Tigranes

I've spent 44 hours on it so far. I'm not done with it. I'm having fun. If I play a co-op campaign with my friend like I plan to, I'll have spent more time on it than Oblivion. Length, replayability and value is not a "x hours vs. y" kind of thing that some people confuse it as. Judging DS3's length involves looking at the game itself, not some half-baked comparisons to whatever any given person thinks is the "standard". IMO, 2 things stand out when you look at DS3; (1) The game would indeed have benefited from a few more quests and a couple more minor areas just to give a sense of variety and to explore the story. e.g. One more town that you visit to try and secure an alliance but where your efforts are cut short, or one small area where theres a Legion remnant (i.e. a Legion admirer that is defending an old stronghold), etc. I think this would have made it feel a more 'fuller' game. (2) Something that strikes me is that if DS3 was made like manhy other ARPGs, every single wilderness area would have been 50% as long. e.g. Look at East Forest - if a 'in-between', filler mob area like that was found in Torchlight or Diablo 2 (forgetting for a moment D2 had procedurally generated maps), it would have been twice as large, but with no new content; there would simply have been twice as many trees, spiders, chests full of random items, and one or two more dakkenweyrs. i.e. DS3 features less grind than many other ARPGs, and this makes it feel shorter. That was quite obviously a design decision - DS3 could easily have gotten away with making every single area 50% larger or something, then slowing down your XP gain. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on the type of player you are. I sit on the fence to grinding, but I know there are people who love it and people who hate it.

The FO3/FNV pipboy is a terrible form of UI. It takes a long time to bring it up, the actual area for presentation of info is tiny, you have to navigate through several types of tabs to get anywhere, all the fields are too small making you scroll a lot, and generally every single part of it privileges style over substance. Apart from "hey cool, pip-boy", there's no redeeming features to it.

I think it' sonly that area, though I can't quite remember.

Spoiler?

VGchartz' methodologies, and their failings, are quite publicly known - use some judicious google searching if you must, but I think it's unfortunate to encourage the "me vs. you" polarisation. VGchartz does the best it can, and most of its problems are due to the industry being unwilling to provide good numbers, but at the end of the day they have been known to have a general error margin of 20-30%, and then a few titles where they're just completely off (by, like, 5-6 digits). That's not conjecture, that's proof of how their estimates have stood up to real figures in the past. The only question is, are current VGChartz figures of DS3 one of those that are in the right ballpark, or one of those that are quite significantly wrong? No way to tell, for now. Both are possible.

Righto, sounds cool. I'll pick it up in a couple of days.

I knew I shouldn't have set that krug free.

It's not like this is a complex game in any way, it would feel like a waste of resources. A single place where you can see all the keys & commands would have been good though.

I'm finding the mirror Reinhardt is actually quite tough - and a couple of times, even resurrected me and my companion (although if everyone dies except the mirror it seems to be game over). Very useful especially for directing the fire of the bosses, so they stay put for GoA.

No. It's believed that the update(s) so far have been tiny hotfix types, not proper patches with a series of fixes. That is still coming.

It's a standard interview answer about what kind of things he'd like to have changed or done more work on, had he more time and resources - i.e. exactly the kind of thing people always say they want the devs to admit to. Of course, when they do this, everyone cries "WHY DIDNT YOU DO IT ALREADY / WHY HAVENT YOU DONE IT YET / YOU SUCK". Seeing as the game has a detailed tutorial system already in place, fussing about nothing here. Now keymapping for DLC, that would be funny. That'd be even worse than horse armour!

Menu, Party Select.

It's useful to have this interview as another clear sign that the devs want to work on the PC controls for the upcoming patch. I think when we look at combat he's right - most complaints are about the controls, not about how combat itself works. I think combat is amazingly fun, and the bit that makes the game. Edit: You know, it's interesting - from both people that love DS3 or think it's rubbish, etc, sometimes you get people that just try to insist what they think is 'stupid/awesome design', etc is The Truth, if you disagree with them you don't know what you're on about, everything they say is backed up by the Silent Majority, etc. And then ironically, normal people - who, in all probability, like some things and dislike some things - just give up and fade ito silence. It's not like you can persuade anyone if you tell them "DS3 is awesome and if you don't like it you're uncivilised", or "DS3 is crap and you're just a fanboy".

OK, we really need a Reinhardt thread. I 'saved' him for my third playthrough and as I suspected I'm enjoying him the most of all. He certainly looks like a weird old hobo but he is ridiculously powerful. Wondering how other people have fared with him. In this run I pumped Will like crazy, getting the related talent and also the Agility into Ability DPS talent. Gave up stamina, armor, block, etc in item selection just to get more Will. By Rajani I was at level 9-10 and pushing 100 Will, and killed her in less than 5 minutes on the first try (hardcore). I'm in Stonebridge now at Level 17, and with about 150 Will, Geometry of Annihilation kills literally everything. It took out 80% of the First People chieftain's health in one hit, ending the battle in 30 seconds. It's amusing to come across a big mob, roll in the middle of it, cast GoA - Reinhardt gets killed but then everyone else falls on top of his corpse. Comparatively, electrocute is not as amazing despite maxing the electric damage talent, and Reinhardt is definitely a glass cannon, but it'll be interesting to see how endgame turns out. I should also make better use of defensive stances - hadn't realised how useful they were until I started spamming Volatile Barrier with Anjali.

Of course - what I mean is that often it takes work to get an internal, developer only toolkit then make it something that can be released to the public. Sometimes use of third party tools is a factor (which is why AP couldn't get a toolkit), but I don't know if that's the case here.

Nobody said it. On the toolkit, I think it's unlikely for DS3 - from what we've heard so far a toolkit isn't impossible for the Onyx engine, but this wasn't a game with a 3-4 year development cycle and oodles of money in the budget like Oblivion, and creating a toolkit for this new engine would have taken a lot of work. Perhaps in the future. Good news is that once the .oaf files are unpacked, a lot of variables seem to be fairly easily edited.

Yeah, but then it's not as fun. The loot system's pretty bland as it is.

Wait, what? Bioware's in charge of Ultima Online?

Devs have said they want to put this in the next patch. ETA is unknown, as you'd expect for patches.

Still on DS3 too, very fun and good friend of mine will get it soon so I can co-op. Otherwise though, I've got nothing - none of the new releases look interesting in any way (already got TW2). Can someone make me get Alpha Centauri from GOG? I know it's meant to be super awesome but I could never get into any sci-fi strategy games because I have no bases of reference - I'm a history nut and that gets me into Civ, EU, etc but in something like this I just get lost and dont' know what to do because none of the names or lore stick. Also considering Civ V on sale, but (a) Steam sucks and (b) AC is probably better.

Characters are never meant to start at max HP after death. Even the current system can be exploited where if you're on 12 health it's better to die and be resurreced.

So you've (1) selected a specific ability to add proficiencies too? You're not still on the ability selection sideo n the left? (2) the ability in question does not already have the full 5 proficiencies?

Also, you open the gate by using the 2 statues, not clicking on the gate.

The proper patch hasn't come out yet, has it? Just a few tiny updates.

I'm curious how it could be on various European top 10 and top 20 charts if it sold that low, though. In one chart it was at overall 9th for its debut week - so everything below it, like Alice, sold even less? How does that work? O_o Those kind of numbers should place a game way way below. Either vgchartz will do a massive readjustment after a week or two of US sales, or... nobody buys games except Wii Fit anymore.