Recent content by divyanthj

elysebluemoon said:

Hi, can you disable all of your mods, verify your game files and try to recreate this again?

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elysebluemoon said:

Hi, can you try deleting the "C:\ProgramData\Mount and Blade II Bannerlord\Shaders" folder?

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Apocal said:

No, it won't make me any more immersed. This would just become a very annoying fetch quest for information in order to do things I need to do to get back to the actual gameplay. I'm not looking in the encyclopedia or on the notables tab in search of T H E F O R B I D D E N K N O W L E D G E. I'm looking to interact with them for a fairly limited set of reasons.

And how would the game know someone is important to me? Personally, I care much more about the pair of 350+ power landowners in Karakalat than I do about the Empress of the Southern Empire. The latter has about 21,000 men at her disposal, the latter perhaps 10. But does the game realize that my interest is due to being able to recruit those 10? And my non-concern with Rhagaea is because we aren't currently at war?

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Kentucky James VII said:

Interestingly enough, this was a trend in filmmaking around the same time as the video games @Zyffyr mentioned. The problem is that it just confuses people. "Realist" cinema sounds like a good idea but in practice it's just in contradiction with the entire purpose and strength of storytelling, i.e. to focus in on a small piece of human existence. Most realist / maximalist cinema is either boring or pretentious, or both. It's the same with video games, even something as broad as an RPG has to eliminate most of the tedium and redundancy in human life otherwise it just becomes bloated and disorganised.

If you wanted to make a game about note-taking or memory you would have to focus all the mechanics on that to justify it. I think this is part of what people mean when they react negatively to realism in games. Gameplay works best when it's focussed on one thing, and the more little details and dead-end, detached mechanics you add the less focus there is.

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Kentucky James VII said:

That doesn't matter, most players cheese the mongols by putting forts in their spawn point (which is announced about 10 turns before they show up). And simply knowing that the Americas exist in 1080 AD when the game starts will impact anyone's campaign unless they consciously act as if it isn't there. But I don't see why these are "problems" that have to be resolved. Players will suspend disbelief to such a degree that none of this is necessary for immersion. It's the equivalent of wanting a film to have plot threads that go nowhere, just like in real life.

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Kentucky James VII said:

That can only work to an extent, but you can't force a player to "un-know" stuff in a game. An example of this is Medieval 2 Total war where after your first playthrough you know that the Americas exist and that the Mongols are coming. There's nothing the developers can do to prevent the player from preparing for things they know are coming, so most developers just accept this, and leave it up to individual roleplayers to make the decision of whether to metagame or not.

Player / Character knowledge dissonance exists in all games with any sort of progression whatsoever, but as long as the game mechanics are good and allow for multiple playstyles most people will ignore it. The believability you gain from doing this isn't worth the level of annoyance you will cause players by deleting information from under their noses and forcing them to write stuff down.

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Zyffyr said:

The assumption is that the person making the notes has the intelligence to organize things.... like one section has everything about a single subject.

My position, by the way, isn't a personal bias - it is standard industry knowledge. Long ago game developers thought it was a great mechanic to force you to remember everything on your own. RPGs didn't have minimaps or quest logs. Eventually they realized that everyone just wrote everything down anyway and there was absolutely no value to making people remember everything. It creates frustration without adding difficulty.

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Zyffyr said:

While I can get behind limited release of information, the "forgetting" mechanic is an objectively bad suggestion. If I can bypass a mechanic by the simple expedient of having a piece of paper and a writing implement next to my computer then the mechanic has no value and is a complete waste of development time.

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