Tigranes

You're... using BG1 UI for BG2? That particular party is actually very tough if you're on Hard or Insane, with mods like SCS, in fact too tough for me in a number of playthroughs. After TW2 I might continue my BG run and see if I can bring him down.

Having heaps of fun just running around in Chapter 1 town. Still terrible FPS though, which means the arm wrestling minigame is really hard for me - you lose the bar once and you can't get it back with the laggy mouse. Encountered one possible bug where Geralt wakes up with a bad hangover and - turns out you need to talk to the fisherman to start the chain of events, but after I failed the initial I couldn't try again, or talk to anyone else. Generally feels like a bigger and better TW1 in almost every aspect - it's the same game but beefed up and polished a lot more. Dialogue is verbose, appropriately written and funny; combat is the same twitchy swordtwirling but more varied and thoughtful. So far though it does appear a lot more linear - there is C&C but the experience as a whole is driven through cutscenes and triggered episodes. I don't mind, since they've designed it very well. It feels like wandering around looking up various scenes that the devs have planted throughout the game.

In good projects the QA works with the developer - bugsquashing has to happen all the time, not "here's our Beta version, get back to us with 317 bugs to fix". A buggy game can have many causes (convoluted development process, rushed schedule, bad tools, change of tools, bad management, etc), so Obsidian surely is part of the problem, but it really depends on whether SE has given them a good investment in QA, whether the delayed time is being used well, etc. Anyway, yes, it's important for Obs to make DS3 bug free esp. after they've come out and said it. Personally I've seen so many more buggy games that Obs don't seem that out of the ordinary, but you never want gamebreaking bugs for anyone.

In Chapter 1 now and the forest is killing my frame rate back down. Would be awesome to play this thing at a proper rig. QTEs have been simple and not really that bad so far, I'm trying it with "Difficult QTEs" on for now. Just depends on the frequency and if they ever get needlessly complicated. At least theres an option to turn off. I actually like the fact that they throw in all these various gameplay types in the first 5 hours - dragon, stealth escape, etc - so far it's a very guided and 'cinematic' experience but it's done so very well. Interface is fine to me. The main GUI is almost identical to TW1, then theres the Ctrl slowmotion radial which works fine - then the full screen Inv/etc menus are just OK, just as TW1 was. Only main problem is the inventory screen obviously should have allowed much larger lists with all the info at once, but hell, it's not much worse than the original Tiny Icon Bonanza. Anyway, if you haven't bought it yet, buy it now. You won't see a better RPG release in 2011.

That's my impression as well. I'm fairly happy with lowish settings at 10-15fps now, I'll stick with it until I get a new desktop. Done about half of the prologue and it instantly shows you that it's going to be great. Pretty linear and maybe too cutsceny at the moment, but that should change after the prologue. Playing on Hard and dying a lot, getting to grips with the combat and also with the low fps. It is definitely harder and definitely requires more tactics than TW1.

My GPU definitely isn't integrated. Don't know if that means I can replace it, though. I've found that turning off all unnecessary processes and disabling the second monitor's helped - I'm running low settings but with OK textures at 12-13fps now. Will see if defragging helps later - good to know a laptop which technically fails min. reqs can still run it. Which woudl be fine with me if the combat wasn't so twitchy to require more FPS. Just died to about four random soldier mooks.

Can you even do that with laptops, or has it changed these days? Thinking of buildilng a new PC when I move stateside in September though. Seems that Texture Downscaling really makes the game look like a puddle of mud - now I have all settings low but no Tex down & "Small" Texture Memory size, and getting 7-10fps running around in the opening area. Heck, I just tried medium settings with antialisaing, bloom, blur, SSAO, etc, and it runs at a steady 7-8fps - doesn't that mean it's a CPU handicap? But on whatever setting this game looks amazing - the tentflaps are waving, trebuchet firing overhead, huge war camp you can see in the horizon in every direction, bright sun shining, literallyd ozens of characters walking around laughing and talking, banners waving, grass waving, even at low settings it's beautiful. And even on my crap PC loading times are fast and inventory / etc menus are responsive (though dialogue options have mouse lag).

Laptop. Intel Core2Duo P7350 2Ghz. 3GB RAM. Nvidia 9600M GT 512mb. Win7. Going to fiddle with settings to see if it's a CPU or GPU bottleneck, unfortunately I suspect the former, which means there's really no improving that fps. I'd be perfectly happy with non-castrated textures and 15fps...

Well, it runs. On the very lowest settings of everything at 1280x800. At 8fps. And the textures are so downgraded half of them look like Morrowind and the other half look like Deus Ex. The first one. ...and the game still manages to be good looking :cry:

Taking about an hour to unpack and install.

It's the other way round, since publishers usually do the QA for medium sized devs like Obs.

Hardware disadvantaged Hulk smash! Well... zoraptor said 10-70 and I assume on pretty decent settings. I'll be happy with low settings and 15fps.

I'm badly out of date on specs, can someone tell me how zoraptor's compares with my laptop (intel c2duo p7350 2ghz / win7 / gforce 9600M GT 512mb / 3GB RAM)?

Bye bye, Zoraptor.

Uh... this is addressed in exactly the bit you quoted: "even 50,000 signatures might show that enough people care to meet that 500k sales target".

It's a single text message. It doesn't make Obama's face pop out of your phone and yell GET TO IT SOLDIER. Let's not blow it out of proportion. I don't know, "there is a tsunami coming right now get the hell out" might be a good one. Or the location of nearby shelters. As LC says, the data privacy thing is the only issue, how the gov is getting all the numbers, how it will use them in the future.

I think most of your criticisms are valid Enoch - fairly dull combat, too many stretched out pedestrian sidequesting portions in the game, some of the larger choices in the game being rather weakly balanced - but I didn't think it really detracted that much from the game. I guess it's a question of whether those things make TW1 simply a clunky pretender at a large old school RPG, or a large old school RPG with its own share of flaws. I tend to think the latter, especially with all the EE upgrades. That said, TW2 seems to be one of those games that make almost everything bigger and better, BG2 to BG1, as far as I can tell right now.

Isn't it because some people prefer splitscreen? I hate splitscreen. Inventory may be OK because the icons so clearly delinate what item is for what character, etc. It worries me more that the shop has like 15 items with the same icon. As long as it's easy to really quickly scroll the shop inventory and also hover & tooltip each item it should be OK.

Interplay has most definitely not recovered from anything yet. Since their 'revival' 4 years ago they've only released 2 games - a basic 2D platformer and a pinball game. Everything else has been empty words for now. They are thus constantly running at a loss (their 10-Q at the end of last year shows hundreds of thousands of dollars every quarter or something like that). We have seen no real substantial work on FO and it is hard to believe it will be out next year, especially since the lawsuit with Bethesda is not yet over - and even then, whether it iwll be any good is unknown. The only way Interplay would be able to make a triple-A budgeted DA game is if (a) FO was, against all odds, wildly successful, and the company was able to expand dramatically with many new quality employees; (b) Herve Caen possesses a silver tongue and the publishers of the world believe giving hundreds of millions of dollars to a half-dead company with no proof of its ability to produce decently selling games since 2004. Edit: That said, I can't help but like your optimism.

Can't remember if they're free or not, anyone else? Anyway, we're getting into personal preference territory here. One thing I will say is that sorry to be a sourpuss, but there's a very small chance you'll see a "DS1/2" mod for DS3, no matter how mod-friendly they make it. You're talking an entirely new character creation system, entirely new classes, entirely new sets of skills, abilities, magic, entirely new interface to accommodate them, entirely new encounter balance, new animations, new items, new store lists, new loot generation... in other words, more like a whole new game than a couple of scripts. Hell, if you want pack mules and a full party too, you've just built up a literal mountain of work that requires a team of developers. What would be nice if DS3 went for a bigger DLC / full xpack thing where they would add in new characters with, again, a new set of unique skills.

For such smart people talking about all these big things my soggy humanities brain cannot comprehend, it sure feels silly to point out something so simple, but... No more calling other people morons one way or the other, please, your e-peen will survive.

If we're looking at a smaller project rather than an AAA title - and certainly, the mismanaged, legally troubled, mostly dead Interplay of today may not be capable of anything more - then they would still need to show their publisher/investors that they would sell at least half a million copies. On one hand, even 50,000 signatures might show that enough people care to meet that 500k sales target. On the other hand, you can bet that out of those 50k signatures, at least 10-20% will probably not end up buying the game (the way the game turns out doesn't tickle their fancy, they've moved on, they pirate it instead, etc). I'd think that in general, you'd want to at least approach 5 digits in signatures, and for the petition to gain traction in online gaming media (which it won't unless it has +5000 at least), for the petition to make a difference. A few thousand? Perhaps, if Atari were pretty close to reviving the game behind the scenes already. A thousand or less? About as much chance as a monkey's arse winning Miss Universe.

I don't see passive regeneration as something horrible - it all depends on how the system as a whole fits together. But as Lord Elvewyn says, my point is - afaik all of DS3's characters have a defensive stance related skill that allows them to regain health one way or the other, then we know Katarina for instance has life-steal abilities. You certainly should never be stuck with 2 health with a boss around the corner with no way around death. This is a different question altogether, really. I always like more variety in skills in my games, but I understand why they went with this model for DS3. Again it comes down to a question of pace and the structure of the game as a whole. Because DS3 has you control a single character and is meant to be a very fast paced, collide-with-enemies sort of game, you want to become intimately familiar with your skills and use them very quickly, hand fits glove - that works better with a smaller array of skills. It also ties into co-op where you still want that fast paced single character experience, but also build characters with specific styles that complement other styles. So it seems that instead of making 50 skills, for instance, they've made 10 skills with 2-3 variations for each skill plus various proficiencies or whatever they are called, so that you have fewer but very customisable skills. Gut feeling before playing the game is that they could still have offered a bit more than what they're giving us now, and I think it'll be a bit too simplistic, but the general direction makes sense. Certainly at least they seem to have tried to make those skills quite imaginative and cool, instead of Fireball, etc.

I always feel sorry for the undercity party - it's like they were just put there so you can feel good using up all the precious resources you've hoarded till now. This time I opened with 2 wand of fireballs, 2 potions of explosions, 1 necklace of missiles and 1 detonation arrow. End of encounter. Very early game, I liked the wand of missiles because they're a surefire way to interrupt enemy spellcasters; later the wand of paralysis can be great against some crazy tanks like the fastest dart thrower in the sword coast. You should always do Durlag's Tower at the very end - unless your thief is high enough level it can be really frustrating, literally everything is trapped. I could only go there once Imoen levelled up enough after dualclassing to kick her thief levels back in, and I had saved up ~10 potions of perception. The death knight is also surprisingly easy if you break his mirror - him and his clone end up killing each other. Chess battle's amazingly hard on SCS/Insane though.

If we're getting into whether DS3 is "Dungeon Siege" enough, or more accurately, whether it has lost some of the charm / enjoyment that the DS system provided, well, it's hard for me to say - I was utterly bored with DS1 after a few hours and thought it was a horrible game, and after a short go with DS2 I felt it was definitely better, but not enough. The trouble is that as far as I can see, the only truly unique appeal the DS1/2 systems had (different not only from DS3 but BG/NWN/etc) is that it was, well, easy and unpunishing. Regeneration. Auto-attacking options. Generally very easy encounters. That's not necessarily 'bad' - but my point is that DS1/2 were unusually geared towards this kind of laid back gameplay, to the point that some people still reference it as a game that plays itself. I think it's difficult to expect that from DS3, especially when you want the game to be more fast-paced, actiony and when you put an even bigger focus on combat. Even if you were happy with DS1/2, it's a lot more boring / tedious if you only have one character, a smaller selection of abilities and most of the time you're fighting rather than talking. Every game sets its particular kind of 'pace'. The good part seems to be that DS3 has made sure that Easy mode is really very easy, and when you make mistakes you still have time to bounce back, and you have the time to try a few different things and see what you should do against said boss. Retreating, holing up in a corner and waiting for mana regen isn't the only way to play strategically - it's much more fun to be dodging the boss attacks, maybe take a few hits, but from those hits learn what you should and shouldn't do, without dying multiple times. And then they've put in the hardcore difficulty for people who do like a challenge (which is different from 'masochist' enjoyment: you can't really condemn people who enjoy difficult games as 'crazy' - that would be the same as me simply saying DS1 is only for idiots and you should learn to game. Point is that there are different types of gamers that want different things.) Now, in the end, DS3 is nearly complete and it is what it is. So leaving aside whether it should have been designed more like DS1/2 to start with, I don't think the issue here is one of difficulty, or one of punishing / not punshing the player. I think the main difference will be one of pacing. And the good news for you, I suppose, is that from watching gameplay trailers (and there is speciffically one out there that we know is on Easy difficulty), you really dont have to jump and roll around like a maniac in order to not die. There's plenty of time and HP room to take a few hits, learn what works/not, make a couple of mistakes, and pick things up along the way then apply those solutions. This is a common misunderstanding. Positive reinforcement is indeed good, but nothing tell us that positive reinforcement to the exclusion of all negative motivations is beneficial. Especially in a game environment, you need to have an appropriate mix of punishments and rewards. Because it's not enough to just encourage the player to solve the problem, or to make him anticipate the rewards of solving the problem - you also want him to dread what might happen if the problem is not solved, and dread the various roadblocks and what they might do to him on the way. Because overcoming obstacles and achieving victory is all the sweeter when it comes after failure, or you know the punishments you have been able to avoid. The only problem is when the balance is off, and the player is too frustrated. (btw, I thought we had mild regeneration in DS3, at least in lower difficulties? No?) That's what makes it more exciting and fun, isn't it? I mean, we dont' enjoy watching a movie where James Bond/whoever always has exactly the right tool to defeat his opponent. We like situations where he has to kill 3 guys with 2 bullets, or forced to go toe to toe with someone bigger and meaner. Again, the only problem would be if Lucas was so handicapped against the boss it is much harder than usual (which would be a flaw with the encounter design, not the combat system), or if globules of health didn't drop like flies all the time like we've seen in previews. Hell, every character has a defensive stance where they regain health! I really think you're exaggerating the extent of the problem.