Fenixp

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...

(I might have been joking very slightly :-P) Seriously tho, there actually is a method called "GetEnemiesInRange" which accepts these parameters!? ... I'm just ... going to assume there's a good reason for that.

Yes. PC gaming as we know it would cease to exist without Redneck Rampage. You always need bad examples to learn from.

Man... if (aIController != null && aIController.CurrentTarget == null && !aIController.IsConfused) { if (GameUtilities.GetEnemiesInRange(this.m_target, aiController).Count == 0) if (this.AfflictionOrigin != null) { this.m_targetStats.ClearEffectFromAffliction(this.AfflictionOrigin); } else { this.ClearEffect(this.m_target); } } aiController with PerceptionDistance is clearly passed to GetEnemiesInRange, there's no point in storing its value into a local variable and then passing it into the function. There's also no point in creating a new list. And besides, what's up with passing its reference as opposed to returning a new list from GetEnemiesInRange (so that the method can, say, be used directly)? You've suffered too much C in your life, haven't you?

I need Dishonored 2 in my life. ... Arkane and Bethesda, please don't screw up! (Dishonored, Wolfenstein: The New Order, DOOM, Bethesda is shaping up to by my fav publisher when it comes to pure quality of titles they release.)

That's how the original looked. So you had to get close and hover your crosshair over individual signs to get their captions. I suppose Skyrim would have been a better example, but I'm worried that any mention of me liking Skyrim will get me stoned in any hardcore RPG community.

It's not that I mind quest markers per se, I just don't like when they're mandatory. Quest markers are extremely easy to implement, they might as well be there - it'd just be nice if games got developed around them being disabled and then added them later on. The game is optimized for 1080p and higher resolutions. I'm pretty sure CDP: Red can manage road signs legible in TPP :-P Now I wonder when did sign posts become common and how did they historically look like... That's not necessarily how it needs to be done tho - I know my walls of text are a slog to read, so I'll just point you towards how Outcast did things (NPCs just turning at pointing at where you're supposed to go) and possibility to build upon that (there's already functional GPS in GTA games, transcribing directions into dialogue would not be that difficult, altho admittedly results would not sound too natural) And when you arrived to your destination, you've had to hold down the "highlight everything I need to interact with" button anyway because without it, the game often wouldn't even allow you to examine many clues.

Is that a bad thing tho? If there's something Witcher 3 direly needs, it's a tad more editing. I'd kill for the game to be about half its current size with filler content being cut out and more effort being put into the game world - including such revolutionary features as proper signposts! Text without emoticons is so 1980s. Get on with times, old man.

Aren't changes that GMDX makes to level design too radical?

Well, context - Miasmata takes place on a deserted and largely unexplored island. It's just a very fun way of implementing navigation as a direct part of gameplay. Anyway, I would like to point out that map markers are precisely what millennia of evolution of navigation lead to, with modern GPS navigation systems and whatnot :-P It's difficult to excuse in non-high tech settings tho.

No :-P But let's not go down that route again, it's an incredibly subjective discussion anyway. I meant a systematic solution not adding more work to the entire development process (sextant might work like that too I suppose). The clever thing about Outcast is that its solution effectively worked as objective markers, was fully automated, but at the same time was very immersive and worked well within the setting. I would really like to see a game building upon that - instead of directions being pre-scripted pieces of writing, they could be made dynamic, with characters constructing effective way of getting somewhere based on their current position and position of wherever player wants to get (as in, in the background, pathfinding engine will set start, goal, translate individual steps of the way into a form which'll work for dialogue screen and then proper phrases would get picked from a pool into terribly sounding voice acted segment.) It would solve both the issue with objective markers being necessary and with development process being more complicated in order to accommodate for proper directions. Probably the best system I've seen for leading player trough a big, open map was the one present in Miasmata tho - the player had to actively draw a map by triangulating his position based on landmarks around him, which would, in turn, reveal a part of his map. Alternatively, he could find pre-drawn maps lying around the world, which would also add points of interest to the map, marking locations which'll be important for the player - however, since there was nothing indicating direction player was facing save for compass and no magical icon telling player where exactly he is, he'd again need to locate himself using the triangulation method and comparing landmarks with what was on his map in case player got lost. A beautiful solution, using both pre-made assets and systematic solutions to help the player get his bearings. Shame the survival mechanics are so limited in that game. ... Dear Lord, I'm writing walls of off-topic again. There were nice ... Dots ... Where you had to go and uh ... Big circles for bigger areas in Witcher 3. I guess. Now I'm back on topic. Edit: Actually, may I use this occasion to complain about the bloody batvision in W3? "Follow the red line made out of human steps or a scent (because yes, that's exactly how scents work.)" And even worse, when I was trying to actively avoid it in areas I was supposed to investigate, the game wouldn't let me interact with many objects without it being active. Why do I absolutely, positively need every clue in vicinity glowing!? I can find them myself thank you very much.

There was still quite a lot of it there - then again, Dark Souls borrowed a lot of its mechanics from third person fighter hack and slash whatevers so I suppose W3 got somewhere in between (the combat in W3 is still very deliberate and not button mashy unless you're brutally overlevelled for a given area) Of course all of those things are massively derivative, but I'm not one to say that's really a bad thing. It's just how the evolution of a media works. It's not necessarily that players find this hard, it's also developers. I'll give you a typical example from Morrowind, albeit I'm sure exact wording was quite different: "Oh hi, I have a mudcrab farm and there are people who want to ruin my mudcrab farm. Oh, want to help? All right, that's grand, you can get to it by going down this road, taking the first left and then, when you hit a fork, go right, straight ahead and you'll get there." So, after following these instructions as they were given, I ended up on a lone island with a strange cat telling me easter eggs and no mudcrab farm in sight. Construction of the world itself is a process which constantly evolves throughout the game's development and the moment, say, a road is moved or otherwise changed around, writers need to accommodate for this change and, often enough, quest designers need to do so as well - god forbid that dialogue already having voice acting done too. This kind of stuff has gotten even exponentially more difficult now that more people are involved in creating a game. So, the easy way out? Quest markers! Just tell the game "Step X of quest Y points to NPC Z" and the game can then systematically navigate player towards the next objective and all NPC has to do for the quest to sort of make sense is to give you vague directions, like "On top of a roof" or "In the town of ... ." Thankfully, designers seem to be slowly realizing just how incredibly regressive designing a game around quest markers is, and they seem to be increasingly willing to either invest into proper communication channels and productions processes for their games so that this aspect can be avoided and made altogether optional. Sadly, with vague directions given by NPCs in Witcher 3, some quests were figuratively unfinishable. I do hope we'll go full circle eventually and open world games finally figure out a non-obtrusive, systematic way of giving us directions. I mean, it's not like bloody Outcast solved that issue 17 years ago in an extremely elegant and immersive fashion or anything *grumble grumble*

The combat system a massive Dark Souls wannabe without actually understanding what made that system tick so well for instance. I don't think there's a single original mechanic in The Witcher 3, even Gwent borrows heavily from Condottiere.

Don't blame that on controllers, deciding to put 4 of anything because of "4 buttons" would just be lazy design, plain and simple - especially since there've been an insane amount of games already with no such limitations in place.

Do you still get more XP for non-lethal takedowns? If I dislike something about Human Revolution and I suppose Mankind Divided it's that non-lethal playthrough is just far too easy to achieve - I'd even argue it's easier than lethal one since, in HR, you get more XP for clean hands, being unnoticed and individual non-lethal takedowns than you do for lethal ones. The game also tends to reward you more when you try to be non-lethal. Thing is, this worked well in the original Deus Ex or, say, Dishonored where non-lethal approach severely limited your options and made the game inherently more difficult - whereas in new Deus Ex games, non-lethal seems to quite simply be the most optimal way of playing them (you even get a non-lethal sniper rifle for crying out loud! If it at least worked like it does in the original where hitting someone with a sleep dart makes them yell and panic for a bit before they get knocked out, but nah. Are there even any real-world anesthetics which put you under in a second?) Edit: Actually, thinking of Dishonored, the expansion had the right idea, altho some of that was in the original game too - with proper upgrades, the best you could get out of non-lethal playthrough was knocking people out over distance using fairly expensive resource (whereas headshot with a regular bolt could do the job otherwise), melee you had to wait for entire choking animation to finish whereas executions were extremely fast and even disintegrated the body when upgraded, there was tear gas grenade to lose pursuers or you could just throw a regular grenade and kill all of them, there were arc mines which killed enemies and also destroyed their bodies whereas their gas counterparts only knocked enemies down and you had to go and recover the body yourself etc. Non-lethal playthrough should be difficult, dammit! ... Then again, lethal was just ridiculously easy as a consequence in that game.

Anna has decided that the frail old lady in her group really needs to learn a thing or two about chemistry. So Anna did what comes naturally to her - she grabbed her taser and tortured the poor woman into knowledge.

BT sues Valve over Steam patent infringement allegations !? I think I'm going to patent All the Things, and any time anyone does any out of All the Things I'm going to sue them.

Well, I never claimed I'd put that kind of stuff in the hands of Valve nor that they're any better. And true, your library does have far greater value than virtual money you'd usually send in GOG's general direction - however, your library can't really be manipulated in any way, not even by the owner really (as in, you can't exchange games or buy anything in exchange for games).

You're wrong and everything you represent is wrong.

Whelp, GOG just introduced a store wallet, which'll allow such fun features as in-game purchases (yup, microtransactions). I'm not entirely sure whether I should be happy about this - well, aside from the fact that a company with a track record of technical ineptitude may now directly receive access to large chunks of money from their customers.

Yup. It's episodic and apparently, individual episodes take ages to release. It also seems to be a bit more of an action adventure game with direct control over your character as opposed to traditional point and click, but given the weird mash of genres that the original was (or was it? Do I remember that right?), I don't think that really matters too much. There's also a complete lack of objective markers which means I never know where to go, especially in linear corridors. It's horrible.

Yeah, there's Timeshift in there.

Yup. I was as shocked as you are.

I'm pretty sure Obsidian declared the game a success after 500k sales tho (also keep in mind there were some boxed copies for backers, GOG copies and Origin copies)