Humanoid

Why use 3 beta keys?? Well given that they were supposed to be temporary, I liberally gave them away to people who wanted to demo the game. Ironically perhaps the beta I redeemed to my own account I never actually played, the others got some use, and indeed one turned into a purchase. So actually, that solved the issue of getting one of the copies back, the person I gave one of the keys to purchased the game for themselves in the Steam sale as a tradeable gift copy because Steam works that way when you have the beta registered, and so they've just sent me their purchased copy instead and I'll not recall that beta key. Just waiting to be able to convert the other copy to a GOG key (I requested a Larian Vault copy originally, but looks like that's no longer an option). As to the whole GOG incident, I too find it hard to believe anyone thought that a two month delay in releasing a game made any sense businesswise. It does make me think that perhaps the delay is actually that GOG Galaxy was meant to launch much earlier but met some delays. I'm not so hot on the idea of Galaxy either, but recognise that the old games business is pretty stagnant these days and that they probably need new revenue streams.

Levels are a fairly easy abstraction of character ability, I have no issue with them, but neither are they the only way to represent power, as demonstrated by game systems which decouple skill gains from levels or remove them altogether. That said, there are some trends that I do like and some I don't. One I think works is starting at a level above one, which neatly takes care of your starting skill allocations, and helps provide some illustration to your backstory. This works even if it's "fake" skills or levels: DXHR for example started you off with various augments already active and having put points in them - but you can never not have points in them. It represents what you've been doing in the months since the augmentation, that you're not just some guy fresh off the operating table. A long standing dislike, on the other hand, is the concept of empty levels, where you are not given the chance to make interesting decisions. At the barest level, it's those levels in DnD where you're just given an extra hit dice and maybe an incremental automatic improvement to your hit rolls but literally make no decision. But not much better is the tiny incremental skill increases, often seen in MMOs, where every single level you get one point which you put into a passive 'talent' that requires multiple points to max out. Most commonly this just increases the damage of some ability by 2% or so, and that you're expected to do the exact same thing for the next four levels to gain a net 10% increase. This can often be a problem in systems where levelling is too frequent, which tends to dilute the design space of devising those interesting decisions. It's a waste of a levelling system.

Ugh, this turned out messy. I used three beta keys, for the three digital copies I'm entitled to, but I need all but one of them back. They say they'll have a mechanism to convert them to GOG keys, but that's good for only one of the copies, I need to unredeem the other but for it to remain a Steam key, but there's no apparent way to do that....

Well pertinently for the PC, it's worth buying them even with no intent to play them, if only because Josh's mod requires them. So I guess not only is the DLC for console more expensive, it's missing the most important perk PC owners get for buying them.

Adventure games are short enough as it is, cutting them up into pieces has in my experience compromised the final product: narrative continuity is lost, and puzzles tend to get compartmentalised. And that's from having just two episodes, not five. It's a cost reason, I get that, and the alternative might not be getting a full game at all. But it has an inevitably reduced potential because of that. I mean, I'm disappointed that after all these years and relative success, Telltale have not been able to migrate to 'full-fat' games, or perhaps it's just them being stuck in the comfort zone of their old ways.

I'd like to be earning 75 grand a week but I suspect that statistic is slightly off.

Everyone does, given the options are more accurately labelled lakeside, tundra and swamp.

The Sims 3 performed abysmally even on the best machines, so from those noises I don't think the situation has improved terribly much. That said, that degree of customisation isn't something I've ever made use of personally. It's not oversimulation as such, in that it's optional, but there's a thing where when presented with too many options, I'll just mentally switch off and ignore all of them. It's like when I'm thrown into the middle of a massive shopping centre - there's an overwhelming amount of places to go stuff to check out that I'll just end up walking around for a couple of hours and buy nothing.

They don't own the Descent property, so they can't, legally speaking. I'll get my coat.

They're among the better DLCs for any game out there, but the way it turned out is such that I only ever got around to playing one of them and don't feel the urge to start a new game to get to the others. Which is probably a useless non-committal answer for the purposes of this thread. For a 400% markup, I wonder if it'd not be technically more efficient to just buy the base game for now and save the DLC for when a really good special comes along. But I don't know how that works on console, admittedly.

Mildly curious now, aside from 'Murica*, what other countries have domestic leagues wherein the national anthem is played before every match. That'd be probably at least mildly instructive. * Admittedly most of my knowledge of American sports tradition comes from The Naked Gun.

No no, it just goes to show that the, erm, "physical" side of romance (via mods) sell far better than the emotional side of it.

I didn't end up playing it through because the very gamey combat system put me off (lower each enemy's HP but avoid killing them). But I like the concept and haven't ruled out going back to it sometime. The other reservation I guess is that you could probably nab it DRM-free for the same price by waiting a little, if you care about that sort of thing.

Let him play for a inter-prison XI for the next couple of years.

See the advantage of soft toys is that you can put them into one of those vacuum-sealed space bags.

It'd be easier and more palatable to be friends with the darkspawn for some people I suspect.

I'm fully supportive of the fact that holding back access to big guns and energy weapons and the role that design has in terms of worldbuilding. That's great. But consider that access to their corresponding skills can be controlled just as well, and with an equally positive effect on worldbuilding when they're considered in context. A more immersive, naturalistic world, *and* a more intuitive character creation system lacking the gotchas of what actually shipped. Building an immersive and believable game world is a collaborative effort incorporating all elements of game design, not just literal level design alone. Common sense should tell the player that they shouldn't be able to specialise in something they could not conceivably have access to.

Huh, there are border guards between states over there? I know the stereotype about being more security-conscious over there, but I still find that surprising.

Nostalgia alone isn't ever enough, really, which tends to explain the annual nature of this kind of thread. But if each time we go around, one or two people stick around and become general posters then it's worth it. And if not, well we've still had about a fortnight of fun out of it.

Oddly they are in the editor window, but nowhere else. Guess Apple's lawyers weren't so thorough in their checking.

Have you played all four of the games in option #2 to make sure none of them are also crappy cynical cash grabs too? (Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is the only game I know anything about out of all eight games up there, so I couldn't answer)

Never say never I guess, but the DA property is one that currently has negative currency with me. I was disappointed with the first game and felt it ultimately wasn't worth my money,in that I appreciate what it was trying to do but that effort alone is not enough. Past that, I'm comfortable with my decision to skip the second game altogether. As a consequence, the perception of DA3 from pre-release materials, launch feedback and actual witnessing of unedited gameplay would have to be clearly a net positive to drag the franchise back into the black in my books -- and at the moment it's running at a net negative as well based on the first of those elements. The second problem is that I haven't even taken ME3 into account there, a game that in my personal view was an unmitigated disaster. If I'm generous I could set that aside, writing it of as a result of the separate development teams. If I'm not, then, well....

It would have been an interesting approach if certain skills like Energy Weapons and Outdoorsman were untaggable, both to serve as a subtle hint, and as a piece of world-building. Your character has lived in a vault since birth, a vault apparently without access to advanced weaponry, so the absence of any restriction of tag skills actually is the jarring aspect of character creation here. A skill in a gameworld is both more interesting as a roleplaying choice and can be more elegantly designed around in the game content if it has a context, instead of being just one of dozens of identically presented ones in a flat list.

The problem is mostly an artefact of finite XP. In a "realistic" world, you'd expect someone to pick up skills faster if they had prior synergistic experience: for example an established musician ought to be able to learn a brand new instrument much faster than a complete novice. In a typical game setting the opposite applies, the experienced character literally can't afford to spare the skill points to learn something new, because they've used up all the sources of XP. Game logic is such that the world's best guitarist would be the absolute worst person at learning how to play the piano, and the best candidate would be the uneducated hobo with no skills whatsoever. There are workarounds, I think various PnP games have rules which might let you use a percentage of your ability in a different skill to approximate that of a skill you don't specifically have. Imagine if Fallout for example added half your Guns skill to your Energy Weapons skill when determining effectiveness. Perhaps lower ranks of skills become cheaper for high level characters so they can pick up supplementary skills for little-to-no XP investment. It's not as gamebreaking as it might seem because the gain here is in versatility and not in absolute power: a character with 100 in small guns and 70 in energy weapons is not really more powerful than one with the same score in small guns and zero in energy weapons. But it makes a huge difference in determining whether it's viable to redevelop existing characters rather than restarting the game. TL;DR: In the real world, skills that you've learned but are not actively using are valuable assets that may serve you well in future. In games, they're a millstone that drags you down to the point of almost complete ineffectiveness to the point you should kill yourself and start over. If this penalty were removed or at least made significantly less impactful, then the issue of respecs would be far less important.

Goals scored is the next tiebreaker (head to head is obviously not relevant in this case), and if that's also equal, then it's a coin toss (not literally, but a random mechanism).