Orchomene

I second that. Or maybe, I hate QTE even more than mini games. When I buy a cRPG PC game, I shouldn't end with a console arcade game. I mean, I've not bought a Xbox, I've bought a PC. I play game that involve thinking and choosing. Not games that involve the right click at the right moment or the coordination of a guy that attempted to do the same movement for hours. So, if devs want to add those 'amazing' things like mini games and QTE, please add an option in the setting to remove those awful things or at least to bypass it. I remember an old crpg called Gorasul. In this game, you could choose the difficulty of combat (not original) but also the 'adventure' difficulty with things like puzzles (e.g. with higher difficulties, instead of multiple choices responses, you have to write the answer).

What mods would you recommend to make Oblivion playable ? I've tempted to play it, but felt bored with all the 'close portal' quests that were very repetitive. What do Nehrim do ? Change completly the story or just modify it sufficiently to make it an interesting story ?

This should answer your question.

From GB : Major Nelson Podcast #381 features an interview with senior producer Jason Bergman in which he reveals a handful of details on the upcoming DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, Dead Money. NMA gives an overview of important points. -Takes 4-6 hours to beat -Each companion has their own perk, can only take 1 at a time -Veronica has new dialogue options after you beat the DLC and can get 1 of 2 new perks depending on what you say. -Ghost People apparently need to be decapitated or gibbed to be killed; Shooting them elsewhere stuns them. -The Nightkin companion is schizophrenic and has two personalities, Dog and God. Both have their own perk. -The human companion is named Christine, and is described as mute but intelligent. -The ghoul companion is a lounge singer named Dean. You may have seen him on posters or load screens in the main game. -New weapons include the Holo-Beam and the Beartrap Fist.

Playing Drakensang : TDA. It's strange after having played Dragon Age how this game succeeded when DAO miserably failed. Sad it had less success.

A DLC that is aimed to people that play for achievments is not something I would care. It's like a tax on dumbness.

HOMM3 is certainly the best of the HOMM serie. You should still find on the web very good maps and campaign developed for it. I enjoyed AOW, but not as long as I enjoyed HOMM3.

You played too much with Boone and thus broke him.

Maybe I'll begin a new FONV playthrough. Is another patch planned ? Is there a date you can give us for the first PC DLC available ?

After Drakenfand RoT, I'm replaying the first Drakenfang. A third one is also expected but sadly after Radon Labs almost banquerouted and been saved by Bigpoint. So, I'm not sure the franchise will keep being so close to the PnP game.

I don't know what can be expected from this TESV. Morrowind was good, Daggerfall was their best game but I couldn't finish Oblivion. So, wait and see on this one. I agree that the level sclaing and the mechanics for level up are broken, too.

What I find impossible to understand is how Bioware ended with such a crappy RPG system in ME1 (the skill system is just not a good mechanic) and such a poor inventory system, even worse than the one in Kotor. They have been doing CRPG for ten years, you can imagine they would have taken a look at different PnP rpg systems to get some inspiration. For the inventory system, lack of stacking of same items is just not acceptable. It would have been really easy to put a number close to the object to show the number of duplicates. It could also have been useful to have a sort function. It's not like those things are difficult to implement and are costly. So instead of repairing what was broken in the RPG mechanics, they just removed all. Fort the rest, I can of course excuse the poor shooter mechanic since they are not very experienced in this. Same for the lack of balance since it's a single player game and balance requires a lot of time. And story wise, it's just the kind of story they like. Not really my kind of stories, but they try to put interesting elements even if some side quests were a bit tedious. In ME2, the story was lacking, side missions were more contrasted with some interesting and some really boring. The RPG mechanics totally disappeared and the focus on psychological issues of crew members was a bit too much omnipresent. That and the corridor shooter experience. Boring. So I'm not expecting something from this franchise which has been presented as sci fi but is just space opera and very star wars like without light sabers.

You don't lose anything, I think. ME2 may be the worse gaming investment I made this year. It's kind of a mix between a poor FPS, a RPG with poor mechanics and a level of storytelling equal to the one of NWN OC. I can't even understand how people can love it. With some games I disliked, I may understand why other people love them.

It's kind of Village People dancing on M. Jackson.

I agree. But with some evolutions in focusing on sentimentalism and childish attitudes.

As time goes on, we will see more and more open source engines. At the moment, already some exist for indie devs but the tech is a bit old. Yet, with time, the tech will reach some limit imposed by the human body : perception is limited, so nything that is better than what one can see is just useless. Of course, blockbusters will keep having best sales (which it requires because of the big budget), but there will be a lower tech gap between blockbusters and small devs.

You can't compare both on developent cost. The entertainment industry doesn't follow the same model as the equipment one costwise. Fridges and equipment don't cost 100 times what they cost ten years ago to be developped. Maybe electronics could follow this model partially. The closest comparison with the video game industry seems to be the movie industry. One can see that in a mature market (movie), there are places for low budget films and for blockbusters. I can fully enjoy a movie that has 1/100 the budget of a movie like Avatar and won't go and see Avatar. Thus, I think that in ten years or maybe more or less, the video game industry can reach such balance too. That means having professional that can spread information about high quality products outside of the shinny aspect that is too much considered those days. Video games critics are clearly immature, in majority. People enjoying vidoe games are also clearly immature because it's not been a long time that video game is a mass market. But in ten years, I'm not sure people will keep on only buying the video games with good graphics and high mareting budget. We have to wait for the video game culture to become more developped in the masses.

DD is a better game it looks like in the first few hours. The beginning is a big dungeon and after that, the world is more open. Yet, it's been a long time I've not played it, so it may feel a bit dated gameplaywise, now.

I don't really care. I'm not really interested on anything having to do with the ME universe.

Internet crowd is full of asocial beings that fall in love with people they have never seen and just discussed with through chat. Of course, not every people on Internet, but if you go to a lot of places, you will be amazed. Just go to MMO sites. Millions of people playing WoW that I feel a bit "strange" to stay polite and here, you see at most 20 people lurking frequently. Compare the figures. I can also add that maybe 80% of internet are porn sites, and you would get the whole picture. So, Bioware forum is exactly what I'm exptecting from an internet forum with "normal" people, that is people obsessed by relationships in video games with pixelized npcs. A bit like some japanese obsession for used panties. Thousand comes quickly. Say you have ten different choice branches (like ally with mages or templars) with two choice each branch, that becomes 2^10 endings, i.e. 1024.

Bioboards: a very disturbing corner of the internet. Bioboards: a very representative corner of the internet.

I think that's why I find them dull. I'm not into serious isolationism in stories because I don't understand it. Individually I can understand introversion and a strong lack of desire to be face-to-face social very often, but isolationist is another matter. It's not interesting because it makes for a static/dull culture, and one that's likely doomed in the long run because of it, as you mention. Although I do realize in NV they were trying to lessen that aspect of themselves a bit. You need to play fallout 1 to understand more, I think. In fallout, the world is just about emerging from the war, less than a century before. There are small settlements and some are trying to organize and could be the begining of a new civilization, but only if you have a good imagination because those settlements are nothing but grains. The BoS was created to be sure humanity would not lose the technology and knowledge that existed before the war. They had to be isolated to avoid influencing the new settlements with those technoogies because giving to much firepower to instable groups would just tranform the new world into an even more bloody battleground. Strating from fallout 2 and onward, there are groups that seem to be large enough to give some stability and the BoS could thus change their point of views. It's a bit visible in fallout 2 with the small BoS outpost in major towns : they are here to observe and decide when it will be the good moment. In fallout 3, the BoS attitude is strange because they are destabilizing the already too unstable settlements, but Lyons thinks it's a necessity because of the mutant threat. In Fallout NV, the BoS has already missed he point the BoS could have changed and are just remants of the past surrounded by a state (the NCR). They have no more goals, they are just relics from the past and are dommed to disappear. As you can see, there was ogic in the begining for the isolationism. But this isolationist should have evolved. The BoS was just too rigid to evolve and we could already have predicted it in fallout 1 : they needed to be rigid in the fallout 1 world to survive, but this rigidity would become a burden in the future.

I had the bad idea to take Two Worlds 2 in french. Well, voice acting in french is really awful, never seen a french voice acting so bad : monotonous, cut sentences, questions that sound like affirmations, strange accents,... You can check french reviews of Two Worlds 2 and you will see that the scores are much lower than engish reviews because of this. I think I will now stick to english versions of games, french localizations have become really bad in the last games I've checked. Some even have spellings and grammar worse than a google translation.

I can't agree more. Leveling your character and having such boss fight is frustrating (gameplay aspect) and the story ending is lame, too.

I found Divinity 2 to be far above Two Worlds 2. Not a lot of freedom in quests, it's more a mix between an ARPG and a RPG. There are original puzzles, some fun moments, hidden objects, a somewhat good story and now a balance that allows you to find some challenge all along the first part of the game. The expansion is a bit easier (you may have to increase the difficulty) but its story is a good addition and conclusion of Ego Draconis. What I don't like are the action parts of the game as a dragon destroying flying fortresses. What I like is the lack of quest markers, the way many places may hide a hidden treasure (like dungeons with secret rooms). Graphics are good, voice acting seems ok (but I'm not a native english spoker), musics are very good. It's one of the good games of this year.