Tigranes

Awesomeness. Agriculture: Ignacio Nunez Laranjera, Christian Reform Party. No strong feelings on this one, just like the idea of slow but gradual land reform. Also balances the rest of the cabinet nicely. Defense: Antonio Alejos Espinales, Popular Stability Party. It's always good to have a war hero (revolution hero) on your cabinet, and US ties are pretty pragmatic at this stage anyway. Internal: Julio Olivares Las Casas, National Liberation Party. I don't like the whole 'Liberation Theology' business and would have picked Fleming, but I like his idea on literacy, and you might need a principled man like him to reduce corruption in the government. External: Francisco Ferrante Oberon, Christian Reform Party. Sounds like an able guy that'll get the job done without screwing it up with anyone - just what we need. Trying to get a good mix of young and old, throw in different types of popular picks (war heroes, caring priest, intellectual) and of course skills. They should work well with each other, having excluded Rosanes (which might have consequences later?)

O.K.

You could set off a nuke in Van Buren...

Have it in 2011 and I can go. I'm 90% honed in on the strategy of doing an MA here then a PhD in the U.S. now. Kinda sucks since I could actually do a PhD straight away, but what can you do? NYU costs a lot of $.

Played as France a bit using Rights of Man. It's clear that the patch changed a lot of things. Money is much harder to come by, and if someone takes your port or disrupts your trade routes it is a quick way to lose the war (which is awesome)... but of course, as ever, I've been able to raid GB trade routes for 5 years without them building up a navy to retaliate (maybe they can't afford it). I haven't seen any naval invasions yet, though the Dutch took Ceylon without ever being at war with Portugal. The AI is a lot more aggressive however; Austria contested my succession in 1705 and started a continent-wide war, though they've been too busy with Serbian rebels and their war with the Ottomans to do otherwise. Prussia and Poland-Lithuania are locked in an eternal war with lots of territories being exchanged. Norway broke free from Sweden, and the Indians are running rampant, especially the Cherokee. It's all a little TOO aggressive though. It's like MTW2 where everyone hates you, except here they do actually accept peace if you thump them (thank God). But finally, the battle AI does seem to be borked in comparison to pre-patch. Whereas pre-patch they'd set up a line, do some side maneuvres, then charge and fire roughly in that line, now they do a lot more back and forth, milling about, screwing up the line, etc. Hmm...it might make the game unplayable if it keeps up, but I haven't played a lot yet.

You could launch cows from ballistas?!

I have enough trouble becoming proficient at civilised life to worry about uncivilised life.

The entire Fallout franchise has always had a little bit of sillyness. With FO2, I think it was more of a particular brand of sequelitis that compels the designer to think of new, 'spicy' things that hadn't been done in the original - combined with the well-known fact that all the areas were put together with only a few weeks of dev time left. With FO3, once again, I think it was trying to give player all sorts of 'cool' things to do (which Emil explicitly stated as one of Beth's driving design perspectives). Oblivion broke a huge amount of lore, so perhaps not.

No, no it'll be great! Imagine, TNO returns as a split-personality schizophrenic struggling with various facets of himself wanting to make a comeback. During dialogues you will make use of obsidian's new DDS dialogue stance system, where the three buttons on your console controller correspond to Good, Neutral and Evil personalities. You will also be able to romance Fall from Grace and Annah at the same time, but of course it will be tasteful. ...okay, I can't go to the Codex anymore I guess.

Ah. That's odd - when I had finished the game, I went back to save outside the BOS Citadel, after Raven Rock; i.e. just before you talk to people and Liberty Prime starts its steamrollin'. Then I went exploring to the satellite dishes and so forth, and looked okay. I didn't erally go to the cities again though, so who knows. Probably safer to stop before 112 as you say.

Awesome stuff. 1) B, just because it gives us some newsworthy 'achievements' like catching a corrupt official (and also gives us some time). 2) A, people might be happy with tax breaks or redistribution programs at the start, but one, two, three years down the line, they're going to look at how many jobs there are around and how many cars are in the streets to judge your regime. 3) A, which helps the economy too - and also because I'm not sure in this context which demographic is our biggest supporter. Yes, I'm not very moral when it comes to governments.

I finally found my dusty old Thief 2 CDs and installed on the new laptop, but everything looks a bit weird (like... washed out... though that is probably to do with forcing a 1024x768x16 on a 1280x800 desktop), and there are a lot of random crashes. Ugh. I always enjoyed playing Thief 'ironman' + 'silent assassin' - you do your very best never to get caught and to kill nobody, because if things go wrong you can get in trouble real fast. Deadly Shadows was slightly disappointing in that it was easier to run around, hide, then start again, but the game does get a bit too easy if you start killing and blackjacking to 'clear' areas.

How metagame and anti-C&C can you get? These perks are basically cheat toggles that let you flip debug switches in the world to keep yourself interested. >.< I would rail about how moronic this is, except that by the time you're level 15 you're already a God anyway. This is what happens when you do too much audience research and have no principles guiding your design.

What choo talkin' bout? Clearly half a minigun + half a minigun = whole minigun.

Moss arrow in the face!

The new patch brought in aggressive AI and naval invasions, but apparently broke peace-making diplomacy and battle AI. I'm still going to try it again, with the Rights of Man mod that apparently makes things a bit more 'historical' and fixes some quirks. Took me like 24 hours to patch through the terror-crime that is Steam, so it better not be a broken game again...

I'm sorry, but I already won you all in page 1: Surely we can move on beyond two monkeys wrangling each others' necks going NO ITS NOT REAL I wonder how stealth can be made more interesting in a relatively 'real world' setting. Certainly the introduction of disguises would be great and very Fallouty in properly 'civilised' areas; otherwise... gah, just bring in Thief's mechanics!

Detailed equipment - that's a good point. Perhaps the original designers felt that because of the setting and the type of game it is, introducing a large variety of equippable items (and thus introducing a 'monty haul' element) was not really a priority (or appropriate). Additionally, you'd be hard pressed to find non-magical, non-sci fi, reasonable upgrades in such a varied list of equipment when you can't reasonably expect to find 'good' gear in the wastelands anyway.

I'm surprised modders haven't been able to introduce a On/Off (or % of occurrence) toggle yet. I suppose its not just an int value that they can change...but surely Obsids can do it.

I... don't think you got what he's saying. The 'flaw' he's talking about is the dressers stuff.

I agree the combat is fun. The sci fi - I don't actually mind the fact that it's silly, but the fact that it completely destroys the pace of the game (just when you're having fun you're whipped out) and it's ALL unskippable. There is NOTHING to do when the doctor is rambling so you have to wait, you have to use the Animus to start and quit every time, you have forced interludes where you... go to sleep, etc. Certainly there's things in that game that have great appeal and it's one of those games I really WANT to enjoy, but I really think that was an amateur mistake. However, if you're not interested in discussing this and just want to have fun, that's fine too. Anyone wanna bet on a modern-day Thief 4 where Garrett has a gun and theres a government conspiracy regarding a secret religious object passed down by the Hammerites through the ages...?

I quickly appreciated that I shouldn't treat it as another Thief, but I was so disappointed by the fact that you've got this beautiful looking, amazingly populated, live-looking city... and you can't talk to anyone, go into any buildings, steal anything, find any real info, anything... you just engage in a couple of repetitive minigames filled with Sims-like icons until you can finally assassinate. And the assassinations were great fun (if you ignore the stupid phase-out-into-sci-fi-vacuum-and-listen-to-long-rant bit). If the rest of the game was prepared and free-form like the assassinations it would have been great. One thing I'd really love to see is a subtle improvement to guard behaviour. You've got great patrolling and LOS-based reactions / raising the alarm system already, with those timeless quips, but doing things like guards noticing things that are missing and going off to investigate (which you can use to your advantage), etc would make it amazing. I was quite happy with Deadly Shadows so I have good feelings here.

a) you CAN explore places not populated by humans in all three games. FO3 has a lot more locations than the other two combined, so FO3 has more of these too. b) the issue with Fo3 was that having a lot of locations was great, and some of them were really interesting, but the 'dungeon-y' character of so many of these locations (i.e. the skeleton with the morphine might be interesting, but all you could DO in most of these areas was just shoot or stealth your way past and get the loot - there weren't areas like the army depots in FO1/2 with different interaction options), and the manual trudging through the wasteland you are doing to find these places, combined to a sense of... chuggish repetition. This wasn't an issue with the originals because the (much fewer) locations were handcrafted and worldmap travel takes seconds. You can argue that it's still better to have a lot of locations and the ability to walk around in the wastelands fer realz, which is fine - I don't agree personally but I think that's a very valid viewpoint. But yeah, that difference is why.

You are all savages for not telling me this sooner. Stay tuned next week for the official announcement. You might want to start practicing your surprised look in the mirror. Excites me way more than New Vegas, to be honest, just because there hasn't been a good stealth game in years. Don't get me started about the retarded joke that is Assassin's Creed.

Don't worry too much about catering to audience needs, just do it the way you like it. If you make the LP too hard for yourself it'll never finish/update. Chances are if you're enjoying it we will as well. Obscure game LPs are always welcome, and that one looks really LP-friendly actually. Currently I'm enjoying the Codex LP of an old Borderlands-game with wacky LARP'd cutscenes.