EUIX
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Posts posted by EUIX
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If you look at the "first peek" trailer, it definitely looks like there were significant downgrades. Around the 2:00 mark, I remember being amazed by how fluid and impressive the model animations were (look at the way the character runs up the path and shifts their weight when turning).
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I just finished the game. My total playing time was 30 in game hours, probably 35 if you count all my reloading.
There is definitely the outlines of a great game here and there are moments when you feel "ah that's really cool", the game surprises you with its reactivity and spontaneity, when you do something that you feel will break a certain quest train and instead it rewards you with a different solution.
But there is obvious signs of project mismanagement, feature creep, lack of funding or all of the above. Many mechanics, particularly combat and the XP tables are poorly implemented, the game degenerates into a story experience and the gameplay component is reduced to simply walking around and clicking on characters because there is no challenge or difficulty curve whatsoever. Every task can be succeeded at with 100% success. I had over 24 intellect by the end of the game with 3 edge, so I didn't even need to expend intellect to pass any checks. There seems to have been budget issues, cyphers for instance all have simple art and effects that look the same. Remember how cool it was that all the mage spells that were level 6 and greater in Planescape had unique and sweet FF7 like animations?
All this could have been swept under the carpet and forgiven if not for the the final act. You really get the sense that large amounts of content was cut from the latter part of the game. If one goes back and looks at the trailers, it is clear that there were a whole additional city and narrative path that continued on from the Bloom that in the end were reduced either to narrative text in the form of Meres or very small gameplay areas at the very end.
For this last reason the game really suffers, it's obvious there were significant cuts to the core narrative and plot, much less forget about the fact that the promised Fathoms and labyrinth are essentially nonexistent or heavily gimped. The Calm (the castoff's mind area) has very little depth beyond a few reactive quests in the beginning (unless I missed it). One get's the impression that Sagus Clffs and the Bloom COMBINED was originally the first hub and the second was the Oasis and Jora. The latter being totally axed and the end game rushed right after the Bloom.
All in all, for 4 years of development, multiple delays, which I completely accepted as the price of delivering a high quality product the end result is just sub-par. I don't measure this as a successor to Planescape: Torment but simply in isolation as a Role-playing game. Perhaps 5 million dollars really was not enough money to deliver the game we all dreamed of, and really the true cost would have been something like 20 million, but in that case, the designers and architects of the game should have had the vision and responsibility to scope the game in a leaner and more concise manner. Instead one ends up with what is essentially half or 2/3 of the game that was promised.
I mean don't get me wrong, I am just happy that games like this can still come out in this day and age and to have had the experience and I am happy to have had this experience of a new game in the vein of Planescape but overall I cannot feel this is a satisfactory product experience. Perhaps in the future we will learn how the development process went but I cannot help but feel it didn't not go very smoothly. What is currently the game, does not feel like 4 years of development, unless one scrapped and remade the game more than once.
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Holy crap, EUIX is back. Welcome!
haha yea, been lurking on and off since Pillars. Moderator now! Old timers are going up.
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I actually think the music in TTON is kick ass. I remember spinning up the beta the first time and hearing the title track with headphones on, really brought back the Planescape nostalgia. Like Planescape it also has a great credit's track. It's more a shame that there isn't more the music.
That being said, starting to explore the Bloom now and I am thoroughly enjoying it. I have heard that the end game gets rushed so I will make a final judgement when I finish the game.
In addition to my comments before I do feel the game is too easy. I am playing a high intelligence Nano and its just way to easy to succeed in all effort tasks and there are way too many shins in the game, you can pretty much buy whatever you want, and especially since there is not much combat, you are not really challenged to upgrade your equipment or expend your cyphers. The game economy really needs a overhaul, in my opinion it should be much harder and more expensive to rest and the amount of shins that oddities sell for far less. And EXP gains need to be gimped, just like Pillars, you gain EXP way too fast. I am a hour into the Bloom and I am already Tier 4.
One the key highlights of the effort system is that failing at tasks just leads to different but also interesting solutions to problems and questlines but it's hard to expect players to deliberately fail at tasks when they came easily apply effort to everything.
So far at least the only cut of which I am absolutely steamed about is the in game codex. I l loved the in game encyclopedia of characters and locations in Planescape and Pillars of Eternity and Dragon Age and the Witcher games. Being able to just sit and read awesome lore is great.
The journal layout is also atrocious, the text boxes are so small, cramped.
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I think the stretch goals being cut is really just a symptom of larger project management problems. Inxile is basically Troika of the old, great ideas but without the technical or managerial sophistication to fully realize them.
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I just got to the bloom. So far so good, I had already played through the Sagus cliff section multiple times in the early access so I didn't see any new content until after that point. There are definitely a couple of bugs that they didn't fix even after the beta. For instance, if you reload and go into the Lazaeret the dead Peerless ones bob around. Also a couple of quest threads don't finish completely. Definitely mad about all the stretch goals that got cut. I remember during the kickstater how much hype there was and now seeing all the goals become pages from a choose your own adventure book is bad. Also there seems be some lack of polish, in the interface but also just small things, i.e. the interface and design of the Mere just looks amateurish. Also characters can't seem to turn on the spot and instead have to execute a small 360 turn around which sometimes causes them to get stuck.
We will see how things shake out. So far it has taken me about 23 hours to get to the bloom. I guess this game will be 40 hours at most.
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Bull****. I'll take my chances with democracies of equal capability like India or Indonesia, thanks.
I am not going to get engaged in a pissing contest over Indian manufacturing or what not though I think you will find India and Indonesia combined don't have a fraction of Chinese manufacturing, China is much too big a topic for me to huff and puff about on a video games forum (doesn't even increase my post count on this forum =\ ) but I will just say these words which sum up what I feel, and hopefully not make a mountain out of a molehill.
There is such a virulent strain of anti-Chinese sentiments in most of the developed west it's hard to get a straight forward rational analysis of things so I won't pretend my sources are any more valid then yours. I don't want to sound like I am the resident CCP stooge but there are things in China that are just so fundamentally different, arising primarily due to history, unprecedented poverty and turmoil that has only recently ended, an enormous population, along with incomplete economic and still to be implemented political transformations that gives the impression of an alieness (I know that's not a word) but are really just the result of the heretofore.
Democracy, human rights, labor protection, these are just words, they ring hollow and insignificant next to the tumultuous events of 20th century China. Of course you might think history is no justification nor precedence for the present, and you will be right. It is not to excuse all the problems with Chinese practices these days but to establish the context in which these transformations must happen. If you understand the difficulty of compressing over a hundred years of western development into a single generation upon 1.3 billion people that until 1979 roughly speaking was in a constant state of political, economic upheaval then all that has and is transpiring, in all things, is not difficult to understand. People in the meantime will continue to suffer some more then others but there always has been casualties to change, to I dare say progress, some accidental others deliberate and there always will be. In the end the way of the world remains; the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
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He is trying to sue a Chinese company in China from the United States? Fat chance in hell, anyone who grew up or spends any decent amount of time in China knows how ludicrous that sounds.
Compensation is much lower in China then it is in the U.S. nobody ever got 5 million dollars because he found a dime in his hamburger at McDonalds. If you are crippled for life you might get $20000 USD and sign a letter waiving any further legal action The law does not protect you in China only your guanxi, this apples to Chinese citizens and foreigners.
I don't mean to sound cruel but that is the way things are, things are getting better but while things are getting better people will continue to be screwed. That said not buying Chinese products is unavoidable, and stupid to begin with. The reduction in cost due to Chinese manufacturing is one of the reasons living standards in the West could improve. All socio-economic classes in the west can afford basic appliances, textile fabrics and computers and electronics because of there are people half a world away willing to work 12 hour shifts and cause serious environmental damages to their country.
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As long as they have more then 3 voice actors this time around.
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You just need to scroll down a bit you can see the other two parts.
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http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-...th-korea-1-of-3
This is one of my favorite NK documentaries, I 've seen a lot of them. You don't see the camera man much in this but his balls must be made out of titanium sheathed diamond.
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DLC usually don't sell very well on PC's, until Fallout 3 anyways... No one with a computer is usually willing to pay for **** that should have been in the game like Broken Steel.
Anyone remember Trials of the Luremaster? That was DLC.
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In my campaign that I played in college we were a five man party of a Barbarian (me), Cleric (DM), Illusionist Wizard, a Bard and a Druid. So basically a party of 3 with two useless ****s hanging on. About the most memorable thing I could think of was this one time when we had to fight a chain demon (no I am not making that up) who could hurl chains from thin air at us and had gigantic damage reduction which made me unable to hurt it.
So after getting beaten for several rounds and wasting spells, our Druid had the idea to cast Otiluke's Resilient Sphere on it, in the belief that we could take a break and strategize while neither party could harm each other, since the demon was in the sphere. But when he cast it he forgot that the chain demon was still hurling chains at us, the next round of the demon's the DM started rolling for damage and I knew we just ****ed ourselves. Or rather the Druid ****ed us.
The next few minutes were spent looking up the rules of Otiluke's Resilient Sphere, last 1min/level, impregnable, cannot be breached. Fortunately for us the Cleric "serendipitously" had a scroll of dispel magic on him.
There was also this other time we killed a ice dragon by hurling a dozen fireballs at it from the outside of the room it was in. Funny it worked out that way as the dragon was taking double damage and we had looted a bunch of Necklaces of Fireball that we never used so we ended up with three characters who were slinging 10d6'ers from the outside corridor per turn.
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Saw Jin-Roh again a week ago. Brought back a lot of memories, last saw that movie 10 years ago, I feel old just saying it.
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Too many, Modern Warfare 2 for one, though I won't be able to play anything until Christmas at the earliest, if not next summer.
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I definitely made 2000+, at the time I thought I was posting as fast as I possibly could, I couldn't understand how some people had like 10000+.
Check out Metadigital's profile here. 15,000 posts since he registered. That's still under 9 posts per day and he hasn't been seen in almost a year. If you tried, you could get that in less than 5 minutes every day for however many years. It's a huge number of posts, but when you consider how much time some people have actually spent on these forums, it's not as mind bogglingly huge a number as it might seem.
Yes but just what are you posting? Sure if you want you can write a bot to make 10 posts per minute for you consisting of nothing of ascii gibberish. After a while you just run out of things to say or comment about.
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Who is this person? Is she like a popular WoW player or something?
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You really have to be hardcore to have your character die permanently, like Hearts of Iron hardcore. Props to anyone who can lose their lvl 60 char and keep on playing.
I dunno, I play HOI but I was never hardcore enough for hardcore D2, and I played the **** out of D2. Hell could you imagine a duel in hardcore? Do your characters die permanently from PvP?
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I was in Dandong a month back, and on the Broken Yalu river (yalu duan qiao), there are binoculars that you can rent and look into North Korea with, it's very surreal seeing all the high rises on the Chinese side and on the NK side there is nothing. I can only imagine what it must be like at night. Afterwards took a drive along the highway and after a while the Yalu bends into North Korea so all that separates China and NK is a fence, there was a gap in the fence about 3 meters wide where anyone could walk in. It is another world over there.
Our driver said the NK Border Guards bring back refugees by stringing them together with steel wire threaded through their shoulders. Because they are so malnourished you can get the wire straight through the flesh and out the other end easily.
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Christ I can't believe I watched that.
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Can you suggest a REALLY good game for either PC or PS2, then? Or Wii.
You can instead shoot heroin into your bloodstream, it would be better then WoW.
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I definitely made 2000+, at the time I thought I was posting as fast as I possibly could, I couldn't understand how some people had like 10000+.
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A lot of this generation who were introduced to FPS through Halo don't really think much of the original Half-Life. If you didn't play it back in 1998, back when the helicopter on the cliffside in Surface Tension caused you to **** your pants, it's just not the same after being first exposed to Halo or Gears of War.
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There were two really old Dark Sun rpgs by SSI but beyond that nothing has been done in the setting for a long time. Love to see Dark Sun, I think the chief feature of Dark Sun is the extremely high difficulty level.
What are you playing right now?
in Computer and Console
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Battle Brothers. I got it a while back and couldn't really get into it. Lately, I have been horribly addicted like in my youth to this game, playing it in all my spare time. On veteran difficulty it's one of the most challenging games I have played.
I also received my backed copy of Battletech but only gave it a brief whirl. I gather a patch is going to be needed at some point to fix some optimization issues.