Trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible, I think there are two possible outcomes to it: I suspect each will have different ramifications for the final installment.

That's a fairly good case in terms of tone actually, and the baseball analogy is intriguing. I know nothing of its rules, does it work similarly with numerical disadvantages?

Absolutely - still, I loved watching the scenery even though I had no idea what I was supposed to do half of the time. Kinda impressed that you managed get that much into it.

Perhaps not entirely related, as it's not an action game, but your comment made me think of the shift from the tight, claustrophobic, city- and dungeon-based adventuring of the original Bard's Tale, to the open wilderness connecting the cities of the second.

Individual battles are more difficult, true, but I found injuries, which were a real problem in the original, were mostly a non-factor in my playthrough for this.

That sequence was devastating - such an underrated game.

A relatively obscure game I love, Sword of the Stars: The Pit, does this, rather uncharacteristically for a turn-based roguelike rpg, on a narrative level. There are diary entries that you can collect and keep between playthroughs which help you make sense of its story. It's a strong game regardless, but I found it a…

It's my favourite title of the last couple of years, but I can't deny that the early game can be a chore. My makeshift solution is to play with permadeath on (which, really, should be mandatory) and to allow a few weeks between playthroughs.

Agreed, though I think it's much better to subtly hint at possible paths/content than outright give them away. It's what the early Souls games did so brilliantly, an approach that, in my opinion, has been sadly neglected in the last two installments.

Westerado is fantastic: its open world offering more freedom than any of the AAA titans that came out last year and featuring the best banjo-and-harmonica videogame soundtrack ever. There's even a whittled down free version available here:

The no-lost-content rule is quite probably the most pernicious, counterproductive rule in all of game design. As dear as it's held by developers, it's ironic that games choosing to disregard it end up as more powerful experiences simply because of the awareness that you may/will miss something: Deus Ex, Dark Souls,…

I remember being endlessly intrigued by Skool Daze on my old Commodore 64. What fascinated me the most, was the fact that you actually had to play through the lessons and how it made a game out of observing school etiquette. You could also rename every student and teacher in the game which, thinking back, is probably…

Scratch that, I meant "go gnorth".

I think that was part of his point though perhaps his idea of a "nontrivial effort" may be a bit misleading if left unexplained. It's not that it inherently makes a text more difficult (he certainly would agree that Finnegan's Wake is a more demanding read than Hopscotch) but that it requires a completely different,…

Espen Aarseth's Cybertext, explores this concept of the ergodic work: a text (including games) that requires "nontrivial effort" to traverse it. It's a fascinating read (though definitely not a light one) and he makes some very interesting points about
the difference between a difficult work like Finnegan's Wake and…

Tried Sunset Overdrive for the first time yesterday and had a blast. Only played it for an hour or so, but I'm secretly harboring hopes for Crackdown levels of fun.

Thanks for the welcome messages everyone, I'm utterly stoked to be part of the team! Now if I could only find a way to change my avatar pic - Disqus seems to be objecting…

Asylum is easily the best of the bunch, it's more contained so there's meaning in every space rather than isolated spots. I thought Origins was really bland.