LadyCrimson

I have a feeling that Obsidian will be able to stretch out and do a heck of a lot more with 4million than I ever could.

Mixture of both. Common items as loot, dropping from the majority of the enemies/fights I have no issue with. I mean, you kill a bunch of bandits who were trying to waylay you, you're probably going to rifle the bodies and see if they have anything useful. Cash/stuff to sell, spell scrolls, arrows, basic gear. Not that one has to take the spoils of war so to speak, but it makes sense to me that the possibility is there (edit: but not EVERY enemy in the lot has to have it...good enough if it's somewhat random if they have any "loot"). But it shouldn't be that every enemy has a potential to drop some uber/lore related item. I prefer to find the more interesting items via certain quests, tougher enemy encounters, chests/areas that aren't easy to get to, etc.

I don't mind a Lore/Skill ability for this, altho I tend to get irritated when only a mage can learn it or something (essentially "forcing" one to have a mage in the party). But to me it makes sense that there are going to be magiks that no one in your party may be able to ID offhand, so a representation of needing some skill/knowledge in order to do it isn't something I'm against. Just...no constant "scrolls of ID" that one has to carry around all the time. And I'd be fine with being able to equip an item regardless of it's ID state, unknown penalties/risk included.

Hubby. We still haven't finished the PT2 run of the game. Getting pretty close now tho. But we have discussed (repeatedly) how BL2 doesn't have enough replay value...that's still our main disappointment. Weapons/drop rates are a part of it. The more heavily scripted main questline another part. Dunno. I wish you could take the improved combat of BL2 and put it into BL1.

Baldur's Gate did this. For example the weird artefacts and robes of the Archmagi in High Hedge. It's been a very long time since I've played much of BG. Details like that I tend to forget. I wouldn't mind this type of option. But they'd have to be careful that degradation isn't paced too fast re:cost or potential length of adventuring far away from any town/merchant. I personally don't want to have to constantly go "back to town" because my armor is about to break after a few big battles. That'd be too Diablo-ish. Still, it is a bit more realistic to have some kind of wear and tear + repair on gear so I wouldn't mind having some level of it. Crafting as a type of money sink, as others mentioned, sounds good to me too.

*looks at the last section of the poll* Null vote. Don't mind some sexy, don't mind some implied sex, if it was all optional. But no, it's not my preference to have/play a highly sexualized game. Obviously, if a game is largely intended to be some kind of nudity/sexual game showcase from the beginning, that's something different, but in terms of P.E. or any other more "typical," more general-market fantasy cRPG, I'd rather leave it up to mods/modders to add that kind of stuff in for people who want it.

Ate Chinese food. I still laugh at hubby's inability to eat rice with a fork. Learned he'll have the week around Xmas off after all, which is always nice. Played games until we were almost falling asleep. Hubby's already asleep and snoring, think I'll go join him. To sleep, that is. I don't snore. Sometimes I snuffle a little, but I don't snore. Definitely not. Nope. Never.

We have a sort of catch-all long running Music thread series, for what you're listening to/faves, cool tunes you've randomly found while surfing YT, even music you may have performed yourself. So I think it might be best to continue the general music posts centered there.

Money sinks like games of chance with a .02 chance of an awesome item. *irritated mumbles about Borderlands 2 slot machines....* Bribery options for information you need for quests or whatever are always good. Expensive bribes, not just 20gp. Having items in mid-to-late stage stores that are occasionally very good, but also very expensive. The sort where you'd save up almost the entire game to be able to get them. I guess they'd have to be static in the store to have a chance of buying it, tho...not sure how that would work, if it would at all. Costs a lot of money to join some factions? ...mm...that's all I have. I is sleepy.

I like a journal that feels like as much like a journal as possible, but it has to be organized well enough for me to fairly easily find the information I want. I don't like paging and skimming and reading for 10+ minutes when all I want is to re-read a quest dialogue from some NPC I met 3 hours ago.

All narration/cutscene/cinematics longer than a few seconds should be skippable after you've seen them once, imo. I can't imagine it's that difficult for the game to keep track if they've played once already and then add in the "skip" button, or whatever.

I had fun with flying in Morrowind until I used/mixed too many potions and ended up flying outside of the boundaries of the game in about .5 second or something. Before they had caps on such things. I don't remember. It was funny tho. But agree with the others that I'm not sure if it has a place in a top down, large-party isometric type game. At least not a visual one.

Still trying to wake up. Might have to increase my caffeine for the day this time. *yawn* During my one major attempt at novel writing, ages ago, I had a similar problem. I had plot outline, chapter outline, historical timeline, even drew a rough map and so on, but I kept changing how the first chapter went, which would affect other things a bit of course. It drove me crazy.

I started trying the turn off subtitles approach because I thought maybe I was missing some potential emotional immersion via vocal tones, as well as my being tired of feeling impatient all the time - plus in some games rapid-fire hitting Enter causes truncated, bizarre cutoffs that also become disruptive to me. This assumes that the voice doesn't annoy you or something...I've had games where the main voices annoyed me so much I'd do everything to skip/silence them instead. I did like some of the extra immersion of letting the voices speak, and I can be a huge fan of voice-acting if I like the VO/characterization, but even then some impatience would creep in. As always ... "just depends."

I'd be happy to have a race of rat people in a game....if there's also a race of cat people. They can be constantly at war with each other, and you have to pick sides, or help them make a truce, or be constantly keeping your cat person companion from eating your rat person companion... ....I'm not sure if I'm actually serious or not.

I have this issue too. Most of the time I'm done reading before the voice is even half way through talking, so I sit there feeling impatient. Even regular dialogues this can come up for me. When they have the option, turning the dialogue subtitles off as much as possible helps because then I'm "forced" to listen instead of automatically reading because the text is there. I'm not against narrated stills/cinematics per se, btw. I just like to see them kept to a bare minimum, like most such things. Start of/intro to the game, maybe one for the ends of a couple big "act" sections, and end of the game.And as mentioned, can sometimes work/be needed for certain things like dream sequences etc. Altho, IIRC, I didn't even realize there were dream sequences in BG1 for a while because I kept force-marching without resting a lot of the time. Heh.

I'm still of the opinion that Windows8 is going to be what shoves me into finally being a Linux user, once Win7 became no longer viable. There are some features about Win8 that sound ok/appealing, but for my old fashioned self, not enough to put up with the things that I think sound horrid. I still don't even love Win7. But I will definitely be interested in what people who use it for a while have to say.

Late night last night I tried to watch the film Act of Valor. The first few minutes was ok, and then what I assume are the "real military dudes" started doing their acting chores. They weren't the worst or anything, but .... yeah, there's a reason why there are professional actors. I tried skipping forward through the movie a bit, and in every scene the wooden delivery of dialogue just made me wince. I had to turn it off. Maybe I'll try again someday. Well it's not watered down. That's good. That was my main complaint about Army of Darkness. I liked AoD as light comedy, but yeah...outside of giggling at Bruce Campbell, it wasn't my ideal for the series.

That's my general viewpoint. Narration itself doesn't add much for me ... that's going to be dependent on whether I like the narrator's voice/intonation, and that's a hit and miss affair for most people. So if we're talking imagination here, I'd actually rather just have text and imagine a voice myself. Or really, sometimes, none at all if possible - I'd rather story/narrative be somehow integrated into the game itself in some way, rather than needing huge chunks of sudden exposition. eg, there's the too many cutscenes ="I'll just watch watch a movie" aspect (which I agree with) but there's also the "then I'll just read a book" aspect. It's a fine line at times.

That would be rather hard on the armor. I'd have to spend too much gold getting the burn marks polished off all the time.

CinemaBlend seems to have had a raging dislike against D3/Blizzard for a while now...I find their articles rather one-sided and thus a bit suspect, but not like I really know... My position about Blizzard the company is about the same as greylord. They're no longer interested in making the type of game that I liked from them. Doesn't make them the devil, but it does mean it's likely I won't be buying another game from them....unless they do an abrupt switch around. Which I doubt.

Finished the 3rd Sherlock series. The last was the best one....the ending was pretty cool, altho personally I think they went a tiny bit overboard with making Moriarty a stereotyped modern psychotic type...could have reined that in just a bit while still making him not as stuffy as in the stories. Watson's stuff at the end almost made me sniffly. Almost. These two characters ... I just love their dynamic together. The series/actors capture that aspect of the stories pretty well I think. I remember one of the original written stories, where Watson gets grazed by a bullet and goes down, and Holmes runs to him in concerned fear.... "It was worth many wounds..." - Bromance at its finest.

I don't mind a marker that indicates what general direction to go in, so I know whether to go south or north or whatever (and then may disappear when I get sorta closeish). What I mind is when games use markers on everything ... that is, your quest is to find an item, say, and the quest marker is on the item itself (and shows up on the map). Then you pick it up, the quest is now to find another item, and the marker moves to that item. Like in Borderlands. I personally like Borderlands, but the marker system (especially in 2) is completely silly, even for the type of game it is. In a RPG game of the type I expect P.E. will be, I can easily do without markers of any kind, as long as the quests are clearly written with a good directional hint, like "North in the Fields of Doom." I don't like it when quest logs are so ambiguous I'm not even sure what compass direction to start in.

I like the website/creator, but it needs a lot more basic options. They can come out looking rather generic, at least for my personal tastes. I didn't try uploading my own pic tho, I'm sure that helps a lot. As long as we can use our own custom images if we want, I don't think we need an image generator built into the game when it's generally so easy these days to find/create your own image and import it.

I've seen the floating skulls and arms still on fire and such before but I don't think I've ever seen that particular effect in NV before.