Pop

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALT

@ you.

Okay, bought it today. Case SLI capable Intel Motherboard 500w power source Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz processor (The Wolfdale was out of stock, and we wanted to get all of our stuff from the same source. Besides, money.) 2 gigs of Ram for $45 (yay!) and A nice little CPU Cooler I plan on getting a nice 20" screen soon and after that, some SLI investment, which will unfortunately entail getting a newer, better power source.

So I've got a physical copy of the mag, and on the second to last page it has a rather nice view of an environment (looks to be a warehouse of some kind) and a render of an asian man who looks very not asian. The screen caps look a little better non-scanned, but the little things, like the characters' thick wrists, still bother me. Considering there were only 2 non-PC characters shown in-game (the non-asian asian man and the black dude with the beard) I'd think they either held back on GI or they're not done with the engine yet.

Well, you know what they say.

There's a whole lot of mouth-breathin' goin on! I'm sorry I missed it.

Probably not. The guy is on the run from the most powerful gov't in the world. You don't want to call attention to yourself, so you wouldn't steal cars unless you were in a desperate situation. The PC will probably rely on public transportation. Makes him a little harder to track.

This thread ran its course when people started making qualitative judgements and arbitrarily rejecting other, similar qualitative judgements as somehow off-limits.

Haha, you're ridiculous.

If you're willing to apply that rule to, say, female genital mutilation (which might have been brought up already, but I ain't reading the rest of this thread tonight) I'm going to go ahead and say you're not worth listening to.

Cadence Weapon - Afterparty Babies http://www.mediafire.com/?zoznuhxts3j

Right now I'm going for Aliens. It's easier to have confidence in what I know nothing about, in this case.

Caul - Whole http://www.mediafire.com/?pdtaylulnjx Caul - Epiphany / Fortunate http://www.mediafire.com/?yy4ym7tznnt Pantha du Prince - This Bliss http://www.mediafire.com/?ey3hnxfoi11

Would you consider a game of chess to be entertaining if the other player's pieces were invisible?

Oh really? Civil War Ben Horne? The Canadian gangster? Andy's baby daddy drama? James' out-of-town romance? Billy ****ing Zane? Really, I enjoyed most of the Windom Earle stuff, but that's at the end of the series. There's a good 6 or 7 episodes of dead weight in the middle of the second season. You can read all about it at The AV Club.

In pure gameplay terms, it could easily be classified as an "Action RPG", but it's certainly not a pure hack-and-slash. It's a sugary hack-and-slash lozenge with a soft and saccharine CRPG middle. The main quest is typical CRPG stuff. Investigations, collection of special items, etc. the non-plot critical parts of the game all entail saving up cash, buying books and reading them so you can go out and collect monster body parts for the abundant fetch quests that make up half the game, and also for your own Oblivion-esque alchemical purposes. As someone who heard how difficult the boss battles could be without leveling up I endeavored to complete as many quests as I could, and only 4 of the 20 or so hours I spent on the game consisted of plot elements, if that. At least 2 of those hours consisted of running from map to map. In lieu if persuasion options there's a signet ring system and a drinking contest system, which are really just a means of withholding info until a certain point in the game and a needlessly complicated bribing system, respectively (finding out what particular kinds of alcohol an NPC prefers is a tedious grind in itself). There are relevant choices to be made, of course, but the distance between a choice and its consequence are often spaced far apart, by a measure of gameplay hours or even game chapters, such that choosing often feels arbitrary, and the desire to replay through the game doing differently is dampened by the incredible grind you have to go through to even get to that point. By the 15th hour of gameplay I started to become detached from the game, as the investigation into the Salamandra became more bloated and it was apparent that it wasn't going to go anywhere for another 12-20 hours. Apparently Geralt became detached as well, as the increasingly plodding search for the Salamandra took a backseat to the burning question of which female ally I wanted to take a second nudie card from, and a profoundly uninteresting race war plotline. All in all, take the crushing, unending disappointment and uninteresting sideplots of Twin Peaks' second season, set it in Tolkien's universe, and get Frank Miller to write all the female characters' dialogue, and you've got The Witcher. I haven't been this disappointed with a game purchase since I got bored one night and bought Dungeon Siege II. Really, I'd be a whole lot easier on it if it wasn't so very, very long. I'd like to appreciate the story, but it's too stretched.

Man, I hope that's a really early version of the engine, because it looks sparse. Like Kane and Lynch sparse. So, things we can infer - - no full customization of characters. Choose from variety of presets. - Dialogue style is fluid. You can start with "debonair" and just put the controller down and watch things play out, or you can switch up the way you speak. - Doesn't sound as though there will be "perks" or any such thing, but each of the 100 (or 90, if you start a skill at min=1) will have some effect on gameplay beyond the obvious. Greater targeting powers for guns, etc. - As expected, the PC is framed for a botched first mission and goes rogue. The PC is forced to enact a covert solo mission only undertaken by those far above his talents. - The mission system is actually similar to that of Assassin's Creed. You have main missions in certain cities, and tangential sidequests that all feed into the main quest. One hopes that unlike Assassin's Creed, doing all the sidequests will give you more than the satisfaction of being a completionist, in other words, the mission ought to play out differently depending on how you handle these side-missions. - Obsidian is attempting to accomodate all playing styles. The example given was interrogating an informant. Bribing him got you the most amount of info, persuasion yielded less info but caused the least number of ethical problems (apparently) and killing him netted you no info but cash with which to buy things. - Obsidz wants PCs to feel "superhuman" by the end, special in their skill. Considering how tedious I found the whole of Assassin's Creed to be, I'm finding myself being nervous.

I don't really think Feargus can transform the way I think about fisting.

No.

Fisting? I don't know if that's appropriate for a family site like this.

it's just getting started.

According to GI, yes. To what extent, it's hard to say.

In that case, I don't really care.

Yeah, Oblivion's gameworld was like a Mass Effect side mission on a grand scale. When you could fast travel, you did, because there wasn't anything out there besides alchemical ingredients to collect and undistinguished dungeons to plunder. Open worlds require bigger and better content to make them work. Play something like the Godfather game and, while it's a relatively accurate mapping of New York / New Jersey in the 1940s, it feels really, really sparse. It doesn't feel lived-in or alive the way an actual city does, and that casts an air of falsity over the entire proceedings. Most open-world games have this problem. It works in something like GTA where there's opportunities for constant no-limit / no consequence action, but in an RPG it's not as effective. Absolutely, if that loading screen entailed more NPCs, better AI and actual events.

It's sort of like the Moon mission. There are a LOT of turrets (about a level and a half's worth) around 3 slightly altered "hangar" buildings that you'd see on most other sidequests. But there's also a unique building and the presentation of a binary choice at the end. If you're big on XBL achievements, it adds about 3 or so assignments to the game, which should make it easier to attain companion achievements without getting lucky with collection quests.