Fenixp

That's a pretty accurate depiction of any Slavic city, yes. Or town. Or village. Or cottage in the woods. Just Slavic civilization in general really, cops fine people who drive cars with traces of blood in their alcohol

I wouldn't even mind microtransactions being there given how obscurely they're hidden and never shoved in your face - which is exactly like they worked in Rise of the Tomb Raider and nobody really raised a fuss over that by the way (it's funny how gaming public hates on something only in case it's made aware of that thing's existence, I guess doing research and coming to an opinion is difficult) At any rate, there's been another issue with Rise of the Tomb Raider which I suspect is closely tied to the microtransaction shop, and that's always online DRM, to an extent at any rate. The game never kicked me out in case my connection dropped while playing, but it would also not allow me to launch the game while Steam was set to offline mode. That was a piece of information I was not able to find anywhere and since I suspect new Deus Ex works precisely the same, it'd need to be a splendid game for me to purchase it. But since I value narrative as much as I value gameplay in Deus Ex titles, I don't think the new Deus Ex stands a chance of me purchasing it in any other way than in deep discount. Wide reports of it having its ending massively rushed and its tone being completely inconsistent throughout the game pretty much kills all of my interest in buying it full-priced.

Perhaps because Human Revolution contains Generic Movie Score 145 (well I'm kinda unfair here, the soundtrack is pretty good) whereas original Deus Ex contained some of the best music in videogame history. I can still hear UNATCO theme in my head... (well I guess then there's the whole discussion about gaming soundtrack slowly moving away from iconic tunes into more ambient territory, but then Doom 2016 happened and kicked everyone's arse as far as soundtracks are concerned.)

I pressed ctrl+f, typed "Ciri" and found nothing. She's therefore not in the picture. Anyway,

And now for something completely different: I have put about 30-something hours into Starbound before deciding to give up on the game. Now don't get me wrong, the game is pretty damn good - especially its exploration aspect shines with a variety of procedurally generated worlds and various dungeons in them and the storyline itself, while not really great in any way, offers hand-made dungeons and small challenges while constantly directing you towards new content in a non-intrusive fashion (so yes, you can just completely ignore it and explore freely). The problem I have with it is that you start noticing very similar dungeons and content within the first 10 hours so exploration eventually ceases to be as exciting as it was at the start. Which would not be that bad, but there's one huge problem the game has - lack of meaningful mechanical interactions. It's great that you can construct NPC colonies, but those NPCs just sometimes give you random quests, may act as merchants and sometimes give you a rent. They don't have any real needs, there are no management elements in there - those guys are just there. The game also allows you to use wiring and logical connections to build complex systems within your colonies, but there's not much useful that you can use these for aside from automatically opening doors or such. It's riddled with stuff like that - it has a whole bunch of interesting mechanics which largely exist isolated from each other. Like I would like to create a big farm, add automatic irrigation to it (which was pretty damn tricky by the way, I ended up with this: ) then, say, have my colonists harvest and re-plant it - you know, that kind of stuff, where individual mechanics co-exist and interact with each other. With that said, the game's rather cheap and there's still a lot to do within. I started a new, heavily modified game adding a ton of content and hopefully interactions and I'll give it a proper shot after I'll leave the game laying there for some time before returning to it.

Putting thoughts into their brains, I apologize :-P You claim developers do something for a reason that you have constructed in your head was my point. Just as I have done in the games you have just mentioned (okay, I didn't play Styngian Abyss), but also in, say, STALKER, Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Dishonored. And I agree, experimentation and exploration are my favourite things to do in videogames. And it's cool that you didn't have to ring anyone for help, same as I never had to enable objective markers. But the phone service was there. I'm pretty sure you can just kill him, no?

That they're adults who can decide for themselves which features would they prefer in their game? Putting words into someone else's mouths without a single shred of evidence notwithstanding, I guess I am missing your entire argument since I for one enjoy when developers give paying customers some agency in how do they wish to enjoy their game. It's not fault of the entire gaming industry that you choose to perceive optional features the way you choose to perceive them. Were you even around in the earlier days of teh interwebz? No matter the stage of evolution of gaming media, questions of "Where is X?", "Can't find Y." and "How do I do Z?" kept popping up pretty much constantly. Hell, before that, major developers had paid phone services in place to help players who were stuck in their games (thinking their audience are a bunch of idiots, clearly). It would require some major selective memory to phase all of that stuff out and claim that an entire generation of gamers did not need help with navigating large and complex levels. Then there were printed guides you could buy in addition to the game, and later on there was a massive boom of internet walktroughs and hint books. Which would be the entire reason as to why they can be disabled, unless you choose to be offended by a mere presence of an optional feature, in which case I'm shocked you didn't choose to be offended by existence of, say, Prima guides.

I uh... I'm not sure how to tell you this without offending you, but developers of Human Revolution seem to think that their audience is intelligent enough to choose which features do they wish to use. Look, I'm not lying here: I'm playing with most of that stuff disabled (yes, including aiming reticule because you can aim down sights, but I hate inventory tetris so automatic inventory management is a must for me) and the only thing which the game still does is mark the objective on your map, which is a feature we've had for ages now and makes quite a lot of sense. Aside from users preferring more convenient measures, there's a wide array of people with various degrees of visual impairment for whom these modes can be quite helpful (there's no colorblind mode which sucks tho) or, say, people who have trouble with navigation for no fault of theirs. I don't know how about you, but I think giving users a choice is always a good thing. Well you can, just ... Just click the "off" button and they're obliterated in your game :-P You can even imagine an Ion Cannon shooting them from orbit or whatever, it's crazy!

But... None of those things are forced upon you in either Human Revolution or Mankind Divided, they're entirely optional. (what is not optional is level design, sadly) Anyway, never heard of GMDX mod, it does look rather great tho. Let's see whether I can force myself to get past the terrifying aiming controls the original had.

Probably the best (and the most anemic) review I've seen on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnoiZ7s6EF8 It also came from other sources I researched - the gameplay and level design is awesome, a step above what Human Revolution offered, but narrative sucks monkey arse. ... Now let's hear from people who actually played it :-P

PC Gamer HQ, 05:56 am "Hey. Hey, Josh. Hey, Josh." "Yes?" "Tell me names of 100 PC games, I gotta write something and the deadline is this midnight." "Sir, I'm a janitor." "It's fine, just give me whatever." *sigh* "Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II ..."

So uh... That's what happened to Duke 3D in all e-shops. Classy move, Gearbox. Classy move.

There's an entire class focused on abilities based on soul manipulation + a bunch of abilities unlocked for Watcher throughout the storyline are supposed to be based on soul manipulation. It's just fancy talk for 'magic' of course, but that particular theme penetrates into all aspects of the game, including monster lore. Anyway, I'd say that if it's fantastical nature of the setting we're discussing, major recurring themes of the setting are not exactly unimportant - and soul manipulation was one of the most intriguing and fantastical themes Pillars of Eternity operated with, albeit it was premise that was fantastical while its exploration much more grounded. Which... You know, was one of my favourite things about Pillars. Allow me to remind you that this discussion on "What did mr. Sawyer mean" started with this response to my post: Which is where I started to try and figure out where has Josh Sawyer admitted it's a problem in the first place. Because without it, bringing up his name in the conversation is kind of pointless in the first place so I figured you probably know something I don't.

Yes, there's the word 'Soul' used in the presentation. There's also the word 'Silly' used in the presentation. Neither has much relevance to what you are saying or to your statement "Josh thinks he's onto something" in relation to the tone of the world and both could be interpreted in may ways. What I'm asking you to do is to quote the relevant parts of the presentation as I don't see how do they relate to what you're saying so that we may continue the discussion constructively. You're doing yourself a disservice by trying to pass me as an idiot as opposed to properly quoting your sources - it's not actually that difficult to do and it would have saved us like 2 posts. The only part I have found which is relevant is "Introduce more diverse locations, be attentive to lore pacing, use Tyranny’s highlight system, include some sillier characters – possibly a different companion type." which doesn't at all reinforce your point that mr. Sawyer would consider the general tone and seriousness of the world a problem. Then there's "Players and reviewers had mixed to favorable reactions about the world and lore. There was a lot to learn and keep track of. Many players wished for more light, funny, or silly elements." He didn't say he agrees with the sentiment - just that it's a reaction of unspecified "Many" players which, again, is not saying much. In short: You're stretching his statements without even knowing the context.

While you can encrypt data which reside in memory and only decrypt them while they're being used, at some point, they have to be decrypted - which is where they can be messed with, albeit this is a teeny bit more difficult than when they're just plainly stored in memory. With that in mind tho, encryption and decryption algorithms are not exactly cheap when it comes to processing power - the game's performance would be even worse than it currently is if, on top of all it does right at this point, it would also have to deal with that kind of load.

It looks extremely cheesy and disgustingly sexist. Sold. Edit: Ah, just noticed your post in "What are you playing" thread. It changed nothing.

Yes, that's where he mentions they should introduce some sillier characters, not that the game as a whole is not wacky enough, which brings me back to my original point of majority of people apparently liking the game.

I'd say it very much depends on whether it was a decision of design team or management team. If it's the latter I could easily see microtransactions being implemented to shut them up while not changing the balance of the game at all - it didn't raise nearly as much uproar at the time, but Rise of the Tomb Raider also has a microtransaction shop yet I'm pretty sure there are trainers for it. Hell, GTAV has an in-game money shop (even for SP) and a bunch of official cheats at the same time. Bear in mind I'm not actually defending them, there's 50 euro sitting on my account that I've had set aside for Mankind Divided and the way I see it, it'll probably go towards buying a bunch of fun indie games or Dishonored II.

I wouldn't really trust Metacritic on this either - There's a massive cloud of nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses that shrouded Baldur's Gate games throughout the years to the point of people unquestioningly rating it highly as the "best game ever" purely based on nostalgic memories alone (many old games get far higher user scores than they'd deserve due to this). Aside from that, Baldur's Gate, at the time of its release, was a revelation to many. It has streamlined the previously clunky and overly complex RPG genre, it has simplified it and opened it up to a much wider audience, to the point where BG and Infinity Engine games as a whole were the first RPGs many were really able to get into. At this point, it has a massive historical and cultural significance to gaming as a whole. Pillars of Eternity, being mostly a derivative of what Infinity Engine games were back in the late 90s, can't ever live up to that kind of legacy. With that in mind tho, I would absolutely say that it's a significantly better game than Baldur's Gate 1 and, in my mind, also surpasses Baldur's Gate 2 in many areas - proper balance being one of those things. Sure, it was awesome to get that amazing weapon which was oh so much more powerful than your most powerful stuff... Just to find out that you have specced your party so that nobody can really use it. It was so great to get those massively powerful spells until you noticed you can't use them because your specialization forbids it. And when the realization that my entire party only exists to protect the mage who does the vast majority of the actual damage, let's say 'fun' wasn't exactly the word that came to my mind. Then there's writing which I was never a big fan of in Baldur's Gate, it always kinda reminded me of the silly campaigns we've done in DnD as opposed to the amazing ones, but hey, we're getting into a massively subjective territory here.

Did you see the GDC talk? Did he say anything along those lines? To my knowledge, Josh Sawyer only wishes for more diverse environments (which is quite understandable regardless of tone) and would like to add, quote, "Some sillier characters", emphasis on some - and, true enough, the game could use a little bit more humor, altho not that much. Overall, from interviews I've seen/heard, he's fairly happy with the tone of the world they've set in the original game. So where did you get the idea that even Josh Sawyer agrees with all of your points, disregarding the fact that him agreeing doesn't necessarily mean he's correct?

Yup. Yup, that's true. And it includes pre-order bonuses - they only work on your first save. I'd be willing to gamble money on the game possibly not working as well as it could, but with this kind of bull**** surrounding it... Nah. I'll save my money for Dishonored 2.

They did actually show on the 'little window thing' on the bottom right part of the screen - there are two tabs, one for combat log and the other for conversation log.

I really enjoy micromanagement, so I enjoyed micromanaging my dudes in Pillars of Eternity as well. I'm one of those people who always turn off AI in tactical RPGs, even in games like Dragon Age. There's good news tho - if you felt like 6 party members were too confusing in Pillars of Eternity, you could actually only bring 4 and even have the game reward them with more experience. That's sadly not an option for people who enjoy larger parties in a game which only offers 4 party members.

You sort of missed the point there - this 'people' entity you have mentioned on several occasions which had been disappointed with Pillars of Eternity has given the game average rating of anything between 80-90% on just about all user rating sites I've seen. Which means that, by and large, Pillars of Eternity is pretty damn liked by its fanbase as opposed to being disappointing. Oh, sure, you'll find a decent amount of forumites complaining about the game, but that's quite simply how complaining works - people are generally a lot more likely to go trough the trouble of registering on a forum and writing a post when they're unhappy about something.

Marrying narrative and gameplay -> In-game, you swing your sword which breaks a pot and this systematic change leads to changes in a storyline. You save Paul from special agents in spite of the game telling you that you can't and storyline changes, that's what it looks like when a narrative is married with gameplay. When gameplay itself is used to tell a story rather than lengthy dialogues, like when breaking cameras on levels of Citadel Station reduces Shodan's grip on them, that's when a narrative is married with gameplay. Later Ultima games, System Shock, Dishonored, Deus Ex series just to name a few examples which most certainly married gameplay and narrative significantly better than any of the Dragon Age games, Pillars of Eternity and Infinity Engine games combined.