Tale

Blood Dragon DLC confirmed!

Ahh, the terrible boss fights and boss cutscenes in Mass Effect 3. This is one of my favorite circlewhatsits. No sarcasm, I could read people criticizing it for hours. At a certain point I just took it as assumed that everyone silently agreed not to do those things anymore about the early 2000s. But that's the problem with silent agreements, not everyone hears about it. The EVA fight in particular reminded me of the second boss fight in a D&D game I was in a few years back. It was the guy's first time DM'ing, not counting the around 3 sessions that preceeded this specific fight. It's the first time he actually started deviating from the module he was working out of, trying to add his own flavor to the game. We were standing around whacking at the boss with it doing absolutely no damage. And then in shows up is DMPC who does something awesometm, then proceeds to win the encounter without us contributing anything meaningful. That comparison is exactly what I mean when I say "amateur."

Or the Eluvian is scheduled to become super important. It was in DAO, Witch Hunt, and DA2.

More Dragon Age. On Awakening now. I remember being challenged at this game previously. I'm playing Hard, but I just one-shot Queen of the Blackmarsh at level 27. I guess having... /sigh 325 hours in the game, I should have the strategies down by now. But this is only my third time through Awakening, so there might be surprises still!

I watched the full PAX demo and I have to say I'm really impressed. It might even be worth getting if all agency in the storyline is absent. I can kind of understand that. My first character was an elf, but to be honest here the non-humans are almost tacked on. The main plot is a human nation where humans are fighting humans for human reasons. And the one elven love interest is Zevran. The Dwarves and Elves get a large sidequest. When a game is all about humans, I'd wager people will play as humans. I wish there were stats for Morrowind.

Shrimp fried rice and a Lucky U IPA. I did not do a good job at the fried rice, but it was my first time. And I've decided I don't like IPAs based on this one beer...

Exactly. I now have my suspicion that the way they're getting around drastic changes to the setting from the Mage/Templar war is that it's only the crazy "Red" Templars and the Abominations that are fighting. With all the less extreme Circle mages and Templars sticking around to go back to how things were afterwards, if under the Inquisition.

They're clearly Jedi.

A book can too, either way it's dead trees doing magic because stuff. Or more specifically because they wanted an excuse to give mages a weapon slot item.

Makes as much sense as a staff. FEEL THE MAGICAL POWER OF WOOD

Kossit, Tale, Qunari is the religion, Kossith is the race. That is, unless the RP options are where you can align yourself with the Qunari goals. But even that would be regardless of race. Even David Gaider prefers people call them Qunari. I'm calling them Qunari. http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/371/index/14893267/1 Besides, the player will probably be a Tal-Vashoth. Kossith isn't even technically correct. Kossith was the ancient culture, and the word is antiquated and unused. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Kossith

Glad to hear about Qunari. Hope mage will be an option for them.

You'd be surprised at what follows from what. And while I'm wary to be overly speculative about what can and can not be done, I'll just say that even at the most optimistic, giving unique features to the PC is an extra cost they may not desire to incur.

Until I hear otherwise I'm going to disallow linking to the video. If the publisher is pulling them from youtube then I'm going to ask that be respected on these forums. Feel free to talk about it if you have seen it, however.

My memory always sucked and I've found I really only remember stuff I think about. It's possible you're just moving to a different schema. How you interact with trivial stuff may be changing.

I had a troubled youth. Where I came from you couldn't go outside without being confronted by drugs. Everything they say about slippery slopes, for me it was absolutely true. Some "harmless" recreational drugs at first, but then that wasn't enough. I started looking for excitement elsewhere. And I needed money to support it. I had to deal, I had to steal, and it got to a point where I didn't know which one I was doing to support which. It all just spiraled out of control and I lost myself. And I absolutely hate this, but it took the death of a friend to straighten me out. He was a good kid. He didn't deserve what happened to him. He was driving to the police station to bail me out one day and he was hit by a drunk driver who was out partying that night. The one guy who tried to help me was killed by someone just like me. And I couldn't handle that. How many people had I hurt who were good like him? I don't even know. I wish I did, I wish I could make it better. But I cleaned up. I made better of my life. And I hope, without a belief in any higher judgement, that I will have caused more good with the time since then than bad before. And even though this may be my last act, I hope it will do more good still. You see, I saved some money I'm not proud of. I dared not use it because I didn't deserve it. But you, the people with me here, I believe in you. I want you to use it to do good. You'll find it BLARGH

I just found out that Goals are limited to scene in Shadowrun Returns. I... don't even know how... why... This completely kills the ability to do any goal that transitions scenes without micromanaging every step. I mean, you don't really have to micro, but their journal will just be empty if you don't. Or the alternative is that I can just copy the broad goal into each scene and just constantly bring it up each time they load into a scene.

Games derived from the Team Fortress model beat it out rather handily. Whether that be Team Fortress itself or Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. If you break out of the Call of Duty and Halo spheres you'll find lots of that. Natural Selection has lots of playstyles. And these games actually have movement abilities, not just variations on attacks. With environments that make use of it. Still, I liked ME2's combat. I think ME3's expansion of powers kind of homogenized classes a bit outside of Vanguard, and the enemy designs did nothing to play with what differences remained. Complaints of rails usually are due to the rails being visible, not the rails existing. As in the player has lost all motivation for following the main plot and that's when they notice they're not allowed to do anything else.

Absolutely. I've observed the phenomenon in myself. One of the ME3 breakdowns talks about it as "narrative coherence." And I won't swear to it, but I think the Redlettermedia examinations of the prequel trilogy talked about it too.I think it's really simple to think of just as a breaking point. You have these little problems you're willing to forgive and overlook, even without thinking, but they start building up. And either they build up too greatly and start encroaching on the parts you enjoy or this one big thing comes out and it just breaks. And everything you forgave before, you go back and stop forgiving. Humans are funny things because of stuff like this. It's a combination of reinforcement and attrition. And now that I've ranted about this phenomenon that's only interesting to people like me, I guess I need to find a point to make out of this. No matter how much I crucify Dragon Age 2, no matter how much I gather people up to hand out pitchforks and torches, no matter how much I complain about cameos, references, recharacterization, and small world, no matter how much I talk about how the plot seems badly formed and justified... it is still better than Mass Effect 3.

People didn't complaint about Hawke's personal story. Or at least, that wasn't the meat of most complaints I heard. They complained that the entire last act was on rails and the bad guys dropped philosophical differences for pure crazy. People actually liked the Qunari plot. But the personal plot was just a narrative McGuffin. Something you followed to get hooked into the real plots. I mean, the personal story stops being relevant even halfway into the game. Of the three major plot threads, two of them were save the world. And one of those fails simply because the city of Kirkwall is full of crazy people.

I wouldn't be surprised if "importing" simply doesn't exist (because there's no shortage of bugs). I suppose we could allow people to import their game states to the Keep (I haven't read the article yet), but the idea is to use this to set your "import state." Just put in a good word for me with the people choosing beta testers. *nudge* *nudge*

Should be an issue for everyone. Not just for importing, it lets you check out alternate content you don't have imports for. And it can help you overcome import bugs.

What seems disingenuous to me is people acting like they know how or why particular parts of a game were produced. A piece of content decently cut from a game and a piece of content produced wholly separate from a game look identical to the end user. It's not bad behavior to try to alter the price of the product they sell even if they were cutting parts to sell later, assuming they're not being deceptive. If they produce a game and cut it into 20 parts to sell to you later, the only real concern is if any of those given parts is worth buying at the asking price. If they're being genuinely deceptive that's a real problem. Telling you things are included that are not. But that's not what you're accusing them of.

Just saw the gameplay video. The environment interactivity is wonderful. Didn't look like there was much filler combat.

Butthurt is on the list of things I would never say. Aside from referential such as this post.