Humanoid

I couldn't have a custom avatar on the BIS forums, but this is the first one I used on the Interplay forums back in 2003, which has been carried forward since then with a minor modification to add the Alpha Protocol text. I'm not sure I even have the version of this avatar without the text anymore. And using the GIMP as a gif editor is way too much work anyway. I don't even know what the whole everyone-has-Alpha-Protocol-in-their-avatar thing comes from. I saw all the cool kids using it so I did the same.

Well if you play Privateer or Pirates in peaceful trading mode, sure I can see a comparison. Just instead of shooting things, you navigate traffic jams and the occasional idiot sedan that merges in front of you instead. The devs are currently working on American Truck Simulator. Maybe that'll have guns since it's America and all that.

I thought FO3's worldbuilding was at its most disjointed when they forced you to travel via subway tunnels to a lot of places. It makes the world feel like a bunch of disconnected rooms that don't even exist in the same physical space. It was a crap approach when Ultima 8 did it, and it's worse still to do it 15 years later.

The only IE game with a sensible ruleset, so it has that going for it. (I first came into contact with this community because and during the development of IWD2, so it does have a little sentimental spot in my heart)

It's probably one competent but low-ranking guy that gets assigned to "hey, go fill up this location with some random clutter" and does the best he can with it, but no one ever recognises his work. Random aside: Something I read recently reminded me of the Operation Anchorage DLC for Fallout 3. I watched an LP of it once and it's the all time low of videogame writing. It's as far behind the rest of Fallout 3 as the rest of Fallout 3 is behind New Vegas.

Still completely unable to get into Fallout 4, so I've taken a diversion and picked up Darkest Dungeon. Prior to that I tried a little Long Live the Queen, but that was a short-lived disappointment. I've only done a few easy missions so far, but it's far more engaging than FO4, and very much has that "one more mission" feel to it. Downsides are probably that the short missions feel about the right length for me, and so the longer ones might end as boring slogs, but I'll find out for sure when I actually tackle some of them. The balance of dungeon-delving to town management feels about right with the short dungeons at the moment anyway. It may also be a game that's prone to grinding because of the easy availability of just spamming low level dungeons, and because its enforced ironman saves means playing in an extremely risk-averse way. Another issue is that your characters, despite the good variety of classes and the individual traits and quirks they pick up, end up feeling kind of samey after a while because there's really only one set of sprites for each class, each character of that class just being a simple palette swap. They feel quite a bit less individual than XCOM, which is probably the closest game I have to compare this to. I like the town management here better than XCOM's base building, so far. tl;dr: Darkest Dungeon > Fallout 4 > Long Live the Queen.

I just started a new game and was able to make beds immediately after leaving the vault first time. Granted it was only because I bummed around the starting town for too long that it became night, so I deleted my old bombed-out bedframe and placed a new bed in my old room so I could advance the time.

No no, you have to romance the final boss in a modern vampire game.

Very much a tangent, but being able to walk away from any dialogue any time you liked should be baseline for any game. Of course, scripting the NPCs to properly react to it is difficult, but even if it just resets the conversation it's better than being trapped in one you never wanted to be in. To illustrate with an example, during character creation, you talk to an annoying salesman at the door who just won't shut up. The game lets you just walk away and shut the door in his face. Of course, this is actually part of the character creation so you have to talk to him eventually, but in the hands of a good writer, this mechanic can be accounted for in a better way for some potentially wonderful emergent gameplay. It's like Mass Effect interrupts except you potentially can do anything you like instead of just pre-scripted paragon/renegade actions.

Yes, that dialogue text is verbatim (it's a mod).

It runs for a year, so sometime in July next year.

But do you get paid for this "research"?

Yeah, I ragequit during the second (I think) dream sequence and never touched the game again.

Better than Fallout 3, easily. That's a bit of damning with faint praise though because I quit FO3 after about 10 hours and never touched it again. I'm a similar amount of time into Fallout 4 and I'm still giving it every chance to come good, even though I have to kind of force myself to fire it up over doing other things. Even while playing I'll get distracted and just tab out do other things for a while, it's not a game I'll ever find myself staying up late nights to play.

Sounds like how I felt about XCOM, hated it whenever I had to do any UFO mission larger than a medium (or alien bases, etc). Alien architecture is both boring and terrible to play. I wish the game was just the urban abduction maps forever.

There are certain limits for sure. But doesn't it ultimately depend on core combat design (pace, action options and fine grained they are, HP system, encounter design, what ever goes with the territory) whether those limitations as per lacking a party to control are really all that relevant? I don't see it as a problem, it just calls for a tad different take than a party based design. I thought Fallout (and moreso Fallout 2) was interesting enough for me to like its systems. Certainly with location targeting, and the different punches and kicks you could do as unarmed (as poorly documented as they were). I do admit I likely prefer simpler combat systems to most people though, since to me it's not at all the part of the typical RPG that I enjoy.

I just want a developer to understand that "turn-based isometric" is not synonymous with "party-based".

I think FO3's interpretation of the BoS as lawful good paladins is even less true to the source, so in a way, the way FO4 has them is an improvement. I haven't really listened to the ingame radio yet so I kind of did the quest to help the DJ with no prior context. The game is like "I'm sure you know him", and I had no idea he was actually someone you could meet. You couldn't meet Mr New Vegas after all.

So after the Deathclaw incident, I went ahead and made a beeline for Diamond City in a bid to avoid the general opinion that the early part of the game kinda sucks, and ...I dunno really, it's still a game I kind of have to convince myself to sit down and play a bit, rather than one I can say I'm genuinely enjoying. I mean, I've only just finished wandering the city, talking to everyone, doing minor quests, and it's okay, but it's not holding my attention and I'm tabbing out to take breaks frequently (like I am right now). Guess the big test is coming up where I step outside town, not as a lost, desperate vault-dweller but as someone with a firm purpose with the whole gameworld open proper - let's see how that goes. An anecdote about the best and worst moment so far: there's confrontation at a bar, and I'm the supposed mediator, but as I walk in, the game engine is happy to let me walk and sit down on the couch while the confrontation occurs. It's a trivial thing, but it feels cool for you to sit there lounging comfortably and occasionally chiming in in a relaxed way as the camera cuts to me while two other people have a tense stand-up conversation a good distance away. It's wonderfully organic in a way a Bethesda game has never been before. It plays out almost like a cutscene. Then the conversation suddenly breaks off for some reason. They're still in talk range so I restart it. It breaks again at the same point, and this time I know the NPCs haven't moved out of range or anything. So I have to get up, walk up to the characters involved, and restart the conversation yet again to finally complete it. Goddammit Bethesda. Still, to be positive for once, the strides they've made in dialogue have been pretty impressive, in that I haven't found one where I absolutely hated the manner and delivery of the NPCs - a very common thing in their games past. If an NPC is a jerk it's okay because I can respond in kind, and that makes a big difference.

I think the theory is that the new consoles with their new memory architecture means games designed for them really love bandwidth. Even in that context though, this test was a real eye-opener to the extent I'd have guessed there's something wrong with the test: via Techspot

Yeah, it's a new thing, K-series CPUs come in smaller boxes maybe about the thickness of a paperback novel. Cain, for gaming at the moment and for newer Intel CPUs in general RAM speed matters much more than it used to, which is why the recommendation is to get 16GB of faster RAM such as that DDR4-3000. The default speed of DDR4 is DDR4-2100 and that's a big performance hit for certain games. I know Fallout 4 in particular is a big outlier, it benefits massively from higher RAM frequency. Faster RAM > more RAM.

Try something like this: Notes: - No OS so if you need to buy Windows within that budget, need to trim a bit. - One obvious candidate would be dropping to a non-K CPU, which also drops the need for the third-party cooler (as K models don't come with one). - 550W is plenty for any system with one graphics card. Assume ~100W for the CPU and ~200W for the video card, plenty of headroom. - There are probably some bundle deals that can cut down the price even more, but I disregarded them - but there's a Newegg bundle for that RAM plus a 6600 non-K for example.

Not the best first impression the game could have given me: Okay, so I goofed and spent all my minigun ammo trying to snipe raiders from the roof. I took it that trying to take out the deathclaw with my puny small arms might be somewhat challenging, so in typical fashion the most expedient way to take it out is to exploit classic Bethesda AI. The whole time here, the deathclaw is charging headfirst into the wall while I plink away at its tail. I mean, rationally I would just choose to slink away and not engage the thing, but thou must.

Next thing we know, someone will come here asking for a sequel to Descent to Undermountain.

By the time the game finished installing I only could play about an hour last night. Which wasn't enough time to even leave the house, because I spent pretty much the whole hour messing with character creation - though to be fair it wasn't all on one character at least. God I wish they'd shut up though, the comments they both make every time you make a tiny change was cute for about thirty seconds. Anyway the UI for it kind of sucks and is a weird mish-mash of keyboard and mouse controls, but I'm happy with the scope of changes you can actually make. Being able to use the whole screen is an obvious improvement versus Skyrim's half-screen and FO3/NV's one-tenth-screen, and the lighting is neutral so there are no tricks of the light. It's a little worse than Skyrim at providing an accurate expectation of what you look like once you get into the gameworld proper, but I guess it's sort of inevitable given that they at least attempt to animate some facial expressions this time around, versus the perpetually neutral mask of the Skyrim player character. So yeah, that's my entirely superficial first-look at the game. Maybe tonight I can get some actual gameplay done.