Tigranes

Is it wrong that I see that and think "Lesbian pervert with hi-tech voyeur porn tech"?

Devs have commented that OTS would be difficult because the game has no skyboxes. The XML files appear to suggest that a few areas do, but that may simply be placeholders. So it's pretty certain that there is a substantial amount of skyboxes/ceilings missing. Now, quick-fix copy-paste skyboxes won't be too difficult, since the Onyx engine is clearly capable of this, but ceilings would take more work. So what it comes down to is this - the current zoom-in view offers as close to OTS a view as is possible without rendering ceilings and skyboxes. Maybe it can afford to tilt up a tiny bit more. But a substantial change? Again, I wouldn't mind seeing this if it gives us more options - but I'm not sure how much can be done. Note that I'm talking about the zoom-in view, not the default 'iso'-style view. The zoom-in view is already quite close to your 15', it's the 'iso' that's ~45.

Russian Oblivion supermod looks awesome. Awesomer than Skyrim. What the heck is this? It's awesome. Probably they know the professional industry trick of Trailers That Look Way Too Good, but still.

Again, if you were looking almost parallel to the ground, what you see includes the sky and ceiling. I mean, just stand up where you are now, and look straight ahead. There are ceilings. Without ceilings and skyboxes, everything would just cut off at a certain height then you'd see a big grey expanse or something. And yes, that woudl take up 10-20% of the screen when you look straight ahead. So yeah, if somebody found a way to hack it in, great - gives people options. But if Obsidian did it in a patch they could never do that - you can't patch and say "new camera mode available" if all the ceilings are missing.

I assume you've checked that it actually did download the whole thing from Steam? In my case, the download site simply gave me... a link to Steam. If it did, search these forums - someone had a similar deal with the boxed copy and there was some fix to stop Steam from doing that. It's one of the joys of Steam becoming so big, I'm afraid.

Nothing really easy to miss, but maybe: (1) Tracking down the 3 people who committed crimes against the Legion 30 years ago - from the goblinc ouncillor, only after you beat Dapper Old Gent. (2) Finding the rifle for the Glitterdelve merchant and/or finding painite for the scholar. (3) If you don't destroy the heart of nagog, currently it's bugged and the quest will never close.

Zoraptor is right - never buy from Steam if you actually want to support indie developers. Also, because of the whole verification / etc process stuff, indie games tend to have much slower patching/udpating on Steam - you're getting an inferior product. I'm intrigued by Dead State and have no doubt Brian Mitsoda can write something interesting, but certainly the graphics currently look way too sanitised. Won't be so important if the actual game holds up, though.

Wherever you buy DS3, you need to play it through Steam - as it is a Steamworks game. (Yes, it's crap... it does tell you that before you buy, though, at least.) What happens when you do sign into Steam? And of course, patching happens through Steam as well.

It's Wellington, all employees should get 50 "bus broke down" passes per year...

You're... a bit late to the party Vilhelm Let's move on..

It's not a question of 'going forward', it's a question of design. The perspective difference does change the way you experience a game. Personally, I'd hate DS3 if, for isntance, we were stuck in the KOTOR camera. In fact, I thought one of the key reasons KOTOR combat was such a horrible mess is because it's really hard to see what's going on or target everything easily. I know you see it differently and I appreciate that. I just think it's important people don't extrapolate what they like as the "way forward". (BTW, for FNV, Obsidian had no choice. It would have been extremely difficult to make the Gamebryo engine go 'isometric'.) Anyway, it's clear a lot of epople want changes in the DS3 camera - what's not clear is how many people just want MP camera untethered, how many just want a wider zoom for MP, how many want a over-the-shoulder view, how many people want some/all of that, etc. I can understand people wanting over the shoulder for DS3, but I don't know how fun it would be to actually fight in that view. In any case, sorry to be a sourpuss, but over the shoulder view is the most unlikely thing to happen at this stage. I mean ,they'd have to go and make ceilings for EVERYTHING.

This is contradictory, actually - in terms of angles, what you get in the zoom-in mode currently, is pretty much as far as you can tilt the camera before you need ceilings and skyboxes. i.e. currently, you can see farther ahead in the horizon in zoom-in than zoom-out, right? Well, that's really the limit. The only other way to 'see farther down' is just to zoom out more, which I think is the best solution for most people.

The hilarious thing is that there is no status quo in the Codex. Even the Holy Trinity is regularly attacked - i.e. Torment and its gameplay, Fallout and its combat. And since the 'decline' of the industry (i.e. post-Oblivion) it's become even more varied, i.e. Witcher 2. If you want status quo, you want NMA.

My vote is on an Obsidian ex-dev. Who just wants to come back home

He's one of the harder bosses, but not that bad if you work it out. it feels like he's super strong / has tons of HP because you have to dodge so much and he kills you so quick, but in fact it just feels that way. The homing electrical bolts are slow and easy to dodge if you're aware - I found that a good way is to roll/teleport across them (i.e. they're coming in from the left, when they're near roll left, so you roll 'past' them), which can make them confused and hit each other/theground and fizzle. Arguably the greater threat is his charge ability, due to the small platform, but Ehregott's attacks are pretty formulaic and after a while you can tell when he takes a half second to gear up for it. Don't bother reviving your companion unless you get a lucky lull, or you will die. Just dodge pretty much all the time; use empowered heartseeker to take out automatons when they come in; otherwise just normal shots & heartseeker on Ehregott as you dodge, curse if you have time. Obviously don't bother with anything that takes time like hound or flintlock.

Reinhardt is easily more powerful than all the other characters except a powergamed Katarina. High will + Geometry of Annihilation will kill everything; before you get that, the first lightning skill actually does decent damage with high will as well - by level 8 in the forest it could do +300, I think. Main thing is that he's always going to be a glass cannon and you need to play him like a high risk easy die fellow. If that doesn't suit you go with a different character or a lower difficulty - Reinhardt is meant to die easily when surrounded. For that particular wolf fight though, running away + teleport works well, since the mirror you create will suitably distract them long enough for you to kill.

New Game+ is only "easily designed and easily implemented" if it is half-arsed. i.e. add 30 to every single monster's level. That's what I struggle to understand about everyone that keeps asking for NG+. I can see why people would want it, or think it should have been in, but for DLC? You've already mastered all your abilities, so where do you go unless you just want a character that only grows in HP/Attack/Will? The loot tables only go up so far, so they'd have to be extended, but then you'd want your new high level loot to have different textures/models, wouldn't you? Simply making all monsters higher level would play havoc with game balance making a horribly skewed experience, so you'd need to touch them up again, too. Redo the stores as well. It's the same as people asking for a higher level cap - it's not just a matter of changing '30' to '35', because if you did just that your experience with those new levels would suck a lot. Actually, my sense is that Arena might even be easier.

Isn't it ironic to say "OK I don't like Obsidian because they screwed up this other game but I'm not going to let my opinions influence my reviews"? You're right that reviewers need to try and take account of different opinions and try and balance out their own bias, but you can only do that when you recognise the bias that you have.

If Onyx can do bigger areas it would be totally awesome. It's reported as being pretty flexible, so I don't see why not - the corridors and skybox were likely DS3's own constraints (partly influenced by consoles, project scope, etc). Generally, though, screw this "OMG THIS GAME HAS NO LOADING SCREENS IT ROCKS" crap, seamless world is a nice bonus to have, not a necessity. A big world with loading screens isa lways better than seamless corridors.

Done with Divine Divinity. I very much enjoyed it, but especially on the back of DS3 it makes me realise how hard it is to make ARPG combat fun and not a button masher. The intriguing thing is that Divinity 1 gives you a lot of options and interesting skills, a typical control scheme that works well, a huge world with lots of monsters to fight, etc. But in practice, skills are either not differentiated enough to bother using both, are balanced poorly and not worth wasting points on, etc., and you end up using, well, five or six active combat skills the entire game. (In my case, Meteor Strike and a sword killed everything, with occasional uses of Skeleton Wall, Life Leech, and later, Hellspike.) After the first few hours, I was just so tired of mashing left-click on everything. It didn't help that the loot system seemed to be broken - I was literally swimming in money after 5 hours and shops would almost never offer anything worth buying. That said, it did a lot of things right - good seamless world full of interesting places, reasonably interesting quests, some nice touches of wry humour. I'd probably have enjoyed it a lot more if it featured IE-style combat or something, rather than Diablo.

You don't need to recompile your edited files to make it work - which will make modding really simple in that aspect. All you have to do is place the edited XML file in the correct place (e.g. data/global/world/blahblah), and the game will reflect the changes. I haven't touched the files again but I'll try and puzzle out a few other things soon. My gut feeling is that the camera might be hardcoded, though. Which is weird, because surely there's a trigger somewhere for the dapper old gent fight. Hoping someone who actually knows something about coding will jump on it, but ah well.

Chill people. Don't get too hot.

I don't know if a lot of games offer that option, these days - I only remember it on older PC games like Unreal Tournament, etc. Seems like your TV settings mimght be a bit weird, though, if the HUD is that bad. Rest of the game looks fine?

True. Let me clarify - I remember waiting to get my grubby hands on Oblivion the first day, having played Morrowind. Despite the train wreck Oblivion was, Morrowind is still enough to get me excited about TES. Now I just relax and say "I might get it, I might not". Certainly, the incredible thing about Oblivion was that although it had a LOT of design flaws everywhere, it was still a very fun game for a while, and could have been a very credible game with only a few factors adjusted (level design fixed, join-every-guild adjusted, Oblivion Gates scrapped). If they focus a lot more this time on actually making interesting situations in that open world without atrociously written handheld sequences (i.e. less Dark Brotherhood, more pirate ship assassination)...

No options to adjust HUD opacity in current options screen. You can adjust gamma for the game as a whole.