Tale

My concern is that it might be too much of putting your eggs in one basket. Even the people who support the change seem to defend it as "Dragon Age needs to be more like Mass Effect." Lack of diversity can be strong for a while, but it tends to backfire unexpectedly. That can be sooner or later. That assumes, of course, that the similarities between the properties will continue to converge as everyone seems to fear or hope they will (whichever side your camp is on).

Yeah, they need more explosions and car chases.

Domination gets pretty easy if you let everyone beat each other up first. I kind of lucked out in my domination game in that the only person who fought against me before fighting other people was Babylon. America and Russia fought England first. And Rome and Persia had been in war for half the game. So nobody (but Babylon) had the resources to put up a good fight (though Russia had some on their second attack).

Too Human is one of the worst games I've ever played. I wanted my money back and I got it for free.

Is everyone so scared of spoilers? The dilemma itself wasn't the point, but the point was that the dilemma, as presented, sucks. But we keep seeing that sort of thing. I'm not exactly one for dark and edgy, so I can have my appreciation for it, but I don't see it as fulfilling the objective of a dilemma.

Works wonders if you've got some maritime city-states as allied.

Yeah, people should never work on things they enjoy and can be proud of.

Doing a Bollywood game now. Archipeligo, huge. I have score victory turned off, as well as science victory, I'm uncertain about domination victory. Nobody has ever declared war on me. A few wars have been declared amongst the others and they all seem important. And they all want to drag me into them. Probably because I'm the only financially stable civ. I started off on probably the largest set of islands. Which are technically the same island since they're all connected by one tile choke points. I blocked off a 3 tile choke point so nobody got close to me until the 1800s when my neighbor founded a city so close that it moved my guys back. The entire world has declared on him, so I should be safe. Heck the bottom half of my part of the island is the only unsettled land left, I'm not settling it though because of Bollywood conditions. I have more strategic resources than anyone else, like 40+ coal and horses. Nobody actually uses horses, but it's useful to trade. I use them to bribe people at war with my city-states. It froze up on me last night so I didn't complete the game yet.

The Sacrifice was done in 29 minutes. Seems anticlimactic.

I thought the point of robots is that they don't have feelings and thus you can abuse them and work them as much as you want... Racist.

Which would be the entire point of deconstructing the winning third option response to the no-win. Wrath of Khan did it well.

If that's a deconstruction, it deconstructs the sadistic choice. It's not a deconstruction of take a third option, which is what I'm talking about.

How did AP deconstruct it?

It is overused. Which means its due for a deconstruction, I should think.

That's not even trying. You can succeed and still fail. Like, you save the woman and the bus full of doctors, but it turns out that there was also a bus full of orphans and kittens set to explode near that farm everyone's parents tell them that the family dog was sent to when it got old. And you were never told about it, it was a secret fallback plan. IMAGINATION

The actual purpose of the thread is in the spoiler.

Don't be rude, bots have feelings too!

The bad guy has given you the typical sadistic choice. Save the woman you love or a bus full of doctors. You only have time to save one! What do you choose? You've seen this kind of thing in lots of games, with or without the third choice. inFamous had the first two. Alpha Protocol occasionally had all three (I only saw the first two, but was told that Veteran allows a third sometime). Mask of the Betrayer could be looked at as a game built around the idea with the Soul Eater mechanic.

I went on my rant about that way back in the day. Dragon Age wanted to be dark or whatnot. Well, it kept giving us rosey ending options that were just as easy as the rest. Then just for the heck of it, denied a middleground option for Alistair/Loghain. I'm a big thematic individual. And it was inconsistent on that. Is it meant to be about doing extra hard to earn your happy ending, despite the fact that the happy ending wasn't any harder? Or is about how you can't always win, despite the fact that you could more often than not and the only time you couldn't it simply felt forced. It seems like that designer might understand my position. Third options (options outside the assumed in pursuit of a more ideal ending) need to be harder or else the first two become trivial. But I have a difficulty imaging a way to actually generate that difficulty. I thought the "rally the crowd" option in ME2 was simply silly. I don't think talking to a few more guys or being consistent is exactly earning it. But off the top of my head, I can see ways. Make the player pay attention to detail and have hidden quests based on pursuit of those details. In that sense, maybe simply hinting that Mages could have helped Conner could have been viable and made that quest better. But I would have liked to risk something to pursuit it.

What took you so long? I realized I hated it by Act II. I never did complete the thing until after Hordes came out. I still don't even know why I gave Hordes a chance, but am glad I did.

Won my Oda Nobunaga game by conquest. Actually achieved the rank 1 score at the end, yay. Maybe I should turn up the difficulty at that point. I'd been buddies with Rome most of the game and he'd been in a war with Persia and Egypt and winning. He knocked out Egypt and wore Persia down. I allied myself with every single city-state on the map the round I declared war. Two conquered cities later (including his capital), my peace offer included my war dec on persia because I figured he'd like that. Persia's two nearly dead pikemen ran screaming from a sole attack helicopter that took Persia's capital for the win.

I dunno, I haven't fought the French yet. I do know my Samurai haven't met a city they can't take in two attacks. According to the 2k games wiki on them, Musketeers are better. They're as much better than Samurai as Samurai are compared to regular Muskets.

I take back what I said earlier. As Japan you're not set up until Musketmen. You're set up until Riflemen. Samurai are better than the unit that follows them, if also more expensive.

Your cut of that would be what, $5?