Tigranes

The 1.01 patch is out - http://social.bioware.com/game_patches.php again it's located on their annoying social network in an effort to 'encourage' everyone that doesn't want stupidity to come on the side of their game. And yes, I will complain about it persistently because it's still nowhere as persistent as Bioware. Glad to know they left the harder difficulties alone, but easy should indeed be quite easy for those who want it. I might not bother for now, since I'm not affected by any of this.

Exactly, but either the ESC key is hyper-sensitive (I've taken to tapping it gingerly) or not everything is independent; i.e. skipping the last line before a cutscene tends to skip the movement. One key example is in Lothering, when you talk to the ash warrior . After you persuade him, I assume there is animation for him leaving; however, when I skip the line of conversation, he just 'pops' out of existence and we go straight to the townspeople commenting about it. I don't think I hear the last line the warrior says at all!

Yes Volourn. I did brush my teeth this morning, Volourn. I am studying hard, Volourn. I generally see release-date DLCs as naked profiteering, yes, but I wasn't too bothered by integrating DLC purchases in-game; in fact it is convenient and if you'er giong to sell DLCs you might as well do it that way. I haven't encountered the 'in-game' salesman yet, though, so it remains to be seen just how obnoxious it is. Unless it is quite very obnoxious, I maintain that it's not the mode of delivery that's the problem, but just how making DLCs and selling them is *too* important.

Well I've been playing and playing, and now I'm wandering about My first impressions hold, and I did get a full party wipe from the until I was more careful with flanking and healing. I get the feeling the beginning bit in the camp favours a Rogue with all those locked chests and genlock rogues popping out of nowhere, and it might have saved me a few hairy situations as well. Good times. I do wish they would fix the conversation skipping sometimes, though. I read very fast so I use the ESC key in every conversation, and it seems when there are animations or movements inbetween lines they are skipped entirely; sometiems I'm sure some lines are being skipped in one go as well (and then they don't reappear in the journal, the journal only shows lines you didnt skip). Eh.

Is it confirmed that the combat calculations are actually doing this, or is this just in the feedback you get on your character sheet? AFAIK, yes, it is confirmed, and it seems it will be patched later. Okay, so I've played a few hours with my male human mage, still doing the origin story . The game looks really, really good and can accurately be called a successor to BG so far, though with the small flaws that were as predicted. Plot is ho-hum Bioware stuff; nothing shocking, surprising or thought-provoking (yet) but well polished and delivered decently. The world and lore, on the other hand, is interesting, detailed and woven well into the game. I like the ways in which the Chantry, the Circle and such are described through various characters' biased eyes. Characters are all decent until now, with generally good voice acting. The King has a terribly annoying voice and an even worse personality, but I think I've heard that he's not as moronic as he appears to be at start. Dialogue is better than I expected, too - typical Bioware, but no real cringe-worthy stuff and quite a few enjoyable turns of phrase. Levelling and such looks good so far, could have done with a bit more variety but thats not a big deal. Combat is interesting - very much a NWN/MMO-ish evolution of infinity engine combat. On hard difficulty I have had characters die a couple of times but mainly through carelessness. I do imagine it becoming quite challenging once I get out of origins mode, though. There's a bit of a 'I don't know what's going on but the scripts are doing stuff for me wow this is fast' feeling, because compared to IE games' 6-second turns things happen a lot faster, and without an action queue the battle can progress quite quickly. I think I'll get used to it though, and that hectic feeling should combine well with the whole premise of waves of darkspawn. Auto-regen however is ridiculous. It only takes 5 seconds in early levels to get everything back and you get enough mana to spam spells anyway (it's the cooldown that stops you, rather). I'd imagine that something would have to give to balance it out though - i.e. I'd prefer potions to be a bit more common in return for half or less regeneration rate, or even more health and mana for you. i.e. you still have to deal with finite resources over the course of a dungeon or area rather than everything resetting after each encounter. I imagine mods wil be out soon enough, and it's not a game-breaker until then. Controls are horrid - and this is from someone who wielded the NWN2 camera with natural ease. I really have no idea why you have to right click on *everything*, and you can't change this - you can only swap mouse buttons and that changes the menu clicks too. I also ended up changing a lot of keys, but I'm starting to get the hang of it. I think once I get used to it it won't be so bad. The menu and interface are great, though. Maps have good markers, inventories have good comparison systems, selling items and equipping and such eliminate pointless clicks with good shortcuts, group inventory system works well, quests and codex are nicely laid out, character stats are still there, etc, etc. The game runs really well - I could run it at max settings on my laptop but I got some lag in areas with lots of particle effects, so I toned it down a bit. Loading is frequent but not very long. The game is really good looking as well. The art direction *is* pretty generic fantasy but is done well; the bloom is there but nowhere as nauseating as in 90% of all other games these days; most importantly, everything looks great together... with the blood off. The integrated DLC and such mechanics are very nice as well, though I haven't run into those 'ad characters' yet. Overall the game really is good, perhaps better than I expected, very very fun. Auto-regen is my only peeve but the combat is generally very satisfying. Onward we go. Oh, a spoiler question on the mage origin:

Apparently it's meant to be half dex half str but it's all str. So there are in fact no weapons that give bonuses based on dex.

It simply did the EULA thing then skipped straight to the progress bar. Perhaps something just went wrong with my one. It's also taking a good 20 minutes, but that's probably my computer. Now trying to do the DLC installation, let's see if it works. edit: Well that was alright. Ran game, logged in, redeemed code through in-game link, d/l appeared but failed, went to Config, cleared cache, tried again, now it's going. With my internet it'll take all night, though.

Auto-regen removes choice from players who don't like it, though. I think in this case it's all about choice. Hopefully it will be easy enough to mod the regeneration rate down - just a single variable. It seems my retail regular version comes with Stone Prisoner and Shale, is that normal? In any case, let's see how smooth installation goes. edit: What in the world of - you won't let me choose where to install? You stupid, stupid morons. edit: and I have to register on their social network to unlock Shale, according to my instructions. This is like installing a Microsoft product, christ.

I am sure that in due time, people will mod away the auto-regen, implement a death system and more. Actually, not having played the game, I think the blood, auto-regen and moronic romances are the only things I want gone - the first is already an option in the vanilla game and the third is easy enough on your own. Monty, you cad, you didn't start hard from the beginning?

When you post seven thousand posts a day you would be too. Anyway, I think Torchlight will be shelved in favour of Dragon Age now (which is in my bag but I'm at work) until at least a new patch to work out the loot stuff. I got some good fun out of it though, it was worth the cheap price.

Going to the local shop to get it now, regular version, PC.

What happened to this thread? "YOU'RE A PIRATE! A FILTHY PIRATE! A PIRAET PIRATE PIRATE!" "it's missing features, but that doesn't count as limited because I don't care about those features." Retail release is Friday for NZ as well, waiting waiting.

The only real 'fun' thing rogues could do in IE combat was stealth, scout and backstab to get the enemy mage or something down before the battle (and at higher levels, use their evasion to lure enemies to one spot for an AoE spell). I expect it will be similar, unless backstab is 'nerfed'?

I've played the Witcher at the girlfriend's and will probably do so with Dragon Age as well. I was annoyed and embarrassed with the idiotic romance dialogues and sex scenes because firstly, I was purely embarrassed to be associated with such low-quality dross; secondly, I disliked how there was a potential that her opinion of role-playing games might be unfairly influenced by it. Surely, 'eh dont whine so much mate' has to be the most misused argument in gaming today (even if most of us need it from time to time). Anyway, impressions I'm getting from across the board are quite positive, pointing to a fun, well-made game with good, challenging combat. Excellent. The Codex has a couple of nice balanced impressions as well (if you can sift through 10 pages of "IT SUCKS" and get to the intelligent members).

Highlighted sparkles, the big massive gold circles beneath your characters, any floating text that is there during battle (there is some, right?), etc. It's not too big a deal, but I always turned off the green circles for IE games as well. I think the world of Ferelden should meet its end through a nasty disease that spreads through blood contact, by the way.

I finished the main quest with my Alchemist at level 36, and dabbled in a bit at the Infinite Dungeon. The game is definitely fun and well made, but flawed in a serious way that detriments from becoming the addictive Diablo-clone we hoped it was - basically, the loot system. 1) You get way too many magical items and they are all rubbish. You occasionally find a rare or unique that is actually useful to you, and this *was* how things were in Diablo, but in Multiplayer at elast you were sharing items around. I think it's a bit more extreme here. 2) Set item stats are randomised, which takes a lot of fun out of collecting sets. 3) Enchanting has a silly exploit where you get a random normali tem from the first level in the dungeon and enchant it 100+ times for dirt cheap, ending up with godly weapons. This is in fact necessary after level 40 or so, because the loot you get from drops become so inadequate (see 1) that you need to enchant like hell to get anything better. Pity. Still fun, but pity.

I've heard that you can turn off the blood - bigger question for me, can you turn off or tone down those big ugly markers and glitters on selected objects? I'll be a happy chump if I can play with as little of those massive arrows and circles making everything look like a government form as possible. And I'm sure every romance will have a 'piss off, git' option that BG2 had.

I'm going to start on Hard and pause to micro everyone a la IE games, so the lack of an action queue might get annoying. I didn't bother with the scripts in BG, or FF12, and I'm not going to bother now - I have strategy and simulation games that do that sort of thing much better. I'm sure it helps those of us who don't want to pause every 2 seconds, though.

*shrug* all I want is a highly polished, big romp with tons of loot and a party-based, RTwP D&D knockoff combat that doesn't babysit you. All accounts to point to Dragon Age being that. I don't think anyone expected the other bits to be anything other than a game that takes itself too seriously, has entirely too much blood and sex for its own good, etc. I probably won't game the game for a few days at least - how's the combat compare to, say, NWN2 or BG2?

Well blistering barnacles and a great big pox on them.

I haven't done much character research, but I'll probably play some form of dwarf mage, because magical synergy = best thing about DA I've heard, and dwarves sound much more interesting than elves. Probably female, since usually there're more romance options for guys (maybe not anymore?) and I'm tired of listening to trash romance dialogue. Sten's the only NPC I'm sure to take, I think, though I think most NPCs will actually be quite good (except for perhaps a little overdose on the Disney).

Yes, it's only 40USD worth of bandwidth here. Meh, I can wait.

How big is pre-loading (or downloading) guys? It woudl be cheaper than retail for me but I probably can't handle the bandwidth.

I stopped bothering with fishing after the first few. I like the idea, but having such a slow minigame in such a fast paced game is counterproductive. Guys, if you think the loading is taking a bit too long, there is a community fix out that works very well: -> Go to the game folder and find Pak.zip. -> Unzip it, you should get a 'media' folder. -> Right-click it, hit send to, then click Compressed folder - you should then effectively get a media.zip. -> Back up pak.zip, then rename media.zip to pak.zip. This should cut down all loading times considerably; for me it's about a 1/3 difference. Level 22 with my alchemist, around level 23 in the dungeon and seemingly getting close to the end.

Torchlight, EU3, and FM2010 soon.