Humanoid

I always ran out of momentum after reaching Vegas too, but that was true of my very first run as well. I'm a sucker for a simple revenge story. Up to that point it was a personal quest, the game thereafter was doing a job. Yes yes, I'm a heathen who wouldn't mind a little more linearity and gets a little overwhelmed with too many options. Not that it wasn't still my game of the year though...

If I had to pick one thing FO3 did better than Skyrim, it's that my character was marginally less of a doormat for NPC questgivers. Yeah, a lot of the alternate options (like, y'know, blowing up the starter town) were idiotically written, but Skyrim had their one and only option frequently turn out just as idiotic, so eh. That said, I only managed to log single digit hours into FO3 before giving up, while Skyrim nearly clocked up triple figures.

Spent about half an hour arranging, rearranging, then re-rearranging my virtual shelf on GoG - mostly by genre but all grouped up so that series would all be on one row and so forth. Count stands at 125 games, including the free ones. I estimate the ones I've ever downloaded at about 20.... Pickups this weekend are Deus Ex, Anachronox and the Thief games, none of which I needed to buy, and none of which I plan to play in the foreseeable future.

I thought one of the chief complaints the stereotypical Bio-fan supposedly had was that *no-one* in the game was bisexual. Then I heard that they would supposedly be patching in the same-sex relationships later, but no idea what became of that.

I never got past the first round.

Could argue you're better off this way.

I remember the feature too - it was irritating. Not saying it inherently is, but fleeing isn't the same as running around like a decapitated chicken. I also vaguely remember Fallout having fleeing enemies making a break for the edge of the map, then staying there (recollection may be faulty). Now I don't mind foes running away out of reach for good - which is only reasonable unless you drop everything and give chase immediately - but I expect a lot of completionist types might get irritated at the lost loot and whatnot (fortunately it seems XP won't be an issue). Alternatively, combat can end up breaking down into trying to position your group into a ring to try to keep foes from fleeing as you whittle them down one by one. It's one of those things that's superficially simple but implemented incorrectly can be a big drag on enjoyment.

The 'harm' as it were would be in the resources for balancing and testing the feature. In principle, I'm fine with the idea though it's one I find pointless, but only as far as an undocumented feature in terms of support: you know, the usual disclaimer of "provided as-is with no warranty."

Due to the new assets required, I imagine that minute for minute, TOR's new content is orders of magnitude more expensive than equivalent content from previous MMOs. I remember reading something along the lines of an expansion features summary, listing *one* new planet. Of course, that figure of one is then multiplied by the number of classes, and the light and dark side of each: that's up to 16 times (I know most of the time it'll be shared and be more like two to eight times as much) as much effort in some areas than single-track competitors...

Take the reverse of this thinking and think big! Engineer the Eternity engine to be the Infinity engine, or indeed the SCUMM engine, of the 10s and TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Ensure it's easily extensible and adapted to a variety of scenarios and then you could have comparatively tiny teams consisting of writers and scripters producing high-quality content in parallel. Steampunk, sure. Sci-fi, of course. If rights permit, maybe even licence it out to third parties.

It's no bad thing to occasionally stroke the player's ego, but subtlety is important here. Presuming Twitter and phone cameras haven't been invented yet in the game setting, news travels both slowly and inaccurately, and is interpreted differently in different places. Catching a whiff of a conversation in a bar is a long way from fanfare on the streets and it should definitely be kept towards the more discreet side of the scale. Done incorrectly, this kind of thing can end up instead making the world feel like a very very small place where everything revolves around you.

As long as they omit the mundane elements: both products and components, I won't complain overmuch. Found a shard of a legendary weapon that you want to turn into a sword? Great, but don't make me have to collect leather to make the grip. Broadly speaking it'd be a matter of handwaving all the stuff a stereotypical town smith would have, you just provide the one, or few, special parts to get it made. Nothing groundbreaking, it's really just BG2's system really, e.g. assembling that elemental flail. The key here is that there's no balancing of "dropped" loot vs crafted gear: they are one and the same.

That's for a very rigid and literal interpretation of a 'quest' - there's sort of a disconnect going on here between that reading and a broader one of "the accomplishing of objectives".

What did you consume in the preceding ~750 years though?

If protection isn't a concern then naturally they'd wear the most comfortable garb around: T-shirt and trackie pants. Smart casual if invited to a party.

Not to dispute the point, but it's an annual poll they do where previous winners are automatically excluded, so most of the usual suspects were ineligible for this year's edition. Okay interesting I didn't realize that. But for the record who were the previous winners (or losers in this case ) Not something I've followed (since I'm not American) but apparently from 2006-2011 respectively: Halliburton, the RIAA, Countrywide Financial, AIG, Comcast and BP.

The thing about DXHR's dialogue battles was not related to either its fun factor or balance, but the notion of roleplaying. It's at home in the DX (or AP) setting, but in a genuine roleplaying game, it shifts the gameplay from choosing the option which best fits your character and instead makes it a case of choosing the *right* option. I certainly hope that in a game like Eternity, that I can choose the interesting option instead of some defined "correct" one, aside from a few exceptions like riddles and whatnot. There should be no *right* answer. Lockpicking on the other hand is about doing it right or doing it wrong, so I can understand where Josh is coming from in that regard. Not that I support making it a minigame; the hacking in DXHR is a large part of why I quit it about 2/3rds through.

Not to dispute the point, but it's an annual poll they do where previous winners are automatically excluded, so most of the usual suspects were ineligible for this year's edition.

I miss having HKD around to 'shop some box covers up. Rubber Soul with the Obsidian Fab Four?

The comedy poll option should have been "I'd sooner pick my own eyes out". Don't think it would fit even in Thief, which isn't meant to be Locksmith Simulator 2012. On the other hand, I've always kind of wanted to be able to pick locks in real life..... hmm.

I would extend it beyond that personally, as scouring the map methodically looking for every possible XP-bag/goblin in the game is at the least no more desirable than running around hoping for random encounter experience (a'la Final Fantasy), and probably much worse. Casting my mind way back to the very start of Fallout 1: killing every single rat in the cave you start out in: not compelling gameplay in any sense of the word - I'd very much call that grinding. I would certainly hope that in a typical playthrough of a game, the player encounter only a minority of the actual possible individual foes in the game - not in terms of variety, but in terms of quantity.

Heard November, but that was a while ago. My take on what SWTOR did well was to provide a sense of character ownership in a way WoW never did for me. Sure it was an illusion, but it was the first MMO, perhaps since UO, in which I felt I was playing *my* character and not the writers'.

Feels like a lot of the issue some may have with the non-scaling, limited XP reward system is down to equating a progressive system to a linear one. It's natural to advance the plot in *a* sequential order, which is not the same as saying that it's necessary to progress everyone down the one same singular sequential order. I would also argue that it would add some sort of dynamicism to sidequests (which as I've argued prior, should provide minimal XP gain) to have both dependencies and resolutions tied to your progress in the main plot, instead of being a completely self-contained "guy who stands there from the start of the game right to the end waiting for you to happen to pass by". This is a benefit both on the narrative side, avoiding the sense of sidequests being unrelated busywork, and on the mechanical side, of being able to at least approximate the PC's expected ability levels at a given point in the game. Now even if one disagrees that the above path is not a desirable one to take, it remains that increasing the granularity of XP awards, be it in kill or skill XP, does not affect the problem of anticipating player level in any meaningful way in terms of actually designing the game. What it does do it just add a method for the player to attempt a workaround by the act of grinding. I would say that if that situation had occured in a 'natural' playthrough, then some proper refactoring of the progression curve would be the solution, not that "grind some more" band-aid.

I'm also not sure why people think that if a game isn't linear, it's totally going to be Elder Scrolls or GTA-type open go-anywhere-you-like-with-no-possible-negative-outcome as soon as the 'tutorial' section is done.

There might be a decent niche for someone to develop a utility to manage multiple Steam accounts automatically. A good use for this would be to have every game exist on a separate account to enable resale of games you're done with.