Fenixp

I suggest you to go and play multiplayer if you never want to play that game again.

*Eye twitching* Witcher 3 *twitch* Is not a port. *twitch* It was developed simultaneously for PC and consoles. *twitch twitch* Ports get first created for a device and then, later on, ported to other devices. *twitch twitch twitch drool*

Never claimed otherwise, just saying that characterization of Kylo Ren is a pretty bad attempt :-P Besides, Star Wars always drew from fairy tale archetypes primarily which is why "Evil for the sake of evil" characters sort of worked in spite of not really being great characters. It's not about me thinking it, he just had one - his introduction was that of a badass who knows exactly what he's doing, going trough a powerful force questioned by his own allies, a force user who can't even keep his temper, a learned mind reader who can't penetrate mind of an untrained force user from our perspective, all the way to the final fight (so yeah, it wasn't even the final fight alone either). At the start of the movie he's set an expectation and he then kept failing to live up to this expectation repeatedly. Now all of that is fine and could be an interesting character arc, both for Kylo and Rey - if the movie communicated it well. But it didn't. Which brings me to... Great, you (potentially) understood Kylo's character because you know what his writers knew. I don't. Good writers will write the character in such a way that after watching this movie, I will *understand* what Kylo Ren is going trough. He just didn't have enough screentime for that to happen tho, his entire conflict got like 5 minutes out of the entire movie. If it's so essential to gain understanding of his character, he should have gotten way more than he did, even instead of protagonists - that would be an interesting spin on Star Wars formula, actually. Similarly, Rey could have resisted Kylo because she got previous Jedi training ... Alternatively, the movie had piss-poor writing. It was never even suggested that her resisting is hugely out of the ordinary for a force user in any way, nor did an invisible Obi-One appear, saying "Use the force, Lu... I mean, Rey!" It was just a thing that happened and you need actual understanding of the previous movies to get that it's weird - what most viewers will get out of that scene is that Kylo Ren is bloody incompetent. All of these ideas you keep talking about are interesting - but if any of them was the actual intention of scriptwriters, it was communicated absolutely horribly, which is kind of bad for a movie of this caliber. You can argue all you want with your interpretations of events, but it doesn't change the fact that *while watching the movie*, most people saw Kylo as an utterly incompetent fighter with no redeeming qualities to make him an interesting villain. And for such overwhelming thoughts, what you felt while watching the movie is what matters the most. It's superhero TV serial and it's... Quite untraditional.

In the OT, most evil characters didn't have much characterization aside from being evil tho, which is why they worked reasonably well. Force Awakens is desperately trying to characterize the villain which is why things like lack of motivation seem so jarring to a viewer. That's along with the downward power curve shown about Kylo Ren, who starts off seemingly competent and actively works his way down trough the movie. I love well made villains, but if you want to see one who's well done from a recent production, just look at Daredevil and Winston Fisk. Conflicted and makes mistakes about as often as the show's hero, yet fearsome and competent. Kylo Ren is unbelievable and his character traits seem to be all over the place, and "But he'll get better in next episodes!" is a fairly weak argument.

Personally, I consider open world games that force fast travel to be enjoyable to quite simply be not that well designed. It usually means there's not all that much interesting populating the world, and that the open world doesn't really give you a reason to travel trough it repeatedly like randomized events or dynamic evolution of the world - it just makes the entire concept of open world a bit wasted IMO. If you need a perfect example of how to do an open world, look no further than Arkham Knight or Arkham City - dynamic events keep happening around the place, traversing the world is fast and painless and listening in on random snippets of conversations will give you information on quests organically, without the use of markers. Extremely well done and thoroughly enjoyable, these games don't really need fast travel in any respect. And yes, I do realize this implementation would quite simply not translate to Witcher - but, well, that's why we have game designers, to be creative with game design :-P I strongly disagree.

You're welcome. Feel free to ask anything, any time. Anyway, in case someone manages to google this topic: Spells on the left are spells that are *known* to you. Spells on the right are those you can actively use in combat by hovering over the appropriate spell level icon on the lower part of the screen while you have your mage selected. You can only ever actively use 4 spells of any level, however, your mage can have several grimoires equipped/in quick slots and switch between mid-battle. This takes precious time. You can remove an active spell from the right part of the screen by left clicking it. When one or more of the 4 slots on the right are free, you can add new spells to your active spells by left clicking a known spell on the left part of the screen, it'll get added automatically. Note that each row of the active spells corresponds to a spell level - you can cycle between spell levels using arrows on the upper part of the spell book or by clicking the roman numeral next to active spells row. When you loot a grimoire off a dead mage, you can open it via right clicking it and use the + icon to add these spells to your known spells pool. This'll cost you money, for reasons, but there is no limit to known spells, only to those actively used.

Well you can just fast travel a lot :-P But yeah, the open world epidemic needs to stop, just... Please. You can see the design concessions Witcher 3 has made to support open world: Artificially leveled enemies, level restrictions on gear, that kind of stuff. I would have preferred a bunch of small and carefully crafted locations like White Orchard at the beginning to what we got.

Uh... Can you actually give the Steam key you got with copy of PoE to a friend? Isn't that creating a duplicate licence or some such? I know that's not what you're talking about and the way Obsidian handles DVD versions always felt a bit off to me, but still

I'd say Humanoid is kinda wrong and right at the same time. Witcher games (especially the third one) are a peak of RPG genre - they're going to be videogaming classics and have clearly overshadowed their source materials. Witcher books are an excellent read and when compared to other modern fantasy literature, it clearly stands out. However, I don't believe these books have what it takes to stand the test of time - Sapkowski is an excellent writer, no doubt about it, but I don't see his books having a lasting appeal outside of the thrill of reading them itself. I'm going to re-read them this year anyway just to get all the references from the games (read them 8 years ago originally) and see if my opinion changes, but ... I don't really think so.

Well, Durance and one other NPC who you're yet to meet are both written by Chris Avellone - lead designer of Planescape Torment. Blame him :-P Personally I really disliked those two NPCs as they stylistically didn't seem to quite mesh with rest of the game - some people consider them the best companions in the game tho, so go figure. As for the rest of writing, it's mostly just difficult to understand because you're thrown into an unknown fantasy setting and get flooded with names, locations and events you have no knowledge of, yet your character mostly does. It's all accessible in the journal and I quite enjoyed this aspect of storytelling - it can be somewhat bothersome tho.

I wish for that too. I was not kidding tho - gold is a bit of an issue at the beginning of the game, but I learned everything I stumbled upon with my two mages and never ran out. That's why I think decision of limiting crafting and spell learning by monetary costs is quite dumb - all it does is give player impression of a limitation where in reality there's none. Planescape Torment trough and trough. Wordy, lengthy dialogues with tons of foreshadowing of things you can't know about at the beginning, the whole game entirely revolves around a set of themes, highly philosophical etc. I loved writing in Pillars of Eternity, but it's definitely not for everyone.

Just play the game and loot everything into your endless stash located somewhere in a pocket dimension. Endless gold is essentially what happens then. The economy of the game sucks anyway so there's no need to make it even more painful - just be able to afford everything and you'll be fine. And yes, you need to add copper into all of your crafting recipes for whatever reason and apparently, mages use melted copper to write their grimoires. It's a thing the game does. It's kind of dumb.

Spending entertainment time on things you don't enjoy just because you believe you should enjoy them is wasting that time. Uninstall it, shelve it, go do something else and have fun. Perhaps a few years down the line you'll get a huge craving play Pillars of Eternity again and find that suddenly, you're really enjoying it.

Soo have you played Wolfenstein: The New Order? Just sayin'.

Sounds about right. Look at real life precedence: The Eldar. There's the famous Rat utopia, but who cares, Eldar.

*sigh* RIP indeed. What is up with 2015, seriously.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't at all. Then again, this discussion is a bit older.

For me, Rise of the Tomb Raider as I thought the original to be absolutely fantastic and one of the best mechanical implementations of character progression I've ever seen, expansion pack for Pillars of Eternity so it's finally finished and I can replay it again, expansion pack for Witcher 3 as Witcher 3 is amazing, and that's just the first two months. Then there's XCOM2 and since I really, really loved XCOM: EW, I'm quite excited for that. This year was filled with amazing RPG releases. I do hope the next year will bring a good few as well - starting with this one. Loved Deus Ex, loved Human Revolution, I do hope this one won't follow fate of Invisible War. Oh hell yeah. Shadow Warrior was amazing. Not nearly Wolfenstein: The New Order amazing, but still, amazing. And this one will contain coop! Over the years, the original Dishonored became one of my favourite games of all times. And DLC for Dishonored was even better than the base game. So sure, I'm kinda excited for that - I'm just quite worried about promises of open world. Edit: Oh right, and Dark Souls 3. I'm really excited for DS3.

Yeah, Witcher 3 deserves (almost) all the praise it can get. I still believe it would be a better game without RPG and item progression as the game gains very little from those and not including them would give CDP space to polish up combat mechanics and perhaps give bigger differences in light/medium/heavy armors and various weapons which I would dig, but overall it's quite phenomenal. ... And all of you need to play Sunless Sea. ... Especially you. Do you like Terry Pratchett and Lovecraft? Then definitely you. I'm yet to finish it, but after how much of a shift was Dragonfall to Returns (and Dragonfall is utterly brilliant), I'm a bit saddened to see that Harebrained is sticking to the formula from Dragonfall for the most part. Nonetheless, characters are great again, and your base of operation (whatever it's called this time around, I'm terrible with names) again feels like a living place - people coming and going, slowly changing, with tons of small stories to tell all across the place. It's quite magical. I adore how every choice you make, it's written in such a way that it feels like the right choice for Geralt. Almost every single choice in TW3 feels like a decision Geralt of Rivia would make and almost none are out of character for him - that's writing brilliance.

Let's do best of the year ... Things. Game of the Year: Pillars of Eternity. Superb revival of Infinity Engine RPGs with fantastic lore, intriguing storyline and great combat system. It took everything I disliked about IE games, fixed it, and then added some. Game's not perfect, certainly - but I'm already looking forward to doing a second playtrough once second part of the expansion is out and I'm the kind of guy who usually only plays everything once. It's also my surprise of the year by a large margin. Best Writing would have to be Sunless Sea, no contest there. The game's writing is absolutely stellar, and I don't think I have ever played anything quite like it. With lighthearted tone and minimalist use of text, the game presents us bizarre, depressing and utterly alien setting. In a very Lovecraftian fashion it only hints, never fully spells anything out. It gives player snippets of lore, characters and conversations and then leaves it up to player to piece everything together, to complete this engrossing puzzle of Sunless Sea. Everybody needs to play this. Witcher 3 for not getting how the **** do RPGs work, but being a stellar storytelling experience nonetheless. The combat system in the game is fantastic, the game is absolutely gorgeous, and the writing is superb. Bloody Baron questline is up there when it comes to best videogam writing, voice acting and generally direction I've ever seen and while the rest of the game isn't quite up there, it's damn close. A relatively unexperienced Polish studio has shown us how do you do open world storytelling well and surpassed all expectations. Best Homeworld Homeworld Remastered is the best homeworld game of 2015. ... Really, I was just looking for where to squeeze Homeworld as the two games have been a stellar experience and everybody should play them. Very untraditional approach to real-time strategy games, very slow, very elaborate with engrossing story and amazing soundtrack. And finally a reasonable drawing distance which is what stopped me from playing the originals. And yes, I know remasters are cheating. The best old game played this year would have to be Shadowrun: Dragonfall. It's cyberpunk which is an automatic +, but it's generally got a fun storyline, great companions and companion quests. It's also a game which really made me care about my "base of operations" - I got massively invested into my part of Berlin and cared a lot about fates of its inhabitants. Fantastic mission variety and quite a few ways of reaching an objective help too. Feel free to make up your own categories :-P

Puzzle-based bosses are fine, but bed of chaos was horrible. Fighting it was just no fun and what's worse, there was pretty much no skill involved.

You're saying it like that's a good thing :-P

https://youtu.be/jTZyr6iaYIc?t=16m38s Pillars of Eternity got a "Best thing to come out of crowdfunding" award from a guy who talks about videogames on the internet. It's completely irrelevant and inconsequential. About 400.000 people saw it tho so I imagine that could sell a copy or two. Yay!

XCOM exists and Xenonauts exists, so it's not like we don't have a choice in the matter. Both tackle the same themes and both approach them very differently - playing Xenonauts 100% safe and catering to modern design considerations would only give us another XCOM, which we don't really need as XCOM is excellent. And as far as I'm concerned, a good deal of poor design has been removed from the original X-COM games by Xenonauts (this is bloody irritating, just by the way - if I refer to the series as X-COM it'll get confused with XCOM, but if I refer to them by their European names of UFO, there's bloody Altair and their UFO trilogy.) Base management is easier, the game is a lot more readable and anything you want to do is a lot easier and more intuitive. If all Xenonauts wanted to do was to recreate old X-COM games and make them more accessible, I'd say they have succeeded.

Oh right, Sunless Sea. Sorry for bringing this topic up *again*, but I'd slam my head against a wall if I didn't mention it. Stellar and nontraditional writing, almost completely alien setting to dip into and a game cheerfully defying many principles of modern game design, putting worldbuilding, storytelling and exploration ahead of such petty concerns as player convenience.