Tigranes

It's still very raer to actually have 64 players playing the same instance outside of MMOs. We're only just getting over the 8 limit in FPS. Kind of curious what was so fun about DS1/2 multiplayer for the fans that you want to see again? Was there anything special about it?

Really? I thought it got incredibly boring. Interesting to see it worked for some people. edit: though from memory, that was mainly due to the difficulty and the skills, etc. Click and Watch works fine in, say, BG2.

My point is that a quick and gruesome death is a valid way of telling the player that its too dangerous, and it's not a sign of 'bad design' or 'frustrating level design', as you guys are implying. The best is when it's combined like in FNV (you really will get chunked by deathclaws, but hey you were warned), but death and reload is a perfectly valid mechanism, it's not a 'failure'. The only failure would be if alternate paths were not properly marked for the player who then tries to kill deathclaws 200 times. Now, when you read Todd Howard's full quote ...it is actually pretty ambiguous, that could mean anything, so we'll see.

Yeah, it's perfectly reasonable to go anywhere you want in an RPG world and expect any enemy and any situation to offer you a reasonably similar level of challenge designed to ensure that death would only come if you screwed up, i.e. to the extent of playing Mario without the jump button... This is just another case of throwing around abstracted generalities that have no relevance to this particular context. It makes sense to get rid of frustrating reloading on "guess right or die" puzzles, it makes no sense to make that argument when talking about decisions like level scaling. In fact, the question should never be "should an enemy be so strong to kill a player character easily", it should be, "should a game allow the player access to areas that are meant to be too difficult", and if a game does so in a good manner, great! It's nonsensical that we started off from that desire for nonlinearity and player freedom, and have now gone face back into arse, and are arguing that player freedom, actually, represents making him able to go anywhere to the point that he should not really be in danger anywhere. Because it's frustrating.

There's nothing wrong with reloading. Dying is an integral part of the way you play video games.

Demos rarely come out so soon, you should look for one near the release date or after it.

On the 'big scale multiplayer' stuff I can see the disappointment, but ...Wasn't this known since the very beginning? Were you expecting, say, easter egg skeletons or something? I suppose that'd be cool but they'd get boring in about 3 seconds. Extremely hard and time consuming, and if done by devs, extremely time and money consuming since they've taken care to craft 4 unique classes that defy typical classes, integrate them into story, balance game, build item designs, etc.

Arcade's quest is unmissable.

A doppleganger, and Chrono Trigger. Never played CT much but I guess we can assume the D&D kind? Shapechange?

Meanwhile, I dream of a day when forum moderators become an obsolete relic of the past.... Keep it nice buddies.

Don't get me wrong, I think the open world worked fine in the main game, but having played that several times I did appreciate Dead Money as something very fresh. I do agree about the Villa area being hard to navigaet, but I thought it fit the theme of the place nicely.

above: ...from the New Scientist, by the way.

Finished Dead Money, at about 5 hours. Excellent, definitely worth it and FNV really benefits from the 'tighter' design of a DLC. On the main talking points, I didn't feel the collar/speaker/etc mechanisms were that bad at all - certainly nowhere as annoying as MOTB's spirit meter (though I was fine with that too). You can run through most areas before your head blows up, I enjoyed being careful and sneaking around high-strength enemies but you definitely don't have to crawl around all the time. Heck, you can just run past holograms most of the time. It's definitely high level but I played on hardcore/very hard with a level 15 character and did OK. Story is well done, though I didn't find all the fragments to add it all up so the impact wasn't as big as it could have been. Dog is definitely the standout character. The introduction of whole new enemies and weapon sets, and the fact that you need to scrounge for survival, makes it interesting, but once again, the difficulty/annoynace is overstated I feel - after an hour or two you're swimming in the 'new' gear anyway.

That's because putting in the money to continue making 'item updates' doesn't make financial sense for non-MMO games, and publishers would not fund the developers and allow them to do this. I'm sure many devs would love to spend a few weeks adding things and touching up their released games if they had the money. Anyway, on loot, it depends on what your standard of loot-heavy is, but most of Obsid games have been pretty loot-heavy for the kind of games they are. None of them have been action RPGs and none of them have really had that kind of multiplayer, so it wouldn't make sense to have Diablo-level loot in those. I imagine here it will be different.

As I expected my laptop will struggle on PC/Graphics. I preordered years ago, will be happy as long as it runs...

They did two last year, good enough for me.

Would have preferred Diablo 3 style presentation where you get to see the character running around blowing things up at speed, as mentioned the whole 'cinematic' closeups don't work with the game and you can't really see a lot. I like the fact that we're getting characters that really mix up the standard fighter/mage/etc.

(1) Feargus never said PC games aren't worth investing in anymore. What Obsidian are clearly doing is trying to expand the range of games they make and the range of platforms they deliver on. (2) Alpha Protocol's problems weren't so much due to porting, it was due to the game getting a bad reception and SEGA pulling the plug on future support. (3) Some usual good-things-for-PC-players have been mentioned, such as a properly designed mouse/keyboard control and higher graphics options for PCs. I suspect the interface will be rather 'consolish' though.

Wow, that got sidetracked. :D My point was simple and there is no getting round it: PC ports with 3rd party involvement run a higher risk of screwups and when there is a higher risk it makes every sense to hold off purchase a few days and see, if you were planning on preordering. All that stuff about DA2 comparisons just stinks of argument for argument's sake. Still excited for DX3 and looks like a fun game, but whereas I might have preordered before, I'll wait a couple of days or so now.

I read the article. Doesn't matter what the team is, though, when you are looking at a lower-priority port with a third party developer involved on such a complex game it makes every sense to pass on it Day 1 and hear some user reports. Since you know, worst case scenario is you pick it up Day 1 and this was the one they buggered up. Not so 'moronic', I'd think.

With Gothic I recommend that you just invest a few hours into it and get used to the controls, perhaps with a few adjustments. I mean, it IS still sort of keyboard and mouse, just very weirdly so. I set it up so that I look with the mouse, I WASD to move, I left/right click to attack, and set all secondary buttons near the WASD. There's no doubt that G1/2 are criminally clunky, but theres mroe than enough to make up for it.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/23...oped-by-nixxes/ DX3 PC developed "sort of in-house but also with outside studio" Obviously if you pre-order the PC version you're a moron. Let's see if the port is horrible or merely adequate.

I agree with you and lay a small online token of respect to the avatar of utter Win. However, Foo Fighters? Pretty good. That's all. I realise we must duel to the death now.

It's quite strange, really. I've been a strong proponent of the Biowriting = Mediocre Soap Opera argument, but recently I've been thinking more and more that in many ways, you can see what its defenders are talking about. When you're in there playing their games, a lot of the times, perhaps 50%, their writing and, say, obsidian's writing is hard to tell from each other. I mean, there are only so many ways you can say "Rescue my daughter", and to Bio's credit they definitely have their moments. I think the real difference is not just a writing difference, but it comes hand in hand with things like their plot design (especially which parts of the plot are exposed to the player and how), dialogue design (which choices, when, how), and with other gameplay elements tied to writing (e.g. character romances). The main reason I appreciate BIS/Obsid writing so much is that there are nearly always moments when you are really, really excited by the navigation of the dialogue tree itself (something they arguably pushed to the maximum in Alpha Protocol, if it worked for you) - really gripped by what they might say next and really torn between the choices. And it wasn't always just because of the quality of the lines, it was always tied in with the position those dialogues had in the plot (PS:T 3 incarnations talk, Myrkul talk), how the choices were set up (Ravel, Master...), sometimes how they'd react to things you'd done outside that dialogue. It is cool to hear from some people that DA2 did have some such exciting moments, though, and i hope they get any credit due on that so they keep working in that direction.

I've harped on about it for about 600 different posts, so I'll keep it simple: offline mode used to not work, takes more than 30 seconds for me to start (used to be ~5mins), automatic updates that do it even if you refuse, difficulty with patch rollback, ads, difficulty with mods sometimes, insistence on making it necessary for everyone.