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**** man what game were you actually playing

What kind of game is that? A game devoid of good qualities.

If The Witcher consisted of actual substance the sexual pandering would've been at least 8-10%. I mean it's the end result of just about every encounter with a female character. When it isn't, they at least allow you to try, as with the barmaid in Chapter 2. And really as my previous post indicates, it's just one piece of **** in that very large septic tank. It's just sort of emblematic - you bring it up and you know exactly the kind of game the Witcher is.

Specifically you're hugely rewarded with renaissance-themed porno! What an awful, awful game the Witcher was. Badly translated, badly voice-acted, Haneke-esque in its schoolmarmish, po-faced tone. Trivially moral, narrow minded, mean spirited, sanctimonious, uneven, meandering, dim, distracted, more distended than a Wheel of Time doorstopper, more tedious than a cheap Diablo clone. Choices and consequences are given while the stakes are deliberately sabotaged to put forth an ever more "mature" (read: miserablist) and "complex" (read: nonsensical) universe. The meat of gameplay is grinding and collecting, long stretches of which connect choices that are difficult to really care about outside their academic importance with regard to the design of the game. Probably the worst game I have ever played, and I've played some bad games in my time. Oblivion was not nearly as bad as The Witcher. It was just as boring, but it was not as earnestly ambitious. I had heard that CDProjekt was having financial difficulties, and I was hoping that they would be prevented from unleashing more noxious gaming sludge onto the market. Given that Witcher 2 has no publisher at this time I can still hope, but The Witcher succeeded largely because of its worst qualities, and I fully expect the sequel to do the same.

Not necessarily. From what we can tell, Obsidz probably started work on New Vegas before they got an official contract from Bethesda. Aliens got axed in February and Sawyer started playing F3 incessantly, etc. The contract was signed in April and the announcement was made shortly thereafter. I would doubt that we've got a BG3 or NWN3 in the works simply because relying on Atari is such a big big big risk. They may not be in as bad of straits as they were before Ghostbusters and the like came out, but they're still shaky. They just got a new CFO within the last few days. On the panel Fergie talked about taking a risk to make D&D games in the past since they love the game, but 2 or more years being dependent on Atari is a whole 'nother level of risk. That having been said, I think Anthony Davis said way back when on the Codex that the unannounced game is fantasy, and I think that was after Seven Dwarves got canceled. And let me be the first to say a bloo bloo 4th ed a bloo bloo.

Also if they continue to insert cutscenes of fighting into fighting gameplay with this frequency people are going to mistake it for a Metal Gear Solid game. That's actually the first thing I thought of, after the whores.

Could use more whores.

Barum pum pum Feargus speaks Just for reference this was after Fergie had participated in a panel in which he talked about relying on established properties during rough times. Make of that what you will.

Engineers are pretty okay in my estimate. Their abilities are basically custom grenades so even if the intended effect doesn't happen you should still do some damage. I can't remember what the name of the biotic / soldier class is (sentinel?), but I think it's the most powerful of the classes. Good weapon capabilities (the shotgun is 9x more useful than the infiltrator's sniper rifle, because of how small the levels tend to be) and their abilities, specifically barrier, augment your fighting power pretty well.

XKCD suxxx

Yeah, tech firms and Silicon Valley in particular are kind of notorious for having really ridiculous company cultures with exorbitant creature comforts, spas in the workplace and the like. It's all endemic of the dumb optimism that came out of the dot com bubble. Thing is I've never heard of that sort of opulence in a game developer, with one exception - Harmonix, who make it a point (at least from a PR perspective) to really push the music-friendliness of their culture. For example, any employee can take unlimited unpaid vacation hours for the purposes of touring or performing as the member of a band. Given Activision's history with Harmonix I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was specifically a dig at them. Seems kind of late, though. You know Kotick is banging his head against a wall for not getting the Beatles license first.

We're pretty much past the era of full xpacs, at least when it comes to non-PC exclusives. What passes for an xpac these days is becoming less and less substantial. The Pitt, for example, only provided about 4 or so hours of gameplay.

AP widget

1080p?

If you save beforehand, yes. Also if you play through the game again to that point, yes. I'm a little bit drunk right now.

October.

I ain't saying AP is being rolled out like a Leisure Suit Larry game, but for example, Sie is really the only major NPC we've been shown thus far. Seeing as how she's being highlighted in countless previews and interviews it seemed like there had to be a good go-to distillation of the character, for sound bit purposes at least. To be sure, the dynamics and consequences of how you interact with the Sie character are emphasized, but Sie as a character in the narrative is basically summed up as a "mercenary cougar", a term with a definition that begins and ends with the type of relationship she can have with the PC. I'm guessing that Sie is going to turn out to be a subtly drawn character, but in the previews she's essentially a Bond character defined by her sexuality. Obsidz is at least complicit in that.

I thought the term "high fantasy" predated the era of tabletop games. Fantasy fiction has been around for over a hundred years and I guess if I could distill my notion of "high fantasy" down to one single thing it would be "imitation Arthurian legend", or at least fantasy pulp in the vein of Robert E. Howard. Knights, noble quests, magic not being necessarily rare, but there being a pronounced supernatural element to the setting at least. Witches and warlocks and spirits and ghosts and such exist out there in the world. TVTropes puts D&D and Arthurian / Conan type stuff into the category of "Heroic Fantasy", but their definition of High Fantasy seems to jibe with mine. The difference seems to be in the focus on the scope of the story. Still, the whole "grand conflict between the forces of good and evil" is what seals it for me. The thing with the Forgotten Realms seems to be that there are a lot of grand conflicts (so many, often several at a time, that it becomes ridiculous) but no THE grand conflict, outside of, I don't know, the Time of Troubles maybe?

I don't know. It seems like Dragonlance had its main conflicts on a pretty large scale, with dragon armies and ****. FR always seemed to focus around the adventurer's group. Plus whenever I think of High Fantasy I don't think of Elminster (pretty much a carbon copy of Gandalf except he doesn't adventure) but of the Black Knight (for all intents and purposes, a Sauron-type conquering villain) and castles and princesses and ****, which are all pretty much Dragonlance. FR was always a bit weirder than that, largely because of how ridiculously prevalent magic was, and because of how the malevolent powers of the world tended to be subversive and hatch plots instead of launch armies. It's too loopy to be high-fantasy, and it's a bit more interesting than the more traditional fantasy tropes. I'll take, say, the Zhents or the Red Wizards over the Orc Hordes (or the Blightspawn, for that matter) any day. It looks like in Dragon Age you'll actually be raising an army from the races of the land ala LOTR. Which is fun enough, I guess (there was an element of that towards the end of NWN2) but it's not really interesting as a hook.

I don't think I'd classify the FR as high fantasy. Dragonlance was definitely more in the LOTR-aping vein. Dragonlance always did bore the **** out of me. Dragon Age looks like it might do the same.

I thought that as well, but they don't necessarily have to go violent to be scary. A good chunk of Fantasia is really supposed to be kind of scary (I'd say some of these pics are pretty Fantasia-y), and don't forget that one song from Dumbo that freaked the **** out of you when you were little. Plus Disney already farmed out their most famous characters to the ridiculous Kingdom Hearts series. Here be the link.

It seems pretty clear by this point that emphasizing the sex was at the least one of a few different things that Obsidz emphasized about their games, and even with my rudimentary knowledge of how PR works I'd bet there was a one-sheet sent out to game journalists telling them what was interesting about Alpha Protocol, and what to focus on in previews. The presentation of Sie in particular seemed to lean on the possibility of sex with that character, to an extent. The romance aspect was probably on that sheet. As it is on the lists of most WRPGs made post-BG2, I imagine.

So some stuff has hit the webs and it's speculated they are from Warren Spector's (of Deus Ex fame) new game for the Wii. Junction Point studios was bought out by Disney in 2007. Looks like they've gone with a horror-steampunk look. Read about it here.

Can we get someone in here who can actually make an argument against the article without focusing on the character of the writer? Can we get someone in here who is actually capable of participating in a cogent debate? No? This word, it does not mean what you think it means. Actually misanthropy is "a hatred of humankind". What you're talking about is misandry, or "a hatred of males". Misogyny is actually misanthropy, unless your implication is that women aren't human beings the way men are. Perhaps it's best that I don't ask you to clarify.