Tigranes

I think it's hilarious how when a group of people in the industry have arbitrarily decided that the consumer should get more and more inconveniences for his money and get treated worse and worse, there are consumers who really pull out every argument in the book to try and defend the course of events and accuse others of being whiners or whatever. Even worse, is complaining a crime now? Why don't we discuss the issue instead? It doesn't make you cooler, more intelligent, or more correct if you call other people whiners., it just devalues your argument. Obviously DA2 DRM isn't the "worst ever", that's a completely meaningless debate, except to show how this stuff is becoming more common. The only actually relevant issues are (a) does DA2 DRM inconvenience the consumer in a substantial way, and (b) is DA2 DRM part of, and encourages, DRM getting more and more intrusive and prohibitive? You could argue that (a) is not substantial, and I can see how people might say that - though even in New Zealand you get frequent internet outages - but (b) is pretty much impossible to argue against. Unless you want to be an ostrich and say "meh DRM doesn't affect me so far, so I'll assume its future iterations will continue not to bother me, so all of you are whiners shut up". And that's very logical... 'course it's not the end of the world, but it's a good reason not to buy DA2. Made an exception with FNV, but this isn't worth supporting bad DRM. Of course that's the reason. Doesn't mean DRM is effective in practice, or that consumers shouldn't oppose it.

You'll be glad to know that DA2 DRM also comes with limited activations, free of charge. Of course it's not. So?

I heard it's pretty simple and not really worthwhile unless you go MP? I'm on the fence, might try the demo. edit: Steam only? Blargh.

That's actually a really good point, if I had been excited for the game and preordered I would be pissed. They can't cancel & get refunds? I can deal with dumb marketing, but dumb marketing that gets in your way and damages your experience is quite another thing. In the wider scheme of things,though, it's another big release that feels that online checks are the way to go - and sales will probably be inconclusive enough to validate the decision. Go go continuous-online-check-you-don't-own-anything-forced-updates-micro-transaction-mod-unfriendly-model.

Woop, that's it. No Dragon Age 2 for me. Not worth putting up with that nonsense.

Well, basically, ironman means you can't reload because the fight isn't going well for you or because someone got killed. Sometimes people will say ironman should delete your saves, etc., but because of bugs like you encountered I tend to think that's rubbish. Anyway, you reloading to refight battles is definitely not ironman, but that's ok - better for the LP if you don't get wiped out, I uppose. Lovely. Are those names from the original module?

Finally caught up, awesome stuff sorophyx. If we're going ironman then there's no other way, you gotta do every area and every battle - it ain't true ironman otherwise. We killed him, right? Same in BG, actually, and from memory, IWD.

Sounds awesome, except... well, why the hell do you need to buy flour? Do they want you to larp a baker? It woudl be excellent if they had things like various ore mines competing with each other and whole towns' livelihood depending on those mines - so that if you mess up one town's production it will have an impact on factions or other quests. However, most likely it's only related to "-Speaking of jobs : woodcutting, weaponsmithing, sells stuffs you made to the forge or to the mill..." Doesn't sound particularly unpredictable. Better than the quest compass. Unless you have both. In that case, roflmao. might as well retcon the lore so that every person carries teleport stones and can teleport you straight to wherever they need you to go.

Not bad, Hurlshot, not bad. Myself, I hit 8 over par today... ....at the pirates mini golf place

Chain Shot is the only overpowered weapon skill. If you only used ARs until the end game you would have seen that they are a very useful and effective weapon throughout; it's simply that with CS, the Pistol is too powerful and too fun.

I'm on the fence on Div 2 or TW2, i'll probably try one of them soon but I'm not sure which one. Both seem flawed in their own ways, but might well win my money over the guaranteed-but-not-really-exciting promise of DA2.

I played hardcore all the way through and on Cautious, companions dying are only ever a problem when (a) they are indoors and the aggro/alert mechanism sometimes goes berserk, I suspect due to it not accounting for walls and even less with elevation within a single cell, and (b) when you're trying to kite or snipe or camp and they blithely march up to the enemy. Certainly wasn't great but not a huge deal either, sometimes you'd leave them on Wait.

Incredible speed at which the events are taking place, I hadn't expected it at all. Certainly the MB risk is very very high if Mubarak leaves now.

Steam does suck, but you can use Offline Mode. Hopefully. Unless Steam bugs out on you.

Now you just sound like Volo. Me not using it doesn't make it any less gimmicky and stupid.

The dictators and Kings in the region will all die in the next 2-3 decades if they aren't overthrown, so even if they survive the Tunisian precedent, it's a matter of time. But yes, timing is going to be all-important - especially in Egypt. The protests like that are nothing really new though, I'm under the impression that Egyptian dissent hasn't been able to mount a meaningful political / military challenge in a while.

Oh. Well, given how well-judged those GOTY awards are, meh. I don't see why you'd need to disparage your own GOTY for that, though I guess in your case you're just excited about playing RDR at some point. Anyway, not sure how we can all do Top 10 lists since I barely tried 20 games last year. I'd say Obsidian delivered with Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas, they pretty much booked up May-July & October-December. Risen was probably the big one in the first half but the release was in '09.

So if you've never played it, how do you know it's GOTY?

I bought Risen, Dragon Age, Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas, Gothic trilogy set, PES 2011, FM 2011, Victoria 2, Gamebiz 3, Eschalon II, half a dozen GOG games, and maybe I've forgotten something here. Man. That's around 250 euro. At least I got my money's worth out of most of them.

Slowtrain raises a good point (if I understand correctly) - slower backpedalling with the existing archery system, even if arrows are more powerful, could be weird. You'd also need to look at LOS/draw distance & area design (can you sneak about the undergrowth and find a good faraway spot to start shooting?), as well as enemies' aggro/detection/pathfinding issues, where we usually either have magical homing missile critters that find you after one arrow, or just stand directly against the cliff wall where you shoot them from above.

Lots of little changes there that look very encouraging if done right. None of it is new, but a lot of it is new to TES and it will benefit from implementing such things (differentiating magical elements, etc). Agree with entrerix that it's a good call on increasing bow damage, I don't have a problem with making arrows "rare and expensive" though. Seriously. Does anybody think it will actually be really rare and really expensive? Look at ammo in FO3/NV. Big test will be whether they get the animations / jostle / stagger etc stuff right without overdoing it. Pretty good noises so far though.

Any and all screenies should be taken with a grain of salt until we get ingame footage anyway. (Looks niceish, though.)

If they're going to whore themselves out like this, at least they could do it for a good cause.... ...Minsc and Boo as unlockable characters with original VA!

Now I remember why the whole Desther-Fenthick-Aribeth thing was so annoying. Potentially Fenthick's fatal indecisiveness could have been an interesting plot point, a good story to tell about refusing to believe his faith was mistaken, etc., but it doesn't get developed, we get one cheesy conversation then an even more cheesy and insubstantial crying from Aribeth. I also remember the level design being OKish in Ch1 before it just descends into Four Macguffins Per Chapter. Keep it up!

I'm sure it will be very differerent from NWN2. Outside of D&D systems you don't really see such a complicated character development system, outside 'prestige classes' (like DA brought in from D&D).