Magnum Opus

Still don't much like Steam as a medium for acquiring games, preferring a disk version whenever possible. I kick it old-school. Is a good idea, though.

Thanks for the feedback on DA2; I keep waffling between skipping the game entirely and holding out for a good bundle-style deal with the DLC, and it's comments like these that convince me that the game's worth a purchase after all. Am seeing the game still in stores at 19.99 these days, but it doesn't come with any DLC, I don't think. Maybe is not quite time for me, yet. Besides, am still being impressed with Skyrim. That should keep me going through the holidays at least.

Skyrim. Was originally so put-off by the craptacular PC interface that Oblivion had that I was only mildly interested in this game, but after looking at a few gamer-type reviews of the system, I decided to give it a shot. Best gaming flip-flop of 2011 for me by far. And that includes my about-face on the Dragon Age franchise after reading what DA2 was like (supposedly; closest I've come was the demo and that was enough of that game for me, but after playing that demo I can easily believe what they're saying about the rest of the game). Am actually rather enjoying Skyrim... more than I've enjoyed most games in the last several years. Edit: Have been off-and-on considering Assassin's Creed for the last couple years, but the DRM talk surrounding Ubisoft has prevented me from actually buying. Heh. Is kinda weird, and probably not what they intended with their copy protection, but that seems to be the way it works for me. I'll accept a draconian DRM on titles that I really want (probably because at this point I look on DRM as a necessary evil... necessary in the sense that publishers simply don't release games without it anymore, I mean), but for marginal titles it'll just serve to make me steer clear altogether, even for those titles that I might otherwise have purchased. *shrugs* DRM... it makes me laugh sometimes.

If memory serves, you should be able to right click somewhere in the update window (though not in the text window... IIRC) and there will be an option to "keep all patch files". I think it's disabled by default, but I think that's what you're looking for. The files will be in the {NWN2 install folder}/patch folder... or thereabouts. Heh. Has been a while. Sorry I can't really recall the specifics, but I'm almost 100% certain the installer lets you save the patch files locally. Best I can think of, though, if you've already got your game fully patched is to poke around on the Neverwinter Vault (here, more specifically) to get the files you want. Me, I'd be sorely tempted to reinstall the game and just check that box in the installer's context menu, rather than wade through the various iterations of patches on the Vault. Best of luck finding what you want, though.

Probably so. And that, as a corollary of the "security", is probably the main reason it's online-only, no mods, etc.etc: So that some players don't find a way to make it rich via scamming the system in some sort of offline mode without Blizzard keeping an eye on things. When it was just pretend money, you could dupe items and even trade them, and it was all just playing. Frowned upon as cheating, certainly, but it was still just play with the only things at stake being bragging rights and bruised egos. But with the addition of real world monetary transactions? Different ballgame. Hyper-commercialization changed the character of the internet back in the middle 90's, now it looks to be doing the same to gaming (or it will if this model gains traction). Ultimately, though, I just have to agree with your earlier sentiment: Pity.

Always online? Even if you're playing single player? That's... well, that's a pretty big strike against this game, actually, and that's coming from someone who often forgets that his internet connection is still active. The "wealth of improvements and features" listed above have absolutely no benefit for the single player mode in which I'm looking to play the game, so from my perspective there's no comparison at all: online-only provides me with a lot of restrictions for no gain. I no longer own a laptop, and I've only flown twice in my entire life (there and back again), but in this Mr. Pardo is spot on: there ARE other games to play. Diablo 2 might just be one of them. Anyone know if that frustrating-as-hell checkpoint save system that they used in Diablo 2 is going to plague us again in Diablo 3? Have to admit that I'm a little interested in seeing just how much money I might have earned from hawking wares that are useless for my current character -- am sure that the player base will form guilds to collude with or against each other to turn the whole thing into a parody of itself eventually -- but that curiosity might just have to go unanswered if Blizzard keeps going with the boneheaded design moves. I do have to admire the peculiarly unified mindset that evidently has all the major players of the entire computing world moving toward the "cloud" model of application design, though. *golf clap*

Information previously easily accessible with one click now requires 5. And then is split so you have to do more to see all info, while it was all in 1 screen in DA:O. That's hardly improvement is it? This is why I automatically cringe when I hear that a game I'm looking forward to is being developed "with consoles in mind". Somehow, the developers' brains just seem to go on hiatus when it comes to PC interfaces if they've been looking at the console side. Info in DA2 is more segregated (you've got the main skills page on one screen, but you have to click to go into each tree before seeing anything substantial about those skills? Why? Only answer I can come up with is "controller"), and this was my main beef with Oblivion as well. It was just too much work getting to the information I wanted for the game to be any fun. Never mind the (apparently) lame-brained plot line or the repetitive gates, it was the interface that killed that game for me. I would say that I'm hoping they've improved the PC interface since the demo was put together, but at this point I find that I don't much care about DA2 any more. But it's a problem that seems to plague every single cross-platform game in some way, regardless. Am resigned to the fact that certain gameplay elements have to be altered to cater to all platforms, but I will never understand why the interfaces have to be borked as well. Am growing increasingly weary of tolerating it, as well.

Me too. It's finally crossed the line that I was first concerned about when I picked up Baldur's Gate, combat-wise: how on earth am I going to control multiple characters in real time? Pausing the game in order to play it "tactically" results in me hitting the spacebar three or four times for each second of time I let the game run. BG was all right; even with six characters I still had that underlying six second round to space out the actions I was required to take, so my pausing was less about me trying to catch up to the game and more about me deciding to try something of my own volition. DA2 has crossed into different territory for me, even from Origins. The animations are over too quickly for me to keep up on my keyboard even just controlling one character, never mind three or four. Between that, the neutered overhead camera (woe betide the Hawke that gets shoved up against a wall in an alleyway; good luck seeing anything under those circumstances), and the incessant bloodsplosions and flames washing over 90% of the screen, this game plays like a pure action game. The tactical options are still there, but I already know I'm not going to be using them: To do so would require too much fighting with game itself, bouncing on the spacebar all the time, trying to move the camera to the one angle that'll let me see something... Just watching a few gameplay videos shows how fiddly and cumbersome the game really is. At this point, I find myself wishing Bioware would do one of two things: abandon the "tactical gameplay" altogether and just go with a straight action game -- they're heading in that direction anyway -- or make a turn-based game that affords me the time to actually use the options they're implementing (heh... not in my lifetime). Origins was slow enough that I could let things unfold and enjoy the nifty moves I'd told my people to do. DA2 isn't. Has been a lot of criticism that DA2 is an action game. Technically speaking I know it's not true, but I'll be a monkey's uncle if I don't find myself agreeing with the sentiment anyway because it sure seems that the game wants to be played that way. *shrugs* Still, I am glad they released the demo. Confirmed that my decision not to preorder -- or even adopt the game before any sort of gold edition was released -- was the right one. Have to admit that I was impressed with how fluidly the game ran on my Radeon X1650 graphics card, though. They've clearly either done a lot of optimizing, or hacked out a lot of the things that were bogging Origins down. Maybe both.

A little bit of investigation reveals a simple method by which the dastardly whitecoats can be foiled: Don't log in to your EA account when you're playing. From the Bio website: "To get your download counted, you will need to log into your EA account while playing the demo." Am going to assume that the demo is going to be like the character creator or Origins itself was, and that you don't actually need to be logged in to play it. Edit: Ninja'd.

Will assume you meant the game, rather than Stan. Tho... if Stan, post pics.

Am not so fussed with the size -- as mentioned, gargantuan hooters are the norm in games. I just don't like the overall look of her. Looks like someone stuck a pair of grapefruit on a post, and a pumpkin on top. Aside from her boobs, the girl (and yes, to me she does look like a girl, not even late teen) has no discernible shape at all, just straight lines. The shoulders... where are her shoulders? Have heard that mannish shoulders on females was a complaint with the original, though, so I shouldn't be surprised that instead of subtly fixing the problem, Bioware's just gone and removed them entirely. Seems to be their M.O. these days. Don't like the droopy ears, either, which in the end is likely to be more important than post-and-grapefruit body design (am currently wondering if they've got a jiggle mesh associated with them so that they flap when she moves; now that would be awesome... am referring to the ears, there, not the grapefruit). Am hopeful that Bioware is merely showing a bad picture.

Hey, every character's got to have a hook. This can be his. Nervous twitch or something.

Didn't feel that the timed dialogue in AP really added much to the experience, save a certain annoyance when my hand shifted on the keyboard and the game ended up selecting a response which I never intended. Frankly, though, am not surprised. Bioware in particular seems to be taking a long hard look inside my skull these days, seeing what I didn't like about the games I've recently played, and then deciding to implement those features specifically. Out of everything that was wrong with AP, that would have been at the top of my list. I'm sure they're doing it just to piss me off. I'm personally hoping they'll go with the "checkpoint" system of saved games, too. That'd be just peachy.

Giving Alpha protocol another whirl, and having a good amount of fun with it. Am getting a black screen after the first cutscene in the Triad mission for Hong Shi in Taipei, though. Don't recall this issue in my first play when the game came out... anyone know whether there's a fix for it floating around out there?

Turn-based? In this day and age? Someone's gonna be in trouble when THE INDUSTRY finds out about this. *quietly marks this one down on his Games-To-Watch list*

Am rather impressed with the new Marcus too... in that I actually recognized him as Marcus. Who'da thunk it, eh? Maybe I'm overly impressed when games actually offer this sort of continuity these days, but the fact that they've got at least one actor returning to voice the same character they did in the setting 10 years ago... day-um, that's the sort of attention to detail I appreciate, and feel helps set the serious game-storytellers apart. Props.

I'm calling it: The unreliable Narrator in DA2 will be the main antagonist for the game. Narrator, they say, is looking for Hawke. Well, maybe Hawke is looking for Narrator, too. ... tho that might be getting into the psychedelia previously mentioned, and something best served with a side order o' 'shrooms.

Does the social site have any stats for most common character or anything like that? If 80% of people all picked human noble I can imagine there'd be some disappointment with respect to the effort put into the Origin stories. I think the length of the game is a large handicap in this regard. Decisions that you make probably aren't transparent enough that players don't get the "reinforcement cookie" that something they did 30 hours ago actually changed something now, and the sheer length of the game I think makes it intimidating for restaring with a different origin story. The social site actually carries a lot of stats regarding a body's playthroughs... when it works. Character, origin story, percentage of party kills, amount of damage dealt, even a synopsis of the story for that particular character in bullet point form. And there are achievements on the site as well, although from what I can tell, they're just lumped together in one giant achievement pool instead of bound to the character that acquired them. As a stat-gathering tool, it was actually pretty darned thorough. For many players, particularly on the console side, it was bugged all to heck and nothing ever got uploaded, or only a small amount of their game data got uploaded, but I would imagine that it served its purpose well enough to give Bio a clearer picture than ever before about just how players use their products when it comes to such things. But that's only on an individual per-user basis. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think the site has a publicly viewable profile of all players, saying that 90% played Human Male Wizard, and that they played that character to level 18 before getting an Archdemon-related achievement. But I would actually be surprised if someone over there hasn't written a little snippet of code to sift through that aspect of the site to see just what's what. It'd present an incomplete picture to be sure, but it's still better than nothing.

The origins in DA:O, I liked them, but they must've been prohibitively cost-ineffective to implement. Never held out any hope that they'd become a standard feature, even if they'd found a way to make them more meaningful later on in the game without breaking the budget. No, the experiment I was referring to is the possibility that they might use Origins game data going forward, and not just for DA2. The Warden in Origins could turn out to be the Kevin Bacon for Thedas... but would be happy if DA2's events/characters recognized King Alistair and Loghain as the slaer of the archdemon, if that's the way Origins played out with the import. Subsequent games could offer a different viewpoint into that period of time, rather than following along from DA2 in chronological order the way most series do, and could also import an Origins save to set up the world state. As far as experiments go, that one hasn't had a chance to yield any results yet. Not even sure if that's what they're doing with the series, but I think it might be a neat way to give a certain meaning to what players did in Origins (beyond a simple end-game slide show). The effects could be complex and meaningful or they could be as inconsequential as an email from the cerberus network; need not be all that onerous to implement (though the likelihood of the game pulling a Conrad Verner/Helena Blake would still be high, I suspect). But the expense of setting up the origins in Origins has already been paid. Might as well squeeze a little more out of them if they can do so easily.

" am kinda sad that we were correct 'bout the waste and impotence o' the origins." You and me both. Me, I thought the game was successful enough, but I suspect I'm using a different measure for success than BiowarEA. To me, 3 million+ in sales seems pretty good, but I suppose the long development time ate away at the profits too much. Leading to... "'course the "narrative shift" stuff could all be more bio bs. this game gots a relative short development cycle, and the move towards full vo no doubt necessitated some changes. writing dialogue for Hawke, a human protagonist with defined qualities, makes the writer's task much less onerous... and by utilizing the dialog wheel, bio can save significant vo resources as well. this Hawke stuff may simply be a time/resource saving measure that is getting sold as a boon to the player. " Savings on development. Higher profits. "HA! Good Fun!" It was fun. More fun than I've had with any other Bio game since the BG series wrapped up, at least. I suppose I'm being a little unfair, given how little of the game has actually been revealed, but DA2 has somehow gone from a "must-buy" to "something to keep an eye on" with all this wonderful-sounding PR-speak. Maybe Origins was simply meant as a one-off thing all along: give fans of that style of game something to chew on, and allow players to "customize" the world of Thedas with Their Warden as a jumping off point for all of these Hawke-like legends, many of which -- explicitly or no -- have some sort of genesis in the Warden's episode. Would be an interesting take on personalizing the experience of gaming, if nothing else. My only beef is that I prefer the more ambiguously defined hero over the more Shepard-Hawke type.

Huh. Is it wrong that what I've seen so far of the new direction DA2 is taking (art style and otherwise) has me reconsidering my decision not to buy Leliana's Song?

*blinks* You says what?

Haven't progressed all that far in it, but Book 2 is very similar to Book 1. If no point-and-click movement system bothers you, this hasn't changed. Dialogue is still verbose, combat (as a mage character, at least) is still pretty easy. Unless it happens to be raining. Then my character's primary form of attack happens to get neutered to a fair degree.... fire attacks just aren't as potent in the wet. Not sure if weather has any other effects. Am personally liking the addition of food and water requirements, but I'm not sure how effective they'll be. Right now, I haven't purchase any create food or water spells for my mage, so I've got to scrounge around for food and bring along what water I think I'll need, and that places some nice limits on inventory capacity as well... more food and water for longer excursions, but as a weak little mageling I can't carry too much to begin with, and a pair of full waterskins eats up a good chunk of my weight limit. I suspect that food/water as a limiting factor will simply deprecate itself once I get those spells and devolve into busywork. Will buy the spells for the sake of completeness, but I suspect I'll forgo using them, save as a true last resort feature. I rather like having to make those sorts of decisions in games like this. Thankfully, am not particularly bothered by the lack of point-and-click, nor put off too terribly by the ease of combat. There's no autopilot in this game, so if I want to win, I've got to do something for it, and if I'm not paying attention I can still get my arse handed to me (see the aforementioned comment about fire and rain). The game is mostly about exploration anyway... finding all those neat little nooks and crannies in the forests and caves, discovering a little story element or bit of loot as reward. All in all, I'm having a blast with the game. Well worth the money, IMO. But then, I felt that way about Book 1, too. Some series have "sequels" that really don't bear much resemblance to the original games. Fallout 3 as a sequl to Fallout 2... little resemblance, IMO, at least in game play. Divine Divninty and Divinity 2... again, same deal. Book 2 can't be called anything but a sequel to Book 1. Is quite refreshing, a series that seems to make no apologies for what it is. There are enhancements, but no major changes that I can see. Is good. Me like.

*nods* That's a possibility. Have only been through that sequence once so far, and as I said, I likely missed a lot in the epic frenzy. I'm still fuzzy on exactly what's happening with all of the Harbinger Possession stuff. Is that the Reaper, or the Collector General, or what? Buggered if I know (ha ha ... bugs... ) I know that That's largely where my impressions were formed, I think, but yeah... plenty of room for error on my part. Am personally running on the assumption that they're the same person. The interlocking story hooks are just a little too striking, and Aria goes out of her way to mention that despite her position on Omega, she's got a lot to hide. A new name isn't a stretch of the imagination for her, I don't think. @Gorath: TIM == Harbinger ... heh. Was thinking of "antagonist" in more the literary than literal sense with that one. In absence of any sort of well defined Bad Guy, TIM seems like the most antagonistic character in the game to me. Lord knows I've done enough to tick him off, too, with the way I ended the game. Miranda defecting, Collector base destroyed, Normandy II stolen out from under him... heh. He's gonna be so PO'd in ME3... heh.

****Rampant Spoilers to follow... sometimes. Most times, even, maybe. **** Found the main plot ultimately unfinished, personally. Maybe it's because I wasn't really paying all that much attention (was all caught up in the epic actionyness of the collector base blowing up an' all, so I'm certain I missed much of the detail), but I think there are still some unanswered question regarding the Collectors. Am not convinced, for instance, that they were simply Reaper-tools out to destroydestroydestroy. We know the keepers on the Citadel were a Reaper-repurposed race. We know the Protheans altered them enough to "emancipate" them from Reaper control (at least, enough to make them ignore the Reapers' signal to open the gates of hell, so to speak). We know the Collectors have had peaceful dealings with other sapient races, even going so far as to exchange technologies. We even know that the Collectors were experimenting on their own people as well as humans, looking for similarities. Why? Don't think that was ever really answered in the game, was it? Personal speculation leads me to wonder whether the Collectors were, with their Shepard-fetish, really trying to destroy the Reapers on their own terms, and that when Shep blew up the Collector base, he wasn't already shooting himself in the foot. A group of re-purposed Protheans who had regained their own sense of autonomy from the Reapers -- enough to want to see the Reapers destroyed, anyway -- could have been a pretty big boost to Shep's Crusade. Harbinger's final words might be interpreted as suggesting such, anyway: base is about to blow up, Harbinger says "you have failed." Failed at what? Not at blowing up the collectors, obviously. What then? Shooting self in foot with larger Reaper picture, maybe? If Harbinger believes that Harbinger is key to Reaper's ultimate defeat, then yeah... makes sense. If such failure, turning the feel-good victory at the end of ME2 into an "oops, shouldn't have done that" moment in ME3, is still a possibility in the overall story (which I think they've laid enough groundwork for), it can't be a very compelling failure, since it'll have to be both revealed and overcome in the final heroically victorious chapter, but maybe Bio simply needed part two to end happy. Save wild roller coaster ride from despair to salvation all for third game. Don't know that I'd have done the same in planning a trilogy, but... *shrugs* Then again, maybe the Collectors were just... there, and there's nothing more to it. I can see that happening too. Basically, is a few too many finer points of speculation that were never answered once introduced, one way or the other (or that I failed to notice being answered... that's a possibility, too). Is very much a "middle game of a trilogy" sort of plot. A placeholder plot, almost, something to tide player over while those elements that will actually mean something in the last part are introduced off the side all sneaky-like. Just wish they would have made it more compelling, is all. Is very few elements in main plot, after all: we got Normandy 1 being blowed up real good: introduction. Got Horizon. Got disabled Collector ship. Got derelict Reaper. Got final battle. Not a lot to chew on there, not when you consider all the companions and loyalty missions. Want to know more about the collectors/Protheans, dangit! ME2 is kinda like BG2 in that regard. Irenicus were a fine villain, one of Bio's best, but in terms of Bhaalspawn saga he was a sidelight. Only thing of note regarding Bhaalspawn saga for Our Hero was the introduction of the Slayer transformation, and even that didn't turn out to mean much in the end. ME2, though, doesn't have an Irenicus to bolster its story. Am quite curious about where they'll go in ME3 regarding the crew, though. Spent a LOT of effort in training and acquiring this crew in ME2: was whole point of game, in fact, so far as I'm aware (see caveat regarding finers points of detail that remain unanswered). But there's also room for one or more of those characters to be removed from the picture. What sort of crew will ME3 give us? Stick with ME2 crew if they survived, sure, but if not... fall back to ME1 stragglers like Alenko/Williams and Liara and Wrex? Still in picture if not in party, after all. Convince Alenko/Williams that you're not typical Cerberus schill to get him/her back on side, resolve Liara's personal difficulties with Shadow broker to get her back, cure genophage to get Wrex? Or maybe recruit Aria from Omega and use her to bring Wrex back on board, since they "had a thing" a few centuries back? (speculation, that, but possibly not far off the mark: many interlocking hooks with the stories of those two. And for a while, I was almost sure that Aria would be recruitable in ME2, because she had the exact same kind of "badass reputation" that everyone else Shep was recruiting had). Even if they only write a couple new characters, there's still going to be a healthy complement of familiar faces floating around, I think. Maybe even give Anderson one last hurrah, since he got screwed over by the Alliance when they stole his hsip and gave it to Shep and then never really settled into his council role. He's a little creaky, but I think he's still got enough in him for one more battle, and I think he's the type who'd rather burn out than fade away.... would be good side-plot material, that. Anderson in the vanguard against the Reapers, old hero... DOOOM. ***** Ok. Is safe now. ***** ** I think ** Overall, am more impressed with the saga of the ME series than the game play; am even rather glad that it doesn't quite measure up to a "normal shooter", since I don't much like normal shooters. Had more fun with the mako than the planet scanning; was disappointed that they didn't make the mako environments at least a little bit interesting/relevant, but rather scrapped the whole idea to introduce something even more tedious. Would have liked a real inventory. Would have liked a real antagonist (this assumes that TIM doesn't count as the antagonist of the game, too, a point of which I'm not convinced). Would have liked a less predictable area design (see lots of low cover, you know there's a fight what's gonna happen; telegraphing ambushes is what it is; enemy ought to take a little time to move crates off to the side). Would have liked a few more RPG leanings, instead of Shooter/adventure (the adventure part is fine, BTW). Would have liked a whole bunch of things in an ideal world. Am still having fun with the game, and will be picking up the third sooner rather than later when it finally comes along. Good game.