Fenixp

Dishonored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZgnXjXk2N0 Based on state of alertness of an opponent and relative position of opponent and player, it tried to choose the most relevant animation. Failing that, the game just let the strike connect and do damage. It looked a bit awkward at times, nonetheless it's a significantly better approach than what the new Deus Ex games do.

To be fair, I can also imagine the conversation going along these lines: "Okay, let's insert the option for the player to fight this super-powerful character, at that point, he can't kill him anyway." "So what if he does?" "Eh... We'll have to make the game react to it properly, but only like 1% of the player base will see that." "All right. Let's drop the option." Which then arrives to a PR person, who says "All right, that's a great idea! We just need to spin it so that it doesn't seem like we're taking away choice because it's not worth implementing." And voila, "We like our players and don't want to frustrate them!" was born.

*slash* *ugh* *slash* *ugh* *slash* *ugh* *slash* *AMGGGRRRH* I think calling it an actual melee attack system is rather generous. Then again, learning where to hit the bastards with a baton to take them down was rather challenging. I'm still not entirely sure what's up with the cutscenes by the way, if Dishonored could do it properly, I'm pretty sure Deus Ex can too.

I don't even have a 4k monitor yet. I should get one, I do need more of dem pixels to play Starbound.

We're getting into extremely subjective territory here, but to me, even the emotional side of Dragon Age: Origins felt extremely generic and by the books. Sure, emotions existed and they might as well have been exchanged with any other Bioware game. Obsidian has managed emotional titles in the past, I'm sure they can manage just that again at some point without harkening to Bioware in any way. I for one can live without panties and pants of all of my companions dropping to the ground the moment player character appears and listening to absolutely everybody having issues with their parents/father figures while figuring out that every single person in my party is actually a special snowflake with a special past (it's why I adored Sagani in PoE after all, she wasn't really special in any way, just really good at what she did.)

Stats are only changed for Story Mode and Path of the Damned, all other difficulties just have different enemy composition.

Not to mention developers never being able to fully predict what'll players come up with - that encounter which kills 99% of players might be cheesed by the remaining 1%. I'm pretty sure Obsidian has allowed these things in the past, and I'm also pretty sure games then reacted to such unlikely victories. Oh well.

*shiver* No. Just... No. The less Obsidian learns from Dragon Age: Origins the better.

Already found him. I made sure he's in the process of reading it right now. ... Oh wait you mean your co-worker.

The planetary exploration spin could be quite neat - Dragon Age: Inquisition has already presented us some very pretty-looking environments with decent enough exploration. It's just a shame that the whole experience was ruined for me by it basically being Checklist Ticking Simulator 2014, so I'm hoping for some better quest design.

MGS5 is for PC as well. Anyway, I'm so glad that vast majority of AAA titles see multiplatform releases - my computer supports a wide array of control methods, can be connected to TV and (at least until the release of the new versions of newest console generation anyway) massively outpowers all of them. I'm very glad I no longer need to have 3 computers with slightly different architecture and arbitrary limitations so that I can play everything I'm interested in. The way I see it, consoles should be sold on advantages they can offer over computers - they can easily offer the whole "Living room entertainment system" experience, add smart TV functionality, more convenience to gaming etc., etc. - the sooner platform exclusivity gets obliterated the better.

Oh, Curious Expedition, not Renowned Explorers. I'd say it's weird I keep confusing the two, but it's actually not. Anyway, Renowned Explorers is great!

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure where did the whole Resolve thing originate. There's a ton of checks which require INT or Lore, and a decent amount still for Perception or Dexterity. Possibly the least of them require Might and Constitution, but even those are there (and some of them are pretty damn essential)

"We will offer high dynamic range lighting on supported platforms, that means every detail will come to life with a sense of depth, richness and realism that simply hasn't be possible in the past." Yup, that's exactly how HDR works.

I'm not entirely sure about their English translation, but Witcher books are actually pretty good if you're willing to reawaken your inner teenage angst. ... And boy oh boy, those books are filled with angst, especially short stories. They're pretty good at what they want to do given the target audience tho and the base narrative is actually quite good, especially if then followed by games.

Well then. The goal was to stay as faithful to the original as possible :D Co-op's exciting tho!

The goal is to stay faithful to the original Morrowind, especially mechanically. Buut it's an open sourced project so there's nothing that prevents people from implementing these features (altho especially co-op would be rather tricky to properly implement into an engine which is not built for multiplayer from the ground up)

Apparently, the best way of resolving traffic issues in Cities: Skylines is to make driving a living hell for your residents. "So, you want to get to your neighbour over there across the street using your car? Whelp, better pack some food 'cause you're in for one hell of a ride! Or you can just use the overpass over there and walk."

Alternatively, there's a slim chance people exist who enjoy things you don't enjoy. That said, defending Bethesda's "10/10 GOTY" in spite of Bethesda almost never innovating and almost always screwing up at some level is rather strange. They're actually creating new assets for the engine port? I thought they're just reworking original Morrowind's assets to run on new engine.

More importantly, penny dreadfuls were short criminal stories widespread at the end of 18th century. Completely unrelated to the current discussion, but I do love this quote: Juvenoia for the win! So it's now just like the original engine then!

Everybody needs to play The Dark Mod. Any new interesting maps around?

Not when you went with Ghost/Clean Hands playthrough - that was when Dishonored surpassed Thief games for me. Still, Dishonored could definitely do with upping the combat difficulty - I think it was a mistake to make all out combat play-style viable, even violent means should require a lot of stealth. (To be fair, when caught in Thief, all I had to do to escape the AI was running in circles a bit so there wasn't much mechanical tension there. I think most of the tension came from much slower pace and exquisite sound design.)

I felt like level design was a tad weaker in the Daud's story overall, but really just a little bit. Everything else was just flat-out superior to the base game.

Can't be arsed to decompile the code, it's quite possible that the side-effect of expanding a list is there for optimization purposes, but I've seen quite a few similar shortcuts written in order to save a bunch of lines of code for a common operation done on a collection, which can be written via LINQ queries in a much more concise and readable manner (which may often be slower of course, but... That argument would be rather moot given stellar optimization we've seen in POE :-P) I might be entirely wrong of course and I'm pulling all of this out of my arse - still, I did work with legacy code a decent bit and have seen similar constructs written for these reasons. Unity 5 seems to be using Mono equivalent of .NET 4.0 which should readily support all of this, but I think earlier versions of 4 used something like ... 2?

Oh wow, Unity is using an ancient version of Mono. That explains so many things...