Starwars

Playing as a Cipher, I used Dominate Will on one of the members of the adventuring party near the wyvern nest after the introductory talk. After I had finished off the rest of them, the member who was dominated was still, er, dominated. I could then click on him to initiate the whole opening conversation again. I suspect this behaviour could also be found in the rest of the game whenever the enemy is part of a conversation before the battle.

And the previous system could be solved by having a skill point pool or something where you could save up points for buying the higher skill levels. That would bring down a lot of the clicking. I'm not a fan of this new system at all. By bringing the skills and talents together, you have to make a choice, yes. But it seems to be a choice that is going against what PoE seemed to want to accomplish. With the new system, I have to decide in a rather strange way if the skills are more important to roleplaying my character, or the talents. And by choosing one or the other, I have to also accept something that may not be at all part of the character *I* want to create. I don't really see the "player focusing on one or two skills" as a problem. Yes, it's very likely that people will do on the first playthrough. But there could be alot of playthroughs following that one. I like to experiment more with character-building systems after I've done my initial playthrough, and maybe spreading my points differently when I know more about the system. In Fallout games, I almost always go for as diplomatic a character as I can on the first playthrough. But then I create other characters after that. Same goes for other roleplaying games, depending on what they allow or not. In TES games I almost always go for a Rogue-ish character who sneaks, backstabs and uses ranged weapons at first. Again, try other builds and skill allocation on replays. I would certainly do the same in PoE.

Played a bit more. It feels like the game feels yet a bit more visually clear to my eyes, just how characters and such look, but might be my imagination playing tricks. Either way, it's fun watching the game come together in that way. While new bugs crop up (and there are several new for this build), I think the game feels better and better with each build overall. I'm still not sold at all one the coupling of skills and talents, and I think it feels downright weird. I'd still much prefer when we got control over the skills directly, even if that system felt a bit weird also. I am however immensely glad about the new talents overall. It's almost a thing of... the more the better really, I hope they'll come up with even more. I think this is one area where the game doesn't really need *balance* that badly. Of course, all should feel viable, but just having a wealth to choose from here makes it much more fun to build a character. However, I still think the long list of all the talents is just... not good. Put the various talents under different tabs or something, having a long list like that just makes it annoying. I'd also prefer it if there were no healing talents because... well, I dunno, it just cheapens the health-regen a bit. Glad we have a conversation history in the log. I'm liking the tips in the loading screens, ideally there would be a toggle for them but I'm liking them. They need to be spellchecked though. Pathfinding still needs work. Finally, about the backer NPCs... How exactly will they work in the game? I mean, you can click on them now and get a sorta ministory to read through. Is that how it's supposed to be? Feels pretty weird to me.

Even if they *do* decide to keep the skill/talent system as is (my first impressions of that are really bad but I do need to give it some time also to see how it feels in the long run), they *desperately* need to fix the talent choice screen. Just having a long boring list like that is just... no. It makes me want to bypass the leveling process more than anything.

I like the loading screens as well, great for improving the "feel" of the game. But as for the changes to level up system... Nonononononononono... Noooo. I wasn't amazingly crazy about the skill system before but the new system just feels terrible to me. I guess the idea was to make roleplaying ideas "flow out" a bit more naturally but this just feels backwards. No matter how one slices it, this is a numbers game and I *want* to try and optimize my characters a bit and by linking combat skills to Athletics etc etc etc, this just gets in the way of developing a build I want. Also, choosing the talents from a looooong list from top-to-bottom is just a pain. If the choice is between this and the previous skill system then PLEASE bring back the old system. This was not an improvement in the least as far as I'm concerned except that it's nice that the backgrounds give a mechanical change now. Not a fan of these change at all, bleh. Also, the "recommended" UI hints on the character creation screen, nooooo. Get rid of them, it's not needed. People who buy this game will read. And if they don't want to read, they'll figure out something is wrong and re-do after complaining a bit. Don't plaster that stuff on there, urgh. Get rid of it please. Yeah, not a fan at all of these changes so far. Terrible.

I don't think the story is in itself that particularly amazing either. For me, it's what I talked about earlier, the setting kinda brings it alive. I guess what makes it really enjoyable to me is how it touches upon a lot of events that I find interesting in themselves. The journal is really crappy though, not because it doesn't hold your hand, but it's just... crappy.

Replaying Arcanum. This game is such a mixed bag. On one hand, the combat, dungeons and some of the writing are absolutely terrible. Like... just awful. On the other hand, character creation, roleplaying, some other writing, the world and background are *fantastic*. I'd also forgotten how cool some of the lore books in this game are. The book on how the technologists tried to re-animate an Orc, only to have the Orc try to rip the face off the inventor are just... they're great to read. The world is just genuinely interesting, moreso than I could remember. Some of the things you do in-game become fun just by how you do them in context of the world. Many RPGs have the "find this character" quests. In Arcanum, what do you do? You go to the Hall of Records in Tarant and look up where they live. Very simple gameplay, but a perfect example of how putting a simple twist on something can make it more fun. You can get telegrams. Telegrams! How cool is that? And I love the bits about finding the books on Tsen'Ang, the slight Lovecraftian feel to it, with the Victorian flavour. Or digging into the Panaari religion. All that stuff is just awesome to me, and much more interesting than what we're usually charged (or how we're charged with them) with in RPGs. It owes so much to the setting and shows how much impact it can actually have to have those things we often end up doing in RPGs wrapped up in a different context/feel. It can mean the world sometimes. I hope PoE will have *some* flavour as well though it's set in an "earlier" age than Arcanum (well, they're different universes but you know what I mean). It's just a shame that Arcanum also has the Black Mountain Clans, the Hardin's Passes, the Stringy Petes (sooo silly), the various sewers and the seemingly endless ultra-boring random encounters as well.

New build for today, GO!

The lack of communication about this is kinda annoying though. I am fully aware of the intricacies behind software design, but the silence is kinda deafening. It's not that I'm worried about the project particularly, but I think they should do a better job of keeping us updated on when to expect the updates because... well, the beta-acess and communication was a part of the kickstarter after all. It's gotten longer between the builds, rather than the other way around, and definitely longer than what they've said.

Aside from death-threats not being OK in the first place, even on the internetz (yeah, yeah, we should all just toughen up and grow a thick skin, those feminists are out to take over gaming etc etc...), it was doubly stupid of this guy to post something like that aimed at the platform in which hands they've placed their game. It's good STEAM did what they did. Thumbs up.

Yeah, come on already!

I'm 31. Can't recall exactly when I first started playing games but it was somewhere between 20-25 years ago. First game I remember playing was Space Invaders on C64.

New week - new scream about new build time! Come on OEI!

Darklands is an awesome, awesome game. Hope you enjoy it.

I think FEAR was an excellent, excellent action-game. But the horror elements were, well... It was not particularly scary, not in the least. The atmosphere's good though, and I know I jumped more than one time when some soldier opened fire right in my ear after sneaking around. Condemned was a nice idea I think, but I think the whole "vulnerable ex-cop" goes down the drain with the video-gaminess of it. You still whack a million crackheads throughout the game, you get shot and bludgeoned etc. It still manages to feel like a classic, game "monster-maze". Great idea but the way they did it was kinda self-defeating I think. Many disagree though.

More articles, another one against GamerGate. http://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-and-its-gamerga-1646145844

I'm not opposed to it, but it really depends on what the game-devs want for the overall experience. Wasteland 2 gives XP for pretty much everything, your character could fart and it'd give XP. I think that's fine because in WL2 there's such an abundance of stuff to get XP from (whether the act of using the skills a million times is actually *fun* is another discussion...), whereas I don't quite get this feeling from PoE. Overall, I think I'd prefer it if they keep the "objective based" XP they were going with from the start, but chop up the XP as much as they can for smaller mini-goals where indeed unlocking a certain door, talking down a person, sneaking past something, whatever, could yield XP if it's accomplishing a particular goal. But, like I said, I'm not really opposed to the idea of unlocking giving XP period. But if that's the case, then there will probably be other areas also that needs "boosting" in terms of XP, various skill usage situations and so forth. I don't want to be in a place where, as others have pointed out, I feel the need to unlock stuff just to milk the game's XP.

Continuing on in my playthrough of Child of Light after taking a break from it as my girlfriend completely fell in love with the game and powered through it. What a lovely little game it is, absolutely gorgeous to look at and the gameplay is pretty fun also. The one thing I'm not a fan of is the crafting system which is rather basic and sorta time-consuming and boring to deal with. Other than that, it's wonderful for what it aims to do. Really charming game.

The problem in my opinion with Isolation is that it tries so very hard to be a proper "Alien game" that it sorta... I dunno. It feels fanboy-ish in parts. Of course there is a slow opening, because that's what Alien has, DUH! Never mind that the slow opening in Alien had... well, it set up the characters, it created the tension and relationships with the characters. In Isolation, it amounts to walking around dark areas where things go "clang clang" in the background. It didn't succeed in raising any tensions afaik, it's very predictable. Also, since the game wants to be an authentic Alien experience so bad, the video-game bits stand out like a sore thumb in a rather bad way. The whole "oh here's a door, but you need a particular piece of equipment to get through *that*, and to get *that* piece of equipment you have to jump through a bunch of other hoops (including finding other door-opening trinkets). Ripley will get frightened by the Alien in a cutscene but there is zero remorse/fright once you kill humans. Synths (the Working Joe enemies) look really uncanny valley and scary because... well, there is an in-game reason but it's so *obvious* that they designed them that way just to spook the player. I dunno. I don't really wanna bash the game in one way because it's so obvious that the devs really wanted to deliver something authentically Alien. The game is *beatiful* and feels very much like the first movie. The audio is excellent. But sometimes it's downright fanboy-ish, and it really hurts the game in my opinion. It's like they tried soooo hard to get the Alien bits right and then they suddenly remember that they had to design a game around it also. When the game really works, it shines (you will certainly have a few memorable moments with the alien), but most of the time I was sorta disappointed by it. It's tense at times but not scary. And it gets downright annoying later on once you have seen the alien a lot and have gotten killed by it a lot. It's worth experiencing I suppose, many people seem to like it a lot. I think Amnesia is a *far* better horror game though it we're gonna compare with other games. I haven't finished the game though so take it with a grain of salt. As for me, I just completed Expeditions: Conquistador and it was a bloody marvelous game. Really hope they'll make another one.

There are also people waiting on the Mac and Linux versions with no updates either.

Let's have a new build version!

Shadows do tend to crave a lot of power, but it's not just that. Sometimes games (or maybe the engine in this case) *are* just poorly optimized. I was playing Alien Isolation over at a friend's house and his rig is slightly worse than mine. Isolation ran like a *dream* with pretty much everything turned up (think only one setting was down from the highest) while WL2 runs a lot more sluggish on my slightly better machine. And the graphical difference is... kiiiiiinda big.

Got Expeditions Conquistador as part of a really, really cheap bundle. Why on earth haven't I played this before? I almost feel ashamed that I got it for such a cheap price.

I would like to say though that I feel Wasteland 2 had the area sizes completely wrong. It's nice to have big maps but in that game, they just feel unnecessarily big. A lot of them (especially town maps like Rail Nomads and Rodia) could have been a *lot* smaller if you ask me. It being 3d (as well as fighting the camera) does have a lot to do with that. I don't get that nice sense of exploration in WL2 that I do in the IE games (and even PoE). Uncovering the maps mostly felt like a nuisance to me, waiting for the moments in the game that are actually fun.

I *think* I actually used that on one playthrough, yet still managed to drop the egg. Not 100% sure though.