Humanoid

Not a fan of the setting either but would consider a low-key game set in it, without the stuff like wardens, darkspawn and deep roads. DA2's more personal story premise is closer what I'd like to see moreso that DAO but the gameplay, not so.

Try running it in Exult if it feels any better. http://exult.sourceforge.net/ I think Richard Garriott did his own voice-work for Lord British back then - particularly notable in the Serpent Isle intro.

But Broken Sword 4 wasn't meant to be the end of the line as far as I know - doubly so now that Broken Sword 5 is likely to be released this year thanks to the success of the remastered predecessors. Further, BS4 was outsourced for the most part to another developer I think.

It'd be like the little post-credit scene in certain movies that plays when everyone except the janitor has left, only worse.

oops, mispost

$15 isn't so big as to trigger much in the way of buyer's remorse though, unlike buying a full price title.

I didn't really see Kaidan to be whiny enough to fit the stereotype, indeed he was mostly anonymous. Not ideal of course but that just leaves him as a boring character instead of an annoying one which is marginally the lesser crime. Until ME2 of course when he goes all angsty, but I am told that's because there was no script prepared for the character and he just read Ashley's script word for word (haven't verified myself though). I've been trying to resume my second ME2 playthrough but it's a harder slog than I thought as an adept, just feel incredibly ineffective. I hear it's much better in ME3 so it should be worth persisting with, but I can only stand playing one mission per session before feeling burnt out. Hmm. Also noticing the plot stupidity more for obvious reasons.

Seeing that they're going all Hollywood on us, maybe it's a good idea to take the present Hollywood preoccupation with reboots to the series. Gotta be darker and edgier though, so when you land on Eden Prime, Shep takes one for the team and dies. You play Jenkins.

Can't you send them a self-addressed envelope and have them send you the files on floppy disk? Oh, wrong century.

My top wish is the same - that hopefully the WC4 delay is due to trying to get the rights to the Creative-bundle-exclusive DVD edition with non-interlaced video. I'd also take the Prophecy DVD edition if it was offered of course, though a bit tired of the space squid/bug theme at the moment....

Random thing I forgot to mention - kids in the game have the exact same body as adults, only scaled down. It looks freakish.

I can overdo it even more if need be. e.g. "DA3 will probably be a cover-based shooter based on traversing the Deep Roads."

In other words' date=' EA figured the time and money spent on making an expansion is better used churning out the next full installment in record time. [/quote'] Or reading between the lines, time and money is better spent on doubling the price of the expansion, removing the requirement of owning DA2, removing the part of the title after the colon, and appending the number '3' to it.

If they designed ME3 around any intention to be able to continue the universe past the ending, then it'd be an almost unrecognisable gameworld. It's basically designed with the opposite of that intention. And as much as I don't like direct comparisons, there's that other fixed-protagonist recent CRPG which seems to deal with the limiting nature of that format much more elegantly and got unprecedented praise for it's C&C. At any rate, I have no real emotional investment with the ME series since I'm a latecomer who played the games out of order (ME2 mid-2010 and ME1 a couple months later), but I can definitely see how much more I would have been disappointed by the series' direction had I played things the right way around. I imagine I had far less issue than most into being railroaded into working with Cerberus in ME2 than veteran players would have been, because all the information I got would have been "these people resurrected you, how nice of them." Most of the plot inconsistencies and wild character redesigns would have slipped right past me.

Didn't notice that on the final boss of the smuggler line - had to go away and get some new gear to kill it.

Nah, haven't played, but in general for me, "Cinematic gameplay" is a dirty phrase.

It's interesting to me that the furore over the ending is taking attention away from issues that I personally care more about. Case in point - until reading that Gamebanshee review linked here yesterday, I didn't know that the dialogue railroading was so bad such that there are five minute stretches between dialogue choices. That to me personally seems a bigger deal since it affects how I play as opposed to the wrap-up.

Also to ensure they're not longer than FO3's main quest, can't have that.

What it feels like to me is that it's a branched development from the end of WoW's first expansion - i.e. the shared functionality between the two is almost a perfect match between the two. Since then there have been the crappy legacy design things that WoW has dropped but TOR has maintained, while obviously adding its own features to that almost-common base. Now since I'm a relentlessly negative person, I'll itemise some quibbles: - A *lot* of group quests compared to WoW - I understand the intent of trying to get people to play together while levelling up but history shows this hasn't worked in the long run. Past the first month or so there's not enough population density to be able to find players with the same goal. I've also encountered "elite" enemies on supposedly solo missions which are a brick wall. - The skill tree (WoW's talents) is very boring - most of the selections are uninspired simple "+x% to skill Y damage" things. Notably WoW is dropping the concept altogether shortly, no more trees. - Peculiarly, enemies seem to spawn in stationary groups of three or four exclusively. There are no single-pulls, patrols or anything like that which makes the world feel much more static. - Somewhat an unfair criticism, but I flat out don't like the Star Wars universe. Lightsabres, pewpew sounding blasters, the range of pointless alien species - none interest me and some particularly irritate me. The lightsabre sound is one of my pet hates. - Alien voice acting forcing me to read the subtitles. Problem is even more exaggerated by the awkward pauses when the aliens end up very stop-start in their speech because they're waiting a pre-determined amount of time that the subtitles are meant to be up for (you can skip of course but it just doesn't flow and I like to sit back). What I like: - The "Loot All" function. A godsend. - Surprisingly I like the voice acting of my character, I feared this when I first heard they would be fully voiced. (For the record most character voicework in WoW is a cringe-inducing atrocity) - A thing that I not so much like, but believe is good design, is the companion system allowing players to experience support roles while levelling up - as opposed to essentially having to learn abilities you've totally ignored while levelling but find out later are crucial at max level. - Inventory space concerns are somewhat lesser than WoW - mainly being able to autosell junk items and that quest items are stored separately. - Characters have reasonable body proportions, mostly - though the really fat ones look unnatural.

Decided to take up the trial too. From the experience of a WoW vet it's essentially the same mechanics aside from companions but that's been mentioned over and over anyway. The pleasant surprise is that I actually do get a few RP options even if the consequences are largely trivial. Yes yes, Dark/Light side binary options, plenty have been said about them too, but it just goes to remind me that no matter how much I take shots at Bioware writing, it's still an ocean ahead of Blizzard - WoW's choices being more linear than Super Mario Bros (warp tunnels!). I don't think I'll continue with it though, but largely I'll say it's not due to the game's faults, but due to general burnout with MMOs. I remember with WoW it took about six months from first playing to being ready for the end-game - a matter of levelling, gearing, and back then, building a good reputation on the server as a competent player (rogue type characters being common as muck). Then in the expansion a constant struggle to assemble and keep together a team of about 30 people playing across all timezones. It's not something I think I ever want to repeat, so I think I'm done.

Alchemy - please god let it be alchemy and potion drinking.

I was thinking of how the re-done Director's Cut of Broken Sword 1 (with new content added and new UI grafted on) revived Revolution and how they now have a proper sequel, and also a brand new IP, in development as a direct result. But where the comparison doesn't fit is that this is only initially being done on the same platform as the original - and that it's not the original developer backing it. ...and I've lost my train of thought. But at any rate, I've never played BG1 past Candlekeep so will follow developments.

Being able to accomplish everything there is to do in a game - no collisions, no conflicts - isn't the hallmark of roleplaying no matter what Bethesda sandboxes try to drill into their playerbase. I would have no problem with Shep for example not being able to do certain quests if he or she didn't have any biotic ability for example. Or in other games, say for instance that Ulfric would never fully trust you if you weren't a Nord. I liked very much how in The Witcher 2, if you went with Vernon you'd miss a big character reveal and any chance of "saving" them. In that sense I think it may have been interesting in ME2 if there actually wasn't enough time to do all the loyalty missions (or perhaps not even enough time to do all the recruitment missions) - you'd end up having to choose the members for which doing their content made the most sense, and suffer the consequences in the suicide mission. Doing so would require more development on the main plot in all likelihood but still.

Yeah, there's really no reason whatsoever to have to justify a character mechanic reset with an in-story explanation - particularly when that very same explanation only just makes the issue worse - why do all the former companions also lose all they've learned while not being subjected to the same trauma? The problem only arises if the game mechanics are always interpreted such that a level 1 character is a weak kitten who can barely take out a bunny rabbit unassisted - but why does a character system need to do such a thing? You can set up a baseline anywhere - level one could just as easily mean "tough alliance trooper" as much as "motor-skill challenged weakling," or indeed "demigod of destruction." It's not like random civilian NPCs and the like need to be set up with the same character system, especially since they are not interactable in combat in any way shape or form. Sure a D&D type world might set up every NPC in it with the same unified character system, but that's hardly applicable here.

One random thing that bothers me is how some things have been left undefined not because of wanting to preserve a sense of mystery but because they couldn't be bothered expending the effort. Prime culprit here of course is the Turian female model for example. We're told in-game that there's no real separation in gender roles for Turians - they're about as prevalent as males, serve in their armed forces, etc - but we never see a single one in five years of the series. For Krogan and Salarian (which were finally shown, ironically) they had some sort of semi-plausible reasoning, but not in this case. The concept somewhat ties into the reaction to the ME3 because even with "It's a mystary" type endings, it usually shows in the writing whether the author has it all together in the background and just doesn't reveal it to you, or whether there really is no logical sense behind it all and the obfuscation is really just playing a Get out of Jail Free card. I remember Garriott talking about how for consistency it was better to define things only when the need arised - in the context of what The Guardian is in this instance I think - to avoid writing yourself into a corner. For the most part ME1 reasonably abides by this, but it began to feel cheap when the sequels continued dodging the issues even after they were presented to the player character.