Tigranes

Huh, that's some awesome memory. I think from what I remember it was definitely partially scripted at least, though they probably meant it to be a scripted representation of what Radiant AI might do unscripted... I don't remember if the scaling down of Radiant AI to prevent crazy world-break happened before or after that, which might go some way to explaining. The main thing that rankled with me, as I remember, was that even though they knew their game didn't feature that kind of reactivity across the board they were happy to put it up on the pedestal then reap the benefits of the press drooling over it - like a worse version of the whole "200 endings" business. Wouldn't mind knowing what I got wrong, don't want to be unfair.

Just the bit where she says there are other Boone fans, too.

Zero. The actual company in charge of the game, who are getting Obsidian to help, have zero game-making experience and will probably take a while to get it off the ground. Not info/hype stage yet.

That's what they do to ya up yonder. Horrible place.

I'm sure I'm not the only one that enjoys the irony of the last page or so? I like fun games, I don't like it when games make me cringe with stupidity or overhanded pandering. *shrug* What I think always gets ignored is - when you have everyone 'bashing Bioware', there are usually going to be two things going on there - (1) Bashing for the sake of it, (2) Bashing because they've done something stupid/bad/detestable. You can criticise (1), but that doesn't make the (2) go away. Same with fanboyism, really, in most cases. The ME series doesn't interest me at all and it looks boring - so I've hardly played it. So I won't presume to make extended judgments on them. But Bioware getting flack for using bland and boring screenshots to hype up ME3 as a "Mysterious New Game"? Bio does it they reap the derision, doesn't make everyone that comments an elitist.

I like the sound of quest fixes, but my char is already halfway through - anyone know about savegame compatibility? Unarmed with explosive backup and terrible Speech (20 at level 14) is working pretty fine so far, Paladin Toaster has evened the odds. The knockback power attack you learn from the ranger in Novac is very useful if you time it right. I like how with unarmed, as opposed to pistols/sniper, ghouls are so much easier to dispose of, but not so much geckos.

That's Route One to the classic media coverage: "Yesterday the Swedish town of Vikingsborg was bombed by terrorists killing 17 sheep and an elephant. Authorities say that this attack was completely unexpected. Critics say that there was in fact a precedent in a failed bombing several months ago, and ask why the government did not heed this warning sign."

Oh, those. For some reason I never connected their weird heads with snakes... probably cause they move so fast and I'm usually running away. Agreed that they are pretty nuts. Doesn't make Optimus, uh, Liberty Prime any better.

What the heck are coyote snakes?

Horse armour, Lying about scripted Oblivion hype sequence that was blatantly fake....a lot of Beth's bad rep (where it has one) doesn't come from their games, it comes from their PR/Marketing. They do do a lot of nice things in that area (DRM, etc), of course, but they definitely did rip people off. Anyway, RPS pretty much confirms it's a brand new engine, not a Gamebryo's Bastard Child.

FO3 was buggy as well, and many of the same bugs were present, just in slightly different ways. Certainly in my case NV's had more buggy quests, but mostly due to the complexity of the quests in question.

Yes, why not have giant crocodiles, mutated balloons and exploding digeridoos as well?! (Sorry, I guess some people actually weren't disgusted by the giant wet dream that was Liberty Prime...) FO3 tried very hard to make you get interested in the main quest at the start, no question about it. In the end story is not one of NV's strong suits, really. In both cases if you follow the MQ you end up doing the breadcrumbs for quite a while.

On the other hand, NWN2 did have quite a lot of problems due to being burdened with a heavily gutted and schizophrenic Aurora, no? Vague memories only...

I think it's pretty funny how Purkake's "wake up you stupidheads" biting sarcasm has gone so far off the charts now it's as diluted as McDonalds sodas. However, you can't deny a man his dedication. Augs look pretty standard, there are a couple of cool things in there like using feather fall to slam down on someone. Certainly more games need to let you rain death from above.

You could have just console spawned your equipment back the first game round...

While we're on the subject; http://www.whenparentstext.com

If you can't speak Swedish, and watch the video while listening to King Crimson, it's pretty surreal. I recommend it.

It's a new engine. I guess this is why they let Pete Hines do the talking, the previous statement was about as nonsense as it got.

CGI teasers are always crap. I liked the dragon ichor bit, but the rest was about as fun as an accounting textbook. There are hints that it might be Gamebryo again, though they were talking really ambiguously. If it is, I'm pretty torn - I hate how quickly we have to dispose of engines these days, and sticking with it allows them to really polish and perfect features/functions, but..

Who?

Look forward to learning about this, actually. Morrowind was excellent and while Oblivion/FO3 were meh, inbetween those two I thought Bethesda showed some improvement. If Todd Howard wasn't still at the helm I'd be even more optimistic..

Won't go on and on about this - suffice to say the market does and ideally should consist of graduated levels of affordability/accessibility, and talking about stoves and cavemen is just diving headfirst into black and white needlessly. Of course there's technological progress but what do you achieve by reducing everything down to that? Hrm... it would be nice to see some proper ragdoll applied to fantasy RPGs though, for once. Fireball making people and small objects fly around and so forth. I guess Oblivion had it, but it wasn't really noticeable due to its rather dour magic.

Sold!

Mass Effect was always about being a you-rock-buddy save-the-world space opera, so I'm not sure why anybody ever thought ME3 wouldn't end like this? Of course, from what I've seen, didn't they already do a lot of 'rally the civs' and 'Shepard I thought you were dead' already? Hrm. What EPIC have they got left?

Yep. But they also had the virtue of being few in number, making you want more, and knowing when to stop and shut up. They didn't go on and on. Of course, I don't know what pre-release trailers for D2 were like...