im all for it but what they did is just drop death feature with 10% death chance and said we will fix it later, im not against a nice calibrated game i hate when they put a half ass solution for a problem that wont happen in most gameplays.
Fair enough - ive not played it in some time so im only arguing in theory and warning of the dangers of thinking "Options save everything". You may be totally right in that this is just a a cheap mechanism and not a well thought out mechanic.
froggyluv, you compliment the devs in assuming they are headed toward "a strong visionary product"... and I hope they are, but I fear that is just...hope. To me, there is so much extemporized in this game that I can't see the "vision" that it started with.
Someone considering scope of a campaign RPG would need, from the start, to be thinking about how long a typical campaign will need to hold together.
Well now i agree with this 100% as well and have stated this many many times on this forums -these games need to be designed from the ground up with a vision of game difficulty and challenges planned with foresight. I think its safe to say THAT HAS DEFINITELY NOT HAPPENED. Personally when i first fired up BL i was in awe -i thought man they really nailed the visceral effect of war and battle in a way i had always dreamed of for Mount&Blade. Of course upon further inspection, soon realized that the strategy/kingdom portion of the game was really thin and unfufilled but figured they are working hard behind the scenes to bring that to fruition. Now we are seeing that yes, a few devs are working REALLY hard behind the scenes but was there ever vision or game forethought that they are working towards or are they in a sense -winging it..?
Population control is of course just one element of the game. The economy and the smithing are two other areas where math modeling should have started before coding. TW is still flailing on both.
A game design document shouldn't consist solely of "I want to make the best damn medieval campaign game with the best damn combat for Single and Multiplayer." It needs to have some idea - some vision - of what that will look like. TW appears to be feeling its way towards an understanding of the details, but dammitall, putting in one system at a time breaks the others and requires endless iterations until it's somewhat workable.
Also +1
A good measure of a calibrated game is like Mount and Blade 1 or Operation Flashpoint -games that dont allow you to scum save and are still enjoyable but with much at stake and the possibility to actually lose - are signs of solid game design.