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Is nothing sacred? Is nothing sacred?

Given the game in question I can't see how the PC crowd could complain about either of those things.

I felt the urge to start playing Mass Effect again, and unfortunately I installed the PC version (don't know where my 360 copy is, exactly) and hit a game-bricking General Protection Fault a few days into my game. Checked on their forums and there's a 30-page long thread started in May (when the game was released) filled with people who can't figure out how to get past it. Troika wasn't this bad. Blame EA, I suppose. Support for other Bioware games has been pretty good.

What's likely the case is that the screenshots we've seen of Thorton with rougher skin / stubble / the like are parts of the game that have been finished before the rest of the game, as eye candy for game journalists and promo screenshots. Even though the rest of the game isn't complete, the part of the game in which you confront the arabian arms dealer is done. The "before" screenshots are ostensibly what Obs is going for in the finished product.

It's not just you. Around here we call it "forward development".

?uestion -

It came out a few weeks ago, and it doesn't.

I'm curious as to whether or not martial arts will be viable as a primary means of combat. From the way Josh had written about it, it seemed like you'd be using unarmed mainly in conjunction with stealth, as in, you use unarmed when you want to avoid combat. If I put my Thorton's skill points primarily into unarmed combat will I end up gimping him? I figured that a sensible "power" associated with unarmed combat, assuming it could be viably used as a primary skill, would be some means of closing the distance between Thorton and his target, a sprint or somesuch, during the use of which you don't take damage. Obviously we can see from the dev diary that the levels are often expansive enough that you could stand to hurt yourself just running straight at a guy who knows you're there. It's also worth asking if there are enemies who will use CQC against you, or at least, characters for whom CQC is recommended.

Uh, Obama is a constitutional lawyer by trade. You don't get degrees in **** you don't care about. Of course, and thus far this cabinet seems to be more or less a technocracy, which is good. I would've pegged Clinton more as HHS or education, but I'm sure she'll surprise me as Sec of State.

Guitar Hero: World Tour Stick around / fast forward to the end. You will be glad you did. It kinda sorta ties into Obs, as it stands now.

I don't think anybody remotely informed about the guy should have seriously considered Obama to be a liberal. It's a testament to how far rightward the political dialogue has shifted in this country that Obama, who's assembling a center-right cabinet and is proving to be Clinton 3, was feared by many a mouth breather to be a socialist. Most of his actual appointments or decisions will not matter all that much, honestly. The crisis-management oriented economic team likely would've been assembled more or less the same under McCain. The things that will matter will have to do with the war, primarily, if he chooses to address it, and he might not, and his foreign policy in general will be something to keep an eye on, what with Russia newly ornery and prone to swinging its **** around. The biggest and most important thing Obama will do will be retaining the current ideological makeup of the Supreme Court for another decade or two. That in itself was worth the election falling to him.

Combat in actual locations is strenuous enough that buffs are useful, and healing is now vital. Favored Souls are hella useful. It is odd that if you use a haste spell immediately before exiting to the map you'll be hasted on the map for a few seconds. Sort of kind of useful, especially if you've got a warlock with Flee the Scene. I did not plan ahead for group feats, and thus I can only get 2, one simply by chance, as my warlock is a half-elf. There's a new patch? Stupid D2D games.

Jason Graves, but also Alex Brandon.

I've hit some weird pathfinding on the Overland map - Every once in awhile a monster will spot me, I'll attempt to make a break for it and my party will move towards the encounter, when I told them to move away from the encounter. That's always fun. Also there's a "jumping" issue, where my party will be moving and they'll suddenly "lurch" half a screen or more ahead or behind the point at which they were previously.

An SDK has been announced (called, of course, GECK) for release in December. Also, DLC in the first three months of next year. January - Operation: Anchorage, in which you enter a simulation of the battle of Anchorage against the Red Chinese. Should be interesting, if a little heavy on the combat. February - The Pitt, in which you travel to the ruins of Pittsburgh, now a hub for raiders. March - Broken Steel (or something), which will allow you to continue the game past the original ending, become a member of the BoS, and destroy the Enclave. Apparently.

If it's anything like Fallouts 1 and 2 there should be an .ini file or somesuch with a variable that affects the frequency of random encounters. IIRC it's how the Fallout 2 Restoration / Unofficial Patch makers were able to optimize the game for processors that are much faster than Interplay / Black Isle expected the game to run on.

That's not always the case. Bethsoft in particular is pretty good about getting out functional DLC in a timely fashion, but Bioware promised lots of DLC for Mass Effect and there was only the one (rather negligible) extra mission. It certainly doesn't seem like we'll see more than one other DLC addition before ME2 comes out.

Rogue skills are about as necessary as they are in the other games - if you've got a wizard with Knock, you've got part of it substituted, but you're still susceptible to traps. But more importantly, most of the skills, particularly those having to do with detection, are put to good use during overland travel. Hide / Move Silently are also useful if you don't like the hassle of combat. The skill with the highest modifier is the one counted, so if you're not actually using stealth in the rest of the game (and let's face it - why would you?) it doesn't make sense to put points into both of them. Choose one, I don't think it matters which, I haven't seen any special dialogue options relating to either, or the like. Gotta hand it to Obsidz, they put a lot of effort into making the skills more useful, and they well succeeded, I think. Also I think I may have fashioned a broken party. Or at least, it's certainly broken now that I managed to complete 3-4 quests in one excursion out on the map and came back to the tune of 15,000 gold or so. They made enchantment way too easy. Party's level 8 and all my fighters are using weapons that do an extra 3 or 4d6 elemental damage. The useful wondrous items all take special ingredients or spell memorization, but all it takes to add a d6 to damage is gold? Tsk tsk, Obsidz.

What about an xpac? I know you guys all hate the DLC queries, but it seems like xpacs are a thing of the past in the Bioware tradition (where for the moment Obsidian resides), at least outside of modular DnD games,. None of the KOTORs had xpacs, Jade Empire didn't have xpacs, ME didn't have xpacs. AP seems like that sort of game, that has all its ambitions wrapped up in a single package, just the one story to tell, only to be continued in an entirely new story.

So after getting a few levels with my Grey Orc Monk / Half-Drow Warlock / Human Ranger / Human Thief party and totally sucking, I restarted with a Human Favored Soul / Half-Drow Warlock (same character as first party) / Halfling Rogue-Swashbuckler-Duelist / Human Bard-Fighter party. I'm doing much better, mostly due to the inclusion of the Favored Soul, who has healing powers. Storm of Zehir's death mechanics are certainly unforgiving of cleric-less parties. Meanwhile the warlock continues to be a decent ranged power hitter (and the fear blast, never really useful in the OC, gets a lot of mileage in SoZ) and the Bard-Fighter is one level away from becoming a Red Dragon Disciple. The 1 Bard / 4 Fighter / X Red Dragon Disciple build is the most powerful I've run across in NWN2, I'm sure I'll have lots of fun with it in SoZ.

Jeremy Soule is the ubiquitous IWD fantasy music guy. Inon Zur is the Fallout 3 guy. If interviews are any indication, Soule would have done a decidedly less half-assed job on the F3 soundtrack than Zur did (my enjoyment of F3 was multiplied many times by mods that replaced the orchestral soundtrack with the ambience from the originals)

I'm thinking that the lockpick minigame is symptomatic of all the other iffy things in the video - lack of polish. I'd bet money on the minigame graphic being a placeholder. Once they nail down the mechanics of the minigame they'll start work on making it look cool.

Is your complaint that there are no CQC weapons? Because there are, at least according to Josh.

I suppose. Don't we have a thread with all the basic info on the game somewhere? Can we pin it to the top of the forum or something?

You haven't read a lot about this game, have you?