Tigranes

They hired an actual martial arts master and focused on getting practical kind of moves that would actually be used in those situations, from memory.

Volo's frothing at the mouth at imaginary strawmen again, but just to come back to the issue - yeah, I don't see a big deal here. There's nothing wrong with a few judicious retcons - retcons suck when they change things for the worse or hugely disrupt the canon. Hell, as Volo/etc pointed out, we see so few qunari in DAO anyway - what if the qunari race has blue qunari, grey qunari, red qunari, ones with horn,s without horns, etc? Not a problem. For me the new look isn't a big deal, just wondering whether the whole 'hyperdisciplined race with very different but very coherent logic' deal gets better developed, or thrown out the window. edit: also, You're still cool Gaider.

It's a slick, well made Diablo II clone. For me the first game to do it 'right' since D2. The pity is that as a SP game, after beating it a few times and going up the levels, you sort of run out of reasons to keep playing - and when it first came out the loot mechanics were a little wonky (crafting). Still, worth it if you get it cheap.

Bio sure knows how to keep us going, at any rate: new Qu'nari. source. Looks like they've been spiced up and made more x-treme... clearly Sten didn't fit in because he was more down to earth kind of guy. I thought they were one of the more interesting parts of DAO lore, we'll see how they change in culture/etc?

Not the point. Or do you want to enlarge this into a discussion where we evaluate every gameplay/story component in a BioRPG? I can see what Grommy means by the catch-22, and yeah, I do think that Bio romances will either stay this way, or become even more integral - they'll get better at what they're trying to do now, but it won't make anybody who is disgusted with it any happier. Well, maybe a little, if by virtue of being fleshed out they get a bit less irksome - Morrigan's romance did seem a little better from what little I saw, because it was invested with a narrative of self-examination, etc. as well. its main failing was that it didn't have a lot of time, and had to resort to silly monologues of "oh, I wish I had friends", but that leads back to what I was saying...

Oh. Well, I thought it was pretty good, but nothing special. It didn't 'click'. Maybe I'll wait for lowered prices then... though with this game, fat chance of THAT happening.

No, you can't, unless you sacrifice any nuances for the sake of making an analogy fit for everything. i.e. you could say it for combat, but you know, combat is recognised as necessary for any and every DAO player, changing things. (Edit: I do see your point though - maybe I feel it's more obnoxious than other things because I don't like it. Maybe a bit of bias.) As I say, I don't mind the STFU option - I don't mind the idea that the romances are there. If it stops spoiling MY dinner party after I say STFU, it's fine. If I end up missing out on a lot of story content because I don't participate in romances, or the romance keeps coming back and asking me if I'm sure, then no, it's annoying. If I was to think about what kind of romance I might actually like in an RPG, I really think they need to cut sex, babies, families, etc out of the equation and start from the basics. The inclusion of sex has meant that in the current 'generation' of romances, all romance is a linear route towards a sexual encounter, after which, for the most part, the romance has concluded. It's just a bloody sidequest: do X, Y, loot=sex, the end. It cheapens the experience, it makes the sex a carnal fan service (and, effectively, softcore porn) rather than part of a romantic encounter. I think if they focus on the small stuff - i.e. two adventurers who grow to like & understand each other, and eventually decide to go romantic - it could be done much better. I don't hold a lot of hope out for this, though, we seem to be going the opposite direction and soon we'll have gay sex, threesome sex, sex with goats, you name it.

Well I'm hearing that missions provide interesting varied gameplay - and I don't know, there's just this amazing weight on my head saying GET IT, telling me I should be excited and I wont' regret it. It's odd, ddoesn't usually happen to me. We'll see...

Semantics again. Sure romances are optional in DAO. The sticking point is that romance is sort of the guy that pops up everywhere you go at a dinner party going HEY LOOK AT ME and handing out business cards with a large portable spray. It's obnoxious. I can get over it if I get the "shut the hell up and never bring this up" option, which, from my memory, you did get in DAO.

Didn't we have vodyanoi in The Witcher? And weren't they like D&D Sahuagin in that?

Of course not, these screenies aren't perfect but anything would look better than DA2's initial screenies. Won't be the case with the full game, obviously. One thing is that DA2 seems to have pretty high quality models for key characters. I like the lighting and some of the stuff going on, like the spin kick thing, but yeah textures are definitely pretty muddy. The guy spinning in the 2nd screenie is interesting - looks like some sort of unusual blur/motion rendering style.

The escaped anaurocj seems interesting enough to merit securing a place as the third option, actually. Potentially it could happen at the worst moment during (1) or (2), i.e. the chaos threatens to wipe out the evidence leading to the kidnapper. (1) is also probably a good way to give the players a nice bit of loot, something not too powerful but unusual enough to feel special.

Generic is overused, but that doesn't mean there aren't stories which are generic to their detriment. I felt that the slick, polished, well produced delivery of the story only served to highlight how devoid of life the narrative was. Personal call, of course.

I was too much of an Age of Empires style man, didn't really like SC or WC much. Additionally, I still don't know how people rave on about SC's storyline - it was generic crap, just delivered slickly, just like Diablo's. Storyline is certainly not why I'd play of any of Blizz games. That said, SC2's certainly looked interesting, so I'm torn...

Well, as long as it's not DA2: It all happened in the Matrix, silly...

From memory there's an FOVAngle setting in one of the engine ini files, check in My Documents or possibly one of the Base files in the Alpha Protocol folder. You could fiddle wth that and see if it helps.

Man, that's weird. :/ What happens if you roll back the ini changes?

I had a nice family friend who actually erected wooden boards in his living room to give me a room when I had nowhere to stay for a few months, who proceeded to die of cancer a few years later. I was 16 or so and it was just really really uncomfortable being in that hospital room knowing he's going to die very soon. I think it was on one hand having no idea whether to be cheerful or solemn or emotional or whatever, and on the other this terrible feeling that I thought I should be more devastated. It didn't help that he instructed his funeral to be a strictly cheerful, tongue-in cheek affair.

Just plumbing through my mega-BG playthrough (the 239th one). Tried to use NPCs I don't normally use, but really, it's no contest - some characters are just too boring (Valygar, Cernd), while taking Aerie is like admitting you like destroying your own brain cells. nevertheless went for PC (Wild Mage), Keldorn, Jaheira, Minsc, Anomen and Jan. used mods to get greater control over their proficiencies, sticking Minsc on bow duty while Keldorn and Jaheira go up. Ideally the two divine casters will keep the smarter and better outfitted SCS mages off my back. Nearing the end of Chapter 2, having done most of the sidequests avaialble - now tackling the Unseeing Eye. Beholders really piss me off because their fast rate of attack means I never know what's going on and who's making what saves, then bam you have people turned to stone (which often breaks NPC scripts). Even worse, I made a mistake andi nstalled a mod component which allows beholders to disarm your Shield of Balduran. Blargh. Still continues to amaze me how absolutely chocked with quests this game is, as well as pretty good reward distribution, enemy differentiation, visual differentiation, etc - especially with some mods.

More details: Why the return of the radial? I never understood the point - it seemed to be borne out of some sort of research committee who worked out it would minimise the cursor movement between each option, but never really did anything great in practice. Still, it's not terrible. The uninterruptible, lengthy 'fatality' animations in Dragon Age were a big annoyance if you wanted tactical combat, so again it's going for "WOW DUDE THAT'S REAL COOL" to the detriment of good gameplay, but meh - again, it's not a big deal. The encouraging point is that the combat doesn't feel too different.

How do you figure that DA has a much longer crit path, by the way? Just curious - I mean, BG2 revolved around the fact that you had the choice of a bewildering number of sidequests to kick off the crit path, while DA pretty much forced you to consume the majority of the game content in the form of crit path hubs. I mean, is a direct comparison really worthwhile? I think there is a point to be had that the Origins were a more significant investment than the strongholds, if only considering the amount of importance Bio themselves, the media, and consequentlyt he consumers, placed on it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_...brainwaves.html Kinect got nothing on this. I'm useless at science but I was quite surprised to see how intuitive and consumer-friendly this was, not at the level of 'well it works but we need a million dollars each time'. Are there more/better examples of this stuff at work? Just seems like it'd be really cool to start integrating this into simple things like lights and other on/off switches around the home over the next couple of decades.

The fact that NK subs were found leaving/returning was known ad reported quite very early, but SK didn't draw full conclusions from it until after the investigation. Well, you know, the last Korean president committed suicide a little while back - and I've read some convincing arguments that there are question marks over his death that were not really looked into. Someone needs to do a superconspiracy out of this. It was very Sherlock Holmes, actually - there were a number of anomalies about security cameras failing to pick up movements reported by witnesses, the logical contradictions in the president's bodyguard's alibi, the weird time-lag between president's time of disappearance, supposed time of death and time of alarm, difficulty in identifying body, etc. (He lives!)

Grommy on the mark here, I think. Bioware has always been very sensitive to fan input / feedback, especially in terms of story/gameplay features. Their own research on Origins probably showed that the amount of work put into it and the PR focus put on it (it was one of the big bullet points) was not justified / cost effective. They probably also looked at how much fans (they think) liked how ME2 streamlined things and offered a more focused experience.

I can totally get behind this, actually, though people will complain about the latter. Anyway. Video game PR has long become not something to be consumed, but a pile of **** to be sifted through, like a detective looking for clues to the mystery in a madman's diary. I sound like 4too, but you know, it's depressing how much of 4too's 1984 discourse is on the mark. If you don't know 4too, never mind.