty much HAVE to provide characters. Otherwise it becomes a game of who can abuse the rules the worst.

Modules sometimes provide characters but how could they force anyone to use them?

And pick up games were and are all over the place.
 
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My vote would have had to go to Skyrim.

I was very disappointed in The Witcher 2. I loved the first one and the sequel was quite a bit different. It played more like an action game with the rolling and dodging than what I was expecting. I preferred the combat style of the first.
 
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RampantCoyote said:
@Shaf - Doesn't look like it's had any effect on my stats yet. Maybe all GameBanshee readers have already played it, and I need to expand my marketing efforts…
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Certainly possible. RPGWatch, Banshee, and RPGCodex have all given the game pretty good coverage. I guess the marketing question is "outside of these places, how do you find the gamers who like old school CRPGS with turn based combat and tons of customization?" Not sure if there is an easy answer. I wonder how Jeff Vogel gets the word out, outside of inflammatory blog posts?

I've noticed that some of the indie PC games sites haven't even mentioned Frayed Knights.
 
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I came to really like The Witcher 2 after some initial strong frustration over certain aspects of the game. I don't see why people have such a hard time understanding why someone might like or dislike the RPG aspects of The Witcher 2 and the condescension with people respond to that disagreement is ridiculous. It has quite a bit to do with how choices made by the player and characterization of the protagonist are worked into the game.

Geralt, to a greater degree than even commander Shepperd from ME, has a fairly well fleshed out and distinct personality of his own. This leads to a character who can come across as far less schizophrenic than other fully-voiced player characters in games like ME. It also means that one can understandably feel that the Geralt they are playing is not their Geralt but CD Projekt Red's. If a player finds themselves disagreeing with the liberties he seems to take based on their choices (in extended dialog, cutscenes, subsequent excluded choices, etc.) then it should be very easy to understand they would not find the RPG experience nearly as satisfying. Additionally Geralt may seem oblivious to some things that may seem obvious and telegraphed to the player - such as pretty much any time someone betrays him or turns out to have an ulterior motive.

The Act 3 consequences of Act 2 choices could also be a source of some players' dissatisfaction. This is particularly true if they felt that obvious alternative choices seemed inexplicably unavailable (having a certain other mage give you a second opinion on a curative you're working on putting together for instance.) Some of this may be an extension of the player possibly feeling the motives and nature of certain characters to be far more obvious than Geralt seems to. So again this can lead to situations where the player will find themselves frustrated and strongly disagreeing with the protagonist they are controlling and perhaps even thinking him a little dim.

These potential barriers to some players enjoyment and immersion in the game are very subjective and personal. They drove me crazy at first and had me wanting to punch Geralt in the neck on more than one occasion. I did eventually accept that this was not a game where choice and characterization are handled as they are in Fallout 2 or even Planescape: Torment and that Geralt was not necessarily whoever I wanted to imagine him to be. Once I was able to enjoy the idea that it was more like the world's most complex choose your own adventure novel I was able to get into the game far more.

The game and protagonist are fully voiced with mostly consistent characterization across each of the highly divergent but fairly cohesive narrative arcs. The value of this is non-trivial and it is also not something we get from many western RPGs. It also means that the ability for the player to determine who their Geralt is and the choices one can make once they begin following a particular route may annoy some players. It is a very different experience than playing and determining the nature of your particular Vault Dweller, tribal, or incarnation of the Nameless One.

It should be understandable how some will find this refreshing and very enjoyable while others will hate it and consider it lacking what they consider to be almost crucial elements of the role-playing experience"; one can understand this without presuming some mental defect is responsible for the differing opinion.
 
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darkling said:
I still don't know how TW2 gets a pass from people when it's a stupid QTE festival. Might as well play BF3's campaign.
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The inclusion of QTEs in TW2 was a questionable design decision, but they weren't frequent enough to disrupt the overall flow of the game for most people.

Personally, I didn't mind them at all. I had more of an issue with the spotty combat controls and sudden difficulty spikes, but I also played TW2 prior to the game being patched.
 
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jwmeep said:
I've noticed that some of the indie PC games sites haven't even mentioned Frayed Knights.
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I've sent some of them copies of the game and bugged them (a little). I should bug them more. Can you PM me with a list of the sites you are thinking about so I can contact them?

(Sorry for the off-topic post. Back onto topic now...)
 
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jwmeep said:
I wonder how Jeff Vogel gets the word out, outside of inflammatory blog posts?
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The old fashioned way: He hires a marketing drone. Plus (a) Jeff Vogel is a brand in the gaming world and (b) he has enough experience to understand who can help him market his games and who can't.
 
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"QTE festival"? I turned on the easier QTEs (or whatever it was called) and can only remember a couple at chapter ends, such as the Kayran. If there were others, they were of so little impact to the campaign they could hardly be called a "festival".
 
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I vote Skyrim as well.

I installed W2 and played for a few hours. Then restarted, played some more. I got to the part where you're walking through the forest and the woman is casting a big shield spell and you have to kill the people attacking you. I stopped and thought, I'm playing an Xbox action game with WASD and a mouse. Dodge roll, swing, dodge roll swing. There's only one path and the fight is entirely based on player skill.

Anyway, I got past that part and put it away. I don't dislike the game necessarily. It's beautiful of course. It seems to be well written, but frankly it also threw me into the middle of a story where I barely had any idea what was going on. I'm sure there's choices down the road, but I felt W1 was more like a Choose-your-Own Adventure book with action in between the choices versus an RPG, and that's what I get from W2.

Also, I just don't get the appeal of the Witcher character. I guess he's OK, but it's like I'm controlling some obscure, foreign comic book hero I've never heard of, interacting with characters that it assumes I'm familiar with... and I feel like I want to just shrug. Like being plopped in as the lead role in a high budget Spanish Telenovela, with swords.

I'll likely play it through some time in the future, but I really couldn't get into it.
 
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Perhaps the gamers at RPGWatch are more into games with lots of walking and pretty vistas. That some may classify Skyrim as an RPG is already tenuous, let alone "RPG of the Year"

Although I rather enjoyed the second and third games in the series, I didn't enjoy the fourth and fifth very much. I would consider them to be more of the "action-adventure"/"Hiking Sim" variety, rather than RPGs.

I've just rephrased your post to match the opinions of myself. Count.

If the Witcher 2 isn't an RPG, than Skyrim is not as well. That have essentially the same system of character building, the witcher 2 just has most of it's perks concentrated into 3 paths, rather than having those 3 paths spread over 21 pools.
 
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Ovenall said:
I vote Skyrim as well.

I installed W2 and played for a few hours. Then restarted, played some more. I got to the part where you're walking through the forest and the woman is casting a big shield spell and you have to kill the people attacking you. I stopped and thought, I'm playing an Xbox action game with WASD and a mouse. Dodge roll, swing, dodge roll swing. There's only one path and the fight is entirely based on player skill.

Anyway, I got past that part and put it away. I don't dislike the game necessarily. It's beautiful of course. It seems to be well written, but frankly it also threw me into the middle of a story where I barely had any idea what was going on. I'm sure there's choices down the road, but I felt W1 was more like a Choose-your-Own Adventure book with action in between the choices versus an RPG, and that's what I get from W2.

Also, I just don't get the appeal of the Witcher character. I guess he's OK, but it's like I'm controlling some obscure, foreign comic book hero I've never heard of, interacting with characters that it assumes I'm familiar with… and I feel like I want to just shrug. Like being plopped in as the lead role in a high budget Spanish Telenovela, with swords.

I'll likely play it through some time in the future, but I really couldn't get into it.
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The reason I use the "choose your own adventure book" comparison is because the ones I read as a kid tended to put you into different tracks early on. There is a lot of variation within those tracks but they have to sort of keep you on one of a few main threads to remain coherent. The few I have read also weren't in the first person though they did have a main protagonist. They weren't you and you couldn't choose what kind of personality they had overall but you could play a role in how they evolved and make key specific decisions for them as though you were playing the role of something like their subconscious.

I consider Planescape Torment to be a another such "choose your own adventure book" style RPG. In PST though the player begins as an amnesiac (a tired trope, but man it works well in that game) and the game was not burdened with being fully voice acted - allowing for a degree of character interaction choices which created one of the largest scripts in gaming history. Geralt however is not anything like a blank slate and these days it seems unheard of for a major release game to force players to read that much text and provide only partial voice overs.
 
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It looks like at least one of us is playing either female or feminin characters and doesn't like the manly look of Geralt :p , in any case it is the second part of a story with almost the same protagonists , it would be pretty stupid to have a new witcher involved.
Yeah the game is a bit unbalanced story wise , Roche / Roche ending makes much more sense and it makes you far more involved , for some reason i think Triss is BSing me .

I still think that choices and consequences are a very big part of RPGing , Skyrim has none ; also in character development skills are much more balanced in TW than in SK. Deus X utilises each skill in a very special way , i think in this field it may be even better than TW2 .
 
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I also hate QTEs - and that aspect of the TW2 turned me off - so I turned it off ;-) You can disable non-critical QTEs, and that left very few, which actually did fit the game quite well. Comparing TW2 and Skyrim from a story point of view, I just found TW2 miles ahead. I love Geralt's story and his identity, finding out more abvout his past, monster hunting etc. Its such a departure from the usual all-conquering-hero-from-nothing trope. Yes, he's a fixed protoganist, but you can still grown him in many different ways, there are real C&C's, multiple perspectives in story telling etc. I couldn't stop playing until I had completed the game. Skyrim was 'cool', no doubt, and I enjoyed it, but it simply didn't draw me in like TW2.
 
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Sir_Brennus said:
I see the problem here. I am not interested in DD games or next gen consoles. I only referred to the PC boxed version which was released on the exact date stated above.

I think it is quite a distorted thingy to count TRoT a 2011 game and FLoA a 2010 one.
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It all depends on definition right?
If you are going with English releases only, TRoT is a 2011 game. In 2010 it was released in German.
And Faery: Legends of Avalon appears to be released in English on PC in 2011, in 2010 it was released as an Xbox 360 game.
 
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It really seems like we have two groups and their pick is determined on which group they belong to:

Group Witcher likes for someone to read/tell them a story with a deep plot and lots of "mostly imaginery" choices. They need a story to make them feel involved with the game. Gads this sounds terrible! What I really mean is that you like a deeper framework built around your games than what our group needs.

Group Skyrim likes a big world where we roleplay our character/choices and only need a framework in place in which to live our alternate lives.

I think Skyrim fits my "be anyone you want to be" itch. I couldn't imagine myself as Geralt and so the Withcer failed completely for me.

In Skyrim I've been an alchemist, a miner, a book collector, a rare gem collector, a Stendar supporter with an absolute hatred for all undead, etc. "I" create the story and play the game I'm imagining. It's why the deep story games almost never work for me. The devs are writing their game, not the game I'll end up playing :)

In the Witcher, I'm Geralt some weird, freaky, scarred white-haired dude that is way to old to be bedding Triss or anyone else for that matter. Also if anyone in the Witcher camp complains about inventory or UI in Skyrim, you're a hypocrite. It was terrible in that game.

Still hope to see both get another sequel. I still hope that Geralt has died of old age and we get to choose our roleplaying in the next game.
 
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