Tigranes

Done & Joined.

Fair enough. I personally tend to forgive a lot of things in a game if there are enough redeeming qualities. I find complaining about Arcanum's broken combat pointless, for instance - not that it isn't very very broken, but because in the context of all the other great things in it, you do have a lot of fun fighting things. And then my years of playing everything at 5fps means only truly gamebreaking bugs register for me. So in the context of these QTEs, I'm thinking, they're mostly dumb, but do they ever really get in the way? (And no, "I didn't notice so I had to reload once wasting 30 seconds" doesn't count for me). Can't comment on 'clunky' as I'm the type where it juts doesn't register... probably because I grew up on 'clunky' RPGs. Wish Geralt could jump, though, just to reduce all the walking round and round.

I think QTEs are generally stupid, but not that annoying. In TW2's particular case, this holds true - as Lexx says, unnecessary, and if they didn't have the option to get rid of most of them it would have been a lot worse. I did think that one particular example (where the building you're in is burning down and damaging you) is a good one, because the QTE forces you to move fast while listening to the NPC - without it you'd just spam Quen and it would be very boring. I'd prefer to discuss the merits of QTEs individually without getting into a silly polemic over whether you're a fan/hater of TW2/QTE/whatever.

Orchomene: Exactly. You've only cited one 'difficult' one, and to be honest the QTE is appropriate in that situation - without it you WOULD be quite relaxed, it helps make you as tense and in danger as you should be. On my super low settings the shadows were 256 & 512 anyway, and they looked good enough. Edit: Anyone tried the Better Combat mod? I'm not a fan of some of it as it seems to make Geralt even more powerful (in the vanilla, once you know your way round you can make him very strong), but it does tone down Quen and make other paths more viable.

AVG's long since outgrown its lean, efficient beginnings to become another large, pointless behemoths. Ditch it. edit: That said, I don't know what's good these days. Using V3 at the moment but not sure how great it is.

I've played once with "Difficult QTEs" on and once with it off. The thing is, if you turn that off, you get like 5 QTEs in the entire game. I dont' think you get any in the cutscene, you just get a few clearly labelled and relaxed situations where you have to tap the mouse button a fwe times (quite slowly, I might add). Anyone complaining about them is bonkers... unless if you want QTEs but wish they were designed better, I guess? The Letho fight in Chapter 1 definitely is a challenge, my main problem was dodging his Aard & Igni. For his Quen, though, I found the best solution to be roll around and wait for it to expire (it's only level 1), or use throwing daggers - they are very handy. If you try and beat his Quen down then it makes it easy for him to kill you (as it should be).

It does save when you turn into though, so that's just 5 enemies. That particular boss tends to be very slow and clumsy, and the arrows / etc are fairly easy to dodge, esp. with Quen buffer. I preferred using a lot of daggers and bombs to get him from far away, then closing in a few times to deliver heavy attacks.

Don't get personal guys.

I love the game, but the railroaded cinematic stuff they're pointing out *is* stupid. The opening of Chapter 2 is probably the one place where it all combines to make a pretty boring 15 minutes - walk around slowly as a different character, fight a duel that doesn't matter, then walk very slowly killing some random things to the next destination. I just don't think they happen frequently enough to bring down the game overall - they end up being fairly small parts of the gameplay and narrative. I think the biggest problem, actually, is when the cutscene decides that you lose when you've just beaten at the end of Chapter 1. That's the worst because it was actually your Geralt fighting, with no good reason for you to lose. At least in Ch2 you're watching what happens to other characters, mostly.

I know what you're saying there, and it would be nice - but that comes down to the point that there is more to co-op/MP than just making it available, it's also a part of how you design character customisation/progression, level design, additional features, etc, etc. My best guess is that Obsidian said to themselves, our main goal is going to be to create a game that, from start to finish, is built for buddy co-op and does it really well, and we're going to design everything to make that really good, because lots of games are designed for online MP or singleplayer then throw in co-op and the market would benefit from a dedicated co-op game. This is backed upb y the way the devs've have been describing DS3 throughout. In other words, even if they, say, took a couple more months and threw in an online MP mode a la Diablo 2, I doubt it would be very good compared to, well, Diablo 3, Torchlight 2, etc. They've decided that instead of trying to do everything OK they would concentrate on making a very fun buddy co-op experience - and my point is if they succeed in that (we shall see on release), then DS3's decisions are very defensible. Quite separate from all this is whether savefiles should be kept on all players, and on that I agree it's strange that only the host can keep them, and suspect there's a technical limitation here. Hoping there will be simple workarounds.

*shrug* I agree that there are some puzzling / problematic aspects here, such as only the host keeping savefiles. The main issue is that people like you are just saying the direction as a whole is 'dumb', and you are doing that because you can only understand what makes you enjoy ARPGs and how you play them. Although DS3's exact solution may be unique, there are a lot of games out there that cater more to buddy co-op than online MP and do just fine. It seems to be for people that want to play together without having to powergame or worry about PVP and all the other trappings of a MMO / online MP world, or for people that want to be able to jump in and out very freely (i.e. get family to play together), or for people that want to play multiplayer but still care about and go through the story and world together, instead of doing 50 Diablo runs. Personally, I loved D2, but there's no point saying "this is stupid" and infer that how you enjoy ARPGs = the truth. (If 'keeping your loot and levels' across multiple playthroughs is the raison d'etre of ARPGs, all singleplayer ARPGs would be pointless.) BTW, given that there are 4 set character types, a relatively low number of character skills, randomised loot tables, a 20-30 hour long campaign and a level 30 cap, what would really be the point of 'keeping your character'? Your maxxed out level 30 character has nowhere to go unless to farm the one last dungeon a million times for no reason, esp. since there is no PvP.

Finished the second playthrough, will now give it a break until I upgrade my rig then try Insane. Want to experience it as it's meant to look. Definitely worth at least 2 runs given the massive amounts to which it diverges, both in the big branching out Chapter 2 onwards and in individual quests. Design-wise it could have done with less 'cinematic experiences' and more choices in various places (e.g. ), but still does a great job at making it a convincing narrative no matter what combination of choices you make.

It actually boils down to a very simple design decision. Do you build an online multiplayer experience where the main point is to create, keep and build your character? Or do you build a co-operative system where the main point is to experience an instance of the game together with other people? Diablo 2 is an example of the former, and then all the other design decisions follow from that - i.e. you have 'New Game+' modes to grind your character up to level 99, you have a threadbare story and a modular campaign design so it never matters that you might jump all over the plotline or kill the same boss 500 times. On the other hand, you don't expect this from BG: Dark Alliance, some of the LOTR games, heck, even a Halo co-op campaign (which, from my experience, is kept separate from its online multiplayer). In a pure co-operative experience you see design decisions that are about helping make it easy for people to play together and keep up together and experience the story and gameplay together. As C2B says it's not an online focused ARPG, and it seems that it never has been. I'd suggest Obsidian were quite foolish to not have made this crystal clear earlier on - they should have learned from AP that when people expect your game to be something different they get pissed off. But the design decision itself is perfectly fine - DS3 simply belongs to a different type/genre than, say, Diablo 2. Personally I wouldn't have minded either way, online MP or co-op. But if DS3 were to go the online MP route, a million things about the game would need to be changed. The level cap is 30 right now - what's the point of keeping a single player running around if he will max that early? The game is story-heavy and with lots of dialogue - that will get really really boring if you want to grind a boss 500 times Mephisto-style. So on and so forth. If we keep DS3 as the game it is now, then just change it so you can carry across your characters, what changes, really? That won't make this game WOW or Diablo 2, like some people want. It's a case of two different philosophies with accompanying design features and player experiences.

I agree that it would be much better if the saves were made on every character, allowing any of them to then play host and continue that game, possibly on their own or with other people. We will see if it is the size of the saves that make this problematic, since I'm not sure what other reason there could be. That said, again, I think it's the height of exaggeration to say it's a gamebreaker for anyone.

SCS Davaeorn is an odd one - either he is ridiculously difficult, if you attack him head on, or he is ridiculously easy to kill, if you abuse his own teleporting tendencies to trick him. My favoured method is to keep my party members scattered (and weaker ones invisible if possible) at the start, then using summoned creatures - preferably undead - to follow him around and make him keep wasting spells. Once the battle horrors are down (they are not as bad as, say, the Ulcaster skeletal warrior, since they can't resist some magical damage), dispel & destroy Davaeorn. Sounds like you ended up doing something similar. I tend to think that intentionally or not, SCS Davaeorn is a nice reflection of the man's personality - the arrogant and haughty mage who wants to kill you with bells and whistles, but can be easily defeated by refusing to indulge his battle plan and being a bit cowardly.

I don't think anyone needs to point out why Purkake's clever jibe doesn't make sense. Aren't we fairly sure already that Obsidian is currently working on, or wanting to work on, a smaller, mobile platform based RPG? And that it may well go down the more traditional CRPG route?

If you have a tight knit group of friends who are committed to playing through the game together, then DS3's system is perfectly fine - in fact in that case the only real difference is that you can't then go out and farm mobs with your own character, MMO-style. DS3's system only becomes problematic when, say, you're just a guy who wants to jump into random games and play with random people and in doing so, level up his own character - the system really disadvantages players who want to (a) play with anyone anywhere, and also (b) progress their own character. If you're playing with your friends there's really no issue. By the way, I find a bit odd you guys are talking about LOTR War of the North - at a brief glance I couldn't find concrete info about how their 'online co-op' works, but usually don't games of that kind, including previous LOTR ARPG titles, work pretty much like DS3, as opposed to Diablo 2? You know, pick mutually exclusive characters (in this case, only 3), then go on a romp in the single player campaign together, where progress is locally saved.

Maybe they expected every single gauntlet to give the character a clearly different look, for example, which is clearly not possible in any game with randomised loot system. If the game randmoly generates Sturdy Gauntlet +2 and Sturdy Gauntlet of Fire +1 they may look the same or hardly different. I don't see how it could be otherwise unless you create a randomised system for generating ten thousand variations of textures. The more important question is whether you get clear visual differences between types and tiers of equipment, i.e. whether your lvl30 character with a couple of unique equipment will look very different from a lvl20 guy. And I think the videos clearly show that we do.

All I know is that I log in with el_dugong and my profile name is Tigranes. What else is there? Of course, turning Steam online to check = lag, lag, doesn't log in, hangs, thinks it's running when it's not, lag, doesn't log in, lots of ads about random games I don't care about, wants to download crap when I told it not to...

Kaftan it just sounds like level / equipment / etc wise you're horribly not ready. Just come back and get the queens later, anytime before end of Chapter 1.

Damn, OK then. id is el_dugong. Don't ask.

Not necessarily - if you play on without your friend, then he/she comes back, they will be able to 'jump back' into their character, which will be auto-levelled to match your character. They just need to take a couple of minutes to distribute their newly gained points. While this means they miss out on a part of the game, that would have happened anyway in any system - it just means you don't have to waste time helping them level up and they doesn't have to give up playing with you because you're too far ahead.

Yep, I'll be wanting some people to co-op with, though hopefully NZ internet won't suck too bad. Although, I forgot if DS3 requires Steam for all versions? I want as little to do with Steam as possible.

Since they must be dirt cheap now, definitely yes. Best story and writing in any RPG in the last 5 years or more. MOTB also won't take too long, there's not too much filler and grinding.