on the audiogaming community's status here. I consider it stupid and dead. There's a reason paladin is meh, it's because it was by the same guy who wrote AAC, which is probably worse. Not hating on you aaron, but your story abilities are meh. But then again who has good story writing capabilities here. Ukio? If I had played through the whole game with jgt or maybe a dictionary of the story maybe I would have a better viewpoint on this, but bk3, or pretty much bk series, just seems less about the story and more about the fighting system and in the case of 3, platforming. Because that's all we blindies can come up with. Let's take some stuff into perspective here. Let's take the oldest and most known games on the market, from packman to mario to zelda to pokemon. Packman was the first and most known game of it's kind, an arcade style chase and beat'em'up game, action. That was one great thing a game needed. Action. BUt, oh wait, here comes nintendo, with mario! Hey looky this is the best game on the market! It beats tetris by a longshot! Speaking of tetris, that was more of a strategy/i'm bored game. Mario was a platformer, action, beat'em'up and obstacle course, yet the story made no sense. Who the fuck is princess peach, why are you rescuing her, why just you, mushroom kingdom? just, bla. Not even going to continue that. But wait, wait, oh looky, here comes... Zelda! An rpg! A game that would immerse you in it's story and battles for hours or even days on end. Don't know too much about zelda so can't give too much opinion here, sorry for bashing mario back there too, really don't know all these games' stories, probably should have done some research. And then I wanna say street fighter but I really no absolutely nothing about that game. But let's jump forward to today. Those old games were the basis for everything we have today, somewhere in the arcade world the basis for GTA and call of duty and all of them came to life. ANd what do we have. There are a few types of games. There's side scroller beat'em'ups like mario, rpg's like zelda, or big fat fighters with loads of strategy like today's call of duty or whatever, don't know it's basis game. Blindies, only got halfway there. They got packman and mario, but not zelda and whatever it is basis for modern fighting games. That's how I see it. And a lot of us are newbs with game creation, and probably none of us can write story. You gotta remember, these big names like the big N hired multiple writers. That was all they did, write the story for their games. We try to pack game design into one person or a small team of people, and it produces this. Big names have probably hundreds of people or at least dozens working on each and every aspect of the game, from geometrics to story to sound design to music design to voice acting to mechanics to graphics to whatever else there is! And there's another issue. Us blindies have gotten so used to our baby food, that we won't tolerate anything more. We can't handle zelda now, not the tipical blindy, which I'm sad to say I'm one of them. And while i'm on this topic, do you know what stw is? Minecraft, knockoff, broke! Sam is a god, gorth's a god though he deserves it, rtr was actually quite close to a good mainstream fighting game, mason has made too many marios, aaron makes games with very odd connections and stories that make no sense, and then a lot of us are newbs. BY this point, muds are the best games we have now, but I don't like muds because they're so non blindy, meaning they're too good and of course they're not audio, but text. If I had a toleration for muds, taking weeks upon months to play, I might actually be a good gamer. But nope, I'm stuck down here with the rest of these blinks, playing redspot and 2dp and up.

I think what we need is quality, not quantity. Just think about how many sidescrollers have been made in the last few years: aac, psyco strike, scrolling battles, 2dp, and so on. In order to get higher quality games, devs should probably just form a team of 2/3 devs and a couple of other people for sound design and story writing, maybe 5 to 10 people in total? This would enable people like me who have coding experience but just not enough time or have difficulty with other aspects of creating games like sound design to still contribute to a game.

Oddly enough, while I probably wouldn't have voiced them in the tonal manner Jayde does, I do recall some of the same concerns upon the game's first release.
In some ways Paladin of the sky feels as if it happens to have things in, character death, romance, boss fights, an afterlife sequence because they were a cool idea at the time or were cribbed from mainstream rpgs, rather than because they were considered in terms of how they add to the story, same goes for enemy names most of which have no description.
I also personally never particularly liked the dragon strike system, since while it feels good in principle, in practice I found it devolved to a learn latest scroll boppit style, rince and repeat most of the time.

However, all of those points are mitigated by the fact that yes, paladin of the sky is the first game of it's type in audio.
Could the plot and design and writing have been better? Certainly, even considering it is not a mainstream game (that point has been made already so I'll not repeat).

However Paladin to me deserves respect for the good things it does, the fact that someone even attempted! a game like this in audio, and a game which flaws or not has had a lot of people spending a lot of time and having quite a bit of fun (I definitely enjoyed myself and will likely do another run through of the game in the future).

Yes, we've had games with good sound and good mechanics, but rarely anything with a really long play value not based on arcade accumulation. Even Entombed, much as I admire the game, is at rock bottom a combat system with a plot tacked on, it doesn't have an ongoing story, one reason why most of the actual rpg style experiences I've had myself have been with muds or browser games.

The only really major regret I have over paladin of the sky, is that it seems Aaron hasn't expanded on the game in the future.
At the time of release when such concerns were raised, Aaron's response was understandably that as only his second major game project, Paladin still represents a learning curve and that we'd be seeing more in the future.

Psycho strike and the gate are definitely worthwhile as far as they go, but possibly not the direction that myself and others wanted to see after paladin.

So, basicaly this all comes down to that eternal cry of the audio gamer when we get a little of what we want but not quite all of what we want:
"Please sir, I want some more!" .

I tried this game and quit after about half an hour and never went back. Obviously I didn't play enough of the game to form all the opinions Jayde has, but I did form one opinion and it was a deal breaker.

With all its beeps, boops, bangs, and bongs, the game sounded like I was miniaturized and put into a pinball machine rather than the spaceship the game's authors would like you to believe. Not one single sound effect was even close to representing the real thing, like they do in Blindside and Entombed.

Thanks, but no thanks!

I agree on sounds Jayde, indeed I've often had this debate with people who say "I won't play muds without a soundpack"  after trying Alteraeon and assuming there is more like that. yes, of course good sound and music is lovely, but to me at least other elements such as gameplay, story and atmosphere trump that.

With paladin though I at least thought the choice of predominantly background music with few sound effects was semi deliberate, harping back to 8 and 16 bit era rpgs as it does, I actually really rather like the music that is there myself.

While I don't know if Aaron would give out the engine for Paladin or let others muck with the code to create other games, I did at least expect him to release a second game much as you describe, certainly one with an improved combat system with more on the story.

Hopefully we'll see something like that in the future.

The idea of an rpg creation engine is an interesting one though, albeit I don't know if you could make a system generic enough to create things like unique bosses or a potentially engaging enough combat system as opposed to just minimax all equipment and wail away with the highest damage attack/spell going.

As I said, you could probably create the main elements, ie, areas, dialogue, enemies, descriptions etc and likely make a good game in the process, however from all I've heard of rpg maker it takes a good bit of custom coding to make the game actually unique. This is especially true with combat systems, since comparatively few rpgs actualy have combat systems that require the player to really interact with the combat itself as opposed to as I said, just minimax and then repeat the highest damage attack going.

This is one thing the adventure to fate games do extremely well, though even they don't always succeed given the lower number of available skills and the reliance upon equipment.

Actually, I'd love to see the crazy party card battle system expanded to an rpg since that potentially has a great setup for interactive battles and just requires the characters, story, levelling and exploration to add.

Indeed, I could well imagine an rpg maker being made out of that since the main difficult element is already there.

I also must add, and sorry for not putting this in my original post it came to me after posting it, that the lack of footstep sounds made the game feel... weird. It made me feel like I was flying literally everywhere and it made even the outside areas seem... dry. There was no atmosphere to the game whatsoever.

True enough, I suppose, although coders who can write are a godsend. I'm partnered up with one on a different project. I write better than he does, but he codes with a very high degree of skill, and I know just enough to know what works and what doesn't, and usually why.
As time goes by, I intend to learn to code, at least to some extent. This will make me one of those semi-rare writers who can code.
Aaron can code, there's no doubt. But writing is not his strong suit.

One thing I'll say though is this. Paladin wouldn't need a top--notch story to make it loads better than it is. It could be full of tropes, and it would still work mostly. If Aaron did the following, the game would look leaps and bounds better from a writing perspective:

1. Fix all the grammar and spelling mistakes. "fill free" should be "feel free". Cruelclaw "sat" in the corner, not "set". And for heaven's sake, add commas! They're really useful things!
2. Kill the supercharged diction regarding speech. I'm not saying stick to "he said, she said" every single time, but when I see words like "argued", "bit back", "moaned", and such used far more often than "said", my first thought is "here is a writer trying too hard to force me to see how his characters sound". Hint: if your characters have character, we will know how they sound most of the time. A little of this is fine, but Paladin's script is choked with it.
3. Give each character a unique voice. This wouldn't take much effort either. Maybe make Cecil particularly loud (noted by a lot of exclamations and the like), give Kelly some sarcasm, make Shawna moody (this is hinted at with her defeatist speech near the end, but nothing else), and actually lend Lucy some dialogue that proves she's perky, instead of just sorta telling us. Then make Simon sound, y'know, competent. This wouldn't take a lot of work.

In fact, the entire list I just laid out would take someone with high-school English maybe three hours, most of which would be spent correcting the lacking commas and occasional spelling mistakes. It's not like I'm asking for university essay-level writing here, or a 40-hour treatment from a professional copy editor. And I think that's why I'm so passionate about it. You could make a so-so game fairly good just by cleaning those things up.

Regarding footsteps, I don't much care that I don't hear them. Footsteps, and navigation in general, isn't integral to the game. Oh sure, if you wanted to make a full RPG with the best immersion possible, you'd want what Shadow Line does, with background sounds, different footsteps and plenty of puzzles/interactables to play with. But you don't absolutely need those things to make a decent game of it.

Sorry. I keep going on diatribes. Haha.

When I play games, I want to be able to immerse myself in the game's world, that's not possible with unrealistic sound effects like those in Paladin. Put simply, they break the immersion.

Blindside was totally awesome! it's to bad that the author has abandoned it. I'd really like to see it finished, and more games like it published.

Right now it pretty much stands alone as a fine demonstration of what's possible.

Unfortunately, choicescript seems to be the only coding stuff I can possibly learn to master...right now.

Completely agree with Jayd and all of post 17. What makes something advance requires a lot of work. I've never heard anyone who are really good and still have all way to do all of what makes it so. And I ashame my pothetic English since it still doesn't lead me further from what I am.:(

Oh yeah right, one huge game and one story to admire, is Shadow line (or rine as Japanese tend to change l to r). That game has another flaws though. Some voices aren't that great, good but not great. But of all that, it doesn't make replay value tasteless in anyway. Paladin, however, I stuck with it for a week and collapsed in front of my laptop due to extreme boredom. Repeating dragon strike skill patern over and over tires me out quicker than anything. I curse at Aaron so many times whenever I try to play that game. Can't it be better? Can't you just come up with something at least a percent less boring than this? But that was it. At least it was just luck on my side that I got the game, despite bank issues I have. But even the demo tires me out...think of that.

My opinion:
Halflings should officially all be killed, so it is important that they stay hidden. The paladin, from what I understood, is a normal transporting ship to humans. Maybe Xopolis is just in their way, and they'll just fake something about needing to land because of one or another reason to the humans and unload the dragons there. Or maybe they will fly the humans to wherever they are seposed to go and go to Xopolis with the halflings after that. Transporting halflings is illegal, so they are probably trying to hide it by putting them in a ship full of humans. Not sure how good are the halflings themselves about being hidden.