nikolokolus

Real adventurers wear breeks and a jerkin. Robes are for stuffy academic types and ascetic hermits.

Little do I care about romances being or not being included in PoE, but your post makes little sense for one reasons: in the end characters are nothing but strings of code translated into pixels. They don't and can't have free will whether it's if...else or random() or whatever. If romances feel "rapey" to you that so should everything you ever do in any game. Everything I wrote made sense, read it again.

If Obsidian wanted to make a MUD, I'd probably give that a go, but that's about it.

I read plenty of those complaints when it came to New Vegas.

I'm happy keeping BSN quarantined and firewalled off from most of the rest of teh intawebz, the way it is #thankyouverymuch

My main objection to romanceable companions in CRPGs is that without fail, the object of desire becomes nothing more than a blank canvas upon which the player projects a wish fulfillment fantasy. In these games we hope to suspend our disbelief and it usually comes down to the extent that writers succeed in creating characters that are believable and nuanced. Much of the illusion is shattered for me when it becomes apparent that there is a minigame embedded in the conversation tree for the player to "win" and subjugate said NPC to their desires. For me, the illusion of a real person rests on a character being written with their own beliefs, morals, goals and proclivities; romance options in every RPG I've ever played have invariably broken that sense of verisimilitude. So unless a writer can come up with a way of removing the sexbot, rapey aspects of romance in games then I don't want it in the games I play (equal parts creep out factor and "immershun" breaking).

You only get those easter eggs if you enter a specific code IIRC at the start of your game. I don't have that code and I haven't seen any Codex references (yet) but I'm only about 15 hours in.

Wow, now I seen everything. I've seen "BioWare was never good" posts, and I've seen "EA magically corrupted them like poison" posts. But now I've seen "there were evil devs in the company held in line by the good devs". The Good Doctors always - let me repeat: always - wanted to be rockstars, and Rockstar. They have said in countless interviews that everything wrong with DA2 was their fault. This was after they left the company (which most likely had nothing to do with EA's management and everything to do with them just wanting out). Look. I've talked to DA2 devs. I know the bull**** that went on. Not all of it, of course, but enough to get a good picture. So it's not like I'm color coating it because I want my genitals inside EA's female workers or something (yes, someone actually accused me of this). But there is no such thing as Good vs. Evil. That's a whole lot heat for what was a throw-away line from me. Of course it's not a good vs. evil thing and I'll be damned if I ever phrased it in those terms. Whatever the case, I sort of blanked on the EA buyout timeline. NWN was indeed pretty much crapola as game if you took out the mod tools, so the doctors were probably full speed ahead with mainstreaming their games ... the only thing I can say is that what had become a company content to produce banal games also became a company producing banal games loaded down with microtransactions post EA and maybe that stands out in my mind when I think about that company now?

Gud gud. I might even be done with Divinity Original Sin by then.

Why can't promancers just be happy that they're going to be able to force any companion NPC to screw their main character in Dragon Age Inquisition? Isn't that enough for them?

God I hate EA. Who knows, maybe this is the kind of dreck, that all of the junior developers wanted the company to produce, when the good doctors were forcing them to produce quality, RPGs for the PC?

Sorry, gave my extra key to my cousin. In any case this game is well worth the purchase if only to support Larian, who have finally delivered on a product that feels like it turned out almost exactly as they wanted it to. This game is a true labor of love. No dumbed down, publisher mandated horse poop, thrown in to cater to a console crowd. It's unabashedly niche, and it pays the best compliment to gamers I've seen in years - Larian thinks you're smart and that you want a challenge.

The circle is closed. The story of the Bhaalspawn is over, any "sequel" is just cashing in on the name. Time to move on and cherish our memories.

Yeah, magic is pretty awesome. Teleport is a must have IMO. However I guess you could go the archer route and use a lot of special made arrows to achieve the same status effects, or the hillbilly's fireball, which is a pool of oil and a lit candle thrown into it.

Something like $65 pledge level and up

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/metalweavedesigns/non-player-cards-npc-a-card-based-npc-generator This looks kind of neat. Might be handy for when you need to whip up a sort of fleshed out random NPC on the fly during a game, or a good way to brainstorm a new PC.

My god. Divinity: Original Sin, has me and it just won't let go. I wish I actually had time to play the damn thing.

Dragon Commander came for free with the D:OS kickstarter ... Can't say it did anything for me. D:OS on the other hand is a freaking modern masterpiece. 10/10 would kickstart again.

This should asuage your fears.

As a fan of barbarian archetypes in fantasy, but generally not a fan of the way they have been translated into RPGs/CRPGs over the years, I am somewhat hopeful after reading this update that somebody finally got it right. Still have to see how it plays hands-on, but the aesthetic seems spot on so far. Thank you!

Sure PCs should be special, but why does it have to be an inborn characteristic and not something achieved? Think about a lot of the really accomplished people from history, were they really imbued with something supernatural, or were they just a lot more ambitious, maniacally focused and luckier than their fellows? Chosen one story lines are so played out. Maybe it worked for the Nameless One in PS:T, but I'm hoping for something different.

I want to quote this as much as possible because I agree. MMORPGs, with rare exceptions, seem to be absolute financial poison. They're expensive to make and run, hard to get a return on the investments involved, and the market's already saturated with fantasy RPGs. By all accounts I've read Elder Scrolls Online is going to bomb, and that's part of a AAA franchise that's a license to print money for Bethesda. I'm not sure an MMORPG based on much more niche-orientent game like PoE would fare any better. The only MMO I ever participated in that I thought was even remotely engaging was Dark Ages of Camelot, but to be into it you really have to sacrifice the important bits of your life. I had to bail within 3 or 4 months because I couldn't find any way to balance my life with being able to take part in the Realm vs. Realm gameplay (which was the only compelling part of the game IMO). But hey, more power to those who happen to be one of the rare invidiuals who don't have to hold down a job, have a partner that wants to game with you and you don't mind if your body turns into a gelatinous bag of fat.

I think they have really absorbant adult diapers to help with that now.

Linux has some pretty easy-to-use distros (Mint, Ubuntu, etc.), but because it will never have a monolithic, "closed garden" approach (like Apple) it's always going to be a bit of a kludge of disparate elements thrown together with a ton of variance. I suspect Valve's SteamOS will get about as dead simple as Linux can get for gaming rigs as its beta matures, as for the rest, it's not that Linux people don't want to make it easy, it's that it inherently attracts a lot of tinkerers that want the guts of their operating system as configurable and exposed as possible and no two systems (even with the same distro) are ever going to be quite the same.

More important to me than how powerful items are collected, I do want to say one that I'm in the Gary Gygax, 1st ed. D&D, Dungeonmaster's Guide, camp regarding artifacts. There should be a cost associated with wielding world breaking power - an ersatz fantasy nuclear bomb. Whether that cost comes in the form of corruption, life-force being drained away, you must sacrifice a companion, etc. These things should freak me out a little bit when I find them and make me scared of their side-effects. So however or whereever they are acquired, the most powerful items should hopefully fill me with equal parts trepidation and excitement.