Humanoid

Total Supreme Space Dungeon Siege Commander

I don't follow whether these War Assets affect gameplay or narrative throughout the game at all or if they're basically just the variable in a giant switch statement at the end of the game that determines which ending movie to play. i.e. Does coming into various key plot points "unprepared" actually have an adverse effect on the next segment of the game? It seems precious little incentive to me if the whole much-talked-about mechanic was simply a substitute for a quick youtube search.

Heh, I did word that a bit ambiguously - but I meant mod and scope outside the context of gameplay - and Gorgon's answer is pretty much what I expected the answer to be. At any rate, the vibe I get from the discussions here and elsewhere is that if I consider ME1 and 2 as brief, entertaining romps with guns and a bit extra (which I do) then ME3 can hardly be seen to be delivering any less, and usually delivers more. If I try to view the predecessors as the dawn of some new epic paradigm in world design (which I don't) then ME3 may feel like a cheap cop-out.

Get an SSD, sure, it's the biggest single upgrade one can do to their machine. SSD durability is also not affected by reads, just the writes, and when it "dies" due to wear it is still accessible in read mode. In typical desktop usage scenarios this time to "death" is well over a decade. BUT! Yes there are catches. You are on WinXP which is double-handicapping you with its addressable memory limitation (unless you're using the buggy WinXP-64) so you're probably stuck with ~3GB usable RAM, and in terms of upgrading. WinXP is not SSD-aware - a surmountable issue, but a chore when the OS can't do automatic housekeeping on the disk. Further, and perhaps more fundamental, is why you feel the need to have your disks scanned with that kind of regularity. There's a certain point past which security software becomes indistinguishable from malware due to its impact on the user experience - it's easy to become so paranoid about security that it ends up hampering your system's usability more than any virus could ever hope to. You might also want to consider a hardware firewall perhaps, so you can ditch the somewhat cumbersome BitDefender. Unfortunately it's going to turn out to be a bit of a shopping list following all the above advice but I maintain the trade is completely worth the cost in terms of the control and pure usability that you gain. No one with a decent library of games really buys an SSD to house *all* of them, just a number of select ones. It's also trivial to create symbolic links to transparently move an existing installation to the SSD. This is particularly useful for Steam (it baffles me how after all this time it's still incapable of putting your games anywhere but in the Steam directory) where typically you wouldn't want or be able to fit the entire library on fast storage.

I wouldn't imagine it too hard to make a provisional Game of the Decade when the decade is a mere 14-and-a-bit months old. I haven't made the plunge yet since I've had some non-gaming distractions keeping me busy but no doubt it'll return soon. Most likely it'll come down to whether I can wait a month or so for the Witcher 2 EE with sundry other things and tackle this later. Normally this would be "waiting for the rough edges to be polished out" time, but as it sounds relatively glitch-free already (aside from some logic errors along the lines of supposedly dead people reappearing in later cutscenes) it's more a question of how much DLC bastardry they'll be planning between now and then. I'm not a huge bigger-picture-world-oriented gamer but I do need it to provide a coherent reason to pursue the main questline - hence while endings are relatively irrelevant, there needs to be reasonable in-character motivation (the reason I found DA:O unfinishable). Anyway, before I get lost in a sea of rambling on - is there any scope at all for modding in this instalment or is it all pretty much locked down like its predecessors?

I never could tell the why and when it happened but sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. I remember hired thugs following me in and out of a store for example, but also bandits who won't leave their fort. If I were to play the game again, I would recommend following either the recommendation to not do the quest to kill the first plot dragon until a bit later, or alternatively to follow the main quest immediately until the point you get the ability to fight them on even ground. Other stuff you might want to consider (besides the almost-universal SkyUI and Categorised Favorites) - the stuff I've come across sometimes too late, are: - Quality World Map mod that can show all roads on the map screen. - Either the Essential Horses or Cowardly Horses (depending on how much you thing the former is cheating) to counteract the tendency of horses to try to trample a dragon whenever they appear. - Fast Travel from indoors (Radiant) - the full version is obviously too exploitable, but the version that allows it from certain obvious places (chiefly the Thieves' Guild hideout) saves a lot of frustration and loading time. - One of the pickpocket mods that raises the maximum success cap - because a hard cap of 90% feels stupidly low.

Well Australia's version of dirt-cheap is the UK's full price - so as someone who imports the vast majority of their games, it's hardly ever about the price for me - after all half price junk is still junk - but about, ahem, non-sponsored feedback on it. Even then I still screw up badly, DXHR is still sitting on my shelf, never installed, four or five months after buying it.

I know it'll be plenty playable enough, but I'm not the type to generally buy new releases - probably the only one in the last couple of years being The Witcher 2. Going back I only bought Skyrim early February which is comparatively early for me, and New Vegas and Civ V were on similar timelines. Fallout 3 was over a year after release (and a total waste of money even at that). Indeed Mass Effect 2 I bought almost 6 months after release, in July '10 (going by dates in Windows uninstall list), and also 6 months for Alpha Protocol.

After quitting Skyrim, I spent about four hours today looking through my games - on my shelves, in boxes in the garage, on my hard drive, in my GoG and Steam accounts - and I couldn't find anything I felt like playing. I installed Lionheart (never played it before) and played for 10 minutes, installed Might and Magic 7 and didn't get past character creation, and downloaded Arcanum but lost the mood before even installing it. Ended up spending an hour just watching a Let's Play of Return to Zork (which I only remember as being too scary for me as a kid in the day). Guess I'd be extra-vulnerable to an ME3 sales pitch at the moment having been rained in for an idle weekend with nothing to play.

Or maybe fool around with it if/when Mr Morris at IT-HE publishes an anti-walkthrough. The reality though is that I almost never come back to unfinished games, which is why I probably haven't finished over half my library.

I put Skyrim down about a week ago and tried to get back to it today, obstensibly refreshed. Once Dwemer dungeon later and I was out again - there's a point where all the dungeon delving provided goes beyond the notion of providing content and into the realm of "gross misallocation of resources." I can appreciate that they're not all identikit clones of each other and they're to an extent hand-designed but there's a point where it all blends into the same repetitive haze. 5 dungeons in and you think there's some clever variations in them. 10 dungeons in and you start to see the themes recurring. 15 dungeons in and you feel you've seen all they have to show you. 20 dungeons in and you start asking yourself why you're still here. Wikipedia tells me there are 150 of them. Did no one in the development team stop to consider for a moment "Guys, is the answer to what the game is lacking another three-part dungeon?" "Is there nothing else Ted could be working on that would add some more variety in the game?" It's not meaningful content if all it makes you do is wish there was a "teleport to final set piece battle" for each of them. The rare quests like the above mentioned murder mystery investigation may have been implemented somewhat clumsily but were huge releases from the tedium, but unfortunately too few and far between. Anyway, in the end I got almost triple digit hours out of it so I can't say it's a bad purchase, but it's one I won't regret abandoning unfinished. I wish I could rewind my mind and replay from the start given some self-imposed rules (including selective cheating) I posted earlier and stop me ruining it for myself, but alas.

Like Orson Welles' famous monologue about the Swiss, mustn't let pesky detail in the way of a cheap shot.

iOS port would make more sense for Dragon Age 2. DA2 is built around the one Awesome button and how many buttons does the Iphone face have? Sorry, couldn't resist

They cancelled UO2 because it would have cannibalised the then aging UO's subscriber base, so it'd be a surprise if they pitted a competing sci-fi MMO against their recently-launched flagship. And as popular as ME is I wouldn't think it'd be able to achieve critical mass in terms of audience faster than Star Wars. ....unless they've given up on TOR already of course. (Personally I'd say if they want another MMO, resurrect Privateer Online )

I recall the story that's been floating around some years that nVidia made enemies of both Sony and Microsoft over the contracts for the respective consoles - something like them being stuck with the original contract from the time the consoles were originally designed and being unwilling to renegotiate or something. Can't just change vendors mid-cycle of course but naturally, but it's not surprising that because of the lingering emnity that they'd switch camps to AMD (which have been supplying Nintendo since the Gamecube I believe). So in all likelihood, all three next-gen consoles will be AMD powered. A marketing coup no doubt (not sure if they can get their logo on the actual consoles though) - but apparently in terms of profit it isn't that big a deal which is why I imagine nVidia weren't too concerned about burning bridges and preferred milking the current contract. Actually I think the real advantage maybe AMD getting a leg up in terms of ported game performance if the architecture of the mooted console graphics are anything similar to their desktop chips, given that developers will presumably optimise for those platforms first and foremost. As for the Blizzard staff cuts, reducing customer support staff (a lot of them in-game "Game Masters" I think?) might make sense in the context that they've lost ~15% of WoW customer base over the last year. Think it was something like 10m down from 12m. I suppose then the actual development staff cuts would be the more interesting news - chopping about 60 developers sounds like a bigger deal than the headline 600 general staff number.

I always thought that Las Vegas sign was a chainsaw over his shoulder, oops.

If available at the right time I'd probably start a game from scratch using it - I've tried the ME1-ME2 export procedure and it made the character facial structure a bit wonky so there's no real reason to export assuming the editor is reasonably comprehensive.

Tempted to do the same except for cycling instead of football. In the latter it tends to be a choice, but for the former it's usually the only language (well, Flemish that is) used for most "minor" races. To date being the cultural barbarian that I am, I haven't picked up any other languages though. If so inclined I'd probably pick up German reasonably easily given that my parents speak it, but I don't see any immediate utility in it. Same goes for Spanish which my sister speaks.

I remember ruining Alpha Centauri for myself when I found about the commonly abused strategy of Supply Crawler spam. Makes Civ4 Stack of Doom (ab)uses seem reasonable. But yeah, I continue to treat SMAC as the true Civ3 because the official game of that name was so underwhelming. (Call to Power was a complete waste of money, the only amusement I got out of that one was the one awesome African music track and the comedy value of the "Australian civilization" headed, hilariously I might add, by Carmen Lawrence)

Marriage in Skyrim is just a business arrangement, the word romance doesn't appear anywhere in the script. Though to be fair I think the priest pretty much says as such - something like "Skyrim is a harsh land so people just get married willy nilly" (I paraphrase slightly) - so they've conveniently covered their posteriors. Good read on that Thieves' Guild thing anyway, I like complaining and I like reading complaints so I find that entertaining. Anyway the point is not that the questline is heavily railroaded, but that the destination of the train is so bizarrely improbable. I hadn't done the Dark Brotherhood when I stopped so not sure about any comparisons to it.

I played ME2 then ME1 so I'd be in a bit of a pickle if I chose to buy ME3 - ME2 was finished with a boring old default Shep who wasn't really RPed (no idea what key choices I even made), whereas my ME1 character was at least reasonably developed. I really don't feel like replaying (either game) so as I imagine there probably won't be an ME1->ME3 export procedure 'll probably end up just creating a new Shep. Eh.

The more pertinent question is whether it'd be reasonable to mod in options for those sort of quests or is that outside the scope of the creation kit?

Heard that the PS3 was the most problematic platform in terms of freezing but nothing specific. On PC I get the occasional slowdown, feel like it occurs when zoning to an outdoor area, after I've been playing a while - minor memory leak maybe. Only had a couple of CTDs so far in about 50 hours play with no readily identifiable cause but I'm a compulsive quicksaver ("Did the game detect that last buttonpress? Better hit F5 again to be sure"). I also have an issue where the eye graphics of my character get screwed up after a while, not sure if that's a vanilla bug or a mod (the blocky faces one?), or maybe even just running out of VRAM (1GB card starting to show its age at 25x14 resolution) Tangential whine: Anyway, I'm on an indefinite break from the game now though not halfway through the main quest yet (I'm aware I could knock it off in a few hours more). I probably haven't played any of the previous TES games as long as this one so it may be a familiar complaint, but it's a game that one can easily and unintentionally ruin for oneself simply by playing a certain way. If I had the patience to restart, I would and cheat a moderate sum of gold at the start of the game, then loot nothing except quest items and direct gear upgrades; would not touch any of the crafting skills; would not take any companions, and would not do any randomly generated quests. With those restrictions I probably wouldn't have dug myself into the hole of tedium which it turned into for me.

Stamina is just magicka for non-magic abilities (except that the basic attack doesn't take up any). It does make it trickier as a battlemage type character since you have to spread your level-up bonuses across three stats rather than two, but gear and potions can compensate - generally speaking gear can reduce mana costs of one school of magic, while potions can increase the total pool. Bear in mind that with the starting 100 magicka some spells you won't be able to cast at all since they cost more than your maximum. I also think that stealth archers are the strongest build in the game almost to the point of being broken. I abandoned my first character because it got somewhat boring - you end up sniping from a distance, move away a little while the remaining targets run around for a minute, then they reset and you repeat with them having zero chance of finding you. And yeah, you have to find a little alchemy table to mix potions, and an enchanting table to enchant gear. They're as common as muck though, any decent settlement has at least the alchemy table, and they also tend to be midway through in most of the the non-trivial dungeons. ________________ As for the level scaling, my understanding is different. Most generic creatures don't scale, they're replaced instead. I believe a Frost Troll is a Frost Troll. A zombie is a zombie. The only difference is that once you're higher level, you randomly get spawns of "strong zombie," then "stronger zombie," and so forth. It's a literal change - i.e. "strong zombie" would be the actual tooltip in the game. The lower level ones still spawn for variety even when you're at the level cap, even though you could kill one with the equivalent of a rusty letter opener by that point. Now there's also a floor and a ceiling for each creature type so eventually you do genuinely outlevel all possible versions of a creature - for example there's a point at which you activate "strongest bandit" (which isn't all that high really) and past that point you will outlevel anything that can possibly spawn in a bandit's den, making them trivial. The reverse is true for the floor - there is no lower level version of Frost Troll therefore if you encounter any early on, they will smack you around pretty hard. There is a regular Troll which is easier but they don't share a spawn point - the locations they're respectively eligible to spawn are mutually exclusive. The things that scale 1:1 Oblivion style (or 5:5 or somesuch) are restricted to named boss creatures generally and therefore mostly encountered on the main quest.

I loathed Oblivion (only played maybe 3-5 hours total) whereas I've played this about ten times that amount so it's an improvement - but yeah, going too far off the beaten path in terms of character development will mess you up. If you engage in combat normally (unlike me, who barely needs to swing and never generally takes damage) it generally isn't a huge issue. I believe how it works is that unlike Oblivion you don't get a 1:1 levelling of each enemy type. Instead it's a stepped system where once you hit a certain level, a diifferent creature becomes available to be spawned. So in a bandit's den if you head in at level 1, all you get are "Bandits" which are by definition level 1. If you head in at level 5 you probably still only get the same. Once you hit level 10 (as an example), the random generator starts producing "Bandit Thugs" (in a mix, some low level ones continue to be generated) which are much tougher. At a meta-level, the worst possible outcome would be for a character to, fresh out of the Temple of Trials, go to the first town and engage in some kleptomania - at which point you end up a level 10-20 character with level 1 ability to fight and survive fighting level ~20 enemies. The only way out of that hole will probably be to buy skill training funded by said crime spree - but you'd have to finagle a bit to gain access to fences at that early stage of the game. Further there are some anomalies due to certain monster types having a minimum and maximum level. Notably the minimum level dragon is, I believe, lower than the minimum level bear - resulting in the former being easier to dispatch until you reach a certain level. It also creates the infamous scenario in which (because creatures in the game can attack each other) a bear easily crushes a dragon in single combat.