That one actually kind of makes sense. If I was a boss monster and I heard that there was a Sword of Boss Monster Slaying floating around somewhere, I'd go out of my way to get my hands on it so it couldn't be used against me.

Okay, that makes sense

I didn't nean it that way. I mean somthing like the boss is droping a sword, but you don't know what to do with it, because you have spend much money for a better sword day ago... things like that...

Yeah, you are right, sorry for that. But I think, you should steal stuff, when they're not looking and not right in front of their eyes...

If that's always the case—that is, to beat the boss you basically must have a weapon greater than what he leaves behind—then, yes, I agree that the gameplay is unbalanced, which is a flaw.

Yeah, that bugs me too. More generally, it bugs me when your abilities progress at a rate that parallels the challenges you face. I.e., at one point in the game, your attacks do 10 damage and your enemies have 30 HP, then just as you level up/find equipment that lets you do 20 damage, you start facing enemies with 60 HP.

I used to run a lot of tabletop RPGs and something I liked to do was right after the PCs gained new abilities, spells, or equipment I'd provide them with a couple of encounters that were designed to let them show off their new goodies. Afterwards I'd start ramping up the challenges again, but when you've worked hard to get something it's nice to get a chance to kick ass with it for a while.

That's fine if it's a game about stealing; in a game about something else, that's just going to distract from the focus.

That's one thing I like about Morrowind. You've got to be sneaky about stealing, which adds to the challenge and makes the game more fun.

A couple of other things I've thought of:

Respawning guards. Iknow this happens in both Morrowind and Fable. When I decide to be totally evil, and clear out a town, people shouldn't just pop out of thin air to attack me. Once all the guards are dead, they should be dead. And it should take a few days for new ones to arrive.

Places where you can't use weapons, but really want to. Like Bowerstone in Fable. There are some really annoying people in that town, and unfortunately I can't shoot them in the face with an arrow.

Magic Bag of Holding. You character can carry around enough stuff to fill a small warehouse, although to look at him you'd never know it. Does he just shove it all in his pockets? Morrowind did a little to solve this, allowing you to carry only so much weight. But still, you're running around with five full suits of armor tucked under your cloak, and still capable of using both hands to fight. The player does need to be able to carry some loot out of dungeons with him, but this is just a little ridiculus. The best system I've seen for this is in an old game called Castle of the Winds. You were only allow to carry a maximum weight and a maximum bulk. If you wanted to carry more stuff, then you had to buy a bigger backpack. But even then, you could still carry around a huge chest full of armor and weapons and still be an effective fighter.

Hmmm, maybe it will end when piccolo finishes The Game.

Well, I'm putting my money on "The Game". I mean, seriously, what can go wrong when you have a name like that?

At first I was skeptical about The game, but now I really want to play it. Come on, piccolo, give us a release date!

That's the best euphemism for burglary I've heard in a while

I dislke any game where the mechanism shows too clearly, unless it's cleverly woven into the story somehow. e.g. I wouldn't mind the bosses killing me first time, if they did it in an interesting way.

i got the name from anime dot.hack sige

edit: in the anime if you died in the game you died in the real world. alotof you guy whould be dead since you said you dont mine being killed by a boss. when i play a game i never die unless it has that flaw i talked about. where dieing is apart of the story line.

[url=http://www.taleworlds.com/]Mount & Blade[/url] has a semi-satisfying solution to this:
- The more inventory (excluding horses) you carry, the slower you move.
- If you have horses in your inventory, they carry a part of your load, so the more horses you have to carry your stuff, the faster you can move on the map. And map speed is an important factor in the game, since it decides over whether you can run from a stronger party or get slaughtered.
- In battle, your inventory chest pops up at the spawn point, and you can only access it by going back there.

You have two inventories iirc; on with fighting gear (if you have too much, you get some penalty in fights). So you have to weight how many arrows you want, and if you want a shield or not (because of the weight). Then there is the "party inventory", which is where you can keep trade goods etc, you can also keep horses here (apparently, never tried that) and that offsets the decrease in speed from carrying a lot (and i guess it helps to speed up those slow manhunters etc?).

My main gripes are story:

Too much story
They put a lot of the budget into pretty cinematics and pages and pages of dialog that you button-mash your way through. If the story is that separate from the world the player is supposed to immerse themselves in that you have to force-feed it to them like that, YOU FAIL.

The absolute worst is when a story actually captivates you and they ruin it with a cinematic. Sure it's pretty, but it pulls you out of the game. I'm no longer the hero, I'm no longer doing things, I'm just watching this douchebag on the screen do stuff -- stuff that I should be doing, stuff that I have been working toward this whole time. WHY WOULD YOU TAKE AWAY THE MOST SATISFYING PART?

Too little story
Sometimes you just want to beat stuff up, and that's cool. But you need a little direction and motivation. Games that feel distant suck. Sequels, especially, suffer from this. There's nothing more to discover about the characters, no carrot on the end of the stick, and the emotion of the game is flat.

Cloud has a TON of emotion. It's a very simple game! It really doesn't take much, you just have to stop milking the franchise title and wearing sterile gloves all the time and show the player that you've actually poured something into the game.