Fenixp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvpgyjRWcqY

There's less micromanagement because there's less to react to. Situation on the battlefield doesn't ever change during your turn in turn-based games. Which is one of the reasons for why they feel so sterile to me.

Yes, if you check out extras section of the game page, it lists flac soundtrack as well as mp3 - for both NWN2 and Pillars. I assume Tyranny'll be the same. Edit: Actually, for NWN2. the game page mentions 3 soundtracks in mp3 and original soundtrack in flac.

Titanfall 2 review, author starts off talking about the campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzkJXexq3C4

Every single thing you see in the trailer you can romance. We have something for heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, zoophiles, objectophiles, necrophiles and a whole bunch of other uals and philes, some of which we're not allowed to put into our promotional material! In Mass Effect: Andromeda, when you think "I'd hit that", you can, whatever that is!

There's a complete edition over at GOG. If you're unfamiliar with GOG, they sell games completely DRM free, with none of these digital distribution apps required - you just download install files, you can do this directly through your browser, and then you can burn them to a CD/DVD or save them on a thumb drive or wherever else you'd like. These files are yours to keep. If GOG ever goes bankrupt and ceases to exist, you can still install NWN2: Complete Edition or anything else you buy from GOG and remember to back up. Incidentally, Tyranny will also be released over there. (you'll have to wait a few days longer for GOG to release patches tho.)

They should just drop the pretense, hire J. J. Abrams and start making movies.

I still don't get who in their right mind thought it a good idea to release Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2 and Infinite Warfare inside timeframe of about a single month anyway. Especially the former two, considering they both come from EA.

You mean your average Call of Duty player is smart enough to get through the hell of Windows updates, account registrations and utterly dire UI of Windows store to even get as far as buying a game through it? Honestly, I don't believe Windows Store is much of a factor, purely because it's terrible and next to nobody is using it. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of the game's sales were made of Windows Store sales, and even that I'd bet I'm over-estimating. I bet there's like 100 people buying it through Windows Store, and those happen to be poor grandmas of both Microsoft and Activision employees.

According to SteamCharts, since release, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare had a peak at about 15k players concurrent players on Steam. To put this into perspective, it's currently at position of 34 of the most played games on Steam, mere days after launch. Games like Path of Exile, Witcher 3 or SMITE currently have more players than Infinite Warfare. That's... Rather dire.

Yeah, I actually thought you meant ME1 was tedious, not ME2. I found the original Mass Effect... Not that great, because it was neither here nor there - it had both bad RPG and TPS mechanics, leading to a game which would be entirely meh without its world and characters. ME2 finally decided that yes, third person shooter was the way Bioware wanted to go, and felt a lot better for it.

It gets a lot less tedious from there. Wait, you're talking about Mass Effect right?

Nah, the minimap itself is rather small, but there's also the distance indicator and time indicator that for some reason goes with it. Additionally I'm rather anal about unnecessary UI elements. This one? Does it really make such a difference?

... Oh you bunch of grumpy old farts.

I would argue that what developer has to say is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. Even if he wrote that code fully wanting to point out that men and women behave differently in dating (which is truly a highly controversial opinion worthy of analysis), an unfinished code can be purposefully exaggerated or even bugged. In a software I was developing some time ago, I've had to implement functionality where small additions could be automatically added to an ordered meal/drink. Purpose was to, say, automatically order sugar with tea. In early alpha tho, I only had a limited selection to work with, so I made it so sugar gets automatically added to all diabetic diets. Did I do it as a political commentary on our need to eliminate diabetic people? Nah, it was the first identifier I've seen, and thought it was kind of funny.

You can. It goes from "Ridiculously huge" to "Only takes 1/4th of the screen now"

You can, and it plays horribly. The game massively leans on its objective markers - nobody ever describes you way anywhere, there are no road signs to speak of, and when you finally arrive to a destination, there's no height indicator in the main map, you can only see those on minimap. That said, you can download Friendly HUD mod, enable 3D objective markers and disable minimap. The mod actually allowed me to get rid of pretty much all UI - combat-related information only appears when I draw a sword and 3D objective markers only appear when I enter Witcher senses mode, so like 90% of the game I spend with no UI whatsoever. It's great. (Incidentally, the mod also allows you to enable something akin to the Skyrim's compass on top of the screen)

It could have been, with a different game taken for its subject and if it was less accusatory (I mean, "But what kind of system is being designed, that in order to ‘just make it work’, you wind up with a system where there will never be bisexual men?" Is the author ****ing serious?) Like if what article has taken look at was, say, Crusader Kings 2 which is a very well documented game, that's been released for ages and also deals with defined genre roles (bonus points for being factual as opposed to what I quoted above) - yeah, that could have been interesting. In-development game which can easily have its gender roles defined by autor's sleep deprivation and which is already outdated, one day after its release? Nah. That's just click-bait. Not to mention click-bait harmful to the developer, especially the bit about interview at the end (I know it's explained in the comments, but most people won't read the comments. Taken in isolation, that footnote sounds especially condemning.) Edit: Altho, to be honest, to make something like this interesting to me personally, you'd kinda have to consider multiple sources and make your conclusions based on their similarities and potentially their cultural context, not ... "A dude wrote numbers in the code that he'll change anyway. And more importantly, there are things in the code that he didn't write, which is especially condemning because... Guuuuh... The game isn't finished so ... Eeeeeh ... Things that aren't there can't possibly appear."

20161103T052238Z is the only way to avoid confusion. Remember, timestamps can be essential.

The weirdest thing about it is that even in American english, you say "5th of June". Alternatively, you write 6/5. Because f you, logic. Edit: Apparently, June 5th is also correct. I will now descend into madness.

I've got a piece of gaming non-news for you: RPS published an article titled "How RimWorld’s Code Defines Strict Gender Roles". If you want to give traffic to that atrocity, here's the link . Claudia Lo goes through source code of an unfinished game and does her damnest to discover why it's politically incorrect. All right, so... Can anyone explain why on Earth am I still reading Rock Paper Shotgun?

Oh it's something different entirely for pen and paper. Keeping track of a dozen or so of skills for each character would be insane. Renowned Explorers is great - funny, reasonably well written and mechanically interesting. I'd still wish they would experiment with something a little different than abilities decreasing a bar which turns enemies to defeated when it empties, but at least they're trying -something- that's not just "Shoot people until they're dead." Oh and playing the game feels great, even when you're a total scumbag.

It comes hand in hand with the complaint that they're linear - hell, the original Doom had this figured out, if you want to get rid of excessive backtracking, make levels branch out. That way, player will only ever have to backtrack a bit. So instead of being a long, linear corridor, if tombs were more branched out, you could, say, have a puzzle in the first room that you enter, but you'd have to go down that corridor over there to find first half of the puzzle, the second corridor over there to figure out second half and then open the door leading to treasure, which would contain the last path. Incidentally, most fortresses in Skyrim do actually follow a similar model. May I ask you to try and do something? Try heading to Documents/My Games/Skyrim/, find the SkyrimPrefs.ini file and set the "bShowCompass" value from "1" to "0". This will hide the compass altogether. Asking to do that might feel weird right after you have praised the compass, but I actually have a fairly good reason for it - you can re-enable it at any point without consequence (I'm still not sure why this isn't a bloody option in main menu) and I found that I appreciated Skyrim's world design a lot more without it. That's because Skyrim is actually fairly ingenious in telling player where there are things to be found - like when you see a smoke coming from a mountain and come in to investigate, you'll find a cave. Or an old, overgrown passage leading somewhere. Or snowy path marked by stone hills. That kind of thing. It's incredibly varied and extremely immersive, much moreso than just following compass. And as a bonus you'll start noticing a ton of tiny details you missed while following compass - the world has incredible amount of detail put into it that aren't even marked on the compass, like sacrificial sites, small caches with bandit's loot, shrines, stuff like that. I feel like the compass kinda drags one's attention from all of that detail so that you can find the next black spot you see on the compass.

While this is true, it wouldn't really eliminate trash encounters anyway. Most players want to feel like their characters are progressing, and even if combat is rare, many will welcome a chance to try out their new gear on weaker monsters every now and again. That said, I'd kill for an RPG which will challenge the player by difficult dialogue, just for him to meet some traders later on that player will be able to sweet-talk into great prices using his silver tongue as the "low" of the difficulty curve. The important thing is that the easier bits need to be comparable to the more difficult bits. Sadly, out abstraction of dialogue has not managed to get that far. ... Well, mostly. I'd like to see more experimentation like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZkiQBiPCEI Congratulations, you have disarmed 100 traps! You can now use two-handed swords and knock-down your opponents in combat! I feel like XP-based systems only ever work when XP is awarded for reaching milestones, not for doing stuff. Because the moment XP is awarded both for combat and stealth, I suddenly have an urge to sneak through an area and then turn around and kill everything in it. Why? To improve persuasion, of course. When XP is only rewarded at certain points of the game however, regardless of how you reached that point, distributing skill points can be easily explained away by just about -anything- you were doing on the way there.

Well I suppose it depends on what your definition of a filler encounter would be, for me I'd be something along the lines of "Encounters that neither push the story forward in any way nor challenge the player". And their purpose is... Basically, if all you did was present player with a long string of challenging encounters, player would grow tired of your game relatively quickly. That's why most games don't have linear difficulty curve, what you want to achieve is basically this: You want to have challenging peaks to test player's skills and then less difficult encounters to give player a feeling of empowerment, which feel especially important in RPG with character power progression. And while I suppose it would be possible, it's rather difficult to make these downs meaningful in a readily apparent sense. Thus, trash encounters, those enemies you mop the floor with when you master a new mechanic/your characters get new gear or level up, become rather important. Still, you can't keep the difficulty down for too long, otherwise the game'll become boring. Incidentally, this is another thing Pillars of Eternity does incorrectly: Not only is there far too many of these "downs", the way combat is structured essentially means that the moment you let your guard down and make a couple of mistakes, you can get a party-wipe. Which is stupid, because instead of being relaxing power romp, trash encounters just continue to tire player out as opposed to help him relax.