Tigranes

The uber equipment from TW1 is only scaled down because if you could import them in their full glory the entire game would be retarded. The only other solution was to not allow importing them at all (which I'd have been fine with, but I can see a lot of people complaining about that, too). Otherwise, it's certainly more robust a loot system than TW1, and more rare and expensive stuff to craft near endgame. My complaint would be that they're not differentiated enough - often the difference between, say, Temerian Jackboots and Nilfgaardian are 1% bleeding resistance or something - so the progression becomes quite linear. With the 4 different types of meteorite steel swords, again, one is clearly better than the others. It would have been nice to have item attributes change Geralt more drastically. TW2 is certainly better than 1 but looting is still not a strong point.

Pretty much, think of every single campaign - whether SP or MP - as separate, without crossover between them. Whether you play alone, with a friend, or a stranger, you start a campaign, you pick your character - that character, its XP, and loot, exists and is saved in that campaign, but isn't taken out. Since MP is built to support drop-in/out, you can join a game that someone else might have been playing for 5,10,15 hours - you just join, pick a character, which is autolevelled to where everyone else is, then you play together. Same deal if your friend leaves and you want to keep playing. The issue right now is that the savegame file for your campaign is stored on the host's computer - if you want to play on without the host, you'll need to manually transfer the savefile over. So the design is, it's very easy for you to (a) join a friend who's already been playing for a while, then play with him, without being very underleveled or having to play alone to 'catch up'; (b) keep on playing even if your friend goes away for a while, or even permanently;

I can do it for you. Professional courtesy.

Actually, if you look at the completion rate, I suspect that Oblivion, Diablo, etc have many 'quitters' as well. And then you get weird things like people paying $60 to play a FPS that finishes in 8 hours and not complaining, even if they don't play MP afterwards. Your point stands though, the price tag is often used as a blanket measure. I'm guessing that the 2D game they seem to have going right now is an effort at diversifying.

The prologue is indeed linear and has too many cutscenes. I like the setting, that is, the situation of a King putting down a rebel, etc., but I do feel it should have been half as long. Persevere to Chapter 1 and it gets a lot better. Flotsam in particular is a lot more similar to TW1.

I love the idea of DK and UU, but suspect I won't be able to get into them - with graphics this aged, some types work fine for me, some types don't. I remember trying DK and not being able to tell what was going on, it just felt like random blurred pixels bumping into each other in the dark, and I'll probably feel the same with UU's combat. Also, Crusader? Where?

Looks good, don't care about new hairstyles or whatever but faster menus and combat response tweaks sound great. Also ran into a few of those small bugs that made you reload (NPC stuck, etc), so that's nice.

My bad. What is Dragon Wing, anyway?

Your loot and experience IS saved to your multiplayer characters. The limitation is that those characters can't be moved to different games, they just exist in the particular game. Matt-C, you don't like what Obsidian did with DS3 MP, we get it. What's the point saying the exact same thing 38 times in 2 days in every single thread? Criticism's fine, but you're not going to make anyone agree with you by yelling into their ear every 5 minutes.

Settle down, people. We're pretty laissez-faire about moderation but I'm sure we'd all rather talk about stuff than scream and whine.

Uh... I hope you're wearing bullet proof vests I personally thought DS1/2 were rubbish, but certainly it had people who enjoyed it. In any case, if we accept that DS3 is a very different game (and it was always going to be, even if Chris Taylor made it), it is a bit of a risk to make an ARPG that gives more than a rat's arse about story and, well, anything that gets in the way of running around beating things up really fast. Wish the PC demo would come out so that I can see for myself the most important part of the game - whether the combat, that 'core gameplay', is fun and well designed. (Even if we had the dream multiplayer bonanza some people want, game would suck if combat sucked.) Can people who have actually played the Xbox demo tell us about that a bit more? Surely that's the more interesting bit for all of us.

From memory, you are meant to have different starts, or at least different ways in which the starting bits unfold, depending on choice of character... because of course you're meant to run into the other 3 characters along the way and thus 'unlock' them for that campaign. This unlocking obviously doesn't apply to co-op, so I don't know what happens there, though.

Yes, unless they are about fighting in tunnels.

Fallout: New Vegas had to use Bethesda's version of Gamebryo, because they only had ~12 months to make the game. This is the first time Obsidian is using its own engine, Onyx. Edit: And of course, Onyx looked very, very different in the Aliens RPG leak. I suspect they've gone for lower textures because they want the game to run well on lower specs, handle lots of monsters on screen, and be played zoomed out.

Actually, all they need to do is actually look at a real PS2 game:

It depends on the game - something like Age of Empires, for example, was rated & beloved for its multiplayer, but it turned out that something like 80% of their sales came from people who would only ever play the single player campaign. Would be a bit different for Blizzard games, of course.

There's no problem with debating the issue or criticising Obsidian, but we've already got multiple threads about multiplayer where comparisons to DS1/2 abound. Plasee feel free to continue there.

Hrm. It makes sense to me in local coop, since in DS3 everyone would stick together anyway. In online coop you'd expect everyone to have their own screen, though? We'll see...

Wait, people like split screen? That's news to me, but then I haven't played co-op/MP in ages. I used to hate split screen, but maybe that was because everyone had tiny monitors/TVs back in the way. You couldn't see anything.

If you look at the distribution of scores, you don't see a trend of Europeans giving all games an easier time; you see several trends that include (a) US scores heavily punishing certain aspects, such as high difficulty, while going easy on other aspects, such as story, while the EU scores have different priorities; (b) slight bias towards games from their own regions for both sides, though this may not be intentional; © tendency for US to give AAA titles high scores because they are AAA, though this may, again, be related to how US scores value production values a lot more. Whether you think either side is better or worse depends on where your own priorites lie. Of course, it's then complicated by factors such as reviewers often going by their personal opinion, some reviews being influenced by indirect bribery in ads and exclusives, etc.

I can understand people criticising the design decision because they really wanted online MP, or think it's too much of a change in the franchise, but I'm not sure what "this is 2011" even means. What's wrong with having some diversity and different games that focus on different features to make them good? It's not like an ARPG without online MP is crap by default (as evidenced by, uh, gazillions of ARPGs out there). I guess it puts a lot of pressure on the buddy co-op though - they sacrificed a lot of things to concentrate on it, so it needs to be very fun to make the game really stand out.

Let's keep this thread to demo impressions (once anyone gets it), the online MP discussion can go in the relevant thread.

Fight about the points, not the people.

They're bad scores if they're from a US game mag; from European ones, they're decent. Of course, American ones generally tend to focus a huge amount on production values and accessibility for their final scores, even if they praise other elements like story in their actual review content.

I know you don't mean LOTR style epic Calax, but I'm not sure they could have done a lot more to add a sense of 'scale' - we already have dialogue references to past battles and what it means for the North as a whole, we get to participate in numerousd iplomatic discusisons and political intrigue with kings, sorceresses and ambassadors, we get a big international relations conference, we have a tightly fought siege and all out battle, etc. I think the actual problem is not 'epic' but delivery of the sense of scale and conflict, which might be what you meant. I thought Ch2 was the best at it, though. Especially if you go to , everyone's talk and behaviour reflects a sense of impending danger and possibly doom, which hangs over the city in every corner; nearly every single quest is written to reflect this gloomy condition; you run into multiple scenes of conflict and pre-war skirmishes out in the 'wilderness'. I thought Chapter 1 was a lot worse in that the Scoiatael are much more invisible, and what Dandelion describes as that air of amoral, calculating opportunism is hard to find outside of certain characters and the finale. Things such as Kayran's threat to Flotsam, and the missing , for instance, could have been delivered a lot better. That said, few games do this very well - it's hard to come up with any great examples. NWN1/2 certainly didn't do much in this department, they just used a very convenient plague.