alanschu

Fffffuuuuuu Purchased.

Of course. I am powered by the tears of rage and require it for sustenance.

Fermi's Paradox refers more to the idea of interstellar travel. That doesn't answer the why. It just reinforces the idea of evolutionary biology. Those that fall in love and work together are advantaged and more likely to procreate due to not being dead. Similar to why we have a taste for sugar and fat.

As for the OP: Why not?

Gonna have to disagree. Unless you've seen a Maria Caliban post, it's possible to now know a Maria Caliban exists on these forums. It's a bit like a Schrodinger's Maria Caliban. (Jebus I forgot how often I posted here in the past....)

Oh probability distributions. Good times good times.

Nah, some of us are just suggesting excuses (in the form of outright lies) that the idea of a Christian murdering people based on religious motivations (like an anti-Muslim agenda) isn't actually religiously motivated. I mean, I'm sure if the guy was Muslim he'd still have gone on his Muslim bombing spree to protect the world from Muslims.... Oh wait, it only happens once, so we shouldn't count that. Especially without looking at any sort of context. And education is irrelevant too, because these people were raised in our schools and therefore on equal footing. No other context. There are some educated Muslim people (in a principally homogeneous Christian environment), so it obviously undermines the education argument (though outliers naturally don't undermine the idea that we should exclude/ignore the non-Christian Christian attackers). Never mind if we bothered to expand the scope of where these attacks take place (i.e. the religiously motivated crimes around the world that still exist today by messed up people that feel their protecting their Christian way of life). <rant mode> I'm agnostic-atheist, but in general have no real beef with people that follow whatever religion that they want. When I see posts that propagate hate, it makes me angry because it's just part of the problem. I had the misfortune of having a (misguided) Christian friend that liked to forward along all of her chain emails (religious or otherwise) because she thought she was spreading actual information. Seeing people spread propaganda that a Muslim "protest for peace" involves brandishing weapons and putting up signs that talk about killing white Christians is damned frustrating. And this crap happened frequently. She genuinely believed that Islam is fundamentally set towards murdering Christians (and other religions) and substantiated her perspectives based on the absolute lies that she did not know were lies. If one is wishing to state that religiously motivated Christian attackers are much less common (especially in the West) you're not going to get an argument from me. Christians already went through their "lets murder other Christians because I don't like the way those types of Christians are" phase, as well as their "lets murder non-believers in general" phase, and thankfully it seems to be (mostly) no longer an issue. But there are still people that get killed, terrorized, and harmed in a multitude of ways by people that justify their actions based on their Christian faith. I don't consider these people accurate representations of Christianity, and it shouldn't be anything more than a statement of the obvious that the number of Christian motivated crimes is going to have a lesser chance of happening in countries that have a strong Christian homogeneity. Take a peek at say, the United States, and you'll see the occurrence of awful crimes that occur by people who share Christian beliefs. We just like to pull some wool over our eyes and go "Well, those aren't Christian motivated crimes. We all know Christianity doesn't condone that stuff, so they're obviously misguided and really if we're honest with ourselves it's more of a political agenda than a religious one." As though people buy into the notion that because someone suggests the idea of separation of Church and State means that religion and politics are separate. That guy that bombs an abortion clinic isn't really doing it because of religious reasons or anything like that... it's more political because, you know, abortion is purely a political topic, not a religious one.... </rant>

I enjoy the entire experience. The gameplay isn't that great, but the level of story telling is fantastic. You may say "well it might as well just be a movie." Maybe you're right. People like to digest this down to cost. How much does it cost? How long is this movie? There's a level of interactivity with it that also doesn't come with any normal movie. If you're not able to get past the gameplay, that's fine. Obviously that aspect is the most important to you to the point where the other stuff isn't enough value. AwesomeOcelot has different priorities in what he wants out of games. If you're not capable of understanding why other people may like the game, then that can only be on you. People do like it. It's not because they're monkeys that are clearly a few cans short of a six pack. It doesn't mean I like ALL my games to be like that, but the narrative has always been an important part of my gaming experience. Also note, I didn't say game of the year. But it is easily the most memorable game I have played this year. My GOTY is XCOM, but events that happen in Walking Dead are so well done that when I'm presented with a particular choice it is often quite memorable. My most memorable gaming moment this year comes from The Walking Dead though, even if it's more interactive movie than "full fledged game." Perspective is important. I don't give 2 iotas for the Call of Duty games. But I can still understand why people like them and why they are successful. And they are definitely filled with more more involved gameplay than The Walking Dead, yet I find myself infinitely looking forward to an annual season of The Walking Dead game than I am for the next Call of Duty game.

Context is important, however. Unless people feel that Islam is just fundamentally not capable of coexisting with others... a perspective that was once ascribed to Christianity. In fact, the intolerance of Christians is in large part why they were persecuted by the Romans! Fun times and all.

No, from a pure game perspective it's not that remarkable. But it's probably still my most memorable game of the year simply because it's greater than the sum of its parts. Then again, I don't have some innate resistance to "OMG QTE must be teh suck." It's not a hard game in the slightest (although I did die at times), and it's basically just an interactive story. But it's an awesome one with some writing and VA that other companies should take note of. It's the only game I've played where despite knowing what the probable outcome of said quicktime event was going to be, I found myself pretty much trying to break my Q key because a bit of me was hoping I was wrong. Cool you don't like it, but if you can't understand why other people like it, it's on you not them as far as I'm concerned.

EDIT: Nevermind. Time would be better spent finishing the device that lets me punch people through monitors.

Bold prediction!

Wasn't Breivik Christian?

Lunch works

Buy the Walking Dead!

Yeah, I remember people being quite upset at losing their Defender +5 too actually.

Eh, I remember having heated arguments with those people on various places. They may have been less justified than now, but it did happen.

Thats interesting, where was it and did you go? BioWare does stuff like this. Though it's nothing formal or anything. If you're in Edmonton I could easily give you a tour though.

BG2 actually does import your character. There were people that spoke out against choices not being honored too.

I'll take an excellent narrative over Morrowind any day though. I've replayed Fallout: New Vegas. I was unable to return to Morrowind after a break (in large part because the Journal was utter crap). Different strokes for different folks and all. I wasn't the one saying that remembering where the badass stuff is one of the best parts of the game though. Also, what you describe here is level scaling (so you might not actually know it'll drop loot matching your level, and by definition since it's matching your level it's no longer deterministic so we aren't talking about the same thing anymore). I have tried doing stuff like you describe in the past, and while it's fun for a short while, ultimately it takes me out of the game. I now play RPGs from the perspective of "I don't go to a place that my character doesn't care to go for" even if it results in suboptimal gameplay. I stopped being a power gamer years ago. Again, different strokes for different folks.

Also, just finished The Walking Dead. First game I can remember that actually resulted in a genuine tear going down my cheek. I've been choked up at times before, but never actually teared up.

@WorstUserName It's important to note the specifics of your statement. "It kind of confuses me why choices like that were given in the first place if the devs weren't planning on following on them. It wasn't just some accidental death stuff like in Baldur's Gate 1, they were pivotal, scripted moments where you were given the specific choice of whether you wanted to kill a character or not." You can be unconvinced if you'd like, but you've literally asked "why were choices even given in the first [emphasis mine] place." I think it's very clear by many of the decisions in DAO that ultimately full on following through with them was going to be impossible. Part of the reason why DA2 is in a different location is that it distances us from that. But based on your statement, which is what I responded to, we were either doomed to enforce canon (which leads to you being confused why those choices were given since we're not following up on them), or doomed to react appropriately to all choices (scarcity sucks). Your statement refers to decisions we made for DAO. Since your statement implies that enforcing canon (to the extent of Fallout 2 or something) is inappropriate, any thoughts on what you would have preferred we did differently for DAO?

I'm not sure if this is necessarily an advantage or not. It makes the game universe predictable and consistent, but you're basically just describing metagaming. To the point where "I can effectively break the game because I know where to go to get all the best stuff."

Just to nitpick, if a player is at any time able to deduce "This is clearly the best solution for me" (which I find is often the case when choosing between "good" and "evil" then it's not really a dilemma at all. In order to be a dilemma, no choice can be considered to have a practically acceptable outcome. You may have lesser of evils, but ultimately if you could have neither outcome occur, that'd be preferable.

It all depends on what you're doing within the year. The EA Sports stuff is highly iterative year to year, but not huge and wholesale changes. Those come after a few years. The model doesn't necessarily work as well with all game types (EA Sports are arguably not a "creative" title, in the sense of creating a narrative and the challenges that may or may not be presented with those types of games), but I think part of the issue is that it's still somewhat newish. Improving parallelization is still coming along. But once an engine is complete and designers/writers know all it can do and don't expect to do anything different, creating a new game story is probably not too time consuming. But you will be restricted to the same types of game mechanics without that programmer support.