I'd agree with that. (Hell, a bard is a solid support character even in a combat game -- but it's not for players who need to be the star.)
Along similar lines, a 3/3.5E rogue is ass in combat in the typical campaign which turns into mostly unsneakable monsters at the higher levels, but cleans up in a big way in a campaign with mostly humanoid enemies.
Honestly, this never bothered me. It was just one of those things we chalked up to game balance and moved on. Your rogue ducks and covers so well they don't take any damage even if they can't get out of the way.
Weird prestige classes or later book additions aside, the core classes with evasion just aren't that good in most campaigns that we ever wanted to make them weaker.
Also, their magic system seems a lot more reasonable than memorizing spells. I always thought of spells more like skills than chunks of memory.
They're changing this in 4E, apparently.
For my money, 3E had it right. You had a choice: You could play one of the spontaneous caster classes like a sorcerer, which doesn't memorize spells, or you could play something like a wizard that still did.
Playing the spell-preparation casters was, for me, one of if not THE best thing about playing D&D. On any given day, you could be the weakest guy in the party or the strongest, depending on how well you anticipated what would happen and picked accordingly. The best wizard players I've seen wouldn't always be doing something every round -- if the party had a fight well under control, they'd save their arsenal for when it could be used to greatest effect. They equally wouldn't be trying to crank out damage every round if a simple slow or blindness was all it would take to turn a fight.
From everything I've heard about 4E, all of the fun of that strategy and finesse is going out of the game. I'm hoping not.
After 8 years in the wild, I think WotC has a good idea of what in 3rd Ed simply isn't fun. Save or die is not fun. Critical confirmations are not fun. Gnomes and half-orcs are not fun. OTOH, there are tons of requests for things that are fun that aren't in the rules. I think WotC is chucking things nobody ever liked, anyway.
FWIW, I think all of those things are fun.
Different strokes for different folks and all that.
It sounds like, in an effort to balance classes better, they've all become a lot more alike. That is, a wizard and a warrior will have a very different list of abilities, but they'll all have X abilities to use at will, X abilities to use once an encounter, and so on. Do you feel this is a fair assessment? If so, is there any concern that in making the classes more alike you'll have essentially created one well-balanced class that no one wants to play? In 3E, a lot of the classes require very different kinds of strategy and in my experience all players have different favorites for reasons that seem to be going away.
How do you feel you've struck a balance between a desire to simplify/streamline rules to speed play and make the game more accessible, and a desire to preserve the strategy and general goodness of the game as it exists today? Details about proposed changes that were a tough call either way would be interesting.
I cannot agree more completely. The 1,000 end users at my company will always need help with the simplest tasks on a PC. Unless companies start testing employees on computer usage before hiring them; there will always be a need for an IT department at a large company.
I agree... and further, while of course as a business owner you'd love for every person in your company to be able to do everything, the reality is that those people are going to be rare and expensive. If my company can hire accountants without regard (within reason) to how technically retarded they are, and someone else's company must hire accountants that can troubleshoot and fix all of their computer problems themselves, I'm going to get way better people for the money -- and my people are going to spend more time actually doing their job.
Pretty much everyone knows how to clean to some minimum standard, but most companies I know still hire a cleaning/housekeeping service. It doesn't make sense to pay your normal employees to spend time doing something that someone else can do more cost effectively (even, in the case of IT, if the IT people cost more than your 'normal' employees) and better.
This doesn't make Flash any better, I'm just saying that people who proclaim that Silverlight is great because it will have a real open source implementation aren't telling or don't know the whole story.
All that being the case, I think you still have to ask yourself:
1) Is this a lot more than Microsoft has historically done, openness-wise?
2) If you had heard a few years ago that Microsoft was trying to make a Flash-killer, would you have expected any kind of support from them in making it run on Linux?
3) How much more than this can you realistically expect, given that Microsoft's goals as an organization are never going to be, say, the FSF's goals?
The last time I looked at the SR 3E rules, I swear the thing that let you reroll sixes on initiative was mutually exclusive with anything that added extra dice -- in other words, a way for the exceedingly rare character with no initiative-boosting magic or cyberware to be a little less pathetic.
Usually (but not always), the really broken things in any system require a 'creative' reading of the rules.
As best as I remember, 3 passes in a round was pretty standard for any decently optimized character, but getting into 4+ country pretty much required that you were a cybered character and that was the *only* thing you were doing with your cyberware, assuming everyone wasn't a cyber-zombie and/or running around with all kinds of delta-grade stuff.
These are all great things to have, except when it gets to the point where you have to know the content from 20 or 30 books to make an effective character.
Yeah, I definitely think that agreeing on a much smaller subset of books to be used for a campaign is the only sensible way to play 3.5. You're always going to end up excluding something that someone wants to use, but if you don't, there's just too much there and the DM has to be too much of an expert on too many different rules and possible abusive combinations of things. I've known players who could do that, but they weren't generally the same players that were the best DMs.
I've read some of the proposed changes for 4.0, and I don't see what there is to be afraid of. They've identified a level range that is fun to play at (something like level 7 to 13?), and they aim to make gameplay in general reflect that level range.
I don't have a problem with the idea of extending the 'sweet spot' of D&D, although I personally enjoy the lower levels in 3/3.5E too. The game definitely breaks down in a bad way at higher levels and probably more of the campaigns I've played in have been killed by that than anything else. I'm all for trying to fix that.
I'm not in favor of the WoW-ification of D&D, and it really feels to me like that's where they're trying to go with the rules they're changing -- like they're trying to streamline 95% of the strategy and interesting bits out of the game.
Another proposed change is to make all player types battle capable, so that you aren't drawing straws over who has to play the cleric, etc. Once again, fine by me.
This is a mindset I've never really understood.
Everyone has favorite classes or favorite kinds of characters, but they're usually not the same kinds. I know a guy who pretty much plays wizard every time. I know a guy who always plays a cleric or a rogue. Etc. I've never played with a group where no one wanted to be the cleric but everyone felt like someone had to be. (In any case, clerics are bad-ass tough in 3.5E.)
I feel like the direction they're really going in is homogenizing the classes, and that feels like a huge mistake to me. The guy who always plays wizard likes the strategy of the class, the way you can be the toughest guy in the party or the weakest guy in the party on any given day depending on how well you picked spells. Another guy who mostly plays spontaneous casters doesn't want to screw around with that, and so on. If you make all the classes basically the same, probably you've now got a bunch of classes that make none of those people happy.
I haven't read the 4E SR rules, but I've heard they move a bit faster. Apparently everything now has the same difficulty number and bonuses/penalties add/remove dice instead of moving the difficulty number. I'm not sure if I'm in love with that, but I admit the previous SR system had difficulty number weirdness, i.e. rolling a 6 is twice as hard as rolling a 5, but rolling a 7 is just as easy as rolling a 6, so +1 difficulty could either be immense or meaningless.
I didn't have a problem with the combat system in SR 2E/3E though. Yeah, there are more rolls involved in resolving an attack than in a game like D&D, but equally a single attack is more likely to put someone out of the rest of a fight than an attack in D&D is, past the first few levels. I can't think of a lot of SR fights I ever saw that went more than 1-2 rounds of combat. If anything, I think D&D feeling like its fights go faster has more to do with my having played a lot, lot more D&D.
(Aside: Nearly everything I've heard so far about 4E D&D scares me.)
I'm baffled that the newspost is calling this a last-ditch effort.
Even the biggest fans of / experts in Silverlight that I've talked to say that Silverlight 1.0 is basically a glorified beta. It's usable, and you can do some flashy things with it, but it doesn't include even some of the basic anticipated features yet that got them excited about it in the first place. How can you have a last-ditch effort to save the first very rough release of something? Did Netcraft confirm that Silverlight is dead and I missed it?
My prediction: Silverlight will be a rarity for at least another version or two, but it'll start taking off. Microsoft excels at letting someone else innovate, break ground in an area, and make all the mistakes that someone breaking new ground is guaranteed to do -- and then comes in a couple years later and says "If we were going to make X again from scratch, already knowing all the lessons the X people have learned the hard way, how would we do it?" What they come up with won't do everything better than the original, but it'll do enough better to get people interested.
From there, you'll get Flash and Silverlight in competition, and with any luck both will end up the better for it.
Without intending to kick off a religious war, I can admit my bias: I hate, hate, hate Eclipse-the-IDE. People whose opinions I generally respect love it, so I assume this is personal preference and not some greater statement of flaw. Nearly everything about the way it's designed or how you use it (that I've encountered) is a 180 degree turn from what my intuition tells me to expect.
I had no idea about the non-IDE applications of Eclipse; thanks for sharing. The question I have to ask is: would you actually want to do those other things with Eclipse? That is, why is a solution of that form preferable to, say, making a game from scratch or on a platform that doesn't involve Eclipse? What are you getting there? I have no idea at all and I'm curious.
(I mean, when you come right down to it, you can generate personalized web page content with COBOL, and I've done work on projects that for assorted crazy reasons did! But no one should do that on purpose when alternatives are available.)
Neither is the issue about companies: IBM can use MS-Office all they like; it doesn't have the slightest bearing on this discussion.
It may not be relevant to the discussion at large, but it's extremely relevant to the specific post it was a response to. (Poster saying, in essence, that Open Office should be taken seriously when discussing relative user base size because IBM uses it.)
I'd be really curious to see numbers on the size/number of companies using Google Apps Premium vs. ones that have some kind of Sharepoint solution setup.
A bunch of people upthread have made the point that the cool part of Google Apps is more about collaboration than trying to be an 'Office Killer', and I tend to agree. Sharepoint in a lot of ways is MS's answer to that office worker collaboration question. (I've heard a lot of people bitch about earlier versions of Sharepoint, not so much the most recent, but I've barely touched it so I don't feel qualified to say if it's crap or not or how it does or doesn't stack up to Google's premium offering.)
It's also worth mentioning that Halo 3 had some single-player appeal plus a ton of multi-player appeal, whereas Bioshock only appealed to the single-player crowd. Portal, same thing, although the Orange Box as a whole appealed to both. You can't really call that anything like cross-genre appeal, but... it's clear that a lot of people buy games mostly to play with other people. Of course a game that can appeal to either is going to generate bigger sales numbers.
Multiplayer games also tend to generate bigger sales numbers because you're never really 'done' with them, whereas I know a lot of people who played Portal, loved the hell out of it, but were done with it in a couple hours and probably will never go back. It stands to reason that console-side, that amounted to a lot of people renting but not buying it.
Basically, I agree that TFA looks at a subset of the data and draws the unsupported conclusion that unwashed philistine masses love teh Haloz because they don't appreciate good games.
Playing devil's advocate... if everyone taking a class, at the end of it, has an excellent knowledge of the subject and is able to apply it well... why shouldn't they get an A?
Yeah, I'd definitely wait in that case. My wife's XP machine has some GForce 7000-series or other graphics card in it and it struggles to run HGL at a decent framerate unless most of the graphics settings are cranked down to medium/low, to give you some idea. It's more than playable at those settings, but if that's a struggle I imagine it'd kill your poor graphics card.
A first-person Diablo-style game is just about exactly what Hellgate: London is supposed to be, for what it's worth. I think it does a pretty good job of achieving that, but purists of either style of game might not.
Really, all the article manages to say is that IBM and Microsoft patent a ton of shit, which is news to no one since they're enormous tech companies. The news post probably should be flagged flamebait or troll.
All that aside, I could buy Microsoft being one of the companies that generates the most innovative ideas each year. That's more a statement of just how much different crap the company is into than any innotation per capita assessment. For example, I'd say the Wii shows more innovation than the 360, but video game console stuff is about all of what Nintendo does but it's only a fraction of what Microsoft does.
I assume when you mix a good company and an evil company, you get an evil company. Kind of like multiplying a positive number and a negative number.
Personally, I think Google should change their motto to "Do no petty evil." or something like that. They'd still avoid running sweatshops or monopolistic business practices, but they'd get to have killer robots, sharks with lasers on their heads, and hidden fortresses. The geek street cred would be off the charts.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd agree with that. (Hell, a bard is a solid support character even in a combat game -- but it's not for players who need to be the star.)
Along similar lines, a 3/3.5E rogue is ass in combat in the typical campaign which turns into mostly unsneakable monsters at the higher levels, but cleans up in a big way in a campaign with mostly humanoid enemies.
Honestly, this never bothered me. It was just one of those things we chalked up to game balance and moved on. Your rogue ducks and covers so well they don't take any damage even if they can't get out of the way.
Weird prestige classes or later book additions aside, the core classes with evasion just aren't that good in most campaigns that we ever wanted to make them weaker.
Also, their magic system seems a lot more reasonable than memorizing spells. I always thought of spells more like skills than chunks of memory.
They're changing this in 4E, apparently.
For my money, 3E had it right. You had a choice: You could play one of the spontaneous caster classes like a sorcerer, which doesn't memorize spells, or you could play something like a wizard that still did.
Playing the spell-preparation casters was, for me, one of if not THE best thing about playing D&D. On any given day, you could be the weakest guy in the party or the strongest, depending on how well you anticipated what would happen and picked accordingly. The best wizard players I've seen wouldn't always be doing something every round -- if the party had a fight well under control, they'd save their arsenal for when it could be used to greatest effect. They equally wouldn't be trying to crank out damage every round if a simple slow or blindness was all it would take to turn a fight.
From everything I've heard about 4E, all of the fun of that strategy and finesse is going out of the game. I'm hoping not.
After 8 years in the wild, I think WotC has a good idea of what in 3rd Ed simply isn't fun. Save or die is not fun. Critical confirmations are not fun. Gnomes and half-orcs are not fun. OTOH, there are tons of requests for things that are fun that aren't in the rules. I think WotC is chucking things nobody ever liked, anyway.
FWIW, I think all of those things are fun.
Different strokes for different folks and all that.
It sounds like, in an effort to balance classes better, they've all become a lot more alike. That is, a wizard and a warrior will have a very different list of abilities, but they'll all have X abilities to use at will, X abilities to use once an encounter, and so on. Do you feel this is a fair assessment? If so, is there any concern that in making the classes more alike you'll have essentially created one well-balanced class that no one wants to play? In 3E, a lot of the classes require very different kinds of strategy and in my experience all players have different favorites for reasons that seem to be going away.
How do you feel you've struck a balance between a desire to simplify/streamline rules to speed play and make the game more accessible, and a desire to preserve the strategy and general goodness of the game as it exists today? Details about proposed changes that were a tough call either way would be interesting.
I cannot agree more completely. The 1,000 end users at my company will always need help with the simplest tasks on a PC. Unless companies start testing employees on computer usage before hiring them; there will always be a need for an IT department at a large company.
I agree... and further, while of course as a business owner you'd love for every person in your company to be able to do everything, the reality is that those people are going to be rare and expensive. If my company can hire accountants without regard (within reason) to how technically retarded they are, and someone else's company must hire accountants that can troubleshoot and fix all of their computer problems themselves, I'm going to get way better people for the money -- and my people are going to spend more time actually doing their job.
Pretty much everyone knows how to clean to some minimum standard, but most companies I know still hire a cleaning/housekeeping service. It doesn't make sense to pay your normal employees to spend time doing something that someone else can do more cost effectively (even, in the case of IT, if the IT people cost more than your 'normal' employees) and better.
This doesn't make Flash any better, I'm just saying that people who proclaim that Silverlight is great because it will have a real open source implementation aren't telling or don't know the whole story.
All that being the case, I think you still have to ask yourself:
1) Is this a lot more than Microsoft has historically done, openness-wise?
2) If you had heard a few years ago that Microsoft was trying to make a Flash-killer, would you have expected any kind of support from them in making it run on Linux?
3) How much more than this can you realistically expect, given that Microsoft's goals as an organization are never going to be, say, the FSF's goals?
Not that I don't love Starcraft and wouldn't love to see it find new life on other platforms, but isn't this a cease and desist waiting to happen?
The last time I looked at the SR 3E rules, I swear the thing that let you reroll sixes on initiative was mutually exclusive with anything that added extra dice -- in other words, a way for the exceedingly rare character with no initiative-boosting magic or cyberware to be a little less pathetic.
Usually (but not always), the really broken things in any system require a 'creative' reading of the rules.
As best as I remember, 3 passes in a round was pretty standard for any decently optimized character, but getting into 4+ country pretty much required that you were a cybered character and that was the *only* thing you were doing with your cyberware, assuming everyone wasn't a cyber-zombie and/or running around with all kinds of delta-grade stuff.
Just wanted to comment on a few things:
These are all great things to have, except when it gets to the point where you have to know the content from 20 or 30 books to make an effective character.
Yeah, I definitely think that agreeing on a much smaller subset of books to be used for a campaign is the only sensible way to play 3.5. You're always going to end up excluding something that someone wants to use, but if you don't, there's just too much there and the DM has to be too much of an expert on too many different rules and possible abusive combinations of things. I've known players who could do that, but they weren't generally the same players that were the best DMs.
I've read some of the proposed changes for 4.0, and I don't see what there is to be afraid of. They've identified a level range that is fun to play at (something like level 7 to 13?), and they aim to make gameplay in general reflect that level range.
I don't have a problem with the idea of extending the 'sweet spot' of D&D, although I personally enjoy the lower levels in 3/3.5E too. The game definitely breaks down in a bad way at higher levels and probably more of the campaigns I've played in have been killed by that than anything else. I'm all for trying to fix that.
I'm not in favor of the WoW-ification of D&D, and it really feels to me like that's where they're trying to go with the rules they're changing -- like they're trying to streamline 95% of the strategy and interesting bits out of the game.
Another proposed change is to make all player types battle capable, so that you aren't drawing straws over who has to play the cleric, etc. Once again, fine by me.
This is a mindset I've never really understood.
Everyone has favorite classes or favorite kinds of characters, but they're usually not the same kinds. I know a guy who pretty much plays wizard every time. I know a guy who always plays a cleric or a rogue. Etc. I've never played with a group where no one wanted to be the cleric but everyone felt like someone had to be. (In any case, clerics are bad-ass tough in 3.5E.)
I feel like the direction they're really going in is homogenizing the classes, and that feels like a huge mistake to me. The guy who always plays wizard likes the strategy of the class, the way you can be the toughest guy in the party or the weakest guy in the party on any given day depending on how well you picked spells. Another guy who mostly plays spontaneous casters doesn't want to screw around with that, and so on. If you make all the classes basically the same, probably you've now got a bunch of classes that make none of those people happy.
I haven't read the 4E SR rules, but I've heard they move a bit faster. Apparently everything now has the same difficulty number and bonuses/penalties add/remove dice instead of moving the difficulty number. I'm not sure if I'm in love with that, but I admit the previous SR system had difficulty number weirdness, i.e. rolling a 6 is twice as hard as rolling a 5, but rolling a 7 is just as easy as rolling a 6, so +1 difficulty could either be immense or meaningless.
I didn't have a problem with the combat system in SR 2E/3E though. Yeah, there are more rolls involved in resolving an attack than in a game like D&D, but equally a single attack is more likely to put someone out of the rest of a fight than an attack in D&D is, past the first few levels. I can't think of a lot of SR fights I ever saw that went more than 1-2 rounds of combat. If anything, I think D&D feeling like its fights go faster has more to do with my having played a lot, lot more D&D.
(Aside: Nearly everything I've heard so far about 4E D&D scares me.)
I'm baffled that the newspost is calling this a last-ditch effort.
Even the biggest fans of / experts in Silverlight that I've talked to say that Silverlight 1.0 is basically a glorified beta. It's usable, and you can do some flashy things with it, but it doesn't include even some of the basic anticipated features yet that got them excited about it in the first place. How can you have a last-ditch effort to save the first very rough release of something? Did Netcraft confirm that Silverlight is dead and I missed it?
My prediction: Silverlight will be a rarity for at least another version or two, but it'll start taking off. Microsoft excels at letting someone else innovate, break ground in an area, and make all the mistakes that someone breaking new ground is guaranteed to do -- and then comes in a couple years later and says "If we were going to make X again from scratch, already knowing all the lessons the X people have learned the hard way, how would we do it?" What they come up with won't do everything better than the original, but it'll do enough better to get people interested.
From there, you'll get Flash and Silverlight in competition, and with any luck both will end up the better for it.
Without intending to kick off a religious war, I can admit my bias: I hate, hate, hate Eclipse-the-IDE. People whose opinions I generally respect love it, so I assume this is personal preference and not some greater statement of flaw. Nearly everything about the way it's designed or how you use it (that I've encountered) is a 180 degree turn from what my intuition tells me to expect.
I had no idea about the non-IDE applications of Eclipse; thanks for sharing. The question I have to ask is: would you actually want to do those other things with Eclipse? That is, why is a solution of that form preferable to, say, making a game from scratch or on a platform that doesn't involve Eclipse? What are you getting there? I have no idea at all and I'm curious.
(I mean, when you come right down to it, you can generate personalized web page content with COBOL, and I've done work on projects that for assorted crazy reasons did! But no one should do that on purpose when alternatives are available.)
Having used all of the above, what's especially innovative about any of them?
Neither is the issue about companies: IBM can use MS-Office all they like; it doesn't have the slightest bearing on this discussion.
It may not be relevant to the discussion at large, but it's extremely relevant to the specific post it was a response to. (Poster saying, in essence, that Open Office should be taken seriously when discussing relative user base size because IBM uses it.)
To be more clear, they used Office at work. It was the software that their IT department provided/installed for them.
Some friends of mine currently work at IBM or did within the last year or two. They all used (Microsoft) Office.
I assume some departments of IBM eat their own dog food, but they definitely don't all do it.
I'd be really curious to see numbers on the size/number of companies using Google Apps Premium vs. ones that have some kind of Sharepoint solution setup.
A bunch of people upthread have made the point that the cool part of Google Apps is more about collaboration than trying to be an 'Office Killer', and I tend to agree. Sharepoint in a lot of ways is MS's answer to that office worker collaboration question. (I've heard a lot of people bitch about earlier versions of Sharepoint, not so much the most recent, but I've barely touched it so I don't feel qualified to say if it's crap or not or how it does or doesn't stack up to Google's premium offering.)
It's also worth mentioning that Halo 3 had some single-player appeal plus a ton of multi-player appeal, whereas Bioshock only appealed to the single-player crowd. Portal, same thing, although the Orange Box as a whole appealed to both. You can't really call that anything like cross-genre appeal, but... it's clear that a lot of people buy games mostly to play with other people. Of course a game that can appeal to either is going to generate bigger sales numbers.
Multiplayer games also tend to generate bigger sales numbers because you're never really 'done' with them, whereas I know a lot of people who played Portal, loved the hell out of it, but were done with it in a couple hours and probably will never go back. It stands to reason that console-side, that amounted to a lot of people renting but not buying it.
Basically, I agree that TFA looks at a subset of the data and draws the unsupported conclusion that unwashed philistine masses love teh Haloz because they don't appreciate good games.
Playing devil's advocate... if everyone taking a class, at the end of it, has an excellent knowledge of the subject and is able to apply it well... why shouldn't they get an A?
Yeah, I'd definitely wait in that case. My wife's XP machine has some GForce 7000-series or other graphics card in it and it struggles to run HGL at a decent framerate unless most of the graphics settings are cranked down to medium/low, to give you some idea. It's more than playable at those settings, but if that's a struggle I imagine it'd kill your poor graphics card.
A first-person Diablo-style game is just about exactly what Hellgate: London is supposed to be, for what it's worth. I think it does a pretty good job of achieving that, but purists of either style of game might not.
Really, all the article manages to say is that IBM and Microsoft patent a ton of shit, which is news to no one since they're enormous tech companies. The news post probably should be flagged flamebait or troll.
All that aside, I could buy Microsoft being one of the companies that generates the most innovative ideas each year. That's more a statement of just how much different crap the company is into than any innotation per capita assessment. For example, I'd say the Wii shows more innovation than the 360, but video game console stuff is about all of what Nintendo does but it's only a fraction of what Microsoft does.
I assume when you mix a good company and an evil company, you get an evil company. Kind of like multiplying a positive number and a negative number.
Personally, I think Google should change their motto to "Do no petty evil." or something like that. They'd still avoid running sweatshops or monopolistic business practices, but they'd get to have killer robots, sharks with lasers on their heads, and hidden fortresses. The geek street cred would be off the charts.