Tigranes

I'm too busy to sit and watch a video, so I read the article. It's very sad - and points to how one of the key things lacking in every promising game project is the ability to make the right managerial decisions. (Not that publishers are necessarily better at that, mind you.)

Hey? It's a completely open game after the (lengthy) tutorial and there's no problem at all with wandering around.

I don't know, I've never really run into gamebreaking bugs, the worst I've had is two unfinishable quests. At worst, you always have all your previous saves. And I think a patch with many quest bugs is coming out next week.

I mean, on that count of having the style, architecture, etc. down, the game is just simply fantastic. Its the RPG mechanics where it has mediocre strains. Later there's a nice disguise/infiltration/blending kind of superquest to do with the monastery area, which is where I'm at now, and while the gameplay is a bit clunky the atmosphere is top notch - the monk lifestyle reminds me of prisons and armies, as it well should.

*sigh* Well, goodbye thread. It was good knowing you.

What a stupid thing to waste your time over. I'll play what I enjoy, and make my own judgment about its subliminal messages, thanks. Not buying it based on a media witch hunt is just as idiotic as buying it to spite the former. In other news, I think I'm not too far away from the end, now. The mid-late game falls away because there's only one real stage of narrative / gameplay progression - from humble peasant to lord's employ - and the game's shown you all of its cool tricks. But its ability to deliver on the relatively-historical Bohemian aesthetic is simply unparalleled, and I hope they can improve on this in a possible sequel.

I reverse my judgment, test must be true

I think everybody likes the idea, but nobody understands the random disassociated ranting surrounding it. Alpha Protocol, I remember, had simple ways to edit the .ini for enemy damage output and other such values. If only all RPGs had that, we could have this 'aggro mode' in any number of variations.

Yeah, the fact that you're trained in one combo then made to do a reversed combo is a massive red flag. I tried the Skin one, then quickly peeked at the Countries one - the test design is far less plausible for 'appraising nationalism', and it does raise questions that they felt this one should also be included. I could potentially see the 'spoilers' Valsuelm mentions as being intended, i.e. activating many users' existing intention to prove that they are not biased towards males/thins/whites, but that would still be a questionable method & needless risk. Is it 'accurate' for my own implicit biases? I certainly can't tell you, otherwise it wouldn't be implicit. But the test certainly doesn't persuade me of its own validity or competence.

POE, and the IE games before that, were always about relatively flat and static environments with highly limited points of interaction - combat was always essentially taking place in flat geometry rooms with no real props or environments to speak of. I would certainly welcome more work done on this front, though I expect Deadfire's development focused on other areas to improve.

I've played a crapton of this, and I did have to replay ~20 minutes of action a couple times; that's usually the longest you go without a save, and I use Schnapps only for key occasions like before getting into a big fight. I'd agree that the savegame mod is a good backup until they patch in save and quit at least. I think my experience of the game is really magnified by the appreciation of the historical detail and aesthetic they've pulled off. Of course there are inaccuracies but it's pointless to measure them - what matters is the broader feel that they've delivered on. As amazing as TW3 was on the 'bloody good looking open world' front, this is much more absorbing for me.

Nah, better to wait five more years or so, you can never be sure

Zero significant bugs, a few minor ones, in ~8 hours of play for me. I guess mileage varies.

*shrug* I agree that restrictive save systems is a losing battle and they should not have tried to fight it. Sounds like the savegame mod works just fine, though, so no problemo. I'm actually enjoying playing it with minimal saving at the moment - and of course every good night's rest and many quest ticks give you saves.

This isn't an Action RPG. The normal game, which is always designed for nonironman....? Ironman isn't a 'benchmark', it's a niche optional mode. The really long and rambly prolegomena aside, sure, a "aggro" mode sounds cool. I would try it for sure, as even a crude damage switch would knock all of the balancing into chaos in a way that might be interesting.

The extended prologue (you think it's over, but it ain't until you see the film-style intro credits roll) is super cutscene heavy, but the game opens up after that - still plenty of cutscenes and story events, but first impressions aren't quite accurate. I've had very few bugs and solid performance, but mileage always varies with individual setups. The feeling you get when walking through a raining Czech forest is just nothing like anything in Skyrim, Oblivion, or even TW3. They really knocked it out of the park. On a sufficiently good PC, you could probably post screenshots on Facebook and some people will scroll down thinking it's a real forest, not because of the graphical fidelity per se but the aesthetics/design. My guy has just learned how to write - because, of course, a Bohemian peasant ain't going to know no writing off the bat.

Played a few hours, loving it. It just oozes historical style. I won't get into the nitty gritty of whether the pauldrons are exactly 15th century Bohemia or whatever - but the way they've done the forests, the wall murals in churches, the layout of the towns, etc. is just fantastic and as close as any game has ever gotten. It actually kept reminding me of the times I was physically in the region. At least in the early hours it's less "open world" and more "lots of cutscenes, scripted story events" in an open world foil, I suppose closer to TW3. The writing is actually really well done; it is generally very down to earth, and the pacing and scene direction is decent as well. It's not TW3-style bombastic high-flying drama, it has its own style. Not sure how combat will pan out, but the system itself seems very interesting - no flashing buttons all over the place, you're watching your enemy and timing your clicks to play a tightly structured attack/parry/'direction/block/dodge combo set. The 'save potion' thing I think is silly, but so far I've not really needed it - I welcome the encouragement not to savescum pickpocketing and the like, and just roll with it. No real bugs so far, except the one time I jumped through the town walls, fell down and broke both my legs, leading to a reload.

Thaos as PC is too PST, really. I also thought the Watcher was stupid, but I'd have preferred a simple no-name adventurer. It's just so hackneyed to find oh you are chosen one with superpowers & the chosen of the chosen with a special coincidental connection to Iovara and Thaos. The whole aspect of integrating death/reloading/sequels into the setting is something people spill tons of ink on, but I've never found particularly important. Oh, ok, you found a way to make player death make sense in the gameworld. Cool. Not really going to help the character or the story become truly memorable.

As long as the game's not compromised/gutted for consoles, there's no problem. And we won't really know that until the game's out.

The Outer Worlds is a pretty generic term, I think it's pointless to speculate so far. I'm sure that book is unrelated, it looks like the same trashy generic B-grade sci-fi of which dozens are released per year.

Summoning Volourn to unite with his soulmate, the OP

When was it ever like that? There's always been patching. Even before the general introduction of Internet. They sent floppydisks to you with patches via the regular mail. So yes, there will be patches. And it's a good thing because it will mean a better product for all of us. I never ever patched a game during the before steam era and noone ever mentioned them. Unless you were really involved in a game community you'd never notice. I usually would download or buy a years later edition of a game and be like "oh, includes patch 1.01. Cool whatever it is". Developers were making them, yes, but the games didn't really need them - they were complete and played good. Now most games are blatantly unfinished or unpolished on release and patches are mandatory. Pillars 1 was good at release and, although patched made it better, if they never made them, it would still be good and most wouldn't care that much. No. That may well be your personal experience, but patches, and bugs, have been a part of PC gaming for almost its entire history. It's true that in the 80s, you didn't exactly have weekly updates, and sometimes they'd just start selling newly patched versions in stores without even really bothering to tell people it's been updated. But as Mannock says, even in the floppy disk era you had a convention of getting replacement disks - and in some cases, you were an individual user encdountering a game-breaking bug, mailing in your own disk and save to the creators for a specific fix. Games were being rushed out the door due to the same pressures as today - set marketing schedules, budget issues, etc. - at least as early as the early 90s, and you already had many reports of high profile games shipping with bad / unplayable bugs needing patches. Of course, the Internet, then rising bandwidths and paltforms like Steam, would then facilitate higher frequency patching. And although some people now see it as an annoyance, it's important to note just how many benefits that brought. Games, as a whole, are buggy and always have been, and frequent patching did not 'cause' companies to feel it's ok to release bad games. At best, that's a minor side effect. What frequent patching does allow is for these games to be corrected and improved in ways that gamers and devleopers could only wish for in the past. POE specifically made a huge amount of 'modifications' to balance / systems rather than bugfixes, which of course raises understandable frustration from certain kinds of gamers. But it's also important to note that there are many people who thought the game had improved measurably through these patches, and that this not only made the final product far superior to 1.01, but also improved the game's longevity. No, I can't give you a statistical breakdown of which group is larger. I doubt you can, either. In the absence of any such evidence, I think the wise thing is to take both groups seriously, rather than make the unprovable claim that 'most wouldn't care'. (if anything, it might be that 'most' buyers don't care or notice either way, and don't actively support either position.)

I think it's perfectly appropriate response for you to be frustrated by those bugs. Having played RPGs for 20 years, I just don't think you will ever be able to go and 'find another company' that can guarantee you'd never have this problem, not when we're talking about RPGs with a modicum of tactical and systems complexity. I don't even mean that it's physically impossible, I just mean that's how the lay of the land is.

Jon gets a pass because I'd rather he didn't conduct more... experiments on me Poor Khalid.

The one on the right is dressed like some cosplay prostitute, who would have big problems getting around in both cold and hot regions. But then, it's in the grand old tradition of Irenicus the bondage elf!