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Humanoid

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Everything posted by Humanoid

  1. Humanoid
    Well it's taken three days, but finally a positive response that GOG keys will indeed be sent out. Happy with the outcome, if not necessarily the handling thereof, but eh, hopefully that's lesson learned.
  2. Humanoid
    YouTube might be kinder than the critic reviews by the look of it....
  3. Humanoid
    The only Google hit for "Protect the Red Scribes" is Bound by Flame.
  4. Humanoid
    Lethal takedowns were completely pointless to the extent that they were only good for the novelty of seeing the silly animations. Even ignoring the ridiculous double XP for a non-lethal takedown, I don't recall a situation where an enemy was actually had the chance to be revived by another. Between that and the XP for unnecessary hacking and good grief, that game had the most messed up XP system of anything I can remember.
  5. Humanoid
    Urgh, the development path of XCOM's Long War mod continues to be simultaneously one of the most fascinating but most frustrating things around. Their technical accomplishments are incredible, by this point the changes far dwarf that of anything Firaxis themselves have been able to come up with. But it's also heavy with design decisions that are very questionable balancewise and often sacrifice gameplay for some contrived flavour. It's the standard armchair designing scenario, and it's disappointing because for the most part it's completely non-modular, like it or lump it. Since we've been discussing the Bloodlines modding scene lately, I think it's somewhat comparable here. Yes, Long War always promised to be a complete overhaul rather than a bugfix release, but I just don't think there's been enough consideration given to each individual feature as they are implemented. I wish there was a more restrained and balance-tested approach to this. A particularly glaring example is that regular sectoids have been granted psionic abilities - both mind fray and psi panic - which they don't hesitate to abuse. Sure, in terms of the setting, giving them psionic abilities sounds completely reasonable. But gameplay-wise it is extremely problematic at early levels, where success rates for the attacks are very high against your low-ranking troopers (and the new fatigue mechanic, which I love by the way, ensures you're carrying low-ranking guys for a lot longer), who have absolutely no defense against it. The result is each and every sectoid now has a spammable on-demand near-guaranteed panic attack, which inevitably leads to unmitigated chain panic. Yeah, gamebreaking balance change there. Another issue is that alien pod locations have been completely unrestricted, instead of specific predetermined points on the map where static groups may be placed, every tile outside your initial line of sight is a valid location. Sounds interesting until you realise this will result in placement in potentially nonsensical places, and indeed place them in silly proximity to each other. Ah well, any final release is still a bit off, so hopefully the final result is a fair bit more sensible. Unfortunate that the present builds are problematic to the extent of turning me off from any desire to try and playtest them. EDIT: And giving drones passive damage resistance so you can shoot them and do zero, ZERO, damage. Bloody hell. And they've made the interceptor game *worse* by giving it much greater prominence. Yeah, it sucked before, but making it harder but no more responsive just makes it all the more suckier. Grrrrrr.
  6. Humanoid
    Pfft, just "silently" kill them by smashing their heads full whack with a baseball bat.
  7. Humanoid
    And you defeat them by applying a heavy-handed all-encompassing blue filter over them.
  8. Humanoid
    Well I'm one of them. But as a bigger picture thing, I guess it also illustrates the potential pitfalls of partnering with a publisher like this. At any rate, it's backtracking on a specific commitment and it's fair enough that they're pursued for it, even if I have little doubt that a majority would have chosen a Steam key given the option. That kind of thinking, after all, is exactly what the Steam ecosystem has been engineered to nurture.
  9. Humanoid
    The 36 hours of deafening silence so far are probably the most damaging. It may or may not work out in the end, but they've already botched the customer relations aspect of the release far worse that Shadowrun initially did. It's certainly the most disappointing launch event of any Kickstarter project I've backed thus far. This is especially true in the context that GOG provide these keys free of charge. They're quite open on the fact that the publisher of a game can request as many copies of their own game as they'd like with no restriction. Conjecture perhaps, but the feeling is that Atlus might be freaking at the notion of effectively sending two copies of the game to each backer and counting it as "lost" revenue, and thus are choosing to withhold the keys.
  10. Humanoid
    You'd expect an American to be better at crafting something gun-shaped than that disgraceful attempt, clearly that's why he was suspended.
  11. Humanoid
    Plants vs Zombies GOTY is free on the Origin store until the end of the month.
  12. Humanoid
    Doesn't feel that long ago that it was all about Dawson's Creek and Mmm'bop.
  13. Humanoid
    The only reason the argument of "You must have finished the whole thing to have a valid opinion" is ever made is so that, whatever the response, the followup argument of "you went through the whole thing, so you must have liked something about it" can be made.
  14. Humanoid
    Y'know this is a bit of a non-sequitur post, but I find from experience this kind of thing does work better when handled from the top down. I know I'm probably on a bit too much about my MMO experience, but I do absolutely find that guilds with a balanced leadership group (indeed for the first few years the officer core was actually majority female) in terms of diversity are much better social places, and not just because of policy and enforcement of booting out troublemakers: indeed that didn't need to happen much if at all. The value was more in setting cultural expectations of how to behave in mixed company, instead of allowing that insular "Internet" mentality to fester in homogenous environment. And while initially I'd say the leadership representation was mostly proportional to that of the larger membership, inevitably as the greater group grew in size the membership skewed towards the average demographic of younger and maler - and yet this did not really end up presenting a problem because we had a strong cultural base and a strong existing memberbase that made sure that situation remained in place. How any of this would apply to a large forum I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if a better, and visible balance in forum leadership and moderation had some beneficial outcome.
  15. Humanoid
    You'd think they'd learn, but no, trouble brewing with the Tex Murphy release where they're apparently forcing Steam for all backers despite an explicit prior statement that alternatives would be available for non-Steam users. This is doubly confusing because a GOG representative has claimed that GOG keys for backers have been generated and provided to the developers. So where are they? One has to wonder whether the 'partnership' with Atlus might have something to do with this mess. Today: GOG, yesterday: Kickstarter campaign, two years ago:
  16. Humanoid
    Well there was only really one DLC - but originally the DLC wasn't integrated into the game: it was a separate entry in your Steam games list and was executed independently of the rest of the game. The director's cut places it where it belongs in the main game. So frankly, you will be replaying the original campaign, because that's the only thing available to do. The other main change would be the boss fights, besides that there are some graphical tweaks (neither positive nor negative really, just baffling), new game plus, and some commentary, nothing consequential.
  17. Humanoid
    I'm in a Star Citizen corporation of which I am the only member. It's just a virtual treehouse, no one's going to police them in any way besides the automatic obscene name filter. Besides, I played WoW for seven years. I never divulged my gender and no one ever seriously asked. Voice chat was strictly optional (hint: Logitech G-key macros), so it's not a policy I'd even be able to enforce - indeed I made it a point to not ask for any personally identifying information in guild applications, just the bare minimum in confirming availability. Sure, it's probably not the common thing to do, but I guess that's the luxury of building up your own community. The early days of Star Citizen would afford plenty of opportunity to do a similar thing if one were so inclined. P.P.S. Rather than a mod adding the Enclave to New Vegas, I'd rather a mod that removed them from Fallout 3. They died in Fallout 2 and should have stayed dead instead of just being the convenient contextless villains that they are now.
  18. Humanoid
    Chinese Daikatana.
  19. Humanoid
    Obviously a subtle hint that the next Fallout game is set in Australia.
  20. Humanoid
    I hadn't heard of the game until you posted the above. So it's not very effectively being marketed despite that.
  21. Humanoid
    The thing is, I don't even remember using the Obfuscate abilities in my Malk playthrough. I don't know if it's my faulty recollection, but I'm reasonably confident that in the first chapter alone you can get your mundane stealth abilities easily high enough to get away with ridiculous things already - y'know, the crouching dead in front of someone in a vaguely darkish play and having them totally oblivious. I do remember the stealth tutorial being pretty tricky though, so I guess the skill ramps up pretty quickly, but it shouldn't take much to reach Bethesda-stealth levels of absurdity. It's been a decade sure, but I'd probably say Deus Ex Human Revolution is the closest comparison to the game mechanically - down to the cheesy and improbable sneak takedowns and silly boss battles - with the magic invisibility cloak being strictly optional.
  22. Humanoid
    Sort of: the DRM-free version was initially only available to backers as a direct download from the Harebrained website, Microsoft's conditions precluded any sales from GOG, Humble Bundle or any other platform. When the restriction was lifted, the direct download option was removed and backers instead given the option of either a GOG or a Humble Bundle key.
  23. Humanoid
    There are many more outliers than that, such as the 5870 also being rated higher than the 7870. But FLOPS are a very specific thing so it shouldn't be taken to have a direct correlation with actual gaming speed.
  24. Humanoid
    Toreador has Celerity I believe, which makes gunplay trivial. I remember gunning down a sidequest boss within the duration of one usage of the skill - which was long enough to empty my fully loaded pistol and then some. For what it's worth, I think I played just about the whole game as a stealther (the pistol thing was my second, aborted playthrough), and it was mostly viable. P.S. Yeah, standard combat-heavy tutorial, I always skipped it after the first time, though I can't remember if that was a mod feature.
  25. Humanoid
    Yeah, but those always felt like simple line-for-line replacements for the normal dialogue in most cases, the NPCs generally don't react to them. That said, I played Malk first up, and only did 1.5 chapters on my subsequent non-Malk playthrough, so it's not a comprehensive analysis. I'm not using it as a criticism as such, it's probably as far as they could go without creating a wholly separate campaign for each clan - but I've always considered it more jokey than insightful, and am fine with that.
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