alanschu

I'm guessing because it just fits that archetype we're all used to. You aren't bound to wear them if you don't want to though. You could deck them out in full plate if you want

I like finding combo strategies for spells.

Jock can die!?

Currently fighting off a ton of counterattacks in Cambria! I'm holed up in the sector with the ACA which lets me train up militia, and my high leadership trainers have just arrived, freeing me kill squad for...uh, killing! It's a challenge to never ever use Bobby Ray's, but I'm still thinking on turning off drop all haha. It's just ridiculous how much stuff drops that it's kind of intimidating. 360 items in my sector after all the counter attacks!

I believe the game was marketed more as an "Action RPG" type, so I'm not too surprised that there isn't that much for exploration.

Totally! This is like Duke Nukem Forever 2, amirite? You seem to be implying so with your statements. Never mind the fact that Ironcreed didn't make any claims about how the company owes him anything, but is expressing his anxiety over a game that had a supposed release date within a month that still doesn't have a concrete release date.

In KOTOR you're forced to become a Jedi, as well as give a **** about the Star Forge. KOTOR isn't exactly freedom defined. Dragon Age doesn't force you to sacrifice yourself for the greater good either.

If you're going to split hairs like this, you can say this about any game. Including Dragon Age. This sounds like a semantics issue, and was certainly not what I wanted to imply. You play Max Payne because he's the focus of the story. It'd be very unusual for them to have created Max Payne, with all of his bullet time awesomeness, and then NOT let you, the player, play as Max Payne and experience it. Regardless of whether or not it's your "avatar" or whatever, most games focus around the primary character the player controls. You're still playing the character that's the focal point of the story. Just because you don't start off as the primary catalyst doesn't mean anything. Having said that, the focus is definitely not on the King, or Loghain. The focus is always on the character that you're controlling, and your role in fighting the Darkspawn with the King and Loghain (and Duncan) at Ostagar.

The thing is though, if they did that they'd lose the money from those that pay the subscription fee for a predominantly single player experience. I don't know if it'd be that successful to release single player versions of the games.

Once you grow weary of the bonus missions, just do the main quest.

I suppose. Just to make sure I'm understanding this better, but people wouldn't have an issue with becoming a Grey Warden in Dragon Age, if it meant that they just chummed out with another Grey Warden? Having said that, while I've never played Tales of Symphonia, I'm guessing you go where your character (Lloyd) decides to go. So really, who's following you? Is she just following you around because she has some uber power to save the world, but apparently relies on others in order to protect her? Or is it more like FF6, where everyone could be considered a protagonist?

I have long since stopped caring, and didn't even realize until wandering into this thread that there was another. You're right that few people care. Which ever mod does come out first, the other will probably get zero coverage at all because those that have been waiting, already got it from the first mod.

The only game where I can think of where you don't play the hero is Dreamfall. You have to save April Ryan because April is the hero. I wouldn't consider Zoe a Lancer through. Still, does Dreamfall focus on you the character, or April? I haven't played it. Some could argue that Revan is the "hero" of the KOTOR series, but the Exile is still very much the focus point of KOTOR 2 (not really a great example but hopefully you can see what I mean). I disagree, though only partially. Diablo II may focus a lot on the travels of the wanderer from the first game, but the fact is, I'm still the one smacking down Mephisto, Diablo, and Baal. Seems pretty heroic to me. I have a feeling the game would be less popular if we just followed around some AI NPC that actually killed all the bosses and collected the phat lewt Well, it's assigning motivation in the fact that if you do nothing, at worst you die, at best you run away somewhere else and Ferelden is loss. Not really an interesting game if that was the case. BioWare did the same with Baldur's Gate as well as Knights of the Old Republic, and definitely Mass Effect.

I feel I should add that I am talking about RPGs. It is more than possible to create cool stories where you are the side characters. Those games, IMO, tend to be relatively linear and static though, from what I can tell. Even then, warping it in a way that the story of the game isn't actually about the character the player is playing is quite difficult.

That's not a Lancer. A lancer is someone who plays an important role in the story, but isn’t the Hero. You're describing the experience of being a random bystander. I put Lancer in quotation marks because he's talking about being an imaginary person in Max Payne. Because the example Oner used was Max Payne. I'm unaware of playing any sort of Lancer character in Max Payne. Since we're picking hairs, would someone be content to play a Lancer to Alistair? To Duncan? Where the PC isn't the one actually making any decisions, but rather the side characters? How many people like playing the roles where they aren't actually the ones making the decisions? Where they aren't the ones that are the focus of the story? Would it be fun to be the Lancer to the Vault Dweller, where you don't actually decide where to go outside of perhaps making suggestions for the hero to decide whether or not he would agree to do so? Just a side character beside the Bhaalspawn? What games truly have you playing the Lancer, because I emphatically disagree that Max Payne is in any way an appropriate example.

Then you'd be wrong.

Actually, I play every game that has a predefined protagonist with this mindset, that I'm the supporter, the grey eminence, the twelfth man so to speak. And I enjoy it. Not being the hero, but hir lancer, rooting for hir success, (and enjoying the badassitude of my position) can be quite fulfilling. Take Max Payne for instance, you're not supposed to be the guy, you're supposed to symphatize with him, feel his pain. As for the non-standard game over cut scene I mentioned, all I'm saying is, showing some sort of consecvence (grammar skillz not working tonight :/) is better than nothing. That doesn't change the fact that you ARE PLAYING MAX PAYNE! It's not like you're playing Mona Sax or some other character. If that's your example then I don't think we're talking about the same thing. It seems to me you enjoy being the one that controls the protagonist. Would you enjoy being the "Lancer" of a farmhand in Redcliffe that is lucky to survive the fight, while the Grey Warden hero comes in with his party, does all the quests in the area, and then moves on in the story while you remain in Redcliffe, to be the "Lancer" of your farmhand? Would you enjoy being some no name cop in Max Payne, watching Max Payne do all these ridiculously cool acrobatic moves, while the game slows down for HIM, while your copy is subject to the same penalties as the hostiles during bullet time? Max Payne is called Max Payne because the main character, that you play in the game, is Max Payne.

I'm referring to just the preseason. Once the regular season started it was open season. This includes watching Pronger not bowl people over in the preseason games I watched him play live.

As for the length of the game, my first playthrough was about 60ish hours or so on the in game clock, with maybe a couple hours of idle time (leaving afk to go somewhere). The idle time is probably balanced by the "uncounted" time with loads due to dying. My playthrough was pretty complete, though missing the odd thing here and there based on conversations with other people at the office. I didn't stop to solve very many puzzles situations though. I also did complete one puzzle a lot faster than most people do, so yay me! I didn't do any restarts or anything, and played through with my first character. I did fully listen to pretty much every line of dialogue in the game though. Yesterday I beat the game in about 10 hours, doing the most critical path possible while skipping virtually every line of dialogue/cutscene possible, with my PC immortal and running scripts to instantly kill every hostile on screen. The only cutscenes I watched were the end game ones since I did stuff differently and was curious what the epilogue would be. This is probably pretty close to a lower bound on game time, and required cheats for me to do it.

I agree with this. While the cutscene is important given that there's that specific choice in Fallout, the game could have functionally worked if you never had the option to join the Master at all. I'm not sure that you can say that without experiencing the story. Could they have done it? Sure, but from what I can tell it would have only really made sense if they'd make someone else be the "protagonist" and let the player play more of a backup role. That might sound cool at first, but at the same time, I don't know if people (myself included) would really enjoy a game where they aren't necessarily the focus of the story.

Not exactly. And never . Ultimately though, the ability to avoid becoming a Grey Warden doesn't exist. Which makes sense, given the story that BioWare wants to tell. Just like how the ability to avoid becoming a Jedi in KOTOR doesn't exist.

It costs twice as much though and has DRM so, yeah, I would still recommend the GoG version... The GoG version doesn't come with Unfinished Business though. It's only $4.99 on GoG so that still works out to $5.00 off the Steam price although, yeah, it's not really worth getting unless you really, really want more JA2. As for the modding, I did not mention that the Steam version did not work with 1.13 -it, as you said, does I believe- but I do know that some Steam games do not like it unless you turn the "auto-patch" feature off. I never said that it was you that said that the mods don't work. However, you decided to respond to my post about how the mods will still work with the Steam version. Just because you didn't make posts that mods may have issues, doesn't mean that someone else didn't. Looking at price, sure, don't get the steam version. I never said otherwise either, since, you know, all I did was say that the Steam version still supports the mods. 1.13 specifically.

It looked very much like a complaint that killing people inside a building didn't make the town upset, but killing people outside did make the rest of the town upset.

I remember seeing Mike Peca, when he was an Oiler, skating around and tapping people that had their heads down instead of hitting them. The more veteran players tend to not bowl people over, even though Peca more than had the ability to.