Tigranes

Another "Dragon" in a game's name and I'll puke. The dragon bits in Divinity 2 were undiluted crapola, so I'm not excited at all. Hoping that it'll be a lot better (and completely different) though, if they're building the whole game around the idea.

I think that's an indication of where you are going 'wrong'. i.e. You're too busy rolling around and dodging enemies and essentially on the back foot most of the time, so that you are never attacking enough to build up adrenaline. Quen is definitely OP. As I've said from the start they needed to make Quen last half as long and block cost half as much vigour. I think there's mod(s) for that now... waiting for my new computer before I return to TW2.

Actually, looks like a persistent Diablo clone with completely unoriginal classes and skills. Pass.

Why don't you have bombs or traps, though? The ingredients are plentiful and they really change a battle - sure, sometimes you'll find you've run out or something, but generally, I mean, they're mainly there for crowd control, so if you don't use them of course you'll be on the back foot and running more. I've also found if you go full magic user route you can get 3-4 vigour pretty early - lets you Aard/Yrden + coup de grace difficult enemies or the sign that charms enemies. IMO you don't really want to be in a situation where you consistently get damaged - you want to work out a system where you don't take much to begin with. It would have helped if blocking cost less vigour (there's a mod for that now), but yeah. If you're running around relying on swallow to bring you back from the brink on a regular basis, you either haven't figured out a good way to fight, are not good friends with twitchy combat, or both.

You go to hell in every ending, don't you? It's just how you get tehre.

There's a huge difference between "the one thing I found that works" or "the one thing that suits me best", and the "only thing that seems to work". There are very clearly several styles of play that are viable in TW2 (though of course not as much as, say, a proper party-based RPG) - some are easier than others, and obviously individual players are oriented towards particular solutions as well. On Hard, once I figured out various ways, there were only a few fights where I had to roll/run around in circles, such as if you choose to take on La Vallette and all of his men. There's no denying that rolling is silly and overpowered in TW2 and blocking underpowered, but there's lots of styles to be found there if you look.

Part of it might also be that going with Risen, they wanted to make sure they don't just make another Gothic. And I can agree with that - as much as I loved the Gothics they were always pretty lopsided works. We'll see how it pans out, but another thing to consider is that if the game retains what's really important to PB games - i.e. its own brand of difficulty, exploration, creative solutions / world reactions - then it might be a good thing if the game gets a little gloss of EPIC to draw more players in.

Penny Arcade: Take a random comment on a video game blog, draw some person that says it.

They wouldn't have an NDA saying "We shall not tell the gamers what's in a patch", but for example Obsidian couldn't say "Oh we want to give you another patch but we can't because Square wont' let us and we have to wait for them to do some clearance stuff", depending on the contract/relationship. It's silly, but sadly, that's the industry norm.

I'm told it plays like a series of missions with puzzles where you use your landscaping powers to guide the little funny people to safety/civilisation - not exactly Populous but definitely creative. Planning to demo/buy it.

We don't need seventy thousand topics about the same stuff - lots of places to talk about the camera issues.

I'd be interested to hear more about what you feel are the distortions in my impression - in the end it's hard to beat actually being in the country. I can definitely agree with the generational shift argument, though I'm less convinced that the 'silent majority' in Australia (and to an extent, NZ) stands so far apart from the vocal minority. If anything, there are two vocal minorities - the 'crazy' anti-immigrant voice, and the 'higher values we are the world' voice of tolerance - and the 'silent majority' oscillates between depending on the issue and their own demographic. In particular, it'll be interesting to see the actual public opinion makeup on the burqa issue, 'boat people' refugees, etc. Re. Chinalco, if you're saying that the media hoopla was just that, a circus, fair enough, but I don't think you can say that it's different just because it's China. If we're talking the specific arguments for and against the Chinalco bid, I'd definitely agree that there were legitimate concerns with the Chinese government in the background, etc., but I'm talking about the way in which a rather blanket, uninformed anti-Chinese rhetoric was so widely mobilised. A lot of the discourse was at the level of "this is CHINA. No explanations necessary. Hide your children" - Australia has a lot to worry about China in terms of the natural resources market, regional soft power, etc., but that is different.

*shrug* I forgot a lot of TW1 backstory, never read the books, and felt that you do get confused while playing, but by the end understand enough - i.e. you understand Nilfgard nearly / still can screw everyone over and plays in a different league.

That was very foolish, it just shows that they haven't thought this through, how does it make sense for you to be able to get hit while hovering in the air and how does it make sense to not give any edge to other abilities so they are more or equally useful than other abilities? And you don't need focus from any other ability or skill since you have endless wrath. You realise invulnerable means not able to get hit?

Tried Two Worlds 2. Very underwhelmed. I'm growing very sick of the FPP/OTS one-person real-time combat in RPGs, in nearly all of them it's just (a) really easy, (b) really repetitive and in the end is just mediocre, never exciting. TW2 seems to have all the bells and whistles and some promising areas, but really, there's not enough for me to stand the boring combat and cumbersome PC movement.

If I were you, Krezack, I wouldn't be so optimistic about Australia. You're right that it is in a very good position politically and economically to grow as a stable and reliable powerhouse over the next few decades, and of course it's one of the better places to live in. But if we look at multiculturalism, for instance, I don't see much indication that Australians as a whole have a deeply embedded ideology of multiculturalism and tolerance (beyond the general Western standard). The openness to Asia and Asians, fuelled in part by the recognition that they are critical for Australia's trade prospects, is not the whole picture - there's also a fair bit of latent xenophobia, as exemplified, say, in the Australian media & politics' knee-jerk reaction to the Chinalco-Rio Tinto deal back in 09/10. (Basically, everyone crying OH GOD THE CHINESE ARE TAKING OVER WE DONT WANT THEIR SORT HERE, as if China = Big Brother...) The burqa issue, i.e. a non-issue that has been made into an issue, that has now crossed from France to Australia/NZ will also be a big litmus test in the next few years. In short, I think Australia has been able to afford to be multicultural and tolerant because its economy's been going well and because that's been the dominant paradigm, but I don't see anything really deeply rooted that suggests Australian society will hold on to that as a high priority value if things go bad/different.

I onyl played a little bit with Lucas, but Shield Bash is definitely useful early game - the Dakkenwyrs in particular are a huge challenge for most characters, with Lucas you can sit and stun. Otherwise, I found pretty much every ability for the other 3 characters useful in some way, though some abilities are clearly better (GoA, Heartseeker). What I really thought was lacking was not the abilities, which were great, but the talents - too many of them were "+ to stat", mmore interesting ones with strategic impact like the roll-to-slow/damage would have been nice. Perhaps talents to make Katarina fire faster at the expense of a small amount of damage, or Anjali leave a trail of fire as she walks in fire form doing a bit of damage / burning people.

I'm not sure what to think. For me, none of the changes really kill the game per se - I always thought Blizzard games are mediocre and boring in single player, with their completely dull 'epic' storylines and repetitive gameplay. They only become fun in multiplayer where the excellent balance and grinding mechanism maximises the competitive/cooperative aspect. So always online doesn't affect me in practice. Neither does the modding rule, since the only non-cheat mod you could use in D2 multiplayer was maphack. Etc. etc. But it really is annoying what they are doing and I don't want to support it. With SC2 and D2 they're showing that they've decided the best way to go about these things is decide on a blanket rule (often on the strict side), make up some transparently nonsensical BS as an excuse, then get the riot police out on anyone who 'disobeys'. Talk about overdoing it. Ironically, I think as someone who played a lot of MP D2, the auction thing will affect my experience the most. Of course I knew people were trading characters and items for money in D2, but integrating it into the game is different - I don't want to be sitting there killing bosses and looking every nook and cranny hoping to get the last drop in the Set, and have someone in the game say "screw it, I'm leaving and buying it for $20", or people discussing builds & strategies saying "so start off by buying this and this....", playing with my friends and having them buy crap to get stronger than me, etc. In a game like Diablo where so much is competitive/comparative and the trade economy affects every serious player (think how much the valuation of a Stone of Jordan changed over D2's lifetime), having an integrated auction is a huge annoyance and disruption.

So... the trappings of a MMO? You'd think with the hundreds of hours I spent on D2 it'd be impossible for them to make me reconsider, but here I am...

It's difficult to live with the acute knowledge that if a gunman were to open fire on you, you'd probably die in a sordid, pathetic, painful manner, probably hiding beneath other bodies or begging for your life with snot coming out of your nose. Unfortunately, that is the truth. I won't claim to know how Drowsy would deal with it, himself, but expecting that the mainly-kids should have done better carries little weight, and simply rings of careless thought speaking before experience.

Talk 'bout the game(s), not the people, their writing skills, or how you can provoke people the fastest, guys.

Blue balls come at fairly regular intervals - no special solution, just roll to dodge. I find it's useful to dodge across them - i.e. if they're coming in from the right, dodge to the right, not left, so that they need to criss cross then fizzle themselves out. Try not to do too much and rush the fight - if you've got rolling down pat it's not hard to dodge the swarm of monsters, for instance, and then at intervals when the Creator is a bit knocked out you have plenty of time to revive companions and damage him.

It says "when the ability is empowered". That means the normal version of Graceful Repose only heals you - the empowered version of Graceful Repose heals everyone. Empowered abilites are only available when you have mastered that ability. You master an ability by using it a lot. You can check how far away you are from mastery through a long horizontal progress bar below the ability name, in the ability screen. You use Power, not Focus, to use empowered abilities (check the keybinding screens for how to use them). If you are early in the game, don't worry for now, or just frequently use Graceful Repose - when you unlock your first empowered ability, the in-game floating tool tips will tell you this has happened and how to use it. The same goes for every single ability in the game - once mastered, the empowered version does something different and more effective. This info is also found in ESC -> Help.

May the Steel be with you.

I have HTTT but after a while I realised its new battle system really makes EU3, well, not EU. You'd think it removed the most frustrating element of EU, but it speeds everything up so much that it feels like you're playing the wars on hyper-speed, then slowing down again for 15 years of badboy or whatnot. Never tried Divine Wind, I probably won't stick with my return to EU3 long enough. I just wish Victoria 2 would become interesting Trying to carve out a slice of the Med with Aragon. Magna Mundi makes things interesting and a lot more like a push-pull than a linear path to glory - eventually had to conquer half the North African coast to stop the Berber pirates, but beyond the coast they keep throwing off my vassalage and annoying me. I've managed to inherit Naples, though, and get started on taking over the Mexican natives.