Blodhemn

I loathe this sort of speculative, gossip response that comes with these events as much of it is political, and most of it is inaccurate. All of a sudden, everyone is an expert and need their opinion heard. Just stick with the facts and spare the misinformation.

Maybe the President will break it down for us, being a bomb expert and all.

Everyone is part of the problem. From the fans who expect everything to be perfect, to the publishers who rush games to get a quicker return and the developers who promise and hype their games beyond belief and don't deliver. I could name just a handful of games that I was really blown away with over the past 10 years, while the rest fall into 3 categories: pretty good, ok time waster or f'n horrible. Obsidian, for example, has games that fit within all of those categories. One of the few games that I've been blown away with in recent years was Alpha Protocol and one of the worst games I've ever played was Neverwinter Nights 2. That's just the nature of it and I don't see any clear solution. We will get good games, some great ones on rare occasion, and an awful lot of mediocre/trash - just like in all sectors of the entertainment industry. If making a great game were easy, then everyone would be doing it..

Yeah, it's a little weird but the market is there. If people are so willing to fund it then how can you blame the company? I'm not really a fan of the stretch goal thing tho. Keep paying a bit more and more and we promise the game will be longer AND better!! Eh, that's already getting old.

Playing Dead Money. It's really too bad Obsidian went with the constant "conflict" approach with the stupid beeping collars, conveniently placed toxic clouds and bear traps, recycled holograms, respawning ghost things and their stupid noises, because the story elements are pretty nice. I just don't understand why game designers do this. Does everyone have ADD and need to be in a "conflict" 24/7 or become instantly bored? It cheapens the experience nearly to the point of making it redundant and never to be played again after completion.

I've had those same arguments as well, but hey, the people funding these projects are mostly people who don't have a market catered to them and if they want to support these promises, then that's no different to people preordering the next Bioware game or whatever.

Haven't read this until now as I'm just staying away from corrupt law/government as much as possible these days, but is this surprising to anyone? The USA is run by lawyers and is a place where common sense has all but vanished in this devolved society with the manipulation of words being held in the highest regard. It'll only continue to get worse until one day people wake up and wonder how we got to the point that we are and then it's too late to change anything. Our time as the hypocritical world leader will be over soon, so I take pleasure in that, however it'll only be replaced by an even more hypocritical one.

Depends on your point of view. I enjoyed the first 2 Bioshock games over Deus Ex HR. They played much better as shooters and HR felt like it had too many things tacked on just because it had to. I have yet to play Dishonored, but plan to later on.

B:I Takes place in 1912. Yeah, I haven't paid any attention to B:I since I'm surely going to get it, but a bit later down the road as I've got games I need to play beforehand. So my post needs to read as Bioshock 1 & 2 but I really doubt the new game has noir aspects, like the first two. There's nothing noir about Bioshock 1 & 2. You seem to be mistaking the Art Deco art and architecture for noir, which is a cinematic/fiction style/genre. Infinite, ironically, actually has a lot of noir elements (Booker DeWitt is the archetypal noir protagonist before the game goes all quantum mechanics and superstrings.) That's exaclty what I said. You've confused my post. I haven't played B:I, so I might very well be wrong about any noir elements there, but I'm going to assume that they're extremely light.

It had the complete opposite affect on me. Almost made me want to resign as a gamer. Maybe you have to be drunk to enjoy it.

B:I Takes place in 1912. Yeah, I haven't paid any attention to B:I since I'm surely going to get it, but a bit later down the road as I've got games I need to play beforehand. So my post needs to read as Bioshock 1 & 2 but I really doubt the new game has noir aspects, like the first two.

I've heard both that we've come out fine, and that we're gonna lose. I think it's "They paid back the loans with interest, but america still holds stock in the company that'll be sold at a loss." GM repaid the TARP loan with other TARP funds that was set aside for future GM problems. Sounds almost too goofy to be true but it is.

The games aren't really noir. More so a mix of 30s-50s art/architecture/caricatures.

Yeah, that's pretty much Bioshock - I doubt it gets better for you though to be fair, pretty much every game has some sort of balance problem. I'm not a huge fan of the combat, though it's better than most games, it's just repetitive. Basically, Bioshock does atmosphere better than most so that's what you're playing for.

I like the Bioshock games for the setting, music and voice acting. So many games suck in that department, even atleast half of Obsidian's games, so that's pretty much all I play the Bioshocks for. The voice acting alone gives the game more character than the stilted sims which I'm pretty much tired of playing. I wouldn't even play Fallout New Vegas if I didn't rotate the music as there's virtually no character to the game save for old music.

I can accept that point, but that you think publishers are the ones that do this and need to do this is beyond words. Someone needs to. But it's probably more accurate to say "some of the time".

Most RPG makers are uncreative in things outside of their realm. Case in point - regards to the South Park game, for a demo, Obsidian had a generic as hell cave quest and when Matt and Trey saw it, they immediately made better suggestions to improve it. That's why I don't fully buy into this "evil publisher" idea that is pushing Kickstarter. A lot of the time, there needs to be someone outside of the nerd bubble to suggest things for improvement.

I find that kind of funny. Yeah, FO3 had your typical good/bad but so did FNV, it just had more options and at the end, even though I planned on playing one side, I couldn't care for one more than the other and just end up wanting to be independent even of the Yes Man. House/Caeser - two sides of the same coin, Caeser is also the stock "bad" and dull. NCR - very boring and the stock "good" for the most part.

NWN2 is a pretty laughable game. I had to uninstall it even after getting through that goofy first act. I'll probably try MOTB some day in the future but nothing of the OC is of much quality.

I'd take the Witcher 1 combat over any of the strict turn based rule sets that rpg fans long for. I mostly can't get into many of these Kickstarters because of that. Yeah, the story elements are nice, but those combat systems are as unappealing as it gets. I almost wish I didn't support the game I did because the combat looks like a joke so far. I'm leaning towards supporting the new Torment though, mainly because the story elements are still better than all of the other titles that it almost won't matter if the combat sucks.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with all of that save for the dialogue, which I just didn't find of much better quality - good breakdown of the games nonetheless. That's not to say Obsidian can't write good dialogue - Kotor 2 and Alpha Protocol are examples to the contrary, but it's clear more thought went into the bulk of writing for the quest trees in NV than it did for good character writing.

No, I see the difference between the writing - it's obvious. But, I'm nearly finished with Old World Blues for the first time, and I hated the style of humor throughout the entire DLC. So, in moments like that, compared to FO3's DLC, even though it's more involved writing, it comes off as the writers trying too hard to be funny, and that brings the experience down more than just some vanilla writing that came with FO3 DLC. Throughout the entire NV experience compared to FO3, again, it's obvious there's more of a backdrop to the story and all of the different factions and people, but when it comes to dialogue, which is what should push the story and have me actually caring about it and it's characters, NV fell just as flat as FO3 did. And when they tried adding more character to the dialogue, like in Old World Blues, it's just grating.

What's so great about the NV writing? The quest structure is obviously better than FO3, although at times it gets messy and unorganized, but the dialogue itself is equally as lame and at times worse than FO3. Overall, the two games are about even to me - enjoyable to cruise around in at your own pace.

That's how I thought the first game was. I found a good sniper rifle early on, and after that the good weapons were few and very far between the thousands of useless drops.

Is it just me or are most games not really that optimized for PC? I can play something like BF3 with everything maxed and I get smooth gameplay for the most part(save for some sections of a map), whereas something like Saints Row 3 there's jutter even when I pull the settings down, and Fallout New Vegas as well. Maybe open world games sort of suck on my system or I might need to reformat and start with a fresh windows install. I just got a new video card and run the graphic intensive games well, but in the uglier games, I don't notice any improvement at all.