polytourist97 on 9/4/2010 at 08:02
Yeah, that was going to be my assumption as well. Or were other mmorpgs keen on that sort of thing even before WoW? I feel like there is no end to the amount of grief that accursed game causes me even though I've actively avoided anything to do with it as much as possible since its release.
Ostriig on 9/4/2010 at 10:56
Technically speaking, Invisible War came out before World of Warcraft, so that should strike a lot closer to home for your issue. For what it's worth, though, I don't think the passage you bolded is necessarily a reference to a respec option in DX3, though it could be.
polytourist97 on 9/4/2010 at 16:34
Oh wow, you're absolutely right I forgot that you could switch them out in IW. I just never did and approached the game like that wasn't an option because it was more fun for me that way. Although I still believe that ZB is correct in assuming WoW is the instigator for making respecs the standard in rpgs.
*edit* and I didn't mean to imply that the bolded section of my initial post was a direct reference to a respec option, but given the trend of RPGs I've played lately, as well as the wording, it did stir up the idea in my mind.
ZylonBane on 9/4/2010 at 16:49
Yeah, technically Invisible War wasn't an RPG at all. Much like Bioshock, it was at best an adventure game.
It would be interesting if someone came out with an RPG that allowed you to explicitly choose whether each skill upgrade was temporary or permanent, with the permanent upgrades having a greater effect.
polytourist97 on 9/4/2010 at 17:18
That's similar to what I was hoping BioShock was going to do when they first announced that you would be able to swap plasmids, e.g. you could choose to either change out a plasmid, or upgrade it to a more powerful level. Therefor the longer you stayed with one set of powers the more costly it would be to "respec", but the more beneficial your current spec would be.
ZylonBane on 9/4/2010 at 17:45
Quote Posted by polytourist97
That's similar to what I was hoping BioShock was going to do when they first announced that you would be able to swap plasmids, e.g. you could choose to either change out a plasmid, or upgrade it to a more powerful level. Therefor the longer you stayed with one set of powers the more costly it would be to "respec", but the more beneficial your current spec would be.
IW did do that... but then they undermined the entire system by giving the player so many upgrade cannisters that you can pretty much respec at will.
polytourist97 on 9/4/2010 at 20:01
Right, but also weren't the plasmid "change" canisters and upgrade canisters separate canisters (just like in DX)? It's been such a long time since I played IW I'm kind of fuzzy on the details (if that wasn't already obvious enough).
So the choice to change vs. upgrade isn't technically a mutually exclusive choice (which is what I was hoping BS would implement), though theoretically there would still be that system of tradeoffs if you wanted to change an already upgraded ability...but like you stated, there were so many upgrade canisters lying around that there wasn't really even a trade-off either way.
heywood on 12/4/2010 at 15:19
Quote Posted by polytourist97
Right, but also weren't the plasmid "change" canisters and upgrade canisters separate canisters (just like in DX)? It's been such a long time since I played IW I'm kind of fuzzy on the details (if that wasn't already obvious enough).
So the choice to change vs. upgrade isn't
technically a mutually exclusive choice (which is what I was hoping BS would implement), though theoretically there would still be that system of tradeoffs if you wanted to change an already upgraded ability...but like you stated, there were so many upgrade canisters lying around that there wasn't really even a trade-off either way.
No, in IW there was no distinction between biomod canisters and upgrade canisters. There were two types of canisters, regular and black market, and both types could be used to either install/change a biomod or upgrade it.
My preference is for forced permanent choices, but I don't think it's a big deal either way as long as biomod upgrades are scarce and harder to obtain than in IW.
DDL on 12/4/2010 at 15:44
To be fair to IW, it wasn't exactly 'respec at will', more 'respec at will...once': there were enough aug cans to go from "all level 3 bunch of augs" to "all level 3 bunch of different augs", but not enough to do so (completely, at least) a second time. Admittedly even then, it felt like too much, particularly toward the end, where they pretty much acquired "multitool" levels of ubiquity..
Nameless Voice on 12/4/2010 at 17:15
Come to think of it, the game probably had just about exactly enough to outfit your character with an entire, fully-upgraded set of all regular augs, or a fully-upgraded set of all black-market augs, which is why there seem to be so many aug canisters.
