Humanoid

I always get Gears of War mixed up with Gods of War. I also mix up Uncharted with Infamous for some reason.

Hmm, only it actually is a good argument. ... no? Please, learn from Volourn how to formulate a counterpoint, then come back. You mean, pick any random two options of bold, italic and underline and apply it to the whole post?

I wouldn't see the page count from the front page, alas.

The most important question seems to have been missed: will there be a Paradox logo on the backer game boxes?

Dammit I get all antsy whenever anyone posts in this thread in the hope it's something new.

Totally stealing Tepid's template. Shattered Steel: 0 MDK 2: 0 Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood: 0 Baldur's Gate: 0.1 Tales of the Sword Coast: 0 Baldur's Gate 2: 1 Throne of Bhaal: 1 Neverwinter Nights: 0.5 Shadows of Undrentide: 0 Hordes of the Underdark: 0 Knights of the Old Republic: 1 The Old Republic: 0.8 (of one class) Jade Empire: 0 Mass Effect: 2 Mass Effect 2: 1.5 Mass Effect 3: 0.2 Mass Effect Galaxy: 0 Dragon Age Origins: 0.5 Dragon Age 2: 0

Maybe this reason has broader appeal: each of my future PCs might cost me $100 less without Windows.

I'd probably have minded the ME2 Cerberus issue a lot more, and used it as an example of bad writing, had I played the series in correct order. But I actually started with ME2 before backtracking, so the ridiculousness of the whole thing became somewhat lost on me. Sure, I still got the feeling of 'this is dumb' in hindsight, but it'd never match up to how it'd feel if I were properly invested in the plot development. As such, my memory of ME2 is probably a fair bit better than it 'deserves'. (And on the non-writing front, it also means the complaints about the radically revamped combat mechanics were lost on me) I attempted ME3 last and loathed it, and it was nothing to do with its ending (which I find now serves as scapegoat of sorts masking the problems with the rest of the game, right to the beginning). Maybe in hindsight I should have started with ME3 and worked my way backwards.

A 25% off title amongst a list of 50-75% titles though, which is a shame. The current GOG sale is a bit of a flop in general. Actually it apparently was possible to get Deponia 3 and other high-value titles like Aarklash, Amnesia, Memoria, etc in the first few hours of the Pot-of-gold sale, but it's apparent now that it's not so much random in that there are a limited quantity of each title available, and the allocation of said titles has been exhausted very quickly indeed. Picking a random title now picks from a very shallow pool of cheap titles, probably the ones the publisher agreed to have unlimited quantities available for $2.

It was originally a mod for EU, the beta version is the EW-compatible (and expanded featurewise) version - the description isn't updated for the beta.

The Long War mod (look under the optional files section) for EW is now in beta and is quite playable. It revamps the game thoroughly - even more thoroughly than Enemy Within did. So if you want more XCOM, it's the perfect solution. Some of the stuff they've changed I'm amazed is even possible within the engine - e.g. eight classes, three choices of ability for each promotion, panic being a fine-grained 100-point scale and with the ability to take back countries who have left (but also new ways to lose countries), giving interceptors experience and promotions, and aliens having research and promotions of their own. The most notable thing strategically is that soldiers get fatigued after missions, forcing you to maintain a larger roster with multiple squads to rotate in and out. And despite all the fancy new toys and abilities you get - heck, you get six soldiers from the very first mission and two item slots always - it's clearly harder than the original balance.

It's one of those fundamental disconnects between how people grow in real life and how people grow in games. There's no reason to believe, in-universe, that if you meet someone really good at what they can do, you too can be that good by just training a bit (cue Rocky training montage). After all, you've grown from barely being able to kill rats to being able to easily slaughter terrifying monsters over the course of a few months, if not weeks, so it's not an unjustified belief on the character perhaps that their trajectory will continue upwards in the same manner. It's not the fact that you've beaten Sarevok, but the knowledge that you've been able to increase your own ability by orders of magnitude quite easily. Sure, the goal is quite far away in absolute terms, but if today I can jump one metre high, then tomorrow I'm able to jump 10m high, then finding in a week I can jump 100m high, then there's every reason to believe with a bit more time I can jump 1000m high. It's ridiculous by any reasonable standard, but such is the setting, and not just in a metagame sense since it's clear the power gain is quite literal in-universe. But yeah, I prefer my power curves to be quite a bit shallower.

Proper mech sims use a HOTAS setup!

Yeah, it's not fantastic how it's set up in BG2, which is why I assign it a somewhat secondary motivation, and it's an artifact of the fantasy setting where power is manifested in a very tangible way. It's much easier to recreate the same scenario in a more contemporary or modern setting and have it be at least somewhat believable. Y'know, Irenicus as Hyman Roth rather than (Bizarro-)Superman. Unfortunately this isn't the blasphemy thread where I can more satisfyingly rail against the notion of supermen.

Don't mind the act of flying myself, but I hate the whole airport business and ticketing schemes. Air travel should be no more complicated than train travel: rock up to the station, buy a ticket to X destination from the booth, then when the next plane arrives, take all your stuff in and relax.

DLC to be released 27th March - free for Deluxe Edition owners - The Falcon and The Unicorn. The release will coincide with the introduction of MacOS support.

I barely remember BG2 having not played it since the original release, but there was sort of a tangential motivation at least in that you were pursuing revenge against that guy who kidnapped and tortured you. Some of DA:O's stories were the opposite in that it forcibly took you away from pursing said vengeance when you got conscripted. (Sure you actually might get revenge later, but that's more happenstance and doesn't actually motivate you to do the things you actually do)

I don't mind the origin stories as self-contained viginettes either, but where I differ is that I feel they sabotage the overall game in that they set the wrong overall mood for the core storyline - colours the whole thing under a veil of oppression. Being coerced into doing something may well be a valid storytelling option, but crushed my motivation to actually accomplish anything, and so I ended up quitting the game about halfway through. It's why I proposed trimming the fat at the start of the game - cutting out content sucks, sure, but I think it's a worthwhile sacrifice in this case as it actively detracts from the rest of the narrative. I've never played IWD, but in IWD2 You arrive in area as a band of mercenaries looking to do mercenary work, and do exactly that. You're not a bunch of peasants conscripted by the local lord, which is essentially what DA:O does. Now both are stories that could exist, and both probably result in the same fighting of waves and waves of goblins, but they are thematically opposite as can be, and colour the entire feel of the game from start to end. If the very beginning of DA:O had established that I am a Grey Warden, and had been for some time, and that Duncan was definitively my commanding officer, then I'd have been much more motivated to follow through on his goals.

This is why I feel the error was in creating the intro sequences for six different games then trying to dovetail them all into one continuity as soon as you're done with the tutorial. Granted I haven't played all six, but some do flow into the main story better than others. Point is, you don't have to get around the bottleneck if you don't create the bottleneck in the first place. It's never been about railroading or not-railroading in CRPGs. It's between good railroading and bad railroading. Good railroading is when the path matches well with what you wanted to do anyway, bad railroading is of the "why the hell did I just agree to do that?" variety. I get that Duncan is basically forcing you to go along on pain of death at the beginning (one of my most hated NPCs of all time, but if handled correctly you could make that into a 'good' character trait). But what irks me is that the game forces some variety of Stockholm syndrome on you, it's like being a slave who upon finding his slavemaster is dead, chooses to remain a slave anyway. The game even teases you about it, you can tell Alistair that Duncan was a bastard who deserved to die, but all you get is some meaningless relationship hit and have to go along with the dead bastard's plans anyway. Now I'm not suggesting my take on the game is universal, but what I am saying is that a large part of being a CRPG writer is in correctly anticipating how players will feel about a scenario and therefore building your railroad tracks in that direction. Say New Vegas for some reason had to be cut down to only have one endgame path for whatever reason - do you force the NCR path or the Legion path? I think the answer is pretty obvious there. Likewise, I have no problem that NV's initial setup is in trying to track down Benny for revenge, because I think it's a reasonable reaction for the majority (though as always, an 'out' is welcome). In Skyrim, I think I would be correct in saying most people loathe the character of Maven Black-Briar, but the only options presented are to either help her, or to not do the (thankfully optional) quest. I feel it would have been much better received had if only one solution was written, that it'd be to work against her. Writing resources permitting, write the reverse choice working for her.

Okay, so if I were to play just one Total War game, should it be Rome, Medieval 2, or Shogun 2*? My default purchase will include the former two regardless, but will stretch to the latter if it's really really superior to the others.

Another one of those gimmick sales, this time it's that you can pick a set of up to five random games for $2 each. Decided to get into the spirit of the thing and rolled the dice. Results: Avernum I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream When Blobs Attack Ittle Dew Aqua Kitty Eh, probably won't play any of those. I'll wait until there's a better sense of what the pool of eligible games are and decide whether to go again later in the week.

That was unusually fast even for Yahtzee.

I repeat myself, but DA:O would have been better as plain old Dragon Age, and the sole content change would be to delete all the origin stories and have you start as someone who's already a Grey Warden. I mean, no one complained about their Shepard being forced to be a space marine or whatever, because it was established as a a simple fact rather than being forced through clumsy railroading.

Nope, the games are all bundled into one key, that is, all the $1 games are one key and all the $6 games are one key and must be redeemed together to the same account.

Probably my chance to try a Total War game (in TBS-only mode) for the first time ever. Shame they're all Steam-only titles. Doubt the $15 Shogun 2 is worth stretching for though, unless someone here feels really strongly about it?