Pop

We've been running the RC at work and the speed difference between Vista and W7 is really quite striking. They added a bunch of features that are really quite nice as well. It's like the leap from Oblivion to Fallout 3.

I'm wondering if VB is canon. I heard that there was stuff in Operation: Anchorage that echoes stuff from VB, but if it isn't there's no reason why there couldn't be a Giant Radioactive Dustbowl on one edge of the map. Wouldn't be too pretty to look at from afar, but hey, that's life. Which reminds me of an old Fallout PnP game that I had devised in which the stand-in for a water chip / GECK was a weather control apparatus needed to save the PC's town from the encroaching Giant Radioactive Dustbowl. Finding it would require actually going into the Giant Radioactive Dustbowl, meeting weird things and eventually getting to some Military Base that has it. I should really get that started up again.

PR aside, Google's complicity in gov't. censorship and repression in China and elsewhere give it a reputation of being, if not immoral, amoral. Meaning, it's a capitalist enterprise just as Microsoft is.

Oh yeah, I'd like to take the opportunity to say **** the Witcher. **** it right off.

I would honestly give Fallout 3 a shot if I were you. It's much better than you'd expect it to be, which is "not very good at all".

New Dev Diary

So is CDProjekt out of the hole or what now?

A common and important element running through MCA's work w/r/t romance and character interaction in general has been an external supernatural force that binds characters together. With Torment it was the oaths that were sworn for the Nameless One, with KOTORII it was the magnetic attraction between the Exile and the broken individuals that made up his party, and I want to say there was a similar theme in NWN2 but I can't recall it exactly (though the thing with oaths was revisited in MOTB) The thing about romances and relationships in RPGs in general is that they develop really abnormally fast, when you think about it. In Mass Effect you pick up random people and put them in your party and in no time flat they are loyal to the death. The supernatural elements in MCA's games has made these relationship arcs much more sensible and coherent as the attraction between the PC and the party cannot be helped and is deterministic. But given that AP is a real-world game it can't have that external element helping make sense of the relationship dynamics it's going to run into the same problems that other games have, where relationships move so quick that people either feel like sluts or high school students with low self esteem.

Here is the best build for NWN2 and it is nigh-unstoppable - 1 level bard 3 levels fighter 10 levels Red Dragon Disciple whatever else you want (I usually go with Fighter for the extra feats, perks of other PrCs don't usually get powerful enough to matter by the time you can't get RDD levels anymore) The bard level makes just about every skill available to you as a class skill (you'll need the Able Learner feat to take full advantage of this as the game progresses) while your BAB is just shy of a full-fledged fighter. Meanwhile your strength is naturally augmented by 6 and con/cha are also boosted, and your hit die for RDD is d12. You can max out a number of skills while still being an incredibly powerful fighter.

Somehow it still surprises me that 15 minutes of pure genius is released and all y'all can talk about for 4 pages is marketing and the merits of a PC port.

Oh hello gameplay footage Looks better than Psychonauts. Funnier, too.

I didn't know a younger Robert Downey Jr. was working on this game.

Well I know "hordes" were something they only just implemented in UE3 for Gears of War 2. Obsidz could probably work up something similar but it seems like a lot of trouble to go through. From MCA's presentation it's apparent that some sort of crowd system will be implemented (Thorton has to prevent an assassination during a political rally or somesuch) whether that involves Mike in the middle of a huge crowd (harder to program) or observing from a distance (easier) I don't know.

Given the limitations of their engine it seems as though they won't be showing Taipei as busy as it is. From what we've seen the Taipei section of the game will feature a subway, a park and alleyways (and no city is too modern to have dirty alleyways)

With good reason. Real CIA agents don't really directly deal with world events or personalities, they just... live in a foreign country and chat with / pay informants, who in 999 of 1000 cases have nothing really spectacular to report. Most of them are accountant-types. A realistic espionage story would be terribly unexciting because espionage is pretty boring because international politics is pretty boring. If that interests you, just mod the Sims. You'll get much closer to reality than any strategy / action game ever will.

I think the cover art is intriguing enough to rope in impulse buyers. Genre games have to display certain elements to grab undiscriminating potential consumers - for action games and action-RPGs, it's people (the protagonist or an enemy) brandishing weapons threateningly. For strategy games, it's military units, probably of different types, portrayed working in tandem. The use of shadow in the cover hints at a stealth component and/or a mystery.

It speaks to the average forumite intelligence on this forum that people are assuming from the outset that the person on the cover is Thorton. Are you all retarded? It says The Espionage RPG on the cover and you're assuming the guy in shadow with a scar on his face is the ****ing protagonist? Really? Jesus Christ. I was expecting people to at least have knowledge of basic James Bond conventions. This is just embarrassing. That having been said, the art is very reminiscent of the Bourne film posters in their color scheme, with a little more Bond-esque "mystery" thrown in, which is just as well.

The first video footage of AP released had enemies using cover.

Ah, going deeper into the ugly organ of the Codex. I like how Roshambo still loves to name-drop and claim sole responsibility for the way several games turn out. He's pretty much the Perez Hilton of video games. I read his posts and the word "ASPERGERS" flashes in bright neon, over and over.

man I'm not sure how one becomes so deluded that they can use the phrase "decadent idiocracy" with a straight face.

I never liked you McGinnis!

I'm just bemused by the notion that variety in handler expectations throughout the game could be seen as problematic. You presented a scenario where you, the player, is preferring heavy combat over other styles of play and you're given a stealth mission, and you ask "what then?", which is a leading question, as the answer is obvious - you reap whatever consequences there happen to be for ignoring the strictures imposed upon you for the mission. Why would you ask that if you were satisfied with the answer? So you in effect ask me to justify your experiencing unsatisfactory consequences for your play style, even when negative consequences in this case are the only consequences that make sense. The OP was asking if it was sensible to worry that it would only be possible to establish functional relationships with factions by following an implicit demand for a playstyle that is consistently applied throughout the game. I figured that it was, and that's problematic because it does create an incentive to align with the faction that appreciates your style. Even with advantages doled out to mavericks who disobey handlers, gamers will be to factions as schoolchildren are to seats - nine times out of ten, kids will pick a seat on the first day of class and stick with it throughout even if they haven't been explicitly told to pick a seat and own it. Adding variety to handler demands makes it far less likely that a player will be inclined to align with a group solely because of his "class", because he won't know if factions will consistently fit his play style and he might not establish a tight relationship early on in the game. It allows him to be critical instead of just going through the motions.

Tough ****. AP is supposed to reward you for every decision you make, but that doesn't mean you're going to get all the results you want regardless of the way you play. A mission handler who prefers random senseless carnage every single mission is rather boring. If you want to gain influence with SIE then FFS do what the **** she says, not what you want her to want from you. If you're upset that all of a sudden she doesn't want you to Hulk out on everything then you've obviously already bought into the idea that SIE is the Fighter's Guild of the AP world and that her faction only makes sense when it expects a singular thing from you. Variety provides challenge. Roll with it. That having been said I would not be particularly surprised if SIE was in fact psychotically obsessed with gore 100% of the time.

I think there's validity to the concern that these handlers will be just a reskin of tired RPG conventions, where Albatross = thieves' guild and Sie = fighter's guild. What if I'm a stealthy character but I'd like to align myself with someone other than Albatross in that case? Arguably, I'd be penalized for attempting to do so, and restricts choice.

He meant it in the latter way. Alpha Protocol comes from the distinguished Witcher school of gender politics.