Pop

Maybe it was because of the difficulty level I was playing on, but the QTEs in Fahrenheit were never more than leisurely for me, and it was pretty cool for awhile. But at some point in the game the mechanics that were prevalent at the beginning (the conversation system, the puzzles and most importantly, the time attacks) disappeared and the game became entirely QTE based.

They've had those since the days of the Sega Genesis. Pretty sure my old gravis gamepad had one.

(psssst, QTEs are minigames)

I haven't run into any instances in which two different things you can say illicit the same reply. The trees are very basic, but at least they make sense.

Actually in a lot of ways I thought the dialogue system was better designed than, say, Mass Effect's. At least you don't have any false choices.

Also you guys should totally poach some talent from the HBO shows. From the looks of it they can't catch a ****ing break in Hollywood (see: The stars of The Wire and Rome appearing in Punisher: Warzone) so who knows, they might bite.

As annoyed as I might be by a delay, 3 months is a lot of time. The difference between an AP released in March and an AP released in June could be measured not just in polish but also in actual content delivered.

I know of a few MMORTSes in beta. The problem is that the nature of MMOs make it such that the game moves at a glacial pace, as you grind and grind to get meager bits of experience, and it takes weeks of play to do what you would normally be able to do in half an hour of single-player RTS time.

Oh thank god.

Was he as garishly colored as everything else in that movie?

Bad example (at the 2:25 mark). Better example - Idris Elba, who played Stringer Bell.

No idea. I like to think it dissuades people from posting ridiculous things.

Better they extend it now than in February.

The Metal Gear Solids are done for. Metal Gear will remain to be exploited by Konami. Kojima's right-hand man was supposed to take over MGS a few iterations ago but Kojima just couldn't keep himself out of it. He still might not be able to.

Mebbe. When you turn on google alerts for "alpha protocol" you tend to get either A. regurgitations of the dev diary by blogs (Rorie's doing or natural events?) or B. Reactions to a change in the uTorrent program. Apparently they switched from VOIP to UDP or... something. But the word "protocol" is thrown around a lot and so it gets picked up by the alert system.

Nobody likes Nicole Kidman. Less people like Baz Luhrmann.

I have heard my English compatriots refer to the meat-and-spice based stew as "Chilli". This is not the correct spelling, nor is it an actual word. the word is "chili". Get it right, Britain.

Actually Halo's voice talent I would say is no better or worse than those any other game. Bioware poached Captain Anderson from Halo, after all.

Yeah, it's unfortunate they made the Samarchan ranger a dual-wield specialist. I used her as a crossbowman throughout the game. Couldn't get her to dual-wield without constant nannying.

Breaking News Source Personally if I was going to record dubstep for a game there would be artists I'd go to before BT (as a general rule I think Trance is garbage), but the man's a professional and very slick (he produced "Pop" for N'Sync), so it's understandable. Man can probably work a deadline like nobody's business.

Moira had a decent accent, it was just a terrible VO job.

Right, and that's a good point to consider. Still, for any number of reasons I don't think a shoestring BG3 would be successful. BG2 had the series being described with the word "epic" more often than not. It's been something of a blessing and a curse for Bioware as a company. I seem to remember someone in this thread referencing filmmaking in comparison to making games (did I imagine that?) Making games is not like making movies, at least not making movies as you can now. I'd consider a comparison between the age of the Studio and the current gaming landscape. The internet cuts costs somewhat but we haven't yet seen a gaming equivalent of digital photography, an innovation that both makes starting out in the field easier and lowers day-to-day overhead. In order to make a competent looking and playing game that isn't terribly simple (ie not cat golf) you still need quite an investment of time, money and manpower. I'd argue that the difference between an independent game developer and a major professional game developer is greater than the difference between an independent filmmaker and a major professional filmmaker. Passionate people still find ways to make their games, but it's definitely not something you can just up and do in your backyard. If I'm making a movie independently I can be creative and use what I have on hand and what I can find as tools of my trade. If I'm making a game I have to make everything from scratch, just like EA has to. EA just has more resources. Everybody has the capacity to make a ****ty movie. The vast majority of people lack the capacity to make a ****ty game.

Were it that simple, and that consumers would be satisfied with an old-school BG3 that had roughly the production values of Galactic Civilizations 2. By and large gamers want to have their cake and eat it too.

A few copies, sure. But has been outlined by somebody else here (Grom, I think?) making niche games doesn't make sense when your budgets are the same as mainstream games. People won't pay extra for a good game of a specific type, they'll want to pay regular rates if they'll want to pay at all, so if you're going to go against the grain you have to be prepared for low sales, not hope that you'll tap an untapped market.

If you've never played the original MGS and want to, it's probably easier to play.