Tigranes

The Twisted Rune alone has more fiersome and varied mage opponents than all of DA.

More mage-oriented battles a la BG2 would be nice, we haven't had enough of those in zounds.

The 50th and final game will be cancelled when Herve Caen's illegitimate son steals the setting license under a French legal loophole. Infuriated, Josh Sawyer will finally crack and leave on a futile journey to arrest God and bring him to a Belgian court for reparations. As Feargus presses the button to begin a 51st project, the database will crash, the space-time continuum will rip apart, and there will be an auto-save. Panic will break out and the QA testers will make a run for the money vault, but their efforts will be foiled when Brian Mitsoda and Annie Carlson, dressed in black latex, swoop in and make off with the gold bars. Mitsoda will later be found with severe injuries and permanent amnesia in a Mexican desert, his only possession a tome written entirely in Malkavian. As the building collapses inwards, Feargus will beg and plead with Chris Avellone, but he will knock Feargus out with a single punch, calmly scoop up his writing notes and dive into the rift. When the dust settles and the tabloids have left, Bioware will annex the land for their Romance Writing Studio. Duh.

That reminds me... Say "Knight-Commander' every time the NPCs say "Grey Warden" in Landsmeet, endgame and postgame slides. Makes ya tingle.

I like how we interview forumites now. taks, can you give an answer regarding allegations that you've been cavorting with young outspoken Australians?

I suspect that the actual experience itself would hardly be worth the money and bother; its just the knowledge that one is out in space, the contextual thrill of transcendence, as it were.

I saw it at Reading last night and it was good stuff. I liked how they used real 'dolls' for the bodies of the monsters then CGI for the facial animations (and I guess the weird way they jump). I haven't read the book so it was all new, as well. I have to say the music was brilliant. It was fairly original and striking, and conveyed the mood of the scene and visuals better than any movie in a long time. I liked how for the most part it did so without resorting to typical and generic combinations, the acoustic guitar was great at times.

I have to agree with LOF on that last point, actually. We have not seen the end of socialism as a school of thought, even if it may never re-emerge in the Bolshevik form.

Nope, its just slightly overzealous balancing. But thanks. This makes me think of something interesting (and obvious to some) - mages are the only class capable of long-term enemy debilitation. Rogue, Dog, Shale and Warrior skills can paralyse or otherwise disable an enemy for 5 seconds, max. In fact, in Hard and Nightmare difficulties, that should be the primary function of a mage, to take enemies out of the fight. Now that arguably the most effective spells in the game at doing so have been significantly toned down, we might see more attrition in DA battles in higher difficulties - i.e. it's gonna be harder to freeze enemies and make sure you take no or minimal damage, you're going to be able to hex them and put them to sleep and such but also account for the fact that most fights will leave you bloody(ier).

These are pretty drastic, and I think overdo it a little. CoC and Blizzard nerfs are fine, but CP and FF should have only been cut by 6-7 seconds, not 11-12. Now I wonder if they will turn out to be less useful than some other spells... well, I won't know, since I'm finishing this playthrough without the patch, and next run will be solo rogue.

No.2 was a robot, and it's disappointing - the dynamic would have been interesting with Zathrian.

Got to agree. It's the first Bio game since BG2 that I've played more than twice, after all. They do whine a lot about hwo you don't understand them, and I thought the storyteller responded well (Oh, I see, you'll just waltz in and understand us and solve all our problems), but yes, other than that it wasn't really there. I liked the dwarves the best of all in DA.

Grrrr. People keep complaining about how Sten is useless and always drops dead in a fight - well Shale is that for me. The fact that he can't equip real equipment really really hurts him, especially in nightmare. Compared to a DW (not sword/shield!) Alistair at level 15 he has less armour, less dodge, similar attack, more damage, a lot less resistances. The fact that Alistair can get +70% phys and +50% mag res and Shale can hardly get any means that Shale is becoming useless as a damage absorber as I get into late-game combat. I'm about to go the Deep Roads and have taken him out for Sten, and I can already tell the difference. Also, I've given up micromanaging all party members in DA, there's no action queue and sometimes when you issue orders at the beginning of combat they don't listen to you, because they still have to do their animation for unsheathing their swords and looking menacing. *facepalm*

Balancing is just as necessary as bugfixing, as long as it's done right.

I definitely am pretty harsh and judgemental, yes. But reading that you enjoyed the song, for instance, does make me realise that my tastes and judgements can be completely untrue for other people. It might be worth repeating that I only speak for myself, and didn't want to disparage your own response to the scene. Anyway, I do welcome, as you say, efforts to deliver different kinds of emotional experience through games and it was definitely a bold attempt - more and better would be good, absolutely. I think we simply disagree on just how well done this one was, but I guess it's a case of it 'clicking' for you and not for me. You've done enough to make me see it more carefully next time, though. And yeah, why the hate against rogues?

Oh: having read the patch notes in full now... (a) Why didn't Bio fix the toolset breaking AI/scripts issue, as it basically stops anyone from using the toolset for fear of breakage? (b) Why didn't Bio fix the bloody mess that is DLC implementation, as it's broken at least hundreds of playthroughs already based purely on forum posts? I can only assume they are big problems and they're still trying to fix it, but recognition would be nice.

Actually, FO3 did feature better writing than Oblivion for the most part. It's still not very good, but I liked how they clearly paid more attention to story and writing this time round, and hope they'll continue that in TES5. But really, yeah, story and writing is not the point of playing any Bethesda game, it's the exploration and such.

I haven't read the thread carefully, so hang me up and throw tomatoes if I'm being clueless, but as far as quality of writing goes, I don't see how anybody can't recognise how superior FO1/2 writing is over FO3. You can debate about change of perspective, game mechanics, quest design and whatnot, sure - but just look at the writing. I don't think FO1/2 writing was amazing, but it managed to consistently hit the right note and give the right feel for most of the games. You can't find many instances where you think to yourself 'oh that's contrived', 'they're overdoing the swearing' or 'this doesn't seem Fallout-y' (yes, it's possible for FO1 to set the terms on what Fallout-y is and at the same time fail to meet those standards in different parts). And sometimes you have some downright hilarious or memorable, quotable lines. I do think FO2 and FO3 are similar in one way, that they both 'break out' of the universe too often, which is why some people don't much like FO2 either. I think for me the difference was in FO2, most of the time, it was funny; in FO3, dialogue is never funny except by mistake.

It should all be the same. It's a legal issue so I doubt anyone would risk it. Of course, this doesn't cover direct download / online purchases, and even more importantly, flat-out piracy. I had no problems with getting Risen as direct download (I think Risen *was* unrated for something stupid, like someone urinating somewhere - or was it G3?...) As someone in the affected area who had to look at his options with Gothic 3 and so forth, I have to say it's pretty sad and ludicrous how attractive piracy becomes in that situation. I wouldn't mind if NZ, for instance, deliberately 'banned' the game, as they did with Manhunt, but sometimes they would have given an R18 if it existed.

I used to just make one drakeskin and one dragon, but this playthrough I actually found all 6 drake scales so I'm going for the 20-sovereign premium drakeskin armour for Leliana. It's taking a long time to finish, though, so we'll see. I didn't think the dragon-scale was that special, considering you find about 20 high-class heavy armour in late-game quests, but good light armour really is worthwhile.

Well there you go for audience differentiation. I found it so B-movie it was hilarious - just the obvious difference in voice (which, to be fair, is a problem even in full budget movies when your actor can't sing) and I don't know, I found it didn't really connect to rest of Leliana's personality. Interesting to see it works for some people, though.

Sounds like I need that patch, but I'll wait until I finish this playthrough. No way I'm risking Bio breaking my game again.

NZ doesn't have a fully outfitted censorship office that can rate all the games by itself, so for the most part, it copies Australia's. We didn't see a single mention of Gothic 3 anywhere, for instance, whereas GTA4 is plastered all over the place. The most famous 'banned' games were Manhunt and Postal.

Wrong. Unratable = Banned. The law change requires approval from all the states and only Atkinson is consistently against it. So yes, immediately Atkinson is an idiot, and in a wider sense, the entire system is backward.

Vases, trade manifests, private documents, blank vellum, engraved silver bowls = all junk, sell.