ktchong

Neo-Paris in Remember Me, (not an RPG but has RPG elements.) The developer of Remember Me, DontNod, has made one other game, the critically-acclaimed Life is Strange. DontNod is currently working on its first "Bioware-style" RPG, Vampyr.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zlj03FjL3_g

Well, the Sun's article does have a point: the female characters in Mass Effect: Andromeda is ugly. IMO, BioWare seems to be pushing some kind of "ugly (women) acceptance" agenda. Which is not entirely impossible because feminists and SJW have been pushing the "fat (women) acceptance" agenda for about a decade now. The "ugly (women) acceptance" is the natural extension of fat acceptance. Nowadays, BioWare seems to be more concerned with pushing some social justice agenda rather than making good games.

NOT SO MODEL BEHAVIOUR Bioware accused of deliberately making Mass Effect: Andromeda female characters ‘ugly’:

One of the Big Three industry reviews is out: GameSpot gives it a 60%.

Metacritic update: 75% for the PC version, 7 reviews 75% for the PS4 version, 23 reviews 77% for the Xbox One version, 17 reviews Seems like this one is heading towards as having the lowest Metacritic scores for a BioWare game - and the first BioWare games to score below 80% overall. (Dragon Age 2 was the lowest at 82%.) Does anyone want to make a prediction as to where the final scores will be?

The first act is very important. In today's competitive market, a video game has 30 minutes to an hour to "hook" a player with a great introduction. I have been more than generous to watch a few hours of the playthrough and story. 213374U may complain about how people who have not played the game should not judge the game. I do not even want to get into the gameplay aspect of Mass Defect: Androgynous. I could see from the videos that Mass Defect: Androgynous has cringeworthy dialogues and an uninspired story. I could already see the game has terrible character and facial animations. I do not need to play the game myself to know the dialogues are awful, the story is uninspired, and the animations are bad. I can find out all that from watching videos on YouTube. Look, here is the thing. When I watched the playthrough of Horizon: Zero Dawn, I got an urge that I wanted to keep watching to find out more about the story and the character. I felt that, wow, I had to buy a Playstation 4 (which I did) because I wanted to experience that story and that character myself. On the other hand, I did not get that feeling from watching Mass Defect: Androgynous. At some point, (maybe about two hours into the let's play videos,) I thought that the story is uninteresting, the dialogues are awful, and the animations are painful to watch. I decided Mass Defect: Androgynous is a disappointment and not a game I want to play anytime soon.

The review embargo has lifted. The Metacritic scores for Mass Defect: Androgynous is currently 75% for the PS4 version (12 reviews) and 77% for the Xbox One version (6 reviews). The PC version has only 3 reviews so an average/Metacritic score is not yet available. Those Metacritic scores, based on the let's play videos I've seen, are about right: an uninspired story (or at least an uninspired first act of the story,) lackluster dialogues, poor animations, and ugly character models (especially for the female characters.) I'd probably score it between mid-60 and low-70, if what I've heard about the bugs is true, (i.e., Mass Defect: Androgynous is the buggiest BioWare release ever.) As of now, Mass Defect: Androgynous is the BioWare game that debuted with the lowest Metacritic scores, even lower than Dragon Age 2. EDIT: The Metacritic scores have dropped to 73% for the PS4 version (15 reviews or 2 additional reviews) and 75% for Xbox One (7 reviews or 1 additional review.) Still waiting for an average score for the PC version.

PewDiePie on Mass Defect: Andromeda, "Where did it go wrong? What happened? WTF?" PewDiePie has 50+ million subscibers. When he bashes the game, it will impact the sales. Mass Defect: Andromeda is already a MEME, even other game developers are rubbing it in:

FYI, social justice warriors are also angry at Mass Defect: Andromeda for a different reason: Forget about the culture war. People should not buy Mass Defect: Andromeda because it is a bad, poorly-made game. The quality of BioWare games has been in a gradual decline for some years. Mass Defect: Andromeda is a new lowest point for BioWare games. People should stop buying BioWare games, but not for any idealogical or cultural reason. People should boycott BioWare games because we should not encourage BioWare from making worse and worse games. Customers should not allow BioWare to continue to leverage its brand and past reputation to exploit fan loyalty into buying bad games.

More of the abomination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA07hLF-3tE Even the trailer has plenty of terrible animations:

Whoa... the facial and mouth animations are awful. In some scenes, I think the animations are actually worst than the facial/mouth animations in the first Mass Effect game, which came out ten years ago. WTF happened to BioWare?? Did BioWare replace everyone who had worked on the old Mass Effect games with new hires straight out of college or something? EDIT: even the quality of the dialogues and voice acting have regressed from previous Mass Effect games. WTF happened?!?

The development team of Horizon: Zero Dawn will be doing an AMA on Reddit in a few hours: https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/5zidtl/join_our_ama_with_the_developers_of_horizon_zero/

Just so you know, I bought a PS4 to play this game after watching some LPs on YouTube, and I am not a console person. I love WRPG. I love Tomb Raider 2013. I saw the videos. I love the main character Aloy. I loved her story. I was engrossed in the first act of the game. I wanted to find out how the story play out myself. So I bought a PS4 just to play this game. (Of course, I had also wanted to played Uncharted series and The Last of Us, but they were not enough to close the deal. Horizon is the final push that's needed.) I had never owned a PlayStation, and the last console I bought was a Xbox 360 that red ringed on me, and that's ten years ago. (No way in hell I'd ever buy another Xbox, especially now that Xbox does not even have any good exclusive that interests me. I bought Xbox 360 for the first Mass Effect, whose IP Xbox no longer has as an exclusive. Now the only exclusive IP that Xbox has are Halo and Gears of War, and neither belongs to a genre that I like, and neither is as good as it was ten years ago.)

I am not the only one who thinks it is the best RPG. A bunch of YouTube LP players, (and they play games for a living,) and many commented that Horizon: Zero Dawn is one of the best RPG they have played. i.e., TeamNinja, (who said something like, "wow, this is one of the best if not the best RPG I've played" when the end credit rolls - he even decided to do a review after finishing the game, and he does not usually do game reviews on his channel,) ChristopherOdd, (who usually played several games at a time on his channel, but said, "I think this is my favorite RPG so far" and just stopped playing all other games and focus on Horizon because he said he is "addicted and can't stop playing it,") farfromsubtle, theRadBrad, etc. All of them have commented that Horizon is either one of the best or the best RPG they've played. And those guys play games for a living. BTW, I don't necessarily agree with them. As a RPG, some may think Horizon falls short. However, it is, IMO, no doubt the WRPG with the most engrossing overarching story and most memorizable character with a fully-realized character arc. The story of Aloy, of course. The story is about her personal story to find out who her mother is and why she was abandoned/cast out as a child, but her personal story happens to tie into the story of the bigger world. IMO, that is the best way to tell a story: the protagonist did not set out to save the world. She sets out for something more personal and relatable, but then ends up being entangled in the the bigger story. It is the story and storytelling that puts Horizon above and beyond other WRPG. (I don't play JRPG so I can't speak for them.)

Yes, many players have been complaining that the day/night cycle goes by too quickly, and they want a patch to slow it down. The "Zero Dawn" has something to do with a big reveal/twist in the game, so I am not going to spoil it. The subtitle seems stupid at first, ("Zero Dawn? How the hell did they get that name? Did they get that name by randomly picking words out of a dictionary or bag or something?") But, once you find out one of the big reveals of the story, (IMO the biggest reveal,) then the name/subtitle makes perfect sense.

... and I've been playing WRPG since Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar since the 1980s. Horizon: Zero Dawn has the best story and best character arc I've ever seen in a WRPG. I'd let the following playthrough videos speak for the game. The first video and the first twenty minutes of the second video form the "first act" of the story. The first act plays out like a captivating movie. The gameplay in the first act is strictly linear. It serves as the game tutorial (and a very well-paced one) while setting up the story and character, (i.e., the best character in a WRPG ever,) her backstory and motivation. It is a the formulaic "hero's journey", but it is a fresh take and extremely well executed and well told. The second act opens up the whole world, (i.e., it is an open-world game,) and at that point the game becomes open and less structured, and it has ****loads of side quests, errands. random and scripted encounters, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6JaeNduyFY&feature=share

Obama defeated McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012 due to superior ground game and, most important, the superior technology behind his ground game. The DNC had the superior information technology that indexed, profiled and identified Democratic voters, so ground troops could find and drag those voters to polling stations. It has been almost ten years since Obama revolutionalized DNC's ground game, yet the RNC still has not caught up in term of ground game technology. So the RNC is about ten years behind DNC in terms of ground game and its technology. After today, the RNC will be twenty years behind DNC in voters information technology. What the DNC has here is really cutting edge. In the past, we did not know the result until after the election, so it was impossible to reverse the outcome of any district. Today, the DNC begins using a new and improved voter information system. The new system continuously updates and monitors results in every district, in real-time, based on continuous exit polling. When the system detects or predicts Hillary is falling behind in a particular district, the system will immediately raise an alert. The system immediately runs through the list of registered Democratic voters in that district, and dials and calls them, to find "available leads". At the same time, the system redirects the ground volunteers/troops to that district, to go knock on doors and/or pick up confirmed leads, and drag the leads to polling stations. If multiple nearby districts are at risk at once, then the system calculates the priorities of those districts based on how they will affect overall election outcome. This technology will crush Donald Trump, who has zero ground game to speak of. As far as I know, the RNC does not have anything that is even remotely close to what the DNC has. The current system the RNC has is not even on par with what Obama used back in 2008. That is price Republicans pay for being a bunch of anti-math/science turds. That anti-math/science mentality has retarded Republicans, made them slow to adapt and update to new technology. But hey, maybe Jesus can help those morons overcome math, science and technology.

I love these kinds of alternative theories. Please elaborate: How could his family support support him for fooling all of the american people, are they also in on it? Or is he such a tyrant that they are afraid of him? What if the plan fails and he becomes elected? You guys are giving Donald Trump too much credit. The one thing we've learned from his presidential run is that he is actually a yuge moron with short attention span, (which was a surprise to me.) I did not know he is so stupid. He does not seem like the kind of person who thinks too far ahead or thinks things through.

Mike Pence and the First Stage of Grief https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4ntatuvJTA

Not sure if this was already posted, but here it is... Bad Hombres and Nasty Women!

Fareed Zakaria: Your Views of Clinton Are ‘Irrelevant,’ Trump Is ‘Cancer on American Democracy’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCJcbobMy-g

Wow, two Sam Wang TV interviews in one day! He had rarely if ever done TV interviews, but today he did two! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO5X4DwgC9g A reminder of who Sam Wang is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL8KadI68aE While I respect Nate Silver, Sam Wang > Nate Silver. If Nate Silver is a master of statistical analysis and forecasting, then Sam Wang must be the Grand Master. You can google him. From his profile at Wikipedia: